Princess Celestia nodded to the guards as she walked into Twilight's palace. She had heard a hoofful of names for the palace, but to her it was nothing more or less than a monument to Twilight's accomplishments. Calling it anything other than "Twilight's Palace" just didn't seem right. She looked around the palace's hall and smiled. Rarity's touch was obvious in the time since Celestia had last been in Ponyville. Austere crystal walls were broken up by tapestries that complemented and muted the riot of color and refracted light that dominated the palace. Alcoves and tables displayed trinkets and bric-a-brac and more than a few books. The large doors to the throne room were flanked by more elaborate tapestry depicting the Elements of Harmony and Celestia's experienced eye picked out empty spaces perfect for guardsponies to stand at attention and even a spot for an unusually short, bipedal master of ceremonies to stand. The stairs up into the rest of the palace were flanked with tapestries in solid lavender that did not quite match Twilight's coat and beyond, Celestia could see that homier touches won out over the regal. Even so, the transition from palace to home was subtle, and Celestia noted it with approval. She had a tower to herself in Conterlot that similarly lacked many of the trappings of her political position, and she knew well how the respite was necessary for a mare to keep her sanity.
Celestia blinked once, the only outward sign of her pushing away the idle thoughts. Two months ago, Twilight had discovered the presence of aliens in Ponyville. She had requisitioned a high security staff and dug up some of the oldest spells from the diplomatic archives. Two weeks ago, she had written that she had made a breakthrough in learning about their visitors. Also that she had invented a laser.
Celestia wasn't sure how the one was related to the other. She wasn't entirely sure she wanted to know, either.
Last week, Twilight had reported that her breakthrough had panned out and she was actively collecting large amounts of information. Also that she was still uncertain as to what, exactly, it was she had been learning. Finally, Celestia had a break in her schedule to allow her to visit, and possibly learn about the puzzling series of events that led to such cryptic reports about their visitors.
Celestia blinked again, having sufficiently reviewed her purpose and organized her thoughts. She made for the stairs leading up and staunchly ignored the decor as she walked, although she could not help but pause at one alcove which featured a ruined, cracked, velvet-lined case that had once held the Elements of Harmony. The main library wrapped around the staircase through the 'trunk' of the palace, and Celestia passed several floors with stacks of books. Even after all these months, much of the library was still empty, but clearly Twilight and Spike had been hard at work rebuilding Ponyville's collection. Finally Celestia arrived at the top of the stairs and the corridors of the palace's wider, branching section. Here she slowed her pace and peered in door after door in genuine interest.
Celestia was privately envious of Twilight's decision to re-purpose most of her meeting rooms as laboratory space. True, Celestia had an entire school for her research, but she hadn't had time to personally hold experiments for decades. She had not done so regularly since, well, Luna would remember better than her. She passed rooms with runes carved in the walls, rooms with tables filled with beakers and test tubes, and one room with a collection of pacified clouds. This last room brought a new smile to Celestia's muzzle. She had been afraid Twilight would neglect the subtleties of her new magics. She passed another room filled with the various scrying implements and scribes monitoring the alien complex. She moved past quickly, not wanting to disturb the ponies from their labors.
Finally Celestia looked into a room to find Twilight and, to her happy surprise, most of her friends. She walked into the room. "Twilight?" she called.
Twilight's head shot up from the papers she was working on and she smiled. "Pr-er, Celestia!" she said happily. Rainbow, Applejack, Fluttershy, and Rarity all looked up at Twilight's shout. Twilight shot to her hooves and cantered over to Celestia's side like an eager filly. "I didn't know you were in Ponyville!"
Celestia dipped her head apologetically. "Yes, well, I may have forgotten to write ahead," she admitted. "I had an opening in my schedule and wanted to see for myself how your research has been going. Without all the pomp of a royal visit," she added in a loud whisper.
Rarity certainly did not scowl and mutter about the unfairness of it all. Ladies do not scowl. And if they did, it would not be in the presence of Princess Celestia. And even if some strange warping of the fundamental forces of the universe caused such to happen, it would never be in response to something Celestia herself had said or done. And so whatever the expression was that she almost made, it was not a scowl. Instead, she smiled and bowed to her soverign, seeing the rest of her friends do so out of the corner of her eyes.
Celestia nodded to them. "Rise, my little ponies," she said gently. She turned her attention back to Twilight. "How is your research going?"
Twilight nodded eagerly. "We've made a lot of progress!" she enthused. "The Federation computer is almost a how-to guide to their culture!"
"Computer?" Celestia asked, sounding out the strange word.
Twilight, if anything, only nodded faster. "Uh-huh! It's what they call their archive. It's an entirely mechanical means of storing and retrieving information." She frowned. "Well, sort of mechanical. We're getting information kind of at random, and a lot of it doesn't make sense. Yet!" Twilight smiled uncertainly. "I promise we'll figure it out soon."
Celestia chuckled. "I have no doubt you will, but perhaps you should start at the beginning?"
"Oh, right," Twilight faked a laugh. "The beginning. That would be the place to start." She abruptly stopped herself and took a deep breath, moving her hoof to her chest as she did so. "The beginning," she repeated, more calmly. "I suppose I should show you. It's a few doors down." She trotted over to the door and paused expectantly at the hallway.
Celestia followed Twilight, and the smaller alicorn picked up her explanation. "We - myself, Rarity, and Doctor Whooves - built a magical machine that extracted and translated information from Federation devices. We tested it on all of the data storage of a 'pad' that I, well, took from the Federation 'duck blind.'"
"Duck blind?" Celestia asked.
"We still haven't decoded an explanation for that," Twilight confessed, "but it's the informal name for this kind of observation post -- well hidden and in close proximity to its target." Her ears straightened as she returned to her impromptu lecture. "One of the first things we translated was an error message the device generated before, well, Spike ripped it to pieces. Carefully!" Twilight raised a hoof to silence an objection Celestia didn't actually have. "We were careful in how we took it apart. Barely any of it broke. Anyway, the error included some information about how the 'pad' connects to their 'computer.' One thing was the 'sub-magical frequencies' the Federation uses for communication like this." Twilight hoofed open a door and stood aside to let Celestia enter first, pride radiating off her.
Celestia looked into the room. Originally a library or study, it was lined with bookshelves, but instead of books the shelves had oblong crystals set in stands, most with a sheet of parchment hanging under them. The center of the room, on what had once been a reading table, was dominated by a metal disk studded with jewels. Another oblong crystal was standing upright in the center of the disk, and the whole thing glowed with magic. A wire led from the disk several pony lengths to a cage made of "Is that copper?" Celestia asked.
"Brass, actually," Twilight said. "It's enchanted to allow a specific magical signature to penetrate the palace and access the inside. That signature matches the 'sub-magical frequency' the Federals use to allow their devices to communicate. And their communication device is in there."
Celestia frowned. "Then the Federals know that one of their devices is in the palace."
"Their machines know," Twilight clarified. "I believe they have as many as a hundred such devices. Nopony is actually tracking all of them."
"But couldn't the machine alert them?" Celestia asked.
"It could," Twilight admitted, "but I have learned that machine logic is a strange thing. The computer scrying the palace would report the presence of their technology here immediately, but the computer tracking the devices connecting to it does not care where those devices are. It recognizes that a 'padd' that belongs to its 'network' is trying to get access and allows it." Twilight shook her head. "Strangest of all, I think that only one computer is doing both tasks. But without an explicit instruction to do so, it cannot use the information it already has."
"And if they truly have so many devices, they will not think to give such an instruction," Celestia mused. "A dangerous assumption."
"A necessary one," Twilight countered glumly. "Celestia, I don't like all the secrecy. It isn't, well, friendly."
"No, it is not," Celestia agreed. "Had the Federation approached us openly, I would never condone this kind of research. But they did not. As my sister would put it, 'they hath set upon Us in secrecy a game with rules of their own devising, and We are duty bound to best them.' But then Lulu is somewhat fond of cheating at checkers when she's losing."
Twilight giggled. "That helps," she admitted.
Celestia nodded and turned to the shelves of crystals. "But you were explaining your contraption? Your sister-in-law was surprised by how much crystal you ordered."
"Ah, yes," Twilight yelped. "It was actually Doctor Whooves's suggestion. Each crystal holds information pulled from the Federation computer. The machine transcribes a page or two to parchment, which we use to guess at the content of each crystal. We still aren't sure how to request specific information, and we got some duplicates before we were able to devise a systematic approach." She frowned at the diamond and emerald in the disk, which were easily twice as big as the other gems. "We keep having to rebuild the contextual enchantments, too. The computer has a lot of cross-references in its information, and pruning away excess, links I guess you could call them, has been a challenge."
"But why store the information in enchanted crystals?" Celestia asked. "A natural gem might be able to hold all those links."
"That's the genius of the design," Twilight said. "No matter how close they are, no two natural gemstones are really the same. But crystals can be grown to order." Twilight gripped the crystal in the center of the disk with her magic and lifted it smoothly from its setting. She wrapped it in parchment and set it aside while also levitating a new crystal that fit perfectly in the place of the old one. "A magical machine enchanted around natural gemstones would shatter if you tried to replace a stone like I just did. But because these crystals match each other, at least in the ways the enchantment cares about, we can swap them out. Each crystal on these shelves holds information from this one machine, and we've built a couple 'scribes' that write down information from a crystal so somepony can read it. That's what we were doing when you showed up, Princess." Twilight waved a hoof at the wall of crystals. "I don't know how much knowledge we've accumulated. Some of it is technical, some of it is cultural, some of it is historical, biographical, even agricultural. I've been reading their research logs, and I think that they have been trying to compare magic against technology they understand, so their computer has a lot of information about those technologies. And since we use magic in just about everything we do..." Twilight trailed off, grinning.
Celestia smirked. "They need an equally vast collection of technology to compare against. But is that really the most important thing to study, Twilight?"
Twilight sighed. "No," she admitted. She perked back up. "But I did find out where they came from!" Her horn lit and she cast an illusion spell Celestia knew well, projecting her imagination into the air between them.
The image was also familiar to Celestia. "A star chart?" she asked. Twilight had projected a map of the night sky, as it had looked for the past thousand years. Luna was not certain if she should remake it, as she once did regularly. The ponies of today knew the stars as a comforting constant, rather than the dynamic canvass of a princess desperate for recognition.
Twilight nodded. "We knew the Federation was not on Equestria. What we didn't know was how far they had come from." She frowned at the image and it folded, twisting and expanding. The two-dimensional map became a three dimensional field with stars scattered throughout it, the familiar constellations shattered beyond recognition. "This is something like what the night sky looks like from the outside," Twilight explained. "They call it the Hromi Star Cluster."
Celestia stared at the image, shocked. "From outside?" she asked. "From beyond the sky itself?"
Twilight nodded. "We can't see them from inside, but apparently there are stars beyond the night sky. They are much further apart and easier to navigate, so the Federation expanded much more quickly outside than in." Twilight made the image of the night sky shrink, then made a new dot far, far away from the now tiny cluster of stars. "This is about how far the Federation homeworld, 'Earth,' is, from the night sky. I think. Their measurements don't make sense. Something about light having a speed."
Celestia had not moved from her staring. "From beyond even Luna's sky," she wondered. "How long have they been traveling?"
"The Federation was founded two hundred years ago," Twilight offered. "And at least one of the scientists was on Earth itself a month ago. A vacation, to see his family."
Celestia shook her head, and Twilight let the illusion fade. "Powerful visitors, indeed," she murmured. "Twilight, I am very glad I entrusted you with this responsibility. I would not have thought to look into their technology, and I would not have found out just how powerful they must be."
Twilight frowned. "What would you have started with, Pr-Celestia?"
"Names," Celestia said instantly. "Who these people are, what they are doing here. Their laws and customs."
"Rarity is reading up on their laws," Twilight said. "Applejack is reading something else that looked like laws, but were called something else. And Pinkie is reading their personnel roster."
Celestia smiled. "I also would not have had friends to share my workload with," she said fondly. "Shall we hear what they have learned?"
Rarity looked up from her parchments and bowed again as Celestia reentered the room, following Twilight. Twilight smiled at Rarity and asked, "Rarity, have you learned anything about the Federation's laws we should know?"
Rarity shuffled through her pages and set her glasses on her muzzle. "Indeed I have, darling. They call themselves the United Federation of Planets. Their laws are written to give basic rights to anypony, regardless of species, so long as they are sentient." She frowned. "I am not sure how many species on Equestria fit within their definition of sentience. Ponies absolutely fit, so will griffons, minotaurs, dragons, donkeys...but I am being distracted." She shuffled her pages again. "The Federation itself focuses on matters of trade, diplomacy, exploration and the like. Member states are largely autonomous and send delegates to a legislature somewhere called Earth." Rarity looked to Celestia. "But the most important thing I have found, Princess, is that Federation law prevents them, or any member state, from contacting us directly. The only exception is if we invite them to Equestria first."
Applejack looked up. "Beggin' yer pardon, Princess," she called out, "but ya'd best hear what I found here, afore you think much on what Rares found."
Celestia and Twilight turned to Applejack. "Please, Applejack," Celestia prompted. "Twilight said you were studying more Federation laws?"
"Not as such, Princess," Applejack said. "Turns out the Federals squattin' on mah farm are part of somethin' called 'Star Fleet,' which sounds mighty military to my way o' thinkin', but they don't seem to think o' themselves as such. An' this here," she shook her own stack of pages, "is some o' the regs and rules they gotta live by. And top of the pile is this 'Prime Directive.' General Order Number One, it says. Lots o' fancy talk that boils down to, if we don't have tech like what they got, they ain't supposed to let us know they exist. They can't tell us nuthin' we didn't figure out on our own, an' they're supposed to do whatever it takes to stop us from learning about them, their tech, the universe, any o' it." Applejack scowled. "Way I read it, they wouldn't lift a hoof to save a foal, and might even consider murderin' ta keep their secrets."
Twilight gaped at Applejack. "Applejack, that's horrible!"
"It's right here, Twi!" Applejack said furiously, shaking the parchment at Twilight. "Plain Equestrian, neat as you like. 'Any and all measures must be taken to prevent the spread of cultural contamination of prewarp societies, regardless of ponitarian concerns.' That sounds to me like 'Let 'em suffer if it makes the secrets die with 'em.'"
Twilight snatched the parchment in her magic and read over it with a scowl. "That can't be right. They're researchers, not..." Her expression slackened. "Not...what the bucking Tartarus is wrong with these ponies?" she shrieked.
"Less than I feared, more than I hoped," Celestia said softly.
Twilight turned to see Celestia reading over her withers. "Princess?" she whispered.
Celestia didn't correct her. "This does not read as a justification for slaughter," she explained. "Merely non-intervention, taken to its worst extreme. I can sympathize." She smiled sadly. "I have seen generations of ponies commit the same mistakes of their forefathers. Once, before Nightmare Moon, my sister and I tried to teach ponies not to repeat the same patterns. Our students resented us, called us stifling, and I believe they were correct. Everypony needs room to make choices, so everypony must be allowed to make mistakes."
Twilight reread the Directive. "But according to this,"
"According to this, everything you learned this past month Should Not Be," Celestia finished. "No doubt every member of this duck blind faces severe punishment once they learn of your efforts."
Twilight's eyes widened. "I don't want anypony to suffer because of what we did!" she objected.
Celestia smirked, although it didn't reach her eyes. "I did warn you that you would cause suffering without intending it, Princess Twilight," she said. "It is an inevitable fact of life. The question is, what can we do about it?"
Twilight heaved a breath. "Even if we destroyed everything, we can't unlearn it," she said. "Forget the Federation stuff we've uncovered. I improved a translation spell we thought was obsolete. We've learned about aliens. We've learned there's something beyond the night sky itself. Rarity, Whooves and I created an entirely new way of enchanting crystals. We even invented a laser."
"I still do not understand how," Celestia mumbled.
Rarity twitched. Princesses do not mumble. It was against the order of things.
Twilight threw her hooves wide. "And what we have learned about the Federation already...Princess I don't want to destroy what we have!"
"Nor should you," Celestia said gently. "Twilight, they can hardly ask us to obey laws we shouldn't know exist. Perhaps things would have been better had we never discovered them, or if they had never come to Equestria. But they have, and we did. This is the reality we must deal with, now."
"It's okay to be a little selfish, dear," Rarity added. She smiled when Twilight turned to face her. "Oh really, Twilight, I do have some self-awareness. Generosity requires a degree of selfishness. Remember that debacle with Polomare? Being too generous is disastrous for business, which forced me to impose on my friends. I shudder to think of the repercussions of a government that gives too freely. My point is, darling, that what the Federation or this Star Fleet wants and what Equestria needs may be incompatible."
"And I should pick Equestria?" Twilight asked. "Automatically, without thinking?"
"Never without thinking," Celestia interrupted, "but it should always be your inclination. You are a Princess of Equestria. You have a royal duty to all our little ponies to be mindful of their needs. Would burying all that we have learned be the best thing for them?"
Twilight sat and thought for a full minute. "No," she said at last. "No, we cannot hide the truth from everypony. That would not be honest."
"Darn tootin," Applejack said.
Twilight smiled slightly. "But we also need to be generous when we can, and kind to those we might hurt. Pinkie was reading up on the Federation crew roster, wasn't she? Where did she go?"
Rarity and Applejack blinked and looked around. "Um, no idea, sugarcube," Applejack said.
"Here are the sheets she was reading," Rarity added. She levitated them to herself. "Looks like she dropped them. Ensign Lorian? Why would she OH SWEET CELESTIA!" Rarity's horn flashed and she collapsed into her fainting couch.
Twilight raised an eyebrow and glanced at Celestia. "She usually doesn't do that around you," she noted.
"It is a bit awkward," Celestia noted back.
Twilight pulled the top sheet to herself. "Let's see if I can read this without oh buck me." Celestia coughed an undignified laugh that Rarity was too unconscious to be disturbed by. "This is bad. This is very, very bad."
Celestia looked over the sheet Twilight was holding. "I don't see anything to be alarmed by," she said.
Twilight pointed a hoof at one line. "That."
Celestia frowned. Applejack wandered over to Twilight's other side. "Whachyall lookin' at?" she grumbled. "Could ya be a little more clear?" She peered at the parchment. "Whoa nelly!"
"Would somepony explain the problem?" Celestia complained.
Pinkie didn't smile. Oh no, smiling was small potatoes. She beamed. Beamed in the dark, where nopony could find her. Oh they had told her not to. They had lots of big words and reasons and all kinds of boring lectures that didn't matter at all. And they were mostly Twilight. Sometimes Applejack. Party poopers. Nopony poops Pinkie's parties! Nopony! There, a noise! She pulled the firing cord on her party cannon just as the door opened.
"Surprise!"
As Pinkie observed the confetti and streamer covered alien, standing in his quarters next to a massive cake and a smoking party cannon, she was sure this was going to be her best. Party. Ever. She beamed at the alien, eagerly awaiting the joyous noise of a well-executed party.
The alien stared back stoically. Then he calmly closed the door.
Pinkie's beam dropped a few lumens. She glanced up at the banner she had decorated Ensign Lorian's room with. "Maybe 'happy birthday' means something bad in their language?" she asked the empty room.