Professor heaved a sigh of relief and stepped away from center court, hurrying back to the edge of the dais to join Dorion. “Well played. Does this mean we win a free trip back into the tunnel? Or should we just take our ball and go home?”
Jade rolled her eyes. “I vote home but let’s leave the ball. I don’t ever want to play this game again.”
Professor grinned. “But you’re so good at it.”
TEN
Jade stared at the enormous stone sphere and felt the memories of the underground ordeal come flooding back.
After nearly three days, her recollection of the events of that night had mostly faded to something like the memory of a bad dream. What most occupied her thoughts and filled her with anxiety was not the terror she had experienced when the bomb had detonated, killing Acosta and Sanchez, or the ball court, or hours spent making their way back to freedom, but rather the lingering uncertainty that surrounded the attempt on their lives. Why had Hodges turned on them? Who was he working for, and perhaps more importantly, working with? Until they knew that, they had to let the world believe that they were dead.
They had emerged from the labyrinthine cave system about an hour before dawn. After surviving the ball court, the rest of the journey was almost anticlimactic. They found another passage leading away and soon Professor reported that they were ascending. As before, the tunnel was wide and easy to negotiate. More than once, the way forward was blocked by cave-ins, but the knowledge that they were getting closer to escape supplied them with the energy to dig their way out. As they broke through one collapsed section of tunnel, Jade felt cool air rush in, and knew they were nearly free. A few minutes later, they wriggled through the opening and found themselves on the lower flanks of a stone pyramid — the Pyramid of the Moon. Their long undulating journey through the Underworld had brought them back to the surface a mere stone’s throw from where it had begun.
The exit hole let out almost directly above the Plaza of the Moon, where the ancient inhabitants of the city had made sacrifices to the Great Goddess. The altar to the Great Goddess had, it seemed, been a literal passage to the Underworld. Whether the entrance had been sealed by the original inhabitants as a way of protecting the power within, or by future inhabitants, was a question that would have to wait for another day. Jade and the others had carefully concealed evidence of their escape route before sneaking away from the archaeological preserve.
The site was swarming with activity — military vehicles and patrols — but there was no way to determine whether it was a search-and-rescue effort or a sweep to ensure that no one had survived the explosion. Inasmuch as the bomb had almost certainly been military ordnance, they had to assume the latter, and furthermore, that Hodges had the support of the Mexican Army or someone with influence over the government.
She and Dorion had spent a frustrating day sequestered away while Professor somehow procured fake passports and funds for travel. “I know a guy who knows a guy. It’s a SEAL thing,” he had explained when she had asked, as if that answered everything. By afternoon of the following day, the trio that had escaped the Underworld realm of the Great Goddess were fifteen hundred miles away in Costa Rica.
Now however, as Jade stared at the enormous stone ball, she couldn’t help but think about the strange discovery that had lit the fuse on this entire nightmare. Yet, this enormous sphere, which adorned a rooftop courtyard at the Museo Nacional de Costa Rica — one of more than three hundred such spheres, ranging in size from about two feet in diameter to well over six, uncovered in an overgrown river delta near the Pacific Coast over the course of the last century — was the reason they had come to the Central American country.
A walk through the museum had supplemented Jade’s prior knowledge of the pre-Columbian history of Costa Rica. Because of its remote location and rugged terrain, the narrow isthmus had not supported the rise of advanced organized societies like its neighbors to the north, and so had remained outside Jade’s area of academic interest. For the most part, the physical remains of ancient cultures that had made the narrow strip of land between two oceans their home had been swallowed up by the jungle. One notable exception was a culture known as the Diquis, which had flourished from about the year 700 C.E. only to be wiped out completely, shortly after contact with European explorers in the sixteenth century. The Diquis were best known as the artisans who had created — probably, at least — the enormous stone spheres.
Little was actually known about the spheres, which had first been discovered in the 1930s by workers clearing the jungle to make room for banana plantations. They did not appear in the historical record, apparently forgotten by the last of the Diquis and overgrown by the rain forest long before the arrival of the Spanish colonists. The only way to estimate their age was by dating the soil horizons in which they had been found — a fairly reliable technique known as stratigraphy. It was believed that the earliest spheres had been carved about 600 C.E. but many of them had been disturbed or even destroyed by workmen and treasure hunters. What stratigraphy could not reveal was the reason why the primitive Diquis had made the enormous stone sculptures that were very nearly perfect spheres.
It was certainly possible that the orbs beneath the pyramids of Teotihuacan had no connection whatsoever to the Diquis spheres, but Jade wasn’t a believer in coincidence. This wasn’t as simple as disparate cultures discovering pyramidal architecture thousands of miles and hundreds of years apart; spheres were extremely rare in the ancient world. Unfortunately, trying to prove — or for that matter disprove — a connection was proving to be a tough nut to crack, especially since so little was known about what the locals called “Las Bolas.”
Jade reached out cautiously, placed her palm against the sphere, and closed her eyes.
“Well?” asked Professor.
She smiled without humor and drew back her hand. “As they say around here, nada.”
“So what’s the next move?”
“There are several active archaeological sites in the south where the spheres were discovered. Most of them are in the Oso region, close to the town of Palmar Sur. I say we head there and look for anything that might indicate a connection to Teotihuacan: trade goods, artwork…” She glanced over at Dorion. “Maybe catch some WIMP vibes.”
She expected the physicist to correct the mischaracterization, but he surprised her by letting it pass. “It may be that something about the shape of a sphere facilitates the collection of dark matter. We may very well experience more space-time distortions, particularly if a sphere has been undisturbed for a long period of time.”
From their tour of the museum, they had learned that nearly all of the spheres had been discovered in the valley of the Rio Grande de Terraba, just a few miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. Hundreds of them had already been removed and relocated so that they were now scattered all across the country, adorning parks and private gardens. Some had been destroyed, either because they were seen as an impediment to agricultural pursuits or because of an unfounded rumor that the spheres concealed golden treasure. Nevertheless, new sphere discoveries were happening all the time in the surrounding area and four archaeological sites in the Diquis Delta had been granted UNESCO World Heritage status. Jade hoped that, by viewing some of the spheres in situ, and relatively undisturbed, she might be able to formulate an answer to the riddle of the Teotihuacan spheres.