Cyber Way

by Alan Dean Foster

  “It was an electronic hum, a byproduct of whatever the hell it was you set off.”

  “Of course. But don’t you think it interesting that the chant used in an ancient ceremony closely duplicates an electronic hum?”

  “I think you’re nuts.”

  “Yes. But it is still intriguing, don’t you think? One might well ask if my judgment is weak and I am simply willing what we heard in there to resemble the chant of the hatathli I remember from childhood.”

  “What about the other sound?” Moody pressed him. “Hahowa, hahowa? Just a different frequency, wasn’t it? What if it does sound like the voice of xactce’oyan, who is Talking God’s twin?”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It cannot be translated.” He rubbed his legs and sighed tiredly. “It is said that Talking God is very compassionate.” Moody indicated the station. “If that’s compassion, give me sirloin.”

  “I am not foolish enough to say that Talking God and xactce’oyan are responsible for what has happened here tonight. What I am saying is that if—” He hesitated.

  “Go on,” Moody urged him. “Nobody here but us madmen.”

  Ooljee spoke carefully, measuring his reply. “If there is anything to the ancient ways, then perhaps something somewhere, if only part of an inexplicable program, was trying to warn us.”

  “Warn us? Warn us about what?”

  The sergeant shrugged. “Trying to make use of the template. Who knows?”

  “If something was trying to warn us, to help us,” Moody asked him, “then what was responsible for thafl” He gestured in the direction of the burned-out station.

  “Big Thunder,” said Ooljee simply.

  “Right, sure.” Moody rose, kicked at an empty plastic container lying in the street. “That’s just fine. It all makes sense, except that it’s all impossible.” He turned sharply on his partner. “You’re not really asking me to buy a bunch of crap about ‘talking gods’ and their twin brothers?”

  “I am not asking you to believe anything. I am hardly sure what to believe myself. I am just telling you what I know about what seems to fit. I am not saying that it makes any sense.”

  “For a duty cop, y’all sure know an awful lot about your mythology.”

  “We are still raised with it,” Ooljee replied simply. “A child grows up hearing many of the old stories. In a highly homogenized, internationalized world we have done well to preserve a little of our original culture. It is good that the planet shrinks daily and brings people together, if only in quest of financial success. But when it happens too quickly, the little cultures get squeezed between the big ones. Sometimes they get squeezed right out of existence. When high-tech came to the Rez and my forebears started making money they were determined that the Dineh would not be squeezed out of the world.

  “Even so, much has been forgotten by many. That is one reason why I was assigned to this case. Because of certain of my school studies, I know more about sandpainting than any of my colleagues. Otherwise you would now be talking to someone else. But most of them wouldn’t know Bat from Big Fly.”

  “What are those?” Moody frowned.

  “Sandpainting guardians.”

  The detective grunted, wiped rain from his forehead. “So we’re back to that again.”

  “You make it sound simple. It is not, bilagaanna."

  “Bilagaanna, yeah. Your wife told me. Hey, you’d better call her. If she’s still trying to reach you and gets a recording saying that communications are down, she’s first gonna be worried.”

  “You’re right, I should do that. But I do not think I will tell her about the fire just yet. Vernon Moody, my friend, we have tapped into something very peculiar. Perhaps we cannot give it name or rationale, but neither can we deny its existence. You were there. You saw what happened.”

  “I saw a police molly going crazy. That’s all.”

  Rising, Ooljee brushed his hair off his face. “I see I have spoken too much about Talking God and old legends. Maybe you are right. Maybe 1 have. If we could access the department’s AI molly we could ask its opinion, but somehow I feel it may not be operational at this time.

  “Believe what you will, but the fractal pattern derived from the Kettrick painting is the key to all this, whatever this turns out to be.”

  Moody stood next to him. Together they watched the firemen work. “We could try sticking the molly with an AI search and recovery program.”

  “If there is anything left to recover and the molly itself is not damaged. Don’t get me wrong, my friend. I have not stepped over the edge on you. What we saw was physics at work, not spirits. But it involves something we do not yet understand, and it involves that sandpainting.”

  “Okay, okay. Just go easy on the spirit talk.”

  “We prefer the term Holy People,” Ooljee told him. “The Deginneh are not necessarily spirits, not necessarily gods. They are simply those who were here before us. Before the Dineh, the Navaho.”

  Suddenly Moody found himself wishing he was away from there; away from the dark street with its mob of surging, querulous pedestrians and outgrabers and drunks, away from the evicted police and cursing firemen. Back in Florida, throwing a line into the Bay in search of bonefish or perch. Back where life was warm and moist and alive. Not stuck in this high, dry, half-dead place where the buildings seemed to merge with mountains and the alien voices of black-eyed street punks mocked him everywhere he looked. Back where he didn’t have to deal with a partner who talked of spirits and chants and Ways, of Holy People and fractal sands.

  But while his heart might choose to deny it, his mind knew that something more than passing strange had taken possession of a police department’s mollyweb, peeling its sphere and replacing it with a shape other than orthodox.

  It ought not to have happened. A police mollysphere was supposed to be invulnerable, protected from any external intrusion, impervious to virus or peeling. Only a military sphere would be harder to penetrate.

  He’d been there when the template had begun to mutate, had seen it expand to overwhelm the station’s security system as though it didn’t exist. What would have happened had the fires not stopped it? Would it have spread via linking fiber optics to the rest of the city’s police web? Or perhaps farther than that, into financial and commercial and administrative mollyspheres, growing and changing as it wiped out records and programs to satisfy a voracious need for more and more web space?

  “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I know what I saw, and I know what you did, but I don’t know what happened back there and I just can’t buy the idea that something in a hundred-years-old piece of folk art is sophisticated enough to infect a modern high-security molly. Y’all ain’t gonna insist that’s what happened, are you? Y’all ain’t gonna sit there and tell me you think old Grandpa Laughter was web-literate?” ^

  Ooljee regarded him thoughtfully. “Let me suggest to you two possible explanations for what happened here tonight. The first involves Nayenezgani.”

  Moody rolled his eyes.

  “The Dineh had no way to record the knowledge that the Holy People had given them. So Nayenezgani told them how to use powered rock to make sandpaintings. The Holy People did not use sandpaintings themselves. They drew on sheets of sky. Do you know anything about helical molecular masking?”

  Moody blinked.

  “It is the first stage in the manufacture of custom microprocessors. I could describe the process but it is enough to know that it might be described by someone with an imaginative flair for words as drawing on sheets of sky. Very tiny sheets, it is true.”

  “I don’t much care for that explanation. I hope I like your other one better.”

  The sergeant steepled his fingers. “Ignoring for the moment the question of how it got there, we must assume that something very unusual is present in the sandpainting, an inserted fractally coded program which affects the mollysphere much as any modem viral program might. Grandfather Laughter might have added it
in his old age when computers were first becoming common, or it might have been put there by someone else, either when the painting was originally done or at some later date. We can’t check on that, because the original has been destroyed, but I think it a not invalid hypothesis.”

  Moody was nodding approvingly. “That I can relate to.” Gratified, Ooljee took the concept and ran with it. “It gives us a new motive for our murderer. Whatever the template’s primary purpose, there is no denying its power to infect a supposedly shielded web. Something like that might have military applications. Easy to understand why someone might wish to possess the only copy.”

  “So we’ve finally got something worth killing for. Sure beats the crazed collector theory to a pulp. For the first time, that part of the case makes sense.” Moody was slapping his right fist into his open left palm. “It means our suspect’s probably not nuts. That changes a lot.”

  “Indeed it does,” Ooljee agreed. “We now have a killer who knows exactly what he is about, instead of an unpredictable maniac. He may or may not be a hatathli, but I think we can assume that he is a trained weaver.”

  “We can check this.” Moody was enthusiastic, hopeful. “We can see if anything similar to this has happened recently anywhere else in the country. If it has, I may be leaving.”

  “And what if our experience here tonight proves to have been unique, an isolated incident?”

  “Then I’d say that whoever we’re after either doesn’t know yet what he’s got ahold of, or else he’s still waiting to make use of it.” Side by side the two men started walking toward a cab stop.

  “Possible military applications aside,” the sergeant continued, “this template program would make a very interesting instrument of blackmail. Envision it: ‘Deposit so many millions into this numbered Swiss account or I will turn your irreplaceable database to photic slag.’”

  “That’s possible,” Moody agreed, “or maybe our boy has something else in mind.”

  As they reached the cab stop Ooljee reached for his pocket spinner. “First I need to let Lisa know that everything’s okay.” He glanced back at the precinct house. The flames had been knocked down but thick smoke continued to pour from several ground-floor windows. “I don’t think we need to tell her about the excitement just yet. It will only make her worry.”

  “As long as you’re gonna call in, how about we find some coffee before we do anything else? I’ve got a lot of ideas racing around inside my head and not many of ’em make sense. I’m not used to that. I’d like to try and do something with ’em.”

  Ooljee checked his watch. In an hour the sun would be up. It hardly seemed worth going all the way across town to disturb Lisa and the kids. She would not be upset by his absence, so long as he gave her an explanation. He’d worked double shifts before. The thought of coffee was a good one; coffee; ahehee, yes, and something more substantial. Inexplicable chaos stimulated the appetite.

  “You talk,” he said to the big Southerner, “and I will eat.”

  Moody didn’t wonder why his friend chose to call a cab instead of a police vehicle. A request for the latter might arrive in tandem with questions neither of them wanted to try answering just yet. Homing in on the sergeant’s spinner, the cab arrived in a few minutes.

  The rain had let up for a while, but by the time they entered the all-night cafe Ooljee had selected, it was coming down like fractured icicles. Moody followed his partner inside. The sun might be rising but you wouldn’t be able to tell it in this country. When it rose back home, you anticipated warmth and mist and comfort, a tactile as well as visual greeting. The sunlight here was possessed of a penetrating harshness that was as much to be avoided as sought after.

  The cafe was nearly deserted. Ganado’s nocturnal life forms were retreating to their burrows and it was too early for the rest of humanity to be stirring. They chose a booth in back, upholstered in faux leather designed to resemble red cedar. Twisting gods and arching yeis had been engraved on the sides of the booth with a sculpting laser. All the yeis were similar. The artist who had done the work had opted for speed over imagination.

  Not everyone hanging out was Amerind. There were a few Anglos and a couple of Thais: service techs lingering after work, web spinners arguing in their obscure languages, maybe security cops longing for bed.

  The wall dispenser offered a surprising variety of coffees, and the live waitress, when she finally appeared with their order, produced a cinnamon roll the size of a small two-layer cake. Moody hadn’t thought long about ordering it and he didn’t hesitate to dig in. Hard thinking made him hungry.

  The Colombian was hot and fulfilling. Friends often asked how he could differentiate between brews. The younger ones thought coffee came from restaurant wall-dispensers or premix servings instead of beans. There were no gourmets left, he mused, and in any event you weren’t likely to encounter one in the police department of a large eastern metropolis.

  “I suppose the fax got smoked along with everything else downstairs.”

  “Probably,” said Ooljee, “but I have copies in my desk, which is fireproof, and at home. As for the template, it is in here. ” He tapped the spinner holstered at his belt, nibbled at the com-lingonberry muffin he’d ordered. “I wonder exactly what we did.”

  “Just don’t do it again real soon,” Moody advised him. “Not me. Precinct houses are expensive.”

  They were silent for a while then, each man busy with his own thoughts. Moody looked up from the skeleton of his cinnamon roll.

  “The Laughters identified part of the Kettrick painting. Something about a scavenger?”

  Ooljee nodded. “He figures prominently in the Bead Chant and is also called One-Who-Goes-About-Picking-Up-Discarded-Things. He was the one carried up through the Skyhole. You would need to check with a real hatathli, but as I remember the story, he got in trouble with the Pueblo people. Then the hawks and eagles, assisted by snakes, helped him to flee through a hole in the sky. Forty-eight birds are generally shown aiding him, though sometimes twenty-four are used. In our culture, multiples of four and twelve have much power.

  “The birds wrapped him in a black cloud to conceal him and carried him up into the sky, boosted by three rainbows and three bands of lightning. It was very dark inside the cloud, and the birds provided Scavenger with a yellow tube to breathe through and a large crystal to furnish light. Interesting, isn’t it? A legend thousands of years old that mentions breathing tubes and light-generating crystals?”

  “Don’t get me started,” the detective muttered.

  A grinning Ooljee continued. “It is said that Talking God helped also. He is in many of the Ways.”

  “That’s it? That’s the whole story?”

  “Oh, no. There is a lot more, but that was the portion that was illustrated in the sandpainting. Many times individual components of one sandpainting will be used in another, just as similar electronic components are featured in many different devices. Though it is unusual to have so elaborate a painting incorporated bodily into a larger one.”

  “You keep talking about a ‘chant’?” Moody spoke absently, distracted by a young couple who’d just come in out of the rain, laughing and giggling and shaking water from their slickers.

  “The chant is not just a sandpainting,” Ooljee explained. “It is a complex combination of the painting and singing and other things. The song sequence for a single chant, for example, may contain several hundred songs intoned as a litany. A hatathli will sing over his patient while also building the sandpainting. As for the paintings themselves, there are probably many like the Kettrick that have gone unrecorded. Even so, over five hundred distinct and different sandpaintings are known. At least, that was the last figure I remember seeing.

  “There is no telling how many were lost before a couple of hatathlis were finally convinced to allow their work to be recorded in permanent form.” He hesitated. “I think I can tell you what happened tonight, if not how.”

  Moody finished the last of his
coffee, ordered a refill. “Tell me. I could do with some enlightenment.”

  “We disturbed hozho.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  Ooljee leaned back in his seat. “The Navaho imagine the universe to be a delicately balanced place, alive with powerful forces that have potential for good or evil. If you upset that balance, called hozho, terrible and strange things can happen. We believe that only mankind can upset the balance, but perhaps that is wrong. Certainly we upset some kind of balance tonight.”

  Moody tried hard not to smile. “Let’s say that we did. How do you fix your hozho!”

  “By performing the correct Way.”

  “I see. So what you’re telling me is that we ought to go find ourselves a compliant hatathli to chant over what’s left of your office?”

  “That would not be a bad idea.” Seeing the look that came over his partner’s face, the sergeant hastened to add, “Of course, nobody believes in such things anymore. The only people who are going to restore balance to the precinct are contractors and accountants. They have their own chants and ways. Though sometimes I think of accountants as masters of the Red Ant Way.”

  “What does that make us masters of?” Moody was feeling lightheaded from the exhaustion brought on by the night’s events and from lack of sleep. “The Shooting Way? That’s one you mentioned, I remember.”

  “I don’t know, but the moment you think you understand the Ways, they will surprise you. You might be interested to know that there is a Prostitution Way, though it is connected not with what you think but with witchcraft.”

  “Yeah, I can see where that might disturb your hozho, all right.”

  “At least now we may have a motive that makes sense.”

  “What’s this?” Moody feigned astonishment. “Police talk?”

  “Be as sarcastic as you like. But forget for a moment where the Kettrick painting comes from, how old it is, or how Grandfather Laughter came to make it.” There was impatience in Ooljee’s voice. “Something derived from its design penetrated and altered a police molly. Anything that can do that is worth money to certain people.”