The nature of knitted fabric is such that one snipped strand can cause the whole structure to unravel and that is happening right now. She tries to twist her needles around to stab the glowing paper bird, but its planes interact with the folds of space more efficiently than her needles and it escapes. She’s about to snip of her ‘thread’ when she senses a tremor through her needles.Īn origami bird with wings as sharp as laser beams slices through her knitting. She picks a double cast-off like the one you use for socks, sturdy and stretchy. She’s going to win this.Ĭasting off already. Round after round flies from her needles, creating a rhythmic glowing tube that will make a perfect, safe and gorgeous entrance to the wormhole. This is faster because it mimics the normal act of knitting more, and she has a solid start to work with. She sneaks a quick look to see how he is doing, but as she suspected, he’s still folding his pieces of paper for the ring base.
She knits a ring, something the origamist can’t hope to create this fast. There, she’s got enough stitches to close the loop. The screen represents it in red against the gold of her needles. Instead, her needles create the yarn from the universe stuff itself. She’s practiced endlessly to work with the needles only, instead of the fingers knitters normally use to support or guide the yarn. They always do just before the start signal, as if her body knows something she doesn’t.Īulis’s needles quiver and spring into action. Huge masses of people will be watching all over Known Space. Aulis had put flowers on Hoshi’s memorial earlier today. Captain Hoshi couldn’t live with the destruction of twenty-million human beings and killed herself. Captain Hoshi of the good ship “Termagant’s Talons” who happened to observe this had just managed to imagine herself back in normal space, but she hadn’t been able to bring back billions of years of evolution and centuries of human occupation. She casts one last look at the blasted planet New Hope below, where a tendril of alien-altered space destroyed millions of human lives and a whole ecosystem. The battle tests take place here in remembrance of those who died. This is the first heat out here on the memorial ship. Wormholes are used in the battle test because they are self-contained, complex structures that require a huge effort of will and imagination to create, and that’s just what Cobblers need to be able to do. Aulis will be manipulating the layers of the stacked universes, twisting and maybe tearing them in her attempt to knit a wormhole that must be both functional and beautiful to satisfy the battle conditions. In her mind she transforms herself into Pippi Longstocking with an afro and runs with that.īoth needles and yarns, hands and origami paper are only metaphors for what the contenders will be doing in space. She’s chosen superwash merino wool in a color called Jupiter Blue, for its stretchiness and smooth knitting. He holds a piece of pink rice paper, one of the many colors and kinds of paper on his prep table. Her contender across the semi-circular battle room is an origami artist. In her haptic gloves she holds an ordinary circular needle, on her table lie several kinds and thicknesses of yarn, fuzzy angoras and softest cashmeres, as well as strong linens and smooth silks. The needles glow golden against the black of space, represented on the giant screen in the battle room.
The navy needs the Oikotekts, or Cobblers as they call themselves, to repair the world when the aliens come.Īulis lifts her virtual needles, ready to knit the fabric of space and time. The economy is collapsing and people everywhere congregate in fear, pray, drink, make desperate love or kill themselves, whatever their nature tells them to. Ordinary weaponry doesn’t work against them. So far they have cost humanity only the planet New Hope and its inhabitants, but the Katabiotics could potentially destroy the entire human sphere in the galaxy.
The Katabiotics’ erratic trajectory leaves a trail of despoiled reality, where physical laws no longer work, suns gutter and whole ecologies have never existed. Only an Oikotekt, a person of powerful imagination, can hold onto a picture of the universe as it is supposed to be against the reality-altering presence of the Katabiotic aliens. She Knits the Universe a Pink Angora Sweater by Bo BalderĪulis shuts out the frenetic buzz of the arena where she’s competing for an Oikotekt placement in the space navy.
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