Cyber Way

CHAPTER 12

Lisa Ooljee was somewhat taken aback by her husband’s abrupt change of heart as far as visits to his in-laws were concerned, but her suspicions weren’t strong enough to override the children’s enthusiasm. By midday Ooljee had bundled them off via tube to New Mexico.

There was then the matter of the previous night’s lost sleep, which the two men gratefully accounted for. By evening they were ready to proceed.

Moody could only watch while Ooljee made preparations, conscious of the suddenly incongruous domesticity of his surroundings. The relics and reproductions of the crafts of an earlier era—the pots and paintings and rugs—loomed large in his thoughts as well as in the condo’s decor.

There was much less spiritual baggage to deal with in the modem kitchen. He waited while his host connected the home molly mounted on the counter to the police spinner on the table. The home unit would supply just enough web for their needs.

After rechecking his connections, Ooljee activated the small zenat which hung on the far wall next to the refrigerator and ran an autobraid through the portable’s entry-board. Colorful abstract patterns flashed across the monitor.

The sergeant gestured toward the home molly. “I have installed an autointerrupt box between the unit and my spinner. If either approaches overload, everything will shut down automatically.”

“You hope.”

“Is Florida populated exclusively by optimists these days?”

Moody forbore from pointing out that the safeguards at the station were infinitely more sensitive and effective than the discount-store special Ooljee was relying on. On the other hand, their little kitchen experiment had the virtue of simplicity. There was only a single cable to worry about, and no potentially troublesome optic connections.

The sergeant sat down next to his spinner like an old-time projectionist preparing to unspool cinematic magic. He muttered an order and the household fluorescents obediently darkened in response. Moody found himself staring not at the zenat but at the nearby refrigerator. It was wallpapered with childish scribblings lovingly carried home from school, awkwardly posed holomages, cheap decorative magnets, and gaudy plastic flowers. It reminded him powerfully of the family he did not have. Irritated, he returned his attention to the monitor.

Ooljee’s fingers danced over the spinner board. The zenat cleared, its surface a bright, cheerful green.

“I think this will be okay, now that we have some idea of what to expect.”

“Do we?” Moody was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder.

“We have the example of the previous night. I am going to make essentially the same requests of the home web that I made of the bigger one at the station, only I am going to run it at one-twentieth the speed congruent with an interrupt program, which I hope will react at the critical moment and bring everything to a halt so that we will have time to note exactly what is taking place.”

“What if the template program ignores all your instructions and we get a straight-up replay?”

Ooljee gestured at the kitchen counter. “There is a large, wood-handled meat cleaver in the first drawer to the left of the sink. If both my programmed and on-line interrupts fail, take a good swing at the cable. That will be just as efficient at halting the flow of mutational information, if a little more expensive.” He grinned. “One never forgets how to make use of low-tech on the Rez.”

Moody tensed as he stared at the zenat. The spinner had commenced the same inexplicable fractal sequencing which had taken control of the police station molly web. The monitor was alive with the fractal flow, colors and patterns racing past too rapidly to comprehend. Ooljee’s preparations and precautions notwithstanding, the sequence appeared to be running as fast as before. He couldn’t be certain, though. When reproduced at high speed, even the simplest fractal patterns could be disarmingly mesmerizing.

There were no additional screens in the kitchen to come to life, however; no high-density readouts to belch forth incomprehensible figures, no tattle-telltales to warn of impending web failure. Just as there were no heavy-duty backup devices to come on line if the web they were using suddenly tried to expand beyond its proscribed boundaries.

As the sequencing progressed in the absence of smoke, flame, and spark, he relaxed a little. Behind him, uninvolved kitchen appliances hummed quiescently.

“It is replicating,” declared Ooljee tersely. “It’s mutating again. But this time we have it under control. Sometimes less is more.”

“We can’t be sure of that. What about this building’s maintenance-and-service molly? Are you sure it’s isolated?” If that began to smoke and blaze, Moody mused, they could look forward to an interesting time trying to deal with it from their position near the top of the tower. “We’d hear an alarm. At least we know we are on’ the

right track, that what happened last night was not a fluke. The yellow sand in the Kettrick painting generates a reproducible template. It is working just as well, maybe better, on this system as it did on a much larger one. What I do not understand is why it works and what it is supposed to do. If we knew that, we might be able to make use of it, to direct it. Surely it was not designed to keep expanding until it self-destructs.”

The kitchen molly whirred softly, the zenat was bright and silent, and Ooljee’s fingers occasionally fiddled the board of his spinner. It was motionless in the room except for the unending transformation the program was working on the surface of the zenat. Perhaps because it was so scaled down everything seemed less frantic, less out of control than it had at the station. Whatever changes Ooljee had made prior to and concurrent with entering the program appeared to have had the desired effect. They had tamed the template.

The last thing Moody expected was for the seemingly ceaseless rush of images to slow down. However, that was exactly what was happening. As they watched in fascination, the runaway fractal forms began to mutate less and less rapidly, taking on the aspect of recognizable shapes and symbols, until the schematic that took final possession of the monitor shone calm and unchanging back at them from the far wall.

It was determinedly Euclidian. It was quite attractive.

It was a sandpainting.

Not the Kettrick. Something different, figures and shapes organized around a black circle flanked by four curving colored bars. Outside the bars, angular silhouettes clutched a profusion of unidentified objects. The figures were surrounded by additional symbols and devices. If any of it had been created using colored sand, Moody decided, it had to have been very fine sand indeed. The painting displayed no granular texture whatsoever.

A jagged border stuck through with arrowheadlike points surrounded and enclosed the design on three sides. The open end faced the refrigerator. Faced east.

“Pretty,” he commented. “What’s it supposed to represent?”

“Who can say? We need a hatathli here, or somebody from the museum. All I know is what I remember from when I was a kid and what I have picked up while working on this case. That is not a lot.”

“Why’d you call it up instead of the Kettrick painting?” Ooljee glanced back and up at him, his face lit only by the glow from the monitor. “I didn’t bring it up. The template program generated it.”

“Y’all telling me that it did all that processing just to show us another sandpainting that we also don’t know nothing about? Shee-it, my friend, I’m a patient man, but I have my limits too.”

Ooljee hardly heard him. He was entranced by the image on the screen. “Some kind of semi-Mobius program. Begins with a painting and ends with one. Look at it this way, Vernon: it is better than smoke and flames.” He glanced uneasily at the interrupt box he’d spliced into the cable linking his spinner to the kitchen unit. The single warning LED glowed a comforting, steady green.

The frustrated detective relented a little. “I suppose so. What do we do now? Go find ourselves a medicine man? Or an art catalog?”

Ooljee rose and approached the monitor. With a finger he traced the jagged border. “This is a lightning guardian. I doubt it has anything to do with what we witnessed earlier, but it is kind of nice to see it here.” His finger spiraled inward. “I do not recognize any of these yei figures. The feather designs are all wrong. So are the heads. They should be rectangular for female yeis, round for male. Not like this. Perhaps whoever originally drew them was trying to be funny.”

“Yeah. I can hardly restrain myself,” Moody murmured sardonically.

“They are holding many things I also do not recognize.” Ooljee tapped the monitor’s plastic surface. “This might be a medicine pouch, or it might be something completely different. I do not have any idea what the central pattern represents, because of the strange shapes it contains. These,” he indicated the colored bars, “could almost be whirling rainbows, except the colors and proportions are all wrong. But these two additional guardian figures up here”—and his hand moved up toward the top of the monitor—“look very much like Gila monsters.”

“Very instructive.” Moody belched. “Anthropology 101. What does it get us?”

“Very little, on the face of it.” Frowning, Ooljee walked back to the kitchen table and turned to study the complex image anew. “But there is a relevant ritual.”

Moody sat down tiredly. “Not another ritual.”

Ooljee was unrepentant. “It is called the Hand-Trembling Ritual. By it you specifically invoke Gila Monster, a deity who sees and keeps track of everything that occurs. So the legends say.”

“What about it?”

“Ever hear a better description of an all-inclusive database?”

“I’ve heard better names. So there’s a database called Gila Monster. Do you access it, or feed it?”

“You do not believe me. I am not sure I believe me. But there is something there.” He studied the softly humming screen appraisingly. “When working with Gila Monster, you do the Hand-Trembling ceremony. If it works, it leads to what you are looking for. That, or…”

“Or?” Moody prompted him.

“You hear the voice of Gila Monster.”

Though he’d never been outside the South, Moody knew what a Gila monster looked like from watching nature programs on the vid. He was not sure he wanted to speak with one.

Ooljee continued. “The Navaho name for the ceremony means ‘to look for something without looking.’ You could not pronounce it.”

“Do you have a vitamin ceremony? My enthusiasm level is way down.”

“And I am running out of ideas.” The sergeant pursed his lips as he eyed the monitor. His spinner sat on the table, active and alert. The telltale on the interrupt box leading to the home unit shone bright green, giving no indication of behaving in anything other than an accepted, dignified electronic manner.

“I have told you before that I am no hatathli: just a cop with an interest in the old Ways. As 1 remember it, the Hand-Trembling ceremony is comparatively simple and straightforward. Not like Blessingway or Shooting Way. Wait here a minute.” He turned and exited the kitchen. Moody looked after him. “Where are you going?”

“To look up some details.”

“How many domestic mollys do y’all have in this place, anyway?”

“Just two. The one on the counter, and one in the boys’ room for their school work. It won’t interface with the tower molly, but I can access the educational library system with it. That should be sufficient.”

While waiting for his host to return, Moody busied himself with raiding the refrigerator and examining the image frozen on the zenat. The twisting humanlike figures and accompanying symbols, though unfamiliar, were arrayed against the neutral background in symmetrical, orderly fashion. Nor did one have to be an expert to identify the two shapes at the open east end of the sandpainting as lizardlike. East was the direction from which spirits entered, he remembered Ooljee telling him.

The sergeant returned, studying some paper printouts.

His lips moved as he read, as if he were rehearsing.

“I probably will not do this right.”

“It probably won’t matter,” Moody argued. “Look, why don’t we just call it an evening and go get some supper? If you’re that into continuing this we can come back to it in the morning.”

“They may call me to report to work in the morning. I want to work on it now."

Moody shrugged. “It’s your kitchen. I’m just taking up space here. It’s just that I thought you told me you didn’t believe in any of this spirit stuff.”

“Not in spirits. In reason and logical progression. Even coincidence has its break point, my friend. Anyhow, it won’t take very long.” He wasn’t exactly pleading, but the detective could see that his colleague was going to have to get this out of his system. Well, it would be worth a few minutes of silliness to accomplish that.

“There is just one thing: you are going to have to help.”

“What, me?” Moody sat up straight. “Look, Paul, I’m just a good ol’ boy from the Sip. You may want me to concentrate on sandpaintings full of funny shapes and people with different-shaped heads, but all I can think of is steak and yams and red beans and rice. And iced tea, about one part sugar to ten parts tea. I don’t fry my bread, neither. What could I do that would help?”

“I do not have a drum.”

Oh, mama, Moody thought. “A drum?”

“I just need someone to help me maintain a rhythm.”

“You mean, something like this?” Moody extended a big hand and softly tapped the upholstery of the chair next to his.

“A little slower, please.”

“That’s all? Shoot, I can handle this much. So long as I don’t think about how stupid it looks.”

“There is no one here to see you.”

“You don’t need for me to emphasize any beats?”

“No. A steady, unvarying rhythm will be best.”

“You got it. Okay if I switch hands once in a while?”

“That will not matter.” Ooljee had already turned around to face the screen.

Even though he had some idea of what to expect, Moody was surprised when his partner began to sing. The voice was still that of Paul Ooljee, Sergeant, NDPS, but the intonation was archaic, like something out of an old two-D vid or ethnographic recording. It was not difficult or incomprehensible—just different. Moody thought that with a little practice and instruction he could do it himself. There was much that was basal and primitive in it, a simple mon-otonal chant that was probably common to all primitive cultures including his own, irrespective of origin. It grew easier instead of more difficult to maintain his drumming on the chair as he listened to his partner.

Ooljee stretched his left hand out toward the monitor. His right still held the papers he’d brought. There were only a couple of pages. The left hand had begun to tremble like that of a man afflicted with Parkinson’s and Moody mentally complimented his colleague on his accomplished amateur theatrics. He was on the second page of his notes now. In a minute or so this would all be over with. Then they could get something to eat.

The police spinner on the table was equipped with a vocup for recording reports and the confessions of suspects, so presumably it was picking up its owner’s chanting as well. Certainly Ooljee wasn’t prolonging this nonsense for his friend’s benefit.

Something alerted Moody’s nostrils. He sniffed, his gaze shooting to the gall-like growth on the linking cable that was the interrupt box.

“Okay, Paul, that’s enough.” He stopped drumming, but his partner continued the chant, glancing briefly in his direction to indicate that he’d heard but that it didn’t matter. “Hey, that’s enough!”

Smoke was rising from the comers of the interrupt box. Something in its vicinity vented a loud pop.

Moody shoved his chair away from the table and lunged at the cable which connected the home spinner to its wall jack. He let out a yelp of pain and surprise, letting go of the cable as quickly as he’d grabbed it: it was hot enough to bum.

Tiny flames spurted from one comer of the interrupt box, which started to melt. Oblivious, Ooljee kept chanting, his left hand still vibrating madly. The image on the zenat was unchanged.

His host had said something about—Moody yanked open a drawer and fumbled in the semi-darkness until his hand closed around the handle of the cleaver. He’d pay for the cable: cables were cheap. He could not allow whatever was happening in the condo to work its way into the tower molly sphere. For one thing, he was far too afraid of heights.

A single stroke would suffice to sever the thin connection. He raised the cleaver over his head, brought it down swiftly. When it was within six inches of the cable something that felt like hard air took hold of the utensil, wrenched it out of his hand, and flung it into the wooden cutting board on the other side of the sink, missing Moody’s ribs by about a foot.

Gaping, he backed away from the smoking, sizzling, slowly imploding interrupt box. His eyes were very wide and not a smidgen of sarcasm hung from his lips.

In the interim Ooljee had ceased chanting. He put the papers aside and lowered his left hand, which was no longer shaking. The image on the monitor remained. The kitchen was unchanged save for the melting, stinking interrupt box.

No, Moody thought, that wasn’t quite true. There was the matter of the meat cleaver which had somehow leapt free of his clenched fist, flown through the air, and buried its blade half an inch deep in the cutting block. He nodded at the police spinner.

“Turn that damn thing off,” he said tightly. Ooljee regarded him calmly.

“Let’s give it another minute. Maybe something will happen.”

“Whatta you think, something hasn’t happened already?” He tried to divide his attention between his host and the now motionless but previously ambulatory blade.

Something had yanked it out of his hand. He had not gone nuts for a few seconds and slammed it into the block himself. Or had he? Right then reality was a state of mind dearly to be desired. It was something he’d never previously had reason to doubt. Vernon Moody didn’t believe in poltergeists and ghosts. But then, he didn’t believe in flying knives either.

“Just a minute or two more,” Ooljee insisted.

“For what? So it can set the whole building on fire?”

“It is not burning anymore.” This was true: smoke no longer rose from the lump of slag that had been the interrupt box. For some reason Moody was not comforted.

“We are doing something wrong.” Ooljee’s gaze shifted from his papers to the monitor. “Or we are not doing something right.”

“I’ll go along with that,” Moody agreed tensely.

Maybe a spark had struck him, startled him, and he had lost control for a moment, just long enough to slam the cleaver into the cutting board. It made some sense, which was more than he could say for what he imagined had happened.

“C’mon, let’s go eat,” he suggested anxiously. “I’ll even drum on the restaurant floor if you want.”

Ooljee was ignoring him. “Missing something. Not making a connection somewhere.” He remembered his colleague.

“In the old days when a hatathli did a sandpainting, it was to help cure someone of a disease or a problem. In order for the chant to work, the supplicant was required to actually sit on the painting and in that way to become part of it. It was a way of achieving temporary union with outside forces. There was a definite path of action: from the original source of power to the Holy People to the sacred vehicle of the sandpainting and then to the patient.”

“We don’t have a patient,” Moody pointed out in what he hoped was the voice of reason. “Just you and I.”

“And we do not have a hatathli either. Just me.”

“What do you want to do? Sit on the monitor?”

“No.” Ooljee walked toward the zenat. “I believe the idea is to make contact with the design. Think of it as accessing the database. In this instance I am the supplicant, if not properly a patient.”

“Don’t sell yourself short.” Moody hesitated, uncertain whether to restrain his partner or not. It all seemed so silly, all of it. Except for the meat cleaver. “What are you gonna do?”

“Just touch the monitor. There cannot be any harm in that. It is only a projection.”

“Maybe it’s nonconducting Lexan, but it’s still drawing current from the wall jack. Keep that in mind.”

“I am not going to stick my fingers in any sockets,” Ooljee assured him. He was very close to the monitor now. The colors of the sandpainting illuminated his smooth skin, bleeding across his face: red and blue, yellow and black, white and green.

“You can rip it off the wall for all I care.” Moody told him, “but let’s get this over with, okay?” He fought hard to avoid looking at the cleaver.

Ooljee was muttering to himself again. “If the Kettrick painting was true, if no changes had been made…” Gingerly he extended a hand and touched the flat, cool surface of the screen. Whether by coincidence or design (Moody could not tell) he put his open palm over the dark circle in the center. The instant that contact was made, the painting changed.

It was a very small change, one that neither man would have noticed had they not been concentrating all their attention on the monitor. What happened was that the pair of lizardlike shapes guarding the opening pivoted slightly, until their heads were facing the center of the design. At that instant Moody wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d jumped right off the screen to clamp their tiny teeth into the sergeant’s flesh, at which point he’d surely scream.

They didn’t do anything of the sort and he was spared any such embarrassment. It was nothing more, he decided, than a brief moment of unexpected animation, crudely rendered at that.

He expected Ooljee to reach the same conclusion and return to the table. Instead the sergeant spoke softly.

“Interesting. All of a sudden it feels flexible, almost as if…”

Gently exerting pressure, he watched in disbelief as his hand entered the screen, pushing beyond the dark center of the sandpainting, past the edge of reality. The angular yei figures of the painting looked on. Their straight-line mouths did not comment. Their unfathomable dark eyes did not mock.