Oracle

by David Wood

  “Great,” muttered Jade. “Robot spiders. Nothing freaky about that.”

  “You afraid of spiders?” Professor whispered in her ear.

  She ignored him. Despite his persuasive arguments in the cantina, she was far from happy about the way he’d hijacked her dig. The only reason she hadn’t blown the whistle and told Acosta about it was that Hodges did happen to have a robot that would let her see the hidden chamber and she didn’t want to wait another week for Acosta to find someone else.

  I’m not afraid of spiders, she thought grumpily. But robot spiders? That’s just wrong.

  If she had still been keeping score, that probably would have been strike three for Hodges, but she wasn’t, not after learning about Norfolk.

  She had never regretted walking away from Tam Broderick’s offer to join the Myrmidons. She was an archaeologist, not a secret agent, and besides, the last thing she needed was to be working alongside Maddock again. But that didn’t mean she was apathetic about the threat posed by the Dominion.

  Still, they weren’t going to show up here. She was sure of that.

  “Looks like it’s working just fine,” she told Hodges. “Send it in.”

  Hodges spoke into the mic again. “Shelob, end diagnostic.” The robot’s legs retracted and it crab-walked over to stand in front of its master. Hodges picked up one of two joystick controls wired to his computer and spoke again. “Initiate manual guidance.”

  The robot began moving again, only now it was responding directly to Hodges’ will. It walked toward the small hole Jade had excavated and proceeded within.

  “Shelob, light mode.”

  A light flashed on inside the rocky niche, and Jade saw the interior of the access tunnel appear on the computer screen. The robot continued forward at a plodding but relentless pace, and in less than a minute, reached the junction with the vertical shaft, which appeared as a dark hole in the center of the image. Jade had peeked through during her excavation but there had not been much to see.

  She had tried to convince Acosta to let her go in. She was an average climber, maybe not ready for Yosemite, but more than capable of making this ascent. Ever since that business in Germany, she had made a point of always bringing climbing gear along wherever she went. Acosta however steadfastly insisted that the initial survey be done with the robot. Jade suspected the reason for this had more to do with Acosta’s fascination with technology than a desire to preserve the site. Similar remote surveys conducted by a competing team the previous year had revealed previously undiscovered passages under the nearby Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent, along with a collection of mysterious metallic orbs, the significance of which were still being debated. Robots and futuristic technology was sexy. Old fashioned archaeology? Not so much.

  Shelob advanced until the camera was looking directly through the hole, shining its light into the dark vertical shaft beyond.

  “Here’s where my girl will show you what she’s made of,” Hodges said with a triumphant grin. He set down the joystick. “Shelob, autonomous mode.”

  The camera view lurched forward and then swung around with dizzying abruptness. When the image finally stabilized, it showed what looked like an ordinary tunnel shaft, but Jade knew the camera was now facing directly up. The robot was making the ascent without any input from Hodges.

  The next few minutes were interminably long as the robot shuffled up the six-foot wide vertical shaft. In the glow of its high-intensity light, the smooth, perfectly round walls gave the impression of traveling through an old pipe. After the first twenty feet or so, the texture of the walls changed from ordinary bedrock to a more uniform surface that was unnaturally smooth and blood red in color.

  “Painted limestone mortar,” intoned Acosta. “Remarkably well preserved. We’ve moved above the foundation and into the interior of the pyramid. The exterior would have been painted similarly and adorned with murals.”

  Jade noted the absence of decorative artwork and wondered again at the reason for this well shaft that seemed to lead nowhere and which had been sealed off by its builders. Acosta’s speculation about it representing a passage to the Underworld was plausible enough, but Jade was beginning to wonder if they weren’t perhaps moving in the wrong direction.

  A few minutes later, the end of the tunnel came into view. The light shone past the mouth of the shaft, and reflected off the domed ceiling of a larger chamber. The robot paused there for a moment as if allowing the people watching the video feed to appreciate the view.

  “She’s trying to figure out how to climb out of the shaft,” explained Hodges. “It’s a little tricky, but she knows what to do.”

  “Can you reorient the camera?” Jade asked.

  “Sure thing.” Hodges picked up the second joystick and as he toggled it, the view began to change. Jade could now see more of the curving ceiling, including uniquely stylized images rendered in bright yellow and green against the red background.

  “That’s the Great Goddess!” Acosta exclaimed, pointing at the screen.

  Jade recognized the image, a spider-like figure that was believed to represent a deity unique to the Teotihuacan culture, in Mexico at least. “That might explain the vertical tunnel” she said. “The Great Goddess is believed to be the spirit of the Underworld, as well as a symbol of creation, similar to the Spider Grandmother in Southwestern Native American lore.”

  “More spiders,” Professor said in a stage whisper.

  “But no Quetzalcoatl,” replied Jade, matching his tone. “So much for that bright idea.”

  “I did not realize the ancient Americans worshipped a spider god,” Dorion said.

  “Spiders show up in a lot of cultural traditions on the North American continent, sometimes as a trickster—”

  “You mean like the West African spider god Anansi,” interjected Professor.

  “Yes, but more often the spider is seen as a creative or wise force. Her webs are the ideas that hold the universe together.”

  Dorion pondered this for a moment, then asked, “Is there a connection to Arachne of Greek mythology?”

  Jade was surprised at the physicist’s insight. “Not a direct connection, but you find a lot of these archetypes throughout history. Spiders have always been seen as magical creatures for their ability to spin intricate webs. It makes sense that ancient peoples began to see them as a symbol of creation.”

  The conversation fell off as the robot succeeded in lifting itself out of the shaft, giving them an unrestricted view of the chamber. There were more murals, many with familiar themes, but nothing else—no artifacts and certainly no evidence of human remains.

  “Well,” Acosta said after a long silence. “It’s not everything we could have hoped for, but it is certainly a remarkable find nonetheless.”

  Jade wasn’t ready to admit defeat however. “Send the robot down the shaft,” she told Hodges, and then turning to Acosta, added. “What if this was a sacrificial well? We might find a lot more at the bottom than at the top.”

  “Like a Mayan cenote? But why would they seal it off?”

  Jade didn’t have an answer for that, but Acosta evidently did not require convincing. “Mr. Hodges, can you take us down?”

  “No problem,” replied the robotics expert, and then amended, “unless you need to go more than a hundred meters. That’s the limit of Shelob’s cable.”

  “It’s much more likely that we’ll hit groundwater and have to turn back. But since we’re here, we may as well have a look.”

  Water, Jade knew, would not necessarily mean it was—metaphorically speaking—a dry hole. The Maya made extensive use of sacred cenotes—limestone sinkholes—for sacrificial purposes, and some of the greatest troves of Mayan artifacts had been discovered therein. There was a growing body of evidence to support the idea that the Teotihuacanos had performed ritual human sacrifice, though not of the heart-wrenching variety that would later be performed by the Aztecs, but not all offerings were blood sacrifices. The Maya would throw valua
ble artwork into cenotes—jewelry and golden sculptures—to appease their gods.

  Jade mentally began assembling a shopping list of equipment she would need in order to dive. Professor could help her with that; the former SEAL had been her dive-master in Japan, and had a lot more expertise in the water than she. Maybe his intrusion would prove fortuitous after all.

  The camera view swung around to show the top of the shaft, and after a few more minutes of maneuvering, the robot lowered itself into the tunnel and began descending. Jade found herself straining to catch some glimpse of what lay at the bottom of the long shaft, but it remained an impenetrable black dot at the center of the screen.

  A spot of illumination appeared at the center of the darkness.

  “Does anyone else see that?” Jade asked.

  “Could be the light reflecting off water,” Professor suggested.

  As the robot continued deeper, past the opening leading back to the chamber where the group was watching and down into parts of the shaft that had not been revealed by Dorion’s muon detectors, the spot of brightness grew more intense. Meanwhile, the tunnel walls became more irregular. It was still too perfectly vertical to be naturally occurring, but it seemed to Jade as if the craftsmen who had carved out the passage had gradually lost interest in maintaining perfect symmetry.

  “Fifty meters,” Hodges reported. “This sucker is deep.”

  The descent went on for several more minutes until, just as the cable was almost played out, the robot reached the far end of the passage. The source of the reflection however remained maddeningly indistinct; a bright spot directly below. Hodges tried moving the camera, but the bright spot continued to dominate the screen. The glare made it impossible to tell how much deeper the source of the reflection was.

  “End of the line,” announced Hodges.

  Jade turned to Acosta. “You’ve got to let me go in.”

  The administrator gave her an astonished look, but she was ready for him. “I know what I’m doing,” she went on. “I have the equipment and will assume all the risk. I won’t touch anything or take a single step without consulting with you first. You have to let me do this Dr. Acosta. It’s the only way to know what’s down there.”

  Acosta wasn’t ready to give up yet. “Isn’t there any way we can send the robot deeper?” he asked Hodges.

  “I’d need more co-ax. But I’m not sure that would make a difference. It looks like a straight drop, and if that’s water down there, Shelob won’t be much use.”

  Jade let Hodges’ verdict sink in a moment, then instead of repeating her plea, she said simply, “I’ll go get my gear.”

  This time, Acosta did not even try to stop her.

  FOUR

  This is why I love being an archaeologist. Jade squirmed through the hole and looked down into the dark void. The LED headlamp she wore showed nothing that Shelob’s light had not already revealed, but that was about to change.

  She placed her hands—now covered in fingerless gloves with an extra layer of reinforcement in the palms—against the smooth tunnel walls and pulled herself the rest of the way through, trusting the belaying rope secured to her climbing harness to keep her from taking the fast way down. She wriggled around until her feet were braced against the wall and then squeezed the brake release handle on her rappelling descender. The close confines of the tunnel kept her from making dynamic bounds, but the descent into the unknown was no less exhilarating.

  She could make out Shelob at the bottom of the shaft looking like some kind metal drain screen. Four of its legs were stretched out, quartering the passage and holding the robot fixed in place, while the other four had retracted in close against its body. There was more than enough room for Jade to slip between the outstretched appendages, but she wasn’t ready to do that just yet.

  She continued letting out rope—what little was left of it—until the sole of one of her hiking boots touched the robot’s slim central body. She tested her foothold, then let out a little more rope until all her weight was resting atop the robot. Something moved at one end of the body, presumably the camera turning to look at her.

  She unclipped a small Motorola walkie-talkie from her belt and keyed the transmit button. “Can you hear me up there?”

  Under normal conditions, the radio would have been useless, the signal blocked by the surrounding rock, but her signal didn’t have to reach the men in the chamber above. The receiving unit was wired into Shelob’s electronic guts, and the message would make the rest of the journey via the coaxial hardline.

  Hodges’ voice sounded from the speaker. “Loud and clear.”

  “Are you sure this thing can hold my weight for the next pitch?”

  “Better than any of the climbing gear you could use to set your belay.”

  That assurance didn’t fill her with enthusiasm, but she wasn’t about to turn back now. She peered down into the darkness below, noting the shiny spot almost directly underneath the robot. It was easier to judge the distance with her own eyes. “I think it’s only fifty feet or so to the bottom. Can’t tell if it’s submerged or not. I’m going to set the next rope.

  She unlimbered a coil of Kernmantle climbing rope from her shoulder, laying it carefully atop the robot’s thorax, and then went to work rigging a second belay, using the robot as her anchor. When she had checked and double-checked her knots, she shifted the rope into one of the gaps and let it fall. There was a faint rustling sound as the line uncoiled, and then just a second later, a dull thud as most of it landed on something solid.

  “No splash,” Jade said into the walkie-talkie. “Looks like we don’t have to worry about swimming. I’m heading down.”

  There was a jumble of conversation—she heard Professor warning her to watch out for spiders—but Jade focused her attention on the task of unclipping from the first belay and switching to the one she had just rigged.

  Because she was making a rope-only descent into the unknown, she proceeded more cautiously this time, slowly letting out the rope and keeping her eyes on what lay below. Once past the fixed body of the robot, she had a better view of her destination, but what she saw defied both expectations and explanations.

  The source of the reflections appeared to be a large polished metal object—Jade assumed it was a mirror—positioned right below the shaft. She could see her rope trailing off one side. Her original estimate of fifty feet looked to be right on the money and after dropping half that distance, she was able to make out more detail about the cavern into which she was descending.

  The shaft appeared to drop right into the middle of a stadium-sized hollow. The chamber extended in every direction further than her light could penetrate. Aside from the mirror—or whatever it was—the only evidence that the cave was not merely a natural formation was the uniformly smooth floor, which likewise seemed to go on forever. There was nothing on the floor, no altars or statues, nothing at all to hint at the purpose this sealed-off vault had once served.

  She was close enough now to see her reflection in the polished surface below, a weird blob stretched out from the focal point as if she was looking at the back of a spoon. The mirrored surface was convex, curving downward in every direction. The ancients might conceivably have used it for diffusing sunlight and illuminating the rest of the cavern, Jade knew, but it would only have been useful when the sun was directly overhead, and once the pyramid was built, it would have served no purpose at all.

  Jade continued sliding down until she was almost touching the reflector. Up close, she saw that she had been wrong about the object. It wasn’t just a convex mirror; it was a perfect sphere.

  She recalled the discovery made at the Temple of the Feathered Serpent—a strange and unexplained collection of spherical orbs, ranging in size from about two to five inches, covered in iron pyrite to give them a gold-like sheen. This object was considerably larger, easily ten feet in diameter, and although Jade was no metallurgist, she was fairly certain that the metal surface was not “fool’s gold.” It
was the real thing.

  Jade hung there a moment longer, stunned by the discovery and perplexed by its significance. The sphere was like nothing she had ever seen before, certainly not in an archaeological dig. Unlike the hammered gold of most ancient American cultures, this enormous orb was perfectly smooth, as if polished by a machine. She decided she needed a closer look.

  As her feet alighted on the sphere, it occurred to her—too late to do anything about it—that the ancients might have booby-trapped the orb. Nothing happened, but she decided to be more circumspect in her explorations. Pushing off from the top of the sphere, she swung her body out and squeezed the brake release, letting gravity do the rest. She touched down just a few steps away from the enormous golden ball.

  It looked even more impressive at floor level, looming above her, almost double her own height, showing her stretched reflection. It reminded Jade a little of the Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Satisfied that her arrival would not trigger some ancient anti-theft device, she unclipped from the belay and turned to take in the rest of the strange cavern.

  “Hello! Echo!” It took so long for the sound to return to her that Jade was almost startled when it came. The chamber had to be enormous, at least a thousand feet across.

  Before she could begin exploring, the rope trailing down from the shaft started to move, squirming like a snake. She jumped back, startled, and looked up to see someone abseiling down to join her. It was Professor.

  Jade waited until both of his feet were on solid ground to let him have it. “What are you doing? Who said you could come down here?”

  He flashed an indulgent smile. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I needed anyone’s permission. But if you must know, your boss, Dr. Acosta, gave me the green light. Just between you and me, I think he has trust issues.”

  Before Jade could complain further, Professor turned to look at the sphere and gave a low whistle. “Holy…that’s gold!”