Rumors began circulating a few weeks later, and repetition made them believable. The great Kemal was setting up a new project. For the first time, Pastwatch 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 Pastwatch supervisors to recommend that Kemal look into Hunahpu's research, or even -- as must inevitably happen -- for Hunahpu's reassignment to Kemal's project. But the reassignment didn't come, the letter didn't come, and Hunahpu's superiors seemed not to realize that Kemal's most valuable assistant 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, bypassing 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 assembling evidence and writing careful analyses 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 bastards and therefore always looked down on him, became worried about him. They came to see him at the Pastwatch 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 embarrassing. "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 Pastwatch, 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 Pastwatch."

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 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.