Cyber Way

by Alan Dean Foster

  The sergeant was on his feet, heedless of however their assailant might choose to react. “Run. Get up and run. Don’t you see what’s happening?” Moody wasn’t sure that he did, but if he had learned anything in the past weeks, it was that it was best to follow his partner’s lead in such matters. With a grunt, he stumbled erect.

  Independent of wind or storm, stone or guidance, the disk continued its drift down into the canyon, swallowing huge chunks of earth and gravel along the way. When it reached the bottom it halted and began to tip over, falling in extreme slow motion. The gale howling out of the dark maw intensified.

  Peering back into the canyon, Moody saw Yistin Gaggii rise from his place of concealment in the creek bed, throw away his gun, and begin to run toward his pursuers. He was looking over his shoulder, back and up at the falling, falling disk. That embattled circle of night was rotating on some unknown, unseen axis, responding to forces beyond ken or control, slicing through reality like a circular blade as it fell. The tops of a pair of big cottonwoods began to vanish into it.

  The wormhole turns, Moody thought madly as he sought to increase his pace. Gravel and sand slipped from beneath his boots, threatening to send him tumbling.

  Ooljee and Grayhills reached out to help him up the last few feet. Breathing hard, the three of them looked on in horrified fascination at the drama unfolding below. Gaggii was running for his life, running hard, sand flying from his heels. Panic had replaced anger on his face. The disk was collapsing atop him. He ran harder. He would escape its radii. He would not. Would, would not. Would…

  With a yelp of despair Yistin Gaggii threw himself forward as the disk came perfectly parallel to the floor of the canyon. Moody saw him vanish beneath the outer edge: not crushed, but silently absorbed, swept up, inhaled along with the hogan, the motor home, the solar pyramid and satellite dish, innumerable bushes, rocks, boulders, and smaller insect and reptilian lives.

  Standing on the rim of the canyon they found themselves gazing down into a circular black lake. Nothing moved on its surface. But within, the universe itself was in turmoil. Or the database. Gaggii was gone: gone with his dreams and aspirations, his spinners and mollys, his misplaced self-assurance and homicidal indifference. He didn’t matter anymore. All that mattered was the conflict he had left behind, some kind of unimaginable contest for supremacy that might be taking place a few dozen yards below their feet or halfway across the cosmos. Within the disk gods, programs, aliens, or something they could not give a name to, struggled and contested.

  The ants stood nearby and watched helplessly.

  Grayhills grabbed his arm and pointed excitedly, but she didn’t need to point. Moody saw it as soon as she did.

  The disk was beginning to shrink.

  Soon it occupied less than half the canyon bottom. Where it retreated, the surface was as clean and bare as the lens of a camera. It continued to contract until only a black circle the size of a tire remained. Then it was the size of a dinner plate.

  Still inhaling dust and dirt, it irised out to infinity.

  Released to confusion, the amazing storm which had led them to this place began to shudder and dissipate. Clouds broke up and evaporated. Wind tore the walls of the hurricane eye to pieces, then sought refuge in array os and gullies. Moody clutched at his ears as the barometric pressure rose with astonishing speed.

  Below, a section of canyon two hundred yards in diameter had been wiped smooth. No pebble marred its perfect surface, no creosote or mesquite poked its desiccated crown skyward. Flowing down from the north, the lonely little stream spread out in all directions, searching in vain for a course to follow as it sought to reclaim a momentarily forgotten corner of the planet.

  Samantha Grayhills gazed at the exposed strata; white Coconino and dark red Kaibab sandstone.

  “It looks like the setting in a necklace. It looks like—” she struggled for the right analogy, the right word.

  “It looks like hozho,” said Vernon Moody in his easy southern drawl. “Balance and stability, thank God.”

  Feeling suddenly very tired, Grayhills sat down on the edge of the slope and wiped at her wild, rain-slicked hair.

  “It saved us. Maybe saved everything.” She squinted at Ooljee. “Whatever it was you called up saved us.”

  The sergeant shrugged. He was thinking of his wife, of the warmth of her against him in bed at night. Of his boys, making trouble and smiles.

  “Haal hootiid. Who knows what happened? Maybe we had nothing to do with it. Maybe something decided it was time to pick up garbage that had started to stink.” He put down what he had so diligently shielded against Gaggii’s fire.

  Moody found himself staring intently at the still active, still glowing monitor of the mated spinners. After a mo-merit’s hesitation he rose and raised his foot over them.

  “That won’t make it go away.” Ooljee spoke softly. “I have been thinking. It will only delay things. Maybe the next person to learn the secret will be another Gaggii. One who might proceed more cautiously, without leaving behind dead people to draw attention to himself, but one with similar dangerous ambitions. Or it might be some brilliant kid who would do irreversible damage before anyone had any idea what was happening.”

  Moody put his foot down—alongside the spinners. That was the trouble with knowledge, he mused. Once acquired, it was so damn difficult to destroy. The Middle Ages hadn’t been able to wipe out science. What made him think he could stomp the web into nonexistence? As physicists delved deeper and deeper into the construction of the cosmos they were bound to stumble into the web eventually, with or without the clues provided by the sandpainting.

  Grayhills was gazing thoughtfully at the screen. “I wonder: if you knew how, what else could you access through there? Holy People? Yei-tsos, aliens, creatures that live in the web itself? Those drifting patterns and lights: what do they represent? Worlds, living beings, or abstracts?” Moody snorted, flung a rock into the canyon. It did not travel far enough to mar the unnaturally smooth plain at the bottom.

  “Maybe you could access a ‘delete’ button. Ever think of that? ‘Have fun, amuse your friends.’ Delete ’em. Or maybe there’s a command for deleting something else. Like the Earth.” He threw another stone, harder. The pain that shot up his arm was real, reassuring.

  She refused to let him discourage her. “If you could make a wormhole do what you wanted it to, if you could control its position, it would make travel between worlds as simple and easy as crossing the street.”

  “Yeah,” grumbled Moody. “Think about that for a minute.”

  They were distracted by the whirr of rotors overhead. Someone had located the downed skycutter’s emergency beacon. Soon they would be found. Then they would have to explain themselves, not to mention the perfectly round polished basin below.

  “The only problem with having a wormhole to step through,” Ooljee observed quietly, “is that something else can step through from the other side.”

  “Not if we learn how to control it, how to manipulate it.” Grayhills came up behind Moody and began kneading his shoulders with her strong fingers. At first he tensed, then allowed himself to relax, letting her work on the stiff muscles. “Something did, once.”

  “You’re not arguing fair,” Moody objected mildly, feeling the tension ease out of his shoulders. “Where’d you learn how to do this? Not off a molly.”

  “You’d be surprised what you have to learn while working Security.”

  “Who, me? A dumb cop?”

  “Why does it please you to describe yourself that way?” He offered no comment.

  “I wonder what we might find if we subjected some other sandpaintings to the kind of analysis we put the Kettrick through?” Ooljee said. Moody looked up sharply. “Some of the paintings that are used in the Shooting Way or Blessing Way. I wonder if Grandfather Laughter worked with them too?”

  His partner indicated the still flickering fold-out screen. “Don’t you think the offspring of one Way is enough t
o deal with for a while?”

  The sergeant looked over at him. “Other paintings, other clues. Perhaps other universes.”

  “Something else I don’t understand,” said Moody. “Why you? I mean, not you personally, but why the Navaho? Why did these aliens or whatever decide to pick on you, whether accidentally or on purpose?”

  Ooljee rose, scanned the sky for signs of approaching rescue craft. “Maybe they liked the country. If you were coming in via a ship or wormhole or whatever, wouldn’t you choose an interesting part of the planet to study? There are not many planetary features visible from a distance. The Grand Canyon is one of them, and it is right over there.” He gestured to the northwest.

  “Besides, people have been dumping their garbage on the Reservation for a long time. Why should these visitors have been any different?” He walked over to the lip of the canyon, stared down at the newly planed, perfectly flat bottom. The creek was spreading out to form a shallow pond.

  “The ants have found the spray can. Devoutly as I would like to, I am afraid that we cannot just ignore it.”

  Returning to the mated spinners he moved to separate them, paused. Thoughtfully he inserted his fingers into the monitor to disturb drifting rainbows.

  Moody watched him, admiring the play of patterns and colors within the screen. They were beautiful. Not just threatening and inspiring and dangerous, but truly beautiful. Maybe Ooljee was right. Maybe there was much in there worth seeking. Given time and hard work and care, might not the ants aspire to understanding?

  A curious Grayhills leaned over his shoulder. “What are you grinning at, mister detective? You look like the coyote who has just made off with the chicken.”

  “I was thinking about one possibility we’ve been considering. What if we really are components of this database? If that’s the case, won’t it be interesting for whoever built it, when we start learning how to manipulate it ourselves?” She considered. “The revolt of the bytes? Is such a thing possible? Bytes do what they’re programmed to do. They can’t act of their volition.”

  “Maybe we’ve developed beyond what the makers of the web imagined. Maybe we’re the virus in their programming.”

  “I hope not,” said Ooljee. “They may have programs designed to combat viruses.”

  Moody was warming to his subject. “What if we’re an unexpected factor, something new?”

  “I always thought there was a purpose to mankind’s existence,” Ooljee replied, “but not as a virus.”

  “We’ll find out.” Moody eyed the glowing monitor, excited by the prospect it presented, no longer afraid of what they might find when they went aweaving in its unfathomable depths.

  They would learn how to use the alien web, how to bend it to their own needs. And if it turned out that man was merely one component of some immense database, why, he was going to have an impact all out of proportion to his designated size.

  “I don’t think anything will notice us for a while,” he murmured. “After all, we don’t count for much on the cosmic scale. But eventually we’ll make ourselves known.”

  “That might be a good thing,” Ooljee declared slowly, “or it might not.”

  “Hozho.” Moody grinned at his partner. “We’ll have to proceed cautiously, much more carefully than did Gaggii. But proceed we must. It’s the way we’re programmed. The curious bytes, that’s us. I don’t think we’ll be excised for exercising our internal programming. We might even surprise some people.”

  “What people?”

  Moody nodded at the monitor, with its silently twisting rainbow threads and soft explosions and pulsing fractal patterns waiting to be understood.

  “Whoever is responsible for that.”

  He glanced up and over his shoulder. A pair of skycutters were coming toward them, muttering out of the south. Grayhills scrambled to her feet and started waving while Ooljee

  stood next to her, resting his hands on his hips.

  Moody rose slowly, bending to brush dirt and sand from his pants. While his companions watched the approaching aircraft, he ambled over to the mated spinners and gazed down into the depths of the screen, staring thoughtfully at the foot-square image of infinity. If he raised his foot again and put it down, would he fall in, fall forever? Or would something eventually materialize to halt his plunge?

  Kneeling, he sang softly to the monitor, was delighted when the dark display gave way to a picture of a sandpainting. He admired it for a moment, the regularity of it, the neat lines and clean schematics. Then he traced outlines with a finger, nodding with satisfaction when the lizards moved and the painting was replaced by a blank screen.

  He turned off the power to Grayhills’ spinner, then his partner’s. The monitor folded neatly back into place. A quick finger-twist disconnected the units. Hefting one in each hand he rejoined his companions. The purr of the skycutters was loud in his ears now.

  Grayhills took her spinner without a word. Moody turned to his friend and handed over the other. The two men exchanged a long look of understanding. Paul Ooljee turned the device over in his fingers, inspecting it, appreciating it anew. A smile spread over his face. It wasn’t as broad or open as Grayhills’, but it could not be denied.

  Standing alongside the big man from Florida as they monitored the descent of the nearest skycutter, the sergeant deftly and matter-of-factly clipped the universe back onto his belt.

  Author’s Note

  While the spelling Navajo is most common in the Southwest, Navaho is also used. I have used the latter, since the correct pronunciation is “Nah-vah-hoh” not “Nah-vah-joe.”

  Sandpainting is often referred to as “drypainting.” The former is a more literal description of this unique Native American artform. For readers who would like to view excellent samplings of sandpainting both modern and traditional accompanied by nontechnical text, the following slim volumes are recommended:

  Reichard, Gladys, Navajo Medicine Man Sand Paintings. New York, Dover Publications, 1977.

  Joe, Eugene Baatsoslanii (with Mark Bahti), Navajo Sandpainting Art. Tucson, Ariz., Treasure Chest Publications, 1978.

  McCoy, Ronald, “Summoning the Gods.” Plateau magazine of the Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff, Ariz., Vol. 59.

  The Navaho phrase “doo ahashyaa da” means “I am stupid.”

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