Alan Foster - Cyber Way

The sergeant nodded. “Noise like this.” He repeated what they’d heard as they’d fled the room. The hair on the back of Moody’s neck stiffened slightly.

Sheets of water and suppressant poured into the precinct house as the men in yellow slickers beat the flames down.

“I have not seen many ceremonies,” Ooljee was saying, “but those few I remember. When I was ten, eleven, my father took me to see one that was being performed over in Tuba City. There is a spirit called Talking God. He is, they say, in charge of the eastern dawn and also of the chase. That is of course no more than coincidence.” Ooljee mustered a tired, soaked smile.

“He is said to function as a spiritual deus ex machina, materializing with useful suggestions whenever a hero is at an impasse.” He stared at the station. “If a suggestion was given, I missed it.”

“So what’s the connection?”

Ooljee looked back at him, water dripping down his face, his black hair slicked tight against his forehead. “The whu-whu noise we heard? That is the sound the hatathli makes. It is supposed to be the voice of Talking God.”

“It was an electronic hum, a byproduct of whatever the hell it was you set off.”

“Of course. But don’t you think it interesting that the chant used in an ancient ceremony closely duplicates an electronic hum?”

“I think you’re nuts.”

“Yes. But it is still intriguing, don’t you think? One might well ask if my judgment is weak and I am simply willing what we heard in there to resemble the chant of the hatathli I remember from childhood.”

“What about the other sound?” Moody pressed him. “Hahowa, hahowa? Just a different frequency, wasn’t it? What if it does sound like the voice of xactce’oyan, who is Talking God’s twin?”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It cannot be translated.” He rubbed his legs and sighed tiredly. “It is said that Talking God is very compassionate.” Moody indicated the station. “If that’s compassion, give me sirloin.”

“I am not foolish enough to say that Talking God and xactce’oyan are responsible for what has happened here tonight. What I am saying is that if—” He hesitated.

“Go on,” Moody urged him. “Nobody here but us madmen.”

Ooljee spoke carefully, measuring his reply. “If there is anything to the ancient ways, then perhaps something somewhere, if only part of an inexplicable program, was trying to warn us.”

“Warn us? Warn us about what?”

The sergeant shrugged. “Trying to make use of the template. Who knows?”

“If something was trying to warn us, to help us,” Moody asked him, “then what was responsible for thafl ” He gestured in the direction of the burned-out station.

“Big Thunder,” said Ooljee simply.

“Right, sure.” Moody rose, kicked at an empty plastic container lying in the street. “That’s just fine. It all makes sense, except that it’s all impossible.” He turned sharply on his partner. “You’re not really asking me to buy a bunch of crap about ‘talking gods’ and their twin brothers?”

“I am not asking you to believe anything. I am hardly sure what to believe myself. I am just telling you what I know about what seems to fit. I am not saying that it makes any sense.”

“For a duty cop, y’all sure know an awful lot about your mythology.”

“We are still raised with it,” Ooljee replied simply. “A child grows up hearing many of the old stories. In a highly homogenized, internationalized world we have done well to preserve a little of our original culture. It is good that the planet shrinks daily and brings people together, if only in quest of financial success. But when it happens too quickly, the little cultures get squeezed between the big ones. Sometimes they get squeezed right out of existence. When high-tech came to the Rez and my forebears started making money they were determined that the Dineh would not be squeezed out of the world.

“Even so, much has been forgotten by many. That is one reason why I was assigned to this case. Because of certain of my school studies, I know more about sandpainting than any of my colleagues. Otherwise you would now be talking to someone else. But most of them wouldn’t know Bat from Big Fly.”

“What are those?” Moody frowned.

“Sandpainting guardians.”

The detective grunted, wiped rain from his forehead. “So we’re back to that again.”

“You make it sound simple. It is not, bilagaanna."

“ Bilagaanna , yeah. Your wife told me. Hey, you’d better call her. If she’s still trying to reach you and gets a recording saying that communications are down, she’s first gonna be worried.”

“You’re right, I should do that. But I do not think I will tell her about the fire just yet. Vernon Moody, my friend, we have tapped into something very peculiar. Perhaps we cannot give it name or rationale, but neither can we deny its existence. You were there. You saw what happened.”

“I saw a police molly going crazy. That’s all.”

Rising, Ooljee brushed his hair off his face. “I see I have spoken too much about Talking God and old legends. Maybe you are right. Maybe 1 have. If we could access the department’s AI molly we could ask its opinion, but somehow I feel it may not be operational at this time.

“Believe what you will, but the fractal pattern derived from the Kettrick painting is the key to all this, whatever this turns out to be.”

Moody stood next to him. Together they watched the firemen work. “We could try sticking the molly with an AI search and recovery program.”

“If there is anything left to recover and the molly itself is not damaged. Don’t get me wrong, my friend. I have not stepped over the edge on you. What we saw was physics at work, not spirits. But it involves something we do not yet understand, and it involves that sandpainting.”

“Okay, okay. Just go easy on the spirit talk.”

“We prefer the term Holy People,” Ooljee told him. “The Deginneh are not necessarily spirits, not necessarily gods. They are simply those who were here before us. Before the Dineh, the Navaho.”

Suddenly Moody found himself wishing he was away from there; away from the dark street with its mob of surging, querulous pedestrians and outgrabers and drunks, away from the evicted police and cursing firemen. Back in Florida, throwing a line into the Bay in search of bonefish or perch. Back where life was warm and moist and alive. Not stuck in this high, dry, half-dead place where the buildings seemed to merge with mountains and the alien voices of black-eyed street punks mocked him everywhere he looked. Back where he didn’t have to deal with a partner who talked of spirits and chants and Ways, of Holy People and fractal sands.

But while his heart might choose to deny it, his mind knew that something more than passing strange had taken possession of a police department’s mollyweb, peeling its sphere and replacing it with a shape other than orthodox.

It ought not to have happened. A police mollysphere was supposed to be invulnerable, protected from any external intrusion, impervious to virus or peeling. Only a military sphere would be harder to penetrate.

He’d been there when the template had begun to mutate, had seen it expand to overwhelm the station’s security system as though it didn’t exist. What would have happened had the fires not stopped it? Would it have spread via linking fiber optics to the rest of the city’s police web? Or perhaps farther than that, into financial and commercial and administrative mollyspheres, growing and changing as it wiped out records and programs to satisfy a voracious need for more and more web space?