You're listening to the Clarksworld podcast. I'm your host to narrator Kate Baker. Welcome to

the last story for the month of May, 2025, issue 224. I want to thank you again for your

ongoing support of the magazine. We simply cannot do this without you. If you are a patron over at

patreon.com, forward slash Clarksworld, a member of Clarkark's world citizens a subscriber thank you if you haven't

yet please consider doing so your monetary contribution helps us keep going month after month

story after story and this story is titled yarn theory and is by mar Vivert. Hugo and Nebula-nominated author

Marie Vibbert's short fiction has appeared over 90 times in top magazines like nature, analog,

in Clark's World and has 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's a computer

programmer in Cleveland, Ohio. And if you like what you hear, I implore you to go back and listen to Real Meat,

cheaper to replace, and we built this city.

So my dear listener, I hope you can sit back, relax, and let me tell you a very short story.

The mathematician sits on a window seat in her apartment in Krakow.

The cat asleep next to her in a cascade of house plant 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 tail of two cities.

Most assume binary, but it could have been hexadecimal. Make one right, make one left,

pearl, 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.

...