//------------------------------// // Epilogue: Full Circle // Story: On Getting to the Bottom of this "Equestrian" Business // by McPoodle //------------------------------// Epilogue: Full Circle August 25, 2018 The old man in the long brown coat waited patiently as the guard at the Grand Harmony Hotel and Business Center checked his ID. The man swayed slightly every few seconds as his balance adjusted, and he needed a cane to walk confidently. He wore a porkpie hat to cover a head mostly devoid of hair, and glasses to help him to see. But behind those glasses his eyes twinkled with the same undimmed genius of Gus Guiseman. He was one hundred years old. “Everything checks out,” the purple guard told him, returning his card. “You’re a little late.” Gus shrugged. “Blame the airlines. Now which way am I supposed to go?” The guard pointed towards a distant pair of double doors. “Welcome back to Canterlot!” the guard said as the scientist began walking away. “It’s good to be back,” Gus said, raising a hand briefly in the air. As he walked, he saw dozens of people stop what they were doing to stare at him. All of them were Markists. How long had it been since he had seen so many Markists in one place? Ten years? Twenty? No, at least thirty. Back then, there still was a Cold War. It was right after Gorbachev had become Secretary General. Poor Gorbachev. The Soviet Union had collapsed in less than five years despite every reform he had introduced. Collapsed perhaps because of every reform he had introduced. Today, Russia was in some ways better than it had been under Andropov, and some ways worse—the same as you could say for most countries over a span of thirty-three years. The Markists would certainly consider Russia in the “win” column: their financial investments in 1991 had prevented the total collapse of the economy. Russia currently had the third-largest population of Markist citizens on Earth. And native son and convert Stalwart Sentinel had been elected Russia’s president in 1996. This line of rumination brought Gus to the double doors. The usher waiting there opened it and gestured him inside with a bow. Gus shook his head in amusement and entered the darkened ballroom. The lights rose to reveal about half of all the Markist clergy in the world, thousands of individuals, all of them cheering for him. Thanks to the solar lamps installed in the skylight five stories above him, about a third of the crowd was floating. Others were wreathed in fire or water (or jelly?) and Gus even caught one young woman in the act of teleporting from one side of the ballroom to the other. Gus smiled inwardly. He knew that it was inevitable that the larger clergy would eventually find out about what Truth Delver’s team had discovered, just as it was equally inevitable that, in a few more years, the general public would find out the truth as well. He was just glad that this group at least had handled it well. Gus looked around him. This was a lousy location from which to address this crowd. And then he looked up at the balcony two stories above him—that would be perfect. Perhaps the guard had been pointing at the elevator that was next to the double doors? “Oops,” he muttered to himself. “Professor Guiseman?” He looked over to see two teenage girls, both adorned with large, feathery wings. “If you’ll allow us?” the one with blue skin and rainbow hair asked, holding out one hand toward him and gesturing upwards with the other. Gus chuckled. “Sure, why not?” he replied. Gently but firmly, the bold blue girl and the more reticent yellow girl lifted Gus up until he reached the balcony, causing the cheering from the crowd to get even louder. Upon regaining his footing, Gus raised a hand to signal his audience to quiet down, and took the chance to look among them from his new vantage point. He failed to see any other Markists with wings. “Good evening, Priests and Priestesses,” he began, speaking into the microphone that had been set up for him. “I was asked to give a presentation tonight regarding my researches into the scientific underpinnings behind this intriguing faith of yours. The obvious route would have been to write up a scientific paper and then read it out loud to you. But, as I am presently restricted from submitting said paper to any scientific publications, and as the lot of you are obviously not scientists, I decided on a different tack. I’m going to tell you the story, the story of a lowly circle of ceramic. “The year was 1983, and I had just done a favor for the president of a certain chemical company. In return, he allowed me the free run of the place. Well I was giving myself an unguided tour of their R&D facility when I discovered a lone engineer who was trying to make the perfect dinner plate…” & & & After he finished his speech, Gus Guiseman was escorted to a smaller room, where he shook a lot of hands and engaged in small talk: “Professor Guiseman! The world of Markism is eternally in your debt.” He got that one at lot. “Professor Guiseman! I remember seeing you in the Challenger hearings on TV when I was a kid. Seeing you demonstrate the cause of the explosion using a rubber O-ring and a glass of ice water in a matter of seconds is what got me into physics.” That alone made the whole trip worthwhile. “Professor Guiseman! Can you sign my copy of What Do You Care What Other People Think? I have all ten of your books.” “Professor Guiseman! Could you sign my copy of Looking at Physics? I never would have passed tenth grade physics without it.” The former student was referring to the textbook that Gus had co-authored in 2000. Sure, the Markist Church was responsible for getting it adopted by the New Brass Sky public school curriculum in 2003 as a way of thanking him for his contributions to the faith, but it was soon afterward adopted by most of the other states as well, purely on merit. “Professor Guiseman! Is it true that you’re on the short list for the Nobel Prize in Physics this year?” To which his reply was “I sure hope not.” Gus had spent the decade of 1986 to 1996 actually concentrating on his profession for once, pulling out all the really crazy ideas that he had squirrelled away and getting them published. The two dozen papers that resulted laid the groundwork for a grand universal theory of the universe, revolutionized more than one field of physics, and launched the careers of all of his co-authors who weren’t already famous. Two of the papers were co-authored with his coworker, Gabriel Gell-Mann, and one was co-authored with Stephen Hawking. Privately, Gus referred to the set as the ‘Harmony Papers’. He suspected that they would result in a Nobel Prize for someone, but he sincerely hoped that when that happened he would be dead. He had been so enthusiastic in writing them that he did something he never allowed himself to do before: publish something scientific that he wasn’t one hundred percent certain would later be proved to be true. When, in 1996, an inter-disciplinary team of mathematicians and scientists concluded that eight of the papers had been based on faulty math or overturned experiments and the press had demanded an explanation, Gus had merely shrugged and said, “Noffony’s perfect.” The “lisp” was of course corrected for the permanent record. Two young men approaching Gus brought him out of his reverie. “Is it true that you played yourself on Futurama?” one of them asked. Clearly a bet was on the line. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he replied. “In 2003 I played the head in a jar of Professor Gell-Mann, my co-worker. It was sort of a prank.” After some grumbling, a sum of money changed hands. “Did you say Professor Gell-Mann?” asked the young woman with the signed textbook, inserting herself back into the conversation. “The inventor of quarks? I saw an interview with him recently. He must have been so mad!” “He was,” Gus replied with a chuckle. “He sent me and Fox a list of 32 mistakes I and the animators had made impersonating him in the thirty seconds his character was on screen. Privately, though, he confessed that it was the only time in recent memory that anybody had pronounced his name correctly.” And so it went for Gus. Along the way he was fed a rather forgettable meal. He kept looking around for Truth Delver until he finally remembered: The bishop had died more than fifteen years earlier, after a petty fight with Celestia. The funeral was the last time Gus had been in Canterlot, and it fell to Gus to comfort the two sisters on their loss. The three of them had been exchanging letters ever since—Gus still had trouble believing that the bratty little Celestia he had met on the train station was actually a high school principal now. Meridiem Tempest and Gnosi Augur had been spotted briefly visiting the room to wave at Gus before becoming their own center of attention; unsurprising, considering that the married couple had been the official overseers and priests of the Canterlot Church of the Goddess since 1992. The moment when they had taken their new positions marked the point when continuing research into the scientific aspects of the religion had been turned over to a new generation of theology students. Discoveries during this period had been a slow incremental build on the initial collection of research projects. For example, theology students with flying marks learned how to survive their falls from deadly heights when outside the Solarium. (The answer: Depending on what mental mechanism they used to control their flight, they could take up to a five-story drop without breaking any bones. Of course, they would then be required to fake breaking those bones to avoid the suspicion of unbelievers.) Gus’ wandering eye finally took in a group of teenagers in the back of the room that was clearly watching and talking about him amongst themselves. The group included the two “angels” he had met earlier, now devoid of their wings. Another individual, a young woman with purple skin and hair, was staring at him with a manic intensity—he expected a perpetual motion proposal out of her. Standing at their side was Principal Celestia. The group waited until all of the other attendees had left the room before approaching. “Celestia! It’s good to see you after all this time,” Gus said warmly, shaking her hand. “How’s your sister?” “Quite well, thanks. How’s your family faring?” “Gustine gave us another great-grandson this past October.” “Is that great-grandson number ten?” “Eleven. So, who have you brought to see me this evening?” Principal Celestia went through the list of names, starting with Sunset Shimmer and ending with Twilight Sparkle—the crazy one. Twilight of course had a dog-eared copy of The Pleasure of Finding Things Out for him to sign. “It is a great honor to meet you, Professor Guiseman,” said Sunset Shimmer. “We’d like to ask for your help, if you have the time.” “My help in what, young lady?” “In helping us understand a new form of magic. You see, there’s been a crossover of magic from the Equestrian realm—” “More like the crossing over of actual ponies from Equestria,” interjected a pink-on-pink young woman named Pinkie Pie. “With lots of wicked world-threatening and giant rainbow explosions!” “I got better,” Sunset and Twilight both muttered at the same time. “Sunset here has been doing a fantastic job gathering data and doing experiments to see how this new magic works,” the blonde-on-orange girl named Applejack added. “We just need somebody who can organize all of that into some definite rules.” “So we can say for sure that none of this is a threat,” Celestia concluded. “It’s becoming increasingly obvious that we can’t keep these changes a secret forever, so we hope to be prepared for any potential backlash.” Gus turned to the girl with the fiery hairstyle. “You’ve been gathering the data?” “Yes, Professor,” Sunset said meekly. “But I’ll gladly defer to your judgement regarding anything that might not have been gathered correctly.” Gus reached out to gently lift up her chin. “Don’t belittle yourself, Miss Shimmer. Without a good experimentalist, where would us theoreticians be?” “So you’ll take the job?” Fluttershy asked. “A whole new form of magic?” asked Gus, as he took a seat facing the others. “I certainly would like to take a crack at it. Now, start at the beginning. And then tell…me…everything.”