Pastwatch- The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,52

Josemaria and Pedro?"

"So our names are Spanish."

"And your veins are thinned with Spanish blood, and you live with Spanish jobs in Spanish cities."

"Thinned?" asked the policeman. "Our veins are--"

"Whoever my father was, " said Hunahpu, "he was Maya, like Mother."

The policeman's face darkened. "I see that you wish not to be my brother."

"I'm proud to be your brother," said Hunahpu, dismayed at the way his words had been taken. "I have no quarrel with you. But I also have to know what my people -- our people -- would have been without the Spanish."

The priest reappeared in the doorway behind the policeman. "They would have been bloody-handed human sacrificers, torturers, and self-mutilators who never heard the name of Christ."

"Thank you for caring enough to come to me," said Hunahpu. "I'll be fine."

"Come to my house for dinner," said the policeman.

"Thank you. Another day I will."

His brothers left, and Hunahpu turned to his computer and addressed a message to Kemal. There was no chance that Kemal would read it -- there were too many thousands of people on the Pastwatch net for a man like Kemal to pay attention to what would end up as a third-tier message from an obscure data-collector on the Zapotec project. Yet he had to get through, somehow, or his work would come to nothing. So he wrote the most provocative message he could think of, and then sent it to everybody involved in the whole Columbus project, hoping that one of them would glance at third-tier e-mail and be intrigued enough to bring his words to the attention of Kemal.

This was his message:

Kemal: Columbus was chosen because he was the greatest man of his age, the one who broke the back of Islam. He was sent westward in order to prevent the worst calamity in all of human history: The Tlaxcalan conquest of Europe. I can prove it. My public papers have been posted and ignored, as surely as yours would have been if you had not found evidence of Atlantis in the old TruSite I weather recordings. There are no recordings of the Tlaxcalan conquest of Europe, but the proof is still there. Talk to me and save yourself years of work. Ignore me and I will go away.

-- Hunahpu Matamoros
* * *

Columbus was not proud of the reason he had married Felipa. He had known from the moment he arrived that as a foreign merchant in Lisbon he would get no closer to his goal. There was a colony of Genovese merchants in Lisbon, and Columbus immediately became involved in their traffic. In the winter of 1476 he joined a convoy that sailed north to Flanders, to England, and on to Iceland. It was less than a year since he had set out on a similar voyage fall of high hopes and expectations; now that he actually found himself in those ports, he could hardly concentrate on the business that brought him there. What good was it for him to be involved in the merchant trade among the cities of Europe? God had a higher work for him to do. The result was that, while he made some money on these voyages, he did not distinguish himself. Only in Iceland, where he heard sailors' tales of lands not all that far to the west that had once held flourishing colonies of Northmen, did he learn anything that seemed useful to him, but even then, he could not help but remember that God had told him to use a southern route for sailing west, and only return in the north. These lands the Icelanders knew of were not the great kingdoms of the east, that much was obvious.

Somehow he had to put together an expedition to explore the ocean to the west. Several of his trading voyages took him to the Azores and Madeira -- the Portuguese would never let a foreigner go beyond that point, into African waters, but they were welcome to come to Madeira to buy African gold and ivory, or to the Azores to take on supplies at highly inflated prices. Columbus knew from his contacts in those places that great expeditions passed through Madeira every few months, bound for Africa. Columbus knew that Africa led nowhere useful -- but he coveted the fleets. Somehow he had to win command of one of them, bound westward instead of southward. And yet what hope did he have of ever achieving this?

At least in Genova his father had ties of loyalty to