The Best Science Fiction of the Year

Besides selling fifty-odd short stories, twenty-some poems, and a few comics and interactive fictions, Marie Vibbert has been a medieval (SCA) squire, ridden 17% of the roller coasters in the United States and has played O-line and D-line for the Cleveland Fusion women’s tackle football team. She has been translated into French, Chinese, and Vietnamese! By day she is a computer programmer.

The ship was two days overdue for docking, more or less. As a stowaway, I didn’t have access to status reports. My passive data sniffer patiently checked for the docking station network, telling me, “Nope. Not there yet.” My calendar showed the original estimated time of arrival—two days and three hours ago. Having now reached the point at which I’d said I could start worrying, I was busy calculating a new point at which to start worrying again. There wasn’t much else I could do—if I tried anything and got caught, I’d be tossed out an airlock because, as I said: stowaway.

So I knitted. I always knit when I’m bumming. It helps to have something to do while you count your remaining rations and wonder if this is where you die. Also, traveling in storage containers meant I had a constant need for warm knit garments and blankets.

Since I was sure I was about to die, I was doing this insane lace stitch. Everything was slip-slip-knits and cables and knit-three-into-two and shit. Getting angry at the person who wrote this pattern distracted me from my inevitable demise.

The wall panel over my head wrenched open, flooding me with light, and these two people were staring at me and I realized I was in the middle of a cable and I didn’t remember if it was a cable-front or -behind.

I was wedged between boxes of whatever, helmet and gloves off, knitting in front of me, yarn pulled taut and looped around one finger, my instruction screen floating near at hand. There were crumbs all around me because I had eaten the last, most dried-out biscuit. Also, I probably stank. I’d been in the cargo box for seven days and my Ever-SaniTM wasn’t as “Ever” as it claimed.

My captors had vaguely Asian features: a guy with a shaved head and a woman with her black hair in tiny pin curls. Pin Curls was holding the hatch. She looked like she might close it over me again.

Pin Curls pushed the hatch door all the way open. “Fuck. Of all the . . .fuck.”

This was not the typical discovery reaction us stowaways get. The typical reaction was a swift kick out an airlock, or detention until landing. Since we were two days overdue for docking, I was hoping for detention. They had to be close to docking. Right?

I let go of my knitting to hold my hands up. “You can have my stuff. Please don’t kill me.”

Shaved Head held his hand out. “Come on,” he said. “You might as well be doomed with the rest of us.”

He pulled me into the crew’s common space. It was about the size of an apartment kitchen, and as crammed with potted herbs and potholders and garage-sale junk as my uncle’s place. A barrel-bodied robot crouched in an alcove, holding a ladle. An old woman was bouncing back and forth between the only porthole and a table. She saw me, closed her eyes, and said, like a prayer, “Let this be the last bad news today.”

Didn’t feel like I was their top worry. “Is there something I can help with?”

“The station won’t let us dock,” Shaved Head said. “No one’s coming to resupply us. Even with the plants, we have maybe forty-eight hours of air left, and you’re using up an extra person’s oxygen.”

A radio crackled, and I swear the air pressure dropped from all the intaken breaths. Abuela approached the radio like it was a poisonous spider on the wall. Then she relaxed her whole body at once. “Just static.”

Pin Curls (Shirley) had her hands on the ceiling like she was going to powerlift it. “There’s some sensor, says our hull is too weak. Electrical resistance patterns or something . . . The station says it’s too dangerous, and the cargo owners won’t come get us, either.”

I knew how to fix this. “Disable the sensor. You can fake the readings with—”

Gong leaned toward me. “It might’ve helped if we hadn’t ‘fixed’ our problem so fast after they detected it.”

“Ya think?” Shirley kicked the wall to propel herself to the robot and, briefly, tussled with him over the ladle.

“Okay,” I said. “So, we figure out where the hull is weak and reinforce it.”

“With what?” Having successfully wrested the ladle from the robot, Shirley pointed it at me. “Our exploration of the cargo turned up one freeloader and a bunch of crumbs.”

Yeah, eating crumbly food in zero-g is a faux pas. Two days overdue for docking, times how much oxygen and fuel? I saw the others sizing me up against their own survival. “So . . .hey, I’m Mouth,” I said.

She looked like she thought this was another reason to kick me into the cold embrace of space, but Gong grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Welcome! You’ve met me, and Shirley, and Abuela. That’s Fat Robot Chen.”

“He looks like my buddy Chen.” Gong shrugged. “You know, if he were a robot, and fat.”

Abuela tsked. “So friendly. Not enough concern about how we are all going to die! The station’s insurance company refuses to allow us to dock as they would be financially liable for structural damage if our ship failed during docking.” She showed the message to me. They’d tacked “not to mention the tragic loss of human life” on the end. I wondered if it was an AI correcting their lack of humanity, like a grammar-check for decency.

“And there it is. Rhea Station.” Abuela held her hand over the porthole like she was holding back a curtain. “So close, and so far.”

The station was the size of a teacup in the view, but close enough that we could see the flitting lights of other ships coming and going.

“I still say we abandon ship.” Gong floated at my elbow. “Hop in our EVA suits and the station rescue team will pick us up.”

Abuela met this with a string of Spanish curses that I’m going to guess added up to, “My ship and cargo are worth more to me than your nutsack remaining attached to your body.”

Gong rolled his eyes, which resulted in more curses, and Shirley snapping at the both of them to “Get over it,” which gave me the distinct feeling this was an argument that had been going on for about two days. Maybe longer.

I cleared my throat. “Hey, I’m okay jumping out for station rescue, myself.”

They looked at me like they’d forgotten I was there. (Except Fat Robot Chen, whose eyes tracked Gong.)

Shirley raised one hand, a smug/sour look on her face as if to say, “Tossing you out the airlock was my idea first.”

Abuela pursed her lips. “They might not pick up a stowaway. No, I forbid it. And Shirley, hija, I can hear you thinking. No one is getting tossed out of anything.”

Abuela was right: A lot of people killed stowaways to discourage the practice, because capitalism. Time to save the day. “We lower the air pressure. Get rid of all the nitrogen and go pure oxygen. That’ll relax the hull, maybe close some tears?”

Abuela snapped her fingers and pointed. Gong swam to the controls. “Yeah, we can do that.”

I turned back to the cargo box to get my knitting. Shirley flew neatly in my way, glaring death at me.

With the air of a sentry putting up a deadly weapon, Shirley Velcroed the ladle into place over a set of potholders.

The air vents hissed. Maybe it was my imagination, but it felt colder as the air mix changed. I went in the other direction, then, and checked out the cargo manifest. It’s nice to know what’s been poking you in the back. Three hundred popsicle forms. A gross of personal AIs. Freeze-dried food rations. “Novelty items.” Best not examine that one. “Wait . . . you have twenty-five-hundred meters of cable aboard?” I asked.

“None of your business.” Abuela shooed me away from her control panel. “I am asking the station to please check us again, that we have lowered our pressure.”

“The sensor still says it’s not good enough,” Gong said, coming in from aft.

“I’ll disable it again.” Shirley pushed herself forward. I was relieved to have some distance between us.

Abuela hung by the radio like it was prom night and her date hadn’t called. After a long time, there came a reply from the station, peppered with half-legal terms, which ended with, “Lady, look at it from our perspective. Any ship docked is a hole we can’t close. I’m sorry, but no.”

Abuela curled into a ball, a little old lady bean right there. It broke my heart.

Shirley gathered a handful of my jacket. “So we toss her, right? To buy time?”

Shirley, expressing her rosy outlook on others, said, “No way am I letting you go back for some weapon from your hidey-hole.”

I wrenched out of her grip and caught myself against a bundle of bags hanging on the wall. “Trust issues much? Tell me about the spool of cable you got in the cargo. It might save us.”

Gong answered for them, “It’s a high-strength polymer. But what are we supposed to do with it? Tie the ship together?”

I mimed looping cable around my arm, twice, and realized that I sucked at miming. “We tie the cable around the ship.”

Gong shook his head. “We can’t make the pressure even—tie in one direction, you weaken the other.”

Shirley was neatly in my way again. “I’m still not letting you go back there.”

Ugh. More inept miming, then. “We make a bag, a mesh bag, then slide it around the ship. I’ll need at least two others helping. When we get to the far side—” I wriggled my fingers around an imaginary egg-shape and then mimed pulling strings “—we pull it tight. Bam. The whole ship is more secure. The pressure adjusts evenly because of the give in the stitches.”

Shirley, the one I expected the most objection from, was frowning thoughtfully. “You’ll need a hole in the bag for the docking ring,” she said.

“Knitting can always be undone,” I said. “We won’t be cutting it.Come on, who’s with me?”

“You’re an idiot and a stowaway,” Shirley said, “but I’m not letting you take all the glory. I’m in.”

Chen cocked his bucket-shaped head. “What plan was that, dude? Also, did you mean ‘can’ this plan work or ‘may’ this plan work?”

Gong and Abuela resumed arguing. Shirley declared she was going to her bunk, forgetting she was keeping me from accessing the cargo hold. YES! I got my knitting and my tablet. I pulled apart the lace thing I’d been making and started a simple mesh bag for demonstration purposes.

Crap. How big was this ship? I loaded up the instructions for the bag and tried to convert units from inches to meters.

Gong opened and closed cupboards and storage-ties around the room. “Are we out of anything remotely good? Who bought all these pouches of wax beans?”

Fat Robot Chen trundled along the ship’s deck, gripping it somehow. “I got you, bro. The special of the day is chipped beef on toast.”

“No no no . . . ” Gong gently steered Chen away from the microwave. “Buddy, you gotta stop trying to cook. You’ll get us both spaced.”

This struggle escalated, which I thought unwise since it increased Gong’s breath rate. Abuela saved me from having to mention this by flying screaming at the both of them.

Shirley leaned in from the opening to the crew cabin. “Are we going to eat? If eating is still something we get to do?”

They were exhausted. A captive audience. “So, that plan I was talking about?” I showed them my bag. I wrapped it halfway around a wax bean packet. “You see?” I pulled the bag-fragment tight and poked at the packet. “Evenly supported.”

Abuela paused in grabbing Gong by the ears while Gong was wrestling the ladle away from Chen. “That could work.” She narrowed her eyes. “But I’m not doing it, and I’m not sending my grandson out into vacuum.”

Before I could say, “Well, if there’s compensation in it for me,” Shirley bundled me into my helmet and gloves and pulled me with her out the airlock.

Rude, but she showed me where to clip my safety line while Fat Robot Chen spooled the cable out from the cargo bay. The cable was flexible enough to loop around my forearm. I wished I had four ship-size needles, but I could let stitches float free, given the lack of gravity. Dropped stitches (when a loop falls off your needle) aren’t as much of a problem in zero-g knitting. They float there, the friction of the yarn holding the loop open until you get your needle into it again. Lucky for me, because I was a terrible knitter when I started bumming.

The ship was an uneven football shape, round at one end and tapered at the other. The round end would be the perfect bottom of my bag, so we moved toward it to start.

I was clumsy in the suit gloves, but we were going huge here. I made a slipknot the size of a Hula-Hoop and knit ten stitches as big around as my forearm into it, making a disk. It was fun, knitting so big, and went fast. It was like spinning a huge beret, the disk doubling in size with each revolution.

Shirley gazed down the length of the ship, to where Fat Robot Chen was handing cable out the airlock. “Is this going to be enough?”

I should have finished my math. The ship was bigger on the outside. Inside, it had felt the size of my uncle’s camper van. Outside, it looked the size of a trailer truck that delivers camper vans. “Uh . . . how long is this ship?”

“Twenty-four meters and some change, if you don’t count the antennas. Ten meters in diameter.” I couldn’t see her face with her helmet turned away from me, but I heard the suspicion in her voice.

Twenty-four meters, twenty-five-hundred meters of cable? I needed, what, surface area to compare? It was something something 2-Pi-R. “I’m sure it’s enough,” I said, not remotely sure.

Knitting stopped being fun after five rows. My arms were sore and I was sweating and my stomach hurt from holding myself rigid; it’s a natural reaction in zero-g to lock on with your feet and keep your body in a sitting position. Stupidly. You don’t need to but your brain wants to. I made myself stop, but three stitches later, I was doing it again.

Around ten rows, the disk was big enough that I needed someone else to hold the other side. Shirley “sat” on the hull, passing loose floating loops under her hands, spinning the disk while I knitted the other side.

When we were halfway around, the trailing cable tangled in our suit tethers. “Crap,” I said. “We’ll have to unclip and re-clip every rotation, or else we hold the mesh still and we move.”

This is the point in a knitting project where it starts to suck. Before, every row made visible progress. Now, every row looked the same, and I was annoyed with the tethers. My hands slipped with sweat inside my suit gloves. “I need a break.”

“No,” Shirley said, firmly. “We need to finish this in twelve hours so we have another twenty-four to come up with Plan B.”

We untethered and retethered, rotating the knitting. We worked silently until the disk was as big around as the butt-end of the ship.

“Um . . . yeah, we should move this . . . you know, so it’s centered on the ship’s butt? Kinda?” I did more bad miming, hampered by suit arms, hoping I conveyed the picture adequately.

Shirley hopped easily from handhold to handhold, re-tethered, and moved the disk into position. I enjoyed the momentary rest. Better yet, there weren’t any more increases now. This was as long as the rows would get. And it had only taken an hour! We might actually get this done.

It was no longer sensible to rotate the knitting. There were too many random antennas and other things poking out of the hull for it to snag on. Shirley and I crawled in tandem, losing sight of each other, but I saw Fat Robot Chen every pass. He peered along the cable length like he was worried about me.

When we were just under halfway along the ship, it was time to make a hole for the airlock. I looped the yarn ten times around my arm, a convenient way of marking off a long length. It felt odd slipping my arm free and letting the loops float. I was very careful with the next stitch, not pulling at all so my gap would stay open.

Shirley came back from the far side to watch. She thumbs-upped, which I guess meant she realized what I was doing. I poked the loose yarn all around Fat Robot Chen while he tracked me like a rapt gopher. I knit the next stitch into the big loop. Here on out I’d be going back and forth instead of around and around, stopping each time I hit the big loop with one stitch into it. I checked the time. Another two hours eaten up. I was slowing down, but there was still plenty of time.

I was a few stitches away from returning to the gap from the other direction when my triceps went “boink” and then my forearm and my elbow and my pinky finger all cramped up at once.

“Shush. Look. I saw you take a loop and put it through another loop, right? Like this?”

She made a damn slipknot. Close, but not the same thing. “No . . . no . . . just . . . ow. Let’s . . . can we go inside and rest?”

I double-checked my tether and let my body go slack. I floated off the ship, a me-balloon. It was a relief. Maybe I should take my chances with station rescue. At least I’d die lazily. “Why are you such a hard-ass?”

“We’re in danger. It’s not being a hard-ass if you’re trying to save everyone’s life.”

Hell, my arm hurt. “Pushing me won’t make this go faster. You might have noticed I’m not in the best physical shape.”

“Well, yeah, obviously. But I mean . . . I don’t intend to be a burden on anyone.”

Shirley slowly and carefully completed a knit stitch. “Yes,” I said. “Exactly like that.”

She did three more. Her fourth she almost did backward but I corrected her. After the fifth, she asked, “Why stow away? You gotta risk getting killed a dozen ways.”

I wished I had a noble story to tell her, some manifesto to conquer the solar system for the proletariat, but the truth was rather more self-serving. “I like traveling. I have a festival crew job during Lunar New Year on the Moon, and every now and then I stay a full year on Mars, because I have family there and they can always use the help on the farm, but other than that, I’m on a new planet, a new station, a new country every six months. Eating weird new things and meeting weird new people. This is the only way someone like me could ever do that.”

“Yeah. And how easy is that?” She didn’t answer, because of course she knew exactly what it took. Connections. Family. A ship that didn’t break. “Anyway,” I said, “how much of the solar system do you get to see on a cargo ship? Orbits and docking bays.”

Shirley grunted. I showed her how to knit stitches into the dock-hole. I’d guessed the size pretty good. The hole was ten percent bigger than the dock.

We took turns, then, every other row. I think Shirley tried to go faster than I did. Which made me go faster. I was hurting all over when Chen said, “Hey, guys? Do you want me to tell you when the cable is almost all gone?”

I looked at the whole third of the ship still left to cover and wanted to cry. Shirley’s fists were on her hips.

“Gauge!” I said. I started pulling stitches out. “Chen, spool this back, we’re starting over.”

We still had five of her twelve hours! “Knitting has this concept called gauge,” I said. “The size of the finished work will increase if you make bigger stitches. We’re going to make bigger stitches. I’ll double loop each stitch. It should double the size.” As soon as I said it, I remembered it wasn’t that simple, but I didn’t want her to lose faith.

“Knitting bigger also goes faster,” I added. “And unraveling is fast.” I left a floating trail of loose cable behind me as I pulled myself recklessly, tether unclipped.

When I reached the butt, Shirley was there, guiding the loose cable, watching me. “You’d better tether. I’m not chasing your ass if you fly off.”

We were silent as I restarted knitting. It did go faster, with enormous-enormous stitches. I gripped as lightly as I dared to try to keep from cramping up, but after three rows, we had to alternate again, taking catnaps on our tethers. We’d used up another six hours. Holy crap. I needed to rest.

“It’s been thirteen hours since I gave you twelve,” Shirley said as we were working our way over the edge of the butt again. “Now there’s no time for a Plan B.”

We made it past Chen with another big docking loop, and I started knitting two together every tenth stitch to narrow the bag as the ship narrowed. I hadn’t done that last time.

“Hey, me and you are on suit air, and maybe lower pressure means they’re breathing lighter inside?”

I decreased every ninth, then every eighth, then every seventh. This was going to work. The hull was narrowing faster. I decreased every sixth.

There was maybe a fifth of the ship still to go. “It’s not enough,” Shirley said, crying.

I was stupid with exhaustion. My eyes raced over the ship, the lovely loose net enclosing it. There was nothing I could do except at the start. “I have an idea.” I held the loose end toward Shirley. “Hold this.”

I went back to the beginning, undid the starting slipknot, and carefully unknit the first ten rows. You can’t pull knit stitches loose from the bottom like you can from the top. Unknitting is slow and annoying. If this were crochet, I could tug it free . . . Maybe we could start over . . .

“Unknitting the far end. Ugh. I’ll have to do it all the way to the edge of the butt. We’re going to make a tube instead of a bag. We move the tube to center it, so there’s, like, a small bit uncovered on either end, and then I’ll knit this back as much as I can over the butt. Two medium-sized holes are better than one small hole and one big one.”

I froze. How obvious. Our “tube” had an opening halfway along it. “Yeah . . . okay . . . that’s a problem.” What other options did we have? Undo the whole thing? “I’m making a hole at the starting point. Yeah. Tug when I tell you. It’ll at least give you another foot of coverage on that side. There’s some slack around the airlock. One foot won’t move it too much, just make it tight on one side.”

“More coverage, more structural integrity. One more foot is one more foot. Start tugging.”

I didn’t. Damn. I remembered all those small projections from the ship that made us not want to turn the net earlier—thrusters, welds—anything could be caught anywhere.

Chen mused, “May I leave the ship? I may. Can I leave the ship? No, I can’t.”

Shirley crawled to me. “Chen’s not built for extravehicular motion. Don’t blame him. He can be cute when there isn’t an emergency.”

We hung there, both exhausted and despairing and not in a mood for conversation. Gong crawled up to us. His face was streaked with soot and something like . . . hoisin? “Plan B was making glue from beans,” he said. “Don’t ask.” He looked at what we’d done so far. “Why did you put a hole in it? Why didn’t you plan to end it around the dock?”

Mutual desire to kill Gong united us as Shirley and I silently started unravelling the whole thing.

Every time you try to save time by not undoing something, it turns out to take too long and you end up undoing it anyway. It hurt to start over, but this time we started with an about-the-dock-sized open ring on the far side of the ship from the dock. This way we’d save material and the two holes would balance each other. “Now,” I said, resting while Shirley micromanaged Gong’s first turn knitting, “we’ll go as far as we can, but if we’re short, that’ll just leave a bigger opening around the dock. And airlocks are reinforced anyway, right?”

It took eleven hours to finish, including nap-breaks, but we knit a bag around a spaceship. Twelve hours of air left, then we’d all get into the suits. Shirley and I each had maybe an hour of suit air left. Gong had twelve hours. Abuela had a full twenty-four and wanted to top up our tanks with hers, but I said we’d know if it worked in an hour anyway.

Then Shirley and I slept, because we had to. I was so incompetent-tired, Robot Chen had to tie me into a berth.

I stared at my insensible arms, floating in front of me. “I’m never moving my hands again.”

“We don’t even know it’ll work.” Gong had a gallows smile. He held on to the treadmill on the ceiling as he pushed Chen out of the compartment.

I ought to have slept like the dead. The hammock was way more comfortable than a cargo box, but instead I fidgeted, slipping in and out of fitful dreams about knots. When we were down to six hours, Gong woke me and forced me into my suit, visor open, for now.

Abuela woke me by taking my helmet off. “Shh, shhh, hija. We’ve docked with a supply ship!”

I enjoyed my breath of air and swam past her to the main compartment. A big man floated by the table. “We’ll get your crew and contents to Rhea Station,” he said, “but first we need our cargo. It’s a spool of twenty-five-hundred meters of multi-stranded polymer cable.”

Shirley was the one to break the silence. “Your cable is holding our ship together.”

We laughed. I don’t know who started—it might have been Chen. Our would-be rescuer muttered about oxygen deprivation and topped up our reserve tanks before leaving us to die.

Now that we’d successfully docked and undocked with another ship and our sensor was quiet, station rescue had no problem letting us dock.

Which would have been a relief if stations didn’t kill stowaways. We stepped through the station airlock, heavy and dizzy like climbing out of a pool. Security people were staring at us. Security people who looked up from the crew manifest and exaggeratedly counted our heads.

Abuela stuck her arm in front of me. “This is our engineering intern. Such a good girl! She agreed to work for transport. Better not to put in writing and get taxed. You understand.” She pouted.

So that’s how I joined the crew. Now I get to travel outside of storage containers like a good capitalist, as we market our “emergency structural nets” to cargo ships around the planets. I also make cardigans. Fat Robot Chen graciously models them.