Year Of Megan 1938, New Mexicolt
The land was barren and parched, sand relieved only by stray scrub bushes and the occasional stunted tree. It was a wasteland, good for little save the purpose to which it had now been dedicated.
The diplomats – representatives from Lippanzer and Neighpon – moved uncomfortably in their silken formal coats in this desert. They were in an unfriendly land, a country which they knew to be on the brink of war with their own. War – almost unthinkable in this modern age, this age of steamships and railroads, airships and airplanes, in which the arts of industry had been applied to make weapons far more destructive than the sabers and lances or even the flintlock pistols, of old.
It had been over a century and a half since the last major war between civilized Powers – and that had been an affair of lines of ponies, away from major towns – shooting at each other on a chosen field by mutual consent. Thousands had perished. Should war come now, in a time of aerial explosives and automatic-loading rifled musketry – hundreds of thousands might die.
It seemed impossible.
But the Leader of Lippanzer had made his demands in the lands over the eastern sea; the Shogun of Neighpon in the lands over the western. Between them, Steellion marshaled his forces. Armies, fleets, and air-squadrons were massing. There had already been violent incidents – only a few deaths, but harbingers of what might come. The part of the world still under sane leadership had trembled in growing fear for the last five years.
Trembled – and acted. The Ponies of the West had studied certain advanced physical theories, worked in secret for that half-decade. Now, the fruits of their labors would be revealed.
Out in the desert there stood an incongruous metal tower. A few hundred feet high, made of steel girders, with a sphere at the top. The diplomats murmured in confusion as the soldiers led them to this tower, as they were told that this was the fabled device. Their confusion was worse as they were then led back several miles the way they had come, to a squat concrete building.
“What is the meaning of this?” asked Ritten Truper, the Lippanzer ambassador. “I thought you meant to demonstrate your device?”
“Indeed we do,” replied Green Grove, the general in charge of the project.
“Then why have you taken us back to this building? Would we not have a better view of the device from a few hundred yards away?”
One of the scientists, tall and gawky, snorted to herself. “Heh, you certainly would!”
“Finemare, shut your trap!” snapped the general.
Another scientist intervened. He was a broad-shouldered, saturnine stallion. “The nature of the device,” he said smoothly, “is such that its operation may be more safely viewed from a considerable distance.”
“Danke schon, I understand,” said Ritten Truper. “You are?”
“Oppenhorser,” replied the scientist.
“You look ---“
“I am, in fact, an émigré from Lippanzer,” Oppenhorser said. “Your government decided that my continued residence in the old country was – unwelcome. I believe you will soon conclude that this was an unwise policy.”
“I would never criticize the decision of our Leader,” replied Ritten Truper uncomfortably.
Technicians appeared with dark glasses. The diplomats donned them, not without protest.
“How are we to witness the demonstration wearing these?” groused Ritten Truper.
“I believe that the demonstration will still be clearly visible,” explained Oppenhorser. “These are to protect your sight while you watch.”
“My sight?” asked Ritten Truper. “What is this to be, some sort of a giant flash bulb?”
But Oppenhorser motioned him to look through the small view slits in front. “The test is about to begin.”
A voice on a loudspeaker began to count down.
“Thirty,” it said. “Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven.”
Someone threw a switch.
“Electrical igniters armed,” said one of the technicians. He glanced at a bank of green-lit bulbs. “All igniters normal. We have a go on fusing.”
“Twenty-five,” said the loudspeaker. “Twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two.”
Another switch thrown.
“Mechanical separation of hemispheres,” said a technician, checking another bank of lights. “Shielding disengaged.”
“Twenty-one, twenty, …”
“Woops!” said Finemare, looking at a gauge. “Wow, that’s a bit hotter than we predicted!”
Everyone but the diplomats tensed. Green Groves turned to Oppenhorser.
“Do we abort?” he asked? A technician put his hoof on a switch.
“Fifteen, fourteen …”
Oppenhorser checked the gauge.
“Continue,” he said. “Just a small surge.”
“Ten, nine …”
Finemare chuckled. “Bet ten bits we don’t burn the atmosphere …”
“Five, four …”
“How would I collect?” asked Oppenhorser.
“Three, two …”
“Burn the atmosphere?” wondered Ritten Truper aloud. No one answered him.
“One, zero!”
A technician threw a switch.
For a timeless moment, everything was still.
The Sun rose in the west, behind the tower.
That was how it first looked to Ritten Truper. Then he realized that the Sun was rising within the tower.
Then he realized that it wasn’t the Sun.
“Dai Amaterasu!” shrieked a Neighponese ambassador.
A sphere as hot as the Sun expanded from where the tower had been, casting a harsh light across the desert landscape. For an instant, the brilliance was painful even through the dark glasses. The globe of intolerable radiance swelled, rose, and dimmed as something sucked dust up to cover it, the dust sent spiraling up in a column of black smoke, litten from within by the fireball. The ball of hot plasma rose through its column of dust, which began to swell at the top, opening out like a vast cap covering the sky.
All at first in silence, save for the gasps of the observing ponies. Then, the ground began to rumble. Plaster dust spilled from the ceiling.
“Seismic pressure wave,” commented Finemare, a manic grin upon her face. “Soon … soon …”
Furnace-hot wind tore at their faces, lashing them with stinging dust that would have made them glad of the dark glasses had they been able to think. Which they could not, for with the wind came the Sound.
It was a thunderclap, the greatest thunderclap they had ever known, but it rolled on, and on, and on, punishing them with its volume, driving them back on their hooves with its sheer force, even protected as they were by the mass of the bunker. All their ears were flattened in defense against the voice of thunder, and still it rolled on and on and on, shaking their world. It was three miles away, and yet it was as if a howitzer shell had gone off less than thirty yards away.
It was the sound of the air, first pushed out by that flash of superhot plasma, then roiling back in to fill the vacuum as the dying fireball climbed that smoke-stalk into the stratosphere. It went on and on and on as the tortured atmosphere rippled in waves bigger than battleships, then it faded away as the air calmed and the light dimmed back to normality. Suddenly blinded, the ponies removed their glasses to observe the colossal cloud.
For the dust had not settled. Riding the tremendous column of superheated air, it had spread out into a great mass of smoke, spreading out many miles above the barren and now blasted plain. Huge, ominous, still lit from within by a spectral rainbow shine, it resembled nothing so much as an impossible, gigantic mushroom.
Oppenhorser stared at it in awe.
“I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” he intoned, quoting an ancient scripture.
Green Groves was more prosaic. He turned toward the foreign ambassadors.
“We have a line going,” he said bluntly. "We can mass-produce them. Just imagine them going off over one of your armies – your fleets – your cities. Gentlemen – do you still want war?”
Ritten Truper was pale. One of the Neighponese ambassadors was openly weeping.
The conclusion was obvious to any sane pony.
The Leader of Lippanzer was not a sane pony. He declared that he would not be stopped by any threat. “I am no coward,” he declared. “No compassion cow. There will be no surrender!”
His generals looked at each other and came to the only sane conclusion.
It was reported as a heart attack brought on by stress.
The war across the Eastern Sea did not start.
The Mikado of Neighpon was more sensible. He assembled a force of loyal officers and executed a perfect coup-from-above against the military junta which had controlled his country.
“Diplomatic matters,” he explained in his first-ever radio address, “have developed in a matter not necessarily to our advantage.”
The war across the Western Sea did not start.
The ponies would never fight a World War. And the power of the atom would never be used in anger by ponies against any pony city. Such was a cruelty of which their kind were not yet capable.
But there were forces beyond their knowledge in the universe, forces out of their most primal myths, forces which had patiently waited beyond the walls separating world from world. And the scientists of the Manehattan Project had built their bomb better than they knew.
Most of the fireball was only as hot as the surface of the Sun. But temperature distribution was in part random -- and quantum effects loom large on a small scale. There were whole cubic femtometers near the center of the colliding plutonium hemispheres which became – very briefly – as hot as the Sun’s core. And there were cubic attometers which attained – even more briefly – temperatures approaching that of the first nanosecond after the Big Bang.
An attometer was as good as an opened stable door to some of those forces.
Not all of them were malign.
Not all of them.
Several days before the test, Dr. Sweetie Finemare had decided to hedge her bet on the possibility of the nuclear fission reaction spreading beyond the bomb and at a minimum destroying the bunker, by visiting her husband, Rich Greentree, and spending a glorious and possibly final night with him. This was strictly against project protocol, and General Green Groves would have been furious had he known that she had done this.
In fact, Green Groves had already instituted several security measures, including an extra guard post and two locked doors, specifically to prevent Finemare from exercising her hobby of wandering about the project at will in utter defiance of the regulations. Green Groves knew how important was the Manehattan Project, and though he did not really believe Finemare was a spy, he did not want to allow even the possibility of a leak.
These security measures worked about as well as security measures usually did against Finemare, which is to say they provided her with what zookeepers would term an “enriched environment” for the entertainment of their captives. Finemare picked a padlock, jiggered a combination lock, and sweet-talked her way with a wink and a case of hooch past the guards.
Green Groves would not find out for several years that several of the foreign scientists working for the project actually were spies working for Steellion, and feeding him weekly reports on its operations. But that is another story.
What is important to this story is that the ponies had not yet discovered just how dangerous hard radiation can be to an unborn foal, and consequently Finemare – whose husband had come down with an inoperable cancer, and hence had little time left to sire offspring – had no reason to believe that she should, and thus done absolutely nothing to prevent conception. And Nature took its course.
At the moment that the Trinity device vaporized a steel tower in the desert, and provided a spectacular fireworks show for the ambassadors and scientists and technicians and soldiers stationed in that bunker, two equine embryos had attached themselves to the walls of Finemare’s womb. This was uncommon – ponies normally have single births.
What was even more uncommon were the two packets of information, compressed into data at the sub-quantum scale, that rode the gamma rays from the detonation, then sensed the incipent lives within Dr. Sweetie Finemare and steered their respective gamma photons on a precisely chosen course into that womb, which resulted in them decohering and expanding into nanoscale patterns of electromagnetism in just the right places to avoid harming those lives, and attaching themselves to the nascent nerve nets of those two tiny masses of cells.
This of course required a feat of calculation impossible to even the brilliant mind of Sweetie Finemare, or indeed to any computers that ponies would develop in their wondrous, short and tragic Second Age. But it was well within the intellectual powers of two Cosmic Principles.
So it was that Dr. Sweetie Finemare, who had helped to give birth to the Atomic Age, in about twelve months gave birth in a more conventional sense to twin foals. They were very obviously fraternal rather than identical twins, for one – the firstborn sister – was as white as a plasma fireball. Her mane – dripping wet from the birth – was a wondrous, pastel rainbow, as if something in her split the white of her coat into all its constituent hues. Twenty-eight minutes later, the second born emerged, and she was as dark as the night sky, both in coat and mane, though in her mane were specks of white like the stars.
Their sire was already falling into his last illness, but within a few hours he was able to sit with his exhausted but happy wife, and gaze into the wondering eyes of his two children. As was common with foals, they were sufficiently strong and coordinated enough that they might have been able to walk, had they been born on the plains on which the primal herds had roamed, and hence fearing predators, rather than being born to the safe confines of a modern hospital.
The eyes of the white foal were a strange purple, unusual even for their varicolored kind. Looking into them, Sweetie thought of a high violet, and the life-giving, life-taking ultra-violet actinic rays which stream from the surface of the Sun.
The eyes of the black foal were sky-blue. Sweetie imagined them as the atmosphere surrounding the black Earth of the pupils, and her black fur as the endless night of the Universe beyond. They looked out from the little void of her surrounding Universe.
These eyes were innocent, as are any foals, which Sweetie did not find strange. What had made them was anything but innocent, but the process of decoherence and attachment to the nascent neural nets had only been able to transmit a very simplified form of the personalities and experiences of the Cosmic Principles they had been. And their bodies were merely mortal – in this life, they would never know their true natures, any more than did their mother.
But perhaps not their father. For he was, as I have intimated, already at death’s door, and possibly something of Mortis had touched him, and given him strange insight. Not what his foals truly were – for that would have been cruel knowledge, which would have seared his soul with madness. And Mortis, who brings sweet relief from intolerable pain, is anything but cruel. But something, perhaps, of their affiliation.
Rich and Sweetie had, before the birth of their foals, picked out tentative names for them. Yet when Rich finally beheld the foals blinking at him from their mother’s side, an odd mood came upon him, and he bent first to the white foal.
“Sundreamer,” he said, in a voice choked by emotion. “She’s Sundreamer.”
Then to the black one.
“Moondreamer. She’s Moondreamer.”
And Sweetie Finemare, who loved to argue and debate and generally tease every pony she had encountered in her life, both before and after this moment, could not find it in her to brook the will of her husband at this moment – one of the last pain-free moments he would ever know – of their lives.
Besides, it felt right.
“Sure, Rich,” she said softly. “That’s their names. Sundreamer and Moondreamer.”