Cyber Way

by Alan Dean Foster

  “I wonder how big it is?” Ooljee murmured.

  Moody pursed his lips. “Ask it.”

  Ooljee did so. The reply was at once imposing and disappointing. “It says, ‘big enough.’”

  “Big enough for what?” Moody was determined to extract at least one specific answer from the device if they had to spend the whole night trying.

  This time he jumped slightly at the reply. Not because of its content but because the response was formed in ordinary, if obviously artificial, English:

  “Big enough for any request.”

  “How did you do that?” the detective asked his partner. Ooljee shrugged. “I asked it to speak in English, if it could. It was such an obvious thing, I did not think of it earlier. I would be surprised if it does not know other languages as well.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Just a guess. If it is familiar with methods of interstellar travel I would not think it ignorant, say, of French. Do you want me to query it further on that subject?”

  “Shoot, no. English is enough for me.”

  Ooljee regarded the monitor and its panorama of tantalizing beauty. “I am glad you pulled me back, Vernon my friend. But don’t you wonder what we might find if we entered that field fully?”

  The detective snorted. “A couple zillion miles of rainbow threads and pretty sparklies. That could get old after a while. You could also get hungry. What really interests me is where the hell this thing comes from. Not withered old Navaho hatathlis playing in a colored sandpile, I’ll bet. The Kettrick painting provides a way to get in. It doesn’t tell us anything about origins.”

  “I suspect it has been here for a long time,” Ooljee theorized. “It is just that until now no one had figured out how to access it.”

  Moody shook his head. “I can’t buy that. I can’t accept that it’s been here for very long. Not without more proof than we have so far. Like the whore, we have some idea of what it is. We just don’t know the relevant parameters.” He remembered the cleaver.

  “Speaking of parameters, maybe we better hold off asking it any more tricky questions until we’re sure we know how to turn it off.”

  “Why not,” suggested Ooljee with stunning simplicity, “just ask it?”

  “Too easy. That’d be too easy. So, why don’t you?”

  “Why don’t you! It understands English.”

  Moody considered. Why didn’t he? Wasn’t it just a big computer of as yet unknown type, a molly in rainbow drag? Where was the harm?

  Funny; he’d never actually touched a database before, if that’s what all those bright lights and shapes were.

  “Ask it,” Ooljee was urging him. “Ask it to turn itself off. Ask it specifically how large it is, where it comes from. Ask it..

  “All in good time. First I’d like to be sure it’s not gonna suck us in there”—he gestured at the monitor—“ii we happen to ask the wrong question, or ask the right question the wrong way.”

  The comers of the sergeant’s mouth turned up slightly. “Maybe you just have to be sure you ask it nice. Remember what I told you. The correct way to conclude a sandpainting ceremony is to destroy the painting being used in the reverse order of its creation. Generally meat cleavers are not employed for this purpose.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I should use the Gila Monster chant again, try to do exactly what we did backwards. If one does not exit a computer properly, the database can be damaged. If that is what we are dealing with here, it would be shocking if it did not contain a number of built-in safeguards to prevent such damage.” He reached for the spinner.

  “Not yet, man.” Moody restrained his partner. “Lemme ask it one more question.” Ooljee paused, then nodded.

  The detective addressed the monitor. “You understand English?”

  “I understand all acquired languages,” the unisex disembodied voice replied.

  “Glad to hear it, but English will do just fine for right now.” He hesitated. Would his next question set off some kind of built-in alarm? No way of knowing save to ask. But go slowly, he reminded himself. Slowly.

  “Are you,” he asked, “accessed frequently? Relate your response to local values.”

  “No.”

  “When exactly was the last time you were accessed prior to this past year?”

  “Hey—Ooljee said worriedly. Moody shrugged him

  off.

  The reply was harmless enough. On reflection, perhaps it was not.

  “Eight oh-four on the morning of June the twenty-third in the year eleven sixty-two anno Domini—relating response to local values.”

  “Really?” It was all Moody could say. Ooljee said nothing at all, but he was pondering just as hard.

  Of course, the device might have misunderstood his request. It might be misinterpreting values. It might be an absurd, complex joke of unknown origin. There might be a thousand other possibilities.

  One of which was that the reply was accurate.

  Well, he decided, that was certainly an interesting thought. But it was not the question of the moment. Right now they had to forgo the awesome in favor of tracking the prosaic.

  “When was the last time you were accessed within the past year?”

  The voice replied. Ooljee checked his watch. “Sixteen minutes ago. That would have been us.”

  The detective considered, trying to frame his queries as if he were conversing with the familiar police web back home instead of some gargantuan construct out of an as yet unidentified time and space.

  “Prior to that, how many times within the past year have you been accessed?”

  Again the mechanical response. “Thrice.” It proceeded to elaborate. Once the previous morning. That would have been the little episode at Ooljee’s station, Moody reflected. The second time was a number of months ago. Atlanta, perhaps. The third and last was far more recent.

  “Only a week ago.” Ooljee muttered a silent thank you. “It seems that our friend has not yet learned how to make extensive use of this. For which, without even knowing its capabilities, I think we can be thankful.”

  Moody was thinking hard. It seemed too easy but, nothing ventured, nothing gained. “Can you identify by name the individual who accessed you the last two times?” Moody asked.

  “Yistin Gaggii.”

  A great peace washed through the detective. “At last: we’ve got ourselves a damn name.”

  “Navaho,” said Ooljee. “It translates as ‘frozen raven.’”

  “Can’t wait to meet him. But hey, why stop now?” He looked back at the monitor. Suddenly it seemed innocuous, even helpful. After all, no matter how bizarre or alien in design, it was no more than a machine, right?

  “What can you tell us about the individual Yistin Gaggii?” There, he thought. If we’re gonna trigger any implanted alarms that ought to do it.

  Nothing of the sort happened. Instead, the voice proceeded to give them a full description of the man portrayed in the police composites, complete to a reproduction of his voice and notable facial mannerisms.

  And as if that wasn’t enough, it calmly provided an address.

  “Out in the country,” Ooljee commented. “Somewhere up the hill between Ganado and Window Rock. He’s been right here all this time, just outside of town. If he has been keeping to himself, it explains why no one has seen him to call him in.”

  Moody leaned back in the kitchen chair, very pleased with himself. “Shoot, that was easy enough. We were just trawlin’ in the wrong molly, that’s all.” He remembered an earlier query. “Eleven sixty-two A.D. That when your stories say these ‘Holy People’ showed up in the neighborhood?”

  The sergeant was studying the monitor, unable to take his eyes from the ever-changing scene. “Specific dates are not given. The gods created First Man and First Woman. There were four worlds of which ours is the fifth. Our Creation Myth is not so simple as you might think. There

  are many legends, and then there are legends about legends. />
  “There is so much yet to be learned. Modem archaeology has barely scratched the history of the People. You can walk around Mesa Verde or Betatkin or White House or any of a thousand ruins on the Rez and still find potsherds and pieces of basketry and old com, though I have yet to hear of anyone digging optical disks or mollyspheres out of the floor of a cliff dwelling. And if the Anasazi were into computers, it is news to me.

  “The ancient ones must have had friends, if our voice is to be believed. Very skilled friends, very advanced. I do not think they were Aztecs from Mexico. They must have come from elsewhere.” He gestured at the screen.

  “This thing is an artifact, just like the bits of pots and the beads and the arrowheads people find every week on different parts of the Reservation.”

  “It’s a database,” Moody countered. “I wonder where its storage facility is located, its molly-equivalent? Every database needs storage. . . .

  “Or maybe it’s everywhere,” he went on, unsure whether he was being philosophical or predictive. “In the air around us, in the Earth itself. Maybe it encompasses the whole world. I’m just bullshitting, but this is a good time for it, don’t you think? Perhaps we’re all components of a big database somebody set up and forgot about when they finished their own work here. An Earth-mollysphere, a chunk of database backup not worth a second glance.

  “Maybe we’re all just little pieces of ROM: you, me, your kids, everybody else. Pieces that this Scavenger character fussed with before shooting up through his skyhole, or whatever. Maybe it or something else decided to make a joke and give the ROM a way to access their own storage. So they provided a method the local ROM could understand.”

  “Sandpainting,” Ooljee whispered thoughtfully.

  “Yeah, sandpainting, and maybe the chants too. Not necessarily the specific words, but the sequence of tones and sounds. I dunno. What’s the chance of somebody accidentally hitting the right combination of sandpainting and aural accompaniment? You’ve been telling me all along nothing sounds quite like Navaho. Maybe there’s a reason for that, one that has nothing to do with linguistics.”

  “Forgotten,” said the sergeant. “One of the dozens of old Ways that have been forgotten. Except in this case one line of hatathlis remembered, without even knowing the importance of what they were remembering. Grandfather Laughter knew the painting but not what it was for. Because in his time it would have made no sense. ” He looked sharply at his partner.

  “But it makes sense to Gaggii. The second time it was accessed, in Atlanta, people died. Gaggii may know how to utilize at least a small part of this to serve his purposes.”

  “Let’s see him utilize it fast enough to stop a slug from a twenty-eight Sledge.” Moody’s expression was grim. “You remember that address?” The sergeant nodded. “Then what are we sitting here in the dark for? Let’s go get the bastard.” He rose from his chair—and thought again of Atlanta, of crumpled bodies and bloodless holes in cold flesh. Bravado was all very well and good, but the department’s honor rolls were filled with the names of cops who’d died flashily and too young.

  “Think we should request backup?”

  “As much as I would like that,” the sergeant replied, “we would have to explain too much. No one would believe us. I go in and tell this story to the duty lieutenant, you know what he will say. He will want proof, he will want to know— Let’s just bring Gaggii in. He will not be expecting us. We will surprise him, and there should be no problem. I have my concerns, but I think at this point it would be best to keep things simple.”

  Moody nodded. “Okay, then. Simple it is.”

  “But not yet,” Ooljee pleaded. “I want to talk to Lisa before we go after him, and I am tired.”

  “All right.” Moody was tired, too. “First thing tomorrow. Like you say, he’s not gonna be expecting us.

  “And we get some real rest. But first we turn this thing off. Maybe you can go to sleep with it active, but not me.”

  “Afraid of something coming out and painting dirty drawings on your belly while you sleep?” Ooljee taunted him.

  Moody made a face. “How about it decides to vacuum us out of bed and into wherever it is? Or something we can’t even imagine. I just don’t want to leave it running. You leave it running long enough, maybe it gets clever ideas of its own. We don’t know enough about it to trust it.”

  “Very well.” Ooljee rose and walked over to the refrigerator. “Then you turn it off.”

  The two men locked stares for a long moment. Then Moody turned in his seat and deliberately reached for the power switch on the police spinner. His finger made it to within half an inch of the tiny sliding control. Moving it slowly over the hard plastic case, he found it would approach no closer.

  “Like sliding over oiled rubber,” he informed his partner, “except that there’s nothing there.”

  “Oh, there is something present, for sure, my friend.” Ooljee came over to watch. “A field of some kind. I doubt even a good physicist could tell us exactly what is happening here.”

  Moody sat back. “That’s the extent of my ideas. Now we have to go with your chanting.”

  Ooljee took a deep breath, assumed a position next to the table facing the monitor, and began. Moody listened, trying to make some sense of what was being said, failing utterly.

  As the last phrase faded away and the sergeant lowered his trembling hand, the impossible vista which had occupied the zenat vanished, leaving in its wake the image of a flat familiar sandpainting devoid of any depth.

  Ooljee cleared his throat, reached past Moody toward the power switch on his spinner. “That’s it, then.”

  “Not quite. Remember the sandpainting.”

  Ooljee looked at the monitor. “I remember it. So?”

  “The two lizard drawings. They’re still head-down. When the fractal sequence gave birth to the painting, they were heads-up.”

  “Guarding the entrance.” The sergeant nodded. “I’d forgotten.” He walked over to the monitor and put his hand directly over the dark circle in the center of the image, just as he had previously. To his very great relief it remained there, his palm hard against the unyielding glass of the zenat. The pair of guardians obediently pivoted slightly, resuming their original positions.

  Ooljee stepped back, keeping his eyes on the screen. “Try it now.”

  This time no unseen barrier prevented the detective from flicking the spinner’s power switch to the off position. The sandpainting vanished, leaving behind only a softly glowing green screen.

  The sergeant slumped into a chair opposite Moody, suddenly bone-tired. He shook a couple of times, a reaction that had nothing to do with the Hand-Trembling ceremony. Moody dropped his face into his hands, rubbed at his eyes. Tension was draining out of him all at once, thick and heavy, like oil from an old car.

  “What was that all about?” The sergeant repeated it several times, a querulous mantra that fully expressed the way he was feeling. “Or as my father might have said: shash I y adi.” He managed a slight grin. “What in the bear happened?”

  Moody responded with the deep, reassuring chuckle he employed every year when he played Santa during the department’s seasonal visits to local hospitals.

  “I think we can make a few good guesses. What we got here, ol’ buddy, is an accessible interstitial alien database or library or question-answering whatsis that dates to about a thousand years ago.” He shook his head at the wonderment of it all.

  “I feel like a goddamn five-year-old trying to drive his dad’s car. We have only the vaguest notion of what we’re getting into, we don’t know how it works or even for sure what it’s capable of. All we know is that you activate the ignition and away you go.”

  Ooljee was staring at the blank, quiescent monitor. Only moments ago it had been a window into infinity, or perhaps somewhere even less comprehensible.

  “I would not be so concerned if all it did was reply to questions and allow you to reach into itself, but it has shown it ca
n also affect immediate reality in the form of the meat cleaver and the spinner power switch. That leads me to wonder what else it could do, if it became so inclined. Perhaps it could seal off this room from the rest of the building, or this building from the rest of the world.”

  “Shoot, why think small? Maybe it could seal off the whole planet. We haven’t a roach in shitpile’s idea of how big this thing is.”

  “Surely it was placed here for a reason,” Ooljee said. Moody pushed his chair away from the table. “Let’s leave that question alone for a while, okay? Right now I’m interested in a shower, something to eat, and a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow we’re gonna get our boy. Business before metaphysics. ”

  “I will go along with that.” Ooljee rose slowly from his chair. He was intensely curious, but also very tired. “You want to shower first?”

  “Naw, you go ahead. I’ll have a look in the pantry.” As his host left for the bathroom, Moody cracked the pantry seal and began poking through the neat stacks of cans and boxes and plastic containers. Feeling conservative,

  he chose a big box of French bread strips and cheese, inserted it in the cooker. As he waited for the bread to cook and the cheese to melt over it, he walked over to the monitor for one last close look prior to retiring.

  Putting his huge hand against the flat surface, he pushed gently. There was no give, only smooth resistance. He tried to peer behind the monitor, which hung nearly flush against the wall. The receive-activate unit attached to the back of the screen was little more than an inch thick. He tapped the monitor a couple of times, ran his fingers around the protruding edges. The cooker beeped its readiness.

  With a last shrug of contemplation which no one was present to observe, he turned to devote his full attention to his habitual nightly quota of calories.

  CHAPTER 14

  The following morning the kitchen showed no evidence of nightly excursions into other worlds or dimensions. Nothing prevented Ooljee from casually disconnecting his spinner from the interrupt box, or the interrupt box from the kitchen molly. The experiences of the night before seemed as unreal to both men as memories of childhood.