Connie Willis - Cibola

“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 put 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.