Orson Card - Pastwatch - The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus

"Letters," Pedro said. "From Diko, most of all."

Colўn smiled, took the letters, and laid them unopened in his lap. He closed his eyes again, and it seemed he meant to doze off again. Pedro and Chipa lingered, watching him, with affection, with nostalgia for early days and great achievements. Then, suddenly, he seemed to rouse from his slumber. His eyes flew open and he raised one hand, his finger pointing out to sea. "Constantinople!" he cried.

Then he fell back in his chair, and his hand dropped into his lap. What dream was this? they wondered.

A few moments later, Pedro realized that there was a different quality to the old man's posture now. Ali, yes, that's the difference: He isn't breathing now. He bent down and kissed his forehead. "Good-bye, my Captain-General," he said. Chipa also kissed his white hair. "Go to God, my friend," she murmured. Then they left to tell the palace staff that the great discoverer was dead.

In the year 1955, a Caribian archaeologist, heading a dig near the traditional location of the landing place of Cristobal Colўn, observed that the nearly perfect skull found that day was heavier than it should be. He noted the anomaly, and a few weeks later, when he had occasion to return to the University of Ankuash, he had it x-rayed. It showed a metal plate embedded inside the skull.

Inside the skull? Impossible. Only upon close examination did he find the hairline marks of surgery that had made the metal implant possible. But bones did not heal this neatly. What kind of surgery was this, to leave so little damage? It was not possible in 1955, let alone in the late fifteenth century, to do a job like this.

Photographing every step of the process, and with several assistants as witness, he sawed open the skull and removed the plate. It was of an alloy he had never seen before; later testing would reveal that it was an alloy that had never existed, to anyone's knowledge. But the metal was hardly the issue. For once it was detached from the skull, it was found that the metal separated into four thin leaves, on which there was a great deal of writing -- all of it almost microscopically small. It was written in four languages panish, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic. It was full of circumlocutions, for it was speaking of concepts which could not be readily expressed in the vocabulary available in any of those languages in 1500. But the message, once deciphered, was clear enough. It told which radio frequency to broadcast on, and in what pattern, in order to trigger a response from a buried archive.

The broadcast was made. The archive was found. The story it told was incredible and yet could not be doubted, for the archive itself was clearly the product of a technology that had never existed on Earth. When the story became clear, a search was made for two other archives. Together, they told a detailed history, not only of the centuries and millennia of human life before 1492, but also of a strange and terrifying history that had not happened, of the years between 1492 and the making of the archives. If there had been any doubt before about the authenticity of the find, all was dispelled when digs at the locations specified in the archives led to spectacular archaeological finds confirming everything that could be confirmed.

Had there once been a different history? No, two different histories, both of them obliterated by interventions in the past?

Suddenly the legends and rumors about Colўn's wife Diko and Yax's mentor One-Hunahpu began to make sense. The more obscure stories of a Turk who supposedly sabotaged the Pinta and was killed by Colўn's crew were revived and compared to the plans talked about in the archives. Obviously, the travelers had succeeded in journeying into their past, all three of them. Obviously they had succeeded.

Two of the travelers already had tombs and monuments. All that was left was to build a third tomb there on the Haitian shore, lay the skull within it, and inscribe on the outside the name Kemal, a date of birth that would not come for centuries, and as the date of death, 1492.