1000 words, short story
Yarn Theory
The Mathematician sits on the window seat in her apartment in Krakow, the cat asleep next to her and a cascade of houseplant tendrils gently screening the light. She is knitting a sweater and thinking of number theory as she calculates reducing a seven-stitch lace pattern into five. Yarn over, knit front and back, slip, slip, knit . . . Madame Defarge never discloses the mechanism of her knitted code in A Tale of Two Cities. Most assume binary, but it could have been hexadecimal. Make one right, make one left, purl front and back.
The Mathematician should be proofing that article and grading papers and planning that conference trip to Budapest, not to mention starting dinner. Her husband is out tonight, attending a lecture on medieval coins.
She has a news podcast on for background noise, but when they start talking about the alien message, it pulls her attention like an unraveling thread. She sets down the knitting. The cat stirs but settles.
“You can download the entire message received from the aliens on SETI’s website! It’s incredible. I’ve been listening to it while I walk my dog in the morning.”
“Can we play a sample?”
“Yes. Just a few minutes. That’s okay, right, Piotr? Piotr is our producer. He’s nodding from the booth. Okay, here we go . . . ”
She picks up her knitting. Now is not the time to fall down a research rabbit hole, like the year she spent working on that novel about a romance set inside the Solidarity movement in the 1980s. She nearly lost a fellowship, and never did come up with a good ending to the novel.
The podcast plays the less alien part of the message, the human part, which they reflected back at Earth. The message content is unknown, but the human part says clearly: we have heard you. She thinks about translation, the Rosetta stone, transliteration.
She also thinks about how mathematics is a language. Some used to say a universal language, but that’s not quite accurate. There are other mathematics, not just different base systems, constructivism and set theory, MLTT and CoC . . . What might an alien mathematics look like?
Her thoughts wander: How the Egyptians could use pi without having the formula. The ridiculous utility of math, how the model keeps working. Was it simply that humanity needed it to?
Her reduction plan isn’t working, the lace has gotten too tight, the knit front and back she was doing to replace the knit-three-into-one doesn’t take up two thirds of the space, and this raglan sleeve will bunch. She undoes the row and sets the needles down, looking for scrap paper to help with working it out. The thing with lace patterns is just this: it isn’t binary. The lace mesh is not simply a matrix like grid paper. It’s squishy.
Yarn theory.
She’d done a paper on fuzzy logic in undergrad, and the term comes back to her, the start of a pun.
She picks up her laptop. She had downloaded the alien message, like everyone else. Most people are enchanted with the chirps and beeps between the repeated human recording, the “alien music” they call it, and indeed, a hip-hop artist has already released a mix of it that’s taking over dance parties as we know them.
She isolates just that section. She transforms the beeps into a code system. A for the high pitch, B for the low, C for the flutter, D for the sound like a whippoorwill.
She realizes with delight that she can use her knitting pattern software to lay things out visually. She decides on knit for A, purl for B, yarn over for C . . .
Her initial analysis, like that of other mathematicians and code breakers worldwide, failed to find a compelling solution. It’s not binary, they know that for sure. Nor trinary.
She starts with hex. Assume an alien Madame Defarge. There are thirteen identified sounds in the mix, but perhaps one is simply a punctuation, and the others are . . . mood? Inflection? A happy and sad set? A subjunctive case?
Ultimately, it has to be played with. False leads have to be followed until they prove to be false.
Math is a language, but how much can you say in math? How do you express yourself beautifully, subtly? Music is the poetry of mathematics. What if the aliens were as concerned with being poetic as being understood?
Her husband comes home to find her in the midst of a mess of different yarns, knitting. Failed versions lay about her. This one, however, is forming something like the pattern on the Voyager disk. The sun with rays, then another sun, different rays, and three . . . squiggly things. It almost looks random, but it isn’t.
He stares. “Do I want to ask?”
For a beat, she can’t form a response. “I think I’ve knitted the answer,” she says.
She stretches the fabric with her fingers, lays it flat on her thigh to show the detail. “Something like a cuttlefish. Only one form, but three repeats, not sure if that means three sexes or some other basic division, and a mass of little round dots under them. Eggs. They lay eggs!”
His fingers hover, hesitating before touch, but she’s already picking up another knitting experiment. She doesn’t see his expression go from confusion to something like horror. “The aliens?”
“Then, here, the code changes, or something changes. I can’t see what the rest of it means, just this image. Maybe it’s meant as an introduction, as a key for the rest? It could be a warning, it could be a threat, it could be the universal theory!”
Her husband clears his throat. “It could be time for a shot of whisky.” But he doesn’t go to the decanter. He tangles her hands, and soon is knit fast to her. They vibrate together with fearful joy. She burns to move but accepts the pause. She thinks about actions that don’t need translation.
Hugo- and Nebula-nominated author Marie Vibbert’s short fiction has appeared over ninety times in top magazines like Nature, Analog, and Clarkesworld, and been translated into Czech, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Her debut novel, Galactic Hellcats, was long listed by the British Science Fiction Award and her work has been called “everything science fiction should be” by the Oxford Culture Review. She also writes poetry, comics, and computer games. By day she is a computer programmer in Cleveland, Ohio.
