The Oracle's Message

It occurred to her that she knew very little about Spier or his team. Aside from Hans.

She smiled. She knew a lot about him already.

“You all right, Annja?”

She looked up and saw Hans eyeing her. She smiled at him. “I’m fine. Just a bit tired, is all.”

“What about lunch? You could do with a meal,” Spier said. “I suspect we all could before indulging in a little siesta.”

Annja hadn’t thought about food, but the suggestion of it made her stomach rumble. “I could eat.”

They ran from the dive master’s shack to the main pavilion. Strong gale-force winds lashed at the pavilion but aside from the tables set near the open-air walls, the rest of the area stayed nice and dry. Annja supposed that they knew how bad the weather could get and the resort had been designed accordingly.

There was something rather cool about eating in the midst of a torrential downpour, anyway. She dined on some fresh crab-and-lobster-meat salad, drank some of the fresh mango juice and watched as Spier and his team compared notes on the morning’s dive.

“You saw those conical outcroppings, Annja?” Spier asked after a few moments.

“I did.”

“And yet you refuse to believe they indicate the existence of a lost civilization?”

She smiled. “Forgive me for saying so, Joachim, but a few conical outcroppings do not a lost civilization make.”

“Well, they don’t refute its existence, either.”

“Granted, but I’d like to know a bit more about what we’re supposed to be hunting for here.”

“Like what?”

“Like what civilization this is supposed to be, exactly.”

Spier paused and took a bite of his sandwich. “You’ve no doubt heard of Atlantis.”

“Of course.”

“The legend of a prehistoric earth inhabited by technologically advanced races, that sort of thing.” Spier shrugged. “It’s nothing new, of course. But the conventional thinking has always maintained that Atlantis must have been located in either the Mediterranean or the Atlantic.”

“But you don’t believe that?”

Spier wiped his mouth. “It’s not that I don’t believe it, it’s just that I’m not interested in Atlantis.”

“Okay.”

“But I am interested in the other civilizations that were reported to have existed at the same time. Lemuria and Mu.”

Annja frowned. “Most people think that they were one and the same.”

Spier shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think there were three centers of innovation on prehistoric earth—that is, the earth that existed prior to a massive cataclysm that wiped out the races and the evidence that they ever existed.”

“So you think that Lemuria or Mu is the civilization the pearl comes from?”

“I’m fairly convinced of it.”

“But what evidence do you have?”

Spier shrugged. “It’s not evidence that I need in order to believe. I need faith first. If I am then able to locate evidence, then all will be well.”

Annja sighed. She wasn’t going to be able to argue with Spier about how utterly unscientific an approach that was. She’d met people like him before. They got an idea in their heads and there was no way of prying that idea loose unless you could shock them into seeing reality. With Spier, she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to do that.

Not that there was any harm in his believing the pearl might come from a lost civilization. Annja was game enough to go along with the expedition for as long as it took. And there was something intriguing about the conical structures on the reef.

“I scraped away some of the growth and what was underneath was truly amazing,” Hans said suddenly.

Annja had almost forgotten about that. “Marble,” she heard herself saying. “It looked and felt like marble.”

Hans nodded. “I agree.”

Spier’s smile widened. “Very interesting.”

Annja looked at him. “I wouldn’t say that necessarily supports your idea of the reef being evidence of a lost civilization, however.”

“Yet marble does not occur naturally underwater,” Spier said. “Surely you’d concede that point?”

“Of course.”

“So, it must have gotten there somehow.”

“Yes, but it could have been anything. An earthquake, a terrible storm.”

“I don’t think the Moros or other early Filipinos used marble,” Spier said. “I don’t believe it’s even indigenous to the local geography.”

Annja frowned. She’d need to look that up. If it was true, then that might be another point in Spier’s favor, but she wouldn’t jump to conclusions before she had a chance to check things out for herself.

“I can look into it,” she said.

Spier nodded. “That would be good, I think.” He pushed back away from the table. “All in all, I think we had a fruitful dive today. And when we continue, I’m certain we’ll find even more spectacular things.”

Gottlieb spoke up. “Are we going back tonight?”

“Depends on the storm,” Spier said. “If we can escape the weather, I should think a nighttime dive would prove most exciting.” He glanced at Annja. “Are you interested in coming along?”

Annja smiled. “You’ll still have me along?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

Annja shrugged. “I haven’t exactly drunk the Kool-Aid, yet.”

Spier’s eyes narrowed as he processed the reference, and then he smiled. “Ah, yes, well, no worries. I don’t like people who automatically believe everything they’re told, anyway. I find your skepticism refreshing actually. It will help keep us all honest, I suspect.”