Cyber Way

CHAPTER 6

Ooljee lived far out on the west side of the city, in a hexacluster of thirty-story multisided towers. Parks and service facilities separated the cluster from its nearest neighbor half a mile to the south. The parks were full of trees and sculpted sandstone, all of it alien to Moody. Trees and bushes wore their desiccated greenery defiantly. Each tower entrance, he noted, faced east.

A telltale on the truck’s dash beeped as the building recognized vehicle and driver. A heavy garage door swung upward, granting them access to the subterranean garage.

“Don’t you think,” Moody said as the sergeant drove down the ramp and the door closed behind them, “you ought to call your wife and let her know you’re bringing company home?”

“She knew someone was coming. She would be surprised only if you were not staying with us.”

The elevator lifted them nine-tenths of the way up the tower, where they exited into a circular hall. Ooljee crossed to a door that was already opening. A short, stocky woman with a smile like an upside-down rainbow stepped aside to let them enter.

Her name was Lisa. The names of the four-armed, fourlegged ball of fury occupying the center of the living room, when separated into its component halves, were Blue and Sun. The boys remained motionless only long enough to embrace their father before fleeing to the sanctum of their bedroom.

The floor was covered with a fabric that felt like carpet but resembled packed earth, a tour-de-force of manufacturing akin to dyeing a rabbit coat to look like mink. There were couches and chairs of rough-cut real wood, blankets and prints on the walls, pots and shelves full of holomage picture books. The kitchen was contrasting technoshock: all gleaming black plastic and brass.

When Ooljee told him he would have the boys’ room, Moody was immediately concerned.

“Where are they supposed to sleep?” He indicated the long couch in the living room. “Hide-a-bed?”

“No.” Ooljee turned toward the curved transparent doors that fronted the back of the living room. “Out on the porch. It will be a treat for them.”

Moody walked over to the doors. The small size of the apartment was somewhat compensated for by the spacious terrace. It was shielded from the elements by the terrace immediately above it, the semicircular polycrete porches resembling giant poker chips stuck in the side of the building. Ooljee’s provided a breathtaking vantage point from which to view the distant line of red which marked the escarpment of the Salahkai Mesa and the even more distant mountains beyond. Spectacular scenery, but not impressive enough to make Moody forget the pale blue of the Gulf.

One of the boys was tugging at his trousers. He was all black eyes, straight black hair, and youthful energy. Not knowing what else to say and figuring it was a safe place to try out what he’d learned, Moody smiled down at the kid and said, “Doo ahashyaa da.”

The boy covered his mouth and giggled, gazing wide-eyed at the massive visitor. His older brother broke out laughing. Chattering among themselves, they retreated to their bedroom.

Moody was pleased. He’d now mastered two Navaho phrases: yatahey and the one he’d just employed.

Ooljee was talking to his wife. Left to his own devices, Moody walked out onto the porch. Since he was standing on the west side of the westernmost tower in the condo complex, none of the other structures was visible. There was nothing to interrupt the view. Off to the south stood a second complex of glittering spires; electric necklaces stuck in the earth.

It was getting late. Lights were coming on in other apartments. Perhaps their murderer was sitting in one, quietly contemplating the results of his work. He wandered back into the living room, listening to the domestic chatter emanating from the kitchen, a mellifluous melange of English and Navaho. Some of the furniture looked old, but modem manufacturing could duplicate anything, including age. The blankets that were hung on the walls intrigued him. The patterns were not remarkably intricate nor were the colors especially bright, but there was a heft, a solidity to the designs, he had never encountered elsewhere. Gazing at them was like unexpectedly encountering an old friend.

The apartment was not large and he eventually found himself back out on the balcony, staring at the setting sun. If he squinted hard he could pretend he was looking at the sea. A voice startled him. He hadn’t heard Ooljee approach.

“You should be here in the summer for the sunsets, after a monsoon thunderstorm. You would not believe how many shades of gold one sky can contain.”

Moody leaned on the thin, inflexible banister that ringed the porch. “I didn’t know Indians still practiced stealth.”

“I don’t know about that, but good cops do.” He nodded at the sunset. “What do you think?”

“It’s different from where I come from.”

“And not really to your taste. I understand. The land here takes time to appreciate. All the bright colors are in the sky.”

“I guess it’s all what you grow up with.”

“Mostly I think it is the emptiness that gets to people, especially people from back East.”

“Yeah. The only empty land left in Florida is in parks.”

“As much of the Rez as possible has been allowed to remain in its natural state. Modem civilization is peculiar that way, don’t you think? As soon as it achieves a certain level of creature comforts, it begins to spend huge sums on restoring what remains of the original habitat. In that respect we have been fortunate. Development in places like Kayenta and Klagetoh and Ganado has been intense, but if you go west from here, or north, you will find that the land looks much as it did to the Anasazi who settled here thousands of years ago.

“Peripheral development in places like Flagstaff and Gallup has not been nearly as well controlled. I do not think you would find those cities as attractive as Ganado, for all its typical urban troubles.” He gestured at the sweep of distant land.

“One can still go out there and wander through the hills and know that there is the chance he may be the first man to set foot on that particular piece of earth. Or you might find things; a bit of pottery, an old arrowhead, a section of necklace, beads, maybe even a small overlooked cliff dwelling. The park service has been all over this country as have thousands of amateur archaeologists, but there are still places where no man has set foot in a thousand years and more.”

“I’m only interested in finding one thing.” Moody was beginning to feel the strain of the cross-country hop and was not in the least interested in waxing poetic. “Our murderer.”

Ooljee sighed. “You are as persistent as you are direct, Vernon. With luck, we will run him to ground soon. Then you can fly back to your beloved Florida. I hope I am not asked to accompany you.”

“You don’t like open water?”

“Not when it is full of salt. Fresh water, now—I wish I had the time to take you up to Powell.”

“I’m not on vacation.” Moody tapped the spinner attached to his belt. Then, as if aware he might not be behaving as the most gracious of guests, he added, “Helluva view you got from up here.”

“We like the place,” Ooljee said simply. “I would like also to have a vacation hogan, but there always seem to be other priorities. The boys, they eat up a lot of money, and I don’t just mean that literally.”

“I’ll bet.” Screams and yelps reached them from the vicinity of the bedroom. “Don’t they ever slow down?”

“Never. I think they play in their sleep. As for you, I imagine you must be ready to eat.”

“I was ready to eat when I got off the shuttle.”

“We may not manage to fill you up, but I do not think you will go away from our table hungry. Do you like Chinese?”

“As long as it’s not all vegetables and stuff.”

“I appreciate your honesty. Lisa would too. Then she would hit you with a spatula. Don’t worry. We always have pasta or potatoes, and there’ll be frybread for dessert.”

“Bread for dessert?”

Ooljee smiled. “With honey and whipped cream. I don’t think you will be disappointed. Ice cream, too. Ever had pinon nut ice cream?”

“Can’t say as 1 have.” Moody was beginning to salivate. “Also made with honey. It will stick to your ribs. It certainly sticks to everything else. Every time Lisa makes some we have to watch the boys very closely, and we still end up having to dump them in the tub to dissolve them apart.”

The food was rich and wonderful, and despite his resolve, he overate. The result was initial contentment followed by roiling dreams.

Kettrick was there, and his housekeeper. They orbited each other too closely, an obscenely entwined absurdity to anyone who knew anything about Kettrick’s habits. If they were consistently rational, however, dreams would not be dreams.

Their place was taken by the grim, leering visages that populated the dead industrialist’s private museum of the primitive, ghosts and spirits drawn from those parts of the world where the past still lingered and myths retained their ancient powers. In their midst drifted a figure without a face, whose arms were flexible bars of steel ending in fingers like tines. Sparks flew from them, and whatever they touched burst into flame.

Sepik River sculptures shriveled and burned. Masks from Southeast Asia exploded in showers of fiery cinders. African fetishes turned into blazing torches. The conflagration consumed half-remembered stories and unexplained mysteries. Dreams burned like crepe paper, flame giving way to ash, ash to smoke, smoke to a faint aroma of hot carbon where once there had been intimations of reality.

Kettrick too shriveled and burned, as did the housekeeper. Only when all had become ash and charcoal did the faceless figure stride forward to embrace the sandpainting which stood like an icon, untouched and immutable, in the very center of the destruction. When his finger touched the drawing, the shapes on the board sprang to horrid life. Symbols, stick figures of men and women, highly stylized creatures alive with flat, bright color leaped clear of the wood. They were accompanied by lightning and rain and rainbows, lots of rainbows, twisting and contorting like snakes.

They engulfed the faceless figure, melting together into a tornado that wore the garb of a double helix, contracting, tightening until the figure exploded, leaving behind only wisps of itself that drifted aimlessly away in every direction.

Moody awoke drenched in his own sticky sweat despite the fact that it was cool and comfortable in the apartment. Fading images clung tenaciously to his retinas: a hyperat-mospheric shuttle, a dark shape rising high above a basket, an eagle inspecting a single spire of towering sandstone. All soaring, as children dream of soaring.

He rolled out of bed and sought his pants, not bothering with a shirt. Belly hanging over his belt, he tiptoed into the living room. It was silent and empty, the earthtones asleep in the moonlight that entered through the terrace doors.

He examined a pot, a piece of sculpture: cool, reassuring fragments of Mother Earth carried thirty stories into the air to remind the sky dwellers of the real world that existed beneath their feet.

Out on the porch Ooljee’s boys lay still in slumber, secure in their sleeping bags, their internal springs finally at rest. It took him a moment to realize they really were motionless. Lying in the soft glow of moonlight they looked like utterly different beings, the darting black eyes shut tight, tiny fists curled tight against half-parted lips. Under his gaze they slowly metamorphosed into the young men they would someday become.

“I can’t sleep either.”

Moody glanced backwards. Ooljee stood in the shadows clad only in his briefs, gazing at his offspring.

“That’s twice you’ve snuck up on me,” Moody whispered. “I don’t like it.”

“You are pretty quiet for a big ol’ Southern boy yourself. I didn’t hear you get up.”

“Then why’d you come out?”

“Like I said, I could not sleep either. Too much frybread, maybe. Too many thoughts, maybe.”

Moody decided to say nothing about his unsettling dreams. His host might only be talking to help his guest relax. For lack of anything better to say, he repeated the phrase he’d been taught.

“Doo ahashyaa da.”

“That’s for sure.” Ooljee looked back into the living room, where muted colors and traditional designs held back the intrusions of a homogenizing technology. “Look, maybe something has come in since the last time I checked. Want to take a drive? Check out the office?”

“I don’t like to bother night staff,” Moody protested. “They might be busy with something.”

“Like what? A floating card game? Ganado’s big and busy, but this is not Tampa. If you would rather go back to bed, that is okay too.”

Moody didn’t have to think long. “As a matter of fact, I’d rather not. Once I’m up, I’m up. Lemme get a shirt and throw some water on my face.”

“Good. We will take a roundabout. There is plenty of town you have not seen.”

They ended up in one of those neighborhoods common to every large city; a place where cheap residential housing, manufacturing, commercial offices, and lowlife entertainment facilities came together. Not surprisingly, the focus of all this activity was a major university.

“Actual campus is up Keet Seel Street about a mile.” Ooljee pointed out his window. “Lot of rich kids up there, plenty of poor ones hanging around the fringes looking to activate some action. Real interesting mix.”

Ooljee was overstating. There was much here that was kin to similar parts of Tampa and St. Pete, though the ethnic soup was far more exotic. Moody recognized the same youth hangouts, noted the same furtive whisperings as ideas, concepts, goods, drugs, and information were exchanged. Much of the Hispanic insignia and posturing was familiar to him. The Amerind and Asian influences he found utterly foreign.

For example, you would not see in Tampa someone wearing a headband and fringed blue jacket decorated with rainbow figures called Na’a-tse-elit (according to Ooljee). The characters dripped blood, a most untraditional representation. The jacket was belted with silver and turquoise above cream-colored pantaloons tucked into water-buffalo-hide boots inscribed with indecipherable Asian symbols.

What struck Moody strongest was the realization that the locals—be they Navaho, Hopi, Zuni, Hualapai, or Apache—blended in better with the Asians than they did with the Anglos or Hispanics.

Ooljee slowed the truck as they cruised past a nondescript building. Twin doors fashioned of black composite gleamed in a small setback below street level. Glowing rainbow symbols, red and blue split by a thin strip of yellow, guarded both sides of the entrance as well as the lintel above the doorway. At each upper comer of the portal were a pair of heavily stylized neon birds.

“Golden eagle and black hawk,” Ooljee informed his companion. “Guardian symbols borrowed from sandpaint-ing, just like the rainbows. You do not usually see eagles and hawks used as guardians. That is what happens when people try to adapt old traditions to modem uses. Also, in a sandpainting you do not see eagles copulating.”

The neon over the entrance writhed in confirmation of Ooljee’s observation.

“Shima Club. A shima is any woman old enough to be your mother. There are worse hangouts around. This is the kind of place where upscale locals and kids from out of town can meet the children of underclass assembly workers and janitorial staff. Usually a couple of fights a night, but it rarely gets serious unless pharmacuties are involved. I had to break up an altercation right out here on the street a few months ago. It was over a really fine woman. My partner and I, we lingered just to look at her for a while. As she was thanking us for our help and saying goodbye, a half-pound packet of self-injecting frisson ampules fell out of her dress. They had been clipped to her bra. That sizzle is from the Ivory Coast and it will fry your brain. So she was not so fine after all.

“I thought you worked in Homicide.”

“I do, but our department requires that everyone do time on the street once a month. To keep us in touch, the regulations say. I don’t mind.” He rolled up his window, shutting out the blast of weirding music which emanated from the club when one of the twin doors parted to allow a clutch of customers egress. Musicians inside hammered out notes like a bevy of blacksmiths forging knives.

“I am grateful your people sent someone with experience. I was afraid they’d send some young hotshot anxious to make a name for himself who I would have to wet nurse if things got awkward.”

Moody remembered the young detective he’d spoken with at Kettrick’s house. The one he’d tried to have sent here in his place. Nickerson.

“No, this assignment was mine all the way.”

“I never doubted it for a moment,” was Ooljee’s cryptic reply.