“You must have the wrong pony,” the confused crystal pony replied.
Mary reached a hand out and unceremoniously pulled his glasses off, brushing away the blue-white mane. “Well, I know you’re not Richard. But I’m sure I have the right pony. I have an eye for these things.” She folded the glasses and carefully stuffed them into a pocket on his saddlebag. “Tell me your story. Please? I can’t promise to fix anything, but I am sure you will feel better.”
“I don’t have a story…” he mumbled.
It took me a moment to realize just where we’d ended up. The place looked very different from yesterday, when most of it was just random crystal blocks sticking out of the ground. Tools left around indicated that just like us, the workers went somewhere else for the lunch break, but the progress they’d made since the last time we passed through was significant.
It’s the new Memorial Square.
Framed by six tall pillars, each with a finely chiseled cutie mark on it, representing the Elements. Two new, still blocky, unfinished statues to the sides, both pedestals already labeled in bold, official letters. “Spike the Dragon and Prince Shining Armor, Brothers in Arms, Defenders of Harmony.” The other one read, “Lyra Heartstrings and Princess Cadance, Guardians of the Crystal Heart.” Whoever was in charge of sculpting them chose the moment when Shining Armor came back with Spike, and the moment when Lyra wobbled up to Cadance with the Crystal Heart in her teeth, respectively. While the figures were still rough, they were already very recognizable to anypony who was there to see it happen.
That must be what being there to see history happen feels like…
But the center of the entire composition was a huge roughly-hewn slab, with one side flat and polished to a mirror sheen. The Memory Crystal, with two benches next to it. Already, hundreds of names were chiseled in, and still, it was only about a quarter full. No order, no separation, all the hundreds of the dead, as they were identified. The crystal ponies made no distinction between the four moons under the Usurper and the battle against Tirek and Chrysalis, let alone which side of it the dead were on or where they came from. All were taken in as their own. Only Tirek and Sombra’s names were conspicuously missing.
Some names had cutie marks next to them. Some didn’t. Most of those were changeling names – Spiracle, Tarsus, Coxa – but even then, a few ponies had no cutie mark next to their name at all. Just a blank space.
“Everyone has a story,” Mary insisted. “This is why you’re sitting here, this is a place to remember stories. Everything is a story.” She glanced at the towering slab, standing up and running a finger across the crystal. “Merry Cutie,” she read a name aloud. Next to this name was a high voltage traveling arc cutie mark.
The pony on the bench next to her jerked, but didn’t say anything.
Neither did I, choosing to remain silent, although propriety probably demanded I stop her. I’m sure this stallion needs someone to talk to, he’s not the first crystal pony who can’t remain crystal for more than a few hours that I have seen. It’s like lancing a boil. This is a procedure I have no aptitude for, I always found more comfort in books than in talking to ponies. But if she wanted to join Fluttershy in counseling ponies, why start with him? Is it the same mechanism that helps her select books? Is this choice the result of a magical process, or just unconscious intuition, practiced and trained like her sense of time? Can you even train intuition?
“Your world is laughing at me, you know?” Mary commented. “Let me try this again from the beginning,” she said, crouching before the unfortunate stallion again. “My name is Mary. Mary the Human, they call me. Princess Cadance does, at least. What’s yours?”
“Maximum Plank,” he replied with a sigh. “Just Max. Sorry, I’m… not in the mood for conversations.”
I don’t think he noticed Mary’s face twitch as he said his name, but I definitely did.
Mary’s golden eye glittered, and I was sure that for once, I’m finally seeing the polite, reserved alien in her natural element. An obnoxious element, it seems. “Let me take a guess at what you’re thinking,” she said, sitting on the bench opposite him and staring straight into his still confused eyes. The stallion opened his mouth to say something, but Mary put a finger across his muzzle. “You’re watching ponies work, rebuilding, and you’re thinking that they’re crazy, that everypony must be absolutely insane, that making new things is so useless…”
His eyebrows slowly rose, just as the mouth fell open.
✶ ✶ ✶
Max had quite a story to tell, and it took what felt like hours. Time I spent quietly listening, unnoticed, desperately trying to prevent every single hair of my coat from standing on ends.
Mary took her soaked hankie and hid it somewhere in the pleats of her skirt. She gently patted Max on the head. “Now listen to me closely, Max. I can’t make this right. But there is something you can do.”
“Oh?” he whispered, still sniffling.
“You will go to the castle, and ask the door guards to see the commander of Princess Luna’s security detail, lieutenant Jet Park,” she started, her quiet voice ringing, almost hypnotic. “You will tell him that Mary the Human thinks that it’s vitally important that you get a private audience with Princess Luna. Once you get it, which should happen shortly before sunset, you will tell her everything. Halfway through your audience, she will raise the Moon. And then you will tell her what a nuclear thermal rocket is.”
It took a second for Max to shake the shock and stare into Mary’s swirling golden eye. “A nuclear what?!”
“You’re a very smart pony,” Mary smirked at him. “I’m sure you will figure it out, it’s not like she’s going to ask you for a blueprint up front.”
My knowledge of this branch of physics is not particularly deep, but it didn’t take me long to grasp the idea. An ongoing fission reaction used to heat some kind of working fluid would do it. Just as dangerous as it is efficient. It’s the stuff of science fiction that suddenly became… more theory than fiction, with just three words. Still years away, decades, but now, it’s something I might actually see happen with my own eyes.
“You’re serious about this,” Max stated incredulously. “You think Princess Luna will not just… throw me into a dungeon for what we did?”
“Not if you get to her ahead of the report from whatever the United Kingdoms has for an intelligence agency,” Mary said. “There is a chance of that if you’re too late to tell your story.”
“Maybe I deserve to be thrown into a dungeon,” Max insisted, getting up.
“Don’t be silly,” Mary replied. “Just don’t forget to tell her that this is how ponies can boldly go where none have gone before. Use these exact words. This, this will make everything that happened worth it. Nopony will have died for nothing. Now go, my little pony. You don’t have much time.”
Max dithered hesitantly before Mary, opened his mouth to say something, but once again, remained silent. Eventually, he turned around and galloped away, without saying another word, Mary’s eyes intently tracking him.
Only once he was out of earshot, Mary finally spoke again. “Cute, cuddly ponies, right,” she said with unconcealed sarcasm.
“Just which pony are you calling cute and cuddly?” I inquired, sitting opposite her on the bench Max had just vacated. After hearing this whole story standing still and trying to avoid attracting attention to myself, my head was spinning in a very literal sense, and I was no longer confident I could stay upright.
Mary bit her lip, staring at me with her blue eye before answering. “Whatever you might think about yourself, Moondancer, to a human’s eye, every single pony is cute and child-like, evoking the instinct to protect the young. I would even say that ponies hit that instinct better than human children.” She tilted her head to the side, her golden eye swiveling in my direction, and suddenly twisted the topic around completely. “I’m sure you have already figured out that in my world, nuclear fission is not just theory, but a tried and tested technology. Past a certain point in the timeline, it inevitably turns up.”
“I understood that the moment you started asking Max about the design of that… thing,” I shuddered. “You didn’t stop with just one, I take it.” I’m not sure which is more disturbing, the thought that such a weapon was actually used, and was the reason the Crystal Empire was lost for a millennium, or the idea that Mary’s world has more of them.
“Fifteen thousand, give or take, in fifty years,” Mary deadpanned. “Two were actually used in war. About two thousand were exploded for testing. I actually had to prevent a global nuclear war once, that was fun.”
Sweet Celestia!
“There’s that constant temptation I have, to think your civilization less advanced than mine, just because of what you look like and how you prefer to live,” she continued. “I am quite conscious of it, and yet I find myself slipping all the time. And then I find out that you had a nuclear weapon a thousand years ago. Kinetic enchantments instead of chemical explosives, isotope separation through earth pony magic, instead of gaseous diffusion and centrifuges. Turned from theory to practice through the will of a corrupted mad wizard and slave labor of thousands, sure, but that doesn’t even rate, compared to how many humans were employed to make the first bomb, how long it took them, and how expensive it was. I trust you can imagine my reaction properly, now. Crystal ponies have waltzed through the hardest parts like they weren’t there. Cute, cuddly, shiny ponies.”
“I wish they didn’t,” I said.
“Well, they did. And Sombra used it. The rest is history, and most of the remaining history is considerably less hazy,” Mary smirked. “At least, now we have the answer to our question, and you can finish your report.”
“It’s not exactly the kind of answer that makes my life easier!” I snapped.
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you fret,” she said gravely. “No answer would make your life easier, it’s just that kind of question. It isn’t how I would solve this problem, but I certainly don’t have the moral high ground to judge.”
I sighed. This… This will take some time to process. A thousand years ago, ponies making war on ponies was still an occasional fact of life. I shudder to think what war would look like, if a weapon so incredibly destructive was a viable option. Certain fields of magic are still tightly controlled, for the same reason. We know a lot about nuclear fission now, probably more than the Crystal Empire scientists did. They had manufactured more fissile material in four moons than the rest of Equestria produced over the last century, but we did have more time to develop and refine the theories. But are we really better ponies for it, or have we just moved the goalposts further out?
Are we good enough? And could it be that they were good enough, too? Just what makes a pony good enough?
Never mind. It’s something to discuss with a pony, while there’s something about this alien that I should ask right now.
“I’m sorry, I don’t usually ask ponies how their special talent works,” I said. “Most can’t explain, anyway. But this… How the hay did you know?! I’m sure you knew. This… mentalist trick, that was just to get him to open up. You knew the moment you saw him, the rest was just making sure.”
“Logic, a lot of guessing, and some cheating,” Mary smirked. “Your world is laughing at me. This isn’t just a metaphor. Merry Cutie? Sounds way too much like Marie Curie, and that is a name I remember. Maximum’s own name is another match. It’s almost like someone is deliberately throwing me puns pressed into service as hints.”
“This is ridiculous,” I said. And completely unscientific, but recently, I found many reasons to be a lot more careful when using that word.
“No more than the sandwich,” she replied.
That nonsense again. “That’s not answering my question, though,” I said. “Even before those two names came up, you had already decided you must talk to him.”
“Lots of little clues just came together,” Mary said, stretching her legs. “Have you noticed his cutie mark?”
“Not really.”
“It depicts an atomic nucleus with three orbiting electrons,” Mary grinned. “Just like Lyra’s cutie mark means poetry, rather than an actual lyre, this doesn’t mean lithium. For me, it’s the traditional symbol for nuclear physics.”
“It’s also a symbol for science in general,” I countered. “Really, it could mean a lot of things.”
“For it to be a symbol for anything, someone needs to have known what an atom even is. Sure as hay Max didn’t just get his mark yesterday,” Mary insisted. “And then I remembered you mentioning the vault spell with a broken ambient light detection component. I know firsthand what happens to light sensitive equipment too close to a nuclear explosion.”
“Firsthoof?” I ventured. Mary waved her hand in the air. “Oh. Right, sorry.”
That’s… plausible. It’s full of gigantic leaps of intuition, but almost like Twilight, Mary appears to be more intuitive than simply rational in the first place. And yet, it still isn’t what I really wanted to understand.
“Who is Richard?” I finally asked.
“Was. Is. Will be,” Mary sighed, looking away. “Gets messy with time travel, not to mention a completely unrelated story tree, but he was a human I was very much in love with at some point. It… didn’t work out. Couldn’t. I didn’t exactly catch him in the best period in his life, and couldn’t really tell him who I am and where I’m from.”
“So…?” I prompted.
“Richard was a young professor then. He was also one of the physicists who worked on nuclear weapons just a few years back from there. I was pretending to be eighteen again, trying to study physics and figure out how my time machine works,” Mary explained. “He didn’t really talk about this much. But when he thought nobody was looking, that was exactly the face he made. What you called a ‘mentalist trick,’ that was an almost verbatim quote from his autobiography, written many years afterwards.”
“Oh,” was the only thing I could say. “Sorry.” That has all the markings of personal drama I am neither knowledgeable enough to understand nor wish to have any part of.
“Don’t be,” Mary smiled at me. “It’s one of my warmer memories, on average, and you have more to worry about than the emotional state of an alien traveler who meddles your story into a mess.”
“If you manage to stumble into anything more worrying than this before the end of the day,” I replied sternly, “I shall have to send a formal complaint to Princess Celestia!”
“You can ask Prince Blueblood,” she replied, smiling wider. “I’m sure he will be happy to deliver it in person when he’s done here.”
I flushed. Blueblood arrived yesterday evening with a retinue of Guard and a quarrel of lawyers, ostensibly, to sort out the nasty tangle of agreements that applied and did not apply to the newly restored Crystal Empire. The creepy prince did notice me, somehow, and while he was fairly courteous, I was quite put off by the realization that he only talked to me because he was hoping I would know where Trixie disappeared off to again.
“Did you notice that he came with a huge, unmarked wooden crate?” Mary inquired. “It was nothing like the rest of his luggage, which tops what Rarity brings with her on an average trip. Then he called Cadance off for a private conversation, and the crate disappeared. I’m sure it’s nothing important, of course,” she added, making a creepy grin.
“How the hay do you manage to turn everything into a spy novel?” I wondered.
Just as Mary was about to reply, we were interrupted. “Now, girls, what have I told you before?” a stern voice rang out above our heads.
“Sorry, Fluttershy, we were busy,” I said, cautiously glancing up, trying to avoid looking into her eyes. I had forgotten about lunch entirely, and the prospect of Fluttershy chewing you out has that mysterious way to instill even more mortal terror than Princess Luna. “It was… important.”
“What could be so important that you have to miss lunch?!” Fluttershy insisted. “Everypony was worried! I had to send soldiers out to look for you!”
“We got held up helping somepony,” Mary replied, tilting her head towards the Memory Crystal.
“Oh… Oh!” Fluttershy mumbled, finally noticing just where we were and landing between us to stare at the slab. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know, I should have been there…”
“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Mary replied. “Is the lunch still on the menu?”
It took Fluttershy a whole second to process that. “I’m sure that didn’t make much sense. Why do you keep trying to confuse me, Mary?” she frowned.
“Because you’re a sweet pony, and being angry doesn’t really look good on you,” Mary countered. “Come on then,” she said, standing up.
A late lunch is better than no lunch, I suppose.