Pastwatch

by Orson Scott Card

  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 full 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 had 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 l
oot 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 consolaton, the way a man might pet a loyal dog.