Oracle

by David Wood

  “Knock it off,” she growled.

  “I’m serious,” he said, without the least hint of mockery. “If you drive, I can keep an eye out for anyone following us.”

  “Fine.” She took the keys and, without further comment, slid behind the steering wheel and started the engine. Dorion stood by dumbly as if unable to process anything that had happened, until Professor suggested he take shotgun.

  “Shotgun?”

  “Up front with me,” Jade said over the soft rumble of the idling motor.

  Dorion climbed into the passenger seat, still looking somewhat befuddled, and buckled his safety belt. Professor got in the back and started rooting around in a backpack that appeared to have been left on the seat.

  “Where’d that come from?” Jade asked, curious.

  “Just another one of those arrangements I made without consulting you first,” he answered. “I hope that’s okay with you.”

  Jade craned her head around in time to see him release the slide on a matte black semi-automatic pistol.

  “How did you manage to pull that off?”

  “I know a guy who knows a guy. I figure since they already know we’re here, no sense in staying completely below the radar.” He stuffed the pistol into shoulder holster rig and passed it to her. “Here. This one’s for you.”

  “Oh. I don’t know what to say.”

  He grinned and winked. “You might go with ‘thank you.’”

  ELEVEN

  Osa Canton, Costa Rica

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Jade stared in disbelief at what waited for them at the end of the road they had been told would lead them to the archaeological site known as Finca 6 where several of the stone spheres had been discovered by workmen in the 1930s. After the long drive down the Pan American Highway, through a lush verdant landscape that reminded her of her childhood home on the island of Oahu, Jade had been expecting a remote site, accessible only by an arduous trek up an overgrown jungle trail, accompanied by the song of tropical birds and the chattering of insects underfoot.

  “Is something wrong?” asked Dorion.

  Jade pulled the Ford to a stop in the parking area and pointed to the very modern looking building nearby. “That. I thought this was an archaeological site. It looks more like a golf course. This is just a tourist trap.”

  “Archaeologists need to eat too,” Professor reminded her. “And tourists bring the money in. Just like at Teo.”

  “I can understand Teo. It’s huge; of course it brings the tourists. But this…” She waved a disparaging hand. “We’re not going to find anything new at place like this. It’s all staged for visitors.”

  “We’re here. Might as well have a look?” He checked his shoulder holster and then made sure it was covered completely by the lightweight windbreaker he had purchased before leaving San Jose. Jade had one just like it, and for much the same reason. They had risked the stop to purchase supplies and equipment, the sort of things they might need if they had to spend a night in the jungle, though it was starting to look like that wasn’t going to be a concern. As Professor reached for the door, he settled his fedora atop his head.

  “You’re not actually going to keep wearing that thing, are you?”

  He grinned. “Why not? I think it suits me.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a bit…cliché?”

  “The word you were looking for is ‘iconic.’”

  “If you start packing a bullwhip, I won’t be seen with you in public,” she growled, even though she knew her irritation was misplaced. She was frustrated at what looked like another dead end, and was starting to wonder if the whole endeavor wasn’t a colossal waste of time. She was also probably feeling a bit cranky from spending hours on the road, and crashing at one of the rustic “eco” hotels that catered to adventure tourists looking for that “authentic” travel experience.

  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…” H
is 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.”

  “I don’t think we can dismiss it as simply theoretical anymore. We’re going to Isla del Caño because Jade remembered going there in the future. Without that little nugget, we would still be fumbling around, clueless.”

  Dorion shook his head. “The multiverse hypothesis allows that in one or more possible worlds, we discovered something without foreknowledge. We were already investigating locations where the spheres have been found, so it is not merely possible but probable. The space-time effects of the field do not show us our own future, but rather what is happening in parallel realities—just like watching a program on television. It only seems that we are watching our own future because so many of these alternative universes are almost completely indistinguishable from our own.”

  Jade was not sure she understood but was grateful that Dorion had come to her rescue. She punched Professor playfully in the arm. “Yeah. So there.”

  Professor grinned but then immediately countered the physicist’s argument with something even more esoteric, and soon the two men were lost in a discussion that was almost completely incomprehensible to Jade. “Young nerds in love,” she muttered, turning away to look at the passing scenery.

  The idea that she had somehow been given special knowledge of the future was not what bothered Jade. Her first vision had been of something bad happening and they had only narrowly escaped that outcome. Now, she was being guided by an even more ambiguous premonition. But toward what? She thought she understood what Professor meant by Bootstrap Paradox, but what if this was something more like those Final Destination movies, or that old story Appointment in Samarra, where a man tries to escape his appointment with Death by running away to another city, only to find out that’s where Death was planning to meet him.

  What if the universe is trying to correct the fact that we survived the explosion in Mexico?

  This was why Jade hated not being in control, hated being swept along by visions and impulses that didn’t make any sense. The fact that there did not seem to be a better choice was even more frustrating.

  At the mouth of the Sierpe River, they passed out into the choppy wind-swept waters of Bahia Drake—Drake’s Bay, where according to local lore, famed English privateer Sir Francis Drake had harbored his ships and possibly cached his treasures. Drake of course had been highly favored in the court of Queen Elizabeth, and that connection reminded Jade that she had not finished translating the last confession of Gil Perez. As Professor and Dorion continued to debate the finer points of causality loops, Jade opened the journal and indulged in a different sort of time travel.

  Four years ago, with my companion Alvaro Diego Menendez Castillo, I went forth on a mission to defeat the Heretic Queen’s conjurer, whose eyes see all.

  When it became known that the conjurer had used uncanny power to summon the Devil Wind in order to defeat our ships, His Majesty determined that ere another campaign be sent forth, the conjurer’s power must be broken. It would not suffice to kill him, for another would surely take his place. No, rather it would be necessary to cut him off from the source of his devilish power, and this we were sent forth to do.

  It became known to us that the conjurer had left England and for some years had been traveling on the European continent in order to further expand his knowledge of the Dark Arts. We learned however that his collection of books and many tools with which he performed acts of divination had been left behind in his mansion on the shores of the River Thames.

  When Alvaro and I arrived, we learned that the house had already been burglarized and many books and possessions taken, but among the items that remained was an orb of flawless crystal. Alvaro, whose education surpasses mine, likened it to the Eye of the Grey Sisters, though when I asked, he merely told me that it was an old story about witches.

  It is difficult, even now, to write of what happened next. This was, I see now, the first of my sins. I touched this strange orb, this Eye, and I saw….

  I count this a sin of Pride and not of witchcraft, for I did not seek intercourse with the Devil. I must have believed myself immune to such seductions. I make no defense or excuse, but only ask for the Lord’s merciful judgment.

  I know only that I felt drawn to one of the manuscripts in the conjurer’s library, a book that was written in a strange language that was plain to me when viewed through the crystal Eye!

  I cannot relate now all that I read that day. I will say only that the manuscript told of a vision, which the conjurer attributed to an Angel (what blasphemy) named Orphaniel, of a far off land and a great court where orbs of crystal and stone circled each other in an endless dance like the planets in the sky. Anyone touching these orbs would have revealed t
o them everything under the sun—everything that is and everything that will be.

  A gasp escaped Jade’s lips as she read Perez’s account. She looked up and saw that Professor and Dorion had ended their discussion and were now looking at her expectantly.

  “Well?” asked Professor.

  Jade just shook her head. “You are not going to believe this.”

  Before Jade could embark on her summary of the account in the journal, their speedboat arrived at its destination and they spent the next half hour making arrangements for the rest of the journey. There, they learned that the only way to visit the island was by first obtaining a permit and traveling with one of the government approved tour agencies. A few casual inquiries however led them to a dive boat operator willing to shuttle them out to the island and put them on a remote beach, far from the watchful eyes of the park rangers. For the right price of course. Professor paid him in cash. He was glad that Jade had not asked where he’d gotten the money; he wasn’t sure how much longer he’d be able to deflect her enquiries with “It’s a SEAL thing,” though in fact, that wasn’t far from the truth.

  Tam Broderick had established secret, discretionary bank accounts for use by Myrmidon agents operating internationally. If Hodges was monitoring the account, looking for activity, then he would know that they weren’t really dead, but the harsh reality of their situation was that they needed money to survive. Besides, even if Hodges figured out that they were alive, there was no way he could use the bank records to track their location, so it was a risk worth taking. It was probably a moot point since someone had evidently found them out anyway, but he didn’t want to have to explain all that to Jade, especially given how much of a control freak she was turning into.

  Once they were underway, Jade eagerly began relating the last confession of Gil Perez. The name was maddeningly familiar to Professor; he was certain that he’d heard it before. Now I’m the one getting déjà vu. Too bad I don’t have Internet access. I could clear this up with one Google search. The question of the account’s author was soon forgotten as Jade went on with the story.