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interrupt box he'd spliced into the cable linking his spinner to the kitchen
unit. The single warning LED glowed a comforting, steady green.
The frustrated detective relented a little. "I suppose so. What do we do now?
Go find ourselves a medicine man? Or an art catalog?"
Ooljee rose and approached the monitor. With a ringer he traced the jagged
border. "This is a lightning guardian. I doubt it has anything to do with what
we witnessed earlier, but it is kind of nice to see it here." His finger
spiraled inward. "I do not recognize any of these yei figures.
The feather designs are all wrong. So are the heads. They should be
rectangular for female yets, round for male. Not like this. Perhaps whoever
originally drew them was trying to be funny."
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"Yeah. I can hardly restrain myself," Moody murmured sardonically.
"They are holding many things I also do not recognize." Ooljee tapped the
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monitor's plastic surface. "This might be a medicine pouch, or it might be
something completely different. I do not have any idea what the central
pattern represents, because of the strange shapes it contains.
These," he indicated the colored bars, "could almost be whirling rainbows,
except the colors and proportions are all wrong. But these two additional
guardian figures up here" and his hand moved up toward the top of the
monitor "look very much like Gila monsters."
"Very instructive." Moody belched. "Anthropology 101. What does it get us?"
"Very little, on the face of it." Frowning, Ooljee walked back to the kitchen
table and turned to study the complex image anew. "But there is a relevant
ritual." Moody sat down tiredly. "Not another ritual." Ooljee was unrepentant.
"It is called the Hand-Trembling Ritual. By it you
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t specifically invoke Gila Monster, a deity who sees and keeps track of
everything that occurs. So the legends say." "What about it?"
"Ever hear a better description of an all-inclusive database?"
"I've heard better names. So there's a database called Gila Monster. Do you
access it, or feed it?"
"You do not believe me. I am not sure / believe me. But there is something
there." He studied the softly humming screen appraisingly. "When working with
Gila Monster, you do the Hand-Trembling ceremony. If it works, it leads to
what you are looking for. That, or..." "Or?" Moody prompted him. "You hear the
voice of Gila Monster." Though he'd never been outside the South, Moody knew
what a Gila monster looked like from watching nature pro-
grams on the vid. He was not sure he wanted to speak with one.
Ooljee continued. "The Navaho name for the ceremony means 'to look for
something without looking.'
You could not pronounce it."
"Do you have a vitamin ceremony? My enthusiasm level is way down."
"And I am running out of ideas.** The sergeant pursed his lips as he eyed the
monitor. His spinner sat on the table, active and alert. The telltale on the
interrupt box leading to die home unit shone bright green, giving no
indication of behaving in anything other than an accepted, dignified
electronic manner.
"1 have told you before that I am no hatathli: just a cop. with an interest in
the old Ways. As I
remember it, the Hand-Trembling ceremony is comparatively simple and
straightforward. Not like
Blessingway or Shooting Way. Wait here a minute." He turned and exited the
kitchen. Moody looked after him. "Where are you going?" "To look up some
details."
"How many domestic mollys do y'all have in this place, anyway?''
"Just two. The one on the counter, and one in the boys* room for their school
work. It won't interface with the tower molly, but I can access the
educational library system with it That should be sufficient.**
^ While waiting for his host to return, Moody busied him-itself with raiding
the refrigerator and examining the image :f-frozen on the zenat. The twisting
humanlike figures and 1 accompanying symbols, though unfamiliar, were arrayed
,a£ainst the neutral background in symmetrical, orderly fash-^jjqo. Nor did
one have to be an expert to identify the two ;$lfopes at the open east end of
the sandpainting as lizardlike. ^Ififet was the direction from which spirits
entered, he re-
Ipnembered Ooljee telling him.
The sergeant returned, studying some paper printouts.
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His lips moved as he read, as if he were rehearsing. "I probably will not do
this right."
"It probably won't matter," Moody argued. "Look, why don't we just call it an
evening and go get some supper? If you're that into continuing this we can
come back to it in the morning."
"They may call me to report to work in the morning. I want to work on it now."
Moody shrugged. "It's your kitchen. I'm just taking up space here. It's just
that I thought you told me you didn't believe in any of this spirit stuff."
"Not in spirits. In reason and logical progression. Even coincidence has its
break point, my friend. Anyhow, it won't take very long." He wasn't exactly
pleading, but the detective could see that his colleague was going to have to
get this out of his system. Well, it would be worth a few minutes of silliness
to accomplish that.
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