Oracle by David Wood, Sean Ellis Read Free Book Online Page A

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