Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  The house current fails within a few million microseconds. By this time, however, the intruder lies on the floor. His body makes uncoordinated movements but he does not get up. It soon becomes clear that the intruder is dead, and therefore no longer a threat to my owner's health. I am now holding the VRM-1489 hat rack, which I drop. I pull the body out of the entryway and return to the bedroom.

  My owner is leaning out of his bed and trying to reach his wheelchair: "Lieutenant Halloran, what happened?"

  "Error message thirty-nine," I say. "Indeterminate question."

  "You dickweed. Lieutenant Halloran, what has happened to that burglar?"

  "I electrocuted the intruder with the VRM-547 floor lamp." I take the wheelchair and restore it to its proper position.

  "You did?" My owner stares at me for several million microseconds. "I thought—Lieutenant Halloran, aren't robots programmed against harming humans?"

  "Yes. However, protecting your health took precedence. The intruder was a threat to your health."

  "I see." It is many millions of microseconds before my owner speaks again. "Lieutenant Halloran, call the police."

  "Yes, sir, sergeant, sir."

  I go to the kitchen and use the phone to call the police. I also request an ambulance; my owner's physical condition is returning to normal, but it has been in the danger zone and medical attention remains mandatory. I make my requests in the most urgent forms my vocabulary allows.

  There are other problems. I am in need of repairs. The electricity is out. The living room is a mess: the floor is wet, broken glass is everywhere again, the VRM-1489 hat rack is damaged, and I am incapable of removing the body by myself.

  The police and ambulance arrive in reasonable time. The police reset a circuit breaker, restoring power, and the medical personnel remove the body. A paramedic checks on my owner's health and pronounces him fit.

  The police question him in the kitchen while I clean the living room. "I don't know what happened," he tells them. "I was stuck in bed. The robot—it's never worked too well. God only knows why, but it started scrubbing the floor, and that burglar got suspicious. He went to look, and the next thing, bang, the lights went out."

  "What happened doesn't matter much," a policeman says. "Either he stumbled into the lamp and knocked it over, or he pushed the robot into it and the robot knocked it over. Either way he's dead—and no tears lost. Your visitor killed two people this evening when he knocked over a liquor store. You were lucky."

  My owner sits in the kitchen entry, and he can see me from there. "I guess I was lucky at that," he says.

  The police and ambulance depart shortly afterward, and my owner returns to bed. The next morning he calls the VA, and requests a repair technician, who arrives that afternoon. He decides that my damage is minimal, and repairs are easily made.

  My owner discusses robotics with the technician, who is happy to answer questions. "Sure, robots are alive," he says. "You can't always predict what they'll do, which is one way to define life. In fact, no matter how careful you are when you give a robot a command, you can't count on it to do exactly what you ordered."

  "I used to know a guy like that," my owner says.

  "Well, it's not quite the same thing as with humans," the technician says. "People know what they're doing when they 'misunderstand' an order. Robots just 'understand' it in a way you didn't expect. That's different."

  "I suppose it is."

  The technician finishes the repairs, and I resume my functions. There is a considerable amount of work to perform; in addition to my usual routine, my owner makes certain changes in my programming. He invites his nephews to visit again, which entails even more work. Amid all this I note one improvement in my situation. The VRM-1489 hat rack is so badly damaged that my owner decides to put it out with the trash. Thus I will no longer confuse the floor lamp and the hat rack. All is well.

  The two nephews appear late that afternoon, and at first their voice-stress levels are high. My owner speaks to them. "I was talkin' crazy yesterday, and I'm sorry I scared you. I don't ever want to do that again, OK?"

  "OK," they answer. The stress levels remain high.

  "Good. Hey, Sock! Bring out the munchies."

  I roll out of the kitchen, carrying VRM-T-223 and VRM-T-224, coded as a bag of chips and a six-pack of cola. "Sock?" one of the nephews asks. "You changed his name?"

  "Yeah. I did some thinking last night," my owner says. "The robot's name, well, it's just a way to remember someone. I figure if I remember anyone, it should be the Sock and not Halloran." I put the bag of chips and the six-pack of cola on the VRM-53 coffee table. "Yesterday I told you how the Sock died. . . . but now I want to tell you how he lived."

  CIBOLA

  Connie Willis

  “Carla, you grew up in Denver,” Jake said. “Here’s an assignment that might interest you.”

  This is his standard opening line. It means he is about to dump another “local interest” piece on me.

  “Come on, Jake,” I said. “No more nutty Bronco fans who’ve spray-painted their kids orange and blue, okay? Give me a real story. Please?”

  “Bronco season’s over, and the NFL draft was last week,” he said. “This isn’t a local interest.”

  “You’re right there,” I said. “These stories you keep giving me are of no interest, local or otherwise. I did the time machine piece for you. And the psychic dentist. Give me a break. Let me cover something that doesn’t involve nuttos.”

  “It’s for the ‘Our Living Western Heritage’ series.” He handed me a slip of paper. “You can interview her this morning and then cover the skyscraper moratorium hearings this afternoon.”

  This was plainly a bribe, since the hearings were front page stuff right now, and “historical interests” could be almost as bad as locals—senile old women in nursing homes rambling on about the good old days. But at least they didn’t crawl in their washing machines and tell you to push “rinse” so they could travel into the future. And they didn’t try to perform psychic oral surgery on you.

  “All right,” I said, and took the slip of paper. “Rosa Turcorillo,” it read and gave an address out on Santa Fe. “What’s her phone number?”

  “She doesn’t have a phone,” Jake said. “You’ll have to go out there.” He started across the city room to his office. “The hearings are at one o’clock.”

  “What is she, one of Denver’s first Chicano settlers?” I called after him.

  He waited till he was just outside his office to answer me. “She says she’s the great-granddaughter of Coronado,” he said, and beat a hasty retreat into his office. “She says she knows where the Seven Cities of Cibola are.”

  I spent forty-five minutes researching Coronado and copying articles and then drove out to see his great-granddaughter. She lived out on south Santa Fe past Hampden, so I took I-25 and then was sorry. The morning rush hour was still crawling along at about ten miles an hour pumping carbon monoxide into the air. I read the whole article stopped behind a semi between Speer and Sixth Avenue.

  Coronado trekked through the Southwest looking for the legendary Seven Cities of Gold in the 1540s, which poked a big hole in Rosa’s story, since any great-granddaughter of his would have to be at least three hundred years old.

  There wasn’t any mystery about the Seven Cities of Cibola either. Coronado found them, near Gallup, New Mexico, and conquered them but they were nothing but mud-hut villages. Having been burned once, he promptly took off after another promise of gold in Quivira in Kansas someplace where there wasn’t any gold either. He hadn’t been in Colorado at all.

  I pulled onto Santa Fe, cursing Jake for sending me on another wild-goose chase, and headed south. Denver is famous for traffic, air pollution, and neighborhoods that have seen better days. Santa Fe isn’t one of those neighborhoods. It’s been a decaying line of rusting railroad tracks, crummy bars, old motels, and waterbed stores for as long as I can remember, and I, as Jake continually reminds me, grew up
in Denver.

  Coronado’s granddaughter lived clear south past Hampden, in a trailer park with a sign with “Olde West Motel” and a neon bison on it, and Rosa Turcorillo’s old Airstream looked like it had been there since the days when the buffalo roamed. It was tiny, the kind of trailer I would call “Turcorillo’s modest mobile home” in the article, no more than fifteen feet long and eight wide.

  Rosa was nearly that wide herself. When she answered my knock, she barely fit in the door. She was wearing a voluminous turquoise housecoat, and had long black braids.

  “What do you want?” she said, holding the metal door so she could slam it in case I was the police or a repo man.

  “I’m Carla Johnson from the Denver Record,” I said. “I’d like to interview you about Coronado.” I fished in my bag for my press card. “We’re doing a series on ‘Our Living Western Heritage.’” I finally found the press card and handed it to her. “We’re interviewing people who are part of our past.”

  She stared at the press card disinterestedly. This was not the way it was supposed to work. Nuttos usually drag you in the house and start babbling before you finish telling them who you are. She should already be halfway through her account of how she’d traced her ancestry to Coronado by means of the I Ching.

  “I would have telephoned first, but you didn’t have a phone,” I said.

  She handed the card to me and started to shut the door.

  “If this isn’t a good time, I can come back,” I babbled. “And we don’t have to do the interview here if you’d rather not. We can go to the Record office or to a restaurant.”

  She opened the door and flashed a smile that had half of Cibola’s missing gold in it. “I ain’t dressed,” she said. “It’ll take me a couple of minutes. Come on in.”

  I climbed the metal steps and went inside. Rosa pointed at a flowered couch, told me to sit down and disappeared into the rear of the trailer.

  I was glad I had suggested going out. The place was no messier than my desk, but it was only about six feet long and had the couch, a dinette set, and a recliner. There was no way it would hold me and Coronado’s granddaughter, too. The place may have had a surplus of furniture but it didn’t have any of the usual crazy stuff, no pyramids, no astrological charts, no crystals. A deck of cards was laid out like the tarot on the dinette table, but when I leaned across to look at them, I saw it was a half-finished game of solitaire. I put the red eight on the black nine.

  Rosa came out, wearing orange polyester pants and a yellow print blouse and carrying a large black leather purse. I stood up and started to say, “Where would you like to go? Is there someplace close?” but I only got it half out.

  “The Eldorado Cafe,” she said and started out the door, moving pretty fast for somebody three hundred years old and three hundred pounds.

  “I don’t know where the Eldorado Cafe is,” I said, unlocking the car door for her. “You’ll have to tell me where it is.”

  “Turn right,” she said. “They have good cinnamon rolls.”

  I wondered if it was the offer of the food or just the chance to go someplace that had made her consent to the interview. Whichever, I might as well get it over with. “So Coronado was your great-grandfather?” I said.

  She looked at me as if I were out of my mind. “No. Who told you that?”

  Jake, I thought, who I plan to tear limb from limb when I get back to the Record. “You aren’t Coronado’s great-granddaughter?”

  She folded her arms over her stomach. “I am the descendant of El Turco.”

  El Turco. It sounded like something out of Zorro. “So it’s this El Turco who’s your great-grandfather?”

  “Great-great. El Turco was Pawnee. Coronado captured him at Cicuye and put a collar around his neck so he could not run away. Turn right.”

  We were already halfway through the intersection. I jerked the steering wheel to the right and nearly skidded into a pickup.

  Rosa seemed unperturbed. “Coronado wanted El Turco to guide him to Cibola,” she said.

  I wanted to ask if he had, but I didn’t want to prevent Rosa from giving me directions. I drove slowly through the next intersection, alert to sudden instructions, but there weren’t any. I drove on down the block.

  “And did El Turco guide Coronado to Cibola?”

  “Sure. You should have turned left back there,” she said.

  She apparently hadn’t inherited her great-great-grandfather’s scouting ability. I went around the block and turned left, and was overjoyed to see the Eldorado Cafe down the street. I pulled into the parking lot and we got out.

  “They make their own cinnamon rolls,” she said, looking at me hopefully as we went in. “With frosting.”

  We sat down in a booth. “Have anything you want,” I said. “This is on the Record.”

  She ordered a cinnamon roll and a large Coke. I ordered coffee and began fishing in my bag for my tape recorder.

  “You lived here in Denver a long time?” she asked.

  “All my life. I grew up here.”

  She smiled her gold-toothed smile at me. “You like Denver?”

  “Sure,” I said. I found the pocket-sized recorder and laid it on the table. “Smog, oil refineries, traffic. What’s not to like?”

  “I like it too,” she said.

  The waitress set a cinnamon roll the size of Mile High Stadium in front of her and poured my coffee.

  “You know what Coronado fed El Turco?” The waitress brought her large Coke. “Probably one tortilla a day. And he didn’t have no shoes. Coronado make him walk all that way to Colorado and no shoes.”

  I switched the tape recorder on. “You say Coronado came to Colorado,” I said, “but what I’ve read says he traveled through New Mexico and Oklahoma and up into Kansas, but not Colorado.”

  “He was in Colorado.” She jabbed her finger into the table. “He was here.”

  I wondered if she meant here in Colorado or here in the Eldorado Cafe.

  “When was that? On his way to Quivira?”

  “Quivira?” she said, looking blank. “I don’t know nothing about Quivira.”

  “Quivira was a place where there was supposed to be gold,” I said. “He went there after he found the Seven Cities of Cibola.”

  “He didn’t find them,” she said, chewing on a mouthful of cinnamon roll. “That’s why he killed El Turco.”

  “Coronado killed El Turco?”

  “Yeah. After he led him to Cibola.”

  This was even worse than talking to the psychic dentist.

  “Coronado said El Turco made the whole thing up,” Rosa said. “He said El Turco was going to lead Coronado into an ambush and kill him. He said the Seven Cities didn’t exist.”

  “But they did?”

  “Of course. El Turco led him to the place.”

  “But I thought you said Coronado didn’t find them.”

  “He didn’t.”

  I was hopelessly confused by now. “Why not?”

  “Because they weren’t there.”

  I was going to run Jake through his paper shredder an inch at a time. I had wasted a whole morning on this and I was not even going to be able to get a story out of it.

  “You mean they were some sort of mirage?” I asked.

  Rosa considered this through several bites of cinnamon roll. “No. A mirage is something that isn’t there. These were there.”

  “But invisible?”

  “No.”

  “Hidden.”

  “No.”

  “But Coronado couldn’t see them?”

  She shook her head. With her forefinger, she picked up a few stray pieces of frosting left on her plate and stuck them in her mouth. “How could he when they weren’t there?”

  The tape clicked off, and I didn’t even bother to turn it over. I looked at my watch. If I took her back now I could make it to the hearings early and maybe interview some of the developers. I picked up the check and went over to the cash register.

 
“Do you want to see them?”

  “What do you mean? See the Seven Cities of Cibola?”

  “Yeah. I’ll take you to them.”

  “You mean go to New Mexico?”

  “No. I told you, Coronado came to Colorado.”

  “When?”

  “When he was looking for the Seven Cities of Cibola.”

  “No, I mean when can I see them? Right now?”

  “No,” she said, with that, ‘how dumb can anyone be?’ look. She reached for a copy of the Rocky Mountain News that was lying on the counter and looked inside the back page. “Tomorrow morning. Six o’clock.”

  One of my favorite things about Denver is that it’s spread all over the place and takes you forever to get anywhere. The mountains finally put a stop to things twenty miles to the west, but in all three other directions it can sprawl all the way to the state line and apparently is trying to. Being a reporter here isn’t so much a question of driving journalistic ambition as of driving, period.

  The skyscraper moratorium hearings were out on Colorado Boulevard across from the Hotel Giorgio, one of the skyscrapers under discussion. It took me forty-five minutes to get there from the Olde West Trailer Park.

  I was half an hour late, which meant the hearings had already gotten completely off the subject. “What about reflecting glass?” someone in the audience was saying. “I think it should be outlawed in skyscrapers. I was nearly blinded the other day on the way to work.”

  “Yeah,” a middle-aged woman said. “If we’re going to have skyscrapers, they should look like skyscrapers.” She waved vaguely at the Hotel Giorgio, which looks like a giant black milk carton.

  “And not like that United Bank building downtown!” someone else said. “It looks like a damned cash register!”

  From there it was a short illogical jump to the impossibility of parking downtown, Denver’s becoming too decentralized, and whether the new airport should be built or not. By five-thirty they were back on reflecting glass.