Alan Foster: Cyber Way

“The key has to be in the painting somewhere.” The sergeant stared at the monitor as if the sheer intensity of his desire might provoke a response, a suggestion. “The Four Sacred Mountains. The danger you don’t know.”

He started talking to the spinners, chanting so fast his words were incomprehensible even to Grayhills. The web replied in Navaho; guttural, rhythmic, vocomposite phrases.

Grayhills put her fingers to her lips, her eyes wide as she stared across the canyon. “Hurry. Oh, God, hurry.”

The disk had become the color of dried blood. Within that otherworldly circular frame of impossibility something monstrous and swollen was trying to get out. Ooljee’s voice rose in pitch.

Suddenly the horrid shape contracted, turning sideways and shrinking abruptly to half its former size. Moody gaped. There was something else in the skyhole, another outline as vast as the first. It flared and pulsed with shattered lightning as it clashed with its titanic counterpart. Brilliant rainbow bursts exploded from the disk, searing the earth black where they struck, instantly carbonizing anything organic they came in contact with.

“Get down!” Moody flattened his bulk against the dirt and his companions did likewise. Burnt air whistled overhead, fleeing the disk, seeking escape from the confines of the canyon.

The alien forms writhed and boiled like antagonistic oils confined to a glass jar. Squinting into flying sand and grit, Moody watched as the perfect orb of the skyhole began to buckle. Concavities took neat bites out of its rim.

“What did you do?” he roared at his partner.

Ooljee lay shielding the conjoined spinners with his body. “What we discussed!” He indicated the unstable disk. “ Nayenezgani! Son of Changing Woman, Monster Slayer, who wears the flint armor and fights with the crooked lightning. Or maybe it is his brother Tobaschischin, Bom of Water. Perhaps both of them are fighting Big Monster.” He caught his breath. “Or perhaps what we are seeing is disruption in the database. Maybe Big Monster is a virus of some kind, and Nayenezgani a Restore program.”

“It’s hard,” said Grayhills, “to give a name to something you don’t understand.”

So enthralled and terrified were they by the scene within the disk, they forgot whence it had originated.

The door to the hogan burst open and a lone figure came running out, turning circles as it shouted at the canyon walls. For the first time, Yistin Gaggii was neither composed nor in control.

“Get out!” he screamed at his unseen tormentors. “Get out of the web!” He ignored the disk as though it didn’t exist.

As Gaggii raised something to his shoulder, Moody voiced a choice expletive and dragged Grayhills down. A burst of automatic weapons fire scattered sand in front of them.

“Get away!” Gaggii was running toward them now. They lay exposed on the slope, with no cover nearby.

Raising himself onto his elbows, the detective sighted down the barrel of his pistol and fired off half a clip. A startled Gaggii cut to his right and returned the shots wildly. In the depths of the canyon the gunfire sounded tinny and toy like, masked by the driving wind.

Moody lifted his head again, but Gaggii had disappeared. “Damn! Where’d he go?”

“I think he is down in the creek bed.” Ooljee was trying to aim his own weapon while simultaneously shielding the spinners. “We will be lucky to hit him at this range.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t know that. What’s he got?” Fresh fire sent gravel skipping over their heads.

“Looks like a Provalis Ruger. Cannot tell for sure.”

“Self-seeking shells?”

“I doubt it, or he would have used them by now. We cannot stay here. We are too exposed.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

Gaggii’s anxious voice filled the pause in the gunfire. “’You must go away! You do not know what you are doing!”

Moody raised his head. “Who the hell says you do?” For his trouble he had to duck another burst of automatic fire.

“You are breaking hozho, bilagaannal You have upset the balance. You—!”

Moody roared back, interrupting him. “ Who’s disturbed the balance? What the hell do you call thisT’

Ooljee raised his head, pointed. “Something is changing.”

The disk was slipping. No longer stable, it was sliding slowly downslope like glycerin on Teflon. Within the circle the violently clashing outlines were still visible.

The sergeant was on his feet, heedless of however their assailant might choose to react. “Run. Get up and run. Don’t you see what’s happening?” Moody wasn’t sure that he did, but if he had learned anything in the past weeks, it was that it was best to follow his partner’s lead in such matters. With a grunt, he stumbled erect.

Independent of wind or storm, stone or guidance, the disk continued its drift down into the canyon, swallowing huge chunks of earth and gravel along the way. When it reached the bottom it halted and began to tip over, falling in extreme slow motion. The gale howling out of the dark maw intensified.

Peering back into the canyon, Moody saw Yistin Gaggii rise from his place of concealment in the creek bed, throw away his gun, and begin to run toward his pursuers. He was looking over his shoulder, back and up at the falling, falling disk. That embattled circle of night was rotating on some unknown, unseen axis, responding to forces beyond ken or control, slicing through reality like a circular blade as it fell. The tops of a pair of big cottonwoods began to vanish into it.

The wormhole turns , Moody thought madly as he sought to increase his pace. Gravel and sand slipped from beneath his boots, threatening to send him tumbling.

Ooljee and Grayhills reached out to help him up the last few feet. Breathing hard, the three of them looked on in horrified fascination at the drama unfolding below. Gaggii was running for his life, running hard, sand flying from his heels. Panic had replaced anger on his face. The disk was collapsing atop him. He ran harder. He would escape its radii. He would not. Would, would not. Would…

With a yelp of despair Yistin Gaggii threw himself forward as the disk came perfectly parallel to the floor of the canyon. Moody saw him vanish beneath the outer edge: not crushed, but silently absorbed, swept up, inhaled along with the hogan, the motor home, the solar pyramid and satellite dish, innumerable bushes, rocks, boulders, and smaller insect and reptilian lives.

Standing on the rim of the canyon they found themselves gazing down into a circular black lake. Nothing moved on its surface. But within, the universe itself was in turmoil. Or the database. Gaggii was gone: gone with his dreams and aspirations, his spinners and mollys, his misplaced self-assurance and homicidal indifference. He didn’t matter anymore. All that mattered was the conflict he had left behind, some kind of unimaginable contest for supremacy that might be taking place a few dozen yards below their feet or halfway across the cosmos. Within the disk gods, programs, aliens, or something they could not give a name to, struggled and contested.

The ants stood nearby and watched helplessly.

Grayhills grabbed his arm and pointed excitedly, but she didn’t need to point. Moody saw it as soon as she did.

The disk was beginning to shrink.

Soon it occupied less than half the canyon bottom. Where it retreated, the surface was as clean and bare as the lens of a camera. It continued to contract until only a black circle the size of a tire remained. Then it was the size of a dinner plate.

Still inhaling dust and dirt, it irised out to infinity.

Released to confusion, the amazing storm which had led them to this place began to shudder and dissipate. Clouds broke up and evaporated. Wind tore the walls of the hurricane eye to pieces, then sought refuge in array os and gullies. Moody clutched at his ears as the barometric pressure rose with astonishing speed.