Pastwatch: The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus

Chapter 3 -- Ambition

Sometimes Diko felt as if she had grown up with Christopher Columbus, that he was her uncle, her grandfather, her older brother. He was always present in her mother's work, scenes from his life playing out again and again in the background.

One of her earliest memories was of Columbus giving orders for his men to capture several Indies to take back to Spain as slaves. Diko was so young she didn't realize the significance of what was happening, really. She knew, however, that the people in the holoview weren't real, so when her mother said, with deep, bitter anger, "I will stop you," Diko thought that Mother was speaking to her and she burst into tears.

"No, no," said Mother, rocking her back and forth. "I wasn't talking to you, I was talking to the man in the holoview."

"He can't hear you," said Diko.

"He will someday."

"Papa says he died a hundred years ago."

"Longer than that, my Diko."

"Why are you so mad at him? Is he bad?"

"He lived in a bad time," said Mother. "He was a great man in a bad time."

Diko couldn't understand the moral subtleties of this. The only lesson she learned from the event was that somehow the people in the holoview were real after all, and the man called variously Cristoforo Colombo and Cristobal Colўn and Christopher Columbus was very, very important to Mother.

He became important to Diko, too. He was always in the back of her mind. She saw him playing as a child. She saw him arguing endlessly with priests in Spain. She saw him kneel before the King of Aragon and the Queen of Castile. She saw him trying vainly to talk to Indies in Latin, Genovese, Spanish, and Portuguese. She saw him visiting his son at a monastery in La Rabida.

When she was five, Diko asked her mother, "Why doesn't his son live with him?"

"Who?"

"Cristoforo," said Diko. "Why does his little boy live at the monastery?"

"Because Colombo has no wife."

"I know," said Diko. "She died."

"So while he's struggling to try to get the king and queen to let him make a voyage west, his son has to stay somewhere safe, where he can get an education."

"But Cristoforo has another wife the whole time," said Diko.

"Not a wife," said Mother.

"They sleep together," said Diko.

"What have you been doing?" asked Mother. "Have you been running the holoview when I wasn't here?"

"You're always here, Mama," said Diko.

"That's not an answer, you sly child. What have you been watching?"

"Cristoforo has another little boy with his new wife," said Diko. "He never goes to live in the monastery."

"That's because Colombo isn't married to the new baby's mother."

"Why not?" asked Diko.

"Diko, you're five years old and I'm very busy. Is it such an emergency that I have to explain all this to you right now?"

Diko knew that this meant that she would have to ask Father. That was all right. Father wasn't home as much as Mother, but when he was, he answered all her questions and never made her wait till she grew up.

Later that afternoon, Diko stood on a stool beside her mother, helping her crush the soft beans for the spicy paste that would be supper. As she stirred the mashed beans as neatly but vigorously as she could manage, another question occurred to her. "If you died, Mama, would Papa send me to a monastery?"

"No," said Mother.

"Why not?"

"I'm not going to die, not till you're an old woman yourself."

"But if you did."

"We're not Christians and it's not the fifteenth century," said mother. "We don't send our children to monasteries to be educated."

"He must have been very lonely," said Diko.

"Who?"

"Cristoforo's boy in the monastery."

"I'm sure you're right," said Mother.

"Was Cristoforo lonely, too?" asked Diko. "Without his little boy?"

"I suppose," said Mother. "Some people get very lonely without their children. Even when they're surrounded by other people all the time, they miss their little ones. Even when their little ones get older and turn into big ones, they miss the little ones that they'll never see again."

Diko grinned at that. "Do you miss the two-year-old me?"

"Yes."

"Was I cute?"

"Actually, you were annoying," said Mother. "Always into everything, never at rest. You were an impossible child. Your father and I could hardly get anything done for looking after you."

"Wasn't that cute?" asked Diko. She was a little disappointed.

"We kept you, didn't we?" said Mother. "You must have been at least a little bit cute. Don't splash the beans like that, or we'll end up eating dinner off the walls."

"Papa makes bean mash better than you do," said Diko.

"How kind of you to say so, " said Mother.

"But when you go to work, you're Papa's boss."

Mother sighed. "Your father and I work together."

"You're head of the project. Everybody says so."

"Yes, that's true."

"If you're the head, is Papa the elbow or what?"

"Papa is the hands and feet, the eyes and heart."

Diko started to giggle. "Are you sure Papa isn't the stomach?"

"I think your father's little pot belly is sweet."

"Well it's a good thing Papa isn't the bottom of the project."

"That's enough, Diko," said Mother. "Have a little respect. You really are not young enough anymore for that sort of thing to be cute."

"If it's not cute, what is it?"

"Nasty."

"I'm going to be nasty my whole life," said Diko defiantly.

"I have no doubt of it," said Mother.

"I'm going to stop Cristoforo," she said.

Mother looked at her oddly. "That's my job, if it can be done at all."

"You'll be too old," said Diko. "I'm going to grow up and stop him for you."

Mother didn't argue.

By the time Diko was ten, she spent all her afternoons in the lab, learning to use the old Tempoview. Technically she wasn't supposed to use it, but the whole installation at Ileret was now devoted to Mother's project, and so it was Mother's attitudes toward the rules that prevailed. This meant that everyone followed scientific procedures rigorously, but the boundary line between work and home wasn't very carefully observed. Children and relatives were often about, and as long as they were quiet, no one worried. It wasn't as if anything secret were going on. Besides, nobody was using the outdated Tempoviews except to replay old recordings, so Diko wasn't interfering with anybody's work. Everyone knew that Diko was careful. So no one even commented on the fact that an unauthorized, half-educated child was browsing through the past unsupervised.

At first, Father rigged the Tempoview that Diko used so that it would only replay previously recorded views. Diko soon became annoyed with this, however, because the Tempoview had such a restricted perspective. She always longed to see things from another angle.

Just before her twelfth birthday, she figured out how to bypass Father's cursory attempt at blocking her from fall access. She wasn't particularly deft about it; Father's computer must have told him what she had done, and he came to see her almost within the hour.

"So you want to go looking into the past," he said.

"I don't like the views that other people recorded," she said. "They're never interested in what I'm interested in."

"What we're deciding right now," said Father, "is whether to banish you from the past entirely, or to give you the freedom that you want."

Diko felt suddenly ill. "Don't banish me," she said. "I'll stay with the old views but don't make me leave."

"I know that all the people you look at are dead," said Father. "But that doesn't mean that it's right for you to spy on them just out of curiosity."

"Isn't that what Pastwatch is all about?" asked Diko.

"No," said Father. "Curiosity yes, but not personal curiosity. We're scientists."

"I'll be a scientist too," said Diko.

"We look at people's lives to find out why people do what they do."

"Me too," said Diko.

"You'll see terrible things," said Father. "Ugly things. Very private things. Disturbing things."

"I already have."

"That's what I mean," said Father. "If you thought the things we've allowed you to see up to now were ugly, private, or disturbing, what will you do when you see things that are really ugly, private, and disturbing?"

"Ugly, Private, and Disturbing. Sounds like a firm of solicitors," said Diko.

"If you're going to have the privileges of a scientist, then you have to act like a scientist," said Father.

"Meaning?"

"I want daily reports of what places and times you've watched. I want weekly reports of what you've been examining and what you've learned. You must maintain a log just like everybody else. And if you see something disturbing, talk to me or your mother."

Diko grinned. "Got it. Ugly and Private I deal with myself, but Disturbing I discuss with the Ancient Ones."

"You are the light of my life," said Father. "But I think I didn't yell at you enough when you were young enough for it to do any good."

"I'll turn in all the reports you asked for," she said. "But you have to promise to read them."

"On exactly the same basis as anybody else's reports," said Father. "So you'd better not show me any second-rate work."

Diko explored, reported, and began to look forward to her weekly interviews with Father concerning the work she did. Only gradually did she realize how childish and elementary those early reports were, how she skimmed over the surface of issues resolved long before by adult watchers; she marveled that Father never gave her a clue that she wasn't on the cutting edge of science. He always listened with respect, and within a few years Diko was doing things that merited it.

It was old Cristoforo Colombo, of all people, who got her away from the Tempoview and onto the far more sensitive TruSite. She had never forgotten him, because Mother and Father never forgot him, but her early explorations with the Tempoview never involved him. Why should they? She had seen practically every moment of Colombo's life in the old recordings that Mother and Father had been looking at more or less continuously all her life. What brought her back to Colombo was the question she had set for herself: When do the great figures of history make the decisions that set them on the path of greatness? She eliminated from her study all the people who simply drifted into fame; it was the ones who struggled against great obstacles and never gave up who intrigued her. Some of them were monsters and some were noble; some were self-serving opportunists and some were altruists; some of their achievements crumbled almost at once, and some changed the world in ways that had reverberations down to the present. To Diko, that hardly mattered. She was searching for the moment of decision, and, after she had written reports on several dozen great figures, it occurred to her that in all her watching of Cristoforo, she had never actually sat down and studied him in a linear way, seeing what caused this son of an ambitious Genovese weaver to take to the sea and tear up all the old maps of the world.

That Cristoforo was one of the great ones could not be doubted, whether Mother and Father approved of him or not. So ... when was the decision made? When did he first set foot on the course that made him one of the most famous men in history?

She thought she found the answer in 1459, when the rivalry between the two great houses of Genova, the Fieschi and the Adorno, was coming to a head. In that year a man named Domenico Colombo was a weaver, a supporter of the Fieschi party, the former keeper of the Olivella Gate, and the father of a little redheaded boy who had within him the power to change the world.

Cristoforo was eight years old the last time Pietro Fregoso came to visit his father. Cristoforo knew the man's name, but he also knew that in Domenico Colombo's house, Pietro Fregoso was always called by the title that had been wrested from him by the Adorno party: the Doge. Pietro Fregoso had decided to make a serious play for power again, and since Cristoforo's father was one of the most fiery partisans in the Fieschi cause, it was not too surprising that Pietro chose to honor the Colombo house by holding a secret meeting there.

Pietro arrived in the morning, accompanied by only a couple of men -- he had to move inconspicuously through the city, or the Adornos would know he was plotting something. Cristoforo saw his father kneel and kiss Pietro's ring. Mother, who was standing in the doorway between the weaving shop and the front room, muttered something about the Pope under her breath. But Pietro was the Doge of Genova, or rather the former Doge. No one called him the Pope. "What did you say, Mama?"

"Nothing," she said. "Come in here."

Cristoforo found himself being dragged into the weaving shop, where the journeymen's looms rocked and banged as the apprentices carried thread back and forth or crawled under the loom to fold the cloth that the journeymen were weaving. Cristoforo had a vague awareness that someday soon his father would expect him to take his place as an apprentice in the shop of some other member of the weavers' guild. He did not look forward to it. The life of the apprentice was one of drudgery and meaningless labor, and the journeymen's teasing turned into serious torment when Father and Mother were not in the room. In another weavers' shop, Cristoforo knew, he would not have the protected status he had here, where his father was master.

Soon Mother lost interest in Cristoforo and he was able to drift back to the doorway and watch the goings-on in the front room, where the bolts of cloth had been cleared from the display table and the great spools of thread pulled up like chairs. Several other men had drifted in during the past few minutes. It was to be a meeting, Cristoforo saw. Pietro Fregoso was holding a council of war, and in Father's house.

At first it was the great men that Cristoforo watched. They were dressed in the most dazzling, extravagant clothing he had ever seen. None of Father's customers came into the shop dressed like this, but some of their clothing was made from Father's finest cloth. Cristoforo recognized the rich brocade one gentleman was wearing as a cloth made not a month ago by Carlo, the best of the journeymen. It had been picked up by Tito, who always wore a green uniform. Only now did Cristoforo realize that when Tito came to buy, he was not buying for himself, but rather for his master. Tito was not a customer, then. He merely did what he was sent to do. Yet Father treated him like a friend, even though he was a servant.

This got Cristoforo thinking about the way Father treated his friends. The joking, the easy affection, the shared wine, the stories. Eye to eye they spoke, Father and his friends.

Father always said that his greatest friend was the Doge -- was Pietro Fregoso. Yet now Cristoforo saw that this was not the truth, for Father did not joke, showed no easiness in his manner, told no stories, and the wine he poured was for the gentlemen at the table, and not for himself at all. Father hovered at the edges of the room, watching to see if any man needed more wine, pouring it immediately if he did. And Pietro did not include Father in his glance when he met the eyes of the men around the table. No, Pietro was not Father's friend; by all appearances, Father was Pietro's servant.

It made Cristoforo feel a little sick inside, for he knew that Father took great pride in having Pietro for a friend. Cristoforo watched the meeting, seeing the graceful movements of the rich men, listening to the elegance of their language. Some of the words Cristoforo didn't even understand, and yet he knew the words were Genovese and not Latin or Greek. Of course Father has nothing to say to these men, Cristoforo thought. They speak another language. They were foreigners as surely as the strange men Cristoforo saw down at the docks one day, the ones from Provence.

How did these gentlemen learn to speak this way? Cristoforo wondered. How did they learn to say words that are never spoken in our house or on the street? How can such words belong to the language of Genova, and yet none of the common Genovese know them? Is this not one city? Are these men not of the Fieschi as Father is? The Adorno braggarts who pushed over Fieschi carts in the market, Father spoke more like them than like these gentlemen who were supposedly of his own party.

There is more difference between gentlemen and tradesmen like Father than there is between Adorno and Fieschi. Yet the Fieschi and the Adorno often come to blows, and there are stories of killings. Why are there no quarrels between tradesmen and gentlemen?

Only once did Pietro Fregoso include Father in the conversation.

"I'm impatient with all this biding our time, biding our time!" he said. "Look at our Domenico here." He gestured toward Cristoforo's father, who stepped forward like a tavernkeeper who had been called upon. "Seven years ago he was keeper of the Olivella Gate. Now he has a house half the size of the one he had then, and only three journeymen instead of the six from before. Why? Because the so-called Doge steers all the business to Adorno weavers. Because I am out of power and I can't protect my friends!"

"It is not all a matter of Adorno patronage, my lord," said one of the gentlemen. "The whole city is poorer, what with the Turk in Constantinople, the Muslims harrying us at Chios, and the Catalonian pirates who boldly raid our very docks and loot the houses near the water."

"My point exactly!" said the Doge. "Foreigners put this puppet into power -- what do they care how Genova suffers? It is time to restore true Genovese rule. I will not hear a contradiction."

One of the gentlemen spoke quietly into the silence that followed Pietro's speech. "We are not ready," he said. "We will pay in precious blood for a foolhardy attack now."

Pietro Fregoso glowered at him. "So. I say I will not hear a contradiction, and then you contradict me? What party are you in, de Portobello?"

"Yours to the death, my lord," said the man. "But you were never one who punished a man for saying to you what he believed to be the truth."

"Nor will I punish you now," said Pietro. "As long as I can count on you standing beside me."

De Portobello rose to his feet. "In front of you, my lord, or behind you, or wherever I must stand to protect you when danger threatens."

At that, Father stepped forward, unbidden. "I too will stand beside you, my lord!" he cried. "Any man who would raise a hand against you must first strike down Domenico Colombo!"

Cristoforo saw how the others reacted. Where they had nodded when de Portobello made his promise of loyalty, they only looked silently at the table when Father spoke. Some of them turned red -- in anger? Embarrassment? Cristoforo wasn't sure why they would not want to hear Father's promise. Was it because only a gentleman could fight well enough to protect the rightful Doge? Or was it because Father should not have been so bold as to speak at all in such exalted company?

Whatever the reason, Cristoforo could see that their silence had struck Father like a blow. He seemed to wither as he shrank back against the wall. Only when his humiliation was complete did Pietro speak again. "Our success depends on all the Fieschi fighting with courage and loyalty." His words were gracious, but they were too late to spare Father's feelings. They came, not as an honorable acceptance of Father's offer, but rather as a consolation, the way a man might pet a loyal dog.

Father doesn't matter to them, thought Cristoforo. They meet in his house because they must keep their meeting secret, but he himself is nothing to them.

The meeting ended soon after; the decision was to go on the attack in two days. As soon as the gentlemen had left and Father closed the door, Mother sailed past Cristoforo and pushed herself into Father's face. "What do you mean, you fool? If anyone wants to harm the rightful Doge, they'll have to strike down Domenico Colombo first! -- what nonsense! When did you become a soldier? Where is your fine sword? How many duels have you fought? Or are you thinking this will be a brawl in a tavern, and you have only to knock together the heads of a couple of drunks, and the battle will be won? Do you care nothing for our children, that you plan to leave them fatherless?"

"A man has honor," said Father.

Cristoforo wondered, What is Father's honor, when his greatest friend despises the offer of his life?

"Your honor will have your children on the street in rags."

"My honor made me keeper of the Olivella Gate for four years. You liked living in our fine house then, didn't you?"

"That time is over," said Mother. "Blood will flow, and it will not be Adorno blood."

"Don't be too sure of that," said Father. He stormed upstairs. Mother burst into tears of rage and frustration. The argument was over.

But Cristoforo wasn't satisfied. He waited as Mother calmed herself by pulling the extra spools away from the table and putting the cloth back on it, so customers could look at it and so it would stay clean. When he judged he could speak without being screamed at, he said, "How do gentlemen learn to be gentlemen?"

She glared at him. "They're born that way," she said. "God made them gentlemen."

"But why can't we learn to talk the way they do?" Cristoforo asked. "I don't think it would be hard." Cristoforo imitated the refined voice of de Portobello, saying, "You were never one who punished a man for saying what he believed to be the truth."

Mother came to him and slapped him hard across the face. It stung, and even though Cristoforo had long since stopped crying when he was punished, the sheer surprise of it more than the sting made tears leap from his eyes.

"Don't ever let me hear you putting on airs like that again, Cristoforo!" she shouted. "Are you too good for your father? Do you think that honking like a goose will make you grow feathers?"

In his anger, Cristoforo shouted back at her. "My father is as good a man as any of them. Why shouldn't his son learn to be a gentleman?"

Ahnost she slapped him again, for having dared to answer her back. But then she caught herself, and actually heard what he had said. "Your father is as good as any of them," she said. "Better!"

Cristoforo gestured toward the fine fabrics spread across the table. "There is the cloth -- why can't Father dress like a gentleman? Why can't he speak the way they do, and dress like them, and then the Doge would honor him!"

"The Doge would laugh at him," said Mother. "And so would everyone else. And then if he kept on trying to act the gentleman, one of them would come along and put a rapier through your father's heart, for daring to be such an upstart."

"Why would they laugh at him, if they don't laugh at these other men for dressing and talking the way they do?"

"Because they really are gentlemen, and your father is not."

"But if it isn't their clothing and their language ... Is there something in their blood? They didn't look stronger than Father. They had weak arms, and most of them were fat."

"Father is stronger than they are, of course. But they carry swords."

"Then Father should buy a sword!"

"Who would sell a sword to a weaver!" said Mother, laughing. "And what would Father do with it? He has never wielded a sword in his life. He'd cut off his own fingers!"

"Not if he practiced," said Cristoforo. "Not if he learned."

"It isn't the sword that makes a man a gentleman," said Mother. "Gentlemen are born as the children of gentlemen, that's all. Your father's father wasn't a gentleman, and so he isn't."

Cristoforo thought about this for a moment. "Aren't we all descended from Noah, after the flood? Why are the children of one family gentlemen, and the children of Father's family aren't? God made us all."

Mother laughed bitterly. "Oh, is that what the priests taught you? Well, you should see them bowing and scraping to the gentlemen while they piss on the rest of us. They think that God likes gentlemen better, but Jesus Christ didn't act that way. He cared nothing for gentlemen!"

"So what gives them the right to look down at Father?" demanded Cristoforo, and against his will his eyes again filled with tears.

She regarded him for a moment, as if deciding whether to tell him the truth. "Gold and dirt," she said.

Cristoforo didn't understand.

"They have gold in their treasure boxes," said Mother, "and they own land. That's what makes them gentlemen. If we had huge swatches of land out in the country, or if we had a box filled with gold in the attic, then your father would be a gentleman and no one would laugh at you if you learned to talk the fancy way they do and wore clothing made of this." She held the trailing end of a bolt of cloth against Cristoforo's chest. "You'd make a fine gentleman, my Cristoforo." Then she dropped the fabric and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Finally Cristoforo left the room. Gold, he thought. If Father had gold, then those other men would listen to him. Well, then -- I will get him gold.

One of the men at the meeting must have been a traitor, or perhaps one of them spoke carelessly, where a traitorous servant overheard, but somehow the Adornos got word of the plans of the Fieschi, and when Pietro and his two bodyguards showed up beside the cylindrical towers of the Sant'Andrea Gate where the rendezvous was supposed to take place, they were set upon by a dozen of the Adornos. Pietro was dragged from his horse and struck in the head with a mace. They left him for dead as they ran away. The shouting could be heard in the Colombo house as clearly as if it had happened next door, which it almost had -- they lived scarcely a hundred yards from the Sant' Andrea Gate. They heard the first shouts of the men, and Pietro's voice as he cried out, "Fieschi! To me, Fieschi!"

At once Father took his heavy staff from its place by the fire and ran into the street. Mother got to the front of the house too late to stop him. Screaming and crying, she gathered the children and the apprentices into the back of the house while the journeymen stood guard at the front door. There in the gathering darkness they heard the tumult and shouting, and then Pietro's screaming. For he had not been killed outright, and now in his agony he howled for help in the night.

"Fool," whispered Mother. "If he keeps screeching like that, he'll tell all the Adornos that they didn't kill him and they'll come back and finish him off."

"Will they kill Father?" asked Cristoforo.

The younger children began to cry.

"No," said Mother, but Cristoforo could tell that she was not sure.

Perhaps she could sense his skepticism. "All fools," she said. "All men are fools. Fighting over who gets to rule Genova -- what does that matter? The Turk is in Constantinople! The heathens have the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem! The name of Christ is no longer spoken in Egypt, and these little boys are squabbling over who gets to sit on a fancy chair and call himself the Doge of Genova? What is the honor of Pietro Fregoso compared to the honor of Jesus Christ? What is it to possess the palace of the Doge when the land where the Blessed Virgin walked in her garden, where the angel came to her, is in the hands of circumcised dogs? If they want to kill somebody, let them liberate Jerusalem! Let them free Constantinople! Let them shed blood to redeem the honor of the Son of God!"

"That's what I will fight for," said Cristoforo.

"Don't fight!" said one of his sisters. "They'd kill you."

"I'd kill them first."

"You're very small, Cristoforo," his sister said.

"I won't always be small."

"Hush," said Mother. "This is all nonsense. The son of a weaver doesn't go on Crusade."

"Why not?" said Cristoforo. "Would Christ refuse my sword?"

"What sword?" said Mother scornfully.

"I'll have a sword one day," said Cristoforo. "I'll be a gentleman!"

"How, when you have no gold?"

"I'll get gold!"

"In Genova? As a weaver? As long as you live, you'll be the son of Domenico Colombo. No one will give you gold, and no one will call you a gentleman. Now be silent, or I'll pinch your arm."

It was a worthy threat, and all the children knew well enough to obey when Mother uttered it.

A couple of hours later, Father came home. The journeymen almost didn't let him in, just from his knocking. Not until he cried out in anguish "My lord is dead! Let me in!" did they unbar the door.

He staggered inside just as the children raced after Mother into the front room. Father was covered with blood, and Mother screamed and embraced him and then searched him for wounds.

"It's not my blood," he said in anguish. "It's the blood of my Doge! Pietro Fregoso is dead! The cowards set on him and pulled him from his horse and struck him in the head with a mace!"

"Why are you covered with his blood, Nico!"

"I carried him to the doors of the palace of the Doge. I carried him to the place where he ought to be!"

"Why would you do that, you fool!"

"Because he told me to! I came to him and he was crying out and covered with blood and I said, 'Let me take you to your physicians, let me take you to your house, let me find the ones who did this and kill them for you,' and he said to me, 'Domenico, take me to the palace! That's where the Doge should die -- in the palace, like my father!' So I carried him there, in my own arms, and I didn't care if the Adornos saw us! I carried him there and he was in my arms when he died! I was his true friend!"

"If they saw you with him, they'll find you and kill you!"

"What does it matter?" said Father. "The Doge is dead!"

"It matters to me," said Mother. "Get those clothes off." She turned to the journeymen and began giving orders. "You -- get the children to the back of the house. You -- have the apprentices draw water and heat it for a bath. You -- when I get these clothes off him, burn them."

The other children obeyed the journeyman and fled to the back of the house, but Cristoforo did not. He watched as his mother undressed his father, covering him with kisses and curses the whole time. Even after she led him into the courtyard for his bath, even as the stench of the burning bloody clothing came into the house, Cristoforo stayed there in the front room. He was on watch, guarding the door.

Or so the old accounts of that night all said. Columbus was on watch, to keep his family safe. But Diko knew that this was not all that was going through Cristoforo's mind. No, he was making his decision. He was setting before himself the terms of his future greatness. He would be a gentleman. Kings and queens would treat him with respect. He would have gold. He would conquer kingdoms in the name of Christ.

He must have known even then that to accomplish all of this, he would have to leave Genova. As his mother had said: As long as he lived in this city, he would be the son of Domenico the weaver. From the next morning he bent his life toward achieving his new goals. He began to study -- languages, history -- with such vigor that the monks who were teaching him commented on it. "He has caught the spirit of scholarship," they said, but Diko knew that it wasn't learning for its own sake. He had to know languages to travel abroad in the world. He had to know history to know what was in the world when he ventured into it.

And he had to know how to sail. Every chance he got, Cristoforo was down at the docks, listening to the sailors, questioning them, learning what all the crewmen did. Later he focused on the navigators, plying them with wine when he could afford it, simply demanding answers when he could not. Eventually it would get him aboard a ship, and then another; he turned down no chance to sail, and did any work that was asked of him, so that he would know all that a weaver's son could hope to learn about the sea.

Diko made her report on Cristoforo Colombo, on the moment when he made his decision. As always, her father praised it, criticizing only minor points. But she knew by now that his praise could conceal serious criticism. When she challenged him, he wouldn't tell her what his criticism was. "I say that this report is a good one," he told her. "Now leave me alone."

"There's something wrong with it," Diko said, "and you're not telling me."

"It's a well-written report. It has nothing wrong except the points I told you."

"Then you disagree with my conclusion. You don't think this was what made Cristoforo decide to be great."

"Decide to be great?" asked Father. "Yes, I think this is ahnost certainly the point in his life where he made that decision."

"Then what's wrong with it!" she shouted.

"Nothing!" he shouted back.

"I'm not a child!"

He looked at her in consternation. "You aren't?"

"You're humoring me and I'm tired of it!"

"All right," he said. "Your report is excellent and observant. He certainly decided on the night you pinpointed, and for the reasons that you laid out, that he would pursue gold and greatness and the glory of God. All that is very good. But there is not one breath of a hint in anything you reported on that would tell us why and how he decided that he would achieve those goals by sailing west into the Atlantic."

It struck as brutally as the slap that Cristoforo's mother had given him, and it brought the same tears to her eyes, even though there was no physical blow involved.

"I'm sorry," said Father. "You said you were not a child."

"I'm not," she said. "And you're wrong."

"I am?"

"My project is to find when the decision for greatness was made, and that's what I found. It's your project and Mother's project to figure out when Columbus decided to go west."

Father looked at her in surprise. "Well, yes, I suppose so. It's certainly something we need to know."

"So there's nothing wrong with my report for my project, just because it doesn't happen to answer the question that's bothering you in yours."

"You're right," said Father.

"I know!"

"Well, now I know, too. I withdraw the criticism. Your report is complete and acceptable and I accept it. Congratulations.

But she didn't go away.

"Diko, I'm working," he said.

"I'll find it for you," she said.

"Find what?"

"Whatever it was that caused Cristoforo to sail west."

"Finish your own project, Diko," said Father.

"You don't think I can, do you?"

"I've been over the recordings of Columbus's life, and so has your mother, and so have countless other scholars and scientists. You think you'll find what none of them ever found?"

"Yes," said Diko.

"Well," said Father. "I think we've just isolated your decision for greatness."

He smiled at her, a crooked little smile. She assumed that he was teasing her. But she didn't care. He might think he was joking, but she would make his joke turn real. Had he and Mother and countless others pored over all the old Tempoview recordings of Columbus's life? Very well, then, Diko would stop looking at recordings at all. She would go and look directly at his life, and not with the Tempoview, either. The TruSite II would be her tool. She didn't ask for permission, and she didn't ask for help. She simply took over a machine that wasn't used at night, and adjusted the schedule of her life to fit the hours when the machine was hers to use. Some wondered whether she really ought to be using the most up-to-date machines -- after all, she wasn't actually a member of Pastwatch. Her training was at best informal. She was merely the child of watchers, and yet she was using a machine that one normally got access to after years of study.

Those who had those doubts, however, seeing the set of her face, seeing how hard she worked and how quickly she learned to use the machine, soon lost any desire to question her right to do it. It occurred to some of them that this was the human way, after all. You went to school to learn to do a trade that was different from your parents' work. But if you were going into the family business, you learned it from childhood up. Diko was as much a watcher as anyone else, and by all indications a good one. And those who had at first thought of questioning her or even stopping her instead notified the authorities that here was a novice worth observing. A recording was started, watching all that Diko did. And soon she had a silver tag on her file: Let this one go where she wants.