Cyber Way

by Alan Dean Foster

  Grayhills rose and approached the monitor. Moody followed, curious; watched as she traced a portion of the image with a finger.

  “What is this House of Moving Points?”

  Ooljee scratched the back of his head. “Remember, I am a cop, not an academic. This is just a hobby of mine. As I recall, within the chant it is used to invoke the aid of Nayenezgani, or Monster Slayer, in relation to…”

  “It makes me think of Cameron,” she said, interrupting him.

  “You think there’s some guy named Nayenez Gani working in Cameron?” Moody asked sharply.

  “No, no.” Her irritation could not completely subdue her smile. “I thought of Cameron because of the high-energy physics research facility there. According to the vid-piece I saw, the university had just finished installing a Moebial toroid particle accelerator on the north end of the campus. The piece talked about what an ideal location it was, since the entire installation had to be underground and the rock around Cameron is totally devoid of moisture.” Moody thought hard. Particle accelerator? House of Moving Points?

  “C’mon, not you too. It’s bad enough part of this damn painting tells you how to access some kind of alien web-work. Now you’re trying to tell me another part describes a particle accelerator!’ ’

  “I didn’t say that,” she told him. “But maybe your man Gaggii believes that it does.”

  “It is something. It makes sense. Perhaps he is after information he cannot get from the web.” Ooljee oozed optimism. “He won’t get there quickly. The roads between Shungopavi and Cameron are not the best, and there is good reason to believe he is keeping to the back country.”

  I thought this whole part of the state was back country, Moody thought to himself. “Even so, he’s got one helluva start on us.”

  Again Grayhills directed their attention to the image on the monitor. “And this part here is Scavenger being lifted through a skyhole?”

  “Assisted by eagles and snakes with bird power, yes.” Ooljee traced the image with a finger. “Sometimes twenty-four eagles and hawks, usually forty-eight. I’ve never seen a sandpainting this complicated. Maybe that was what attracted Mr. Kettrick to it. Notice the lightning guardian, here.” He pointed.

  “And over there,” she continued, “is the House of Moving Points. A particle accelerator? Or something else?” She took a deep breath. “Tell me about Scavenger.”

  “Legend says he goes around picking up discarded things.”

  Moody looked sharply at his partner, recalling Gaggii’s alien garbage analogy.

  Grayhills was drawing metaphors and analogies like an artist, all of them rife with impossibilities. What kind of scenario was she trying to sketch in their imaginations? He stared at the sandpainting, striving to comprehend its mysteries. Each grain of sand was a dot that had to be connected to another dot to form a complete picture. They only had bits and pieces to work with. It was akin to building a plane without the engines. It looked like something, but when it was finished it just sat there and wouldn’t go.

  Ooljee went for the phone. “I am calling a cutter. We

  will get to Cameron before Gaggii. As to what he is after, we’ll ask him—as soon as we take him into custody.”

  “What,” Moody wondered aloud, “would this guy want with a particle accelerator? It ain’t like he’s after a plane or a free-state mollyblank.”

  Grayhills looked thoughtful. “Maybe it has something to do with this Skyhole legend.”

  “You can’t shoot holes in anything with a particle accelerator.” Moody hesitated. “At least I don’t think you can. I don’t know kudzu about physics, but I follow the news. All an accelerator does is throw particles you can’t see against other particles you can’t see, to make more particles you can’t see half as well as the original ones, right?”

  “I’m no physicist, either. But then, what you usually do with a sandpainting is look at it, not use an extract from it to access some incomprehensible alien web. If you can do something out of the ordinary with one device, why not with another?”

  Moody found himself hoping that Gaggii was simply insane. If he was working with real purpose, with a specific goal in mind, it raised a specter far more chilling than that of an ordinary madman running amok.

  Ooljee hung up, looking satisfied. “Skycutter is on its way. It’s a Flex, the fastest transportation I could wheedle out of the department. They balked at first, but gave in when I invoked the NSI’s good name on our behalf.”

  “We taking backup this time?”

  Ooljee shook his head impatiently. “No room on the Flex and we want to get there well before Gaggii. Any help we need we can recruit in Cameron. There is an NDPS office there and the university’s own security people can help. Gaggii’s description will be all over the town and campus in ten minutes.”

  Grayhills was apologizing as they entered the elevator that would carry them to the VTOL pad on the roof. “I should know more about my own heritage, but wlu-n you’ie trying to keep pace with the latest advances in interlacing spherical database security, it’s hard to find time to study what you learned as a kid. Is there anything else you can tell us about this Skyhole legend, or the House of Moving Points? Anything that might give us a hint about Gaggii’s plans?”

  The sergeant muttered a mix of English and Navaho as the lift ascended. “If I think of anything, you will be the first to know. I keep trying to tell you I am no expert in these matters. It’s only a hobby with me.”

  “Don’t keep selling yourself short,” said Moody reprovingly. “I don’t think there are any hatathlis running around with degrees in criminology, either. Thanks to you, we’ve made some connections. We’ll make more.”

  I’m just not sure I want to, he thought worriedly. He felt as if he’d stepped off a hyperatmospheric shuttle into a deep, dark well. Now he’d been falling for so long, he was afraid of what would happen when he finally hit bottom.

  He glanced surreptitiously at his partner. It must be a lot harder on him, the detective mused. Assisting on a murder investigation, only to end up haunted by his own heritage. At least I don’t relate to a lot of this. So it doesn’t scare me.

  Then he remembered the mutaphysical projection Ooljee had called Endless Snake and decided it was all right to be scared.

  CHAPTER 18

  Moments after the elevator deposited them on the roof next to the landing pad, the skycutter arrived, its rotors sending red dust flying. There hadn’t been time to brief the pilot. Ooljee filled him in as the streamlined craft ascended and turned westward.

  Despite their speed, it would take them a while to reach Cameron, which lay on the opposite side of the Reservation, more than a hundred miles from Ganado. It would take Gaggii a lot longer.

  Ooljee was on the cutter’s radio as soon as they were airborne, lighting a fire under the NDPS office in Cameron and the security department at the university. Both would plug Gaggii’s description and vitals into their dayboards. Without volunteering specifics, the sergeant requested that security around the accelerator facility be enhanced. Anyone demanding an explanation was told to go through Ganado channels.

  He did not request that added roadblocks be set up between Shungopavi and Cameron, for fear of alerting Gaggii and scaring him off. The last thing they wanted was for their quarry to bolt the Rez. This time there would be no slip-ups, no mistakes, no underestimating their man. The instant they had him back in custody, he would be stripped naked and conducted to a holding facility where he wouldn’t have access to anything more electronically sophisticated than a wall socket.

  Once safely clear of the towering artificial canyons and buttes of the city, the pilot configured the skycutter for highspeed flight. The rotor blades retracted to a third of their former length, while the engine slid down its guide slot until it was facing backwards between the two rear-wing supports. It roared with full power, driving the craft forward instead of providing lift. Their speed doubled despite a substantial headwind.

&n
bsp; There was no commercial traffic to slow them. Transcontinental flights stuck to higher altitudes, allowing Kla-getoh Control to vector them straight to Cameron. The cutter could bypass the town’s VTOL port and land right on the university grounds, saving time and worry.

  Moody peered down through the glass at a land dominated by immense table-top mesas and sloping canyons. Scrub and individual trees staked out individual plots of soil, each competing warily with its neighbors. God had spent so much time preparing the ground here, he mused, that He’d grown tired and left without finishing the landscaping.

  Grayhills was gazing at the back of the pilot’s seat, seeking inspiration in bruised vinyl. “The answer’s in the sandpainting somewhere,” she was mumbling to no one in particular. “Maybe he’s not interested in the accelerator. Maybe House of Moving Points refers to chemistry instead of physics.” She leaned forward. Ooljee sat opposite the pilot.

  “Isn’t there anything else you can tell us about the Scavenger story?”

  “You’ve seen the painting.” Ooljee turned in his seat to look back at them. “Scavenger was supposed to live at a place called Whirling Mountain. It was one of the gates between Earth and the home of the Holy People. ” He looked at his partner. “A sandpainting itself is called ikah, which means ‘the place where gods come and go,’ referring to their spiritual abodes.

  “Such gates are common to many cultures. In Tibet they think the city of Lhasa is such a place. In Italy I suppose many believers would point to the Vatican. Geography that is spiritually as well as temporally tangent. Such concepts are not easy for some people to understand.”

  “Imagine where that leaves me,” Moody murmured. Ooljee continued. “The eagles gave the snakes bird power so they could help raise Scavenger, who ascended through the skyhole wrapped in a black cloud to shield him from his enemies. Lightning and rainbows, which signify power, guard the design.”

  “Rainbows.” Grayhills traced lazy designs on the back of the pilot’s seat. “Jagged lightning. Black clouds. Does that suggest anything to either of you? I mean, you two have been studying this sandpainting for weeks, solely with an eye toward catching a murderer. Stand back a little and try to view it from a different perspective.”

  Moody’s expression knotted as he realized what she was driving at. “I’ve crossed the peninsula a few times to visit the Kennedy Center and watch a couple of launches. Nothing major; just weekly orbital station resupply flights. But even the small ones make an impression.” He stared at her. “Lightning. Black clouds ascending. Bursts of multicolored light. Birds flying every which way. Maybe not all hawks and eagles, but birds. That’s not a bad description of the scene at a liftoff. Is that what you’re trying to get me to say?”

  She didn’t reply, simply met his gaze evenly.

  Ooljee looked back at him, wincing as the sky cutter impacted a pocket of inconsiderate air. Moody didn’t think his friend liked flying.

  “The Anasazi made good pots. They built substantial dwellings. They wove baskets. But to the best of my knowledge no launch facilities have ever been discovered at Keet Seel or Awatobi.”

  “That might also be true of whoever left this web behind,” Moody pointed out, “so maybe they used something else instead. Something different.”

  “One hatathli’s rainbow is another’s stream of photons,” Grayhills suggested. “Jagged lightning as force field, black cloud as exhaust. The sandpainting we’re discussing isn’t about frogs and the four sacred plants. Analogies can be drawn here, gentlemen, that are no more farfetched than what we know to be real. The eagles and hawks could be suggestive of something else, or they might actually be representative of birds disturbed by a liftoff. Or a landing.” Moody’s thoughts were racing now, and try as he might, he couldn’t rein them in. “How do the snakes fit in?” Grayhills sagged a little. “I admit they don’t make any sense to me, and they’re central to the design.”

  “They may be descriptive of something we have not yet imagined.” Ooljee stared at his partner, his fingers tightening on the back of his seat as the skycutter bounced through a cloud. “We are in over our heads again, my friend. We need more help.” His eyes darted to Grayhills. “No offense.”

  “None taken, but you could call in the entire advisory staff of the National Academy of Sciences and it wouldn’t do any good. By the time you could assemble and brief them, this Gaggii will likely have accomplished whatever it is he has set out to do. I haven’t been here very long, but you two already have me thinking like a cop. Let’s catch him first. Then we can turn the business of interpreting the sandpainting over to a properly accredited committee so 1 can go back to debugging mollys and you can go back to catching ordinary rapists and crazyboys.

  “Until then we are faced with the reality of this web, so why should we not also be willing to allow the possibility of ancient visitation by spaceship? If you grant that, you can also envision a few surviving Anasazi turning whatever knowledge they may have acquired from such visitors either by intent or accident, into sandpaintings and chants. Ways that have almost but not quite been forgotten.”

  “I wonder what else our hypothetical visitors left lying around?” Moody tried to see past the pilot. “Paul’s told me that more than five hundred distinct sandpainting designs have survived. No telling how many have been forgotten. I wonder how many others contain templates?” He swallowed hard.

  “I’m with Samantha on one thing, though. I still don’t see how the snakes fit in. If we’re envisioning some kind of craft taking off, everything else makes sense. But not the snakes.”

  “Maybe they were the passengers,” she suggested.

  Moody found the image thus sparked unpleasant to contemplate, coming as he did from the tropical South, where snakes of any kind were automatically treated with caution.

  “Unlikely,” said Ooljee. “The Way is clear on that much. The snakes helped Scavenger to rise through the Skyhole. He was the passenger, not them. Still, who is to say how accurate even a hatathli’s interpretation is? For example, there are many words in the chants which cannot be translated. Words whose meaning has been forgotten. Interesting to imagine what some of them might really be describing: webs, visitors, strange machines.” He was silent for several moments. “So much of our tradition is oral; so little written down.

  “Our legends say that this world is only one of five. Other religions mention but a single world. Why do the stories of our forefathers describe four others? They are real places in legend. Might they also be real places in space?

  “The People traditionally regard space as unbounded. We allow room for growth, adaptation, reinterpretation of ideas old and new. Just what you might expect of people whose ancestors were forced to cope with the appearance

  of strange beings from another world.” He tapped the spinner clipped to his service belt.

  “It is traditional to combine new powers with the old. Why not sandpaintings and chants and computer webs? What troubles me are those legends which speak of the universe as a very delicately balanced place, full of immensely powerful forces for good or evil. You would say beneficent or malign. If this balance is upset, even unintentionally, all kinds of terrible things can happen.

  “You recall that I spoke of hozho.” Moody nodded. “It is interesting that tradition insists only man can upset that balance.”

  Moody mulled it over. “That could be the warning the visitors left behind with their garbage. Like the skull and crossbones on a can of poison.”

  “Or it might refer to something entirely different,” Ooljee argued.

  “How do you fix the universe if somebody like Gaggii knocks it out of kilter?”

  “I’d think you would know the answer to that by now, my friend. You restore hozho, balance, by performing the right Way.”

  “Wonderful.” Moody leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms over his chest. “Hey, I got it. Gaggii’s committed two murders. By catching him and putting him away where he can’t bother anything eve
r again, don’t we restore balance? The DA’s office will think so, anyway.”

  “You grasp the concept, my friend.” Ooljee was amused. “I hope that is all it will take.” His smile faded. “Something else: if certain conditions and behavior are repeated with precision, prior events can recur accordingly. Say a sick deer wanders down a certain path in ancient times. Today another deer takes the same path, at the same pace. Traditionalists believe that the first deer’s sick confusion can enter the mind of the contemporary one and it will become ill or disoriented in the manner of the first.”

  “What are you driving at?” Grayhills asked him. “Nothing.” The sergeant loosened his death-grip on the back of his seat. “Only that if Gaggii uses the web to reiterate some kind of ancient alien schematic, a traditionalist would expect any occurrence relevant to that schematic to also repeat itself. Tradition insists that a precisely determined set of conditions should always produce precisely the same effects at a later time.”

  Grayhills pursed her lips. “Sounds like causality to me. I thought we were discussing traditional Navaho medicine, not quantum mechanics.”

  Ooljee shrugged. “A rose by any other name.”

  “What kind of ‘relevant event’ should we be on the lookout for?”

  “I have no idea. But it might be a good idea to keep an eye on the sky.”

  Moody involuntarily glanced upward, only to note when his gaze fell that his partner was grinning at him. That Navaho sense of humor again.

  “If we run into any large black clouds descending on bolts of lightning and rainbow pillars, you’ll be laughing out of the other side of your face.”

  “I do not expect that to happen.” Ooljee repressed his grin. “I am just telling you what the old legends say. As we have seen already, some of them have turned out to be true in ways not previously imagined. We cannot rule any possibilities out.