We untied the shark pony. I fully expected him to pull something, but it didn’t really matter anymore. For all we knew, The Radiant Hope was currently a glowing ball of rapidly dispersing plasma. That meant we had no food, no water, and no way of getting home. We were floating around some large ice balls orbiting a gas giant, hopelessly stranded in space. The dire nature of the situation was slowly becoming all too clear to us. We didn’t have a reason to pretend we had hope.
“Thank you.” The stallion stated as he stood, before turning to Odyssey. “And I’m sorry, miss.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.” Odyssey sounded as dejected as I felt inside.
He looked a little taken aback. “No, I mean it! I had no idea your culture didn’t have an equivalent to the practice of word sharing!”
“It’s fine. She’s fine.” Good goddesses, I sounded worse than Odyssey!
The stallion looked between us with a frown.”What is with you ponies? Don’t tell me you’ve already given up!” He stared at me in obvious disapproval as I stared back in hopeless silence. We turned away from him in silence, the two of us quite dejected. “Look, I get it. It was wrong of me to involve you and your people in this. It was our problem, not yours.” We said nothing. The two of us were still trying not to process the immense gravity of our situation. “Titan is an inhabited planet.”
I interjected. “Titan’s just a moon.” I trotted towards the ship controls and toggled one of the displays, pulling up some basic information on Titan as we understood it. “It’s a ball of ice with maybe some water underneath. Its surface temperature is low enough to freeze our blood to our bones.”
He trotted up to me, not at all happy with my outlook on the place. “What was your name, miss? We haven’t been properly introduced.”
“Jupiter Rising.”
“Miss Rising, it occurs to me that our peoples have a very different definition of the word Moon. Titan is my home. It’s a beautiful, rich world. There are oceans, seas, land, and air.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s all under the ice. If you land in the right spot, you can follow the caves down inside the outer crust. There you can find all of the food and water and shelter you’d ever need. It’s even as warm down there as it is in here.” I looked over his shoulder and called out to my friend.
“Odyssey.”
The girl trotted over and I pushed the stallion aside to meet her. The Princess started first. “I mean, obviously the biggest concern is fuel. We might have to shed some mass to get there again.”
I looked down at my hooves. “If we dump anything now we’re never getting it back.”
“We don’t have much choice, Jupe.”
I looked up at her, hoping for guidance. “Is it worth it, Odd?”
She bit her bottom lip and glanced over at Titan on the little display. “..the ice shelf is a little on the thick side, there could potentially be some of the things he’s saying down there. It’s not completely impossible. If you’re looking for an opinion?” I nodded. “Well… I say we do it.”
We compared our list of scouted landing zones against the stallion’s recollection of the terrain. The Shark Pony had recommended several possible options. A cursory inspection of the options suggested they were all equally hard to get to. I picked one at random. We dumped nearly everything we had out of the airlock. We even unbolted most of the interior panels for the ship internals, leaving the ship’s delicate systems exposed. Odyssey tried her best to guess at the math. We were relatively confident about our chances, but the odds were not exactly in our favor. The stallion sat in Odyssey’s lap. He was looking worriedly between the exposed wire runs from the various component bays all around us. We had him tied down with the paracord from before. Now it was just up to me to aerobrake our way across Titan’s exosphere, by hoof.
“Is all of this really necessary?” The stallion asked of the shaking, exposed ship internals.
“Maybe.” Odyssey replied.
I rolled my eyes at him. “Does he ever stop complaining?”
“Who? Me? My name’s not He.”
I was doing something too important to glare at him. “How does that language sharing garbage work that you’ve got no concept of pronouns? He is a pronoun. He is going to the store. I want to go with him. I don’t want him to go by himself.”
“Oh, those are pronouns?”
“Yes! What do you think a pronoun is?”
“Xe.”
“What?”
“Xe is a pronoun. Xe is going to the store. I want to go with Xem. I don’t want Xem to go by Xemself.”
I turned away from the viewscreen for only a moment, against my better judgement, and looked to Odyssey in a state of absolute confusion. The girl shrugged her shoulders before replying. “I don’t know. I think they’re gender neutral pronouns? High society girls have to know this kind of stuff. You never know when it’ll prove useful.”
The Shark Pony looked up at Odyssey, curiously. “What is a gender and what makes it neutral?”
It took every ounce of selfcontrol I had not to stare at him in dumb shock. “Don’t you know what sex is?” I shouted in the vain hope that he’d suddenly admit to remembering.
He flushed pink. “How is that appropriate?! The act or the biology?!”
Odyssey sighed and answered him. “The biology. Sex is your biology, Gender is how you identify with it.”
“I’m not sure I follow. Can I have an example?”
“Well, my sex is female and my gender is.. female.” I carefully noted that uncertain pause, but I wasn't sure what to make of it. The stallion just stared up at Odyssey, blankly. There was no spark of comprehension to be had.
“Am I to believe that, potentially, one could have a different combination of those things? Like, for instance, a female sex and a male gender?”
Odyssey nodded softly against the turbulence of the ship. “That’s right.”
The stallion stared ahead for a time before replying. “I don’t think we have anything like that, no. My people have a sex, of course, but we don’t identify anything else based off of that.”
Odyssey looked down at him curiously. “You don’t have feelings about your sex? Or a relationship with the roles society expects of you based on it? Really? Nothing at all?”
He gave a shrug of his own. “I don’t think anyone expects anything out of you based on your sex alone, aside from the expected biological functions of course. Others just expect you to be you. There doesn't need to be a label or a category for that, just your name.”
I was marginally impressed with this rejection of Equestrian Ideologies, and I let him know as much. “You know, I think you’d really like it back in my country. The Crystal Empire is totally like that. Labels? Who needs them! Just be you! Do whatever you like!”
His ears perked up at that. “Oh, so you also have a gender neutral pronoun? Is it a different one?”
“Yes! It’s them. They and them. I don’t know how you skipped over some of the most common words in our language and went straight for Xe and Xem.”
I heard him cough from across the cockpit, clearly offended. “Those are plural pronouns.”
I winced at that, unsure what I did wrong. “Sorry?”
He replied with a tone that implied he was speaking out of a desire to teach rather than scold. “It’s fine, you couldn’t have known. It’s extremely important to our people not to conflate the many with the one. Self identity is crucial to our understanding of our inner self versus the school.”
“Oh. Crucial, huh?” I barely understood what I had done, but I felt bad.
“Yes. Among my people, it’s rude to refer to any one individual in a plural sense. It is usually seen as a direct denial of their self identity and their contribution to the whole.”
I felt dirty for saying it now. “My bad. Sorry, I didn't know.”
“It’s alright, Jupiter. I suppose this is how you feel about this Gender concept, Odyssey?”
The Princess sounded a touch embarrassed. “Well, I guess some ponies do, yes.”
“Then I shall make a conscious effort not to incorrectly identify your gender.”
“That’s noble of you!” Odyssey sounded proud, if a little out of her element.
“...and I shall attempt to learn these… not-neutral pronouns. To assist in this.”
Odyssey chuckled awkwardly. “Thank you! I appreciate it!”
“Excellent! Jupiter should also work on that with me, since Xe ..er, I mean He claimed to have a similar problem with X-is.. His people.” Odyssey broke out laughing. I could feel myself turning bright red.
I lost track of the conversation after we had fully entered Titan’s atmosphere. I was too busy trying to figure out how the principles of lift worked in an atmosphere that, I was beginning to realize, the simulators back home hadn’t correctly modeled. I couldn’t expend the energy nor the focus to try to hear the other’s conversation over the rushing winds battering our vessel’s hull. The incessant pounding of my racing heart screaming in my ears wasn’t helping anything either. I did glance over from time to time just to make sure they were both okay. It seemed like the discussion had kept going in my absence. The two even seemed to be growing friendly with each other. That was a heartwarming thing to think about. If we really did have to live here for the rest of our lives, at least the company could be pleasant.
The ship violently shook as we passed through a cloud of condensed gases which was much more solid than it had first appeared. I was instantly much more aware that “the rest of our lives” might not be very long at all. The ship bounced hard as I tried to sweep in for a landing. The ground effect was much stronger than I had ever anticipated and our flying wing was generating more lift than I knew what to do with. Against my better judgement, and my deeper hopes, I had to risk a suicide burn with the manuerving thrusters. With the fuel tanks nearly dry, I pointed the nose of the ship straight-down towards the landing zone and braced for the engines to arrest our momentum at the last possible second. I heard the engines burst out a roar of thunder as I counted my last moments. We slammed down hard on the landing gear, but the computer had managed to keep us alive.
I pat myself down with my forehooves, just to make sure I was still in one completely functional piece. “I… think we made it.”
Odyssey and I were in the process of exchanging our suits from the Tethys debacle with a spare set that was yet to see serious action. We were preparing to disembark into the frozen landscape outside of the ship. From there, we’d follow our new friend out into the world that awaited beyond. I passed a radio communicator to our new acquaintance. He accepted it with the same level of awkwardness I expected from a child that had never seen an earpiece before.
“What do I do with this?”
“You put it on your ear, like mine.” I wiggled my ear to emphasize the one I was wearing. “That’s how Odyssey and I communicate with our helmets on.”
“We usually use our lamps.” That seemed smart. Photons were certainly cheap and reliable. Behind him, Odyssey was struggling to perform her own suit swap with just her three hooves. She hadn’t exactly resolved to ask for help yet, so I let her be for now. “How do these work? Ear flips?”
“Yeah, that’s how you activate them. Then you just speak.” Simple, intuitive, and easy.
“Speak?”
“Yeah, they’re radios. You just talk into it.”
“What’s a radio?”
I stared at him in sudden shock. “Seriously?!” He nodded, gravely. “Please tell me you’re just some uneducated rebel that doesn’t really know how anything in the world works.”
“I am Prince Razorfin, of the High Tail Herd, ruler over all The School.”
“Oh.” So much for that. I had immediate concerns over the implications of this.
“I am indeed educated, of course. Only the wise can wield the power to rule.”
“Uh… sure, okay.” I didn’t believe him. If such a pleasant hope were true, surely a brilliant mare like Odyssey would rule Equestria. Instead we had a mare that couldn’t hold a candle to Odd’s intellect, much less the sun. Behind him, the three-legged alicorn fell over onto the floor with a yelp and immediately became entangled in her replacement suit. My opinion did not change.
“I’ve got a ten year degree in Mechanical Engineering.” And then there was that! I tried to not let my culture shock over the existence of a decade-long degree program be the first thing out of my mouth.
“Oh! N-No wonder you and Odyssey were getting along so well! She’s an engineer too! Though that’s a long time to spend in school.”
“It’s the minimum.”
“Oh.” My previous concerns were doubled.
“What about you, Juptier? Is there more to your name?”
“I’m Jupiter Rising. I’m just an Earth Pony Mare and a Planetary Scientist.” I didn’t usually feel out of my depth around Odyssey. The addition of another self-proclaimed royal, however, was starting to make me feel uncomfortably self-conscious over my lack of titles.
“Do you have any nicknames?”
“Sure! Friends call me Jupiter or Jupe.”
“And are you also educated, Jupe?”
“Of course! Only the brightest minds could qualify for a mission like ours!” He gave a soft smirk, and I almost immediately saw the crippling irony in what I had just said. “I’ve got a Phd in Geophysics. It’s an 8 year program.” He shivered when he heard this, as if his sensibilities were offended.
“Oh, is 8 years the minimum on Earth?”
“For what I’m doing, it’s the maximum.” He stared at me in disbelief, and I felt as though my perfect marks somehow wouldn’t improve how he obviously felt about me. I could hardly connect to him or his disc, but at least he and Odyssey were friends. That was something.
I turned around at the bottom of the ramp and watched Odyssey fidget awkwardly at the top. The Prince hopped from the ramp’s edge to the soil beside me and spun around to see the girl struggling with the decision to proceed. The Princess took a half step forward before hesitating and speaking up. “Hold on, I’ve got an idea, let me try something.” Those sounded an awful lot like infamous last words to me but, who was I to judge? The engineer at the top of the ramp carefully aligned herself, took a few steps back, then attempted a running jump down the ramp. That would have been impressive, had it worked the way she had imagined it. As it happened, Odyssey’s butt collided with the ship above her. She accidentally somersaulted backwards down the ramp in an impressively awkward set of desperate motions that left the rest of us backing away. The alicorn skidded on one hoof, practically tripped over herself, and barely managed a shaky landing on all three legs. I sighed in relief. Odyssey stood a little taller for her success. The Prince didn’t comment.
I turned back towards our ship once more. That reliable workhorse was standing tall in the bottom of a narrow valley. It was surrounded by jagged mountains of ice, ancient glaciers, and soft hills of Titan’s frozen dirt. The thing looked surprisingly out of place where it was. It didn’t belong. It was almost as if it had been inexplicably dropped there by the will of some divine power. The words Victory Everlasting were still emblazoned on the side of the craft. They were written in giant, luminous letters. The name was clearly visible in Titan’s burnt orange sunlight. Seeing it like this, I couldn’t help but reflect on the gleaming little space plane one final time.
“I guess you really will be Everlasting, won’t you?” Apparently, our new friend’s radio was working. That little comment attracted his attention.
“What was that?” The Prince trotted up beside me. I didn't mind explaining myself to him.
“See those words on the side? That’s the shuttle’s name.” He looked over at it.
“Victory Everlasting?” Apparently he could read our language as well.
“That’s right. I landed her with the fuel tanks practically dry. We were burning more engine than fuel on the way down. There’s no more flight left in her, not unless you can bring a whole spaceport’s worth of facilities here for a refit. Even if they strip her for what she’s worth, that unibody crystal airframe will never rust away. She’s just going to sit there now, gathering dirt and dust, forever.” He nodded at that.
“Everlasting.”
“Yeah, like a monument. Forever and always.” He placed a hoof on my shoulder.
“May it stand in memoriam to events worth remembering.” That sentiment had me misty-eyed. I could hear Odyssey sniffling over the radio channel. I almost didn’t know what to say. Well, almost.
“Thank you.” His hoof dropped back to the ground.
“Goodbye, Victory.” It was just a shuttlecraft but, after everything we’d been through, it was like leaving behind an old friend. “Goodbye and good luck.” We turned away for the last time. The Prince led us on. Odyssey had been waiting for us.