Cyber Way

by Alan Dean Foster

  The sergeant looked over at him. “Big Monster lives at a place called Hot Water.”

  Moody sighed. “I’ll bet the northern part of this state is full of hot springs.”

  “So it is. In fact, the San Francisco peaks near Flagstaff are said to have last erupted as recently as the eleventh century. There is plenty of activity.”

  “So this one reminds you of a sandpainting. So?”

  “I would rather it did not. You see, Big Monster did not like Earth people. He destroyed them as fast as they were made. Until he was taken care of, the world was not a fit place for human beings to live in.” He returned his attention to the view below. “I just find it interesting that Gaggii would choose a site close to a hot spring for his final refuge.”

  “Well I don’t see any monsters, big or small,” Moody growled. “I see a crummy little shack housing a murderer.

  I see—”

  Grayhills interrupted him. She was staring, not at the hogan below, but across the canyon. Staring and pointing. “What’s that? Oh my, what is that?”

  Moody looked up sharply.

  It was just a tiny dark spot, a small speck of night against the ruddy talus. Except that it shone with an inner light, hanging in the air hard by the opposite rim of the plateau.

  As they sat gaping, it expanded like a droplet of mercury on a sheet of glass, ballooning first a little in one direction,

  . then another. Shining down through the eye of the micro-hurricane, sunlight gleamed on its surface as if it were fashioned of polished black steel. It drifted slightly to the south, then stopped.

  When it had swelled to an oval the size of Ooljee’s truck, it impacted the edge of the plateau. Sand, gravel, then larger rocks, began slipping from the rim directly above the object. When they reached the oval, they vanished. A small creosote bush was undercut and it, too, disappeared into the vitreous umbra.

  “What the hell is that?” Ooljee whispered aloud.

  Moody spoke without turning. “How should I know? Y’all are the expert on Navaho legend.”

  “That is a physical manifestation,” the sergeant replied evenly, “not a religious one.”

  “The sonuvabitch has accessed something.” Moody’s fingers tightened on his pistol. “He’s trawling in that damn web and he’s snagged something new. Doesn’t he give a shit?”

  “He has killed at least two people and he tried to kill us,” Ooljee reminded his partner. “I suspect he does not.”

  The blackness continued to expand. As they watched, a huge section of cliff broke free and tumbled into the disk.

  And a wind was rising.

  It came rushing down out of the sky, whipping past their faces, straight down into the eye of the swirling microhurricane like water dumped in a bucket. It blew by Moody’s eyes, whispered in his ears; the sound of dust and pollen and bits of soil being sucked away. The disk was inhaling the Earth.

  “Sheets of sky.”

  “What’s that?” Moody spoke without turning, unable to take his eyes from the spectacle.

  Ooljee sat in the dirt, his gun hanging loosely from his

  fingers. “The gods drew on sheets of sky and traveled in ships that looked like black clouds. Remember the painting? ‘Scavenger Being Lifted Through the Skyhole by Eagles and Hawks Assisted by Snakes with Bird Power.’ We had an analogy for everything but the snakes, because snakes cannot fly. They burrow.”

  “Burrow.” Grayhills stood staring numbly at the carcinomatous tenebrosity that had taken root on the other side of the plateau. “Rats, moles, gophers, worms. Worms. That’s funny.”

  Once more Moody felt like the dumb fat kid in Mrs. Waterson’s tenth grade science class.

  “What about worms?”

  She ignored him, spoke instead to Ooljee. “Snakes burrow. Worms burrow. Snakes also stand for lightning, don’t they?” He nodded. “Lightning that burrows. It’s only natural to think of spaceships when we try to envision a method of travel that involves lightning and black clouds. Natural, and wrong. Those old hatathlis weren’t trying to describe a ship taking off. They were being much more literal. They were trying to describe burrowing.” Leaves and twigs blew past her cheeks as her hair streamed toward the far side of the canyon.

  “Will somebody tell me what the hell all this has to do with worms?” Moody pleaded.

  There was a funny smile on her face. “The sandpainting shows snakes. Today we might use worms. It’s all the same burrowing. I think the skyhole in your sandpainting is meant to be taken literally, not as a metaphor. I think Scavenger, whatever he was, didn’t go up into the sky. He went through a real skyhole.” Her gaze shifted once more to the steadily expanding ellipsis across the canyon. “Or as we might call it, a wormhole.”

  The faster he went, the farther behind he got, Moody reflected. “What is a wormhole?”

  She shrugged, as if precise descriptions did not matter.

  “Twisted spacetime. If you grab a cardboard tube at each end and twist it in opposite directions, and keep on twisting it, what do you end up with?”

  “A busted cardboard tube.”

  “Eventually the ends become congruent. There are scientists who believe that if you could get a good grip on spacetime you could twist it like that, so that the two ends which originally might have been hundreds of parsecs apart would end up occupying the same space. You could step through this end and come out somewhere else, somewhere far away.” She indicated the obumbrated disk.

  “There’s a causal boundary over there, a boundary attached to a spacetime that depends only on the structure Gaggii has generated with the aid of the alien web and the Cameron accelerator. A causal boundary, detective, does not distinguish between boundary points even at infinite distances.”

  By now the disk had taken a visible bite out of the cliff face opposite. It was no longer expanding as rapidly, but it continued to eat away at sandstone and soil.

  “What you’re saying,” Moody said slowly, “is that whoever came avisiting this part of the world a thousand years or so ago didn’t use any ships? They just dropped in through a hole in the sky?”

  “What does he want with a wormhole?” Ooljee climbed to his feet, struggling against the wind.

  “Maybe he wants to talk to whoever left their junk here. Maybe he just wants to say hello.” Moody kicked at the ground. “Or maybe he wants to ask them some questions.”

  “Grand presumptions often lead to disaster,” observed the sergeant moodily. “Ants do not ask questions of people who dump garbage, because if that attention is gained, such people are likely to exclaim ‘ants!,’ and reach for the bug spray or the swatter.” He stepped over the edge of the cliff, began slipping and sliding awkwardly down the crumbling talus.

  “Hey!” Moody followed, gallantly trying to aid Samantha Grayhills in staying upright.

  The disk, the wormhole, the skyhole—whatever it was— had grown big enough to drive a truck through. Boulders and trees continued to slide into the caliginous void and vanish. Air howled around the three as they scrambled down the slope.

  “Wait a minute, wait!” The two men slowed, looking back at Grayhills. They were halfway to the bottom of the canyon. “What if you’re right and he has the place secured?”

  “We have to stop him.” Moody hefted his gun. “We can’t just sit around and take in the show. We might not like the ending.”

  “There are other ways to stop him besides trying to put a bullet in his head.”

  “Maybe, but I happen to like that way.”

  “He might feel the same about you.” She shifted her attention to Ooljee. “You’ve learned how to use the web to locate him. Why not use it to interfere with what he’s doing?” She indicated the sergeant’s spinner, which hung from his duty belt. “All the information you’ve acquired since this started is still in there, isn’t it?”

  Ooljee put his free hand on the device, licked his lips. He looked down at the hogan, then across the canyon at the circle of swallowing night. He
was silent for a long moment. Then he straightened slightly.

  “The built-in monitor’s awfully small. Hardly enough to fingerprint on. And it is only a spinner. It’s not mol-lyjacked.”

  “Mine is.” She unclipped the expensive precision instrument slung at her belt, unfolded the top section into a foot-square screen. Moody admired it.

  “Pretty fancy.”

  She grinned tightly. “You two are only public servants, whereas I’m charged with ensuring the security of large companies. Naturally they see to it that I’m supplied with the best equipment on the market.”

  Ooljee eyed it uncertainly. “But does it have enough storage to process the webware template?”

  She handed it to him. “Only one way to find out.”

  The three of them knelt on the exposed slope, Moody trying to shield the two spinners as much as he could. Carefully Ooljee jacked the police spinner to Grayhills’, watched as the screen came alive.

  “What kind of molly you got in there?”

  “Ten gigabyte Yellow Orb, military spec suspension, Denon floating molecular lasac. Single read only, but that’s all we need. You’re the only one going to access.”

  “I hope that is enough.” Ooljee’s fingers danced over the board.

  A miniature of the Kettrick sandpainting appeared on the unfolded screen, the details so fine that only their familiarity with the design enabled them to recognize individual features. Ooljee sat and chanted, his hand outstretched, while the tormented wind shuddered around them, and across the canyon the glistening black oval continued to gnaw at the earth.

  Moody tried to divide his attention between the disk and the interlocked spinners. If the intruder grew much larger, it would engulf the motor home and the hogan. That would not be such a bad thing, he reflected, unless the disk remained behind, a manifestation only a vanished Gaggii could deal with.

  Where was it all going, the disappearing rocks and trees and sand? To another world circling another star? Or perhaps another dimension, or a big room chock full of rainbow threads and mysterious sparkling lights? Or was everything simply funneled into the vastness between the stars, to suffer instant desiccation? Moody was scared, real scared, more scared than he’d been on that day ten years ago in Sarasota when a ninloco dealer outgrabed on sizzle had stuck a need-ler to the back of the detective’s head and threatened to fry his brains.

  Instead it was the dealer who’d been blown away, by another cop on the stakeout. Vernon Moody straightened and sucked it in. He hadn’t survived that moment only to be ingested now by some berserk alien Indian Navaho fairy tale.

  The tiny screen was alive with rainbow filaments: rainbow power, Ooljee had called it. Fulgurant lights danced around the threads, darting through the blackness, while incomprehensible patterns whirled and exploded on the fold-out screen.

  “It’s so small,” Grayhills murmured.

  Easy enough to check though, Ooljee knew. Shoving his hand into the screen, he let the tingling warmth of the web briefly caress his flesh. He withdrew it confidently.

  “We’re in.” He stared at Grayhills. “But where do we go?”

  “Look!”

  As Moody’s gaze rose from the screen he noted that the wind was no longer blowing across the canyon. Instead it was now blasting toward them, making his own hair and (much more impressively) that of Samantha Grayhills’ stream out behind their heads. No longer the fresh, dry air of the high plateau, it carried with it a powerful musky odor he could not identify.

  Air from elsewhere, he thought. Air and fine particles that tickled his nostrils and made him want to sneeze. Behind it an intimation of something huge. His skin grew cold and the small hairs on the back of his neck bristled.

  He saw Grayhills staring in the same direction. “You feel it too?” he asked softly, simultaneously wondering why he was whispering. She nodded. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.” Her eyes dropped to the linked spinners. “We would have to ask Yistin Gaggii.”

  “I don’t think that crazy bastard knows either,” Moody growled. He was frightened and angry and frustrated. “The ant is playing with the garbage and he doesn’t care about the consequences. He just wants to see what it will do.” He squinted at the cliff, straining to see deeper into the disk.

  “There’s something in there. Big Monster, Big Thunder; something out of your collective cultural memory. It’s in there and it’s trying to get out.”

  “Come through,” Ooljee corrected him. “There: you can see it, a little!”

  Immense it was, and amorphous. A slowly solidifying shape. Was that because it was near and gradually taking on a recognizable outline, or very far away and slowly coming closer? Would it stop when it reached the causal boundary that was the disk, or step out into the canyon? Moody could not imagine, because he could not envision it.

  What if it was Big Monster, whatever that was, coming back? Called back to Hot Water to again make the world an unfit place for human beings, to once more destroy them as fast as they could be made? How could they stop anything like that, something from beyond time and place?

  If the web was responsible for bringing it forth, then to the web they must resort to deal with it. What had Ooljee told him, ages ago? About Na’a-tse-elit—no, that was the rainbow guardian. Something or someone called Monster Slayer? He couldn’t remember the Navaho name, but wasn’t that the entity responsible for the destruction of the terrible monsters of legend, the yei-tso? The same one who had told hatathlis that the gods drew on sheets of sky but that man could use powdered rock and sand (and rare-earth masking?). Was that what was responsible for the garbage that was the web?

  He unburdened himself of that and more to Ooljee, only to discover that his friend had been suffering similar thoughts.

  “The key has to be in the painting somewhere.” The sergeant stared at the monitor as if the sheer intensity of his desire might provoke a response, a suggestion. “The Four Sacred Mountains. The danger you don’t know.”

  He started talking to the spinners, chanting so fast his words were incomprehensible even to Grayhills. The web replied in Navaho; guttural, rhythmic, vocomposite phrases.

  Grayhills put her fingers to her lips, her eyes wide as she stared across the canyon. “Hurry. Oh, God, hurry.”

  The disk had become the color of dried blood. Within that otherworldly circular frame of impossibility something monstrous and swollen was trying to get out. Ooljee’s voice rose in pitch.

  Suddenly the horrid shape contracted, turning sideways and shrinking abruptly to half its former size. Moody gaped. There was something else in the skyhole, another outline as vast as the first. It flared and pulsed with shattered lightning as it clashed with its titanic counterpart. Brilliant rainbow bursts exploded from the disk, searing the earth black where they struck, instantly carbonizing anything organic they came in contact with.

  “Get down!” Moody flattened his bulk against the dirt and his companions did likewise. Burnt air whistled overhead, fleeing the disk, seeking escape from the confines of the canyon.

  The alien forms writhed and boiled like antagonistic oils confined to a glass jar. Squinting into flying sand and grit, Moody watched as the perfect orb of the skyhole began to buckle. Concavities took neat bites out of its rim.

  “What did you do?” he roared at his partner.

  Ooljee lay shielding the conjoined spinners with his body. “What we discussed!” He indicated the unstable disk. “Nayenezgani! Son of Changing Woman, Monster Slayer, who wears the flint armor and fights with the crooked lightning. Or maybe it is his brother Tobaschischin, Bom of Water. Perhaps both of them are fighting Big Monster.” He caught his breath. “Or perhaps what we are seeing is disruption in the database. Maybe Big Monster is a virus of some kind, and Nayenezgani a Restore program.”

  “It’s hard,” said Grayhills, “to give a name to something you don’t understand.”

  So enthralled and terrified were they by the scene within the disk, they for
got whence it had originated.

  The door to the hogan burst open and a lone figure came running out, turning circles as it shouted at the canyon walls. For the first time, Yistin Gaggii was neither composed nor in control.

  “Get out!” he screamed at his unseen tormentors. “Get out of the web!” He ignored the disk as though it didn’t exist.

  As Gaggii raised something to his shoulder, Moody voiced a choice expletive and dragged Grayhills down. A burst of automatic weapons fire scattered sand in front of them.

  “Get away!” Gaggii was running toward them now. They lay exposed on the slope, with no cover nearby.

  Raising himself onto his elbows, the detective sighted down the barrel of his pistol and fired off half a clip. A startled Gaggii cut to his right and returned the shots wildly. In the depths of the canyon the gunfire sounded tinny and toy like, masked by the driving wind.

  Moody lifted his head again, but Gaggii had disappeared. “Damn! Where’d he go?”

  “I think he is down in the creek bed.” Ooljee was trying to aim his own weapon while simultaneously shielding the spinners. “We will be lucky to hit him at this range.”

  “Yeah, but he doesn’t know that. What’s he got?” Fresh fire sent gravel skipping over their heads.

  “Looks like a Provalis Ruger. Cannot tell for sure.”

  “Self-seeking shells?”

  “I doubt it, or he would have used them by now. We cannot stay here. We are too exposed.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  Gaggii’s anxious voice filled the pause in the gunfire. “’You must go away! You do not know what you are doing!”

  Moody raised his head. “Who the hell says you do?” For his trouble he had to duck another burst of automatic fire.

  “You are breaking hozho, bilagaannal You have upset the balance. You—!”

  Moody roared back, interrupting him. “Who’s disturbed the balance? What the hell do you call thisT’

  Ooljee raised his head, pointed. “Something is changing.”

  The disk was slipping. No longer stable, it was sliding slowly downslope like glycerin on Teflon. Within the circle the violently clashing outlines were still visible.