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.
She ran into the pullout at the top of the dam and stopped, panting hard. She put her hand up to her heaving chest and looked out across the snow at Denver.
“So you’re saying the cities existed in some other time? In the future?”
She glanced over her shoulder at the horizon. The sun was nearly up. The narrow cloud turned pale pink, and the snow on Mt. Evans went the kind of fuschia we use in the Sunday supplements. “And you think there’s going to be another time-warp this morning?” I said.
She gave me that “how can one person be so stupid” look. “Of course not,” she said, and the sun cleared the cloud. “There they are,” she said.
There they were. The reflecting glass in the curved towers of Fiddler’s Green caught first, and then the Tech Center and the Silverado Building on Colorado Boulevard, and the downtown skyline burst into flames. They turned pink and then orange, the Hotel Giorgio and the Metropoint building and the Plaza Towers, blazing pinnacles and turrets and towers.
“You didn’t believe me, did you?” Rosa said.
“No,” I said, unwilling to take my eyes off of them. “I didn’t.”
There were more than seven. Far out to the west the Federal Center ignited, and off to the north the angled lines of grain elevators gleamed. Downtown blazed, blinding building moratorium advocates on their way to work. In between, the Career Development Institute and the United Bank Building and the Hyatt Regency burned gold, standing out from the snow like citadels, like cities. No wonder El Turco had dragged Coronado all the way to Colorado. Marble palaces and golden streets.
“I told you they were there all the time,” she said.
It was over in another minute, the fires going out one by one in the panes of reflecting glass, downtown first and then the Cigna building and Belleview Place, fading to their everyday silver and onyx and emerald. The Pavilion Towers below us darkened and the last of the sodium street lights went out.
“There all the time,” Rosa said solemnly.
“Yeah,” I said. I would have to get Jake up here to see this. I’d have to buy a News on the way home and check on the time of sunrise for tomorrow. And the weather.
I turned around. The sun glittered off the water of the reservoir. There was an aluminum rowboat out in the middle of it. It had golden oarlocks.
Rosa had started back down the road to the car. I caught up with her. “I’ll buy you a pecan roll,” I said. “Do you know of any good places around here?”
She grinned. Her gold teeth gleamed in the last light of Cibola. “The best,” she said.
JONATHAN LETHEM
Walking the Moons
Virtual Reality is the new pop-science buzzword of the ’90s, like “nano-mechanism” was a couple of years back, and magazines and newspapers are full of enthusiastic articles about how wonderful it’s going to be to be able to sit in your own living room and feel as though you’re actually climbing peaks in the Himalayas, or diving to the bottom of the sea, or exploring lavafields on Mars.…
Yeah. Right.
The author of the razor-sharp and wickedly ironic little story that follows, Jonathan Lethem, is yet another of those talented new writers who—encouragingly—are continuing to pop up all over as we progress into the decade of the 1990s. He works at an antiquarian bookstore, writes slogans for buttons and lyrics for two rock bands, and has also had sales in the last year or so to New Pathways, Pulphouse, Issac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Universe, Journal Wired, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, Aboriginal SF, and elsewhere … and is clearly another Writer To Watch in the years to come.
Walking the Moons
JONATHAN LETHEM
“Look,” says the mother of The Man Who Is Walking Around The Moons Of Jupiter, “he’s going so fast.” She snickers to herself and scuttles around the journalist to a table littered with wiring tools and fragmented mechanisms. She loops a long, tangled cord over her son’s intravenous tube and plugs one end into his headset, jostling him momentarily as she works it into the socket. His stride on the treadmill never falters. She runs the cord back to a modified four-track recorder sitting in the dust of the garage floor, then picks up the recorder’s microphone and switches it on.
“Good morning, Mission Commander,” she says.
“Yes,” grunts The Man Who, his slack jaw moving beneath the massive headset. It startles the journalist to hear the voice of The Man Who boom out into the tiny garage.
“Interview time, Eddie.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Kaffey. Systems Magazine, remember?”
“O.K.,” says Eddie, The Man Who. His weakened, pallid body trudges forward. He is clothed only in jockey undershorts and orthopedic sandals, and the journalist can see his heart beat beneath the skin of his chest.
The Mother Of smiles artificially and hands the journalist the microphone. “I’ll leave you boys alone,” she says. “If you need anything, just yodel.”
She steps past the journalist, over the cord, and out into the sunlight, pulling the door shut behind her.
The journalist turns to the man on the treadmill.
“Uh, Eddie?”
“Yeah.”
“Uh, I’m Ron Kaffey. Is this O.K.? Can you talk?”
“Mr. Kaffey, I’ve got nothing but time.” The Man Who smacks his lips and tightens his grip on the railing before him. The tread rolls away steadily beneath his feet, taking him nowhere.
The journalist covers the mike with the palm of his hand and clears his throat, then begins again. “So you’re out there now. On Io. Walking.”
“Mr. Kaffey, I’m currently broadcasting my replies to your questions from a valley on the northwestern quadrant of Io, yes. You’re coming in loud and clear. No need to raise your voice. We’re fortunate in having a pretty good connection, a good Earth-to-Io hookup, so to speak.” The journalist watches as The Man Who moistens his lips, then dangles his tongue in the open air. “Please feel free to shoot with the questions, Mr. Kaffey. This is pretty uneventful landscape even by Io standards and I’m just hanging on your every word.”
“Explain to me,” says the journalist, “what you’re doing.”
“Ah. Well, I designed the rig myself. Took pixel satellite photographs and fed them into my simulator, which gives me a steadily unfolding virtual-space landscape.” He reaches up and taps at his headset. “I log the equivalent mileage at the appropriate gravity on my treadmill and pretty soon I’ve had the same experience an astronaut would have. If we could afford to send them up anymore. Heh.” He scratches violently at his ribs, until they flush pink. “Ask me questions,” he says. “I’m ready at this end. You want me to describe what I’m seeing?”
“Describe what you’re seeing.”
“The desert, Mr. Kaffey. God, I’m so goddamned bored of the desert. That’s all there is, you know. There isn’t any atmosphere. We’d hope for some atmosphere, we had some hopes, but it didn’t turn out that way. Nope. The dust all lays flat here, because of that. I try kicking it up, but there isn’t any wind.” The Man Who scuffs in his Dr. Scholl’s sandals at the surface of the treadmill, booting imaginary pebbles, stirring up nonexistent dust. “You probably know I can’t see Jupiter right now. I’m on the other side, so I’m pretty much out here alone under the stars. There isn’t any point in my describing that to you.”
The Man Who scratches again, this time at the patch where the intravenous tube intersects his arm, and the journalist is afraid he’ll tear it off. “Bored?” asks the journalist.
“Yeah. Next time I think I’ll walk across a grassy planet. What do you think of that? Or across the Pacific Ocean. On the bottom, I mean. ’Cause they’re mapping it wit
h ultrasound. Feed it into the simulator. Take me a couple of weeks. Nothing like this shit.
“I’m thinking more in terms of smaller scale walks from here on in, actually. Get back down to earth, find ways to make it count for more. You know what I mean? Maybe even the ocean isn’t such a good idea, actually. Maybe my fans can’t really identify with my off-world walks, maybe they’re feeling, who knows, a little, uh, alienated by this Io thing. I know I am. I feel out of touch, Mr. Kaffey. Maybe I ought to walk across the cornbelt or the sunbelt or something. A few people in cars whizzing past, waving at me, and farmer’s wives making me picnic lunches, because they’ve heard I’m passing through. I could program that. I could have every goddamn Mayor from Pinole to Akron give me the key to their goddamn city.”
“Sounds O.K., Eddie.”
“Sounds O.K.,” echoes The Man Who. “But maybe even that’s a little much. Maybe I ought to walk across the street to the drugstore for a pack of gum. You don’t happen to have a stick of gum in your pocket, Mr. Journalist? I’ll just open my mouth and you stick it in. I trust you. We don’t have to tell my mother. If you hear her coming you just let me know, and I’ll swallow it. You won’t get in any trouble.”
“I don’t have any,” says the journalist.
“Ah well.”
The Man Who walks on, undaunted. Only now something is wrong. There’s a hiss of escaping liquid, and the journalist is certain that The Man Who’s nutrient serum is leaking from his arm. Then he smells the urine, and sees the undershorts of The Man Who staining dark, and adhering to the cave-white flesh of his thigh.
“What’s the matter, Kaffey? No more questions?”
“You’ve wet yourself,” says the journalist.
“Oh, damn. Uh, you better call my mom.”
But The Mother Of has already sensed that something is amiss. She steps now back into the garage, smoking a cigarette and squinting into the darkness at her son. She frowns as she discerns the stain, and takes a long drag on her cigarette, closing her eyes.
The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990 Page 68