A large motor home was parked nearby, the satellite dish on its roof a miniature of the much bigger one mounted behind the hogan. Next to it stood a pyramid of twelve tracking solar panels. Cables ran from the motor home into the building.
Moody automatically drew his gun and dropped to a crouch, studying vehicle and structure. “He’s in one or the other. Wish I had a small shapecharger. I’d put one in the motor home, another in the house, and we’d just walk away from the craters, storm or no storm.”
“We cannot rush him,” Ooljee whispered. “We do not know what sort of weapons he may have stockpiled in there, or may have brought with him.” His eyes scanned the ground around the hogan. “There may be perimeter security, either passive or active. And there is something else.” He pointed toward the hot springs.
Moody squinted, shrugged. “So he can take a hot bath if he wants to. So what?”
“There is another sandpainting. It deals with an entity named Big Monster.”
“Nothing subtle about your traditions, is there?”
The sergeant looked over at him. “Big Monster lives at a place called Hot Water.”
Moody sighed. “I’ll bet the northern part of this state is full of hot springs.”
“So it is. In fact, the San Francisco peaks near Flagstaff are said to have last erupted as recently as the eleventh century. There is plenty of activity.”
“So this one reminds you of a sandpainting. So?”
“I would rather it did not. You see, Big Monster did not like Earth people. He destroyed them as fast as they were made. Until he was taken care of, the world was not a fit place for human beings to live in.” He returned his attention to the view below. “I just find it interesting that Gaggii would choose a site close to a hot spring for his final refuge.”
“Well I don’t see any monsters, big or small,” Moody growled. “I see a crummy little shack housing a murderer.
I see—”
Grayhills interrupted him. She was staring, not at the hogan below, but across the canyon. Staring and pointing. “What’s that? Oh my, what is that?”
Moody looked up sharply.
It was just a tiny dark spot, a small speck of night against the ruddy talus. Except that it shone with an inner light, hanging in the air hard by the opposite rim of the plateau.
As they sat gaping, it expanded like a droplet of mercury on a sheet of glass, ballooning first a little in one direction,
. then another. Shining down through the eye of the micro-hurricane, sunlight gleamed on its surface as if it were fashioned of polished black steel. It drifted slightly to the south, then stopped.
When it had swelled to an oval the size of Ooljee’s truck, it impacted the edge of the plateau. Sand, gravel, then larger rocks, began slipping from the rim directly above the object. When they reached the oval, they vanished. A small creosote bush was undercut and it, too, disappeared into the vitreous umbra.
“What the hell is that?” Ooljee whispered aloud.
Moody spoke without turning. “How should I know? Y’all are the expert on Navaho legend.”
“That is a physical manifestation,” the sergeant replied evenly, “not a religious one.”
“The sonuvabitch has accessed something.” Moody’s fingers tightened on his pistol. “He’s trawling in that damn web and he’s snagged something new. Doesn’t he give a shit?”
“He has killed at least two people and he tried to kill us,” Ooljee reminded his partner. “I suspect he does not.”
The blackness continued to expand. As they watched, a huge section of cliff broke free and tumbled into the disk.
And a wind was rising.
It came rushing down out of the sky, whipping past their faces, straight down into the eye of the swirling microhurricane like water dumped in a bucket. It blew by Moody’s eyes, whispered in his ears; the sound of dust and pollen and bits of soil being sucked away. The disk was inhaling the Earth.
“Sheets of sky.”
“What’s that?” Moody spoke without turning, unable to take his eyes from the spectacle.
Ooljee sat in the dirt, his gun hanging loosely from his
fingers. “The gods drew on sheets of sky and traveled in ships that looked like black clouds. Remember the painting? ‘Scavenger Being Lifted Through the Skyhole by Eagles and Hawks Assisted by Snakes with Bird Power.’ We had an analogy for everything but the snakes, because snakes cannot fly. They burrow.”
“Burrow.” Grayhills stood staring numbly at the carcinomatous tenebrosity that had taken root on the other side of the plateau. “Rats, moles, gophers, worms. Worms. That’s funny.”
Once more Moody felt like the dumb fat kid in Mrs. Waterson’s tenth grade science class.
“What about worms?”
She ignored him, spoke instead to Ooljee. “Snakes burrow. Worms burrow. Snakes also stand for lightning, don’t they?” He nodded. “Lightning that burrows. It’s only natural to think of spaceships when we try to envision a method of travel that involves lightning and black clouds. Natural, and wrong. Those old hatathlis weren’t trying to describe a ship taking off. They were being much more literal. They were trying to describe burrowing.” Leaves and twigs blew past her cheeks as her hair streamed toward the far side of the canyon.
“Will somebody tell me what the hell all this has to do with worms?” Moody pleaded.
There was a funny smile on her face. “The sandpainting shows snakes. Today we might use worms. It’s all the same burrowing. I think the skyhole in your sandpainting is meant to be taken literally, not as a metaphor. I think Scavenger, whatever he was, didn’t go up into the sky. He went through a real skyhole.” Her gaze shifted once more to the steadily expanding ellipsis across the canyon. “Or as we might call it, a wormhole.”
The faster he went, the farther behind he got, Moody reflected. “What is a wormhole?”
She shrugged, as if precise descriptions did not matter.
“Twisted spacetime. If you grab a cardboard tube at each end and twist it in opposite directions, and keep on twisting it, what do you end up with?”
“A busted cardboard tube.”
“Eventually the ends become congruent. There are scientists who believe that if you could get a good grip on spacetime you could twist it like that, so that the two ends which originally might have been hundreds of parsecs apart would end up occupying the same space. You could step through this end and come out somewhere else, somewhere far away.” She indicated the obumbrated disk.
“There’s a causal boundary over there, a boundary attached to a spacetime that depends only on the structure Gaggii has generated with the aid of the alien web and the Cameron accelerator. A causal boundary, detective, does not distinguish between boundary points even at infinite distances.”
By now the disk had taken a visible bite out of the cliff face opposite. It was no longer expanding as rapidly, but it continued to eat away at sandstone and soil.
“What you’re saying,” Moody said slowly, “is that whoever came avisiting this part of the world a thousand years or so ago didn’t use any ships? They just dropped in through a hole in the sky?”
“What does he want with a wormhole?” Ooljee climbed to his feet, struggling against the wind.
“Maybe he wants to talk to whoever left their junk here. Maybe he just wants to say hello.” Moody kicked at the ground. “Or maybe he wants to ask them some questions.”
“Grand presumptions often lead to disaster,” observed the sergeant moodily. “Ants do not ask questions of people who dump garbage, because if that attention is gained, such people are likely to exclaim ‘ants!,’ and reach for the bug spray or the swatter.” He stepped over the edge of the cliff, began slipping and sliding awkwardly down the crumbling talus.