Previous: Chapter Fifteen: Into the Pool
Rad looked towards the simulated sky above the floor of the Pool of Xblanque. A gray mist, linearly shaded with altitude, rose from a sparsely forested floor. High above the canopy of the trees, an Archimedean spiral in false color showed the historic track of the lidar mapping drone as faint yellow outlines around paintbrush strokes of green. Stretching as curved walls to the left and right, a curtain of green marked the scanned limits of the Pool’s outer walls.
The landscape ahead was colored in a haphazard, best-guess way, a crazy quilt of visible light and false infrared.
Rad flew towards the reputed large central island of the cenote, at an altitude of 60 meters above the water surface. From this vantage point, although tree canopies occasionally obscured vision, one could see the relative density of lidar and photo data associated with the central island. But on the horizon of the bottom of the cenote, past the central island, on its far, northern rim, Rad could see a bright color of information density lines. The northern edge of the Pool. Where they recovered the camera. Rad passed over the central island, and flew towards the cenote’s northern rim.
What did they see, the last place they looked?
The virtual terrain of the cenote’s floor rolled past, for the most part a ghostly infrared landscape.
While still 200 meters from the northern rim, 3DSee started filling in Rad’s view with actual photography. The drone’s hazcam. The lidar viewfinder camera. The visual cues came in fits and starts, as if the drone were still flying overhead and operating a crude photographic flash to illuminate the scene, at intervals.
At length, Rad’s avatar reached the clearing where Frances’ camera had been dropped by the wallabies of the Pool, to be rescued by Merl’s derring-do.
Viewed from right angles to the angle of the drone’s straight down scan, Rad could tell that the surface textures were hopelessly distorted by perspective. Rad flew upward and turned the camera straight towards earth, as if looking over the shoulder of the belly flopping drone.
There was Frances’ camera, its gauze streamer still attached, the trophy of the day. Other similarly sized dark objects strewn around the field of view were less certain. But the thing they were piled upon? Rad adjusted the diopter on the glasses, raised the field of view, and turned it slightly.
In a world made of rectangular slabs of fallen ancient coral, a battered cylinder, five meters long, appeared. Half buried in silt at the water’s edge. Rad panned left and right until it was centered.
The end of the cylinder was half buried in silt, but appeared perhaps two meters in diameter. There was a dark set of markings along its major axis.
A progress meter chimed. Frances’ camera footage. Deblurred and integrated into the main view.
Rad centered the view again, upon the strange markings. A scattershot of yellow and orange trapezoids across the field of view indicated that the view had been captured by all three cameras, a total of seventeen frames.
Rad rotated the view, zoomed it, and pushed the monitor back so that Rad’s optic nerves could have a go at forming its own conclusions just past the limits of the pixelation of the composite digital image.
The view of the mysterious marking settled, right side upwards for a Western European alphabet. Rad’s brain read the four letters emblazoned on the side of the ghostly cylinder.
Rad tapped out a sentence to Frances, and discarded it. Bendy, text Bendy. Rad tapped out two sentences. Deleted the first one, then the second. How do I tell them this? They’re in… Mexico. I’m in… The weather app. Louisville. Here, was Louisville. Because of… the retreat. The Abbey of Gethsemane. Rad’s lecture on the history of the position of Vatican Astronomer. All that cheese, all that beer, that talk of offset printing…
Rad phoned the Abbey. Sister Lewis answered.
“Rad! Thank goodness you’re okay! Why did you run off? We’re hoping for lecture part two, tonight.”
“Hi, Merty.”
‘Merty’ laughed, asking accusingly, “Are you still awake or did you sleep?”
Rad code switched. “Sister Lewis, I’m good, still loving the 2 AM chant. In fact, I think I can be back near Bardstown in about 60 minutes. Okay if I meet you back at the Abbey?”
“Yes, of course. If we scared you off your honorarium, with our Q&A, remember we put faith in the Miracle at Cana, and you know how that pericope runs!”
“Yes, Sister, my sister,” said Rad. “Jesus is saying, wouldn’t it be great, to go through life, being known as someone who shows uncommon hospitality, saving the best for last, so that the party goes even longer than it needed to? It’s in the Gospel of Mark. The type specimen of Jesus’ miracles?”
This time the pause was Merty’s to break.
“Come straight back down Bardstown Road. South. The road you’re already on is the road you need to be on, and the destination’s in the name. It’s 50 km from you to us. Let us know if you need us to come get you, or meet you on the road. Beep me your SafeTrack and we’ll follow you in all the way back to Gethsemane. We’ll beep you in, oh, I don’t know. 25 minutes, unless you beep us first.”
“Thanks so much,” said Rad. “I’m hitting the road now.”