resented the niche to which ecology had condemned them.
He would have chosen an even more remote spot save for the fact that even a four-by-four had its limits and his motor home was not designed for extended off-road travel. It was top-heavy and unwieldy; not the vehicle of choice for bounding through washes and up steep grades. But it had carried him comfortably clear of prying eyes, both human and electronic, and had allowed him to make his way westward in peace.
It also held a great deal of expensive equipment, some of which he was now piecing together beneath a fold-down sunshade on the vehicle’s port side. As long as he did not exceed the capacity of the portable generator, he would be able to continue his work.
After the first frantic half-hour’s driving he had stopped worrying about pursuit. Worry was a waste of time anyway. It broke down proteins in the body. Once he was able to leave the highway and go off-road he felt relatively secure. His motor home was indistinguishable from a thousand similar tourist vehicles in the Four Comers area and was not registered in his name. There was no reason for a passing police vehicle to challenge it.
They had no idea which way he’d gone. The last place they would look for him was here, in the middle of the Reservation. No doubt they expected him to rush to Kla-getoh in hopes of fleeing via plane, or to drive like mad for Mexico. He had no intention of doing any such thing. He had been readying the next stage of his research when the two policemen had surprised him. All they had done was hurry his planned embarkation. He regretted the loss of his house and all it contained, but he could manage with field equipment. Improvisation had been important from the start.
Time was important now. The police could not be allowed to interfere. He had come too far, drawn too close. If he succeeded, it would not matter what they or anyone else tried to do.
He adjusted the contrast on the zenat attached to the exterior wall of the motor home, then carefully checked Ihe cables that connected it to his spinner and to the molly inside. At home he used infrared and UHF, but cables were more secure when working outside. They were shielded and would not broadcast his activities to potential eavesdroppers. Depending upon the nature of the job, a pick and shovel might be more practical than a mechanical excavator.
Hard driving had brought him to this place. He was pleased with it. High overhead the sky was filling up with wild cirrus clouds, spray kicked up by the bow of an advancing high-pressure system. Soon he could begin. He needed information and help, and planned to call for both simultaneously.
By now the ceremony was as familiar to him as a mother’s lullaby, the chant and fine-tuning second nature. He could have built an audio-visual macro and installed it in his wrist transmitter, but there was an aesthetic to accessing the web manually which he deeply enjoyed.
The activated zenat revealed a dimension formulated by Einstein, with decor by Lewis Carroll. As always he did nothing for long moments but savor the image of writhing rainbows and darting, glowing shapes. Then he recited the new program.
Actually it was not new; it was very old. It simply had not been thought of as anything other than one of many hundreds of chants. Without access to the web it was useful only as an aid in the performance of traditional medicine ceremonies. When access to the alien web was added, it became something very different.
The words were symbolic and descriptive rather than overtly active in the web matrix. They helped the singer to remember the correct phrasing, the proper tones. It was the pitch that mattered, the duration of each vowel, the aural vibrations which actually reacted with the web. Not the words themselves. The chant functioned as a weaver’s chiastic mnemonic.
Gaggii patiently repeated the chant time and again, singing tirelessly, striving to better his rendition with each successive repetition. The words came from the Creation Chant, but were active in a way no modem Navaho had ever dreamed of. It had been composed, or adapted from unimaginable sources, by some ancient Anasazi hatathli, passed on down to his descendants, and thence to the Navaho who had inherited this land in their turn. The words and music had endured. Only the original purpose had been forgotten.
Like anyone else who had ever taken time to contemplate the mystery of their disappearance, Yistin Gaggii wondered where the Anasazi had gone. They had simply disappeared, leaving behind the beginnings of a culture that in time might have rivaled that of the Maya or Inca. Instead they had vanished, leaving behind only their marvelous cliff dwellings to show that they had ever been.
Had they made the jump into the web? Or had they been removed elsewhere by its makers? Or had bad weather and failed crops simply forced them to disperse throughout the Southwest? Was their abrupt disappearance the result of natural causes, or unnatural ones? One day he would have the answer to that question, as he would have the answer to everything else.
Each time he repeated the chant the sky grew a little darker around him, as though a bubble of evening had begun to grow atop the mesa, enveloping chanter and motor home, boulders and brush. Seen through the dry fog of that unnatural darkness, the sky shone dull purple. Nor were these the only visible changes in his immediate environment.
As he chanted, a few of the migrating sparks and points of light within the zenat began to dilate—twisting and flaring. They began to move not in the lazy, meandering fashion of the rainbow threads but with direction and purpose, breaking free of the fractal patterns in which they had heretofore been embedded. They expanded steadily, tumescent with energy, until they filled the screen from edge to edge.
Then they emerged, drifting out of the zenat into the soft false night which had engulfed the mesa top, hovering above the dry red soil and wild grasses.
Gaggii kept chanting until he was surrounded by a half circle of bobbing, corposant shapes, each yellow or red-orange, each an individually expressive nimbus. Despite the fact that it was chilly, even cold atop the mesa, he was sweating profusely. When he felt the time was just right he shifted from the Creation Chant to the web shutdown sequence. Instantly the zenat became again only a blank sheet of photoluminescent composite hanging on the wall of the motor home.
Immediately, several of the cold, refulgent orbs darted toward it. They bumped up against the monitor, curled around its edges, tested it like moths tempting a lamp. They gave off no heat.
Finally they retreated and resumed their places in the semicircle surrounding Gaggii. He picked up the chant again, singing slower and softer now, soothing them to Earth.
The dancing spheres began to extrude projections, expanding riotously as they searched for definition. Heads emerged, followed by legs and tails, smiling jaws, and fine sharp teeth. When the last of the emancipated energy had become mah-ih, one of them sat back on its newly acquired haunches and cocked its head quizzically to one side as it studied the chanter.
“You Who Reach: why do you strand us?”
“I have need of you.” Knowing what he was dealing with, Gaggii tried to watch all of them at once. His fingers did not stray from the controls of his spinner. If they tried to sneak around behind him, he might yet be able to do something. For now, their curiosity outweighed their discontent. But that could change.
Another stopped licking itself long enough to speak. “This is not our place. Let us go back. Though familiar to us from memory, these shapes are uncomfortable. Reopen for us what you have closed.”