“Until then we are faced with the reality of this web, so why should we not also be willing to allow the possibility of ancient visitation by spaceship? If you grant that, you can also envision a few surviving Anasazi turning whatever knowledge they may have acquired from such visitors either by intent or accident, into sandpaintings and chants. Ways that have almost but not quite been forgotten.”
“I wonder what else our hypothetical visitors left lying around?” Moody tried to see past the pilot. “Paul’s told me that more than five hundred distinct sandpainting designs have survived. No telling how many have been forgotten. I wonder how many others contain templates?” He swallowed hard.
“I’m with Samantha on one thing, though. I still don’t see how the snakes fit in. If we’re envisioning some kind of craft taking off, everything else makes sense. But not the snakes.”
“Maybe they were the passengers,” she suggested.
Moody found the image thus sparked unpleasant to contemplate, coming as he did from the tropical South, where snakes of any kind were automatically treated with caution.
“Unlikely,” said Ooljee. “The Way is clear on that much. The snakes helped Scavenger to rise through the Skyhole. He was the passenger, not them. Still, who is to say how accurate even a hatathli’s interpretation is? For example, there are many words in the chants which cannot be translated. Words whose meaning has been forgotten. Interesting to imagine what some of them might really be describing: webs, visitors, strange machines.” He was silent for several moments. “So much of our tradition is oral; so little written down.
“Our legends say that this world is only one of five. Other religions mention but a single world. Why do the stories of our forefathers describe four others? They are real places in legend. Might they also be real places in space?
“The People traditionally regard space as unbounded. We allow room for growth, adaptation, reinterpretation of ideas old and new. Just what you might expect of people whose ancestors were forced to cope with the appearance
of strange beings from another world.” He tapped the spinner clipped to his service belt.
“It is traditional to combine new powers with the old. Why not sandpaintings and chants and computer webs? What troubles me are those legends which speak of the universe as a very delicately balanced place, full of immensely powerful forces for good or evil. You would say beneficent or malign. If this balance is upset, even unintentionally, all kinds of terrible things can happen.
“You recall that I spoke of hozho.” Moody nodded. “It is interesting that tradition insists only man can upset that balance.”
Moody mulled it over. “That could be the warning the visitors left behind with their garbage. Like the skull and crossbones on a can of poison.”
“Or it might refer to something entirely different,” Ooljee argued.
“How do you fix the universe if somebody like Gaggii knocks it out of kilter?”
“I’d think you would know the answer to that by now, my friend. You restore hozho, balance, by performing the right Way.”
“Wonderful.” Moody leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms over his chest. “Hey, I got it. Gaggii’s committed two murders. By catching him and putting him away where he can’t bother anything ever again, don’t we restore balance? The DA’s office will think so, anyway.”
“You grasp the concept, my friend.” Ooljee was amused. “I hope that is all it will take.” His smile faded. “Something else: if certain conditions and behavior are repeated with precision, prior events can recur accordingly. Say a sick deer wanders down a certain path in ancient times. Today another deer takes the same path, at the same pace. Traditionalists believe that the first deer’s sick confusion can enter the mind of the contemporary one and it will become ill or disoriented in the manner of the first.”
“What are you driving at?” Grayhills asked him. “Nothing.” The sergeant loosened his death-grip on the back of his seat. “Only that if Gaggii uses the web to reiterate some kind of ancient alien schematic, a traditionalist would expect any occurrence relevant to that schematic to also repeat itself. Tradition insists that a precisely determined set of conditions should always produce precisely the same effects at a later time.”
Grayhills pursed her lips. “Sounds like causality to me. I thought we were discussing traditional Navaho medicine, not quantum mechanics.”
Ooljee shrugged. “A rose by any other name.”
“What kind of ‘relevant event’ should we be on the lookout for?”
“I have no idea. But it might be a good idea to keep an eye on the sky.”
Moody involuntarily glanced upward, only to note when his gaze fell that his partner was grinning at him. That Navaho sense of humor again.
“If we run into any large black clouds descending on bolts of lightning and rainbow pillars, you’ll be laughing out of the other side of your face.”
“I do not expect that to happen.” Ooljee repressed his grin. “I am just telling you what the old legends say. As we have seen already, some of them have turned out to be true in ways not previously imagined. We cannot rule any possibilities out.
“Keep in mind that the Universe is affected by what is good, which in Navaho means that which is under control, and that which is evil, which is anything out of control. Right now it is Gaggii who is out of control, not the web, not something we have yet to put a name to. Perhaps you are righter than you think, my friend. Maybe we catch Gaggii, maybe we do restore hozho. Not to mention complying with contemporary criminal procedure. 1 don’t have any trouble with that.”
“Hang on!” the pilot called out to them. “Might be a little choppy coming into Cameron. I’m starting down.”
Moody had plenty of time to think as he checked his harness. The flight from Ganado had left him more uneasy and confused than he’d been before. His mind swarmed with unbidden images of strange craft inhabited by alien creatures, of refuse dumped just outside reality, waiting to be gathered up by a garbage truck that was a thousand years behind schedule.
Someone had watched and waited while that garbage was being dumped, the way a cat waits for its chance. Or maybe that nameless Anasazi or Navaho had been instructed by a visitor with unknown motives on how to sift through the pile. By one means or another, the knowledge had been handed down and passed along for a thousand years, its purpose forgotten, until Yistin Gaggii had learned how to interpret the symbols, had rediscovered how to access that which had been left behind.
Moody found that he was furious with the long departed visitors. Leaving behind something as awesome as the web without proper instructions or warnings was akin to dropping a pocket nuclear device in a schoolyard. If Ooljee’s traditions were to be believed, they might be blindly poking and prodding at something just as lethal.
They might never know exactly what it was, he thought nervously, unless it went off.
What if Gaggii banged on it hard enough, or shook it violently enough, or in some other way upset its hoihol He almost preferred to think of giant snakes wriggling their loathsome way out of attenuated starships. Were those sinuous shapes simple embellishments which had been added down through the centuries by imaginative hatathlis? Or did they somehow really relate to the sandpainting’s greater purpose?