"Would bronze make that big a difference?" asked one of the onlookers. "I mean, the flint hatchets of the Mexica could behead a horse with one blow, it's not as if they didn't have devastating weapons already."

"A bronze-tipped arrow is lighter and can fly farther and truer than a stone-tipped one. A bronze sword can pierce the padded armor that snagged and turned away flint points and flint blades. It makes a huge difference. And it wouldn't have stopped with bronze. The Tarascans were serious in their work with many different metals. They were starting to work with iron."

"No," said several at once.

"I know what everybody says, but it's true." He brought up a scene with a Tarascan metallurgist working with more-or-less pure iron.

"That won't work," said one onlooker. "It's not hot enough."

"Do you doubt that he'll find a way to make his fire hotter?" asked Hunahpu. "This clip is from a time when Cortes was already marching to Tenochtitlan. That's why the work with iron came to nothing. Because it hadn't succeeded by the time of the Spanish conquest it was not remembered. I found it because I'm the only one who believed that it mattered to try to look for it. But the Tarascans were on the verge of working with iron."

"So the Mesoamerican bronze age would have lasted for ten years?" someone asked.

"There's no law that says bronze has to come before iron, or that iron has to wait centuries after the discovery of bronze," said Hunahpu.

"Iron isn't gunpowder," said Diko. "Or are you going to show us Tarascans working with saltpeter?"

"My point isn't that they caught up with European technology all in a few years -- I think that would be impossible. What I'm saying is that by allying themselves with the Tarascans and controlling them, the Tlaxcalans would have had weapons that would give them a devastating advantage over all the surrounding nations. They would cause so much fear that nations, once conquered, might stay conquered longer, might freely send the Tarascans tribute that the Mexica would have had to send an army to bring back. The boundaries would have increased and so would the stability of the empire."

"Possibly," said Diko.

"Probably," said Hunahpu. "And there's this, too. The Tlaxcala already dominated Huexotzingo and Cholula -- small nearby cities, but it gives us an idea of their idea of empire. And what did they do? They interfered in the internal politics of their client states to a degree that the Mexica never dreamed of. They weren't just extracting tribute and sacrificial victims, they were establishing a centralized government with rigid control over the governments of conquered nations. A true politically unified empire, rather than a loose tribute network. This is the innovation that made the Assyrians so powerful, and which was copied by every successful empire after them. The Tlaxcalans have finally made the same discovery two thousand years later. But think what it did for the Assyrians, and now imagine what it will do for Tlaxcala."

"All right," said Diko. "Let me call in Mother and Father."

"But I'm not through," said Hunahpu.

"I was looking at your presentation to see if you were worth spending time on. You are. There was obviously a lot more going on in Mesoamerica than anybody thought, because everybody was studying the Mexica and nobody was looking for successor states. Your approach is clearly productive, and people with a lot more authority than I have need to see this."

Suddenly Hunahpu's animation and enthusiasm disappeared, and he became calm and stoic-looking again. Diko thought: This means that he's now afraid again.

"Don't worry," she said. "They'll be as excited as I am."

He nodded. "When will we do this, then?"

"Tomorrow, I expect. Go to your room, sleep. The hotel restaurant will feed you, though I doubt they have much in the way of Mexican food so I hope standard international cuisine will do. I'll call you in the morning with our schedule for tomorrow."

"What about Kemal?"

"I don't think he'll want to miss this," said Diko.

"Because I never even got to the transportation issue."

"Tomorrow," said Diko.

The others were already drifting away, though some lingered, obviously hoping to speak to Hunahpu directly. Diko turned to them. "Let this man sleep," she said to them. "You'll all be invited to his presentation tomorrow, so why make him tell things tonight that he'll tell everybody tomorrow?"

She was surprised to hear Hunahpu laugh. She hadn't heard him laugh before, and she turned to him. "What's funny?"

"I thought when you stopped me it was because you didn't believe in me and you were being polite, with promises of meetings with Tagiri and Hassan and Kemal."

"Why would you think that, when I was saying that I thought this was important?" Diko was offended that he thought she was lying.

"Because I never before met someone who would do what you did. Stop a presentation that you thought was important."

She didn't understand.

"Diko," he said. "Most people want nothing more than to know something that people higher up don't know. To know things first. Here you had a chance to hear all of this first, and you stop it? You wait? And not only that, you promise others who are below you in the hierarchy that they can be there too?"

"That's the way it is in Pastwatch, " said Diko. "The truth will still be true tomorrow, and everybody who needs to know it has an equal claim on learning it."

"That's the way it is in Juba," Hunahpu corrected her. "Or maybe that's the way it is in Tagiri's house. But everywhere else in the world, information is a coin, and people are greedy to acquire it and careful how and where they spend it."

"Well, I guess we surprised each other," said Diko.

"Did I surprise you?"

"You're actually quite talkative," she said.

"To my friends," he said.

She accepted the compliment with a smile. His smile in return was warm and all the more valuable because it was so rare.

Santangel knew from the moment that Columbus began to speak that this was not going to be the normal courtier begging for advancement. For one thing, there was no hint of boastfulness, no swagger in the man. His face looked younger than his flowing white hair would imply, giving him an ageless, gnomic look. What captivated, though, was his manner. He spoke quietly, so that all the court had to fall silent to allow the King and Queen to hear him. And even though he looked equally at Ferdinand and Isabella, Santangel could see at once that this man knew who it was that he had to please, and it was not Ferdinand.

Ferdinand had no dreams of crusade; he worked to conquer Granada because it was Spanish soil, and his dream was of a single, united Spain. He knew it could not be achieved in a moment. He laid his plans with patience. He did not have to overwhelm Castile; it was enough to be married to Isabella, knowing that in their children the crowns would be united forever, and in the meantime he gave her great freedom of action in her kingdom as long as their military movements were under his direction alone. He showed the same patience in his war with Granada, never risking his armies in all-or-nothing pitched battles, but rather besieging, feinting, maneuvering, subverting, confusing the enemy, who knew that he meant to destroy them but could never quite find where to commit their forces to stop him. He would drive the Moors from Spain but he would do it without destroying Spain in the process.

Isabella, however, was more Christian than Spanish. She joined in the war against Granada because she wanted the land under Christian rule. She had long pressed for the purification of Spain by removing all non-Christians; it made her impatient that Ferdinand refused to let her expel the Jews until after the Moors were broken. "One infidel at a time," he said, and she consented, but she chafed under the delay, feeling the presence of any non-Christian in Spain like a stone in her shoe.