Pastwatch- The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,50

as the babies grew to be men.

The older brothers were flutists, singers, artists, makers, and knowers. Above all, they were knowers. They knew when their brothers were born exactly who and what they were, and what they would become, but out of jealousy they told no one. So it was justice when Hunahpu and Xbalanque tricked them into climbing a tree and trapped them there, where the two older brothers turned into monkeys and never touched the ground again. Then Hunahpu and Xbalanque, great warriors and ball players, went to contest the quarrel between their fathers, One and Seven Hunahpu, and the gods of Xibalba.

At the end of the game, Xbalanque was forced to sacrifice his brother Hunahpu. He wrapped his brother's heart in a leaf, and then he danced alone in the ball court until he cried out his brother's name and Hunahpu rose up from the dead and took his place beside him. Seeing this, their two opponents in the game, the great lords One and Seven Death, demanded that they, too, be sacrificed. So Hunahpu and Xbalanque took the heart from One Death; but he didn't rise from the dead. Seeing this, Seven Death was terrified and begged to be released from his sacrifice. Thus, in shame, his heart was taken without courage and without consent. And this was how Hunahpu and Xbalanque avenged their fathers, One and Seven Hunahpu, and broke the great power of the lords of Xibalba.

Thus it says in the Popol Vuh.

When a third son was born to Dolores de Cristo Matamoro, she remembered her studies in Mayan culture when she was growing up back in Tekax in the Yucatan, and since she was unsure who the father of this child was, she named him for Hunahpu. If she had had yet another son, no doubt she would have named him Xbalanque, but instead when Hunahpu was still a toddler she was jostled off a platform in the station at San Andres Tuxtla and the train mangled her.

Hunahpu Matamoro had nothing of her, really, but the name she gave him, and perhaps that was what steered him into his obsession with the past of his people. His older brothers became normal men of San Andres Tuxtla: Pedro became a policeman and Josemaria became a priest. But Hunahpu studied the history of the Maya, of the Mexica, of the Toltecs, of the Zapotecs, of the Olmecs, the great nations of Mesoamerica, and when his test scores proved high enough on his second try, he was admitted to Pastwatch and began his studies in earnest.

This was his project from the beginning: to find out what would have happened in Mesoamerica if the Spanish had not come. Unlike Tagiri, whose file had a silver tag that meant her oddities were to be indulged, Hunahpu met resistance every step of the way. "Pastwatch watches the past," he was told again and again. "We don't speculate on what might have been if the past had not happened the way it happened. There's no way to test it, and it would have no value even if you got it right."

But despite the resistance, Hunahpu continued. No team of coworkers grew up around him. In fact he belonged to another team, one that was researching the Zapotecan cultures of the northern coast of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in the years prior to the coming of the Spanish. He was assigned to this team because it was the legitimate project that came closest to Hunahpu's interest. His supervisors were well aware that he spent at least as much time on his speculative research as on the observations that would contribute to real knowledge. They were patient. They hoped he would grow out of his obsession with trying to know the unknowable, if they left him long enough. As long as his work on the Zapotec project remained adequate -- which it did, barely.

Then came the news of the discovery of the Intervention. A Pastwatch from another future had sent a vision to Columbus, which turned him away from his dream of leading a crusade to liberate Constantinople and brought him, eventually, to America. It was astonishing; to an Indie like Hunahpu it was also appalling. How dared they! For he knew at once what it was that the Interveners had been trying to avoid, and it wasn't the Christian conquest of Islam.

Rumors began circulating a few weeks later, and repetition made them believable. The great Kemal was setting up a new