They fell silent. They watched and listened.

The vision resolved itself into two men, shining with a faint nimbus all around them. And on the shoulder of the smaller of the two men there sat a dove. There could be no doubt in the mind of any medieval man, especially one who had read as much as Cristoforo, what this vision was supposed to represent. The Holy Trinity. Almost he spoke their names aloud. But they were still speaking, calling him by name in languages he had never heard.

Then, finally: "Columbus, you are my true servant."

Yes, with all my heart I am.

"You have turned your heart to the east, to liberate Constantinople from the Turk."

My prayer, my promise was heard.

"I have seen your faith and your courage, and that is why I spared your life on the water today. I have a great work for you to do. But it is not Constantinople to which you must bring the cross.

Jerusalem, then?

"Nor is it Jerusalem, or any other nation touched by the waters of the Mediterranean. I saved you alive so you could carry the cross to lands much farther east, so far to the east that they can be reached only by sailing westward into the Atlantic."

Cristoforo could hardly grasp what they were telling him. Nor could he bear to look upon them anymore - what mortal man had the right to gaze directly upon the face of the resurrected Savior, let alone the Almighty or the dove of the Holy Spirit? Never mind that this was only a vision; he could not look at them anymore. He lowered his head forward into the sand so he could not see them anymore, but listened all the more intently.

"There are great kingdoms there, rich in gold and powerful in armies. They have never heard the name of my Only Begotten, and they die unbaptized. It is my will that you carry salvation to them, and bring back the wealth of these lands."

Cristoforo heard this and his heart burned within him. G.o.d had seen him, G.o.d had noticed him, and he was being given a mission far greater than the mere liberation of an ancient Christian capital. Lands so far to the east that he must sail west to reach them. Gold. Salvation.

"Your name will be great. Kings will make you their viceroy, and you will be the ruler of the Ocean. Kingdoms will fall at your feet, and millions whose lives are saved will call you blessed. Sail westward, Columbus, my son, a voyage easily within the reach of your ships. The winds of the south will carry you west, and then the winds farther to the north will return you easily to Europe. Let the name of Christ be heard in these nations, and you will save your own soul along with theirs. Take a solemn oath that you will make this voyage, and after many obstacles you will succeed. But do not break this oath, or it will be better for the men of Sodom than for you in the day of judgment. No greater mission has ever been given to mortal man than the one I give to you, and whatever honors you receive on earth will be multiplied a thousandfold in heaven. But if you fail, the consequences to you and all of Christianity will be terrible beyond your imagining. Now take the oath, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit."

Columbus struggled back up to his knees. "The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit," he murmured.

"I have sent a woman to you, to nurse you back to health. When your strength is restored to you, you must begin your mission in my name. Tell no one that I have spoken to you - it is not my will that you perish like the prophets of old, and if you say that I have spoken to you the priests will surely burn you as a heretic. You must persuade others to help you undertake this great voyage for its own sake, and not because I have commanded it. I care not whether they do it for gold or for fame or for love of me, just so they fulfill this mission. Just so you fulfill it. You. Carry out my mission."

The image faded, and was gone. Almost weeping with exhaustion and glorious hope, Cristoforo - no, he was Columbus now, G.o.d had called him Columbus, his name in Latin, the language of the Church - Columbus waited in the sand. And, as the vision had promised, within minutes a woman came and, seeing him, immediately ran for help. Before night had fully come, he was being carried in the strong arms of fishermen to the village of Lagos, where gentle hands put wine to his lips and took his salt- and sand-caked clothing from him and bathed the salt from his chafed skin. Thus am I newly baptized, thought Columbus, born again on the mission of the Holy Trinity.

He uttered no word of what had transpired on the beach, but already his mind churned with thoughts of what he had to do. The great kingdoms of the east - immediately he thought of the tales of Marco Polo, of the Indies, of Cathay, of c.i.p.ango. Only to reach them he would not sail east, nor south along the coast of Africa as the Portuguese were said to be doing. No, he would sail west. But how would he get a ship? Not in Genova. Not after the ship he had been entrusted with was sunk. Besides, the ships of Genova were not fast enough, and they wallowed too low in the open water of the ocean.

G.o.d had brought him to the Portuguese sh.o.r.e, and the Portuguese were the great sailors, the daring explorers of the world. Would he not be the viceroy of kings? He would find a way to win the sponsorship of the King of Portugal. And if not him, then another king, or some other man and not a king at all. He would succeed, for G.o.d was with him.

Diko stopped the playback. "Do you want to see it again?" she asked.

"We'll want to see it many times," said Tagiri. "But not at this moment."

"That was not G.o.d," said Kemal.

"I hope not," said Ha.s.san. "I didn't like seeing that Christian trinity. I found it - disappointing."

"Show this anywhere in the Muslim world," said Kemal, "and the rioting would not stop until every Past.w.a.tch installation within their reach was destroyed."

"As you said, Kemal," said Tagiri, "it was not G.o.d. Because this vision was not visible to Columbus alone. All the other great visions of history have been utterly subjective. This one we saw, but not on the Tempoview. Only the TruSite Il was able to detect it, and we already know that when the TruSite Il is used, it can cause people in the past to see those who are watching."

"One of us? That message was sent by Past.w.a.tch?" asked Kemal, already angry at the thought of one of them meddling with history.

"Not one of us," said Diko. "We live in the world in which Columbus sailed west and brought Europe to destroy or dominate all of America. In the hours since I saw this, I realized: This vision created our time. We already know that Columbus's voyage changed everything. Not just because he reached the West Indies, but because when he returned he was full of absolutely believable stories of things he had not seen. Of gold, of great kingdoms. And now we now why. He had sailed west at the command of G.o.d, and G.o.d had told him he would find these things. So he had to report finding them, he had to believe that gold and great kingdoms were there to be found, even though he had no evidence for them, because G.o.d had told him they were there."

"If not one of us, then who did this?" asked Ha.s.san.

Kemal laughed nastily. "It was one of us, obviously. Or rather, one of you."

"Are you saying we created this as a hoax?" said Tagiri.

"Not at all," said Kemal. "But look at you. You are the people in Past.w.a.tch who are determined to reach back into the past and make things better. So let's say that in another version of history, another group within a previous iteration of Past.w.a.tch discovered they could change the past, and they did it. Let's say that they decided that the most terrible event in all of history was the last crusade, the one led by the son of a Genovese weaver. Why not? In that history, Columbus turned his unrelenting ambition toward the goal he had right before this vision. He comes to sh.o.r.e and interprets his survival as G.o.d's favor. He pursues the crusade to liberate Constantinople with the same charm, the same relentlessness that we have seen in him on his other mission. Eventually he leads an army in a b.l.o.o.d.y war against the Turk. What if he wins? What if he destroys the Seljuk Turks, and then sweeps on into all the Muslim lands, wreaking blood and carnage in the normal European Christian manner? The great Muslim civilization might be destroyed, and with it who knows what treasures of knowledge. What if Columbus's crusade was seen as the worst event in all of history - and the people of Past.w.a.tch decided, as you have, that they must make things better? The result is our history. The devastation of the Americas. And the world is dominated by Europe all the same."

The others looked at him, unable to think of anything to say.

"Who is to say that the change these people made didn't end up with a worse result than the events they tried to avoid?" Kemal grinned at them wickedly. "The arrogance of those who wish to play G.o.d. And that's exactly what they did, isn't it? They played G.o.d. The Trinity, to be exact. The dove was such a nice touch. Yes, by all means, look at this scene a thousand times. And every time you see those poor actors pretending to be the Trinity, fooling Columbus into turning away from his crusade and embarking on a westward voyage that devastated a world, I hope you see yourselves. It was people just like you who caused all that suffering."

Ha.s.san took a step toward Kemal, but Tagiri interposed herself between them. "Perhaps you're right, Kemal," she said. "But perhaps not. For one thing, I don't think their purpose was just to turn Columbus away from his crusade. For that, all they would have needed to do was command him to abandon the idea. And they said that if he failed, the consequences would be terrible for Christianity. A far cry from trying to undo the Christian conquest of the Muslim world."

"They could easily have been lying," said Kemal. "Telling him what they thought he needed to hear to get him to act as they wanted."

"Perhaps," said Tagiri. "But I think they were doing something else. There was something else that would have happened if Columbus had not received this vision. And we must find out what it was."

"How can we find out what would have happened?" asked Diko.

Tagiri smiled nastily at Kemal. "I know one man of unflagging persistence and great wisdom and quick judgment. He is just the man to undertake the project of determining what it was that this vision was meant to avoid, or what it was meant to accomplish. For some reason the people of that other future determined to send Columbus west. Someone must head the project of finding out why. And you, Kemal, you're doing nothing productive at all, are you? Your great days are behind you, and now you're reduced to going about telling other people that their dreams are not worth accomplishing."

For a moment it seemed that Kemal might strike her, so cruel was her a.s.sessment of him. But he did not raise his hand, and after a long moment he turned and left the room.

"Is he right, Mother?" asked Diko.

"More to the point," said Ha.s.san, "will he make trouble for us?"

"I think he'll head the project of finding out what would have happened," said Tagiri. "I think the problem will take hold of him and won't let go and he'll end up working with us."

"Oh good," murmured someone dryly, and they all laughed.

"Kemal as an enemy is formidable, but Kemal as a friend is irreplaceable," said Tagiri. "He found Atlantis, didn't he, when no one believed it even needed to be discovered? He found the great flood. He found Yewesweder. And if anyone can, he'll find what history would have been, or at least a plausible scenario. And we'll be glad to be working with him." She grinned. "We mad people, we're stubborn and unreasonable and impossible to deal with, but there is a certain breed of willing victim that chooses to work with us anyway."

The others laughed, but few of them thought that Kemal was anything like their beloved Tagiri.

"And I think we've all missed one of the biggest points of all in Diko's great discovery. Yes, Diko, great." Tagiri looked around at them. "Can't you see what it is?"

"Of course," said Ha.s.san. "Seeing that little performance by actors pretending to be the Trinity lets us know one fact beyond doubting: We can reach back into the past. If they can send a vision, a deliberately controlled vision, then so can we."

"And maybe," said Tagiri, "maybe we can do better."

Chapter 6 - Evidence.

According to the Popul Vuh, the holy book of the Mayan people, Xpiyacoc and Xmucane gave birth to two sons, named One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu. One Hunahpu grew to be a man, and he married, and his wife, Xbaquiyalo, gave birth to two sons, One Monkey and One Artisan. Seven Hunahpu never grew up; before he could become a man he and his brother were sacrificed at the ball court when they lost to One and Seven Death. Then One Hunahpu's head was put in the crotch of a calabash tree, which had never before borne fruit. And when it did bear, the fruit looked like a head, and One Hunahpu's head came to look like the fruit, so they were the same.

Then a young virgin named Blood Woman came to the ball court of sacrifice to see the tree, and there she spoke to the head of One Hunahpu, and the head of One Hunahpu spoke to her. When she touched the bone of his head, his spittle came out onto her hand, and soon she conceived a child. Seven Hunahpu consented to this, and so he was also the father of what filled her belly.

Blood Woman refused to tell her father how the child came to be in her womb, since it was forbidden to go to the calabash tree where One Hunahpu's head had been perched. Disgusted that she had conceived a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, her father sent her away to be sacrificed. But to save her life, she told the Military Keepers of the Mat, who were sent to kill her, that the child in her came from One Hunahpu's head. Then they didn't want to kill her, but they had to bring her heart back to show her father, Blood Gatherer. So Blood Woman fooled her father by filling a bowl with the red sap of the croton tree, which congealed to look like a b.l.o.o.d.y heart. All the G.o.ds of Xibalba were fooled by her false heart.

Blood Woman went to the house of One Hunahpu's widow, Xbaquiyalo, to bear her child. When the child was born, it was two children, two sons, whom she named Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Xbaquiyalo didn't like the noise the babies made, and she had them thrown out of the house. Her sons, One Monkey and One Artisan, had no wish for new brothers, so they put them out on an anthill. When the babies didn't die there, the older brothers put them in brambles, but still they thrived. The hatred between the older brothers and the younger brothers continued through all the years 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 G.o.ds 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 Past.w.a.tch 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. "Past.w.a.tch 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 a.s.signed 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 Past.w.a.tch 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 repet.i.tion made them believable. The great Kemal was setting up a new project. For the first time, Past.w.a.tch was trying to extrapolate from the past what would have happened in the future if a particular event hadn't happened. Why are they forming a project to study this, Hunahpu wondered. He knew that he could answer all of Kemal's questions in a moment. He knew that if anyone in Kemal's new project read a single paper he had written and posted on the nets, they would realize that the answer was right before them, the work was already laid out, it was just a matter of applying a few man-years to filling in the details.

Hunahpu waited for Kemal to write to him, or for one of the Past.w.a.tch supervisors to recommend that Kemal look into Hunahpu's research, or even - as must inevitably happen - for Hunahpu's rea.s.signment to Kemal's project. But the rea.s.signment didn't come, the letter didn't come, and Hunahpu's superiors seemed not to realize that Kemal's most valuable a.s.sistant would be this sluggish young Maya who had worked dispiritedly on their tedious data gathering project.

That was when Hunahpu realized that it wasn't just the resistance of others that he faced: It was their disdain as well. His work was so despised that no one thought of it at all, no rumors of it had circulated, and when he looked into it he found out that none of the papers he had posted on the networks had been downloaded and read, not one, not once.

But it was not in Hunahpu's nature to despair. Instead he grimly redoubled his efforts, knowing that the only way to surmount the barrier of contempt was to produce a body of evidence so compelling that Kemal would be forced to respect it. And if he had to, Hunahpu would carry that evidence to Kemal directly, bypa.s.sing all the regular channels, the way that Kemal had come to Tagiri in that already-legendary meeting. Of course, there was a difference. Kemal had come as a famous man, with known achievements, so that he was courteously received even when his message was unwelcome. Hunahpu had no achievements whatsoever, or none that were recognized by anybody, and so it was unlikely that Kemal would ever agree to see him or look at his work. Yet this did not stop him. Hunahpu continued, patiently a.s.sembling evidence and writing careful a.n.a.lyses of what he had found and loathing every moment he had to spend recording the details of the building of seagoing ships among the coastal Zapotecs during the years from 1510 to 1524.

His older brothers, the policeman and the priest, who were not b.a.s.t.a.r.ds and therefore always looked down on him, became worried about him. They came to see him at the Past.w.a.tch station at San Andres Tuxtla, where Hunahpu was allowed to use a conference room to meet with them, since there was no privacy in his cubicle. "You're never home," the policeman said. "I call and you never answer."

"I'm working," said Hunahpu.

"You don't look healthy," said the priest. "And when we spoke to your supervisor about you, she said you weren't very productive. Always working on your own useless projects."

"You asked my supervisor about me?" asked Hunahpu. He wasn't sure whether to be annoyed at the intrusion or pleased that his brothers had cared enough to check up on him.

"Well, actually, she came to us," said the policeman, who always told the truth even when it was slightly embarra.s.sing. "She wanted to see if we could encourage you to abandon your foolish obsession with the lost future of the Indies."

Hunahpu looked at them sadly. "I can't," he said.

"We didn't think so," said the priest. "But when you're dropped from Past.w.a.tch, what will you do? What are you qualified for?"

"Don't think either of us has any money to help you," said the policeman. "Or even to feed you more than a few meals a week, though you're welcome to that much, for our mother's sake."

"Thank you," said Hunahpu. "You've helped me clarify my thinking."

They got up to leave. The policeman, who was older and hadn't beaten him up as a child half so often as the priest, stopped in the doorway. His face was tinged with regret. "You aren't going to change a thing, are you?" he said.

"Yes, I am," said Hunahpu. "I'm going to hurry and finish sooner. Before I'm dropped from Past.w.a.tch."

The policeman shook his head. "Why do you have to be so ... Indie?"

Hunahpu didn't understand the question for a moment. "Because I am."

"So are we, Hunahpu."

"You? 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 b.l.o.o.d.y-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 Past.w.a.tch 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? G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed 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 the Fieschi, which had been an exploitable connection. In Portugal, all navigation, all expeditions were under the direct control of the king. The only way to get ships and sailors and funding for a voyage of exploration was by appealing to the king, and as a Genovese and a commoner there was scant hope of this.

Since he had been born with no family connections in Portugal, there was only one way to acquire them. And marriage into a well-connected family, when he had neither fortune nor prospects, was a difficult project indeed. He needed a family on the fringes of n.o.bility, and one that was not on the way up. A rising family would be looking to improve its station by marrying above themselves; a sinking family, especially a junior branch with unlikely daughters and little fortune, might look upon such a foreign adventurer as Columbus with - well, not favor, exactly, but at least tolerance. Or perhaps resignation.