by Mobi Warren
“This scrap of papyrus,” her mother announced while holding up a rare fragment in gloved hands, “mentions a race between a girl and a boy on Dia twenty-six hundred years ago.”
“So?” Melissa had responded.
“It’s a big deal, Honeybee, because based on what we know, races in Ancient Greece were always segregated. Girls raced girls. Boys raced boys.”
“What about that story you used to tell me about Atalanta and Hippomenes?” Melissa countered.
“That’s different, of course. That’s a myth and probably never actually happened or happened long before taboos forbade women and men to compete. Women weren’t even allowed to watch the men’s Olympics.”
“I don’t race against boys in cross-country,” observed
Melissa.
“True,” her mother agreed, “but no one forbids you from watching the boys. And when we run in a community 5K, we all run together, right?”
“Yeah,” Melissa conceded, fingering her race shoe charm.
“Well, last month a biologist studying a band of endangered kri-kri goats on Dia discovered the ruins of an ancient shrine revealed thanks to mega-storm erosion. I want to sift through that ruin and look for any relics that might offer up clues to a girl-boy race. And anyway, that island is not going to be there much longer, not with the steady creep of sea rise.”
What happened next took Melissa utterly by surprise. After her mother secured permissions and assembled a top-notch research team for a dig on Dia, she suddenly and unexpectedly left Melissa in her father’s care. Melissa and her father hadn’t lived in the same house in over three years. He felt practically like a stranger. Melissa didn’t know when she’d see her mother in person again. Melissa was interested in ancient women athletes, too, but not when they robbed her of a mother and dumped her on the doorstep of a reluctant father.
Melissa flicked a finger to turn the hologram of the statuette full circle, and to her surprise, discovered a name inscribed on the back of the girl’s right heel. In happier days, her mother had taught her the Greek alphabet, as well as a lot of Greek words, so she was able to sound the name out. Amethea. In spite of herself, she felt a rush of excitement. Artists didn’t normally sign their works back then. She wondered if it could be the name of the athlete. Here was an image of a girl named Amethea who had lived long ago. A runner like herself.
Melissa found her father on the back deck stargazing. A paper-thin flexible tablet balanced on one of his legs. It was covered with equations and diagrams that seemed to be writing themselves. She tapped her wristband and the hologram of the little victory statue rose in the air. “Ba, take a look at this. Mom found it on her dig.”
Her father slipped his glasses, which were perched on top of his head, back down over his eyes. It was funny, Melissa thought, how he preferred old-fashioned glasses to laser correction or to tablet functions that automatically adjusted to a person’s eyesight. Just about no one still wore glasses.
He examined the hologram with interest though Melissa noticed his eyes were rimmed with fatigue.
“That’s quite a find; I’m happy for your Mom.”
He didn’t sound happy, Melissa thought, but surprised her by adding, “The girl reminds me of you, Honeybee.”
“Ba, not that name,”
“Right, I keep forgetting.”
Melissa plopped down in a deck chair next to her father. Her legs burned from the long bike ride, she was anxious about the move to Texas, and her feelings about her mother were a mess. On top of all that, she was frustrated, really frustrated that she’d had a seizure for the first time in months and heard music that wasn’t really there. And yet, looking at the little bronze statue, she felt a flash of joy. The girl Amethea felt almost familiar, as if she could be a classmate or a fellow runner on the cross-country team.
She examined the hologram more closely. Amethea had a calm Mona Lisa smile, the kind seen on statues made during Greece’s Archaic Period, an art history fact she’d learned from her mother. She wondered if Amethea’s life had been less complicated than her own or filled with greater hardship. Perhaps it had been both. No fossil-fueled climate change back then but then no modern medicine either. Over twenty-six hundred years separated them but they were both runners. As she looked at the statuette, a sense of connection kindled within her. She felt part of a long line of women runners that extended far into the past and that lifted her spirits.
Melissa waved a finger over her wristband and the hologram disappeared. She searched the night sky for the backwards question mark that outlines the lion’s mane in the constellation Leo. It was an easy constellation to find in the spring and summer sky, one of her favorites. Regulus, the star that marks the heart of the lion, was shining blue-white like the cap of an ocean wave. She picked up a piece of origami paper from a small stack she kept by her deck chair and began to fold a bee.
“Harmony of the spheres,” her father said softly.
“What?” Melissa asked.
Her father turned to her and asked, “Do you know who Pythagoras was?”
“Sure, the guy they named the Pythagorean theorem after. The sum of the squares of the legs of a right triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse. A squared plus B squared equals C squared. We learned that this year.”
“Exactly. Well, Pythagoras claimed the planets make a sublime music as they move in their orbits. Your mother claimed she heard it the night she and I first met.”
Melissa was surprised that her energetic and fact-filled mother could have made so romantic a statement and even more surprised that her father was sharing it with her. She sat still and listened to the night sounds of crickets chirping. She didn’t hear anything that might be stars singing. She turned her attention back to origami and folded her square in half diagonally. It was going to take months to fold a thousand.
“You know,” her father said, “Pythagoras and honeybees share a connection. Some claim he was fed honeycomb as an infant, but there’s more than that. Remember that Scottish colleague of your mother’s that visited us some years ago?”
Melissa stiffened. Colin Anderson with his shock of red hair and infectious laugh had shown her photos of the small, restored castle he lived in. He was an expert at retrieving layers of hidden text from ancient scrolls. Melissa had found his Scottish brogue charming, but she had also noticed her mother exchange glances with him that suggested feelings beyond the mere friendship of colleagues. She wondered if her father had noticed.
“Not long ago,” her father continued, “he published an article about a passage he uncovered by the world’s first geographer, a man named Hecataeus.”
“Lecture alert,” Melissa warned. On occasion, her normally reticent father waxed on about arcane subjects as if she were in one of his graduate classes. It was usually annoying, as if he wasn’t really speaking to her, just at her.
“Hear me out, Honeybee.”
Melissa glared at him.
“I mean, Mel.”
Melissa rolled her eyes. She’d heard it said that old habits die hard. Her father, eyeglasses perched on his nose, was a living example.
“The text contained a reference to Pythagoras, said he journeyed to a land called Hyperborea to visit devotees of Apollo and that he took along an urn of honeycomb from a tiny island called Dia. Here’s the interesting part—Dia is where your mother is right now.”
“I sort of remember Mom mentioning that. Where was Hyperborea, anyway?”
“Your mother thinks it refers to the British Isles and that Pythagoras’ hosts might have been Druids.”
“That’s interesting, I guess,” Melissa murmured, though she was only half-listening as she made her origami folds. She didn’t want to talk any more about her mother, not when she could sense loneliness in her father’s voice that only deepened her own. She opened the folded square of paper and folded it in half again
the other direction and decided to divert the conversation to the less emotional subject of math, her favorite subject at school.
“Since Pythagoras was into math, I bet he liked how honeycombs are tessellated hexagons.”
“No doubt,” her father answered. “Pythagoras believed all of nature was based on Number. He knew six was the first perfect number, too, and of course, a hexagon has six sides.”
“Six is my favorite number.” Melissa opened the paper again and this time folded it in half horizontally.
“How come?” her father asked.
“I don’t know; there’s just something dependable about it. I always choose six or some multiple of six when I have to make a guess in a game or if I need a number for a password code, and I always like my race bibs to have a six in the number.”
“Does it give you an advantage?”
Melissa detected a slight note of amused skepticism in her father’s voice. He might enjoy thinking about things like the harmony of the spheres but he didn’t approve of superstition.
She admitted, “Probably not, but it does make me feel more confident. But you said Pythagoras knew six was a perfect number? What’s a perfect number?”
Her father twined his hands together. “It’s a number whose divisors, not including itself, add up to the number. Tell me, what are the divisors, or factors, of six?”
“One, two, three, and six.”
“Now leave off six and add up the others.”
“They sum to six. Are there are a lot of perfect numbers?”
“There are, but in the time of Pythagoras, only three perfect numbers were known: six, twenty-eight, and four hundred ninety-six.”
“How come you know all that?” Melissa asked.
“I’m an incorrigible geek. I thought you knew that by now.”
I’d know a lot more, Melissa thought, if you bothered to speak to me more often. She turned back to her folding and began mentally tallying the factors of twenty-eight. One, two, four, seven, fourteen. They summed to twenty-eight.
“Of course, I don’t think that’s why bees use hexagons.”
Her father was definitely more talkative than usual tonight, and Melissa found herself drawn into his reflections. “So why do they?”
“Darwin praised honeybees for being perfect engineers, and I have to agree. Turns out the hexagonal grid used by honeybees is the very best way to divide up a surface using the least amount of wax. There’s even a mathematical proof for that.”
“Honeybees must be pretty smart to come up with a design that conserves resources,” said Melissa. Using rules of divisibility and her own agility with numbers—she was at the top of her class in math—she started to mentally list the factor pairs of four hundred ninety-six, the third perfect number. Let’s see, two and two hundred forty-eight…
Her father, unaware of her mental gymnastics, said, “A human brain contains more than a hundred billion cells. A honeybee brain has less than a million. That’s a huge difference, but bees can learn new things and solve problems. Did you know bees could be trained to recognize individual human faces? ”
“That’s wild. I don’t think I could tell any bees apart by their faces.”
Four and one hundred twenty-four. Five and six aren’t factors. Okay, so eight and… It wasn’t easy to figure out factors of four hundred ninety-six and pay attention to the intricate folds of her origami bee at the same time. She stopped folding and looked up at her father. “Can you?”
“Recognize bees from their faces? I sometimes think I can.”
“Well, all our brain cells don’t seem to make humans very smart, not when we’ve wiped out the bees.”
Her father nodded. “It’s what you do with your brain cells that counts, not how many you have.”
Melissa’s next fold, a reverse crimp, was delicate and required her full attention as well as nimble fingers. Once accomplished, she returned to factors. Okay, eight and sixty-two. No nine or ten or eleven. Twelve, nope. Guess I have to jump all the way to sixteen…
She gazed again at the star Regulus. A faint wisp of sound vibrated in her ear. Some insect, she assumed, as she figured out the final factor pair. Sixteen and thirty-one. Now to add them all up. It took her a couple minutes, but there, yes, they sum to four hundred ninety-six. She felt proud to have cracked the code of the third perfect number. Mental math always felt like a shower for her brain. It left her feeling refreshed and helped her put aside things that were bothering her. Like seizures. Or moving to Texas. Or a mother who was half way around the world.
Holding her half-completed bee in one hand, she turned to her father again. “So how come Pythagoras only figured out three perfect numbers?” She was sure Pythagoras must have been particularly brilliant, and if she, a thirteen-year-old girl, could figure out and add the factors of the third perfect number in a matter of minutes, couldn’t he have done better?
“Well,” her father answered, “for one thing, the kind of arithmetic you and I take for granted hadn’t been invented yet. In the time of Pythagoras, everything was proved in terms of geometry. Number relationships were represented by lines or squares or series of dots like pebbles.”
“If Pythagoras saw numbers as geometric shapes, he would have been a whiz at origami.”
“Except for the fact that paper hadn’t been invented yet. That took the genius of the Chinese some centuries later.”
Melissa yawned. Hermes had followed her to the deck and was lying against her feet, softly snoring. The faint, insect-like sound Melissa had noticed earlier grew louder and more distinct until it drowned out the gentle whoosh of Hermes’ snores. The dog’s ears pricked ever so slightly in his sleep and his forelegs trembled as if he were having a dream. Melissa reached down to stroke his smooth black head and then jerked back upright. The sound had grown clear enough for her to make out the same haunting, sorrow-filled melody she had heard in the almond grove.
The volume steadily increased. Surely her father heard it this time. She turned to look at him but he wasn’t there. She was shocked to discover she was no longer on their deck, but facing an ancient ruin with half-toppled marble columns and a floor of broken tiles. She saw this by starlight for the night sky was so thick with stars it seemed to pulsate. A brisk, cool wind carried the tang of salt. She could hear the shushed, steady pounding of waves; and scents of thyme and roses washed over her. From the distance came a goat’s bleat, but it, like everything in this place, was held in the mesmerizing tune of the flute.
Two figures sat within the ruin. At first Melissa thought it was a woman sitting next to a goat but then saw it wasn’t a goat at all but a small boy pouring a clutch of pebbles from one hand to the other. The older girl beside him blew softly into a pair of joined flutes. The boy leaned against her and his breath came in ragged gasps as if he had been crying. The girl put her flutes down and placed her arm around him. She was wearing a long tunic clasped at the shoulders with brooches in the shape of dolphins. A headband circled her loose, shoulder-length curly hair. Starlight pooled over the pair as if they sat in a waterfall made of light.
Then the scene dissolved and Melissa, dazed and frightened, found herself back on the deck sitting beside her father. What had just happened? Hermes, still cuddled at her feet, softly snored. His legs twitched and she could feel the rise and fall of his chest against her ankle. She turned towards her father who gazed quietly at the stars. Neither Hermes nor her father gave any indication she had blanked out. She looked down at her hands. A fully folded origami bee sat there. But she was certain she had only folded the bee halfway.
“I wonder what Pythagoras would have thought if someone handed him one of your origami bees,” her father said as if unaware of any break in their conversation.
Melissa stared at the bee, confused. How did she do that? She didn’t dare tell her father that she had heard the music again when clearly he hadn
’t, nor could she share that she’d seen two youths in a ruined shrine and had somehow completed an origami bee without being aware of it. She didn’t want to believe she’d had another seizure, so unlike any she’d ever had before. This was more like a hallucination, a dream. If she told Ba, he’d insist on meds.
I’m super tired, she reasoned. I must have nodded off and dreamt about the girl with the flute. It looked like something out of Ancient Greece. Well, that made sense; seeing her Mom’s statue of an ancient girl runner and Ba mentioning all that stuff about Pythagoras must have triggered it. Maybe she’d kept folding the origami bee the way some people walked in their sleep. After all, folding origami was almost a reflex with her. She closed her hand around the bee. It was real enough; the bee was no hallucination.
“Ba, I’m going to bed. I’m super tired.” She stood up and stretched.
“I’m off to bed myself,” he said, but instead bent his head over his tablet and resumed fiddling with his equations.
Melissa leaned down, intending to give her father a hug, but he was already lost in his own thoughts and didn’t respond. Hugless, she straightened back up. For a moment she’d felt like she was having a real conversation with her father. They’d been connecting. How could he not notice she wanted to give him a hug? Her mother was a hugger but you can’t hug someone when they’re on the other side of the planet. Holo-vids, as amazing as they were, couldn’t replicate the simple warmth and spontaneity of a human hug. Her father was right here on the porch with her, but apparently he couldn’t replicate one either.
“You’re going to like Benefit,” he said without looking up from his tablet, “you’ll see.”
