“I do not know,” replied the vocomposite, “because he does not know himself.”
“That makes no sense,” said Moody. “Ask it again.” Ooljee complied, the web replied. “I cannot divine purpose.”
“Well, that’s real helpful.”
“Unless one of you can think of a better question, I am going to turn it off,” Ooljee told them.
Moody had no new ideas. He watched while his partner ran through the shutdown procedure, relaxed when Onscreen was once more dominated by the familiar harmless lines of the Kettrick sandpainting.
The security door was unsealed and a lieutenant stuck his head through the opening. He did not look especially happy. Moody sensed other bodies crowding close behind, trying to see inside.
“Everything okay in here?”
“Everything is fine,” Ooljee assured him.
“The lights and work stations upstairs have been going nuts. What are you working with, anyway?”
“This.” Ooljee picked up his machine. “Department spinner. Mine, as a matter of fact. You can see that.”
“Yeah, I can see that. I just do not want to see the department’s electric bill for the month.” He backed out. As he shut the door behind him, Moody could hear him arguing with unseen people out in the hall.
Ooljee moved to cut the power, paused at Grayhills’ gesture. “Leave it on. It’s pretty, and it’s nice to be able to study it on a big screen. You can see the details better.” The sergeant shrugged, clipped his spinner to his belt.
“I don’t know much about sandpaintings.” She stared at the monitor. “Just what every kid on the Rez grows up hearing, along with whatever other traditional lore your parents decide you should know about.”
“That’s more than me,” Moody reminded her.
“I know more about them than I want to.” Ooljee took a seat with his back to the monitor.
“What’s that part there, left of center?” She pointed at the painting. “The part with all the birds.”
Ooljee gave his partner a look, turned resignedly.
“That is one portion we have been able to identify. Its full name is ‘Scavenger Being Carried Through the Sky hole by Eagles and Hawks Assisted by Snakes with Bird Power. ’ As you can see, it is very complex even for a sandpainting. It comes from the Bead Chant.
“Now over there,” he said, pointing, “you might expect to find something related, but as near as I have been able to determine, that has something to do with the Red Ant Way. Up near the top of the painting is an excerpt from the House of Moving Points. It is as if a painter decided to take bits and pieces of different Ways and slap them all together in one place, linked by devices of his own design, without rhyme or reason. Except that in this case the use of yellow sand is just such a hidden device.”
Grayhills rose and approached the monitor. Moody followed, curious; watched as she traced a portion of the image with a finger.
“What is this House of Moving Points?”
Ooljee scratched the back of his head. “Remember, I am a cop, not an academic. This is just a hobby of mine. As I recall, within the chant it is used to invoke the aid of Nayenezgani, or Monster Slayer, in relation to…”
“It makes me think of Cameron,” she said, interrupting him.
“You think there’s some guy named Nayenez Gani working in Cameron?” Moody asked sharply.
“No, no.” Her irritation could not completely subdue her smile. “I thought of Cameron because of the high-energy physics research facility there. According to the vid-piece I saw, the university had just finished installing a Moebial toroid particle accelerator on the north end of the campus. The piece talked about what an ideal location it was, since the entire installation had to be underground and the rock around Cameron is totally devoid of moisture.” Moody thought hard. Particle accelerator? House of Moving Points?
“C’mon, not you too. It’s bad enough part of this damn painting tells you how to access some kind of alien web-work. Now you’re trying to tell me another part describes a particle accelerator!’ ’
“I didn’t say that,” she told him. “But maybe your man Gaggii believes that it does.”
“It is something. It makes sense. Perhaps he is after information he cannot get from the web.” Ooljee oozed optimism. “He won’t get there quickly. The roads between Shungopavi and Cameron are not the best, and there is good reason to believe he is keeping to the back country.”
I thought this whole part of the state was back country, Moody thought to himself. “Even so, he’s got one helluva start on us.”
Again Grayhills directed their attention to the image on the monitor. “And this part here is Scavenger being lifted through a skyhole?”
“Assisted by eagles and snakes with bird power, yes.” Ooljee traced the image with a finger. “Sometimes twenty-four eagles and hawks, usually forty-eight. I’ve never seen a sandpainting this complicated. Maybe that was what attracted Mr. Kettrick to it. Notice the lightning guardian, here.” He pointed.
“And over there,” she continued, “is the House of Moving Points. A particle accelerator? Or something else?” She took a deep breath. “Tell me about Scavenger.”
“Legend says he goes around picking up discarded things.”
Moody looked sharply at his partner, recalling Gaggii’s alien garbage analogy.
Grayhills was drawing metaphors and analogies like an artist, all of them rife with impossibilities. What kind of scenario was she trying to sketch in their imaginations? He stared at the sandpainting, striving to comprehend its mysteries. Each grain of sand was a dot that had to be connected to another dot to form a complete picture. They only had bits and pieces to work with. It was akin to building a plane without the engines. It looked like something, but when it was finished it just sat there and wouldn’t go.
Ooljee went for the phone. “I am calling a cutter. We
will get to Cameron before Gaggii. As to what he is after, we’ll ask him—as soon as we take him into custody.”
“What,” Moody wondered aloud, “would this guy want with a particle accelerator? It ain’t like he’s after a plane or a free-state mollyblank.”
Grayhills looked thoughtful. “Maybe it has something to do with this Skyhole legend.”
“You can’t shoot holes in anything with a particle accelerator.” Moody hesitated. “At least I don’t think you can. I don’t know kudzu about physics, but I follow the news. All an accelerator does is throw particles you can’t see against other particles you can’t see, to make more particles you can’t see half as well as the original ones, right?”
“I’m no physicist, either. But then, what you usually do with a sandpainting is look at it, not use an extract from it to access some incomprehensible alien web. If you can do something out of the ordinary with one device, why not with another?”
Moody found himself hoping that Gaggii was simply insane. If he was working with real purpose, with a specific goal in mind, it raised a specter far more chilling than that of an ordinary madman running amok.
Ooljee hung up, looking satisfied. “Skycutter is on its way. It’s a Flex, the fastest transportation I could wheedle out of the department. They balked at first, but gave in when I invoked the NSI’s good name on our behalf.”
“We taking backup this time?”
Ooljee shook his head impatiently. “No room on the Flex and we want to get there well before Gaggii. Any help we need we can recruit in Cameron. There is an NDPS office there and the university’s own security people can help. Gaggii’s description will be all over the town and campus in ten minutes.”
Grayhills was apologizing as they entered the elevator that would carry them to the VTOL pad on the roof. “I should know more about my own heritage, but wlu-n you’ie trying to keep pace with the latest advances in interlacing spherical database security, it’s hard to find time to study what you learned as a kid. Is there anything else you can tell us about this Skyhole legend, or the House of Moving Points? Anything that might give us a hint about Gaggii’s plans?”