by Mobi Warren
A fish cannot drown in water,
A bird does not fall in air…
Dr. Bùi was so puzzled by the DNA results he’d obtained by scraping a few cells from one of the returning bees and by the DNA from the pollen grains the same bee carried, that he went back to the field to check on the Yolo hive. The bees that had returned had to be from the original Yolo colony because otherwise the worker bees that remained with the queen would not have welcomed them back. And the DNA did match for the most part the strain of bees the Yolo bees belonged to but with a slight difference. They now carried a gene mutation that belonged to a honeybee that had gone extinct centuries before. The pollen grains matched pollen that his wife Claire had found in ancient Greek tombs. There was no way to explain it.
As Paul Bùi crossed the lavender field, thousands of bees suddenly popped out of thin air and made straight for the Yolo hive. He stood, mouth gaping and eyes wide, as every few minutes a thousand more bees appeared from nowhere. He pulled his glasses off to polish them three or four times because he had a hard time believing what he was seeing.
Running a race in Texas heat and humidity was tough, realized Melissa, as she pumped her arms and legs to carry her over the trail. Many runners appeared to have entered the 5K for a relaxing jog and several people were simply walking the trail, but others were giving it their all. Thoughts of Amethea inspired Melissa to pour on speed and one by one she began to reel in some of the fastest runners. She anchored the words of Mechtild’s poem in her mind and found herself sending them mentally to Hippasus. He was the fish that could not drown, the bird that does not fall. Live, Hippasus, live! her mind called out to him. And then it was I am running with you, Amethea!
With each stride along the cypress-lined trail and beneath the cloud-darkened sky, Melissa found she was experiencing the meaning in each line of Mechtild’s poem.
In the fire of creation,
God doesn’t vanish:
The fire brightens.
Melissa had always feared her seizures, afraid her blank-outs would make her disappear, that she would cease to be. She now saw that was impossible. By accepting her seizures, she had touched the world of Amethea, become a golden swarm of honeybees. Become more truly who she was.
Each creature God made
must live in its own true nature;
She had hated her seizures but they were part of her nature, too. Every creature must be allowed to live its own true nature. That was why bee colonies had collapsed, why so many bees had perished. Humans had forced them to live against their honeybee natures, trucking them like prison crews to pollinate crop after crop after crop, never allowing them to rest or enjoy their own honey. And in doing so, humans had bent their own natures.
How could I resist my nature,
That lives for oneness with God?
How, indeed! Melissa ran even faster, enjoying the fact that she was a runner in a long line of girl runners, a line that she and Amethea both belonged to. And that was when she saw the swift, lean form of Amethea running alongside her, matching her stride for stride. As Melissa sped past cypress trees along the Sabinal River, she could smell the thyme-scented meadows of Dia. She was running in both worlds at once. She and Amethea ran as one.
Pythagoras’ smile widened. Yes, he definitely understood the sequence of folds now. With each new fold he made, a thousand honeybees flew from the shrine’s hollow tree, buzzed over the trail, and gave Amethea speed and courage. The bees dissolved over the turquoise sea and then popped out of thin air twenty-six hundred years into the future, to astonish an entomologist standing in a Texas lavender field. When Paul Bùi had recovered from his initial incredulous shock, he called Bella and when she joined him in the lavender field, a warm, rich laughter rose in her chest. She lifted her arms in the air as if they were wings and then wiggled and waggled in her own version of a honeybee dance.
Pythagoras was making the final fold just as Eucles and Amethea came tearing down the hill. He spread the origami bee’s wings and the bee’s legs dangled as if in flight. The final stade along the beach was all that remained and Amethea, to the crowd’s astonishment, was only a stride length behind Eucles. The bodies of both young athletes gleamed like polished bronze.
Pythagoras blew on the origami bee and at that instant Amethea seemed to burst into flame. She felt the fire of creation in every cell of her body and knew her nature to be that of an athlete, no less than Atalanta. She gained on Eucles in the final seconds of the race and crossed the finish line a foot’s length ahead of him. She staggered but did not fall, her eyes wildly searching the waves for Hippasus. The water had reached his chin. A wave crested over his head and he sputtered and coughed. He would choke on seawater!
Amethea shouted and pointed. Why was no one rushing to release him? She saw Karpos shove the man who had led Hippasus into the waves and helped tie him to the stake. In a flash she understood the same man was charged with releasing Hippasus should she win the race, but Karpos would not let him pass. While the two men argued, Hecataeus broke from the crowd and ran towards the water.
Pythagoras stood with his palm calmly raised to the sun. Origami bee four hundred ninety-six vibrated then lifted into the air.
Dika gasped and pointed overhead. More lines of honeybees, undulating and sparkling, had appeared in the sky. When Pythagoras released his bee, the others swooped down and followed it. They circled the crowd, zigzagged over the water, and hovered momentarily over Hippasus before flying high into the sky and vanishing.
“By the grace of Pan,” Dika uttered. Kimon held a clay figure in his hand, a miniature version of a victorious Amethea.
Someone pressed a palm frond into Amethea’s hand but she dropped it and flung herself into the sea to try to reach Hippasus. But her ankle gave beneath her and she collapsed. Her legs had no more to give. Someone in the crowd dragged her back onto the beach. Eucles, she now saw, had plunged into the shallow waters and swift as a dolphin swam to Hippasus. He and Hecataeus reached the boy at the same time and together broke the ties that bound the goat boy to the stake. Eucles carried Hippasus in his arms back to shore. When he lay the coughing, sputtering boy in Amethea’s wet lap, he said in a low voice, “Forgive me.”
“But you saved Hippasus from drowning!”
“I didn’t slow my pace for you, Amethea. I intended to win.”
Dr. Bùi cycled like a mad man from campus to the riverbank. He was determined to get to the finish line before Melissa crossed it. His conversation with Beau the evening before had triggered something inside him, and he’d thought about Melissa all night as he ran tests on the bees and pollen. Then, when he’d found something perched on a stone by the hive, thought turned to action.
As the overall winner of the 5K dashed across the finish line, Beau whooped, Hermes yapped, and Amaltheia gave a dainty bleat to celebrate Melissa’s accomplishment. She was shocked to see her father, his face red and straining, running towards her.
“Ba, what’s happened?”
“You,” he said with a laugh and lifted her off the ground in a big hug. “High time I made one of your races.”
Claps of thunder and the sudden pelt of rain quickly drowned out their voices. The librarian hurriedly placed a medal around Melissa’s neck as everyone else rushed to gather belongings and head for home.
“That’s quite a runner you’ve got for a daughter,” she shouted.
“She’s quite a daughter, period,” said Melissa’s father. They were wet as otters. Melissa was a stream of sweat and rain and tears.
“That’s my Honeybee!” her father said, then caught himself, “Darn, I used it again.”
“Ba, it’s okay. Honeybee works.’ Melissa smiled and wrapped her wet arms around his neck.
After everyone had a chance to dry off and change, Beau and his mothers joined Melissa and her father on the Bui’s covered porch for a post-race brunch. Rain f
ell in steady silvery sheets and the wet earth released a rich, spicy aroma. Bella brewed a pot of mint tea and Rocio surprised everyone with a big bowl of fresh strawberries.
“Thanks to the steady increase of sanctuary bees,” she said, “neighbors are growing things they haven’t been able to in ages. I swapped some goat cheese for these.”
“Strawberries!” exclaimed Melissa. “I’ve always wanted to taste one.” Rocio handed her the bowl and Melissa selected a plump one. Everyone watched as she took a bite.
“Oh my gosh,” she said, “Ba, we need to grow a whole field of these!”
After everyone had eaten their fill, Beau and Melissa rocked on the porch swing. Beau was modeling a victory statue for Melissa based on the statue of Amethea that Claire Berry had discovered on Dia.
“I saw her, Beau, I saw Amethea. We ran the race together. Hippasus is safe.”
Beau squeezed Melissa’s hand, covering it in red clay. She smiled and didn’t bother to wipe it off.
Her father and Bella couldn’t get over the return of the Yolo honeybees and the inexplicable DNA results. “There’s something quarky about the whole thing,” Bella punned and they all laughed. “Seriously, though, we’re getting close to figuring out how a quark communication system might work for honeybees. And when we do, we’ve got some questions for those Yolo bees.”
Melissa’s father adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses and ran his fingers through his black hair. “I’d really like to know where the bees went and how on earth they returned with altered DNA. They are now the healthiest, most robust honeybees I’ve ever seen. And the happiest.”
Melissa stood up and went inside. When she came back out she was holding her basket of origami bees. She poured them out onto the porch table. ‘Four hundred ninety-five,” she said. “I counted them last night.”
“Why, they’re beautiful!” said Rocio.
“Four hundred ninety-six,” corrected Dr. Bùi. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an origami bee. “I found this one on the large rock near the Yolo hive early this morning. I had no idea you’d been folding so many, Melissa.”
Beau and Melissa looked at each other. “Your call, Mel.”
“Beau helped. They were for you, Ba. We were going to fold a thousand as a kind of prayer for honeybees, but it turns out that four hundred ninety-six was the right number.”
“I don’t know what to say. They’re beautiful, Mel. So much careful effort.” Melissa’s father was clearly moved.
“Hey, that was your race bib number, too, wasn’t it?” asked Bella.
“The third perfect number,” said Beau.
“Yeah, it was perfect,” said Melissa. “In fact, it’s the luckiest race bib I’ve ever had. It had a six in it and four times nine is thirty-six which, of course, is six squared, and six stands for hexagons, and honeybees are hexagon engineers. And—”
Beau lifted an eyebrow. “Mel, you are an incorrigible math geek.”
Her father looked at her, his face bright with pride. “And?”
Beau incised a tiny bee on the heel of his statue of Melissa. “It’s rather a long story, Dr. Bùi, but we’ve got all day, right?” He smiled at Melissa.
The adults stared at the two teens.
Melissa cleared her throat and began, “It all started when I heard a flute in the almond orchard the night we stole the Yolo bees…”
EPILOGUE
A small bronze, no more than eight inches tall, stood in an alcove of the shrine. It was a girl runner holding aloft a palm leaf. A gold votive of the Bee Goddess stood on a polished block of rose-colored marble at the shrine’s center. When no one else died of fever after the race between Amethea and Eucles, several families donated stones, tiles, and labor, and under Kimon’s direction, restored the ancient shrine.
A red-haired woman stood with her young daughter and offered an armful of white roses and barley cakes to the Goddess. A few honeybees with folded wings rested on the altar stone. If you could read the faces of bees, you would have said these bees were happy and optimistic.
“Lay your flowers on the stone, Melissa,” the woman said to the child. The small girl reached up and placed her wildflowers next to the gold votive.
The mother’s hair was held in place by a circlet woven from green and gold threads. It was her favorite ornament, a gift from an admirer who later became her husband. He had given it to her after her victory at the Heraea Games the same summer the goat boy sailed with Pythagoras in search of Hyperborea.
When the mother and daughter exited the shrine, a man met them who tousled the child’s hair and offered the woman a pomegranate. His warm skin smelled of apples and olive oil.
The child looked up at him and said, “Mother has been telling me the story of Atalanta.”
“Has she? I will tell you an even better story.”
“Eucles,” demurred the woman, but he smiled and continued.
“A story about a woman from Dia who won a race with the help of magic bees.”
The child’s eyes danced. “What was her name?”
“Amethea,” he answered, “Your mother, Amethea.”
Acknowledgements
Deep thanks are due Sheila Black, Diane Gonzales Bertrand, Marisol Cortez, Cyra Dumitru, and Eliza Hayse for generous offerings of time, support, and valuable feedback.
Special thanks to my daughter, Emily Han, for first suggesting origami might be a vehicle for time travel, and to my son, Bruce Ho, who never fails to ask good questions.
Heartfelt gratitude to members of the writers and artists group, Stone in the Stream/Roca en el Rio who write, paint, and photograph the natural world with curiosity and wonder, and who advocate tirelessly for environmental and climate justice. A special thanks to Lucia LaVilla-Havelin for the embroidered honeybee that sits on my personal altar.
Deep gratitude to my godmother, the artist Meinrad Craighead, for her inspiring images of women mystics, especially her painting of Mechtilde of Helfta that plays a role in the story.
The first seed for this novel began by reading an article in the November 1997 issue of Discovery magazine about a mathematician’s speculation that honeybees might access the realm of quarks to create their waggle dances. Any errors in my take on this idea are entirely my own!
Finally, a shout out to scientists, mathematicians, citizen scientists, beekeepers, artists, poets, and caring humans everywhere who are working to understand and protect pollinators.
