Cyber Way

Foster, Alan Dean. Cyber Way. New York: Ace, 1990. [S. F.] Book Club Edition.

A rich art collector and his housekeeper are very mysteriously murdered and one of his Navajo sandpaintings destroyed. Police investigation reveals the sandpainting pattern to be an access to a database that may be the universe. See for a computer screen as a portal into an alternative reality, imagery of humans within a dataweb, and for the domestication, or feminization, of computer jargon: the major cop protagonist enjoys doing "mollywork," at his desk "sieving the departmental mollyspheres," using standard-issue "spinners" (10); the webs he uses were created by "police weavers" (13, and passim).