by David Wood
Something moved in front of her; Professor, charging headlong toward the center of the court in a desperate effort to do what she could not. Before he could reach it, the ball hit one of the stelae and rebounded back up the slope, away from his direction of travel. He skidded to a stop even as Jade managed to get back to her feet.
A measure of sensation was returning to her hands, all of it bad. She felt like she’d been smacked with a baseball bat; nothing was broken, but the throb of pain was almost paralyzing. She realized now why the ball game was played without hands or even feet; the ball was so heavy, so dense, that trying to hit or kick the ball might easily break the small bones in the extremities.
“You okay?” Professor shouted as he spun around trying to track the ball’s new trajectory.
“Fine!” she lied. “Don’t let it reach the center.”
The ball deflected off another stela—the decorative columns suddenly seemed to be everywhere—and shot straight toward the center as if from a cannon. Professor made a grab for the ball but was half-a-second too slow. Jade threw herself flat across its path trying to catch it with her body.
The ball struck her hip—another stinging impact—and then bounced into the air. She rolled over just in time to see it begin its downward arc and watched helplessly as it struck just above the trough, bounced across to the other side, and then rolled down the slope and in.
The trough was not very deep—the top of the ball protruded out of it—but as soon as the ball struck the bottom, there was a distinctive thump from within. A rhythmic tremor, almost like an engine idling, began to vibrate up through the stone floor.
“Not good,” Jade muttered.
There was a rasping noise and a small puff of dust as something sprang out of the nearest stela.
No, she realized, not just that one.
Each of the stelae throughout the ball court suddenly sprouted arms—or more precisely, a pair of wooden war clubs, lined with razor sharp obsidian blades. None of them were close enough to pose a threat to Jade or Professor, even when, after more eruptions of dust and noise, they all began spinning in place, their arms whirling like lawn mower blades.
Jade caught a glimpse of sudden movement at the back end of the court. Spikes now protruded up through the holes in floor, row after row of three-foot long sharpened stakes, which had shot up in an instant, and then just as quickly disappeared back into the holes.
“Watch the floor!” Jade shouted, heeding her own advice, quickly sliding her feet away from the holes.
There was a loud snap as the entire left flank of the ball court—where both Jade and Professor were standing—bristled with sharpened stakes. Jade felt the air moving around her, felt one of the spikes strike the side of her shoe as it stabbed the air. Then the deadly spears drew back into their holes.
“Jade!”
“I’m okay,” she replied. “You?”
More spikes shot up from the right flank.
“Not a scratch.”
The spears on the left side shot up again, confounding Jade’s expectation of a pattern. Fortunately, neither she nor Professor had moved an inch and they were once again spared.
“The center looks safe,” she called, and as soon as the spikes disappeared back into the floor, she made the short dash to the trough. She wasn’t ready to risk stepping into the well where the ball now rested, so she straddled it. Professor reached the trough a millisecond before the spikes popped up again.
“They’re coming up totally at random” she panted.
Professor shook his head. “There’s a pattern. It’s a mechanical system; there has to be a pattern. It only seems random.”
“Mechanical?”
“Sure. They must have tapped the hydropower.” He jerked a thumb at the dais where water poured from the hands of the Great Goddess. Jade also saw Dorion there, frozen in place and looking utterly helpless.
“Paul! Stay there!” She turned her attention back to Professor. “You figure the pattern out yet?”
“I think so.” He did not sound very confident. “If we stay close to the corners, we can jump back and forth. The timing will be tricky.”
Too tricky, thought Jade. She and Professor might be able to make it, but she doubted that Dorion had the instincts or the coordination to beat the trap. But it isn’t a trap; it’s a test.
“We’re supposed to beat the game,” she said, thinking out loud. “That’s why they built it this way.”
Professor’s eyebrows drew together in a frown, but then he nodded slowly. “How do we win?”
Jade looked around the ball court, trying to put herself in the role of an ancient supplicant seeking entrance to the Underworld domain of the Great Goddess. The priests would have launched the ball out into the court, and the players would have done their best to keep the ball from reaching the center well and activating the trap, but even if that happened, the game would not be over. Maybe it was supposed to happen; maybe the game didn’t start until the stelae started whirling around with their deadly war-clubs and the spikes began popping up out of the floor. But where was the goal?
“We need to get the ball back up there,” she said, pointing to the pedestal.
“Paul! Think fast!” Professor bent down and scooped up the ball in both hands and hurled it toward the dais.
In ancient times, this would have been an unthinkable violation of the rules; fortunately there were no priests around to assess a penalty. Here, the only liability was Dorion’s athletic ability. The physicist opened his arms to make the catch but was promptly bowled over by the mass of the solid rubber sphere. The ball bounced away and rolled across the dais, splashing into one of the water channels where it was instantly seized by the current and swept along the outer perimeter of the ball court.
Jade bit back a curse and launched into motion. She hadn’t quite nailed down the pattern that governed the rise and fall of the spikes, but reasoned that if she kept clear of the holes in the floor, she would be safe.
“Look out!”
Professor’s shouted warning didn’t include information about what exactly she should be looking out for, but it was enough to make her raise her eyes just in time to see that her she was about to blunder into the reach of one of the stelae. There was no way to stop, so she did the next best thing. She ducked.
Twin bladed war clubs whooshed through the air above her head, and then suddenly a wall of spikes appeared in front of her, just beyond the radius guarded by the spinning column. She tried her best to duck and dodge simultaneously, but instead crashed into the extended stakes, which snapped apart like pretzels. The rest retracted into the floor, resetting for another upward thrust. Jade sprinted up the sloping flank of the court, keeping her eye on the ball as it rolled toward the far end, while trying to remember how long she had before the spikes would pop up again.
“Five seconds!” shouted Professor, as if tuning into her thoughts. “Four… three…”
I can make it. When she heard him say: “one” she launched herself forward, up and over the low wall that bordered the court. She felt the snick of spikes stabbing up at her, glancing harmlessly off her hiking boots, and then she was hit by a shocking blast of cold.
The channel was shallow, only a few inches deep, and while the water was moving fast, there wasn’t enough of it to sweep her away. Instead, it splashed up around her in a froth that soaked her to the skin and chilled her to the bone.
Her muscles had clenched with the frigid baptism, but she forced herself into motion, splashing after the ball as it continued toward the end of the channel. The disruption of the water flow had actually slowed its progress, but it was still rolling toward the unknown. Still on all fours, Jade splashed after it, half-crawling, and launched herself out of a crouch just as the ball started to go over the edge. She slid the rest of the way forward, wrapping her arms around the black orb and hugging it to her chest, even as it rolled off the end of the channel.
Beyond the drop-off, there was a lot
of nothing. Even though it wasn’t powerful enough to sweep her over, Jade was conspicuously aware of the water splashing over her and cascading out into a chasm that went deeper than the light of her headlamp could reach.
She wriggled backward, away from the precipice, and sat up, tightly clutching her prize. Professor was still stranded, but safe at the center of the ball court. Jade rolled over the edge of the channel and dropped down onto the first tier of the seating area and ran down the length of the court toward the dais. The water was deeper close to the statue of the goddess and she wasn’t willing to risk wading into it.
She spotted Dorion, now standing on the far side of the channel, staring at her expectantly. “Paul! I’m going to throw the ball to you. Put it on the pedestal. That should shut everything down. Okay?”
He nodded, still looking a little chagrined at his earlier fumble. Jade thought about offering words of encouragement, but decided that the only salve for his bruised ego was a successful catch. She bent over, the ball in both hands between her knees in a classic basketball granny-shot pose, and gently lobbed it over the six-foot wide waterway. Dorion caught it easily.
“Watch your step,” she cautioned as he turned away. “There must be some kind of trigger mechanism on the floor. We don’t want to have to do this all over again.”
He nodded without looking back and moved directly to the pedestal where he held the ball out and, with perhaps more caution than was warranted, gingerly set it in place. Jade was a little worried that she’d gotten it wrong, and that the ball would once again drop through the center of the pedestal and shoot back into play, but for once everything went exactly according to plan. With another ground-shaking thump, the automated defenses on the ball court shut down. The floor spikes retracted. The stelae stopped spinning and, with one or two exceptions, their war club arms folded back into niches in their carved exteriors.
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
San Jose, Costa Rica
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.
But secretly, she was also hoping for another glimpse of the future.
She did not pretend to understand Dorion’s explanation for the strange effect, but if it was true—if the phenomenon could be reproduced—it would open up a whole new understanding of ancient belief systems.
Maybe that was why Brian Hodges had tried to kill them.
They made their way back through the museum, a converted military fort located in the bustling downtown section of the capital city, and headed for their hotel just a few blocks away. As soon as they were on the steps outside, Professor begged off.
“Hey, you two go on ahead. I’ll catch up.”