Cibola

Cibola

By Connie Willis

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 Sevent 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, 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.”

Cibola. Photo by Elena

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 Filddler’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 where, 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 pseud-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.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2008)