The lighting was subdued, the overhead fluorescents brightening automatically ahead of him as they sensed his oncoming presence. Finding the door his guide had described, he thumbed a nearby buzzer.
At first there was no response, but the third try brought forth a familiar voice from the inset speaker.
“Go away. I’m busy.”
Moody leaned toward the vocup. “The whole world’s busy, Paul. You hibernating or what?”
There was a pause, then a click as the door was unlatched from inside. “Come on in, if you must.”
Entering, the detective advanced far enough to allow the security barrier to close behind him.
Ooljee sat in a swivel casket chair on the far side of the room, surrounded by banks of glowing lights, softouch zenat screens of varying size, and digital readouts. Some displayed text, others figures. A few boasted simple diagrammatics. His attention was focused on the single small monitor directly in front of him. Moody ambled over.
“Look, friend, I don’t give a hog’s rear end where y’all spend your time, but your woman’s concerned.”
“Lisa’s a worrier.” Ooljee didn’t look up from the screen. “It is one reason why we get along so well. I do not worry enough.”
“Okay, but just as a favor to me, give her a call so she knows you’re not lying dead in a gutter somewhere.”
“She knows that. She just likes to keep tabs on me.” He stole a quick glance at his watch. “But I admit I should have called in by now.”
“How come your desk phone didn’t relay her calls to your spinner?”
“Turned it off,” murmured the preoccupied officer. “Yeah, she said you might do that.” Curious now, Moody leaned close for a better view of the monitor.
It was a foot and a half square, the half-inch thick LCD board protruding from the console on a short, flexible stem. Ooljee had his pocket spinner, a standard police Scorpion model, plugged into the main board. One hand worked its keyboard while the other toyed with a ratpad.
“What are you into so intently?” Moody finally asked him. “X-rated molly ware?”
“I got curious about the origin of the sands used in the Kettrick painting. I thought that if all the sand came from one place it might give us a clue to the feud angle. Sadly, there is nothing remarkable about where the sand is from. Black from the San Francisco Peaks region. Red from Monument Valley.
“It is the yellow sand itself that is interesting. It’s radioactive.”
Moody blinked. “Come again?”
“Weakly but distinctively so. Oh, that in itself is not unusual. Uranium has been mined on the Rez for more than a century. In fact at one time houses were constructed using the mine tailings, until people understood the danger and had them tom down. Uranium-rich sand provided a nice yellow color for use in sandpainting. It is not used anymore, of course, but there are still some old paintings around which are slightly radioactive. Museums keep them shielded.
“I told the mollysphere to eliminate every color in the painting except red. Then black, and so on. Nothing of interest resulted from my playing around—until I got to the yellow. This is the result.”
Moody found himself holding his breath as the image of the painting gave way to—a mass of patternless dull yellow blotches.
“Am I supposed to react to that?”
“Not very impressive, is it?” There was a gleam in the sergeant’s eye. “That was my initial reaction. Just for the hell of it I asked the mollysphere to regenerate the original pattern, utilizing one color at a time. I expected it to reproduce the painting each time. That is what it did—until it came to the yellow. Then it asked me a question.” Feeling put upon, the detective mumbled, “A question?”
“Yes. It asked me, ‘which pattern?’ If I had entered the query differently, it would not have responded in that manner and we would be no wiser.”
“And are we wiser?”
“I replied by asking it to generate all the patterns it could, using only the yellow markings as a basis. This is the first image it produced.” A perfect reproduction of the Kettrick painting appeared on the monitor.
“This is the second.” He fingered the ratpad.
A dazzling display filled the screen to its edges; an overpowering melange of swirls and lines, of diagrammed explosions and crystalline constructs, of bubbles with barbed skins and of reticulated transparencies.
“What the hell is that?” Moody blurted.
“Watch what happens when I enlarge a portion of it.” The molly-eye zoomed in on the upper right quarter of the crazed image, which changed without losing any of its complexity. Again the sergeant enlarged, this time by a factor of four. Alteration and enlargement in no way reduced the amount of detail on the screen.
Moody had to swallow. “I’ll be damned. Fractals.”
“Yes. Julia Sets within a Mandlebrot Set, the likes of which nobody’s ever seen before. All extrapolated from the yellow grains in the Kettrick painting. The radioactive yellow.”
“The fact that the sand that was used happened to be radioactive has nothing to do with this.”
“Perhaps not, but it makes for an interesting coincidence, don’t you think? I instructed the web to repeat the exercise again, utilizing each individual color from the painting: red, black, all of them. They generated random garbage. The yellow generates this.” He indicated the monitor.
“The work was so delicate that only a molly could find the underlying fractal pattern. Which leads one to a question: if you need the use of spinner and molly to uncover the pattern in the yellow, how was Grandfather Laughter able to insert it there in the first place? Never mind how did he do it; how did he know what he was doing? Fractals were known in his time, but why put them into a sandpainting, in disguise no less?”
Moody had no comment. He was trying to catch up. “What is most interesting to me, my friend, what is most interesting to consider is this: if Grandfather Laughter, a real hatathli, was only reproducing a design which had been taught to him by his own father, then where and when did this fascinating little pattern originate?”
Moody glanced up from the monitor. “Accident.”
“An accident in radioactive yellow that is not repeated with any other color. How accidental indeed. The proportions are astonishing, as are the relationships between the sets. Even a non-mathematician like me can see that, because the molly sphere says it is so.
“Before you got here I was programming the molly to run some relationships to see how they interrelate.”
The detective was still trying to grasp what he’d been told, what he was seeing. “What do you expect to get from that? More sandpaintings?”
“I do not expect to get anything. But since we are dealing with impossible coincidences, I thought it only sensible to go ahead and see if we can find any more. I won’t let it run all night. This is a metropolitan municipal-level molly.
It ought to be able to run through several billion resolution levels for us. If nothing else, we’ll get to see some pretty pictures.”
“Go ahead and run it, then.” Moody was feeling simultaneously excited by the discovery of something wonderful that made absolutely no sense and exhausted from his nocturnal sojourn. “And then, for God’s sake, call your wife and tell her you’re okay.”
“Just five or ten minutes.” Ooljee was reassuring. “If all we get are changes in the basic schematic, I’ll pack it in and we can go home.”