After thanking the Perera-Pazes for their hospitality, the Rocket Ranchers waited for the peso tram down the hillside and into Merida. Gaby and spouse hugged each of the four. It seemed they’d spent a year together, not two days only.
The peso tram arrived to convey the travelers to Merida. At the bottom of the hill, the travelers transfered their gear to a waiting taxi.
“Where we going?” asked Jo.
“The market, to thank our hosts,” said Bender.
Merl grunted. “Good. We said we would.”
“Yes we did,” said Frances.
The market of Merida was relatively quiet in the mid-morning, but the four, Jo, Frances, Merl and Bender, walked the stalls where Gaby had sought, and secured, passage for them all on the Hunahpu Railway, just two nights ago. Most of the stalls were boarded up, their proprietors choosing to sleep while the tourists slept. But there was one Meridan, sweeping the sidewalk outside the electronics shop, who met their glance. The street sweeper gave a broad smile. Had they met this person? It didn’t matter. Everyone knew everyone here, and they were now part of everyone.
Bender looked the lone street sweeper straight in the eye, and bowed. “Gracias”.
The street sweeper grinned and swept one hand towards the boarded-up market, to indicate that the message was from the whole town. “De nada. Las amigas de los pequnina.”. You’re welcome, friends of the little people.”
The street sweeper shuffled a bit of dust into a narrow alley, and and vanished.
The street was silent.
Jo said, “I’m not going to be much use on a ship. I’m a marsupial specialist, not a sailor.”
Frances said, “I have two grad students back on the Ranch still doing wallaby poop DNA. Using your equipment.”
Bender waited for Jo and Frances to make up their minds, then spoke.
“Merl and I can handle this next phase. Jo, and Frances, you’re off the clock, right now. Sit down. Eat something, and catch your breath. Then book the next ferry back to Sustainaville. Get back to the Rocket Ranch. See what Cass and Varley have learned from poop analysis.”
Frances almost protested, until Jo brandished a debit card bearing the seal of the University of Melbourne.
Frances grinned, and turned to Cap. “See ya when we get back!”
The taxi drove Bender and Merl from Merida, down the jungle highway to Progreso on the coast. Bender’s text message led them to slip 42.
A sailboat was waiting, the Padmosail. Its partially furled sail shimmered a metallic blue-green.
Merl whistled. “That’s e-fabric. This is a solar electric sailboat. That is really pretty.”
Two members of the Marcel Loubens crew commanding the small vessel helped the trio and their gear aboard. There was a slight breeze, but the crew opted for electric power, and soon the boat was humming along past the low wake marker buoys outlining Progreso harbor. As they passed these, the pilot adjusted the throttle, the electric motors surged, and the boat rose alarmingly from the surface of the waves.
Merl added, “Solar electric sail hydrofoil.”
It was impossible for a spacelubber like Bender to estimate the speed of the Padmosail over water, but the strength of the otherwise calm wind in Bender’s face made twenty meters per second a reasonable guess. The planes of the hydrofoil, shaped like airplane wings and mounted on struts plunging below the waterline, lifted the bulk of the boat above the water.
The small boat careered along at incredible speed.
A high wave approached, and the deck trembled. One of the crew turned back to make sure the passengers were still on board, and caught Bender’s shocked glance. The pilot grinned at Bender, before turning back to the horizon in front of the boat, where a sparkling green dot appeared.
The Marcel Loubens resembled less a boat than the fuselage of a sleek 1970s airliner. The forward two-thirds of the upper deck was enclosed, looking very much like the nose and passenger cabin of a passenger jet airliner, albeit with fewer and much larger windows down either side. Perched on the aft end of this was the ship’s pilothouse, topped with radar and communications antennas, and a very shiny brass bell.
The most striking thing about the Marcel Loubens from a distance, was its color. The boat shimmered an iridescent metallic blue-green, a floating Emerald City.
Merl gave a low whistle. “Solar panels. Every single surface is generating electrical energy. The whole darned boat is a solar panel! That is… pretty.”
Bender agreed. “Yeah, it is.”
The little Padmosail drew alongside the Marcel Loubens, and a boarding ladder was tossed to the waiting crew.
A figure appeared at the rail, a slightly built sailor. It was Petra, Captain of the Marcel Loubens.
“Aye, me mateys! Solar-electric sails! Fillin’ our tankards with Sun juice! Come aboard, ye star sailors!”
Captain Petra Lauer was from Madison, Wisconsin, with an accent to match. Bender laughed and climbed the gangway. Frances and Merl followed.
There were introductions all around. Captain Petra’s first officer and chief deckhand was Lukas, who was hard of hearing. Thin and wiry, Lukas was not outwardly an exemplar of the “Able Bodied Sailor”.
“Professor Emeritus of Maritime Architecture”, whispered Petra. “If you ever read the book on what happened to the second Titanic, that’s the Prof’s book. The University doesn’t have the heart to mention their new mandatory retirement age, so they keep granting sabbatical years instead.”
The Professor, indeed, seemed one of the oldest working professionals MaryLiz had encountered in years, but perhaps the weathered skin and sun bleached white hair came with life aboard ship. “How long has Lukas been with you?”
“Five or six seasons… you know, I’m not quite sure, and, I’m willing to bet, the Prof’s forgotten too.”
MaryLiz laughed, “I’ll try to remember not to ask.”
Petra’s face sobered. “When Dr Lukas has a memory lapse, it’s in thanking us for a repair or engineering improvement that the Prof did earlier that day. This vessel is lucky – fortunate, I don’t sail on luck – to have Dr Lukas onboard”
Professor Lukas had materialized a bundle of water safety floatation vests, and distributed them to the three newcomers, Merl, Frances, and then Bender. The three vests were sized to the ranchers. Petra spoke up.
“One rule aboard the Marcel Loubens. Everyone wears a life preserver, all the time. It’s the Professor’s rule, and the Prof won’t move the boat if anyone’s not wearing one.”
The ranchers fumbled with the protective life preservers until all the buckles were snapped.
Professor Lukas spoke up on the features of the floatation vests. Inflation procedures. Radio transponders. Dye trace pockets. Strobe lights.
Once the ‘landlubbers’ were ensconced in personal protective gear, it was time for the Marcel Loubens to get under way. The hands cast off moorings, and pulled away from the quay under electric propulsion. Once past the outer harbor buoy, Petra and Dr Lukas raised the electric blue-green sails of the Marcel Loubens. MaryLiz expected Petra to cut power to the motors, now that the boat was under sail. Instead, Petra shoved a pair of levers forward, and the thrumming of the electric motors intensified. MaryLiz could feel the added power vibrating through the deck.
Petra shouted to overcome the noise of the wind as the boat accelerated. “Power of the sun, me mateys! Near a thousand Watts to a bare square meter of sail! The power of a star, all ours, for free!” Petra sang and prolonged the word “free”.
The sailboat surged westward across the blue water of the Gulf, seeming to climb the hill of its own bow wave. MaryLiz wondered if the boat would simply fly into the air and tip over. She glanced backwards long enough to see Petra, the boat’s Captain, give an answering nod, but Bender noticed that the Captain never broke eye contact with the horizon before the boat.
MaryLiz became aware of a peculiar rhythm in the boat’s course: instead of sailing in a straight line, the boat was describing long arcs, accelerating first to port, then back to starboard. Was this intentional?
MaryLiz turned back to Petra, standing at the wheel. The Captain was looking straight at MaryLiz with a serio-comic expression, framed by the ocean. The sinuous wake expanding behind the boat confirmed the boat’s wild back and forth slew.
Then Petra burst out laughing. “It’s fun! Wanna turn at the wheel?”
“Thank you! I’d love to try.”
“Haha! Anything to wrest the helm from a saucy scuba diving pirate, eh? Arr!”
It was fun, and after learning to keep the boat on course, (“Just aim for the sun, it’s close enough!”) MaryLiz was soon cutting a few arcs in the ocean herself, but cut it out when Frances surfaced ondeck and shot MaryLiz an uneasy look. “Maybe you’d better take the wheel back, Captain,” said MaryLiz, “I’m afraid I’ll cause a seasickness-fueled mutiny among my own crew.”
“Fair enough,” said Petra. “Let’s hand things off to the real expert, our pal ‘Chip’.” Petra meant the ship’s navigation computer. Petra pulled up a chart of GPS waypoints and set the autopilot to follow it. “Care to go below and check on our friends?” Petra asked MaryLiz.
“Sure… you leave this thing on automatic often?”
“All the time,” said the sailor. “We have radar for surface obstacles, and sonar to detect underwater ones, to depths way deeper than we encounter in the Gulf, let alone what’s needed to navigate. And we opt-in to share our telemetry with the network, so anyone in the world can find out exactly where we are.”
MaryLiz thought of the Blue Helmets of UNESCO, and what they would doubtless think if they learned who was aboard the Marcel Loubens, why, and with what equipment. Perhaps they already knew.
“Yes, let’s go below. There’s a few things we need to tell you, and you might as well all hear it at once.”
The two descended the stair into the cabin, as Marcel Loubens’ AI chased the setting sun.
“Uplifted kangaroos. Soviet breeding experiments. Hurricanes and great migrations. The Ancient Maya. Secret jungle railways. UNESCO.” Bobbie wasn’t trying to sound ridiculous, just reading Frances’ bullet points off the whiteboard in the ship’s galley. “Really?”
Frances nodded. Really.
“And so we’re going to do a cave dive in the middle of the night, under the noses of that very same UNESCO?” asked Terry, the other diver.
“Well, not under their noses, as such. UNESCO can’t forbid us to explore the caves of Yucatan, simply because of the vastness of the system. They don’t own it all. They don’t even own The Pool of Xblanque, it’s owned by a private trust tracing back to the original families who owned and worked it. It was that trust that UNESCO negotiated with, to allow – and control – access to the site.
“We don’t know if we can find an underwater passage from the Gulf clear up to the Pool of Xblanque, or at least up to the underground property boundary. Even if we did, it might be too far to go to risk human divers.”
“About that,” Bobbie said. “We have a little something special in store for you, in the hold.”
Said Petra: “Yes. That’s why we told you to stay put. This is how we help you.”