Still, something about all of this felt right, as if it was what she was meant to do. Archaeology was a lot like detective work, and like a detective, Jade had long appreciated the importance of trusting her instincts. Those instincts had brought her here; the least she could do was check the place out.
She got out and led the procession up to the building, which turned out to be an interpretive center for the site. They spent a few minutes browsing the collection of stone artifacts and graphic displays describing the discoveries made at the site. In addition to the spheres, archaeologists had uncovered cobblestone foundations and stone tools, which showed that the giant stone orbs were important to the primitive culture that had inhabited the region, but offered no clue as to why, or how they had been used. Behind the building, a network of walking trails crisscrossed the site where the stone spheres lay scattered like marbles left behind by a giant child. A few were still buried, with the just the tops protruding above the ground. Several were badly eroded and could hardly still be called spheres, while others had been carved with primitive glyphs; historians had yet to determine if the markings were from the time of the spheres’ creation, or some later addition, like Stone Age graffiti.
They visited each in turn, looking for anything that might provide a revelation, but after nearly two hours, even Professor was ready to call it quits. They returned to the visitor’s center to get information about the other sites in the area.
The woman at the information countered shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said in passable English. “But the other sites are not open for tourism.”
“We’re not tourists,” Jade explained, patiently. “We’re archaeologists.”
The woman looked pointedly at Professor in his “adventurer” hat, and then back at Jade. “I’m sure that you are,” she said in a dubious tone, “but you would need permission from the National Museum.”
“We were just there,” Professor said, quickly. “They sent us here.” It was almost the truth.
“If you have permission to visit the sites,” said the woman. “Then there’s nothing more I can do to help you.”
Jade shook her head, no longer feeling quite so patient. “Can you at least give us some information about the other sites?”
The woman sighed. “There is El Silencio, a few kilometers up the Terraba River on the south bank, at the foot of the Coastal Range. The largest sphere we have found is there; two and a half meters in diameter. There is also a cobblestone pavement there. Batambal is just north of here, right off the highway. Four spheres have been located there as well as mounds and other cobblestone structures. Then there is Grijalba, further to the west on the Balsar River. There are more pavements and structures there. There are other sites as well, more than forty-five in total, but those are the most significant. Oh, and of course there’s Isla del Caño.”
“Isla del Caño?” Jade didn’t recall that name from her earlier research, and the idea of finding the spheres on an island intrigued her. “Tell me about that.”
“Isla del Caño is in the ocean, about twenty-five kilometers from Bahia Drake. It is also a very popular tourist destination,” she added with more than a trace of haughtiness. She produced a colorful tourist brochure with a photo of a gray and green tropical island protruding up from an azure sea, and bold yellow letters that advertised boat tours.
Jade took the pamphlet and stared at the image on the cover as is in a trance. “There are spheres there?”
“Two small spheres. Other sites have been identified but not thoroughly explored.”
Jade turned to the others. “I’ve seen this place before.”
“Sure you have,” replied Professor. “It was in Jurassic Park, only they called it something else; Isla Sorna, I think.”
The woman at the counter clapped enthusiastically at this bit of trivia, but Jade put a hand on Professor’s shoulder. “No. You don’t understand. I remember this island. I remember being there.”
Dorion stepped forward and took the brochure from her. His eyes went wide in recognition and he nodded slowly. “Yes. This was where we found…” His forehead creased as if the memory had slipped away.
“We found…” Jade stopped and corrected herself. “We will find something there. Something important.”
“What?”
She searched her memories, memories of something she hadn’t even done yet. How was that possible? Until she’d seen the picture of Isla del Caño, she hadn’t even been aware of a memory associated with the island. Yet, evidently it had been something glimpsed in the blackout episode when she’d touched the Earth stone. Now, she could vividly remember the boat ride, the salt air, that first glimpse of the rocky nub sticking out of the sea. But nothing more. The rest of the memory was still shrouded, an outline of something barely glimpsed from a distance. “I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out when we get there.”
Because the Diquis Delta was a mangrove jungle through which snaked dozens of braided river channels, there were no roads connecting Palmar Sur to Agujitas, the resort town on Bahia Drake where they would be able to charter a boat to Isla del Caño. To get to Bahia Drake, they would first have to take a boat ride through those channels in the imposing mangrove forest. They left the Everest with a rental agent in the village of Sierpe — evidently, this was a common practice for tourists trying to reach the coast — and boarded the afternoon speedboat ferry for the twenty-five mile journey.
The scenic riverboat ride would have been enjoyable under any circumstances, but as Jade gazed out at the passing greenery — the spindly roots of mangrove trees reaching down like octopus tentacles into mud flats exposed by the outgoing tide, caimans lounging on sandbars, too many birds to count — she felt a different kind of excitement. The excitement of seeing something that was already intimately familiar, for the very first time.
“I don’t get it,” she finally told Dorion. “In that original vision…premonition…whatever you want to call it. I died. We all did. And when we changed that future, all of that just kind of faded away. I barely remember it now. So how did I also see this future, too?”
“The space-time distortion caused by the dark matter field might have exposed you to several different possible futures. You wouldn’t remember them, so to speak, until you encountered some trigger, which in this case was seeing that picture of Isla del Caño. I felt it too, and I felt the same thing when I saw you for the first time in Teotihuacan, even though it’s been several years since I encountered the dark matter field.”
“So this might happen again? I’ll keep having déjà vu for the rest of my life?”
Dorion shrugged. “Is it such a bad thing? I would thing think that, in your profession, it would be particularly fortuitous.”
Professor cleared his throat. “You do realize that we’re caught in a Bootstrap Paradox.”
“A what?”
“The Bootstrap Paradox is a time travel problem where a person travels back in time and gives himself important information — like the plans for a time machine — which then makes it possible for him to travel back in time to give himself the plans, ad infinitum. Where did the knowledge of how to build the time machine really come from? It’s like lifting yourself off the ground by pulling on your bootstraps.”
“He speaks of a temporal causality loop,” Dorion explained. “It is a theoretical question that physicists and science fiction writers often concern themselves with.”