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!"