The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “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.

  “Why don’t they put glass you can see through in their skyscrapers?” an old man who looked a lot like the time machine inventor said. “I’ll tell you why not. Because those big business executives are doing things they should be ashamed of, and they don’t want us to see them.”

  * * *

  I left at seven and went back to the Record to try to piece my notes together into some kind of story. Jake was there.

  “How’d your interview with Coronado’s granddaughter go?” he asked.

  “The Seven Cities of Cibola are here in Denver only Coronado couldn’t see them because they’re not there.” I looked around. “Is there a copy of the News someplace?”

  “Here? In the Record building!” he said, clutching his chest in mock horror. “That bad, huh? You’re going to go work for the News?” But he fished a copy out of the mess on somebody’s desk and handed it to me. I opened it to the back page.

  There was no “Best Times for Viewing Lost Cities of Gold” column. There were pictures and dates of the phases of the moon, road conditions, and “What’s in the Stars: by Stella.” My horoscope of the day read: “Any assignment you accept today will turn out differently than you expect.” The rest of the page was devoted to the weather, which was supposed to be sunny and warm tomorrow.

  The facing page had the crossword puzzle, “Today in History,” and squibs about Princess Di and a Bronco fan who’d planted his garden in the shape of a Bronco quarterback. I was surprised Jake hadn’t assigned me that story.

  I went down to Research and looked up El Turco. He was an Indian slave, probably Pawnee, who had scouted for Coronado, but that was his nickname, not his name. The Spanish had called him “The Turk” because of his peculiar hair. He had been captured at Cicuye, after Coronado’s foray into Cibola, and had promised to lead them to Quivira, tempting them with stories of golden streets and great stone palaces. When the stories didn’t pan out, Coronado had had him executed. I could understand why.

  Jake cornered me on my way home. “Look, don’t quit,” he said. “Tell you what, forget Coronado. There’s a guy out in Lakewood who’s planted his garden in the shape of John Elway’s face. Daffodils for hair, blue hyacinths for eyes.”

  “Can’t,” I said, sidling past him. “I’ve got a date to see the Seven Cities of Gold.”

  * * *

  Another delightful aspect of the Beautiful Mile-High City is that in the middle of April, after you’ve planted your favorite Bronco, you can get fifteen inches of snow. It had started getting cloudy by the time I left the paper, but fool that I was, I thought it was an afternoon thunderstorm. The News’s forecast had, after all, been for warm and sunny. When I woke up at four-thirty there was a foot and half of snow on the ground and more tumbling down.

  “Why are you going back if she’s such a nut?” Jake had asked me when I told him I couldn’t take the Elway garden. “You don’t seriously think she’s onto something, do you?” and I had had a hard time explaining to him why I was planning to get up at an ungodly hour and trek all the way out to Santa Fe again.

  She was not El Turco’s great-great-granddaughter. Two greats still left her at two hundred and fifty plus, and her history was as garbled as her math, but when I had gotten impatient she had said, “Do you want to see them?” and when I had asked her when, she had consulted the News’s crossword puzzle and said, “Tomorrow morning.”

  I had gotten offers of proof before. The time machine inventor had proposed that I climb in his washing machine and be sent forward to “a glorious future, a time when everyone is rich,” and the psychic dentist had offered to pull my wisdom teeth. But there’s always a catch to these offers.

  “Your teeth will have been extracted in another plane of reality,” the dentist had said. “X-rays taken in this plane will show them as still being there,” and the time machine guy had checked his soak cycle and the stars at the last minute and decided there wouldn’t be another temporal agitation until August of 2158.

  Rosa hadn’t p
ut any restrictions at all on her offer. “You want to see them?” she said, and there was no mention of reality planes or stellar-laundry connections, no mention of any catch. Which doesn’t mean there won’t be one, I thought, getting out the mittens and scarf I had just put away for the season and going out to scrape the windshield off. When I got there she would no doubt say the snow made it impossible to see the Cities or I could only see them if I believed in UFO’s. Or maybe she’d point off somewhere in the general direction of Denver’s brown cloud and say, “What do you mean, you can’t see them?”

  I-25 was a mess, cars off the road everywhere and snow driving into my headlights so I could barely see. I got behind a snowplow and stayed there, and it was nearly six o’clock by the time I made it to the trailer. Rosa took a good five minutes to come to the door, and when she finally got there she wasn’t dressed. She stared blearily at me, her hair out of its braids and hanging tangled around her face.

  “Remember me? Carla Johnson? You promised to show me the Seven Cities?”

  “Cities?” she said blankly.

  “The Seven Cities of Cibola.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, and motioned for me to come inside. “There aren’t seven. El Turco was a dumb Pawnee. He don’t know how to count.”

  “How many are there?” I asked, thinking, this is the catch. There aren’t seven and they aren’t gold.

  “Depends,” she said. “More than seven. You still wanta go see them?”

  “Yes.”

  She went into the bedroom and came out after a few minutes with her hair braided, the pants and blouse of the day before and an enormous red carcoat, and we took off toward Cibola. We went south again, past more waterbed stores and rusting railroad tracks, and out to Belleview.

  It was beginning to get fairly light out, though it was impossible to tell if the sun was up or not. It was still snowing hard.

  She had me turn onto Belleview, giving me at least ten yards’ warning, and we headed east toward the Tech Center. Those people at the hearing who’d complained about Denver becoming too decentralized had a point. The Tech Center looked like another downtown as we headed toward it.

  A multi-colored downtown, garish even through the veil of snow. The Metropoint building was pinkish-lavender, the one next to it was midnight blue, while the Hyatt Regency had gone in for turquoise and bronze, and there was an assortment of silver, sea-green, and taupe. There was an assortment of shapes, too: deranged trapezoids, overweight butterflies, giant beer cans. They were clearly moratorium material, each of them with its full complement of reflecting glass, and, presumably, executives with something to hide.

  Rosa had me turn left onto Yosemite, and we headed north again. The snowplows hadn’t made it out here yet, and it was heavy going. I leaned forward and peered through the windshield, and so did Rosa.

  “Do you think we’ll be able to see them?” I asked.

  “Can’t tell yet,” she said. “Turn right.”

  I turned into a snow-filled street. “I’ve been reading about your great-grandfather.”

  “Great-great,” she said.

  “He confessed he’d lied about the cities, that there really wasn’t any gold.” She shrugged. “He was scared. He thought Coronado was going to kill him.”

  “Coronado did kill him,” I said. “He said El Turco was leading his army into a trap.”

  She shrugged again and wiped a space clear on the windshield to look through.

  “If the Seven Cities existed, why didn’t El Turco take Coronado to them? It would have saved his life.”

  “They weren’t there.” She leaned back.

  “You mean they’re not there all the time?” I said.

  “You know the Grand Canyon?” she asked. “My great-great-grandfather discovered the Grand Canyon. He told Coronado he seen it. Nobody saw the Grand Canyon again for three hundred years. Just because nobody seen it don’t mean it wasn’t there. You was supposed to turn right back there at the light.”

  I could see why Coronado had strangled El Turco. If I hadn’t been afraid I’d get stuck in the snow, I’d have stopped and throttled her right then. I turned around, slipping and sliding, and went back to the light.

  “Left at the next corner and go down the block a little ways,” she said, pointing. “Pull in there.”

  “There” was the parking lot of a donut shop. It had a giant neon donut in the middle of its steamed-up windows. I knew how Coronado felt when he rode into the huddle of mud huts that was supposed to have been the City of Gold.

  “This is Cibola?” I said.

  “No way,” she said, heaving herself out of the car. “They’re not there today.”

  “You said they were always there,” I said.

  “They are.” She shut the car door, dislodging a clump of snow. “Just not all the time. I think they’re in one of those time-things.”

  “Time-things? You mean a time warp?” I asked, trying to remember what the washing-machine guy had called it. “A temporal agitation?”

  “How would I know? I’m not a scientist. They have good donuts here. Cream-filled.”

  * * *

  The donuts were actually pretty good, and by the time we started home the snow had stopped and was already turning to slush, and I no longer wanted to strangle her on the spot. I figured in another hour the sun would be out, and John Elway’s hyacinth-blue eyes would be poking through again. By the time we turned onto Hampden, I felt calm enough to ask when she thought the Seven Cities might put in another appearance.

  She had bought a Rocky Mountain News and a box of cream-filled donuts to take home. She opened the box and contemplated them. “More than seven,” she said. “You like to write?”

  “What?” I said, wondering if Coronado had had this much trouble communicating with El Turco.

  “That’s why you’re a reporter, because you like to write?”

  “No,” I said. “The writing’s a real pain. When will this time-warp thing happen again?”

  She bit into a donut. “That’s Cinderella City,” she said, gesturing to the mall on our right with it. “You ever been there?”

  I nodded.

  “I went there once. They got marble floors and this big fountain. They got lots of stores. You can buy just about anything you want there. Clothes, jewels, shoes.”

  If she wanted to do a little shopping now that she’d had breakfast, she could forget it. And she could forget about changing the subject. “When can we go see the Seven Cities again? Tomorrow?”

  She licked cream filling off her fingers and turned the News over. “Not tomorrow,” she said. “El Turco would have liked Cinderella City. He didn’t have no shoes. He had to walk all the way to Colorado in his bare feet. Even in the snow.”

  I imagined my hands closing around her plump neck. “When are the Seven Cities going to be there again?” I demanded. “And don’t tell me they’re always there.”

  She consulted the celebrity squibs. “Not tomorrow,” she said. “Day after tomorrow. Five o’clock. You must like people, then. That’s why you wanted to be a reporter? To meet all kinds of people?”

  “No,” I said. “Believe it or not, I wanted to travel.”

  She grinned her golden smile at me. “Like Coronado,” she said.

  * * *

  I spent the next two days interviewing developers, environmentalists, and council members, and pondering why Coronado had continued to follow El Turco, even after it was clear he was a pathological liar.

  I had stopped at the first 7-Eleven I could find after letting Rosa and her donuts off and bought a copy of the News. I read the entire back section, including the comics. For all I knew, she was using Doonesbury for an oracle. Or Nancy.

  I read the obits and worked the crossword puzzle and then went over the back page again. There was nothing remotely time-warp-related. The moon was at first quarter. Sunset would occur at 7:51 P.M. Road conditions for the Eisenhower Tunnel were snow-packed and blowing. Chains required. My horo
scope read, “Don’t get involved in wild goose chases. A good stay-at-home day.”

  Rosa no more knew where the Seven Cities of Gold were than her great-great-grandfather. According to the stuff I read in between moratorium jaunts, he had changed his story every fifteen minutes or so, depending on what Coronado wanted to hear.

  The other Indian scouts had warned Coronado, told him there was nothing to the north but buffalo and a few teepees, but Coronado had gone blindly on. “El Turco seems to have exerted a Pied-Piperlike power over Coronado,” one of the historians had written, “a power which none of Coronado’s officers could understand.”

  “Are you still working on that crazy Coronado thing?” Jake asked me when I got back to the Record. “I thought you were covering the hearings.”

  “I am,” I said, looking up the Grand Canyon. “They’ve been postponed because of the snow. I have an appointment with the United Coalition Against Uncontrolled Growth at eleven.”

  “Good,” he said. “I don’t need the Coronado piece, after all. We’re running a series on ‘Denver Today’ instead.”

  He went back upstairs. I found the Grand Canyon. It had been discovered by Lopez de Cardenas, one of Coronado’s men. El Turco hadn’t been with him.

  I drove out to Aurora in a blinding snowstorm to interview the United Coalition. They were united only in spirit, not in location. The president had his office in one of the Pavilion Towers off Havana, ut the secretary who had all the graphs and spreadsheets, was out at Fiddler’s Green. I spent the whole afternoon shuttling back and forth between them through the snow, and wondering what had ever possessed me to become a journalist. I’d wanted to travel. I had had the idea, gotten from TV that journalists got to go all over the world, writing about exotic and amazing places. Like the UNIPAC building and the Plaza Towers.

  They were sort of amazing, if you like Modern Corporate. Brass and chrome and Persian carpets. Atriums and palm trees and fountains splashing in marble pools. I wondered what Rosa, who had been so impressed with Cinderella City, would have thought of some of these places. El Turco would certainly have been impressed. Of course, he would probably have been impressed by the donut shop, and would no doubt have convinced Coronado to drag his whole army there with tales of fabulous, cream-filled wealth.