Zodiac-Altair as a mission was divided into four phases. First was the construction of the ship itself in Terrestrial orbit, a task divided between the United States and the former Soviet Union, before being united, supplied, and crewed. The second was the voyage from Earth to Jupiter, through the Flandro Object, and ultimately to Rhysling.
The third was to land on the surface of Rhysling – this one had its own hiccups, as those awake at the time could attest, but it was nothing that courage, intuition, and no small amount of human coöperation could overcome. In any case, all of these had been completed successfully. All that was left was the fourth phase: survive. That meant hard work – settling, building, growing, mining, trading, experimenting. . . it’s a lot of work to do.
But they did not have to brave these alone. As each of the other forty-six soon discovered, these ‘ponies’ of the Harmonic Empire on Rhysling were more than willing to lend a helping hand to their new cosmic guests. Dr. Elena Weiss had shown them a number of local plants and meats were safe for human consumption – though of course, the meat needed to be prepared.
Help in that department came from a visiting Gryphon: Mirizveg. As the Empire knew only of the most basic methods, the Gryphons’ more intimate knowledge of such a craft helped ensure the colony’s survival, until the first Terrestrial livestock could be gestated and raised on the new world.
As Mirizveg started to leave the colony, hopefully in better hands than before, Dr. Adam Somerset thought he could hear her speaking in another language – not Ơhqer, nor any language native to Earth. He knew he had his work cut out for him on Rhysling, but knew as well he had a lifetime to carry it out. But he did at least help destroy the language barrier between the Harmonic Empire and the colony – and for his work, Commander Louis Darcy gave him the privilege of naming the place.
Lo, the settlement now bore the name New Tacoma – after his own cradle.
And truth be told, he certainly didn’t complete his mission alone: Ãtir Ḷsapa, alias Twilight Sparkle, had sworn to help the human learn her language, in exchange for learning his. In the process, both of them got more intimate knowledge of each other’s tongues, highlighting its similarities while emphasizing its distinctions – and by the end of the exchange, they were both fluent.
Still, Twilight insisted on using English for the colonists – but it did make her a reliable interpreter for her own brethren, at least. But at some point, New Tacoma had to learn the Harmonic Voice to communicate with their territorial hosts – a duty that fell to Adam and Twilight.
“So how will we do that?” she asked him over breakfast early one morning.
“There’s a certain order to it,” he said, looking up at her from across the table. “First, they’ll have to learn the sounds of the language. There are several that they’re bound to have trouble with – I’ve been making a few adjustments in the meantime, even, dare I say, testing them on you.”
“Oh, get out.” Twilight shoved his chest with her hoof – then burst out laughing. “I thought you were developing a lisp the whole time!”
“Or maybe it’s the start of a new dialect.” He cleared his throat. “Another thing – I don’t think we’d like to use voiceless nasals, but the good news is, we pick up clicks almost instantly.”
“Hmm. . . .” Twilight put her hoof on her chin, grabbing up a sandwich with what looked like daisies in her magic – a term she preferred to use for her telekinesis. “Can you sketch them out for me?” She took a bite.
“Sure, later,” he vowed. “But back on track – next we’d have to teach them the grammar. I’ve seen how. . . for lack of a better word, harmonic the Voice is in that part. Not like English at all.”
“I’ve noticed.” She tilted her head. “What’s up with that?”
“It’s something my father liked to say: ‘If it looks stupid but it works, it’s not stupid.’” He set down his spoon, to demonstrate it abstractly with his hands. “What that means is, it doesn’t matter how elegant, or for that matter how inelegant, you do something – so long as it gets the job done.”
“‘The end justifies the means,’ right?” she asked. That was another phrase she picked up from him.
“Mmm. . . not quite.” He shook his head, then tapped his finger to try to find his words. “It’s not so much bad as it is clumsy.” Though that is an interesting point. “Third, we’d have to have them practice speaking with ponies. The way I see it, Ginzol would get a lot of out-of-towners who wouldn’t be speaking clearly. I hope they’re ready for that.”
“We’ve had to put up with you getting random things wrong for a few moons now!” she shot back. “So don’t act like we’re not ready for forty-something more to do that too – trust me, we are.”
“If you say so.” Adam finished his communal breakfast and got up to stretch. With his joints properly loosened up, he next checked his pocket watch – it was still just after sunrise, and he had plenty of time to work. His eyes remained on the inserted photo of him and Twilight – the same one RPMR-1 took so long ago – before he closed the watch. “Care to join me? I’ve also got to write a paper on the Harmonic Voice, and I’d like for a native speaker to join me – just to make sure I don’t mess it up. If it’s any help, I’m actually almost done with it, so you don’t have to keep coming back.”
“It’d be my pleasure.” Twilight finished up just then, and snatched up both Adam’s and her waste as she got up. “And don’t worry about that – I don’t mind having to come back here all the time. Now, where do I – ? Oh yeah.” For the time being, waste from Earth and waste from Rhysling had to be kept separate, until materials recycling could occur.
As they were leaving the Cancer module, they rounded the corner and ran into Dr. Anton Konstantinov. Or rather, Adam stopped mid-stride, but Twilight planted her face into the Russian’s stomach. “Bbbbbbb!”
She hastily backed up. “Oh, Anton! Sorry, didn’t expect you to be here right now. Good morning!”
“Good morning, Twilight, and it is alright.” He ran his hand over his torso, particularly where he expected her horn to hit him. “It is not worst thing that has happened to me.” He turned to Adam. “Where are you going?”
“Out to work on my paper,” he answered. “Twilight’s going to check it, make sure it’s right.”
“I understand.” Anton nodded. “See you soon, Adam.”
Both of them stepped out the door of the central colony hub – really a decommissioned airlock/sterilizer combination unit – and started making their way to TPRU-1, now relocated on the outskirts of the territory. He had chosen the place as an intermediation between New Tacoma and the Empire at large. It was a decent enough arrangement to the commander, and Adam understood its purpose as a mere stopgap until more proper facilities could be built in the coming months and years – if everything went according to plan, which as far as they could tell, was still up in the air, yet they still remained optimistic about the outcome.
“Hey Adam!”
The linguist looked up on his way. “Yes, Commander?”
“Just wanted to get an update on your upcoming Harmony-Voice class of yours,” Commander Louis Darcy mentioned. “Do we have an ETA yet?”
“When it’s ready” was the best Adam could offer, though Twilight did promise a “Sooner than you might think,” against his hasty advice.
But Louis just laughed. “I’ll leave you two to it. ’Til next we meet!”
The colony’s land had a stream running through, forking off from the same source that fed those marking Ginzol’s northern and southern boundaries. An opportune choice for the colonists to place their first garden and greenhouse – which was where he found Dr. Elena Weiss working.
She heard the trudging, both bipedal and hooved, and looked up. “Twilight!” She waved her over for a moment. “I can use your help with this plant, please – it’s very stubborn.”
“Could you excuse me for a moment?” Adam let her leave him for the moment. For now, he simply sat back and watched her work with the biologist. “It looks like it needs a little more something in the soil,” she said. “Can’t say what, though. Ask Njeledirve when she comes here next. For now, just set it outside in that same pot, water it once a day, but leave it alone otherwise.”
Elena nodded. “Thank you, I will.”
Twilight flounced right back to the linguist. “Right then – where were we?”
–––·–
Adam unlocked the newly-installed door and opened it for Twilight. “Ladies first,” he said.
“Does it matter?” she asked, but accepted the invitation anyway. “But thanks.” She turned around as Adam was walking inside. “Why do you have locks on your door, anyway? I get if it’s for the toilet – but everything else, too?”
“Force of habit,” Adam replied after shutting the door behind him. “See, your things aren’t always safe on Earth,” he elaborated further. “If it’s out in the open and someone wants it, he or she just might take it.”
“That’s not right,” she said.
He shook his head. “No – and that’s our burden to bear.”
Twilight started to get the first glimmers of worry on her face. “Does that mean we’d have to start watching our homes in Ginzol? In Kãtṛlat?”
“I hope not.” He sat down in front of his own terminal, one he would need for the task at hand. “I’ve worked hard to earn the Empire’s trust. I don’t want to see it thrown away.”
She sighed. “Me neither. You’re a good person, Adam – I’d hate to see you have to leave.” She looked at the screen. “But never mind that – why don’t we get started?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” Adam cracked his knuckles. “Alright, let’s just get started with – ”
Suddenly a wisp of green smoke floated in front of Twilight – which quickly materialized into a scroll. “Aaa?” She snapped it up in her magic, undid the golden seal and red band, and unfurled it before her eyes. She read it silently to herself, quickly scanning the lines. Adam thought it improper to pry, and instead turned his attention back to the work-in-progress document on the screen. He remembered when this computer was first switched on inside the lander – apparently the strain was too much for TPRU-1’s own power supply, so he had to ask Twilight to cannibalize RPMR-1’s to provide the necessary boost.
“So, anyway – ” she resealed the letter – “what do we have so far?”
“Everything so far can be seen on these notes.” He indicated the sheets of paper to his left – yellow, lined, covered with messy handwriting and crude diagrams. “I just needed to take these, and put them here.” He tapped the cathode screen. “I’m nearly done with that step. And since I have only one chance to submit a correct paper, you will make sure I get everything about it right – from what I hear around town, you’re good at that sort of thing.”
She giggled. “And don’t you forget it. I’ll make sure you get it right the first time!” She lifted her rear off the ground. “Scoot back, I wanna join you.” When he did so, she lifted herself straight off the ground and into her lap. “I want to see what you’re doing.”
She wasn’t any lighter than the night she fell asleep in his lap in the library, but he had gotten used to the weight – besides, most of it was on her hooves still, which were firmly on the seat between his legs. In a way, she reminded him of a cat. Maybe ‘Antir’ wasn’t so far off the mark after all.
Hopefully with every distraction now out of the way, the first thing he did, naturally, was to do some specific formatting in the document, using a technique she hadn’t seen before. “Lay-tecks?” she tried to pronounce.
“Pardon?”
“That thing you’re using.”
“Oh – it’s [ˈleɪtʰɛx],” he pronounced for her. “LaTeX is what I use where I work. It gives you a simple, plain way of presenting your work, that would look the same no matter who, where, or when someone compiles it.” Adam thought it was a ridiculous requirement for teaching at MIT, but now he had to admit it came in handy for the Zodiac-Altair mission. Guess you win this one.
Twilight raised an eyebrow. “‘Compile’?”
“To assemble, to build – but for writing specifically.”
Her eyes widened. “So it’s safe to say that I could compile Yere Kisữ’s letters?”
“Into a book, sure.” He nodded. “Uh, little help here – is this correct?” He pointed at a specific line.
She squinted “I have no idea what I’m looking at,” she soon admitted.
“The noun classes. I’m listing examples here. Is ṛyli in the right place?”
It took Twilight a moment to try to figure out what the words he used for the classes meant. “Yes, that’s correct.”
“Really? Could’ve sworn that. . . ah well, thanks anyway.” He continued scrolling through the LaTeX document. “How about this here?” He tapped a Venn diagram. Twilight was barely literate in American English, much less the IPA, so he had to sound each of them out for her: [e . ɤ . ɯ .. ɑ . o . u .. i . ɹ̩ . l̩]
“I recognize those sounds,” she said. “Yes, that is correct, well done Adam!”
He chuckled. “Thanks, Twilight. Now, what about. . . ?” He kept scrolling through the document. “. . . this? I put it at the very end, since I thought it was a really interesting part of the Voice.”
She squinted at the screen. “This goes back to the first thing, right?”
“Mhm?”
“In that case. . . yes, that’s right.”
He took a second look at the sentence. “How interesting. And here I thought it was the weird quirk of a dialect.”
She shook her head. “Nope, all of us do that. I could tell you why, if you want. We have a lot of stories to explain why the Voice is the way it is.”
“No, that’s okay, I could probably figure it out. . . eventually. Although. . . .” He scrolled back up to another section and typed another sentence there. “Thanks for pointing that out, by the way – the stories on the Voice.”
She smiled. “My pleasure!”
With that out of the way, he went through his paper notes one last time, trying to find anything that could aid him in fleshing out the body of the paper. But he found he had covered just about everything on the Harmonic Voice – all that was missing was to compile a dictionary and phrasebook, two herculean tasks he would have to undertake at some point. But for the time being, anyone could read and learn about how the language worked under the hood.
“What are you doing?” she asked when she noticed him updating the author section and bibliography.
“I’m adding you to my paper,” he said. “You’ve been a great help to me, so you should get some of the credit.” Not the first time anyone’s done that. . . .
“But I didn’t do anything!”
“You did,” he insisted. “All those weeks and moons ago, when we first met, when we agreed to teach each other. That’s quite a something.”
“Yes, I guess I did. . . .” She put her hoof to her chin. “But it still doesn’t feel right, putting my name on a letter meant to go to Earth.”
“Hey, hey, hey. . . don’t worry about it. Your work is just as important as mine, besides.” He knelt down from his chair, hand out.
She recognized the gesture, and returned it reflexively – placing her front hoof squarely in his palm. Then she was surprised to find it quickly evolved into an embrace. She sighed. “Thank you. I must’ve needed that.”
“To be honest, I might’ve too.” He straightened himself back to the screen. “Let me compile it here, so you can see it for yourself.” He input the ‘compile’ command, and a progress bar flashed on the screen. Ticking by took some time, since it had to construct some vector-based diagrams as well – but it wasn’t anything too complicated; anyone with a half-decent home computer from 1991 could do it. In two minutes, it was ready to be viewed. “Check it out!”
Twilight stood up on her hind legs, planting her front ones on the desk, as she drank in the sight of the compiled document. “That’s a weird title,” she immediately said.
He snickered. “I’ll explain it later, it’s rather funny.”
“If you say so. Let me see more.” As Adam scrolled, she seemed to skim each page, catching random sentences here and there, full of words she had never heard of before, and could guess the meaning of only half. It felt. . . odd, in a sense, to see her first language reduced to a varying set of rules and diagrams and so forth.
“You like it?” he asked her.
“I do!” She settled back into his lap, much more gently than before. She pawed the screen. “But I can’t hold it.”
“No. . . not yet. But we’ll get there someday.”
“I hope so.” She hopped down from the chair. “For what it’s worth, everything is correct. Send it.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He saved his work first, as anyone should, backing it up to not one but two floppy disks – one of which he would give to the commander to print out, the other he would keep on hand just in case. From there, he opened the transmission protocols for the colony, and directed the destination to NASA’s Deep Space Network. Once everything else checked out, he hit the return key to start transmitting the .tex file. “It’s away.” He grabbed one of the floppies. “Let’s go pay Darcy a visit.”
“Okay!” She opened the door for him with her magic, letting him leave the building first. She then shut the door behind herself, and let Adam lock it behind him. They set off on the road to the central hub, watching the children of planet Earth hard at work building a new home on the cool, green hills of Rhysling.
···–·
A well-beaten blue Holden hit a pothole in the paved road, splashing that morning’s rainwater puddled within. It made a hard left turn onto Discovery Drive, and continued going straight on the winding road.
It went over a bridge spanning Paddys River. The driver couldn’t help but take a look down into the stream, rainwater reïnvigorating it with new life. He then grabbed a sip from his morning coffee – a necessity to work such an early shift – before setting it back in the cupholder. A minute later, he crossed another bridge, this time spanning Larrys Creek, and from there it was another left turn, more gently this time, before the vehicle reached the Tidbinbilla Tracking Station – part of NASA’s Deep Space Network.
The driver noted the empty visitor’s parking lot, but kept driving straight, slowing down as he reached an automated gate – basically the only thing separating the visitor’s center from the Station facility proper.
He leaned over to the left side, rolled down the window, and inserted his identity badge into a card reader there. The photo matched his face, even accounting for natural aging, proving that he was Lars Northyard, a CSIRO employee. In a few moments, the reader noted that, yes, all of this was true, and yes, he was authorized to enter at this time to begin his shift.
Once the gate slithered all the way to the left to let him in, Lars made his way to the staff parking lot. It was empty at this hour – four in the morning was not an ideal time for most people, but he was assigned this shift anyway, to monitor the night sky and receive signals from whatever probes happened to be facing the Station at that time. Yes, that included weekends, for space missions did not take sabbaticals. It could be unpredictable work – some nights were completely quiet, others were lit up like the Yankees every fourth of July.
This shift did at least pay the most.
Lars parked his car in his spot and killed the engine. He got out the right side, ID badge still in hand, along with his coffee. He looked up at one of the facility’s dishes – well, not just any dish: this was DSS-43, the largest steerable parabolic antenna in Australia, and indeed anywhere in the southern hemisphere. But it was something he saw every morning – nothing special about it this time, except it was pointing to where Jupiter would be, anticipating a signal from New Tacoma.
The door was a few dozen meters away from where Lars parked, thankfully, and the lot was well-lit between the building and the lampposts here and there. As he walked, he saw the three empty flagpoles lining the entrance. No banners flew from here now, given the rainy conditions, but he knew that by the time he clocked out, there would be flying the Stars and Stripes, the Rojigualda, and of course the Australian National Flag.
He walked past these flagpoles onto the tile walkway. At the door, he swiped the badge into another reader, which instantly read the magnetic stripe, unlocking the door for him.
The interior was coldly-lit with fluorescence, but he was not alone. “Morning, Lars,” another man greeted, standing up to see him.
“G’morn’, Frank,” Lars returned. “Got anything in lately?”
“NASA boys said to keep an eye out for signals from the Pathfinder,” Frank replied. “So far, she’s all quiet on the red planet.” He sat back down. “Same story for Zed-Ae, ’fore you ask.”
“Figures, cheers.” Lars sipped his coffee. “Damn, this is a piss-weak cuppa this morning.”
“They always are,” his coworker quipped. “You always get the cheap stuff at the servo.”
“Oh pull your head in, mate.” He started walking over to his computer. “Alright, lessee what’s up with the Yanks. . . .” He started logging on, and the first thing he did was check his email. “Just the usual news, dadeeda. . . hold on just a tick.” He next checked for signals from Jupiter, and discovered that something did come in after all, contrary to what his colleague had reported. “Frank, what is this?”
“Eh?” Frank started walking over to his computer. “No, that can’t be right. I would’ve known at that time if it came in. I should’ve known!”
“Might’ve taken one too many naps on shift, ya bloody tool!” Lars chuckled at the revelation. “Too knackered for this line of work, I’d bet. Anyway, let’s see what’s here.” He opened the reässembled transmission packets, and started decoding them. It was way too small to be an image, so it had to be some sort of written report from New Tacoma – it turned out to be a .tex file. “Dot tex? Who uses that again?”
“Could be that Somerset bloke, check the metadata.”
“Hmm. . . .” He pulled up the metadata viewer, and saw indeed that the file was last modified by one Dr. Adam Somerset. “Too right. What’s his game again?”
“He’s the linguist, remember? Set foot on Rhysling first, got buddy-buddy with Twilight Twinkle or whoëver, eventually learned to speak their language. Honestly, how can you not remember that? The States still won’t shut the hell up about it.”
Lars turned around. “What, you wanted the commies to have that first too?”
“I – no?”
“Thought so. Though they’re still waiting on him to tell us about this ‘Harmonic Voice’ crock o’ shite.” He sighed. “What a mug, that Somerset.”
Frank had to ask, “Did you try looking at it?”
“Lessee. . . .” Lars opened the file. “Oh, would you look at that? He actually did come through. About time!”
“You know the drill, Lars,” Frank butted in. “The Yanks want to see that, so we gotta report it to them.”
“Yeah yeah, I know.” Now that the mission’s linguistic payload had finally delivered, he was all too curious to see what it was that he found. Screw the rest of the world, they can wait – he had a front-row seat to a piece of history, and he’d be damned if he were to give it up first. “The markup’s really hard to read,” he eventually conceded with a sigh. “Don’t TeX files need compiling or whatever, or is this just it?”
“Somerset must’ve sent us the raw deal, from the looks of it,” Frank answered. “Good for compression, bad for actual viewing. He’s probably counting on someone back home to compile it for him.”
“Actually, doesn’t this place compile TeX files somewhere?” Lars sat up and looked around the room.
“Yeah, you can do it with the terminal.” Frank tapped the relevant icon on the screen. “Use pdfTeX.”
“Oh.” Lars closed the .tex file and started the terminal. “Let’s give ’er a go. . . .”