Alan Foster - Cyber Way

He jerked his hand clear, glanced down at it. There were no visible changes, no marks, nothing to indicate it had momentarily drifted beyond reality.

“Ask it.” he suggested to his partner, “where it is.”

Ooljee addressed the monitor in soft Navaho, translated the reply.

“It says it is right here.”

“Somehow I expected something like that. It’s functional, it’s right here, and it knows last week’s football scores. Cute.” He rejoined his colleague, still examining his hand, slowly wriggling all five fingers. The tingle was fading from his skin.

Whatthehell again, he thought wildly. “Ask it if faster-than-light travel is possible.”

Ooljee did so. Moody awaited the reply with interest. “It says no,” the sergeant told him.

“Then ask it if there’s another way to travel between the stars.”

This time Ooljee’s reply came as one long exhalation. “It says yes, but without faster-than-light travel.”

“I wonder how you travel between stars without going faster than light?”

“This is not helping us locate our murderer,” Ooljee pointed out.

“Nope, but it sure is fun. Ask it how.”

Ooljee had more trouble phrasing the query in Navaho than he did translating the response. “It says you travel other than light.”

The detective nodded slowly, as if some long-held personal theory had just been confirmed. “That’s what I was afraid of. We can ask the right questions; we just don’t possess the necessary referents to understand the replies.” He sat down at the table, staring at the zenat’s revealed wonders. “You’re right: it’s a computer, or database, or library of some kind. It answers questions.”

“I wonder how big it is?” Ooljee murmured.

Moody pursed his lips. “Ask it.”

Ooljee did so. The reply was at once imposing and disappointing. “It says, ‘big enough.’”

“Big enough for what?” Moody was determined to extract at least one specific answer from the device if they had to spend the whole night trying.

This time he jumped slightly at the reply. Not because of its content but because the response was formed in ordinary, if obviously artificial, English:

“Big enough for any request.”

“How did you do that?” the detective asked his partner. Ooljee shrugged. “I asked it to speak in English, if it could. It was such an obvious thing, I did not think of it earlier. I would be surprised if it does not know other languages as well.”

“How do you know that?”

“Just a guess. If it is familiar with methods of interstellar travel I would not think it ignorant, say, of French. Do you want me to query it further on that subject?”

“Shoot, no. English is enough for me.”

Ooljee regarded the monitor and its panorama of tantalizing beauty. “I am glad you pulled me back, Vernon my friend. But don’t you wonder what we might find if we entered that field fully?”

The detective snorted. “A couple zillion miles of rainbow threads and pretty sparklies. That could get old after a while. You could also get hungry. What really interests me is where the hell this thing comes from. Not withered old Navaho hatathlis playing in a colored sandpile, I’ll bet. The Kettrick painting provides a way to get in. It doesn’t tell us anything about origins.”

“I suspect it has been here for a long time,” Ooljee theorized. “It is just that until now no one had figured out how to access it.”

Moody shook his head. “I can’t buy that. I can’t accept that it’s been here for very long. Not without more proof than we have so far. Like the whore, we have some idea of what it is. We just don’t know the relevant parameters.” He remembered the cleaver.

“Speaking of parameters, maybe we better hold off asking it any more tricky questions until we’re sure we know how to turn it off.”

“Why not,” suggested Ooljee with stunning simplicity, “just ask it?”

“Too easy. That’d be too easy. So, why don’t you?”

“Why don’t you! It understands English.”

Moody considered. Why didn’t he? Wasn’t it just a big computer of as yet unknown type, a molly in rainbow drag? Where was the harm?

Funny; he’d never actually touched a database before, if that’s what all those bright lights and shapes were.

“Ask it,” Ooljee was urging him. “Ask it to turn itself off. Ask it specifically how large it is, where it comes from. Ask it..

“All in good time. First I’d like to be sure it’s not gonna suck us in there”—he gestured at the monitor—“ii we happen to ask the wrong question, or ask the right question the wrong way.”

The comers of the sergeant’s mouth turned up slightly. “Maybe you just have to be sure you ask it nice. Remember what I told you. The correct way to conclude a sandpainting ceremony is to destroy the painting being used in the reverse order of its creation. Generally meat cleavers are not employed for this purpose.”

“Very funny.”

“I should use the Gila Monster chant again, try to do exactly what we did backwards. If one does not exit a computer properly, the database can be damaged. If that is what we are dealing with here, it would be shocking if it did not contain a number of built-in safeguards to prevent such damage.” He reached for the spinner.

“Not yet, man.” Moody restrained his partner. “Lemme ask it one more question.” Ooljee paused, then nodded.

The detective addressed the monitor. “You understand English?”

“I understand all acquired languages,” the unisex disembodied voice replied.

“Glad to hear it, but English will do just fine for right now.” He hesitated. Would his next question set off some kind of built-in alarm? No way of knowing save to ask. But go slowly, he reminded himself. Slowly.

“Are you,” he asked, “accessed frequently? Relate your response to local values.”

“No.”

“When exactly was the last time you were accessed prior to this past year?”

“Hey—Ooljee said worriedly. Moody shrugged him

off.

The reply was harmless enough. On reflection, perhaps it was not.

“Eight oh-four on the morning of June the twenty-third in the year eleven sixty-two anno Domini—relating response to local values.”

“Really?” It was all Moody could say. Ooljee said nothing at all, but he was pondering just as hard.

Of course, the device might have misunderstood his request. It might be misinterpreting values. It might be an absurd, complex joke of unknown origin. There might be a thousand other possibilities.

One of which was that the reply was accurate.

Well, he decided, that was certainly an interesting thought. But it was not the question of the moment. Right now they had to forgo the awesome in favor of tracking the prosaic.

“When was the last time you were accessed within the past year?”

The voice replied. Ooljee checked his watch. “Sixteen minutes ago. That would have been us.”

The detective considered, trying to frame his queries as if he were conversing with the familiar police web back home instead of some gargantuan construct out of an as yet unidentified time and space.

“Prior to that, how many times within the past year have you been accessed?”

Again the mechanical response. “Thrice.” It proceeded to elaborate. Once the previous morning. That would have been the little episode at Ooljee’s station, Moody reflected. The second time was a number of months ago. Atlanta, perhaps. The third and last was far more recent.

“Only a week ago.” Ooljee muttered a silent thank you. “It seems that our friend has not yet learned how to make extensive use of this. For which, without even knowing its capabilities, I think we can be thankful.”