Cibola

by Connie Willis

  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 horoscope 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 Co
ronado’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 Cardeñas, 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.

  I finished up the United Coalition and went back to the Record to call some developers and builders and get their side. It was still snowing, and there weren’t any signs of snow removal, creative or otherwise, that I could see. I set up some appointments for the next day, and then went back down to Research.

  El Turco hadn’t been the only person to tell tales of the fabulous Seven Cities of Gold. A Spanish explorer, Cabeza de Vaca, had reported them first, and his black slave Estevanico claimed to have seen them, too. Friar Marcos had gone with Estevanico to find them, and, according to him, Estavanico had actually entered Cibola.

  They had made up a signal. Estevanico was to send back a small cross if he found a little village, a big cross if he found a city. Estevanico was killed in a battle with Indians, and Friar Marcos fled back to Coronado, but he said he’d seen the Seven Cities in the distance, and he claimed that Estevanico had sent back “a cross the size of a man.”

  There were all kinds of other tales, too, that the Navajos had gold and silver mines, that Montezuma had moved his treasure north to keep it from the Spanish, that there was a golden city on a lake, with canoes whose oarlocks were solid gold. If El Turco had been lying, he wasn’t the only one.

  I spent the next day interviewing pro-uncontrolled growth types. They were united, too. “Denver has to retain its central identity,” they all told me from what it was hard to believe was not a pre-written script. “It’s becoming split into a half-dozen sub-cities, each with its own separate goals.”

  They were in less agreement as to where the problem lay. One of the builders who’d developed the Tech Center thought the Plaza Tower out at Fiddler’s Green was an eyesore, Fiddler’s Green complained about Aurora, Aurora thought there was too much building going on around Colorado Boulevard. They were all united on one thing, however: downtown was completely out of control.

  I logged several thousand miles in the snow, which showed no signs of letting up, and went home to bed. I debated setting my alarm. Rosa didn’t know where the Seven Cities of Gold were, the Living Western Heritage series had been canceled, and Coronado would have saved everybody a lot of trouble if he had listened to his generals.

  But Estevanico had sent back a giant cross, and there was the “time-thing” thing. I had not done enough stories on psychic peridontia yet to start believing their nutto theories, but I had done enough to know what they were supposed to sound like. Rosa’s was all wrong.

  “I don’t know what it’s called,” she’d said, which was far too vague. Nutto theories may not make any sense, but they’re all worked out, down to the last bit of pseudo-scientific jargon. The psychic dentist had told me all about transcendental maxillofacial extractile vibrations, and the time travel guy had showed me a hand-lettered chart showing how the partial load setting affected future events.

  If Rosa’s Seven Cities were just one more nutto theory, she would have been talking about morphogenetic temporal dislocation and simultaneous reality modes. She would at least know what the “time-thing” was called.

  I compromised by setting the alarm on “music” and went to bed.

  I overslept. The station I’d set the alarm on wasn’t on the air at four-thirty in the morning. I raced into my clothes, dragged a brush through my hair, and took off. There was almost no traffic—who in their right mind is up at four-thirty?—and it had stopped snowing. By the time I pulled onto Santa Fe I was only running ten minutes late. Not that it mattered. She would probably take half an hour to drag herself to the door and tell me the Seven Cities of Cibola had canceled again.

  I was wrong. She was standing outside waiting in her red carcoat and a pair of orange Bronco earmuffs. “You’re late,” she said, squeezing herself in beside me. “Got to go.”

  “Where?”

  She pointed. “Turn left.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me where we’re going?” I said, “and that way I’ll have a little advance warning.”

  “Turn right,” she said.

  We turned onto Hampden and started up past Cinderella City. Hampden is never free of traffic, no matter what time of day it is. There were dozens of cars on the road. I got in the center lane, hoping she’d give me at least a few feet of warning for the next turn, but she leaned back and folded her arms across her massive bosom.

  “You’re sure the Seven Cities will appear this morning?” I asked.

  She leaned forward and peered through the windshield at the slowly lightening sky, looking for who knows what. “Good chance. Can’t tell for sure.”

  I felt like Coronado, dragged from pillar to post. Just a little farther, just a little farther. I wondered if this could be not only a scam but a set-up, if we would end up pulling up next to a black van in some dark parking lot, and I would find myself on the cover of the Record as a robbery victim or worse. She was certainly anxious enough. She kept holding up her arm so she could read her watch in the lights of the cars behind us. More likely, we were heading for some bakery that opened at the crack of dawn, and she wanted to be there when the fried cinnamon rolls came out of the oven.

  “Turn right!” she said. “Can’t you go no faster?”

  I went faster. We were out in Cherry Creek now, and it was starting to get really light. The snowstorm was apparently over. The sky was turning a faint lavender-blue.

  “Now right, up there,” she said, and I saw where we were going. This road led past Cherry Creek High School and then up along the top of the dam. A nice isolated place for a robbery.

  We went past the last houses and pulled out onto the dam road. Rosa turned in her seat to peer out my window and the back, obviously looking for something. There wasn’t much to see. The water wasn’t visible from this point, and she was looking the wrong direction, out towards Denver. There were still a few lights, the early-bird traffic down on I-225 and the last few orangish street lights that hadn’t gone off automatically. The snow had taken on the bluish-lavender color of the sky.

  I stopped the car.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded. “Go all the way up.”

  “I can’t,” I said, pointing ahead. “The road’s closed.”

  She peered at the chain strung across the road as if she couldn’t figure out what it was, and then opened the door and got out.

  Now
it was my turn to say, “What are you doing?”

  “We gotta walk,” she said. “We’ll miss it otherwise.”

  “Miss what? Are you telling me there’s going to be a time warp up there on top of the dam?”

  She looked at me like I was crazy. “Time warp?” she said. Her grin glittered in my headlights. “No. Come on.”

  Even Coronado had finally said, “All right, enough,” and ordered his men to strangle El Turco. But not until he’d been lured all the way up to Kansas. And, according to Rosa, Colorado. The Seven Cities of Cibola were not going to be up on top of Cherry Creek dam, no matter what Rosa said, and I wasn’t even going to get a story out of this, but I switched off my lights and got out of the car and climbed over the chain.

  It was almost fully light now, and the shadowy dimnesses below were sorting themselves out into decentralized Denver. The black 2001 towers off Havana were right below us, and past them the peculiar Mayan-pyramid shape of the National Farmer’s Union. The Tech Center rose in a jumble off to the left, beer cans and trapezoids, and then there was a long curve of isolated buildings all the way to downtown, an island of skyscraping towers obviously in need of a moratorium.

  “Come on,” Rosa said. She started walking faster, panting along the road ahead of me and looking anxiously toward the east, where at least a black van wasn’t parked. “Coronado shouldn’t have killed El Turco. It wasn’t his fault.”

  “What wasn’t his fault?”

  “It was one of those time-things, what did you call it?” she said, breathing hard.

  “A temporal agitation?”

  “Yeah, only he didn’t know it. He thought it was there all the time, and when he brought Coronado there it wasn’t there, and he didn’t know what had happened.”

  She looked anxiously to the east again, where a band of clouds extending about an inch above the horizon was beginning to turn pinkish-gray, and broke into an ungainly run. I trotted after her, trying to remember the procedure for CPR.