In the White Universe with Black Dots for Stars

by Edd

Nar to the Seventh was good at his (or her or its or their) job. He (let’s say ‘he’ for a reason we shall explain anon) enclosed a mysterious ‘white hole’ and directed the streams of energy, disassociated atoms, and occasional oddities that emerged to their proper destinations.

When Sheila Blalock plummeted through, Nar was at a loss how to categorize her. She had, it was true, been mostly converted into energy. By all rights, he (and here we see why he is dubbed a ‘he’, so as all the easier to distinguish the ‘he’ from the ‘she’) — by all rights he should have discarded her matter and focused the rest of her through a series of lenses trained on the enormous Haploid Generators of Zone Negative Nine.

He paused. He examined her more closely. He disassembled and reassembled her.

“Stop that,” said Sheila.

Nar almost dropped her. To be frank, that wouldn’t have mattered one whit, since they were weightless, but it does go far to explain just how startled he was, considering he hadn’t dropped anything in four billion nings, give or take a centining.

“You talk?” he asked.

“Of course, you ninny.”

“Then you’re intelligent, and it would likely be wrong of me to send you off to power the Hap Gens.”

“It would.” She had a way of sounding quite certain about things Nar felt she likely didn’t understand. “Nice universe you’ve got here, by the way,” she continued. “Ours is the other way around, you know.”

“Other way–?”

“Black, with white stars. I quite like it this way.”

“I’m happy it meets with your approval.”

She felt he sounded a bit defensive about things over which he had no control. Pointedly, she ignored him to admire a black comet falling toward a black sun nearby.

Regarding her, he grew happy. He’d never talked to someone from another reality. Or anyone at all, really, for nings and nings.

They talked, as Nar carried on with his occupation of regulating streams of power and the odd atom. Sheila found herself warming to the colossal being, and Nar grew to admire the caustic miniscule alien and her foreign outlook.

In time they were married (‘married’ in this case meaning they intermingled their consciousnesses in arcane and occasionally itchy ways), and had an indeterminate number of children (or ‘offspring’, or ‘spawn’, or ‘self-aware agglomerations of matter and energy’).

And they lived ever after.