“Say again?”
“Klish-do-nuthti’i. Endless Snake. It appears in many of the Ways.” He nodded back over his shoulder. “Or maybe it was only Ah-yah-neh, Big Snake.”
“Got a lot of snakes in your religion, do you?” Moody was in no mood to be understanding.
“All kinds,” the sergeant admitted readily. “Crooked snakes, water snakes, arrow snakes: they are as common to us as fleas are to you in Florida. It is not surprising that the spirit a hatathli would call up to protect him would take that form.”
“He’s not a hatathli, dammit!” Moody was good and frustrated by their failure to bring Gaggii in, after all the time and effort that had been expended in tracking him down. He felt angry and helpless. He was not going to let reality slip away from him too.
“He’s just a good weaver who’s stumbled across the web to end all webs. He hit back at us with technology, Paul. Not metaphysics or spiritualism. ”
“I did not mean to suggest otherwise.” Ooljee started up yet another slope. Moody followed, sucking air. “But he clearly understands sandpaintings, and probably the Ways as well. There is nothing that says a weaver cannot also be a trained hatathli.
“If the term metaphysics bothers you, perhaps we should call them mwtaphysics. Mysticism is just a name, my friend, for a different level of reality that we haven’t learned how to tap into yet. Try going back eight hundred years and telling one of my ancestors that the spinner on my belt or the watch on your arm is not powered by magic. Tell me that the cutting edge of modem science does not sound more like something out of a sandpainting than a textbook. Take particle physics, for example.”
“You take it,” Moody said with a snort. “I’ll have pastrami on rye.”
Ooljee was not dissuaded. “Particles that have names like smart, and lazy. Forces called weak, up, down. Colors. Is that physics? Or the chant of hatathlis? Take modem recombinant metallurgy. Nothing more than alchemy without the pointy hats. Even a couple of hundred years ago who could have imagined metallic glass, or carbon-alloy shuttle bodies, or all-ceramic engines? Not to mention molly sphere storage.
“Where lies the line between sorcery and science? It is only a matter of terminology, my friend. This web is another place we are just finding out how to visit, the way people decades ago learned how to make photons line up to lase. One more step. Primitive peoples did not understand radio or television because they could not see the signals in the air. That does not make the vid magic. We can’t see this alien web, but we know it is there.”
“There’s the road. Let’s access it." Moody nodded ahead, where the welcome strip of pavement slashed through the forest. “One thing I promise you, my friend. Whether weaver or hatathli, if Gaggii so much as sneezes the wrong way when we get our hands on him again, I’m going to blow his head off.”
“Is that standard Greater Tampa departmental procedure?”
“Naw. That’s Vemon Moody procedure.” The detective wheezed his way up the embankment.
“You are angry. I am angry too. It will not help our situation to give way to anger.”
“Maybe not, but it sure feels good. Want to go back to his place?” He bent over and rested his hands on his knees, breathing hard in the center of the empty two-lane road. The east-west laser pickup strips shone softly in the faint light, waiting to guide the next vehicle that came this way.
“No. He will surely be ready for us if we try anything so foolhardy.”
“How’re we gonna fight something like that—what’d you call it? Endless Snake?” He gestured with his gun. “Might as well have thrown dirt clods at it.”
“It is some kind of tactile program. We must either get to him before he can access it, or else assemble enough firepower to convince him that no matter how much damage he does, he won’t be able to escape.”
Moody nodded, straightening and stretching. He eyed his partner quizzically. “You scared?”
“You bet I am scared, Vernon Moody. Gaggii is learning how to use the sandpainting’s web. Maybe it is no more than alien garbage, but that is enough. I consider myself good with a spinner, but this is beyond me. I am a practical weaver, not a theorist. We need the help of someone who can deal with Gaggii on his own level. We need some heavyweight advice.” He looked past his colleague. There was a light in the distance, coming up the road.
Ooljee fumbled with his service belt. “I am scared because Endless Snake may not be the only program Gaggii has learned how to invoke.” He held up a compact road flasher, began to wave it over his head. The oncoming lights slowed.
Moody turned to regard the woods. Somewhere back there was the turnoff they’d taken earlier, the dirt track and bridge that led to Gaggii’s home. He hated the idea of abandoning a suspect this close at hand. It went against his every professional instinct.
Instinct and experience counted for nothing now, he told himself. This was not a case where standard police procedure applied. Hell, this wasn’t a case where standard reality applied. Besides, there was no guarantee Gaggii had gone back to his place. Maybe he’d kept a car hidden in the woods for a fast getaway. It was gratifying to think they’d upset him, maybe panicked him.
They knew who he was now, exactly what he looked like. They’d bottle up the escape routes. Gaggii wouldn’t be able to cross a border, board a shuttle, buy a tube ticket without being recognized. He was free, sure, but within an area soon to be severely circumscribed. When they located him again, they’d jump him so fast he wouldn’t have time to say boo, much less utter any elaborate chants or threats.
Regrettably, the driver did not have a earphone. He didn’t even have a road scanner. But he did drive them, rattling and banging all the way in his ancient pickup, to the outskirts of Window Rock.
They stopped at the first public phone, Ooljee leaping out to slap his spinner against the emergency terminal while Moody waited nearby—cold, tired, and hurting. Little yeis were excavating his shoulder, hacking away with arrows and medicine knives. It was a relief to see the phone screen light up with the image of another officer sitting calm and relaxed in a warm station.
Ooljee spoke rapidly in a mix of Navaho and English. When he was finished he clicked off, removed his spinner, and walked back to stand next to his partner. Together they watched the road, busy with tourists and commercial travelers.
“Official word is: pick him up now. You want to get some rest and talk to him when they bring him in?”
Moody hugged himself, half-jogging in place to keep warm. He was nearly unconscious from the unaccustomed exertion and lack of food. He knew they could check into a hotel, have something to eat, or borrow a cruiser for a quick ride back to Ganado.
“What do you want to do?”
“My friend, you know me a little by now. Do you think I am crazy?”
“That’s what I thought.” From the depths of his exhaustion Moody dredged up a grim smile.
CHAPTER 16
Swallowing their exhaustion, they followed close on the heels of the heavily armed infiltration team as it violated the integrity of Gaggii’s house four hours later. Procedural caution was misplaced. The owner had long since fled.
The converted garage back of the main house yielded as impressive an array of electronics as Moody had ever encountered outside a university lab or Greater Tampa Operations HQ, all of it state-of-the-art and expensive. Every square inch of wall was boarded with storage flats, zenats, Fordmatsu holomagers, spinner jacks, and 1-2 Septimus sequencers, all of it sandwiched around a Cribm mollysphere big enough to store the annotated Library of Congress, more storage than even a modest-sized company would need.