Tagiri went on. “It’s not hard to imagine that the Interveners, looking back, saw the Tlaxcalan conquest of Europe as the worst, most terrible disaster in the history of humanity. And then they saw Columbus’s drive and ambition and personal charisma as the tool they could use to put a stop to it.”
“What does this mean, then?” said Hassan. “Do we abandon our entire project, because stopping Columbus would be worse than what he and those who came after him actually caused in our history?”
“Worse?” asked Tagiri. “Who is to say which is worse? What do you say, Kemal?”
Kemal looked triumphant. “I say that if Hunahpu is right, which we can’t prove, though he makes a good case, we learn only one thing: Meddling with the past is useless because, as the Interveners proved, the mess you make is little better than the mess you avoid.”
“Not so,” said Hunahpu.
Everyone turned to look at him, and he realized that, caught up in the discussion, he had forgotten whom he was dealing with—that he was contradicting Kemal, and in front of Tagiri and Hassan, no less. He glanced over at Diko, and saw that, far from looking worried, she simply gazed at him with interest, waiting to hear what he would say. And he realized that this was how all of them were looking at him, except Kemal, and his scowl was probably not personal—it seemed to be his permanent expression. For the first time Hunahpu realized that he was being treated as an equal here, and they were not offended or contemptuous at his daring to speak. His voice was as good as anyone else’s. The sheer marvel of it was almost enough to silence him.
“Well?” asked Kemal.
“I think what we learn from this,” said Hunahpu, “is not that you can’t intervene effectively in the past. After all, the Interveners did prevent exactly what they set out to prevent. I’ve seen a lot more of Mesoamerican culture than any of you, and even though it’s my own culture, my own people, anyway, I can promise you that a world ruled by the Tlaxcalans or the Mexica—or even the Maya, for that matter—would never have given rise to the democratic and tolerant and scientific values that eventually emerged from European culture, despite all its bloody-handed arrogance toward other people.”
“You can’t say that,” said Kemal. “The Europeans sponsored slave trade, and then gradually repudiated it—who’s to say that the Tlaxcalans wouldn’t have repudiated human sacrifice? The Europeans conquered in the name of kings and queens, and by five centuries later they had stripped those monarchs, where they survived at all, of every shred of power they once had wielded. The Tlaxcalans would have evolved as well.”
“But outside the Americas, wherever the Europeans conquered, native culture survived,” said Hunahpu. “Altered, yes, but still recognizably itself. I think the Tlaxcalan conquest would have been more like the Roman conquest, leaving behind little trace of the ancient Gallic or Iberian cultures.”
“This is all irrelevant,” said Tagiri. “We aren’t choosing between the Interveners’ history and our own. Whatever else we do, we can’t restore their history and we wouldn’t want to. Whichever one was worse, ours or theirs, both were certainly terrible.”
“And both,” said Hassan, “led to some version of Pastwatch, some future in which they were aware of their past and able to judge it.”
“Yes,” agreed Kemal, rather nastily, “they both led to a time when meddlers with too much leisure on their hands decided to go back and reform the past to coincide with the values of the present. The dead are dead; let’s study them and learn from them.”
“And help them if we can,” said Tagiri, her voice thick with passion. “Kemal, all we learn from the Interveners is that what they did was not enough, not that it shouldn’t have been attempted at all.”
“Not enough!”
“They were thinking only of the history they wanted to avoid, not of the history they would create. We must do better.”
“How can we?” asked Diko. “As soon as we act, as soon as we change something, we run the risk of removing ourselves from history. So we can make only one change, as they did.”
“They could make only one change,” said Tagiri, “because they sent a message. But what if we send a messenger?”
“Send a person?”
“We have found, by careful examination, what the technology of the Interveners was. They didn’t just send a message from their own time, because as soon as they started sending it, they would have destroyed themselves and the very instrument that was sending the message. Instead they sent an object back in time. A holographic projector, with their entire message contained within it. They knew exactly where to place it and when to trigger it. We’ve found the machine. It worked perfectly, and then it released powerful acids that destroyed the circuitry and, after about an hour, when no one was nearby, it released a burst of heat that melted itself into a lump of slag and then it exploded, scattering tiny molten fragments across several acres.”
“You didn’t tell us this,” said Kemal.
“The team that is working on building a time machine has been aware of this for some time,” said Tagiri. “They’ll be publishing soon. What matters is this: They didn’t just send a message, they sent an object. That was enough to change history, but not enough to shape it intelligently. We need to send back a messenger who can respond to circumstances, who can not only make one change but keep on introducing more changes. That way we can do more than simply avoid one dreadful path—we can deliberately, carefully create a new path that will make the rest of history infinitely better. Think of us as physicians to the past. It isn’t enough just to give the patient one injection, one pill. We must keep the patient under our care for an extended period, adapting our treatment to the course of the disease.”
“You mean send someone into the past,” said Kemal.
“One person, or several people,” said Tagiri. “One person might get sick or have an accident or be killed. Sending several people would build some redundancy into our effort.”
“Then I must be one of the ones you send,” said Kemal.
“What!” cried Hassan. “You! The one who believes we should make no intervention at all!”
“I never said that,” said Kemal. “I only said that it was stupid to intervene when you had no way of controlling the consequences. If you are sending a team back into the past, I want to be one of them. So I can make sure it goes properly. So I can make sure it’s worth doing.”
“I think you have an inflated idea of your own powers of judgment,” said Hassan crossly.
“Absolutely,” said Kemal. “But I’ll do it, all the same.”
“If anyone goes at all,” said Tagiri. “We need to go over Hunahpu’s scenario and gather far more evidence. Then, whatever picture we emerge with, we must also plan what our changes will be. In the meantime we have scientists working on our machine—but working with confidence, because we’ve seen that a physical object can be pushed backward through time. When all these projects are complete—when we have the power to travel back in time, when we know exactly what it is we’re trying to accomplish, and when we know exactly how we intend to accomplish it—then we’ll make our report public and the decision whether to do it will be up to them. To everyone.”
* * *
Columbus came home after dark in the chilly night, weary to the bone—not from the walk home, for it wasn’t that far, but rather from the endless questions and answers and arguments. There were times when he longed to simply say, “Father Talavera, I’ve told you everything I can think of. I have no more answers. Make your report.” But as the Franciscans of La Rábida had warned him, that would mean the end of his chances. Talavera’s report would be devastating and thorough, and there would be no crack left through which he could escape with ships and crew and supplies for a voyage.
There were even times when Columbus wanted to seize the patient, methodical, brilliant priest and say, “Don’t you know that I see exactly how impossible it looks to you? But God himself told me that I must sail west to reach
the great kingdoms of the east! So my reasoning must be true, not because I have evidence, but because I have the word of God!”
Of course he never succumbed to that temptation. While Columbus hoped that if he were ever charged with heresy, God might intervene and stop the priests from having him burned, he did not want to put God to the test on this. After all, God had told him to tell no one, and so he could hardly expect miraculous intervention if his own impatience put him in danger of the fire.
So it was that the days and the weeks and the months stretched on behind him, and it seemed that the path ahead would have at least as many days and weeks and months—why not years?—before at last Talavera. said, “Columbus seems to know more than he’s telling, but we must make our report and have done with it.” How many years? It made Columbus tired just to think of it. Will I be like Moses? Will I win consent to launch the fleet when I’m already so old that I will only be able to stand on the coast and watch them sail away? Will I never enter the promised land myself?
No sooner had he laid his hand upon the door than it was flung open and Beatrice greeted him with an embrace only slightly encumbered by her thick belly. “Are you mad?” asked Columbus. “It could have been anybody, and you opened the door without so much as asking who it was.”
“But it was you, wasn’t it?” she said, kissing him.
He reached behind him, shut the door, and then managed to extricate himself from her embrace long enough to bar it. “You’re doing no good for your own reputation, letting the whole street see that you wait for me in my rooms and greet me with kisses.”
“You think the whole street doesn’t already know? You think even the two-year-olds don’t already know that Beatrice has Cristóbal’s baby in her womb?”
“Then let me marry you, Beatrice,” he said.
“You say that, Cristóbal, only because you know that I’ll say no.”
He protested, but in his heart he knew that she was right. He had promised Felipa that Diego would be his only heir, and so he could hardly marry Beatrice and make her child legitimate. Beyond that, though, was the reasoning that she always used, and it was correct.
She recited it even now. “You can’t be burdened with a wife and child when the court moves to Salamanca in the spring. Besides which, right now you come before the court as a gentleman who consorted with nobility and royalty in Portugal. You are the widower of a woman of high birth. But marry me, and what are you? The husband of the cousin of Genovese merchants. That does not make you a gentleman. I think the Marquise de Moya wouldn’t be as taken with you then, either.”
Ah, yes, his other “affair of the heart,” Isabella’s good friend the Marquise. In vain had he explained to Beatrice that Isabella was so pious that she would not tolerate any hint that Columbus had dallied with her friend. Beatrice was convinced that Columbus slept with her regularly; she pretended elaborately that she didn’t mind. “The Marquise de Moya is a friend and a help to me, because she has the ear of the Queen and because she believes in my cause,” said Columbus. “But the only thing that I find beautiful about her is her name.”
“De Moya?” teased Beatrice.
“Her Christian name,” said Columbus. “Beatrice, just like you. When I hear that name spoken, it fills me with love, but only for you.” He rested his hand on her belly. “I’m sorry to have burdened you like this.”
“Your child is no burden to me, Cristóbal.”
“I can never make him legitimate. If I win titles and fortune, they’ll belong to Felipa’s son Diego.”
“He will have the blood of Columbus in him, and he will have my love and the love you gave me as his heritage.”
“Beatrice,” said Columbus, “what if I fail? What if there is no voyage, and therefore no fortune and no titles? What is your baby then? The bastard son of a Genovese adventurer who tried to involve the crowned heads of Europe in a mad scheme to sail into the unknown quarters of the sea.”
“But you won’t fail,” she said, comfortably nestling closer to him. “God is with you.”
Is he? thought Columbus. Or when I succumbed to your passion and joined you on your bed, did that sin—which I haven’t the strength even now to forsake—deprive me of God’s favor? Should I repudiate you now and repent of loving you, in order to win his favor back? Or should I forsake my oath to Felipa and follow the dangerous course of marrying you?
“God is with you,” she said again. “God gave me to you. Marriage you must forsake for the sake of your great mission, but surely God does not mean you to be a priest, celibate and unloved.”
She had always talked this way, even at the start, so that at first be had wondered if God had given him at last someone to whom he could talk about his vision on the beach near Lagos. But no, she knew nothing of that. And yet her faith in the divine origin of his mission was strong, and sustained him when he was at his most discouraged.
“You must eat,” she said. “You have to keep up your strength for your jousting with the priests.”
She was right, and he was hungry. But first he kissed her, because he knew that she needed to believe that she mattered more to him than anything, more than food, more than his cause. And as they kissed he thought, If only I had been this careful of Felipa. If only I had spent the little time it would have taken to reassure her, she might not have despaired and died so young, or if she died anyway, her life would have been happier until that day. It would have been so easy, but I didn’t know.
Is that what Beatrice is? My chance to amend my mistakes with Felipa? Or simply a way to make new ones?
Never mind. If God wanted to punish Columbus for his illegitimate coupling with Beatrice, then so be it. But if God still wanted him to pursue his mission to the west, despite his sins and his weaknesses, then Columbus would keep trying with all his strength to accomplish it. His sins were no worse than King Solomon’s, and a far sight gentler than King David’s, and God gave greatness to both of them.
Dinner was delicious, and then they played together on the bed, and then he slept. It was the only happiness in these dark cold days, and whether God approved or not, he was glad of it.
* * *
Tagiri brought Hunahpu into the Columbus project, putting him and Diko jointly in charge of developing a plan of action for intervention in the past. For an hour or two, Hunahpu felt vindicated; he longed to go back to his old position just long enough to say good-bye, seeing the envy on the faces of those who had despised his private project—a project that now would form the basis of the great Kemal’s own work. But the glow of triumph soon passed, and then came dread: He would have to work among people who were used to a very high level of thought, of analysis. He would have to supervise people—he who had always been impossible to supervise. How could he possibly measure up? They would all find him lacking, those above him and those below.
Diko was the one who brought him through these first days, being careful not to take over, but instead making sure that all decisions were jointly reached; that anytime he needed her advice even to know what the choices were, she prompted him only privately, where no one could see, so that the others wouldn’t come to think of her as the “real” head of the intervention team. And soon enough Hunahpu began to feel more confident, and then the two of them really did lead together, often arguing over various points but never making a decision until both agreed. No one but Hunahpu and Diko themselves could have been surprised when, after several months together, each came to realize that their professional interdependence had turned to something much more intense and much more personal.
It was maddening to Hunahpu, that he worked with Diko every day, that every day he grew more sure that she loved him as much as he loved her, and yet she refused any hint, any proposal, any outright plea that they extend their friendship beyond the corridors of Pastwatch and into one of the grass huts of Juba.
“Why not?” he said. “Why not?”
“I’m tired,” she said. “We have too much to do.”
“There is no time for that,” she said.
“Why?” he demanded. “We’re close to ready, our project is. Kemal is still puttering along with his report on probably futures, and the machine is nowhere near done. We have plenty of time.”
The distress on her face usually would be enough to silence him, but not now. “This doesn’t have to make you unhappy,” he said. “Your mother and father work together just as we do, and yet they married and had a child.”
“Yes,” she said. “But we will not.”
“Why not! What is it, that I’m so much smaller than you? I can’t help the fact that Maya people are shorter than a Turko-Dongotona.”
“You are stupid, Hunahpu,” she said. “Father is shorter than Mother, too. What kind of idiot do you think I am?”
“Such an idiot that you’re in love with me just as I’m in love with you, only for some insane reason you refuse to admit it, you refuse even to take a chance on us being happy together.”
To his surprise, tears came to her eyes. “I don’t want to talk about this,” she said.
“But I do,” he said.
“You think you love me,” she said.
“I know I love you.”
“And you think I love you,” she said.
“I hope for that.”
“And maybe you’re right,” she said. “But there’s something that both of us love more.”
“What?”
“This,” she said, indicating the room around them, filled with TruSite IIs and Tempoviews and computers and desks and chairs.
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