Cyber Way

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?”

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 forgot 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.

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 to 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.