Alan Foster - Cyber Way

“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I know what I saw, and I know what you did, but I don’t know what happened back there and I just can’t buy the idea that something in a hundred-years-old piece of folk art is sophisticated enough to infect a modern high-security molly. Y’all ain’t gonna insist that’s what happened, are you? Y’all ain’t gonna sit there and tell me you think old Grandpa Laughter was web-literate?” ^

Ooljee regarded him thoughtfully. “Let me suggest to you two possible explanations for what happened here tonight. The first involves Nayenezgani.”

Moody rolled his eyes.

“The Dineh had no way to record the knowledge that the Holy People had given them. So Nayenezgani told them how to use powered rock to make sandpaintings. The Holy People did not use sandpaintings themselves. They drew on sheets of sky. Do you know anything about helical molecular masking?”

Moody blinked.

“It is the first stage in the manufacture of custom microprocessors. I could describe the process but it is enough to know that it might be described by someone with an imaginative flair for words as drawing on sheets of sky. Very tiny sheets, it is true.”

“I don’t much care for that explanation. I hope I like your other one better.”

The sergeant steepled his fingers. “Ignoring for the moment the question of how it got there, we must assume that something very unusual is present in the sandpainting, an inserted fractally coded program which affects the mollysphere much as any modem viral program might. Grandfather Laughter might have added it in his old age when computers were first becoming common, or it might have been put there by someone else, either when the painting was originally done or at some later date. We can’t check on that, because the original has been destroyed, but I think it a not invalid hypothesis.”

Moody was nodding approvingly. “That I can relate to.” Gratified, Ooljee took the concept and ran with it. “It gives us a new motive for our murderer. Whatever the template’s primary purpose, there is no denying its power to infect a supposedly shielded web. Something like that might have military applications. Easy to understand why someone might wish to possess the only copy.”

“So we’ve finally got something worth killing for. Sure beats the crazed collector theory to a pulp. For the first time, that part of the case makes sense.” Moody was slapping his right fist into his open left palm. “It means our suspect’s probably not nuts. That changes a lot.”

“Indeed it does,” Ooljee agreed. “We now have a killer who knows exactly what he is about, instead of an unpredictable maniac. He may or may not be a hatathli, but I think we can assume that he is a trained weaver.”

“We can check this.” Moody was enthusiastic, hopeful. “We can see if anything similar to this has happened recently anywhere else in the country. If it has, I may be leaving.”

“And what if our experience here tonight proves to have been unique, an isolated incident?”

“Then I’d say that whoever we’re after either doesn’t know yet what he’s got ahold of, or else he’s still waiting to make use of it.” Side by side the two men started walking toward a cab stop.

“Possible military applications aside,” the sergeant continued, “this template program would make a very interesting instrument of blackmail. Envision it: ‘Deposit so many millions into this numbered Swiss account or I will turn your irreplaceable database to photic slag.’”

“That’s possible,” Moody agreed, “or maybe our boy has something else in mind.”

As they reached the cab stop Ooljee reached for his pocket spinner. “First I need to let Lisa know that everything’s okay.” He glanced back at the precinct house. The flames had been knocked down but thick smoke continued to pour from several ground-floor windows. “I don’t think we need to tell her about the excitement just yet. It will only make her worry.”

“As long as you’re gonna call in, how about we find some coffee before we do anything else? I’ve got a lot of ideas racing around inside my head and not many of ’em make sense. I’m not used to that. I’d like to try and do something with ’em.”

Ooljee checked his watch. In an hour the sun would be up. It hardly seemed worth going all the way across town to disturb Lisa and the kids. She would not be upset by his absence, so long as he gave her an explanation. He’d worked double shifts before. The thought of coffee was a good one; coffee; ahehee, yes, and something more substantial. Inexplicable chaos stimulated the appetite.

“You talk,” he said to the big Southerner, “and I will eat.”

Moody didn’t wonder why his friend chose to call a cab instead of a police vehicle. A request for the latter might arrive in tandem with questions neither of them wanted to try answering just yet. Homing in on the sergeant’s spinner, the cab arrived in a few minutes.

The rain had let up for a while, but by the time they entered the all-night cafe Ooljee had selected, it was coming down like fractured icicles. Moody followed his partner inside. The sun might be rising but you wouldn’t be able to tell it in this country. When it rose back home, you anticipated warmth and mist and comfort, a tactile as well as visual greeting. The sunlight here was possessed of a penetrating harshness that was as much to be avoided as sought after.

The cafe was nearly deserted. Ganado’s nocturnal life forms were retreating to their burrows and it was too early for the rest of humanity to be stirring. They chose a booth in back, upholstered in faux leather designed to resemble red cedar. Twisting gods and arching yeis had been engraved on the sides of the booth with a sculpting laser. All the yeis were similar. The artist who had done the work had opted for speed over imagination.

Not everyone hanging out was Amerind. There were a few Anglos and a couple of Thais: service techs lingering after work, web spinners arguing in their obscure languages, maybe security cops longing for bed.

The wall dispenser offered a surprising variety of coffees, and the live waitress, when she finally appeared with their order, produced a cinnamon roll the size of a small two-layer cake. Moody hadn’t thought long about ordering it and he didn’t hesitate to dig in. Hard thinking made him hungry.

The Colombian was hot and fulfilling. Friends often asked how he could differentiate between brews. The younger ones thought coffee came from restaurant wall-dispensers or premix servings instead of beans. There were no gourmets left, he mused, and in any event you weren’t likely to encounter one in the police department of a large eastern metropolis.

“I suppose the fax got smoked along with everything else downstairs.”

“Probably,” said Ooljee, “but I have copies in my desk, which is fireproof, and at home. As for the template, it is in here. ” He tapped the spinner holstered at his belt, nibbled at the com-lingonberry muffin he’d ordered. “I wonder exactly what we did.”

“Just don’t do it again real soon,” Moody advised him. “Not me. Precinct houses are expensive.”

They were silent for a while then, each man busy with his own thoughts. Moody looked up from the skeleton of his cinnamon roll.

“The Laughters identified part of the Kettrick painting. Something about a scavenger?”

Ooljee nodded. “He figures prominently in the Bead Chant and is also called One-Who-Goes-About-Picking-Up-Discarded-Things. He was the one carried up through the Skyhole. You would need to check with a real hatathli, but as I remember the story, he got in trouble with the Pueblo people. Then the hawks and eagles, assisted by snakes, helped him to flee through a hole in the sky. Forty-eight birds are generally shown aiding him, though sometimes twenty-four are used. In our culture, multiples of four and twelve have much power.