Alan Foster - Cyber Way

“Not quite. Remember the sandpainting.”

Ooljee looked at the monitor. “I remember it. So?”

“The two lizard drawings. They’re still head-down. When the fractal sequence gave birth to the painting, they were heads-up.”

“Guarding the entrance.” The sergeant nodded. “I’d forgotten.” He walked over to the monitor and put his hand directly over the dark circle in the center of the image, just as he had previously. To his very great relief it remained there, his palm hard against the unyielding glass of the zenat. The pair of guardians obediently pivoted slightly, resuming their original positions.

Ooljee stepped back, keeping his eyes on the screen. “Try it now.”

This time no unseen barrier prevented the detective from flicking the spinner’s power switch to the off position. The sandpainting vanished, leaving behind only a softly glowing green screen.

The sergeant slumped into a chair opposite Moody, suddenly bone-tired. He shook a couple of times, a reaction that had nothing to do with the Hand-Trembling ceremony. Moody dropped his face into his hands, rubbed at his eyes. Tension was draining out of him all at once, thick and heavy, like oil from an old car.

“What was that all about?” The sergeant repeated it several times, a querulous mantra that fully expressed the way he was feeling. “Or as my father might have said: shash I y adi .” He managed a slight grin. “What in the bear happened?”

Moody responded with the deep, reassuring chuckle he employed every year when he played Santa during the department’s seasonal visits to local hospitals.

“I think we can make a few good guesses. What we got here, ol’ buddy, is an accessible interstitial alien database or library or question-answering whatsis that dates to about a thousand years ago.” He shook his head at the wonderment of it all.

“I feel like a goddamn five-year-old trying to drive his dad’s car. We have only the vaguest notion of what we’re getting into, we don’t know how it works or even for sure what it’s capable of. All we know is that you activate the ignition and away you go.”

Ooljee was staring at the blank, quiescent monitor. Only moments ago it had been a window into infinity, or perhaps somewhere even less comprehensible.

“I would not be so concerned if all it did was reply to questions and allow you to reach into itself, but it has shown it can also affect immediate reality in the form of the meat cleaver and the spinner power switch. That leads me to wonder what else it could do, if it became so inclined. Perhaps it could seal off this room from the rest of the building, or this building from the rest of the world.”

“Shoot, why think small? Maybe it could seal off the whole planet. We haven’t a roach in shitpile’s idea of how big this thing is.”

“Surely it was placed here for a reason,” Ooljee said. Moody pushed his chair away from the table. “Let’s leave that question alone for a while, okay? Right now I’m interested in a shower, something to eat, and a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow we’re gonna get our boy. Business before metaphysics. ”

“I will go along with that.” Ooljee rose slowly from his chair. He was intensely curious, but also very tired. “You want to shower first?”

“Naw, you go ahead. I’ll have a look in the pantry.” As his host left for the bathroom, Moody cracked the pantry seal and began poking through the neat stacks of cans and boxes and plastic containers. Feeling conservative,

he chose a big box of French bread strips and cheese, inserted it in the cooker. As he waited for the bread to cook and the cheese to melt over it, he walked over to the monitor for one last close look prior to retiring.

Putting his huge hand against the flat surface, he pushed gently. There was no give, only smooth resistance. He tried to peer behind the monitor, which hung nearly flush against the wall. The receive-activate unit attached to the back of the screen was little more than an inch thick. He tapped the monitor a couple of times, ran his fingers around the protruding edges. The cooker beeped its readiness.

With a last shrug of contemplation which no one was present to observe, he turned to devote his full attention to his habitual nightly quota of calories.

The following morning the kitchen showed no evidence of nightly excursions into other worlds or dimensions. Nothing prevented Ooljee from casually disconnecting his spinner from the interrupt box, or the interrupt box from the kitchen molly. The experiences of the night before seemed as unreal to both men as memories of childhood.

The address the web had given them was real enough. Ooljee checked it out before calling his wife. Though enjoying her parents’ company and the delights of Albuquerque, she was still wary of the speed with which her husband had changed his mind and boosted her and the kids on their way. Ooljee reassured her in a calm voice, his expression neutral, his words betraying nothing of the remarkable events which had transpired so recently in her kitchen. Only when he’d convinced her all was well did he hang up and prepare to depart.

The pickup took them out of the city on a route designed to avoid both rush hour and the city center. Soon they were cruising at high speed through Ganado’s eastern suburbs, where expensive residences chipped away at tree-shrouded hillsides and people paid fortunes for unobstructed views of the offices and factories they couldn’t wait to abandon during the day.

Gradually the last homes gave way to National Forest. Altitude markers tracked their steady climb. Once, a fox darted across the two-lane highway in front of the pickup. Moody was at peace with himself. The morning was cool, crisp, clear, the contrails of hypersonic shuttles wild white etchings on the cerulean chalkboard of the sky. Cedar and scrub oak gave way to tall conifers. Patches of shade offered refuge to the last, stubborn clumps of winter. The snowpiles sagged in on themselves, pockmarked with bites inflicted by the heat of early spring.

It was late afternoon when they finally turned off the highway. Ooljee shut down the pickup’s scanner and took manual control of the vehicle. The road they’d entered was narrow but paved. Dirt tracks extended through gaps in a fence line on either side, like fingers from a hand.

Though Moody had managed to exert himself in Ganado without much difficulty, he was having some trouble catching his breath now. Not surprising when one realized that the little paved road was winding its way northward at over eight thousand feet. All he could think of was how lucky he’d been not to have had to come here first, straight from sea level.

“This ain’t gonna work,” he said without warning.

Ooljee eyed him questioningly. “Why not?”

“Too easy. It’s too damn easy. All those months of searching and theorizing and querying sources, then we just ask a strange machine a question and that’s all there is to it.”

“Leading up to the question was not easy,” the sergeant reminded him. “I do not feel like we fell into this without having to work for it.”

“Maybe so.” Moody was inhaling the rich perfume of the pines, trying to relax a little. “How much do you think he knows about this web?”

“It told us that someone, probably the man we are after, has accessed it twice—once probably from here, once probably while in Atlanta. That is not much. I think he is unlikely to be an expert.”

The locator on the dash beeped and Ooljee slowed to make a right turn onto a dirt track. They drove about a mile before crossing a small wooden bridge hand-built of huge old wooden timbers. The creek beneath was running loud and wild, snapping with spring strength and fresh snowmelt.