The sergeant muttered a mix of English and Navaho as the lift ascended. “If I think of anything, you will be the first to know. I keep trying to tell you I am no expert in these matters. It’s only a hobby with me.”
“Don’t keep selling yourself short,” said Moody reprovingly. “I don’t think there are any hatathlis running around with degrees in criminology, either. Thanks to you, we’ve made some connections. We’ll make more.”
I’m just not sure I want to, he thought worriedly. He felt as if he’d stepped off a hyperatmospheric shuttle into a deep, dark well. Now he’d been falling for so long, he was afraid of what would happen when he finally hit bottom.
He glanced surreptitiously at his partner. It must be a lot harder on him, the detective mused. Assisting on a murder investigation, only to end up haunted by his own heritage. At least I don’t relate to a lot of this. So it doesn’t scare me.
Then he remembered the mutaphysical projection Ooljee had called Endless Snake and decided it was all right to be scared.
CHAPTER 18
Moments after the elevator deposited them on the roof next to the landing pad, the skycutter arrived, its rotors sending red dust flying. There hadn’t been time to brief the pilot. Ooljee filled him in as the streamlined craft ascended and turned westward.
Despite their speed, it would take them a while to reach Cameron, which lay on the opposite side of the Reservation, more than a hundred miles from Ganado. It would take Gaggii a lot longer.
Ooljee was on the cutter’s radio as soon as they were airborne, lighting a fire under the NDPS office in Cameron and the security department at the university. Both would plug Gaggii’s description and vitals into their dayboards. Without volunteering specifics, the sergeant requested that security around the accelerator facility be enhanced. Anyone demanding an explanation was told to go through Ganado channels.
He did not request that added roadblocks be set up between Shungopavi and Cameron, for fear of alerting Gaggii and scaring him off. The last thing they wanted was for their quarry to bolt the Rez. This time there would be no slip-ups, no mistakes, no underestimating their man. The instant they had him back in custody, he would be stripped naked and conducted to a holding facility where he wouldn’t have access to anything more electronically sophisticated than a wall socket.
Once safely clear of the towering artificial canyons and buttes of the city, the pilot configured the skycutter for highspeed flight. The rotor blades retracted to a third of their former length, while the engine slid down its guide slot until it was facing backwards between the two rear-wing supports. It roared with full power, driving the craft forward instead of providing lift. Their speed doubled despite a substantial headwind.
There was no commercial traffic to slow them. Transcontinental flights stuck to higher altitudes, allowing Kla-getoh Control to vector them straight to Cameron. The cutter could bypass the town’s VTOL port and land right on the university grounds, saving time and worry.
Moody peered down through the glass at a land dominated by immense table-top mesas and sloping canyons. Scrub and individual trees staked out individual plots of soil, each competing warily with its neighbors. God had spent so much time preparing the ground here, he mused, that He’d grown tired and left without finishing the landscaping.
Grayhills was gazing at the back of the pilot’s seat, seeking inspiration in bruised vinyl. “The answer’s in the sandpainting somewhere,” she was mumbling to no one in particular. “Maybe he’s not interested in the accelerator. Maybe House of Moving Points refers to chemistry instead of physics.” She leaned forward. Ooljee sat opposite the pilot.
“Isn’t there anything else you can tell us about the Scavenger story?”
“You’ve seen the painting.” Ooljee turned in his seat to look back at them. “Scavenger was supposed to live at a place called Whirling Mountain. It was one of the gates between Earth and the home of the Holy People. ” He looked at his partner. “A sandpainting itself is called ikah, which means ‘the place where gods come and go,’ referring to their spiritual abodes.
“Such gates are common to many cultures. In Tibet they think the city of Lhasa is such a place. In Italy I suppose many believers would point to the Vatican. Geography that is spiritually as well as temporally tangent. Such concepts are not easy for some people to understand.”
“Imagine where that leaves me,” Moody murmured. Ooljee continued. “The eagles gave the snakes bird power so they could help raise Scavenger, who ascended through the skyhole wrapped in a black cloud to shield him from his enemies. Lightning and rainbows, which signify power, guard the design.”
“Rainbows.” Grayhills traced lazy designs on the back of the pilot’s seat. “Jagged lightning. Black clouds. Does that suggest anything to either of you? I mean, you two have been studying this sandpainting for weeks, solely with an eye toward catching a murderer. Stand back a little and try to view it from a different perspective.”
Moody’s expression knotted as he realized what she was driving at. “I’ve crossed the peninsula a few times to visit the Kennedy Center and watch a couple of launches. Nothing major; just weekly orbital station resupply flights. But even the small ones make an impression.” He stared at her. “Lightning. Black clouds ascending. Bursts of multicolored light. Birds flying every which way. Maybe not all hawks and eagles, but birds. That’s not a bad description of the scene at a liftoff. Is that what you’re trying to get me to say?”
She didn’t reply, simply met his gaze evenly.
Ooljee looked back at him, wincing as the sky cutter impacted a pocket of inconsiderate air. Moody didn’t think his friend liked flying.
“The Anasazi made good pots. They built substantial dwellings. They wove baskets. But to the best of my knowledge no launch facilities have ever been discovered at Keet Seel or Awatobi.”
“That might also be true of whoever left this web behind,” Moody pointed out, “so maybe they used something else instead. Something different.”
“One hatathli’s rainbow is another’s stream of photons,” Grayhills suggested. “Jagged lightning as force field, black cloud as exhaust. The sandpainting we’re discussing isn’t about frogs and the four sacred plants. Analogies can be drawn here, gentlemen, that are no more farfetched than what we know to be real. The eagles and hawks could be suggestive of something else, or they might actually be representative of birds disturbed by a liftoff. Or a landing.” Moody’s thoughts were racing now, and try as he might, he couldn’t rein them in. “How do the snakes fit in?” Grayhills sagged a little. “I admit they don’t make any sense to me, and they’re central to the design.”
“They may be descriptive of something we have not yet imagined.” Ooljee stared at his partner, his fingers tightening on the back of his seat as the skycutter bounced through a cloud. “We are in over our heads again, my friend. We need more help.” His eyes darted to Grayhills. “No offense.”
“None taken, but you could call in the entire advisory staff of the National Academy of Sciences and it wouldn’t do any good. By the time you could assemble and brief them, this Gaggii will likely have accomplished whatever it is he has set out to do. I haven’t been here very long, but you two already have me thinking like a cop. Let’s catch him first. Then we can turn the business of interpreting the sandpainting over to a properly accredited committee so 1 can go back to debugging mollys and you can go back to catching ordinary rapists and crazyboys.