Alan Foster - Cyber Way

“The birds wrapped him in a black cloud to conceal him and carried him up into the sky, boosted by three rainbows and three bands of lightning. It was very dark inside the cloud, and the birds provided Scavenger with a yellow tube to breathe through and a large crystal to furnish light. Interesting, isn’t it? A legend thousands of years old that mentions breathing tubes and light-generating crystals?”

“Don’t get me started,” the detective muttered.

A grinning Ooljee continued. “It is said that Talking God helped also. He is in many of the Ways.”

“That’s it? That’s the whole story?”

“Oh, no. There is a lot more, but that was the portion that was illustrated in the sandpainting. Many times individual components of one sandpainting will be used in another, just as similar electronic components are featured in many different devices. Though it is unusual to have so elaborate a painting incorporated bodily into a larger one.”

“You keep talking about a ‘chant’?” Moody spoke absently, distracted by a young couple who’d just come in out of the rain, laughing and giggling and shaking water from their slickers.

“The chant is not just a sandpainting,” Ooljee explained. “It is a complex combination of the painting and singing and other things. The song sequence for a single chant, for example, may contain several hundred songs intoned as a litany. A hatathli will sing over his patient while also building the sandpainting. As for the paintings themselves, there are probably many like the Kettrick that have gone unrecorded. Even so, over five hundred distinct and different sandpaintings are known. At least, that was the last figure I remember seeing.

“There is no telling how many were lost before a couple of hatathlis were finally convinced to allow their work to be recorded in permanent form.” He hesitated. “I think I can tell you what happened tonight, if not how.”

Moody finished the last of his coffee, ordered a refill. “Tell me. I could do with some enlightenment.”

“We disturbed hozho.”

“Beg pardon?”

Ooljee leaned back in his seat. “The Navaho imagine the universe to be a delicately balanced place, alive with powerful forces that have potential for good or evil. If you upset that balance, called hozho, terrible and strange things can happen. We believe that only mankind can upset the balance, but perhaps that is wrong. Certainly we upset some kind of balance tonight.”

Moody tried hard not to smile. “Let’s say that we did. How do you fix your hozho!”

“By performing the correct Way.”

“I see. So what you’re telling me is that we ought to go find ourselves a compliant hatathli to chant over what’s left of your office?”

“That would not be a bad idea.” Seeing the look that came over his partner’s face, the sergeant hastened to add, “Of course, nobody believes in such things anymore. The only people who are going to restore balance to the precinct are contractors and accountants. They have their own chants and ways. Though sometimes I think of accountants as masters of the Red Ant Way.”

“What does that make us masters of?” Moody was feeling lightheaded from the exhaustion brought on by the night’s events and from lack of sleep. “The Shooting Way? That’s one you mentioned, I remember.”

“I don’t know, but the moment you think you understand the Ways, they will surprise you. You might be interested to know that there is a Prostitution Way, though it is connected not with what you think but with witchcraft.”

“Yeah, I can see where that might disturb your hozho, all right.”

“At least now we may have a motive that makes sense.”

“What’s this?” Moody feigned astonishment. “Police talk?”

“Be as sarcastic as you like. But forget for a moment where the Kettrick painting comes from, how old it is, or how Grandfather Laughter came to make it.” There was impatience in Ooljee’s voice. “Something derived from its design penetrated and altered a police molly. Anything that can do that is worth money to certain people.”

“You think that’s motive enough?”

Ooljee shrugged. “Daats’i. Perhaps, maybe, possibly. We will find out.”

He paid for the coffee and pastry, waiting for the wall dispenser to process his card. As soon as it was returned they rose to depart.

“Have you heard of the Anasazi?” Ooljee asked his colleague. “They were here before the Navaho. We don’t know if they did sandpaintings or not, but they made drawings on sheer canyon walls. Nearly all of what they knew has been forgotten.”

“Just when you were starting to sound sensible,” Moody replied in disgust.

“It was just a thought. Since I am talking so much nonsense, what is your explanation for what happened here tonight?”

“I’m easier than you. I don’t have one, and I’m not going to lose any sleep over lack of it. We’ll do our best to rerun your procedure and that way we’ll figure out what took place inside the web. Since we’re big on stories tonight, do you remember the one about Pandora’s box? This time we’ll make sure the proper safeguards are in place when you run that expansion.”

“Then you do not deny that the sandpainting triggered a mutation within the web?”

“I know that your departmental molly went nuts. Until we know for sure why, I withhold judgment.”

“I will use a much smaller molly next time.” Ooljee was thinking aloud as they exited the cafe. The rain had finally stopped. “We’ll try it on my home spinner. It is not linked to anything substantial. I wonder what would have happened if the system had not broken down?”

“Isn’t it obvious? We’d have ended up with the world’s first Anasazi spreadsheet.”

Ooljee made a face at him. “If our murderer has something more specific than that in mind, it will behoove us to locate him before he figures out how to implement it. Lisa has been wanting to visit her parents in Albuquerque and I’ve kept asking her to hold off. If I can get her to go and take the kids with her, we can work on this quietly at my place, see what we can find out, before Personnel recovers its wits enough to find me and assign me to something else.” He tapped his spinner.

“We’ll plug the template into my home unit, clear a space in the kitchen in which to work. This time we will be employing far less storage capacity. I do not see us doing any serious damage to anything except my own equipment, though I will have to make certain Lisa’s household files are backed up. God help me if I wipe her grandmother’s recipes.

“This time if I bum anything it is only a few dollars out of the family budget. We won’t be using enough power to damage the building.”

“Y’all are sure about that.”

“No, but I don’t know what else to do.” He looked to his left. “Besides, until they reassign me to another precinct or make my old office functional I have nowhere to report to. So we might as well work at home.”

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.