“I know that you’re looking for a murderer. That’s not my department. Show me something impossible.”
So they did, back at Ooljee’s apartment, well away from the prying eyes of the press and possible leaks. She looked on silently as the sergeant accessed the sandpainting and the enlightened darkness beyond.
“I’ve never seen anything like that in all my work.” She was enthralled by the image in the zenat. “This exceeds the boundaries of theory.”
“There is more to it than meets the eye,” Ooljee informed her. “Go and dip your hand in it.”
She eyed him sharply. “Into it?” He nodded.
Moody was standing next to the screen, waiting. Her smile was as thin as it got. “Is this dangerous?” she asked.
“I’ve done it. Paul’s done it. We’re still here. But this is all new. We can’t make any promises.”
“I see.” She gazed into the swirling, sparkling depths of the zenat. Then she reached out. In contrast to the rest of her, Moody noted, her fingers were slim and delicate. As Ooljee would say, a fine woman.
He heard her intake of breath as her hand passed beyond the monitor’s surface and into the warm, tingling otherness beyond. She rotated her hand from side to side, slowly, before withdrawing it.
“How deep does it go?”
“We were hoping y’all might be able to tell us. Paul kind of pushed the limits until I pulled him back. For all we know, you can jump in and go swimming or running around, or whatever, until you’re out of sight. There might be gravity in there, or there might not. There might be up or only down.” He turned to study the mesmerizing view. “We kinda thought all-out experimentation on the physical level might be a tad premature.”
“Good thought.” The experience left her breathing faster. “I think I’d do a lot of long-term study before bodily committing myself to a place whose physical reality has yet to be defined.”
“Kinda like marriage,” he ventured. That brought back the full smile.
Utilizing the procedure they had developed earlier, Ooljee shut down the web. He poured tea and coffee as they took seats at the table. Every so often, Grayhills would glance
uneasily at the flat gray rectangle of the zenat.
“How do you get it to answer questions? I hardly had a chance to skim the written report, and it wasn’t overflowing with detail.”
“Plain language; verbal queries.” Ooljee dumped sugar in his cup. “It responds readily in Navaho and English. It would probably do so in Urdu if requested.”
She nodded. “First time I ever entered a database bodily—if it is a database and not some other state of matter we don’t have a name for. But until we learn otherwise, that’s how I’m going to treat it.” She turned to Ooljee. “I don’t know shit about sandpaintings, but I can unstick a gummed-up ten-molly parallel processing web inside twenty-four hours. My family traditions don’t originate on the Rez. They’re the six years I spent at Tucson Polytechnic and Caltech.”
“Understanding this can come later.” Moody struggled with his impatience. “What we need right now is to find this Yistin Gaggii again before he can do any real damage.”
“What makes you think he wants to do damage? Maybe he’s just an eclectic seeker after knowledge?”
“Call it a gut instinct based on two decades of police work.” He spoke more sharply than he intended. “That and the fact that he’s already committed two murders.”
“Besides which, you hate him because he made you look bad. I read the report.”
Moody was taken aback. “He’s just a suspect we want back. I don’t have any feelings about the guy one way or the other.”
“I do not believe you. I think you have developed a personal dislike for him.”
“Get off my case, lady. I never let my emotions interfere with my work.”
Sure you don’t, he told himself. Truth to tell, he’d taken an instant dislike to the guy. Gaggii’s attitude of superiority was one that a poor fat kid from the backwoods of Mississippi had been forced to deal with much of his life. He’d encountered plenty of it in high school and lots more in college, even though he’d slimmed down enough to make his size something of an athletic advantage. But people still made fun of his back-country manners and cultural rusticity. What was natural and charming back home city kids found cloddish and laughable. His innate good nature had enabled him to hide the hurt, but not to eliminate it.
Not until he’d been promoted to sergeant in Tampa had people stopped making fun of him. That was understandable within a police department, where the individual you gibed at one day might be guarding your back the next.
“All right,” he admitted grudgingly, “so I don’t like the guy. So what? It doesn’t affect my judgment.”
“I did not mean to imply that it did.” He had a good nature, and she had that smile, he mused.
“Look, this guy’s no hobbyist, and he’s no cracker trying to steal a few corporate secrets for resale on the open market. He’s got something a lot stronger in mind and we’d damn well better get to him before he can put it into effect.”
“For example?” she asked him. Moody noticed that his partner was looking at him, too.
“Well, he’s already figured out how to use it to kill people who don’t cooperate with him, by accessing something unpleasant within the database. Since he made it clear to us that that wasn’t enough to satisfy his curiosity, I imagine he’ll try to access something more. I wouldn’t care to lay odds on its being of a benign nature.” He glanced at his partner.
Paul Ooljee drained the last of his coffee. “There are worse entities in the old stories than Big Thunder and Endless Snake.”
“I understand that you’ve isolated the facilities he was using. Does he have access to any others?”
“We do not know.” Ooljee fidgeted with his cup. “He’d built himself a city-sized web in his home. It is hard to imagine him mustering the resources to duplicate i( else where.”
“He wouldn’t need to replicate all the analytical hardware.” She sipped hot tea. “All he’d need is a tight molly and a fast transfer program. Or he may have transferred everything as he learned it, if only to make sure of a quality backup. Depriving him of his hardware, though, may keep him from making any new discoveries, which would mean we would only have to deal with what he already knows.” She looked at the zenat again. “I’m still having a hard time accepting all this.”
“Any time you find yourself feeling particularly doubtful,” Moody told her, “all you have to do is access that little sucker and stick your hand into it. Kind of removes it from the realm of the abstract right quick.”
Yistin Gaggii pulled off the dirt track and parked near the edge of the little mesa. A broad, flat plain spotted with low scrub stretched out below him, rising abruptly and with the uncanny precision of geometric geologic forces to a much larger mesa beyond. To the north a gigantic dormant volcano stood sentinel over this part of the sacred land, its summit sugared with snow. The sky here was big and bright enough to swallow a man’s worst fears. It was the blue roof of the world. He began removing equipment from the motor home, his boots kicking up dirt and gravel. Dust flowered briefly around his legs before settling softly back to the ground. It was red and clinging, for this was the land where the earth rusted.
The nearest paved road did not have a pickup guide embedded in its surface. Few people came this way for the simple reason that there was nothing here. The porous rocks held no water for wells, the barren ramparts no cliff dwellings for study or pillage. There were not enough weeds and scrub on the surrounding acres to support half a dozen steers. Even the creatures that eked out a miserable living here