Thousand+ Words for Nov. 20, 2025

Those Miserable Little Star-Worshippers," Apoxa muttered to Himself as He Glided....

"Those miserable little star-worshippers," Apoxa muttered to himself as he glided through the cold vacuum of deep space. "The way they cling to their little clods of dirt, it's disgusting. Makes me want to vomit."

"Now, we mustn't impose our own values on the poor creatures," Kalenx replied. She warped space in front of her a little bit more to catch up. "They're so fragile, they can't tolerate space, you know."

"What's to tolerate?" Apoxa asked irritably. "It's the damn stars that have to be tolerated. Sweaty things, churning with gas and light. All that light, how does any creature stand it? Disgusting."

Kalenx smiled as she came alongside her mate. "Well, we don't have to cling to them, do we?"

"No."

Kalenx became aware of a small black hole that was ahead of them at the same time. It was about a dozen light years away and would require only a slight deviation of their path through spacetime to intersect with it. "Hungry?" she asked.

"Yeah, I guess so."

"Let's stop at that little one up there and grab a bite, shall we?"

"Well, it looks a little heavy in organics," Apoxa replied. "I'm not supposed to have that much carbon anymore."

"Oh, come on, one time won't hurt," she said as she modified her path towards the black hole. "I'm hungry for some organics, and carbon would be good for my eggs."

"You're egging?" Apoxa asked with mild interest.

"Yes, I am," she said. "I told you that the other night, honey."

"Oh, I remember now," Apoxa lied. "Well, good. Let's go get you some carbon then." They moved spacetime just enough to allow entry into a tight orbit around the small dense collapsed star. "Oh, that feels great," Apoxa said as he let the tidal forces tug on his body. "This one's not all that warm. How far along did you say you are?"

"A couple of sorers, I think," Kalenx said. "I'm not really sure. Maybe three." She used a unit of time that was roughly equivalent to 3 centuries in time as reckoned by the star-worshippers who clung to a little clod of dirt that was the third such clod of dirt orbiting around an ordinary yellow star in a galaxy that was visible--barely--from the present location where Apoxa and Kalenx floated toward the black hole.

"Ah," Apoxa said. He calculated in his mind--that meant that his mate would produce the eggs that were forming in her body well after the coming season of y'clel. And then the young would hatch and make their way from the hidden dimensions where Kalenx would place them and enter the Universe dimensions sometime in sciorawa. That would not be the greatest time to be born, but Apoxa could find a place with an appropriate level of graviton flux between now and sciorawa.

"I like the cool ones," Kalenx replied. She came to a halt and allowed her body to stretch out in the direction of the tidal force. "That does feel good."

"Yeah." Apoxa changed his shape to a radial pointing upward and downward in relation to the center of the black hole and stretched himself until his downward tip touched the hard surface of the star. "Ooh, this one's pretty salty," he said as he began to feed.

And then Kalenx heard only the sounds of neutrinos being collected and shunted down into his digestive tract. "Honey, don't be a pig," she said as she radialized her own body and touched the surface of the black hole. She too began to feed, and they fed silently for some time.

Apoxa's feeding tip curled up and away from the surface of the star, which was now noticeably cooler. "That's enough for me," he said.

Kalenx was still silently collecting neutrinos, but she too curled her mouthpart away from the surface. "That's good," she said, "but I wasn't really all that hungry myself. That will do me until dinnertime." Both the beings changed their body shapes back to the rough triangles they assumed when traveling through space, and Kalenx folded space so that she was underneath her mate. "You ready to get going?"

"Yeah," Apoxa replied. He folded space so that he was beside Kalenx. "Oh, excuse me," he said as his warping of spacetime interfered with hers.

"Do you mind if I take that black hole with us? I liked it."

"I don't mind. Why should I mind?" Apoxa said.

"You don't mind carrying it?"

Apoxa turned around so that the other side of him was exposed to the black hole. "No. I'm going to put it right in behind us, and then I'll stretch it out into its own time when we get home," he said.

"Okay, but if we run into anybody, would you mind folding it behind you? I don't want people to think we're piggish," she said.

"You don't have to tell me that."

Together, they warped spacetime so that it was a gentle drop to their neighborhood, so far buried in the blackness of space that the nearest galaxy of positive matter, with the attendant sources of photon noise that all positive matter galaxies had, was only a tiny splash of light, insignificant against the other tiny splashes of light that represented galaxies even farther away. Cold, dark, empty space--just the right conditions for Apoxa and Kalenx and others of their kind. The black hole that Kalenx was carrying was pumping its gravity and neutrinos into a dimension that Kalenx had opened and kept open for that purpose; she could always retrieve the neutrinos later, and that way, if they met anyone, the black hole could be folded out of sight.

As they arrived in their own region of space, Apoxa spoke. "Now, don't tell anyone that I ate from that black hole," he said.

"Why not?" Kalenx responded. "What's the difference?"

"No difference," he said. "I'm just trying to be private, you know. At my age."

"Sure, honey," Kalenx said. Together they floated into familiar territory.

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