Alan Foster - Cyber Way

Then there was the monitor, where infinity lay just behind the now transparent diagram of the sandpainting. A mysterious, boiling, animate infinity ablaze with an inexplicable reality accessible via a drawing of unknown origin. Was it another reality or just a hole in this one? Moody wondered. Whatever, it was capacious enough to accommodate most of his partner’s body. Ooljee sensed that the big pale detective from Florida was watching him intently, alert to anything he might do. Suddenly he was thankful for having been blessed with such an unimaginative partner.

“I’m okay. It is all right.” Moody cautiously backed away. Together they turned to examine the view through the window that the sandpainting had become.

“It is not a projection, not a holomage.” Ooljee spoke with new assurance. “It is an opening into somewhere else. Or something else.” He looked around the room and for the first time noticed the meat cleaver stuck in its chopping board. Moody noted the direction of his gaze.

“When your interrupt box started smoking I tried to cut the cable, like you suggested.”

Ooljee nodded slowly. “I think I remember that. What happened?”

“Something didn’t take kindly to the idea. It took the cleaver out of my hand, right out of my damn fingers, and plonked it in the board. Didn’t miss me enough by half. I thought maybe all that homemade country shine I’d sucked in my youth had finally caught up with me, like my momma said it would, but after watching you start for a hike inside

that zenat, I decided that maybe it was happening alter all He nodded in the direction of the screen. “Whatever this is, it don’t want to be shut down.”

“You probably tried an invalid procedure.”

“Okay. You tell me what the correct procedure is and I’ll implement it.”

“I have no idea. I do not even know what we are onto here. I made contact with the image and it reacted. Then I tried to become one with it, exactly as one would with a traditional medicine painting. I guess I sort of lost myself. It was not exactly like I was being hypnotized. More like I was being—invited.”

“What’d it feel like? Inside, I mean.”

“Pleasant. Cushiony and warm. It tingles the way your foot does when it goes to sleep, only it was not in any way irritating or painful. I wonder. If you hadn’t stopped me, if you had cut the cable after I had entered fully, would I have been trapped in there, wherever there is? Or would I have ended up on the other side of the wall when the connection was broken? That would have been awkward.” He nodded at the monitor. “That’s an exterior wall. The only thing on the other side is a thirty-story drop.”

“Well, if it don’t want to be shut down, maybe we can figure it out some. Anyone can see that it’s real pretty, and it’s fun to stick your hand in. What else is it good for?”

“To search for something without looking,” Ooljee murmured. “That is what the Hand-Trembling ceremony is about. That’s exactly what we did.”

“Lay off the superstition,” Moody snapped. He was frightened but not intimidated. Vernon Moody hadn’t been intimidated since he was eleven years old. “We’ve got ourselves an extranormal spatial manifestation generated by the Kettrick template. It’s an outgrowth of a standard molly web and it can be terminated the same way. The chant you used, the hand trembling? Aural and visual stimuli. Nothing mystical about that. There are plenty of contemporary programs that rely on those for activation.” He concentrated on the zenat and on what he knew of suggestion-intensive webwork, refusing to think about Holy People or old gods.

“Forget for now how the template originated, how old it is or how it came to be. Let’s deal with what we have. You say this hand-trembling ritual of yours is designed to help search for something without looking. Well, we’ve found something. You thought it might be some kind of database. Maybe it is. It just has a little more depth than what we’re used to.

“If you don’t find what you’re looking for, you’re supposed to hear this Gila Monster’s voice. Okay. Ask it something. Try accessing verbally. If it was set up in Navaho, then I imagine that’s what it’ll respond to.”

Ooljee hesitated, showing that he had yet to contemplate this line of thinking. “How do I know what to ask it?”

“Ask it anything. Say hello, curse it, insult its origins. Either nothing will happen or something will.”

“Sure. It responded to the chant, didn’t it?”

The chant he’d borrowed from the library, via a child’s spinner. It would be all right, he was sure. He had to be sure or he couldn’t do it. What did they have to lose, so long as he didn’t put his arm back through the painting? Though the sensation had not been unpleasant. It had almost been…

Moody’s tone was sharp. “You’re drifting, my friend.” Ooljee started to argue, then nodded slowly. He stared at the hole in the wall, the hole into elsewhere. The detective was right. It was a physical manifestation of the real world. It had to be, else he would not have been able to interact with it.

Knowing that, he could deal with it.

He addressed it in the language of his grandparents, the difficult rasps and gutturals as natural to him as English. A peculiar language, Navaho. Devoid of many words for specific things, but rich in suggestion. A difficult language in which to do science. It had evolved to serve other needs.

He did not know what to expect, but somehow he was not shocked when a voice responded from the speaker set in the base of the zenat. The Navaho was heavily accented and it was a struggle to grasp the meaning of each phrase. But he understood.

Moody heard too. “That’s no reptile. That’s an electronic vocomposite if I’ve ever heard one.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Ooljee warned him. “Spoken Navaho is not like spoken Shakespeare.”

“I don’t care if it’s kin to street slang. That’s a synthesized voice. What’d it say, anyhow?”

Ooljee was a little surprised at how calm he was. “It said that it was functional.”

“Good.” Moody was feeling much better. “I like programs that aren’t evasive.” He wondered what would happen if he picked up the cleaver and flung it at the monitor. Would it freeze in midair, reverse course, or sail on forever? Better to keep asking questions instead of thinking such thoughts.

“The trouble is we don’t know what it means by that. Whatthehell, ask it what the score of last week’s Steelers-Wasps game was.”

“Wasps I can manage, but Steelers is not directly translatable into Navaho.”

“Improvise. Go on, try it. Let’s see if the damn boojum’s as smart as it is pretty.”

Ooljee spoke, listened to the reply, turned to his partner. “Steelers forty-two, Wasps thirty. Is that right?”

“How the hell should I know? I’m a cop, not a bookie. What matters is that you asked, and it answered.” He approached the monitor, squinting into the crystalline clear light that emanated from beyond. He discovered that he could turn his head and look up, down, or sideways into the screen without experiencing any diminution of scale, without seeing any suggestion of a border or horizon. Writhing threads of rainbow swam like lambent worms through a sea of electrified blackness, avoiding fluorescent geometric shapes and unpredictable small explosions of gold and silver.

Before Ooljee could do or say anything, the detective extended his own hand toward the hard, flat surface of the zenat. It passed through, penetrating an unresisting yei figure clutching unidentifiable symbols.

His hand and forearm floated unrestrained, free to drift among the rainbows and silent explosions. He twisted it to the left, then to the right, wiggling his fingers, feeling the light tingling sensation Ooljee had described, experiencing the same gentle warmth. With the latter came a slight dizziness. He sensed himself starting to falllll….