Previous: Chapter Twenty-Three:
After thanking the Perera-Pazes for their hospitality, the Rocket Ranchers took the tram down the hillside and into Merida. Merl was “driving”, but the tram was on autopilot mode. The ranchers and their gear represented too much for the Perera-Pazes to accompany them, so their goodbyes had been said in the Perera-Paz’s back garden. Gaby and spouse hugged each of them in turn. Hurry back.
They would all miss the Yucatan Railway. The tram’s regenerative braking indicator winked red as the tram descended. MaryLiz remembered her alarm in seeing it for the first time. It can be scary until you know…. Mx Perera-Paz had said. Now the blinking light was a comfort, a reminder that all was well for the tram’s automated return journey up the hill and back home.
At the bottom of the hill, the tram shunted into a parking space, and the travelers transfered their gear to a waiting taxi. Soon the band arrived at Progreso Quay, slip 42, where a ship was waiting.
Merl was a veteran of the inland rivers of the United States, and had seen a boat or two. This one was not new, but clearly loved by its crew. The name Marcel Loubens was painted proudly across the planks of its square transom. A single masted sailing vessel, its main sail, slack in the still of the late afternoon, shimmered a strange metallic blue-green.
Merl gave a low whistle. “That’s solar energy fabric. E-cloth. Look – the whole sail – it’s a solar panel. Just look at it. That is… pretty.” MaryLiz and Frances had never heard Merl use the word.
“Aye, me mateys! Solar-electric sails! An’ our ballast’s a tankard of Sun juice! Full to overflowin’!”
It was Petra, captain of the Marcel Loubens, calling from the boat’s railing. “Step on up, let’s welcome you aboard!”
Frances knew accents, especially fake ones. Captain Petra was obviously from Wisconsin.
This done, 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. Some of the Professor’s discourse was indistinct, but Bender caught the phrase “flouriscein, not rhodamine.”
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, who was 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.”