The police spinner on the table was equipped with a vocup for recording reports and the confessions of suspects, so presumably it was picking up its owner’s chanting as well. Certainly Ooljee wasn’t prolonging this nonsense for his friend’s benefit.
Something alerted Moody’s nostrils. He sniffed, his gaze shooting to the gall-like growth on the linking cable that was the interrupt box.
“Okay, Paul, that’s enough.” He stopped drumming, but his partner continued the chant, glancing briefly in his direction to indicate that he’d heard but that it didn’t matter. “Hey, that’s enough!”
Smoke was rising from the comers of the interrupt box. Something in its vicinity vented a loud pop.
Moody shoved his chair away from the table and lunged at the cable which connected the home spinner to its wall jack. He let out a yelp of pain and surprise, letting go of the cable as quickly as he’d grabbed it: it was hot enough to bum.
Tiny flames spurted from one comer of the interrupt box, which started to melt. Oblivious, Ooljee kept chanting, his left hand still vibrating madly. The image on the zenat was unchanged.
His host had said something about—Moody yanked open a drawer and fumbled in the semi-darkness until his hand closed around the handle of the cleaver. He’d pay for the cable: cables were cheap. He could not allow whatever was happening in the condo to work its way into the tower molly sphere. For one thing, he was far too afraid of heights.
A single stroke would suffice to sever the thin connection. He raised the cleaver over his head, brought it down swiftly. When it was within six inches of the cable something that felt like hard air took hold of the utensil, wrenched it out of his hand, and flung it into the wooden cutting board on the other side of the sink, missing Moody’s ribs by about a foot.
Gaping, he backed away from the smoking, sizzling, slowly imploding interrupt box. His eyes were very wide and not a smidgen of sarcasm hung from his lips.
In the interim Ooljee had ceased chanting. He put the papers aside and lowered his left hand, which was no longer shaking. The image on the monitor remained. The kitchen was unchanged save for the melting, stinking interrupt box.
No, Moody thought, that wasn’t quite true. There was the matter of the meat cleaver which had somehow leapt free of his clenched fist, flown through the air, and buried its blade half an inch deep in the cutting block. He nodded at the police spinner.
“Turn that damn thing off,” he said tightly. Ooljee regarded him calmly.
“Let’s give it another minute. Maybe something will happen.”
“Whatta you think, something hasn’t happened already?” He tried to divide his attention between his host and the now motionless but previously ambulatory blade.
Something had yanked it out of his hand. He had not gone nuts for a few seconds and slammed it into the block himself. Or had he? Right then reality was a state of mind dearly to be desired. It was something he’d never previously had reason to doubt. Vernon Moody didn’t believe in poltergeists and ghosts. But then, he didn’t believe in flying knives either.
“Just a minute or two more,” Ooljee insisted.
“For what? So it can set the whole building on fire?”
“It is not burning anymore.” This was true: smoke no longer rose from the lump of slag that had been the interrupt box. For some reason Moody was not comforted.
“We are doing something wrong.” Ooljee’s gaze shifted from his papers to the monitor. “Or we are not doing something right.”
“I’ll go along with that,” Moody agreed tensely.
Maybe a spark had struck him, startled him, and he had lost control for a moment, just long enough to slam the cleaver into the cutting board. It made some sense, which was more than he could say for what he imagined had happened.
“C’mon, let’s go eat,” he suggested anxiously. “I’ll even drum on the restaurant floor if you want.”
Ooljee was ignoring him. “Missing something. Not making a connection somewhere.” He remembered his colleague.
“In the old days when a hatathli did a sandpainting, it was to help cure someone of a disease or a problem. In order for the chant to work, the supplicant was required to actually sit on the painting and in that way to become part of it. It was a way of achieving temporary union with outside forces. There was a definite path of action: from the original source of power to the Holy People to the sacred vehicle of the sandpainting and then to the patient.”
“We don’t have a patient,” Moody pointed out in what he hoped was the voice of reason. “Just you and I.”
“And we do not have a hatathli either. Just me.”
“What do you want to do? Sit on the monitor?”
“No.” Ooljee walked toward the zenat. “I believe the idea is to make contact with the design. Think of it as accessing the database. In this instance I am the supplicant, if not properly a patient.”
“Don’t sell yourself short.” Moody hesitated, uncertain whether to restrain his partner or not. It all seemed so silly, all of it. Except for the meat cleaver. “What are you gonna do?”
“Just touch the monitor. There cannot be any harm in that. It is only a projection.”
“Maybe it’s nonconducting Lexan, but it’s still drawing current from the wall jack. Keep that in mind.”
“I am not going to stick my fingers in any sockets,” Ooljee assured him. He was very close to the monitor now. The colors of the sandpainting illuminated his smooth skin, bleeding across his face: red and blue, yellow and black, white and green.
“You can rip it off the wall for all I care.” Moody told him, “but let’s get this over with, okay?” He fought hard to avoid looking at the cleaver.
Ooljee was muttering to himself again. “If the Kettrick painting was true, if no changes had been made…” Gingerly he extended a hand and touched the flat, cool surface of the screen. Whether by coincidence or design (Moody could not tell) he put his open palm over the dark circle in the center. The instant that contact was made, the painting changed.
It was a very small change, one that neither man would have noticed had they not been concentrating all their attention on the monitor. What happened was that the pair of lizardlike shapes guarding the opening pivoted slightly, until their heads were facing the center of the design. At that instant Moody wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d jumped right off the screen to clamp their tiny teeth into the sergeant’s flesh, at which point he’d surely scream.
They didn’t do anything of the sort and he was spared any such embarrassment. It was nothing more, he decided, than a brief moment of unexpected animation, crudely rendered at that.
He expected Ooljee to reach the same conclusion and return to the table. Instead the sergeant spoke softly.
“Interesting. All of a sudden it feels flexible, almost as if…”
Gently exerting pressure, he watched in disbelief as his hand entered the screen, pushing beyond the dark center of the sandpainting, past the edge of reality. The angular yei figures of the painting looked on. Their straight-line mouths did not comment. Their unfathomable dark eyes did not mock.
CHAPTER 13
Beyond the symbols and figures was a holomage of infinite dimensions, aswarm with glowing shapes and lines and rainbows, unidentifiable solid objects and geometric forms. Nor was it static. Everything was in constant if lugubrious motion; objects bouncing off one another, rainbows twisting and writhing, tiny explosions of light making the two men blink reflexively.
The striking, undistorted light illumined every pore on Ooljee’s face as he stood there fascinated, his arm extended fully beyond the plane of the screen. The colors were an in vivo physicality, washing away the dullness of his life, cleansing, invigorating, life-affirming. The brilliance beckoned, drawing him onward, rife with a richness of experience he’d never known. With his right hand he reached out to draw it all to him, into him, leaning forward into the screen.
A much less mesmerized Moody let out a yell. “Pau
l!” Ooljee didn’t appear to hear him. Cursing, the detective charged around the table, not caring if spinner and home molly were knocked to the floor in the process.
Ooljee was two-thirds into the monitor when Moody threw a bear hug around his thighs and dragged him back.
There was no resistance and it took only a moment. He was much bigger than the sergeant.
The younger man stood dazed, surrounded by the familiar accouterments of his kitchen, arms hanging limply at his sides. Slowly he came around, finding solidity in the blocky, unyielding outlines of the refrigerator, sink, cabinets, cooker, in the decorations made by his wife and children, in the wall phone and the spinner lying on the table.
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….
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.”
Cyber Way Page 15