Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95

by Robert Silverberg

I must have seen her fifty times during the ride back. Waving at me from the head of a country lane as the bus flashed by. Smiling at me from a bicycle going the other way. Riding in the back of a pickup truck bouncing along in front of us. Standing by the side of the road trying to get a hitch. Her image haunted me wherever I looked. I sat there shivering and sweating, seeing her beckoning in the doorway and watching that door closing and closing and closing again in my mind.

  It was evening by the time the bus reached town. The wise thing would have been to take a shower and go to a meeting, but I went to the house instead, and there was someone standing outside, staring at the screen door.

  I had never before encountered anyone else, in all my visits to the house.

  He was about my age, a short guy with a good gut and tousled reddish hair just beginning to fade into gray. He looked vaguely familiar. I wondered if I had seen him at a meeting once or twice, perhaps. As I came by, he threw me an uneasy, guilty glance, as if he was up to something. His eyes were a pale blue, very bloodshot.

  I went past him about ten paces, paused there, turned around.

  “You waiting for someone?” I asked.

  “I might be.”

  “Someone who lives in there?”

  “What’s that to you?”

  “I was just wondering,” I said. “If you could tell me who lives in that house.”

  He shrugged as if he hadn’t quite heard me. The blue eyes turned chilly. I wanted to pick him up and throw him into the next county. The way he was looking at me, he probably felt the same way about me.

  I said, “A woman lives there, right?”

  “Fuck off, will you?”

  “A blonde woman?”

  “Fuck off, I said.”

  Neither of us moved.

  “Sometimes I come by here and I see a blonde woman in the window, or standing in the doorway,” I went on. “I wonder if you’ve seen her sometimes too.”

  He didn’t say anything. His eyes flickered almost involuntarily toward the house.

  I followed the motion and there she was, visible through the window with the green shutters to the right of the door. She was wearing one of her misty wraps and her hair was shining like spun gold. She smiled. Gestured with a quick movement of her head.

  Come on inside, why don’t you?

  I almost did. Another five seconds, another three, and I would have trotted down that little narrow paved pathway as obediently as the dog who had had the newspaper in his mouth. But I didn’t. I was still afraid of what might lie beyond. I froze in my tracks; and then the redheaded man started to move. He went past me and up the path. Like a sleepwalker; like a zombie.

  “Hey—wait—”

  I caught him by the arm. He swung around, furious, and we struggled for a moment and then he broke loose and clamped both his hands on my shoulders and pushed me with tremendous force into the shrubbery. I tripped over one of the pieces of odd metal junk that were always lying around near the door and went sprawling on my face, and when I got myself disentangled it was just in time to see the redheaded man wrench the screen door open and run inside.

  I heard the inner door slam.

  And then the house disappeared.

  It vanished like a pricked bubble, taking the shrubbery with it, the garbage cans and other junk as well, and I found myself kneeling on weeds in the midst of a vacant lot, trembling as if I had just had a stroke. After a moment or two I got shakily to my feet and walked over to the place where the house had been. Nothing. Nothing. No trace. Gone as though it had never been there at all.

  A couple of days later I moved back to my old place. There didn’t seem much risk any more, and I missed the place, the town, the guys at the meetings. It’s been months now, and no house. I rarely skip a day, going by the lot, but it remains empty. The memory of it, of her, haunts me. I look for the house in other parts of town, even in other towns. I look for the redheaded man too, but I’ve never seen him. I described him once at a meeting and someone said, “Yeah, sounds like Ricky. He used to live around here.” Where was he now? Nobody had any idea. Neither do I.

  Another time I got brave enough to ask some of them if they had ever heard about a little white house that, well, sort of comes and goes. “Comes and goes?” they said. “What the hell does that mean?” I let the question drop.

  I have a feeling that it was all some kind of a test, and I may have flunked it. I don’t mean that I’ve missed out on a terrific woman. She was only the bait; I know better than to think that she was real or that she ever could have been available for me if she was. But that sense of a new start—of another life, however weird, beyond the horizon, forever lost to me now—that’s what I’m talking about. And the pain runs deep.

  But there’s always a second chance, isn’t there? They tell you that in the Program, and I believe it. I have to. From time to time I’ve left notes in the empty lot:

  WHEN YOU COME BACK NEXT TIME, DON’T LEAVE WITHOUT ME.

  I’M READY NOW. I’M SURE OF IT.

  Maybe they will. The house comes and goes, that I know. It’s gone now, but it’ll come again. I’m here. I’m watching. I’m waiting.

  LOOKING FOR THE FOUNTAIN

  We are still in the early months of 1991; and I am still writing short stories and waiting for the coming of the long California summer.

  This one was commissioned by another friend, Gregory Benford, who in conjunction with the redoubtable Marty Greenberg was editing a series of alternative-history anthologies under the title, What Might Have Been. I had already done stories (“To the Promised Land” and “A Sleep and a Forgetting”) for the first two volumes of the series, a couple of years earlier. Somehow I missed Volume Three, but now a fourth was being assembled—stories of Alternate Americas—and, calling on my knowledge of the exploration narratives of the Spanish conquistadores in the New World and throwing in a speculation about a vagrant band of Crusaders, I came up with this one, which saw print first in the May, 1992 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine before making its way into the anthology for which it was written.

  ——————

  My name is Francisco de Ortega and by the grace of God I am eighty-nine years old and I have seen many a strange thing in my time, but nothing so strange as the Indian folk of the island called Florida, whose great dream it is to free the Holy Land from the Saracen conquerors that profane it.

  It was fifty years ago that I encountered these marvelous people, when I sailed with his excellency the illustrious Don Juan Ponce de León on his famous and disastrous voyage in quest of what is wrongly called the Fountain of Youth. It was not a Fountain of Youth at all that he sought, but a Fountain of Manly Strength, which is somewhat a different thing. Trust me: I was there, I saw and heard everything, I was by Don Juan Ponce’s side when his fate overtook him. I know the complete truth of this endeavor and I mean to set it all down now so there will be no doubt; for I alone survive to tell the tale, and as God is my witness I will tell it truthfully now, here in my ninetieth year, all praises be to Him and to the Mother who bore Him.

  The matter of the Fountain, first.

  Commonly, I know, it is called the Fountain of Youth. You will read that in many places, such as in the book about the New World which that Italian wrote who lived at Seville, Peter Martyr of Anghiera, where he says, “The governor of the Island of Boriquena, Juan Ponce de León, sent forth two caravels to seek the Islands of Boyuca in which the Indians affirmed there to be a fountain or spring whose water is of such marvelous virtue, that when it is drunk it makes old men young again.”

  This is true, so far as it goes. But when Peter Martyr talks of “making old men young again”, his words must be interpreted in a poetic way.

  Perhaps long life is truly what that Fountain really provides, along with its other and more special virtue—who knows? For I have tasted of that Fountain’s waters myself, and here I am nearly ninety years of age and still full of vigor, I who was born in the year of our L
ord 1473, and how many others are still alive today who came into the world then, when Castile and Aragon still were separate kingdoms? But I tell you that what Don Juan Ponce was seeking was not strictly speaking a Fountain of Youth at all, but rather a Fountain that offered a benefit of a very much more intimate kind. For I was there, I saw and heard everything. And they have cowardly tongues, those who say it was a Fountain of Youth, for it would seem that out of shame they choose not to speak honestly of the actual nature of the powers that the Fountain which we sought was supposed to confer.

  It was when we were in the island of Hispaniola that we first heard of this wonderful Fountain, Don Juan Ponce and I. This was, I think, in the year 1504. Don Juan Ponce, a true nobleman and a man of high and elegant thoughts, was governor then in the province of Higuey of that island, which was ruled at that time by Don Nicolás de Ovando, successor to the great Admiral Cristóbal Colón. There was in Higuey then a certain Indian cacique or chieftain of remarkable strength and force, who was reputed to keep seven wives and to satisfy each and every one of them each night of the week. Don Juan Ponce was curious about the great virility of this cacique, and one day he sent a certain Aurelio Herrera to visit him in his village.

  “He does indeed have many wives,” said Herrera, “though whether there were five or seven or fifty-nine I could not say, for there were women surrounding me all the time I was there, coming and going in such multitudes that I was unable to make a clear count, and swarms of children also, and from the looks of it the women were his wives and the children were his children.”

  “And what sort of manner of man is this cacique?” asked Don Juan Ponce.

  “Why,” said Herrera, “he is a very ordinary man, narrow of shoulders and shallow of chest, whom you would never think capable of such marvels of manhood, and he is past middle age besides. I remarked on this to him, and he said that when he was young he was easily exhausted and found the manly exercises a heavy burden. But then he journeyed to Boyuca, which is an island to the north of Cuba that is also called Bimini, and there he drank of a spring that cures the debility of sex. Since then, he asserts, he has been able to give pleasure to any number of women in a night without the slightest fatigue.”

  I was there. I saw and heard everything. El enflaquecimiento del sexo was the phrase that Aurelio Herrera used, “the debility of sex.” The eyes of Don Juan Ponce de León opened wide at this tale, and he turned to me and said, “We must go in search of this miraculous fountain some day, Francisco, for there will be great profit in the selling of its waters.”

  Do you see? Not a word had been spoken about long life, but only about the curing of el enflaquecimiento del sexo. Nor was Don Juan Ponce in need of any such cure for himself, I assure you, for in the year 1504 he was just thirty years old, a lusty and aggressive man of fiery and restless spirit, and red-haired as well, and you know what is said about the virility of red-haired men. As for me, I will not boast, but I will say only that since the age of thirteen I have rarely gone a single night without a woman’s company, and have been married four times, on the fourth occasion to a woman fifty years younger than myself. And if you find yourself in the province of Valladolid where I live and come to pay a call on me I can show you young Diego Antonio de Ortega whom you would think was my great-grandson, and little Juana María de Ortega who could be my great-granddaughter, for the boy is seven and the girl is five, but in truth they are my own children, conceived when I was past eighty years of age; and I have had many other sons and daughters too, some of whom are old people now and some are dead.

  So it was not to heal our own debilities that Don Juan Ponce and I longed to find this wonderful Fountain, for of such shameful debilities we had none at all, he and I. No, we yearned for the Fountain purely for the sake of the riches we might derive from it: for each year saw hundreds or perhaps thousands of men come from Spain to the New World to seek their fortunes, and some of these were older men who no doubt suffered from a certain enflaquecimiento. In Spain I understand they use the powdered horn of the unicorn to cure this malady, or the crushed shells of a certain insect, though I have never had need of such things myself. But those commodities are not to be found in the New World, and it was Don Juan Ponce’s hope that great profit might be made by taking possession of Bimini and selling the waters of the Fountain to those who had need of such a remedy. This is the truth, whatever others may claim.

  But the pursuit of gold comes before everything, even the pursuit of miraculous Fountains of Manly Strength. We did not go at once in search of the Fountain because word came to Don Juan Ponce in Hispaniola that the neighboring island of Borinquen was rich in gold, and thereupon he applied to Governor Ovando for permission to go there and conquer it. Don Juan Ponce already somewhat knew that island, having seen its western coast briefly in 1493 when he was a gentleman volunteer in the fleet of Cristóbal Colón, and its beauty had so moved him that he had resolved someday to return and make himself master of the place.

  With one hundred men, he sailed over to this Borinquen in a small caravel, landing there on Midsummer Day, 1506, at the same bay he had visited earlier aboard the ship of the great Admiral. Seeing us arrive with such force, the cacique of the region was wise enough to yield to the inevitable and we took possession with very little fighting.

  So rich did the island prove to be that we put the marvelous Fountain of which we had previously heard completely out of our minds. Don Juan Ponce was made governor of Borinquen by royal appointment and for several years the natives remained peaceful and we were able to obtain a great quantity of gold indeed. This is the same island that Cristóbal Colón called San Juan Bautista and which people today call Puerto Rico.

  All would have been well for us there but for the stupidity of a certain captain of our forces, Cristóbal de Sotomayor, who treated the natives so badly that they rose in rebellion against us. This was in the year of our Lord 1511. So we found ourselves at war; and Don Juan Ponce fought with all the great valor for which he was renowned, doing tremendous destruction against our pagan enemies. We had among us at that time a certain dog, called Bercerillo, of red pelt and black eyes, who could tell simply by smell alone whether an Indian was friendly to us or hostile, and could understand the native speech as well; and the Indians were more afraid of ten Spaniards with this dog, than of one hundred without him. Don Juan Ponce rewarded Bercerillo’s bravery and cleverness by giving the dog a full share of all the gold and slaves we captured, as though he were a crossbowman; but in the end the Indians killed him. I understand that a valiant pup of this Bercerillo, Leoncillo by name, went with Nuñez de Balboa when he crossed the Isthmus of Panama and discovered the great ocean beyond.

  During this time of our difficulties with the savages of Puerto Rico, Don Diego Colón, the son of the great Admiral, was able to take advantage of the trouble and make himself governor of the island in the place of Don Juan Ponce. Don Juan Ponce thereupon returned to Spain and presented himself before King Ferdinand, and told him the tale of the fabulous Fountain that restores manly power. King Ferdinand, who was greatly impressed by Don Juan Ponce’s lordly bearing and noble appearance, at once granted him a royal permit to seek and conquer the isle of Bimini where this Fountain was said to be. Whether this signifies that His Most Catholic Majesty was troubled by debilities of a sexual sort, I would not dare to say. But the king was at that time a man of sixty years and it would not be unimaginable that some difficulty of that kind had begun to perplex him.

  Swiftly Don Juan Ponce returned to Puerto Rico with the good news of his royal appointment, and on the third day of March of the year of our Lord 1513 we set forth from the Port of San Germán in three caravels to search for Bimini and its extraordinary Fountain.

  I should say at this point that it was a matter of course that Don Juan Ponce should have asked me to take part in the quest for this Fountain. I am a man of Tervás de San Campos in the province of Valladolid, where Don Juan Ponce de León also was born less than one year after
I was, and he and I played together as children and were friends all through our youth. As I have said, he first went to the New World in 1493, when he was nineteen years of age, as a gentleman aboard the ship of Admiral Cristóbal Colón, and after settling in Hispaniola he wrote to me and told me of the great wealth of the New World and urged me to join him there. Which I did forthwith; and we were rarely separated from then until the day of his death.

  Our flagship was the Santiago, with Diego Bermúdez as its master—the brother to the man who discovered the isle of Bermuda—and the famous Antón de Alaminos as its pilot. We had two Indian pilots too, who knew the islands of that sea. Our second ship was the Santa María de Consolación, with Juan Bono de Quexo as its captain, and the third was the San Cristóbal. All of these vessels were purchased by Don Juan Ponce himself out of the riches he had laid by in the time when he was governor of Puerto Rico.

  I have to tell you that there was not one priest in our company, not that we were ungodly men but only that it was not our commander’s purpose on this voyage to bring the word of Jesus to the natives of Bimini. We did have some few women among us, including my own wife Beatriz, who had come out from Spain to be with me, and grateful I was to have her by my side; and my wife’s young sister Juana was aboard the ship also, that I could better look after her among these rough Spaniards of the New World.

  Northward we went. After ten days we halted at the isle of San Salvador to scrape weeds from the bottom of one of our ships. Then we journeyed west-northwest, passing the isle of Ciguateo on Easter Sunday, and, continuing onward into waters that ran ever shallower, we caught sight on the second day of April of a large delightful island of great and surpassing beauty, all blooming and burgeoning with a great host of wildflowers whose delectable odors came wafting to us on the warm gentle breeze. We named this isle La Florida, because Easter is the season when things flower and so we call that time of year in our language Pascua Florida. And we said to one another at once, seeing so beautiful a place, that this island of Florida must surely be the home of the wondrous Fountain that restores men to their fleshly powers and grants all their carnal desires to the fullest.