Well, two could play. Moody would smile and nod and appear to take it all seriously, and when the time came, he’d be the one to deliver the punch lines. Ooljee was a good guy and a good cop. He was only having a little fun.
Just as Moody had it all figured, the sergeant threw him a big, fat, sweeping curve.
“I have been devoting some time and thought to the matter of a motive.”
“You ain’t been the only one, brother.”
“The sandpainting is the obvious solution. What we do not know is the question. I think whoever wanted it, or a copy of it, needed it for a particular reason, and not to complete a collection. It may be that this particular sandpainting was used against the murderer in the past, or against his family, or a close friend. Or it may have been employed against a stranger who hired the murderer.
“By destroying it according to tradition he may have been removing the threat it presented to someone. You would call it an exorcism.”
Lordy, mused Moody. Just when common sense had been reasserting its good ol’ self.
“If this guy can electrocute people by an as yet undetermined method, why the hell would he need to trash a bunch of colored sand? You ain’t trying to tell me we’re dealing with something like voodoo, are you?”
“It provides a rationale for a seemingly irrational act,” Ooljee argued. “The underlying principle is the same. To affect another, they need only believe they can be affected. ”
“This is starting to affect me,” Moody grumbled.
“It does offer us a motive.”
Moody eyed him sharply. “You don’t really believe in any of this scrim, do you?”
The sergeant sidestepped the question. “What matters is that someone else may. People who believe are people capable of anything.”
“So we’re back where we started,” Moody murmured. “The guy’s a nut.”
“People have killed for stranger reasons: because their god or their devil told them to, or simply because they didn’t like the cast of another man ’ s eyes, or the tone of his voice. ” Moody couldn’t argue with that. He’d seen it happen too often on Tampa’s mean streets.
“It does not matter,” Ooljee went on, “that we are dealing only with a pile of colored sand and pulverized masonite. What is significant is that whoever did the damage may believe that the sandpainting had real power. It gives us a new line to pursue. There are ways of checking such things. Not as thoroughly or efficiently as I would like, but we can make a beginning.”
“Right.” Moody relaxed a little. It was a relief to find out that Ooljee had had a serious goal from the start.
Beyond the fact that Ganado served as the commercial center of a major high-tech manufacturing area, Moody knew nothing about the city. As they drew within sight of the first towers, however, he knew he was going to have to discard many of his preconceptions.
Fanciful spires rose from massive office blocks that had seemingly been integrated elsewhere and then laid down intact atop the high desert plateau. Not one of the buildings could properly be called old, every one of them having been erected within the last century. Patterned after the rugged buttes and monuments he’d seen from the air, the structures appeared a part of the landscape, as though escarpments and mesas had been hollowed out and overlaid with glass and plexan and composites. Climate-controlled pedways connected the major buildings above street level, soaring
arteries of spun composite and metallic glass.
Downtown, the tall buildings shut out the sun. New construction was going up everywhere. Moody was assaulted by advertisements in a dozen languages. He might as well have been in Manhattan. Only the buildings themselves hewed to a smaller scale.
The peculiar squiggles and curves on many signs which he thought comprised some unknown Middle Eastern language were in fact, according to Ooljee, components of written Navaho.
“Until the early part of the twentieth century there was no such thing as written Navaho.” The sergeant eased their truck around a slow delivery van. “It may look confusing, but writing it is nothing compared to trying to learn the grammar. And you should see what Hopi looks like!” He uttered a nasal melange of consonants and gutturals.
“For something so difficult to write, it sounds beautiful. It is much like singing. The Chinese understand.”
As he tried to make sense of his companion’s linguistic discourse, Moody studied the hovering, acrobatic laser ads. Downtown Ganado was a stroboscopic maze of holos and cold neon, of plasma sculptures that beckoned and danced and teased tired travelers. They alternately tickled and battered the senses not only in English, Hopi, Navaho, and Zuni, but also in Japanese, Mandarin, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, Malay, Tagalog, and the inescapable Spanish of the South American community.
“How much of this can you understand?” Moody inquired dazedly, more than a little overwhelmed by his unexpectedly cosmopolitan surroundings.
“Some Spanish. A little Japanese and Thai. A few words of Malay, plus my English and Navaho. Not as much Hopi as I should. You should hear the patter of some of the local street gangs. In the old days they used spray cans on the walls. Procter and Gamble’s graffiti-out took care of that.
Now they mark their territories in other ways.
“You can’t walk through certain parts of town without triggering a playback voc stuck to a ledge. It does not bother the standup citizens, because what comes out sounds like gibberish to them, but I have seen such messages drive other gang members to distraction.
“You take all those languages I just listed for you and mix them all up with street slang as a catalyst and the result is something we have to use a Cribm molly to decipher. It does not make street work easy.”
“How’s ya’ll’s gang problem here?”
“No worse than that of a city of similar size, though when you have so much new money and excitement concentrated all in one place you are always going to have trouble. There are many wealthy local people and, as always, many poor ones as well. Some of the young poor join gangs, as they always have everywhere. They run phar-macuties, weapons, industrial stats and information, the same way gangs have supported themselves since the beginning of time. I am told it is a little more intense here than some other places. We have unique problems of cultural as well as fiscal disenfranchisement.
“It helps that every major high-tech corporation in the world would like to do work here. It took them a while to discover that the people of the Four Comers region are the best high-tech workers on the planet. There are plants here that literally turn out zero-defect product. Combine those human resources with the unique tax advantages available to multinationals on the Rez and you have a combination irresistible to many companies. Our street people and our problems reflect this influx of outside influence and money.”
So did the ethnic mix that swarmed the walkways, Moody noted. Between the Indians and Asians and Hispanics, Anglos were a distinct minority here, just as they were in parts of Tampa. It did not bother him. He’d been in the minority all his life. Fat people were an unrecognized minority all their own.
He had to agree that this would be a tough town to police. You’d need specialists in a whole range of languages and cultures. Tampa’s ethnic mix of Anglo, Black, and Hispanic was much more straightforward, whereas Ganado was a seething southwestern bouillabaisse.
“Your people aren’t restricted to assembly work, though?”