Pastwatch- The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,66

people actually live like this? But Hunahpu seemed to think nothing of it, though she could sense that his eyes took in everything.

Inside Pastwatch, of course, everything would be familiar, and when they reached her station he immediately sat down at her terminal and began calling up files. He had not asked permission, but then, why should he? If he was to show her anything, he would have to be in charge; this was where she had led him, so why should he ask to use what she obviously intended him to use? He wasn't being discourteous. Indeed, he had said that he was terrifted. Could this very calmness, this stillness, be the way he dealt with fear? Perhaps if he ever became truly relaxed, he would seem more tense! Laughing, joking, showing emotion, engaged. Perhaps it was only when he was fearful that he seemed utterly at peace.

"How much do you already know?" he asked. "I don't want to waste your time covering material you're familiar with."

"I know that the Mexica reached their imperial peak with the conquests of Ahuitzotl. He essentially proved the practical limits of Mesoamerican empire. The lands he conquered were so far away that Moctezuma II had to reconquer them, and they still didn't stay conquered."

"And you know why those were the limits?"

"Transportation," she said. "It was just too far, and too hard to supply an army. The greatest feat of Aztec arms was making the connection with Soconusco, far down the Pacific coast. And that only worked because they didn't take sacriftcial victims from Soconusco, they traded with them. It was more of an alliance than a conquest."

"Those were the limits in space," said Hunahpu. "What about the social and economic limits?"

She felt as if she were being given an examination. But he was right -- if he tested her knowledge first, he would know how deeply he could delve into the material that mattered, the new findings that he thought would answer the great question of why the Interveners had given Columbus the mission of sailing west. "Economically, the Mexica cult of sacrifice was counterproductive. As long as they kept conquering new lands, they took enough captives from warfare that the nearby territory could maintain enough of a workforce to provide food. But as soon as they began coming back from war with twenty or thirty captives instead of two or three thousand, they were left with a dilemma. If they took their sacrifices from the surrounding lands they already controlled, food production would go down. But if they left those men on the land, then they would have to cut down on their sacrifices, which would mean even less power in battle, even less favor from, the state god -- what was his name?"

"Huitzilopochtli," said Hunahpu.

"Well, they chose to increase the sacrifices. As a sort of proof of their faith. So production fell and there was hunger. And the people they ruled over were more and more upset at the taking of sacrifices, even though they were all believers in the sacrificial religion, because in the old days, before the Mexica with their cult of Witsil ... Huitzil --"

"Huitzilopochtli."

"There'd be only a few sacrifices at a time, comparatively speaking. After ceremonial war, or even after star war. And after the ball games. The Mexica were new, with their profligate sacrificing. The people hated it. Their families were being torn apart, and because so many people were sacrificed it didn't seem to be such a sacred honor anymore."

"And within the Mexica culture?"

"The state thrived because it provided social mobility. If you distinguished yourself in war, you rose. The merchant classes could buy their way into the nobility. You could rise. But that ended immediately after Ahuitzotl, when Moctezuma virtually ended all possibility of buying your way from class to class, and when failure in war after war meant that there was little chance of rising through valor in battle. Moctezuma was in a holding pattern, and that was disastrous, since the entire Mexica social and economic structure depended on expansion and social mobility."

Hunahpu nodded.

"So," said Diko, "where do you disagree with any of this?"

"I don't disagree with it at all," he said.

"But the conclusion that is drawn from this is that even without Cortes, the Aztec empire would have collapsed within years."

"Within months, actually," said Hunahpu. " Cortes's most valuable Indie allies were the people of Tlaxcala. They were the ones who had already broken the back of the Mexica military machine. Ahuitzotl