Cyber Way

by Alan Dean Foster

  Moody eyed his partner. “You’re gonna have to use the template again, ask the web where he is.”

  The sergeant was dubious. “I’d rather not. Each time we access I get the feeling I am going to do something wrong, or that Gaggii will finally have figured out how to insert a

  safeguard to cover his tracks and we will all end up like the men on that ship. Or the building we are in will materialize someplace else, or maybe the state of Arizona. I do not want to have to wait on someone to ‘accidentally’ bring us back a hundred years from now.”

  It was an image impossible to avoid: the whole state, with all its rivers and cities and mountains and people, suddenly extracted from reality as neatly as a child would cut out a piece of map. And why just Arizona? Moody thought. Why not all of North America, or if Gaggii wasn’t careful with his parameters, the entire planet? Earth shunted to an obscure comer of an alien database, just another insignificant byte of data in a web large enough to include…

  What? How vast was this web they’d stumbled upon?

  Maybe that’s all it was. Just a big database devised by whoever they were. He could feel himself beginning to lose it, and Vemon Moody, Detective First, TPD, never lost it. But the scale, the immensity, the apocalyptic indifference of it all, was starting to get to him.

  He could see it clearly: galaxies as directories, subdirectories of individual solar systems. Within one subdirectory, little files. One of a place called Earth, or however it was labeled. Tiny subfiles for plants and animals and human beings. Subfile for individuals: Vemon Moody, Paul Ooljee, Samantha Grayhills, Yistin Gaggii. Infinitesimally minuscule bytes easily accessed by anyone who knew how to use the web. Garbage files.

  What was Gaggii after? Surely not something as inconsequential as a means for protecting or enriching himself? No, Gaggii would want to know how to run the subfile labeled “mankind.” Or perhaps his vision was grander. Perhaps he hoped to discover how to access an entire file. Press enter here and shift the planet a little nearer the sun (maybe Gaggii was easily chilled). Or move it next to another sun, for a change of pace. Gravity, the speed of light: suddenly these little constants no longer meant anything. Not when you could access the web and braid yourself a custom Julia pattern here, a Mandlebrot there, and shift yourself into the subdirectory coded Alpha Centauri.

  Moody shivered. How could you go on, with the foundations of your reality become as insubstantial as gossamer? Time, space, speed: meaningless. Qualitatively irrelevant. Who punched in the entries up there? God? The aliens? Navaho Holy People with unpronounceable names?

  Pain flicked across his face. He blinked at a worried-looking Samantha Grayhills. It took him a moment to realize he’d been slapped. Ooljee stood nearby, equally concerned.

  “You were laughing,” she said seriously, “and we couldn’t get you to stop. I’m sorry I had to hit you.”

  “I wouldn’t do it,” said Ooljee. “Thought you might react instinctively and flatten me. What were you thinking about that made you do that?”

  Moody hesitated, finally announced brusquely, “Nothing. Nothing important.

  “What we have to do now is concentrate on what we can understand. Because if you look at this thing too hard, you lose your focus real quick. Let’s just work on Yistin Gaggii. He’s a murderer and we’re going to take him into custody. That’s all we need to worry about.”

  “I’ve been thinking.” Both men turned on Grayhills. She didn’t back down under their stares. “If he’s at the center of everything that’s been happening, then he also might be at the center of this impossible storm. Pinpoint the nexus of the low-pressure system and we might find him there. If it’s over Vegas or Bullhead City then we can try something else, but if it’s as close to here as the National Weather Service suggested…”

  “Give ’em a call,” snapped Moody.

  She nodded, resumed her seat at the console. “I’m on it.”

  Ooljee whispered to his partner while they waited. “I know what your problem is, my friend. You think too much. Especially for a cop.”

  “What if the people who built this web left their own safeguards behind? What if Gaggii accidentally stumbles into one of them? You think it’s gonna deal with him selectively?” He smiled crookedly. “Try ‘not’ thinking about thinking about that for a while.”

  “Nothing is intrinsically good or evil,” the sergeant told him. “It is all in how you use it.”

  “That really reassures me,” Moody replied sarcastically. “I’ll remember that when Arizona is sinking.in the middle of the Indian Ocean.”

  “If such a safeguard exists, it may be clearly labeled.”

  “You think that’d stop our boy Gaggii? He’s come too far to quit now. He’d try getting around it. No, we’ve got to get our hands on him before he can make any serious mistakes.”

  “I do not think,” Ooljee said quietly, “that Yistin Gaggii wants to move the state of Arizona to the middle of the Indian Ocean.”

  “Naw. He just wants to make himself President. Or Emperor of the planet.” The detective glanced down at his partner. “We’re gonna have to kill him to stop him. You know that, don’t you? Because of that damn unreal boat outside. If some hatathli codetalkers made that happen over a hundred years ago, it means you don’t need a monitor or spinner to access the web. All you need is the right words, the right phrasing. It means you can’t stop Gaggii by locking him up. You couldn’t put him in a hole deep enough to keep him from making mischief. So we have to kill him.” Ooljee waited a moment before replying, but not for the reason Moody thought. “I think you are right, but that does not solve the problem.”

  “How so?”

  “What about me? I know the chant. I know the sandpainting.”

  Moody eyed him sharply. “What about you, Paul? You tell me.”

  “I have a fine woman who loves me. I have two wonderful children. I have a job that I like in a place that I like. I have fulfillment. I do not want to be emperor of anything. More importantly, I want as little to do with this business as possible. That which grants power can also take it away. Let specialists who can watch over one another delve into its depths. Let them stumble across any safeguards that may have been left floating in its innards.

  “I am no hatathli. If we destroy the remaining images of the sandpainting it will be a long time before anyone stumbles across its secret again. Perhaps never.”

  “Never.” Moody nodded, pleased. “That sounds like a decent length of time. Never, yeah.” The terrifying, indifferent emptiness of the universe receded a little, bearing some of the fear he felt with it.

  “Don’t you wonder?” Ooljee asked him. “If the codetalkers are responsible for what happened to that ship, don’t you wonder what else might be floating around in the web?”

  “Make you a deal,” the detective said curtly. “I won’t think so much if you won’t wonder so much.”

  Grayhills had information. “The center of the low is only forty-five miles north of here. South of the gap at Cedar Ridge, somewhere between the highway and Marble Canyon.” She looked back up at them. “It’s still fixed, not moving.”

  “Real close.” Ooljee checked his gun. “He did not have to come into town to get what he wanted. Let’s go. We have a killer to apprehend and a storm to stop. Among other things.”

  The two men exchanged grim grins.

  CHAPTER 21

  The skycutter pilot was reluctant to take them up, did so only because Ooljee pulled rank. Like a cork in a whirlpool they bobbed through the clouds, the flight smoothing out only a little when the pilot dropped the rotor and headed north.

  Wind rocked them wildly, while the lightning was frequent and heavy enough to extract prayer from confirmed atheists. Though the wipers battled the driving sleet to a draw, the pilot chose to concentrate on his instruments in lieu of the view ahead. There would be no welcoming landing beacon where they planned to set down.

  Grayhills assured the pilot that a visual sighting would
not be necessary. All he had to do was follow his falling barometer.

  Moody’s stomach rose and fell in concert with the Flex. He hung on and tried to think about something besides his heaving guts.

  Their pilot was a short, wiry, somber-faced youth in his early twenties. Too small for the street, too tough to be stuck behind a desk. As he studied his console he raised his voice to make himself heard above the brutal wind.

  “Been flying four years. I’ve tracked people according to standard police reports and civilian call-ins. I’ve trailed vidwits and run spiral searches. Once I blew a suspect armed with a surface-to-air into a ditch where ground cops could pick him up easy. But this is the first time I ever tracked anyone by barometric pressure.” He tapped the lens protecting a readout. “Look at this damn thing! Twenty-eight point nine-five and still dropping. I’ve never seen it so low. ”

  A blast of wind and rain drove the skycutter sideways. The pilot fought for control, cursing the storm and Ooljee in equal measure. He didn’t ask questions, because he couldn’t spare the time.

  Moody clung to whatever part of the cabin was fastened down. Despite her harness, Samantha Grayhills kept bouncing into him, a sensation he would have enjoyed at any other time. From his seat alongside the pilot, Ooljee leaned forward and tried to see through the horizontal weather.

  Maybe while trying to track the barometer, fight the storm, and weather the up- and down-drafts, the pilot took his eyes off his radar for an instant. Or perhaps it was because they seemed to be flying one foot back for every two they advanced. In any event he suddenly let out a yell and wrenched the wheel hard over as the butte loomed in front of them.

  The skycutter slued sideways. A coarse grinding groan came from its belly as they struck, bouncing once. The pilot tried to shift the rotor to hover, but it was too late. Wind and pressure finished what the initial impact had begun.

  The carbon-fiber composite blades splintered like lengths of frozen carpet. One shattered against the Flex’s armor glass inches from Moody’s face. Only the fact that they were already on the ground saved them. That, and the skill of their angry pilot. In the vids Moody had seen, aircraft crashes always went on and on, long minutes of metal screeching against pavement or stone. In reality, only seconds elapsed between the first contact with the ground and total cessation of movement.

  He slipped free of his harness and helped Grayhills extricate herself from her own. “You okay?”

  “No, I am not okay. My neck is killing me and my chest feels like someone’s been using it for an anvil. But I don’t think anything’s broken.”

  Ooljee was kicking open the door on his side. Moody’s gaze shifted to the pilot, who sat slumped in his seat, his head lolling.

  “Harness did not keep him from denting the console.” The sergeant reached over and put a hand on the pilot’s chest, inside his jacket. “He will be okay. But he’ll feel otherwise when he wakes up.” A weight lifted from Moody’s guts. He had a fondness for the young and reckless.

  The door banged open to admit a blast of damp, cold air. This ain’t no place for a po’ country boy from the South, Moody told himself dourly as the wind whipped at the bare flesh of his face, licking him like a curious carnivore. “We must be close,” Ooljee announced.

  “Why?”

  The sergeant turned to face his partner. “Because I was looking at the barometer just before we hit, and I don’t think it could have gone any lower. So we must be near the center of the storm.”

  “We don’t gotta be near anything,” Moody groused, in no mood to be told how things had to be. “If it was still dropping, then we were heading the right way when we went down, but that doesn’t mean we’re there yet.” He indicated the unconscious pilot. “What about him?” Ooljee considered. “When he wakes up and sees that we have gone, he will do one of two things. Either he will try and come after us, which would be really stupid, or else he will stay with his craft and wait for the storm to die down and searchers to home in on the emergency beacon.”

  “Wish we had that choice.” Moody leaned toward the doorway, halted when he sensed Grayhills right behind him. “Where d’you think y’all are going?”

  She made a face at him. “I haven’t got time for any of that I’m-police-and-you’re-civilian-so-this-doesn’t-con-cern-you kind of thing.”

  “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t make you stay here?”

  Bits of sleet clung to the long black strands of her hair like melting pearls. Bright eyes gazed evenly back into his own.

  “Because I’m smarter than you, and that might prove useful.”

  The detective looked up at his partner. “What do y’all think, Paul? Is she smarter than me?”

  “Oh, I do not think there is any doubt about it,” the sergeant replied with a straight face. “Though whether that rates her coming with us is another matter. However, I do not want to debate the point. She is probably smarter than me also, so we would end up both losing the argument and wasting time.”

  They exited the downed aircraft, Moody wishing for a goose-down parka instead of the light-duty jacket he was wearing. Ooljee oriented himself and pointed. They headed west.

  Moody noted that Grayhills was following close on his heels, using his bulk as a shield against the wind and sleet. “Don’t y’all know that it’s dangerous to follow a bear into the woods?”

  “Not so long as you have a pretty good idea what he’s going to do there.” She grinned up at him, her cheeks rosy from the cold.

  Was it intellectual curiosity that induced her to come along, Moody wondered, or like so many of the scientifically minded was she simply ignorant of the realities of real-life violence? As a percentage of the total population, scientists were the victims of muggings far out of proportion to their numbers.

  Notwithstanding the wind and cold, he was glad to be out of the skycutter. Better to walk. He suspected his opinion might change as the chill penetrated his light clothing. But staying in the downed Flex was an option neither he nor Ooljee had considered. They had to find and stop Gaggii as quickly as possible. That didn’t allow for squatting around waiting to be rescued.

  “Gonna have a helluva time finding anything in this,” he announced to no one in particular as he plowed forward, keeping his head down and blinking moisture from his eyes. At least, he thought with some amusement, Grayhills was having an easier time following him than he was keeping up with Ooljee.

  The sergeant called back from just ahead. “I think it is letting up!” The wind did seem to be dying a little, Moody thought. Sleet became rain, then mere drizzle. Maybe the ridiculous storm was moving on.

  Abruptly—too abruptly—the drizzle gave way to a light mist. Then even that ceased.

  He found himself standing on the edge of a rocky mesa, gazing down into a shallow canyon. A narrow stream meandered through this crack in the Earth’s surface, running water over the millennia having etched away a frame larger than itself. The rim on the far side of the canyon was higher than the one on which they stood.

  Moody turned a slow circle. Dark fog and rain hung like a curtain behind them, almost within touching distance. A circular rampart of cloud enclosed this piece of plateau, reaching toward the heavens. It was thus everywhere he looked. From within the clouds the wind called ceaselessly, but where they stood it was calm and warm.

  “Haal hoodzaal” Ooljee muttered. “What is going on here?”

  “Leave it to a Florida boy to explain, though if I’d been offered my druthers I’d have picked something else to remind me of home.” Moody kicked a rock over the edge, watched it tumble down the steep slope. “We’re in the eye.”

  Grayhills stared at the towering clouds circulating about them. “Can’t be. It’s too small. The whole storm is too small.”

  “So it’s small. It’s still a damn hurricane.”

  “You cannot have a damn hurricane here.” Ooljee reacted as if his denial might itself be enough to banish the outrageousness. “Hurricanes arise in
the tropics. This is Northern Arizona, for God’s sake.”

  “Sorry, but there’s not much question about it. Classic form, down-sized. A mini-hurricane.” Moody was unperturbed by his partner’s objections. The storm was just sitting there, hovering above the little canyon with its seasonal stream, not moving at all, content to spin in place.

  “More like a micro-hurricane.” An occasional stray breeze ruffled Grayhills’ hair. “What a meteorologist wouldn’t give to be here to study the dynamics.”

  “He can have my place,” Moody muttered. He felt like a bug stapled to the top of a champagne bottle, waiting for the inevitable explosion to blow him into the firmament.

  There was more to the canyon than stream and isolated clumps of vegetation. Steam rose from hot springs near the center, close to a traditional twelve-sided hogan of rough-cut logs. The entrance to the structure faced east. Glass windows had been inserted in the stuccoed walls.

  A large motor home was parked nearby, the satellite dish on its roof a miniature of the much bigger one mounted behind the hogan. Next to it stood a pyramid of twelve tracking solar panels. Cables ran from the motor home into the building.

  Moody automatically drew his gun and dropped to a crouch, studying vehicle and structure. “He’s in one or the other. Wish I had a small shapecharger. I’d put one in the motor home, another in the house, and we’d just walk away from the craters, storm or no storm.”

  “We cannot rush him,” Ooljee whispered. “We do not know what sort of weapons he may have stockpiled in there, or may have brought with him.” His eyes scanned the ground around the hogan. “There may be perimeter security, either passive or active. And there is something else.” He pointed toward the hot springs.

  Moody squinted, shrugged. “So he can take a hot bath if he wants to. So what?”

  “There is another sandpainting. It deals with an entity named Big Monster.”

  “Nothing subtle about your traditions, is there?”