Oracle (10 page)

“
If the spheres were somehow employed as collectors for the WIMPs,” Dorion said, “then it would also explain why Jade was unable to move the Earth stone. It would have been much more massive than it appeared. However, it might have been possible to remove one of the smaller spheres. Perhaps the ancient inhabitants of the city took it with them when they abandoned Teotihuacan, or perhaps the Aztecs relocated it when they arrived centuries later.”

“
Or the conquistadors got it,” said Jade. “Maybe our friend back there got trapped by the cave in after his buddies took the Moon stone.”

Professor held up the leather bound book he had taken from the mummified corpse.
“Might be something about that in here.”

“
As much as I’d love to stop for story time, I think maybe that will have to wait until we’re out of here.”

“
Seconded,” replied Professor, tucking the journal away again in a pocket. “Incidentally, at the risk of being labeled a pessimist again, has anyone else noticed that we seem to be going down?”

Jade whipped her head around, pointing her light back in the direction they had come. In the fifteen minutes or so that they
’d been walking, there view had not changed much, but she certainly had not been aware of a change in elevation. Looking back, she could not tell if they were actually going down or not. “Are you sure?”

“
Trust me, I’ve humped up and down enough hills to recognize the difference. It’s slight, but we’re lower now than when we started.”

After considering this news for a moment, Jade shook her head.
“It doesn’t change anything. This is the only way to go. The builders must have followed the course of a naturally occurring passage when they cut this tunnel, but we can see the evidence that they were here all around us. It has to go somewhere.”

“
You’re assuming that it leads back to the surface,” Professor replied. “What if they used that shaft in the pyramid to get in? What if this was their passage to the Underworld?”

“
Well, we can’t very well go back, can we? Instead of always playing devil’s advocate, why don’t you limit yourself to constructive comments?”

Professor shrugged and, evidently unable to offer anything useful, lapsed back into silence. A few minutes later, he was proved right. Half right, at least.

The passage had continued its gradual decline for perhaps another half-mile, during which time Jade began to hear a sound like white noise.

“
Running water?” suggested Professor. “We must be near an underground river.”

He said nothing more, perhaps worried that his statement might be misinterpreted as defeatism, but it soon became evident that the source of the sound was indeed water moving through the surrounding rock, and they were getting closer to it with each step.

The passage abruptly opened into a cavern that would have been considered large by any standard, except compared to the expansive chamber where they had found the model of the solar system. Unlike that vast but austere hall, this cavern bore clear evidence, not merely of use by the ancients, but inhabitation.

They found themselves in what appeared to be a temple complex devoted to the Great Goddess. The deity, in all her spidery glory, had been carved into the wall in such a way that the goddess
’ mouth was the tunnel entrance; they had, in a manner of speaking, been vomited out of her mouth. Water fountained from several other openings in the wall, which had been incorporated into the sculpture as well, each one situated at the end of one the goddess’ eight limbs.  The water collected into six-foot wide channels that framed a rectangular courtyard below the dais upon which they now stood. On either side of the courtyard, just beyond the waterways, were long stone steps that looked remarkably like the bleachers in a stadium. Looking down, Jade could see that the floor of the courtyard was not a flat surface, but sloped gently from each side, like an inverted pyramid, meeting at a narrow trough—about a foot wide and six feet long—in the center. Scattered around the courtyard, at intervals which appeared almost random, were a dozen carved stelae—stylized human-animal hybrids that gazed out with fierce expressions—and everywhere the floor was pock-marked with tiny holes about an inch in diameter.

“
Could that be your missing Moon stone?” asked Professor, pointing to a waist-high cylindrical pedestal at the center of the dais, upon which sat a dull black orb, about twelve inches in diameter.

Jade laughed in understanding.
“This isn’t a temple. It’s a ball court.”

“
Ball court?” asked Dorion, disbelieving. “You mean like football?”

Professor nodded, immediately catching on to
Jade’s revelation. “Close. The ball game was played all over Central America. Just like with soccer today, everyone was nuts about it, though there were variations from place to place. The big difference though, at least from what we’ve been able to draw from contemporary accounts and artwork of the period, is that you weren’t allowed to touch the ball with your hands or your feet.”

“
What then?”

“
You had to use your hips.” He gave a little shimmy that Jade thought would have made Elvis envious.

Jade laughed in spite of their predicament.
“The ball game wasn’t just a sporting event. It was part of their worship and a way of determining who the gods favored. We know from wall paintings at Tepantitla that they played the ball game, or at least a version of it, in Teotihuacan, but no court has ever been discovered. I think now we know why.”

Dorion raised his hands inquisitively.
“We do?”

“
They played it here, in the presence of the Great Goddess.” Jade looked back at the tunnel opening from which they had emerged. “The Goddess of the Underworld.”

“
It’s a ball court
and
a temple,” Professor realized aloud. “They would come down here, probably for special celebrations, and only after appeasing the goddess by winning the ball game would a person be permitted to enter the tunnel and make the journey to the room with the spheres. Or maybe the winners were sacrificed by the priests, who would then enter the tunnel.”

“
They sacrificed the winners?” asked Dorion, incredulous. “Hardly an incentive to play your best game.”

“
Being offered to the gods was the highest honor. At least that’s what the priests told everyone. It’s the same kind of logic that gets people to blow themselves up with suicide bombs; be a martyr, virgins waiting in the afterlife—”

Jade quickly cut him off.
“There’s some evidence of that happening in the late Maya Classical Period and perhaps in Aztec society as well, but probably only on rare occasions. The game had different meanings in different cultures, and sometimes different meanings for different groups within a culture. It was recreation for the average citizen, could be used as a proxy for war, and as we see here, may have had religious significance.”

Dorion pointed at the black orb.
“And that is the ball?”

Jade nodded.
“Solid rubber. It probably weighs about ten pounds, so you can imagine that players got pretty bruised. Some of the wall art shows players wearing elaborate costumes which may have also been protective equipment, and in the murals at Tepantitla, the players are shown hitting the ball with sticks.”

“
It’s a sphere.”

Jade saw what he was driving at.
“You think there’s a connection between the planet spheres and the ball game?”

Dorion spread his hands in a gesture of uncertainty.
“You are the expert. What do you think?”

“
Sometimes a ball is just a ball,” muttered Professor.

“
A sphere is not just a ball. Its shape is determined by gravity. The planets are spherical because particles of matter—including dark matter—will coalesce into spherical shapes. That is why planets and stars are round. I think it’s remarkable that the ancients understood this.”

“
Or maybe the ancients just realized that spheres happen to bounce a lot better that cubes.”

“
Even that is not something to be discounted lightly. The reason the sphere bounces better is because of the way energy is distributed throughout.”

“
Guys,” Jade said sharply. “It’s a great debate, but let’s have it somewhere else, okay?”

She hopped down from the dais and onto the floor of the courtyard. Dorion however reached out for the ball.

“I don’t think you should—” Before Professor could finish uttering the warning, and a heartbeat before Dorion’s hand could touch the ball, something clicked underfoot. The center of the pedestal upon which the ball rested abruptly fell away and the ball dropped down the center like water down a drain.

Jade heard Professor
’s shout and whirled just in time to see the ball shoot from a hole in the side of the wall beneath the dais. She didn’t need the gift of prophecy to know that something very bad was about to happen.

The ball arced
out over the courtyard floor and hit, bouncing with a loud thwock. Jade thought that might trigger whatever nasty surprise the ball court had in store, but aside from the ball continuing on its journey, nothing happened.

In a rush of intuition, Jade saw the reason for this, and just as clearly saw that the danger was far from past. The point of the game was to keep the ball from reaching the goal, which given the sloping floor, had to be the trough at the center. If a player could do that, they would stay safe.
If they failed….

Jade knew from bitter experience that ancient architects had delighted themselves with devising wonderful methods of dealing with unwelcome visitors; there was no telling what sort of death trap they had created here. The ball court was like an enormous pinball game, and if she made the wrong move, it would be game over.

In a split-second, she weighed her choices. She was just a couple steps away from the dais. She could make it back up to that place of relative safety before the ball reached the center... but it
would
reach the center, and under the circumstances, that seemed like a very bad thing. The only other option was to try and play.

The ball was about ten feet away, already descending for a second bounce. She dove forward, throwing her clasped hands out, trying to get them in between the ball and the floor in a classic volleyball bump.

Her timing was perfect, but that was about the only thing she got right. The solid ball hit like a blow from a hammer, slamming her arms into the floor even as the rest of her body hit the rough surface and, carried forward by her momentum, slid toward the center of the courtyard. The friction tore at her, burning hot through the fabric of her clothes, scraping bare skin raw, though she barely felt any of it. The pain of contact with the ball had left her arms completely numb.

The glancing impact was enough to divert the ball
’s course, if only slightly. Jade caught a glimpse of its next bounce. She had managed to knock it onto the section of floor that sloped down from the side of the courtyard. It bounced again, though just barely, and continued rolling along across the slope at a slight curve as gravity began drawing it once again toward the final destination.

Jade struggled to get up. Her arms were nearly useless, so she had to roll to a sitting position to get her feet under her. There was no way she would be able to intercept the ball a second time, but she knew she had to try.

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.”