Dear Princess Celestia
It’s hard to believe that two ponies who seem to have so little in common could ever get along. But I found out that if you embrace each others’ differences, you just might be surprised to discover a way to be friends after all.
Standing in the open door to the library, Spike read the belated letter Twilight had shoved into his claws the moment they got back from the train station. The accompanying story - that Applejack and Rarity had grown close enough to spend a whole night in each others’ company and not drive each other crazy - made Spike wonder if he’d really been away a month instead of just a day.
After placing Spike’s bags in an appropriate, temporary spot on the floor to be unpacked, Twilight watched the dragon scan the letter. She had a wide grin on her face. As Spike rolled the letter up, she leaned forward in anticipation. “So...what do you think?” She asked invitingly.
Spike had come a long way. He was tired and hungry. “Good letter, Twilight. Princess Celestia will like it” With that he sent it. Twilight’s smile disappeared and her ears drooped.
“You don’t have anything else to say?”
“Yeah. You should have mentioned who the two ponies were, but otherwise it was fine. I brought some donuts back from Canterlot. Wanna have a snack?”
“Come on, Spike! Don’t you see the importance of what I learned?”
Spike didn’t want a lecture, but what could he do?“No, I don’t. Can you explain it to me over a donut? There’s a big bag right behind you...”
“It means that anypony can be friends with anypony!”Spike sighed in resignation, and tried to figure out what this meant. They’d had a conversation about this recently. It had had something to do with…
“...Harmony!” he blurted out, but had nothing intelligent to add.
Twilight clapped her hooves together in excitement. “You got it! It means that Harmony is really possible. It’s not just an idea.”
Spike rolled his eyes.“Of course it’s possible” he said, “If we wanted to we could just tell everypony why they had to be nice to everyp-”
“No!” Twilight almost shouted, and jumped closer to Spike, “You can’t pretend to be friends with someone. Applejack and Rarity tried that during the slumber party, and they nearly destroyed the library because they were less like themselves by pretending. Neither would have let that tree fall on us if the other hadn’t been there. It isn’t just unnatural to pretend being friends, it’s outright dangerous!” Twilight had stretched her neck forward so far her nose was touching Spike’s, and her pupils had shrunk to tiny black beads. Her tail was almost horizontal. Every muscle in her body was tensed up.
Spike burst out laughing. “Relax, Twilight!”, he told her, “You’re acting ridiculous.”
Twilight was confused until it registered how uncomfortable her posture was making her. She looked at herself, saw how worked up she’d gotten, and couldn’t do anything but join Spike in laughing at her expense.
When the laughter died down, Twilight conceded, “You’re right. We know who our friends are. We’ll never let each other down.” Spike’s eye was a little moist, but he couldn’t have been laughing that hard.
“I missed you”, he said quietly, “It was lonely in Canterlot without you.”
“You know, according to what I’ve learned, you should never have to feel lonely because any pony can be...” The sight of Spike with his arms crossed, and an unimpressed look on his face made Twilight stop and think.
She blushed, and then said sincerely, “...I missed you, too”
“They won’t get me tonight. They can’t. It wouldn’t be fair if they got me tonight.” Simon’s baritone voice filled the metal craft, cutting through the constant clatter of the raindrops pelting the hull. His words were futile: The nearest human was twenty-five light-years away.
He lay on his bunk, his face pressed against the porthole next to his head. The glass may as well have been painted black, for it was nighttime and overcast and nothing could be seen. If it were daytime, Simon would have seen a swamp. Miles of mud would stretch before him, in most places submerged in brackish water. Trees would jut out of the water at every conceivable angle. Knotted roots would rise out of the water only to curl back in, like sea serpents from so many maritime imaginings.
Simon also would have seen, to his dismay, a bright pink flower in full bloom, two meters across, facing straight up to the sky, about fifteen meters away. Simon had to go out and dig up that flower before sunrise.
As it was, Simon could see nothing with his eyes, but his imagination kept offering an image of what awaited him outside: Hairballs, perhaps a dozen or maybe just one, either wandering through or standing idle, eating. They stood seven feet tall with big, powerful legs on top of huge webbed feet. Sticking out of their flabby, spherical torsos were two long arms with hands that had four fingers each. These arms were powerful enough to uproot trees, which they did on a regular basis. They had no head, but a meter-wide circular mouth they used to eat the trees. The most peculiar sight Simon had seen in his time in the swamp was a Hairball, standing in one spot, with a tree the size of a three-story building sticking straight up out of it. Over the course of a week the tree disappeared into the creature’s body, like sucking on a candy cane.
They were fiercely territorial, charging and bludgeoning into a pulp anything they heard sloshing through the swamp. Simon had landed in their territory.
What made their charges so scary was how difficult they were to kill. Their torsos were mostly hair and muscle, which Simon’s .44 Magnum could easily punch through, but all of their vital organs were wrapped in a sac suspended from fibers that allowed it to dangle freely in its otherwise hollow chest cavity. It was impossible to tell where the sac was in a given instant. So far he’d been lucky and had not had to fire more than five shots before the Hairball fell.
One day Simon had a brilliant insight: Hairballs were hard to kill with projectile weapons because of the pink flowers, like the one Simon could not currently see out his bedside porthole. The pink flowers had a vast network of roots that stretched for ten meters in all directions around them. When something put enough pressure on these roots, the flower would shoot a toxic barb with terrifying speed and accuracy. The victim, still living so long as they didn’t drown, would then be enveloped as the roots grew over them, and dragged down into the mud.
The Hairballs had developed the dangling organ sac as a defence mechanism against the flowers. It was a beautiful display of evolution. Simon logged a report on his findings. He’d never been more proud of himself: no human being who had ever existed knew what Simon knew. Every paper he’d ever written, including his Masters thesis, had more than one name on it, until now.
The only problem was he needed to now bring one of the pink flowers back with him, a task he’d put off until now, his last night in the swamp. At sunrise, the ship would take off for the next part of the planet he was to explore, whether Simon was on board or not. This was intentional of the mission plan so that, even if he got killed, the ship would still return to Earth and something of the outcome would be known. Sunrise was in ten hours. The planet had a forty hour day. Sunrise was in ten hours. The planet had a forty hour day.
He couldn’t go out until it stopped raining. The danger of something sneaking up on him was too high. Forecasts and common sense told Simon that the rain would stop before sunrise. After he had the flower, he could while away the final hours until the ship took off in the safety of the hull.
But what if this last excursion outside was the end of his lucky streak? As he kept imagining, what if a horde of Hairballs were out there waiting? What if this final, easy task found him scattered across the surface of the swamp? In several bits. The thought made him want to pull the covers over his face. Instead, he threw the sheet off and walked out of his cabin.
“They won’t get me tonight. They haven’t gotten me yet. It’s more than just luck. They won’t get me tonight.”
He headed to the front of the ship.
Thirty feet long with a fifteen-foot wingspan, the spot she landed had to be cleared of trees before she set down by a team of robots. She sat on the ground on three legs arranged like a tricycle. Her front landing gear also served as the staircase to the entrance. Inside she was a long hall with five side rooms. Simon stood at the front, facing the thick metal door that led outside. Immediately to his left was the first side-room, the equipment room. He turned around and headed back down the hall, passing first his cabin on his left.
He passed the medical bay on his right. He’d had the good grace so far to only enter this room for routine, scheduled examinations. It was hexagonal, roughly eight feet in diameter, and had a single white chair in the center that could tilt and bend into a thousand different positions. Above the chair hung a chandelier of two dozen robotic arms, each with a distinct surgical implement fastened at the end. It hung motionless like a spider waiting for a victim to sit in the chair.
He continued aft. Also on his right was the eating area. It consisted of a stool, a table, and a meal dispenser in the wall. Much time had been spent here, little of it worth remembering.
Finally on his left was the rec room. It consisted of a chair, a lamp and a monitor. It was in this room Simon spent most of his spare time. He watched a lot of movies. He’d watched The Wizard of Oz fifteen times, according to the records. He thought he knew why: It was the story of finding your way home. He was sympathetic.
Beyond the rec room the hall hit a dead end, but on the ceiling was a door through which Simon would pass to go from this ship, the excursion craft, to the giant, long-range craft orbiting the planet. It was this behemoth that had brought him here, and it was also going to take him home.
The rain still fell heavily. Simon stood beneath the door, looking straight up at it. He closed his eyes. He tapped his bare feet together three times. He said, “There’s no place like home”
He opened his eyes to the whitewashed walls of the ship. He was still twenty-five light-years from home, and he still had to go outside.
“If I only had the nerve”, he sang.
He hummed the tune as he walked the length of the ship again. Again he stood at the door leading out. It still wasn’t time. He turned around again. This time he skipped down the hall, as though it were the Yellow Brick Road.
We’re off to see the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz!
We hear he is, a wiz of a wiz, if ever a wiz there was!
If ever, oh ever a wiz there was, the Wizard of Oz is one because,
because because because because because...
because of the wonderful things he does!
We’re off to see the Wizard, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz!
Simon did not hold back. His voice reverberated through the ship, drowning out the rain and all other noise.
When he finished, there was silence, save for the rain. He didn’t like the silence.
He sang every song he knew. It took him two hours. Most of them were from Broadway revivals he’d watched growing up. He was a fine singer, he’d been told. In truth, he didn’t care one bit how good he was. In school, he’d performed onstage many times, and simply loved the feeling of being the center of attention. He jumped, he ran, he danced. The ship was full of sound and life.
Out of the equipment room glided a robot attached to a rail on the ceiling. It slid along the length of the ship until it was next to and got Simon’s attention. Simon looked into the camera on the robot. Beneath the camera was a monitor showing bodies of text, and beneath that a dusty keyboard.
“Hello, Al. Want to sing with me?”
“No, Simon, I do not” the robot replied with an edge of contempt.
“Are you sure? Didn’t they teach you to sing?”
“Simon, Listen.” Simon listened. There was nothing. No rain. Dead silence.
He sighed. “Al, turn on all the floodlights”
“Simon, you only need the floodlights on the one side”
“I don’t like the dark”
“Very well. All floodlights are on”
Simon rushed to his cabin and looked out the porthole. Al trundled after him.
The pink flower was still there, on the edge of the floodlight’s range. There was nothing else.
He sighed again.
In a warm jacket, long pants and thigh boots, Simon descended the steps. The storm had flooded the swamp and the water reached the third step. Simon waded through the water, harnessed to a specimen box the size of a coffin that floated behind him. He had a shovel in his hands. He approached the pink flower.
He felt the roots under his foot. He took a deep breath of smelly swamp-air, and put down all his weight. Nothing happened. Mercifully, Simon didn’t weigh enough for the flower to care. He walked up to the flower and began to dig.
He heaved the pink flower into the box. It had been more firmly rooted and heavier than he’d expected. He stood still for a moment, catching his breath.
He heard a splash. He stopped breathing.
Another splash.
Simon whirled around and faced two huge, hairy hands emerging from the darkness. The thought of his gun, safety on, uncocked, holstered to his shoulder under his zipped jacket, crossed his mind for an instant when he felt the hands touching his neck. They started to close.
He raised his shovel and heaved forward into the blackness with all his might. He felt resistance, then nothing, then resistance again. The hands around his neck loosened. Simon twisted the shovel one hundred and eighty degrees. The mass pulled away, taking his shovel with it. There was a great, final splash.
There were no hands on his neck, but he still couldn’t breathe.
Simon ran back to the ship. Despite the short distance and his speed, the resistance of the water made it seem agonizingly slow.
He unhooked his harness, charged up the stairs, and leapt into the medical bay chair. A mirror on the wall showed him his purple face.
“What’s wrong, Simon?” Al inflected with poorly-simulated emotion.
“Al, I can’t breathe”, Simon sputtered. He made a shrill screaming noise as he tried to suck in some air.
“Could you repeat that?”
“I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I...can’t...breathe...” He didn’t stop mouthing the words and trying to get some volume in his voice. Finally, the chandelier began to whirl around and descend upon him. Simon’s eyes closed and everything went black.
Simon would have bolted out of the chair if the straps did not hold him in firmly. He was alive. He could breathe. He was very relieved. Al could let him out now.
“Al, c-” he began, but nothing else could be heard. His throat did not vibrate. It was just as though he were breathing the words.
Now Simon was scared again. He tried to ask Al what was going on, but the best he could manage were low gurgling noises.
Al entered the room, looking at him. The straps released, and Simon shuffled shakily to Al’s terminal and typed,
Al, I can’t speak
Al tried his best to sound sympathetic. “Simon, you suffered severe trauma to the larynx. A tracheotomy was performed to save your life by the medical unit. It was hoped that the repair work done had saved your voice. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case.”
Simon typed, Will I ever speak again?
“Possibly, with time.” Al’s screen printed out a line of periods.
“But I don’t know.”
The ship sat on a desert plain. Nothing moved. There was no rain. There were no sounds.
Simon paced the ship in his steel-toed boots, an intentional choice so that his footfalls could make the most sound possible. He’d never learned how to whistle. He was unable to produce sound. The silence was total and unbreakable. He was alone.
Re-Formatted by Admari 07/10/13