Cutie Pi by Ellen Mint

Author:Ellen Mint [Mint, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

I WAS THE globe-trotting librarian crossing into a long-forgotten tomb. The sharp archeologist with a panache for whips slipping into a secret society’s orgy masquerade. The frizzy-haired mathematician bumbling into a massive space station paying no attention to where she walked.

“Watch it!” a voice shouted, and five sets of eyes on bright red stalks swiveled in my face.

I froze, my mouth drying out as the top half of the creature orbited in a full circle to face me. It did that without shifting its legs. Person. That’s a person.

“Do you mind?” it said, three of the always waving eyes darting down to my foot.

I followed suit to find my sandal firmly planted on the diaphanous robes that probably left nothing to the imagination. It was hard to say as the entire body was covered in long, crimson fur.

“Sorry, sorry,” I said, shuffling my foot to the side.

It snorted, “Tourists,” and resumed the long walk down the massive entranceway.

Pillars ten feet in width and easily four or five stories high filled the entire endless foyer. Brass braziers sat perched at the base of every one, but the fires blazing in them shifted colors. I tried to see if they used a special fuel, but Nolan kept us following the horde.

We’d fallen in behind them at the space hatch doors after disembarking and had been trailing ever since. Heat rampaged through the space citadel, if not from the braziers then the thousands of alien bodies pressing in around us. At first, I couldn’t stop looking around, lost in the diversity of what evolution could invent across the cosmos. But as the slow march across the mile to the forum continued on without break, I stopped noticing when a man had a trunk for ears or a woman would raise her skirt and a hundred tiny multi-legged children ran free.

It was the pillars that drew my renewed attention. At a distance, they looked as polished white as the Roman coliseum the way the Renaissance viewed it. While I couldn’t find any flecks of garish paint long since erased from history, I did spot lines carved up and down the entirety of the pillars.

For the first couple hundred feet, that was all I saw. But something caught my eye. Just like on Nolan’s ship, the squiggles started to shift. They’d almost jump into a coherent phrase or word, but if I stared too long it’d turn back into nonsense. Placing a hand over my right eye, I sidled through the heaving bodies leaking every manner of odor.

A pair of lines cut like railroad tracks began to shiver. I tried narrowing my vision, but the harder I stared the more my eye teared up. Exhausted, my sight drifted past the lines and in an instant, an equation appeared. C=2Rπ

Yes!

“Trini?”

“That’s the circumference of a circle,” I said, excitedly jabbing a finger at it like a child that just spotted a zebra.

Nolan glanced at it like the weary teacher aware the zebra was currently fertilizing the grass.

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