Pastwatch- The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,82

time theory against me."

"It doesn't matter anyway," said Diko. "Because even if our time continues to exist, I won't be in it."

There it was -- the unspoken assumption that she would be one of the three who went back in time.

"That's ludicrous," he said. "A tall black woman, going to live among the Taino?"

"A tall black woman with a detailed knowledge of events that still lie in the future for the people of the surrounding tribes," she said. "I think I'll do well enough."

"Your parents will never let you go."

"My parents will do whatever it takes for this mission to succeed," she answered. "I'm already far more qualified than anyone else. I'm in perfect health. I've been studying the languages I'll need for that aspect of the project -- Spanish, Genovese, Latin, two Arawak dialects, one Carib dialect, and the Ciboney language that is still used in Putukam's village because they think it's so holy. Who else can match that? And I know the plan, inside and out, and all the thinking that went into it. Who can do better than I to adapt the plan if things don't go as expected? So I will go, Hunahpu. Mother and Father will fight it for a while, and then they'll realize that I am the best hope of success, and they'll send me."

He said nothing. He knew that it was true.

She laughed at him. "You hypocrite," she said. "You've been doing just what I've been doing -- you've designed the Mesoamerican part of the plan so that only you can possibly do it."

That too was true. "I'm as natural a choice as you are -- more natural, because I'm a Maya."

"A Maya who's more than a foot taller than the Mayas and Zapotecs of the period," she retorted.

"I speak two Mayan dialects, plus Nahuatl, Zapotec, Spanish, Portuguese, and both of the Tarascan dialects that matter. And all your arguments apply to me as well. Plus I know all the technologies we're going to try to introduce and the detailed personal histories of all the people we have to deal with. There is no choice but me."

"I know it," said Diko. "I knew it before you did. You don't have to persuade me."

"Oh," he said.

"You are a hypocrite," she said, and there was some emotion behind it. "You were all set to go yourself, and yet you expected me to stay behind. You had some foolish notion that we would marry and have a baby, and then I would stay behind on the off chance that there would be a future here while you went back and fulfilled your destiny."

"No," he said. "I never really thought of marriage."

"Then what, Hunahpu? Sneaking off to some sordid little rendezvous? I'm not your Beatrice, Hunahpu. I have work of my own to do. And unlike the Europeans and, apparently, the Indies, I know that to mate with someone without marriage is a repudiation of the community, a refusal to take one's proper role within the society. I won't mate like an animal, Hunahpu. When I marry it will be as a human being. And it will not be in this timestream. If I marry at all, it will be in the past, because that's the only place where I have a future."

He listened, leaden at heart. "The chance of our both living long enough to meet there is small, Diko."

"And that, my friend, is why I refuse all your invitations to extend our friendship beyond these walls. There's no future for us."

"Is the future, is the past, all that matters to you? Don't you have just a little bit of room for the present?"

Again the tears flowed down her cheeks. "No," she said.

He reached up and cleared her cheeks with his thumbs, then streaked his own cheeks with her tears. "I will love no one but you," he said.

"So you say now," she said. "But I release you from that promise and I forgive you already for the fact that you will love someone, and you will marry, and if we ever meet there, we will be friends and be glad to see each other and we will not regret for one moment that we did not act foolishly now."

"We will regret it, Diko. At least I will. I regret it now, and I will regret it then, and always. Because no one that we meet in the past will understand what and who we really are, not the way we understand each other now.