Alan Foster: Cyber Way

“Maybe he wants to talk to whoever left their junk here. Maybe he just wants to say hello.” Moody kicked at the ground. “Or maybe he wants to ask them some questions.”

“Grand presumptions often lead to disaster,” observed the sergeant moodily. “Ants do not ask questions of people who dump garbage, because if that attention is gained, such people are likely to exclaim ‘ants!,’ and reach for the bug spray or the swatter.” He stepped over the edge of the cliff, began slipping and sliding awkwardly down the crumbling talus.

“Hey!” Moody followed, gallantly trying to aid Samantha Grayhills in staying upright.

The disk, the wormhole, the skyhole—whatever it was— had grown big enough to drive a truck through. Boulders and trees continued to slide into the caliginous void and vanish. Air howled around the three as they scrambled down the slope.

“Wait a minute, wait!” The two men slowed, looking back at Grayhills. They were halfway to the bottom of the canyon. “What if you’re right and he has the place secured?”

“We have to stop him.” Moody hefted his gun. “We can’t just sit around and take in the show. We might not like the ending.”

“There are other ways to stop him besides trying to put a bullet in his head.”

“Maybe, but I happen to like that way.”

“He might feel the same about you.” She shifted her attention to Ooljee. “You’ve learned how to use the web to locate him. Why not use it to interfere with what he’s doing?” She indicated the sergeant’s spinner, which hung from his duty belt. “All the information you’ve acquired since this started is still in there, isn’t it?”

Ooljee put his free hand on the device, licked his lips. He looked down at the hogan, then across the canyon at the circle of swallowing night. He was silent for a long moment. Then he straightened slightly.

“The built-in monitor’s awfully small. Hardly enough to fingerprint on. And it is only a spinner. It’s not mol-lyjacked.”

“Mine is.” She unclipped the expensive precision instrument slung at her belt, unfolded the top section into a foot-square screen. Moody admired it.

“Pretty fancy.”

She grinned tightly. “You two are only public servants, whereas I’m charged with ensuring the security of large companies. Naturally they see to it that I’m supplied with the best equipment on the market.”

Ooljee eyed it uncertainly. “But does it have enough storage to process the webware template?”

She handed it to him. “Only one way to find out.”

The three of them knelt on the exposed slope, Moody trying to shield the two spinners as much as he could. Carefully Ooljee jacked the police spinner to Grayhills’, watched as the screen came alive.

“What kind of molly you got in there?”

“Ten gigabyte Yellow Orb, military spec suspension, Denon floating molecular lasac. Single read only, but that’s all we need. You’re the only one going to access.”

“I hope that is enough.” Ooljee’s fingers danced over the board.

A miniature of the Kettrick sandpainting appeared on the unfolded screen, the details so fine that only their familiarity with the design enabled them to recognize individual features. Ooljee sat and chanted, his hand outstretched, while the tormented wind shuddered around them, and across the canyon the glistening black oval continued to gnaw at the earth.

Moody tried to divide his attention between the disk and the interlocked spinners. If the intruder grew much larger, it would engulf the motor home and the hogan. That would not be such a bad thing, he reflected, unless the disk remained behind, a manifestation only a vanished Gaggii could deal with.

Where was it all going, the disappearing rocks and trees and sand? To another world circling another star? Or perhaps another dimension, or a big room chock full of rainbow threads and mysterious sparkling lights? Or was everything simply funneled into the vastness between the stars, to suffer instant desiccation? Moody was scared, real scared, more scared than he’d been on that day ten years ago in Sarasota when a ninloco dealer outgrabed on sizzle had stuck a need-ler to the back of the detective’s head and threatened to fry his brains.

Instead it was the dealer who’d been blown away, by another cop on the stakeout. Vernon Moody straightened and sucked it in. He hadn’t survived that moment only to be ingested now by some berserk alien Indian Navaho fairy tale.

The tiny screen was alive with rainbow filaments: rainbow power, Ooljee had called it. Fulgurant lights danced around the threads, darting through the blackness, while incomprehensible patterns whirled and exploded on the fold-out screen.

“It’s so small,” Grayhills murmured.

Easy enough to check though, Ooljee knew. Shoving his hand into the screen, he let the tingling warmth of the web briefly caress his flesh. He withdrew it confidently.

“We’re in.” He stared at Grayhills. “But where do we go?”

“Look!”

As Moody’s gaze rose from the screen he noted that the wind was no longer blowing across the canyon. Instead it was now blasting toward them, making his own hair and (much more impressively) that of Samantha Grayhills’ stream out behind their heads. No longer the fresh, dry air of the high plateau, it carried with it a powerful musky odor he could not identify.

Air from elsewhere, he thought. Air and fine particles that tickled his nostrils and made him want to sneeze. Behind it an intimation of something huge. His skin grew cold and the small hairs on the back of his neck bristled.

He saw Grayhills staring in the same direction. “You feel it too?” he asked softly, simultaneously wondering why he was whispering. She nodded. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.” Her eyes dropped to the linked spinners. “We would have to ask Yistin Gaggii.”

“I don’t think that crazy bastard knows either,” Moody growled. He was frightened and angry and frustrated. “The ant is playing with the garbage and he doesn’t care about the consequences. He just wants to see what it will do.” He squinted at the cliff, straining to see deeper into the disk.

“There’s something in there. Big Monster, Big Thunder; something out of your collective cultural memory. It’s in there and it’s trying to get out.”

“Come through,” Ooljee corrected him. “There: you can see it, a little!”

Immense it was, and amorphous. A slowly solidifying shape. Was that because it was near and gradually taking on a recognizable outline, or very far away and slowly coming closer? Would it stop when it reached the causal boundary that was the disk, or step out into the canyon? Moody could not imagine, because he could not envision it.

What if it was Big Monster, whatever that was, coming back? Called back to Hot Water to again make the world an unfit place for human beings, to once more destroy them as fast as they could be made? How could they stop anything like that, something from beyond time and place?

If the web was responsible for bringing it forth, then to the web they must resort to deal with it. What had Ooljee told him, ages ago? About Na’a-tse-elit —no, that was the rainbow guardian. Something or someone called Monster Slayer? He couldn’t remember the Navaho name, but wasn’t that the entity responsible for the destruction of the terrible monsters of legend, the yei-tso ? The same one who had told hatathlis that the gods drew on sheets of sky but that man could use powdered rock and sand (and rare-earth masking?). Was that what was responsible for the garbage that was the web?

He unburdened himself of that and more to Ooljee, only to discover that his friend had been suffering similar thoughts.