Celestia Sleeps In
Chapter 5—Preparations
Admiral Biscuit
Dale stood in his kitchen, deeply confused. The clock on the stove told him it was 4:17, while the one on the microwave helpfully flashed 12:00. He wasn’t sure why he was in the kitchen.
A look around him suggested that since the refrigerator door was open, and he was holding an empty glass in his hand, he had probably been planning to get something to drink. A brief perusal of the gleaming white appliance located a half-gallon of orange juice, right next to the newspaper.
He poured himself a glass, put the now mostly-empty carton back in the fridge, and kicked the door shut. Scratching the stubble on his face, he looked out in his driveway, where his Accord sat with a canoe still on its roof.
The neighbors probably wonder if I’m losing my mind. Hell, I wonder if I’m losing my mind. For as long as he could remember, he’d been obsessed with neatness—a place for everything, and everything in its place—but the car was still mostly packed from his short trip up north. It was anybody’s guess what was in the cooler, now. Probably best to just throw the whole thing in the trash. Of course, he wouldn’t do that. It’d served him well for over a decade; a little bleach and it would be good as new.
For an entire week, Dale had wandered around his house in a daze. He had suffered memory lapses every day. Sometimes, he found the evidence quite by accident—he’d discovered that he had made breakfast and put the Cheerios back in the oven two days later when he’d gone to bake potatoes. Fortunately, the fire had burned itself out in the oven. More often, it was episodes like this, where he would find himself somewhere in the house with no idea why he’d gone there in the first place.
In his moments of lucidity, he assumed that he was probably going insane, and as strange as it seemed, that thought was oddly comforting. In fact, he would happily have checked himself into the nearest mental institution for a few months of basket-weaving or whatever it was they did these days, if it wasn’t for one little thing: a single prismatic hair.
He had pored over the photos on his camera, loaded them onto his computer, and examined them in every single detail. He had copied the messages in the sand into a notebook. He couldn’t make any sense of it, but as he drew out the shapes he became absolutely convinced that they were, in fact, some sort of language. Despite the difference in the two messages, some of the symbols looked kind of the same, as if they could have been a natural progression.
A Wikipedia article on the origins of the Roman alphabet had shown a similar progression—while some of the letters had changed dramatically, others had stayed quite similar through the ages.
The other thing which persuaded him this was a language was that all the letters looked right together. He’d seen a few movies with alien languages written in them, and the lower-budget ones didn’t look convincing on second glance—they weren’t letters that anyone would actually use. More though was given to the artistry of the set than to the logic of the letters. At least Star Trek had gotten it right with Klingon; an alphabet that seemed sensible. As he wrote them out, unfamiliar as they were, the motion of writing them seemed almost natural. On a whim, he’d tried Google Goggles on the writing, and on the strange ‘U’ that matched the one on the creature’s coat. Unsurprisingly, there had been no results found, although Google was pretty sure the barred U was either a shirt, light bulb, or handbag.
All of that could have been a figment of his imagination. It was possible to believe that he had suffered some sort of mental breakdown on the island. He knew it wasn’t a hallucination, since his camera had seen it, but it was surely possible that he had drawn the messages by scratching them with his shoe, then taken a photograph. Unlikely—he wasn’t given to flights of fancy—but possible. It wasn’t something that he could take to court, so to speak.
The hair was a different matter.
The trip back home had not registered in his memory at all. The last clear memory he had of his vacation was sitting in his canoe in the middle of the lake, frightened that the aliens were going to beam him up or something, and then he was home. Clearly, his conscious mind had completely tuned out by the time he got back to the state park, and the first couple of days at home were pretty much lost to memory as well.
He had been recovering, however. He still felt numb, what his grandfather would have called shell-shocked, but he could remember what he had done the day before. He had gone to the mall with his Ziploc that contained an alien hair.
He had discovered that when he set it on the dashboard of his car all but the closest radio stations were nothing but static. Inspired, after he had filled his car with outrageously expensive gasoline, he had spent the rest of the day at the mall, experimenting. Judging by the puzzled and angry expressions on the cell-phone wielding populace, the hair tended to cause a signal loss at two to three feet. He hoped that none of the dozens of conversations he had interrupted had been important.
He had also discovered, through fortunate chance, that it also interfered with the mall rent-a-cop’s two-way radio at a range of four feet. He could only assume that either the frequency or the power of the transmitter was the cause of the difference. As Adam from the Mythbusters would say, this was a result.
Of course, he could still be imagining it. He could be imagining the trip to the mall, he could be imagining that the hair was affecting radio transmissions, he could be imagining the letters in the sand, but if he was, it was a damned good hallucination. The persistence and the repeatability were powerful arguments for it being real, as unlikely as it seemed. He’d had a few vivid dreams before: once, when he’d fallen asleep in front of the TV he had a dream where all his friends were playing football. Their conversation—which had seemed completely natural at the time—was completely incomprehensible, involving words that he barely recognized, although in his dreaming state, made perfect sense. Upon awakening, he discovered that the show on TV was about innovations in AIDS treatment, and concluded that that was where his mental dialogue had been coming from. After all, Interferon wasn’t a drug he spent much time thinking about.
He put the empty glass in the sink, which was piled full of dirty dishes. Apparently, he’d been forgetting to wash them. He sighed, and began to fill the basin, before remembering that it was four in the morning, and that he should probably go back to bed.
The days had passed in the blink of an eye. Lyra was completely exhausted from hours of studying. While Twilight did much of the legwork in the Royal Archives, she had been run around Canterlot, meeting with ambassadors. All the meetings were cloaked in secrecy, with the questions posed as hypothetical. Any self-respecting ambassador had probably known that there was a real crisis going on, but they were wise enough to keep their speculations to themselves.
Collectively, they had been a friendly bunch, although she supposed she should have expected nothing less. Their advice, however, had been much less useful. Each one of them could expound in depth about the particular culture with which they interacted, but none of them had the slightest clue about how to approach a previously unknown race. The closest she came was with Sheriff Silverstar, who happened to be visiting Canterlot personally to make an appeal for a second Appleoosan deputy. The town had been growing since the accord with the Buffalo.
“Treat ‘em like you would any other pony,” he advised, taking a sip of salted apple juice at the hotel bar. “We made the mistake of underestimating their smarts and organization. Figured jest ‘cause they lived out in the plains, like, they weren’t worthy of our attention.” He frowned. “I think Little Strongheart made a few appeals to us to move the orchard, but we didn’t listen.”
“What if we can’t speak the same language, and it can’t read our writing,” Lyra protested. “If there isn’t easy possibility of communications, how do I make our intentions clear?”
He absently touched a hoof to his hat. “Well, that’s a real stumper.” He silently nursed his drink for a bit, finally looking her square in the eye. “I reckon the first thing I’d do is get it through my skull that they was there first. If they want you to leave, best to do so. Second, ain’t much that beats a friendly hoof.
“I just bet there’s a traditional way of showing peace, something that any creature would understand. Do that, then hope fer the best.” He drained his drink, set a few bits on the counter, tipped his hat, and walked out of the bar.
She sighed. She’d hoped for more, but the sheriff had had nothing more to offer, and it was just like him to cut right to the heart of an issue, and move on without debate once he’d said his piece. She’d heard that he had faced down Chief Thunderhooves unarmed—if it was true, he was fantastically brave for a stallion. Nevertheless, it wasn’t a wasted conversation; she had yet another bit of information for Twilight to track down.
The next morning—technically, later the same morning—Dale woke up feeling more like himself. He washed the dishes, took the newspaper out of the fridge, organized the cupboards, took out the trash, and began cleaning out the car. All the while, his mind was churning over the problem of the aliens on the beach. Apparently, it had finally decided that he wasn’t crazy.
The easiest thing to do, of course, was nothing. He could go on with his life. He could wait until some breathless news reporter mentioned them. Everybody would be shocked, but he’d just have a small smile on his face. He wouldn’t admit he’d seen them before, just act surprised along with everyone else.
Another option was to blow their cover completely. He could lure a second-rate news reporter to the island on some convincing premise, and just watch the story unfold from there. There had been some story in the island’s past that had been major news—sometime back in the seventies or eighties—although he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Still, it had the potential to be a hook for a reporter, if he worded it just right. But what if these aliens didn’t want to be exposed—what if there was a group of guards, like the serious-looking ones with spears, waiting for him to mess up? How would they treat a news reporter and camera crew?
Dismissing possibilities of a return trip, he returned to thoughts of the aliens. Why, of all the places they could have gone, did they come to Earth? Did they hear radio broadcasts? Did they find Voyager? Unlikely, since it was still transmitting, as far as he knew. NASA probably wouldn’t keep clear images of an alien spacecraft under their hat. Well, they might, but someone would leak it in fairly short order.
Maybe they had stopped at one of the outer planets, and heard Earth from there. It was even possible—very unlikely, but possible—that they had landed on Mars, seen the Opportunity rover and wondered where it had come from.
What if it was just coincidence? What if they were a race of galactic circumnavigators, and had just stopped to re-supply? That might explain how they had seemed so surprised to see him on the beach. No doubt tall ships had occasionally been surprised by the natives when they’d sent their boats ashore to re-provision.
The thing to do, he thought as he bleached his moldy cooler, was to start by writing down everything he’d seen, and to begin speculating from that. It was, after all, what scientists did. Well, he’d get right on that, as soon as he finished cleaning out his car.
Two hours later, Dale sat in his study. He had dusted off his desk, neatly arranged a dozen sheets of blank printer paper in front of him, and had two pens ready. I should really buy a notebook. No one will ever believe anything that’s written on computer printer paper. There was some famous mathematical equation that had been written on a napkin, though, so there was a bit of precedent.
They are not from earth, he wrote. Good, in no time at all he’d have something he could sink his teeth into. He took a sip of coffee.
Ten minutes later, staring at the mostly blank paper, he threw the pen in frustration. How did writers do it? Here he was, trying to describe something he’d actually seen, and the best he could come up with was one sentence. He took another sip of coffee.
The problem, he decided, was that he was trying to write something profound. Something for posterity. The kind of thing that would be quoted in textbooks forevermore, and he couldn’t come up with anything. A five-year-old could do better. Maybe it would be easiest to just write down things as they came to him, and sort it out all later. He crumpled up the paper and tossed it into the wastebasket, then took another pull at his coffee.
He looked at the wastebasket, and scratched his chin again. It was a shame to waste a piece of paper like that.
They have four legs, he wrote on the wrinkled paper. There were fourteen of them. The biggest one seemed to be asleep when I arrived, but it woke up later and seemed to be in charge. Good, this was starting to come along. All but one of them had white coats; the last one was a funny blue-green color. Was it fur, or were they wearing fur-covered suits? He hadn’t seen any fasteners on the one that had come up to him, but they could be suits made of some kind of stretchy material, like spandex. They could even have been applied by a sprayer of some sort. He’d seen a video by some inventor that had designed a spray-on fabric. Of course, just because it was on the internet didn’t mean it was true. Still, it was pretty unlikely an advanced space-faring race would just show up to a beach on an island in Lake Michigan nude. Frowning, he continued to write.
Two of them clearly had hair—manes—while the other dozen did not, unless it was under their helmets. He leaned back, thoughtful. The big white winged unicorn had a mysterious flowing mane and tail, but he could discount them as some sort of vanity, since it was clearly in charge. He absently looked over at the Ziploc bag, where the hair was still shifting colors as it always had. It might be nothing more than a particularly clever wig. He’d seen shirts with LEDs in them, so why not a few more decades or centuries of innovation to produce color-changing self-powered wigs? Yes, it was completely unnecessary, but then that was the fashion industry in a nutshell.
` What bothered him the most about the ones that he assumed were guards was their uniformity. Despite promotional photographs, one could line up a dozen marines in uniforms, and they wouldn’t look the same. One might be a blonde, another a redhead; there would probably be differing ethnicities, and even genders these days. Six of the guards appeared to have wings, while the other six had horns, but they were otherwise completely identical in appearance, from their tails to their eyes. This led credence to the theory that they were wearing uniforms. The armor might not be a separate thing, it could be built right into the outfit, and the reason it looked old-fashioned was for traditional reasons.
More worrisome was that if they were military uniforms, they were hardly subtle. In modern human history, the uniforms that one wore into a potential conflict zone were designed to camouflage. It was hard to imagine a circumstance where a brilliant white and gold uniform would be subtle. This suggested that either the aliens had put no thought whatsoever towards disguising themselves, or were so confident in their abilities that they didn’t care. In either case, it led him towards the conclusion that they had little fear of attack, and the shielding bubble they had been encased in probably gave them good reason to be unafraid.
Eventually, he’d filled all the pages, and raided his printer tray for more. He finally had to stop; his hand had completely seized around the barrel of the pen. Judging by the tingling numbness in his wrist, he was going to pay for this in the morning, but he now had around thirty pages of details of the creatures, as well as a lot of speculation.
The biggest problem is that I don’t know anything, and I don’t know who to ask. He could put questions on the internet—it wouldn’t be too much trouble to find a forum of alleged UFO witnesses and abductees, and start asking questions. The problem was that the ones who would take him seriously were, in all likelihood, nuts. It was the most frustrating problem he had ever come across.
Assuming that he desired to meet with them again—and he was unconsciously leaning in that direction—he had not the slightest idea how to go about it. It was obvious that they didn’t speak his language.
But there was a definite possibility of them having a language translator. It was the kind of thing that any worthwhile sci-fi movie had. Admittedly, it was usually a plot convenience, but so were faster-than-light travel and teleporters. While he couldn’t prove that the aliens had FTL technology, they certainly had teleporters, because they’d been there one moment and gone the next.
Dale had managed a machine shop for years, and it had taught him one valuable lesson—never assume anything. A drawing that was crystal-clear would be misinterpreted. A foolproof machine wasn’t. Engineers just made costlier mistakes than his janitor. While it was likely that the aliens had just decided to wait a month to come back in order to study earth and calibrate their translator, assume they hadn’t. In that case, the first order of business would be establishing communications. This would be a simple prospect, since anthropologists did it all the time. A few gestures of friendliness, a smile, hands held open, and boom! Peaceful intent demonstrated. Trade a few words back and forth, pretty soon we’re in business. Dale smiled. This was going to be tricky, but no problem.
Lying in bed, the magnitude of the task finally hit him. The problem that had been nagging him since he had first subconsciously decided to meet with the aliens again. It was so obvious, he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it already.
They were aliens.
The single advantage that an anthropologist had was that he was dealing with humans. While cultures differed, basic biology did not. There had been a study years ago showing that different cultures correctly identified facial expressions—humans were hard-wired to know these things. Any anthropologist could be sure that the culture he was studying held things with their hands—be they weapons or toys—walked upright, used audible language, and had a biologically programmed range of facial expressions. All of that was completely out the window with an alien race. He didn’t know if their visual range was the same as his, if they had a mental communication aspect, how they would signal peaceful intentions, or anything at all, really. In fact, the only conclusion he could come up with was that they were not overtly hostile, since he was still alive.
In his lifetime, war had gone from something that was a part of human nature to something that was best avoided. While it was true that America was currently engaged in two futile conflicts in the Middle East, the population of the country in general no longer seemed to favor war as a reasonable way to settle differences. He hoped—oh, how desperately he hoped—that this was the case with these aliens. After all, it was possible that they were taking the month to draw up papers for Earth’s unconditional surrender. Maybe it took time to get them through the democratic order of planets, or whatever kind of organization it was that the spacefaring races had. What if they were just an early survey team, getting an idea of the value of the planet? He’d certainly dealt with the human equivalent—even though he hated thinking of lawyers as human—when he’d sold his machine shop.
Well, if that’s what it was, there was little he could do about it except to put the best case forward for humanity. The question was, how?
His biggest fear was that they had just accidentally stumbled on the planet. If the mothership was a ways out, they might have just beamed down from far enough away that they hadn’t noticed the satellites and all the other clearly unnatural junk that orbited the earth. It could be that they hadn’t expected to find an occupied planet, so they’d left their scanners off. If that was the case, then everything they discovered about the planet was news to them, and that was a problem.
Dale didn’t know what kind of broadcasts were going out in the rest of the world, but he knew for a fact that the majority of the American news media was obsessed with everything that was wrong with Earthly society. Imagine that they were calibrating their translator to Fox news broadcasts. By the end of the month, he’d have to put a pretty good case forward for the continuance of humanity as an independent society, because the news anchors assumed humans were bastards.
He’d have to prove that humanity was a worthy species. Given America’s current obsession with celebrities, sporting events, and politics, it was a hard argument to make. He would have to give these aliens an idea of what humanity had discovered—even if it wasn’t new to them—of the progress it had made over the centuries.
Even that was a double-edged sword. If he gave them everything, they might see it as a sign that Earth was ripe for the picking, or they might think it pathetic that it took so long to make those discoveries. But there was nothing else he could think of—after all, they had discovered Earth; it was too late to put the genie back into the bottle.
Since they were a spacefaring race, the first thing to do was get a good book on astronomy, one with a lot of pictures. The more detail, the better—his parent’s house had always had a vividly illustrated Time-Life book or two about ships or ancient humanity, or something. Surely there was a similar book about astronomy and space exploration. If he was really lucky, they’d point to where they came from, but if nothing else, it would be a sign that homo sapiens was reaching for the stars, too.
Mathematics was universal. Presuming their numbering system and mathematical notation was as different as their alphabet, calculus and trigonometry were non-starters. If he got a book of geometry, though, they’d instantly understand. They probably didn’t use the same symbols for constants—it was hard to imagine that the symbol for pi was universal, but the concept was. He couldn’t remember most of the math he’d learned in high school, but that didn’t matter. Most of it would come back to him when he had a textbook in front of him, and he figured that they probably weren’t expecting him to be a mathematical prodigy, anyway. It wasn’t like he could teach them anything they didn’t know about math.
Chemistry would probably be useful, as well as physics. If they used a periodic table, they could probably figure out the elements. Books on biology. Show them everything we’d discovered. Show them that we were a curious race. A book on the wonders of the world—maybe not the traditional seven wonders, but more modern ones. Tall buildings, inspiring bridges—what about art? Would these aliens appreciate the detail of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Would they understand the magnitude of Mount Rushmore?
The more he considered, the more likely it seemed he’d be taking a computer with him. After all, a library’s worth of books would sink his canoe. If only there were some way he could get internet access on the island. Finally, mentally debating whether Audubon guides would be a useful resource, he drifted off to sleep.
Lyra tossed and turned in her luxurious apartment in the castle. Naturally, everything was perfect; she even had staff ready to wait on her every need. A bell-pull hung right over the bed, with which she could summon an attendant in an instant. In short, she wanted for nothing.
Except sleep. She would have been comfortable in her own bed, in her own room, soothed to sleep by Bon Bon’s quiet snoring. Even her meditation exercises were doing little to help her. She imagined the calm rock garden her maestro had, but sitting on the rock was the strange alien creature, giving her a look she could only describe as hostile.
Twilight had come up with nothing yet—even the Princesses had been woefully unprepared when they had first met with dragons. She had informed Lyra that there was still some hope in one of Commander Hurricane’s treatises, but she had to have it translated, and that would take a couple of days. The pegasus had done something to start up a dialogue with the griffons—had, in fact, started the peace process—but although the outcome was something every schoolfilly knew, the actual technique was apparently lost to history.
One thing she was absolutely certain of was that this time, she would be in the minority. They had given the creature a lunar cycle to prepare, and unless it was a complete outcast, it had surely informed its alphas that there would be another meeting, and they were sure to send others.
She wondered if she should suggest having more ponies come along, a question which had been plaguing her since the first night after contact. She hadn’t suggested it because to her mind it seemed like cowardice. Lyra could come up with a dozen reasons why it was a good idea, but she could never convince herself that it wasn’t really because she was scared, and she was sure the Princess would see that in an instant.
I should have asked Sheriff Silverstar where courage comes from. She sighed. She had never felt this kind of nervousness while she was dueling. He had just stood up for what he believed in, completely willing to sacrifice himself for his cause. Such a foolishly noble thing.
The next morning, Dale had forgotten most of what he’d been thinking about the night before, as a new idea had come into his mind. It would be good for humanity if he were to take a video of these aliens. That would prove he wasn’t crazy to everybody’s satisfaction. He knew that experts could tell if a video was faked somehow. He could also take lots of still photographs—probably with a film camera, since that was much, much harder to fake.
Without much more preparation than pulling on shirt, shoes, and pants, he hopped into his car and headed towards Best Buy. He was halfway there when he remembered that the hair somehow interfered with radio broadcasts, so who knew what it would do to a digital device? It fortunately had had no effect on the photos he’d taken with his digital camera, but that was a sort of after-the-fact kind of thing. If a single hair could mess up his marine radio and cell phones, what might a creature covered with them do? If they were defending themselves against some type of beam weapon, like a phaser, it made sense that their outfits might somehow deflect or absorb energy; maybe the electromagnetic interference was a side-effect.
Still, that wasn’t an insurmountable challenge. He could build a Faraday cage which would probably shield the equipment. If he bought disposable film cameras, they had no electronics to damage, and it was hard to believe that their forcefields would damage the film on a chemical level, unless they were radiating gamma rays, in which case he had much bigger problems. These days, one probably couldn’t buy a Geiger counter without filling out a lot of paperwork, so there was no way to know unless his film was foggy when it was developed, or all his hair suddenly fell out.
He looked around Best Buy anyway. There were a few small digital movie cameras that were quite affordable and had a respectably long run-time. If he wanted VHS, he was going to have to go to Goodwill, apparently. The clerk in the photo section didn’t even know what a VHS camera was. As he was walking out, he took a brief trip through the computer section. An iPad would be the perfect thing to load up with every kind of example of human innovation possible.
Or would it? He wasn’t exactly tech-savvy himself, and he wondered what kind of effect their EMI might have on a tablet. What would they think if he proudly showed them a blank device that he couldn’t even power up? He could put it in the Faraday cage, but then how would they interact with it? All it would show was how unprepared he was to meet an alien race—not that he needed to be reminded.
Books it was, then. At least those wouldn’t be damaged by any sort of radiation. Furthermore, they didn’t have batteries to run down, and they would be relatively unaffected by the damp. He could give them to the aliens, and they could take them back to their ship, to study at their leisure. It might even be a more tempting prize than him, since they would be able to learn far more information from a book than he could ever provide.
Dale staggered out of the bookstore with a commandeered shopping cart that was carrying at least his weight in books. Judging by the quizzical look on the clerk’s face, there weren’t very many people who bought a thousand dollars worth of books in one go. Still, he’d managed to get a nice selection, from educational books on counting and spelling—in case they didn’t have a universal translator—to anatomy, astronomy, geometry, and most every other scientific subject imaginable. He’d even found a visual dictionary, which would probably be a great help when it came to translations. He bought two copies, one for himself, and one for them. The clerk had asked him why he wanted two; he’d said one was meant to be a gift.
Lyra was finally managing to get some sleep, thanks to a wonderful herbal tea that Zecora made. Twilight had seen the bags under her eyes, and correctly surmised that she needed some help. Celestia had sent a letter to Spike, and a day later, a familiar grey pegasus had cheerfully dropped a large box on the balcony outside her apartment before departing with a friendly wave.
The translation of Commander Hurricane’s diary had proved to be a boon, and Twilight was frantically teaching Lyra everything she had learned from the book. Aside from the wings, the physical structure of the griffons seemed kind of close to the creature’s, Twilight thought, and it might behave in a similar manner. After all, it had talons which Lyra had seen being used to grip things, it had a fairly flat face with a central beak, and if its hoof-coverings were tightly-fitted, it probably had paws on its hind legs. Naturally, they didn’t know for sure, so it was best to leave the interpretations a little vague.
What was clear was that the early pegasus tribes and the griffon flocks used broken weapons to symbolize peace. It was a message anypony would understand. Lyra was in favor of going to the armory immediately to get some, but Twilight held up a hoof. “They have to be deliberately broken,” she said. “The text made that quite clear. Edges have to be blunted, tips broken off, straps removed and the holes re-riveted.”
“Why?”
“Imagine this scene: a pegasus and a griffon confront each other on a cloud. The griffon pulls a broken sword from its scabbard. The pony has no way of knowing if the sword just broke in combat, and the griffon is preparing to defend itself with the half-weapon it has left—which could still be quite lethal—or if it is a message of surrender. Only if the edges are entirely blunted does it reveal a non-hostile intention.”
“So we have to get the blacksmith to break some weapons.”
Twilight nodded. “I got thrown out of the smithy the first time I asked, so I’ll have to have the Princess give an order.” She brightened. “I wonder if a pony learns all those words after becoming a blacksmith, or if it’s part of the qualifications for the job? That would make for an interesting paper. . . .”
Lyra rolled her eyes. If it hadn’t been for her being the Princess’ personal student, and saving Ponyville a time or two, there was little doubt that the townsponies would have labeled Twilight as a complete eccentric within six months of her taking up residence in the library.
“I do have this,” she said, levitating a slim volume out of her saddlebags. “It’s a sort of primer for visitors of Equestria. They have one at the train station, but I had to get this one from the library. Apparently, there’s a storeroom full of them somewhere, but somepony seems to have lost track of exactly where. Celestia had them printed in every language she could find.” Lyra began flipping through the pages as Twilight continued speaking. “The first page is in common Equestrian, the second in simplified Unicorn, the third in Royal Unicorn, the forth page is in Zebra, and so on.”
“It gave no indication it understood the meanings of the messages I wrote on the beach,” Lyra said.
“I know.” Twilight waved a hoof dismissively. “It probably won’t understand any of these either. It may, however, help us understand what type of writing system it uses, though. The first thing to do is give it the book, and see if it pays more attention to any one page than another. They all have a drawing of the race that uses the language, so it shouldn’t be hard to figure out which page it’s on, even though you can’t read the text.” She pointed to a woodcut of a griffon. “There are more kinds of writing systems than I first thought. I talked to an orthographic expert, and she said that there are logographic, syllabic, alphabetic, abugidas, abjads, and featural sytems. Some of the systems use parts of others, and apparently orthographers argue about classification all the time.”
“I still don’t see how helpful that would be, if it can’t read it.”
“It might not be,” Twilight admitted. “If it responds in kind, though, with a scroll or book, it might be a helpful hint to translation if we know what kind of alphabet it uses.” She sighed. “If it can even read or write at all.”
Over the next two weeks, Dale kept on thinking and planning. Something that seemed a brilliant idea one moment seemed idiotic the next. Sober reflection caused the elimination of most of the books. Should there be subsequent meetings, he could bring more, but the thought of loading all those books into the canoe, unloading them at the island, dragging them to his campsite, and then back to the beach was a little much. Not to mention the raised eyebrows as he loaded book after book into his canoe. The park rangers might be easygoing, but they weren’t idiots—people sometimes took along a book or two to pass the time, but not a whole library of hardbound books. He snickered—even if he honestly told them why he had so many, they’d never believe it.
He built the Faraday cage, bought a Camcorder for $15, eventually managed to find a store that still sold VHS tapes, ordered a ‘wedding pack’ of single-use cameras, made lists of things to bring, and emptied two store displays of one-subject notebooks. A week before he was due to head back to the island, he looked around his living room and realized he had enough material to start his own school.
It was then that the fears and doubts began creeping in. He’d made all the preparations he could think of, but he knew it wasn’t enough. He knew that when he got there, he was going to be blindsided. There would be something that he had that offended them, or something he failed to bring that insulted them. There would be while-coated technicians there to vivisect him, right on the beach, to avoid the risk of contaminating their spaceship. Or maybe he would get there and there would be nothing at all, because there weren’t any aliens, and there never had been.
He’d narrowed down his book selection nicely. He had decided on a basic book on counting which prominently featured Elmo, a somewhat more scholarly book on the alphabet that featured cartoony animals, a basic reading primer covering the exploits of Dick and Jane, the visual dictionary, and a book of geometry. He also had managed to find a beautifully-illustrated book of astronomy, which covered both the solar system and the rest of the universe very well, and a book on anatomy which would hopefully answer all their questions about the human body without his becoming an unwilling test subject. He also tossed in a calender, so that they might have a more convenient way to mark days until the next meeting.
Dale had also decided against taking any recording equipment whatsoever: if they wanted to reveal themselves, they would, on their own schedule. If he were to surreptitiously take photos of them, and they found out—well, he’d seen enough movies where one of the bad guys pronounced “He’s wearing a wire,” and knew full well what followed. It would probably be neater, though; rayguns tended to either leave an unharmed-looking corpse or a pile of ash, depending on the movie.
The night before his departure, he sat back in his recliner and nursed a beer. He was completely emotionally and mentally drained. The car was loaded, and everything had been double-checked. He’d left a brief letter on the kitchen table just in case, along with a key to a newly-rented safety-deposit box: as hackneyed as that gambit was, he couldn’t think of a safer way to tell his story if he did disappear on this expedition. Dale chuckled; given the History Channel’s relaxed standards as to what was history, he could just imagine Giorgio Tsoukalos holding out his hands—as if he held an imaginary globe in them—and whispering “aliens.” Of course, these aliens weren’t ancient, and they hadn’t engineered the pyramids.
Probably.
Well, if he actually went and met with them, he supposed he could ask them. He cracked open another beer and clicked on the TV.
A quick perusal of the approximately ten thousand channels on Comcast unsurprisingly revealed nothing of real interest, so he surfed over to the Discovery Channel, where Mythbusters was in progress. Since they’d inspired him to build a Faraday cage—even if it was going to sit in his garage and gather dust—he figured he owed it to Adam and Jamie to watch an episode.
“…But act now, and we’ll double your order!” Dale sighed. He didn’t need one magic blueberry bush, much less two. Did people actually buy these things? Did people really believe that they could have a blueberry bush on the kitchen table that grew fruit by the pound? Did the aliens watch three-dimensional TV that was just as inane?
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things—not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” The slightly off-color image of JFK filled the screen unexpectedly, snapping Dale back to awareness. He didn’t remember the speech, nor could he imagine why a clip of it was playing on Mythbusters, but Adam explained it during a grainy shot of a Saturn V rocket lifting off. He didn’t remember the speech, but he remembered the moon landing.
He had been working as a machinist for a few years—in those days, it wasn’t something that you went to trade school for, you just got a job at a machine shop, swept up shavings, and if you seemed remotely competent, you eventually got to try your hand at the lathe. He’d gone home, a dingy one-room apartment that smelled of mildew despite his constant cleaning, and flipped on his second-hand Zenith console. He knew that the moon landing was probably a forgone conclusion. NASA had been practicing for it for nearly a decade, and aside from the three astronauts dying in a fire on the ground, everything had worked.
It was a refreshing change. From the glory days of Camelot, in a few short years the country had become mired in a seemingly endless quagmire in Asia, with no clear concept of what it was trying to accomplish, or why. Race riots had become so commonplace that they were hardly news, and in Chicago even the police had rioted, assaulting the so-called hippies that were working for the McCarthy campaign. After JFK, political figures had been assassinated with an almost depressing regularity, to the point where the increasingly grim news had faded into background noise.
The image on the screen was slightly blurry, which he supposed was to be expected. It was coming from the moon, after all. There was a camera focused on the lunar module, which was as lifeless as everything else in its view. For what seemed like an eternity, nothing happened, then ladder came down, and Neil Armstrong began to descend the ladder slowly.
He backed down the ladder carefully—it was a steep ladder, like those on ships—and when he got to the bottom step, he reached a foot down and touched the surface of the moon, then picked it back up again.
There had been a fear, Dale remembered, that the lunar surface would be too soft to support anything. Clearly, NASA had been fairly confident it would, but they didn’t know for sure. Armstrong seemed to be testing the surface, making sure it would hold his weight. Finally, he stepped down, and spoke his famous line.
He had felt his heart swell with pride as the second astronaut came out of the lander, and they planted the flag. There was the flag of his country flying proudly on the surface of the moon. Sure, it was a bit passé—planting flags seemed more of a climbing-a-mountain or reaching-the-south-pole kind of event—but there it was. If aliens ever found it, they would know it was us, not those filthy communists who had landed on the moon first, and claimed it as our own.
He flipped off the TV. If three men could get into a tiny aluminum capsule and be shot into space, he could get into his canoe and paddle out to North Fox Island. He sometimes fancied himself following in the footsteps of explorers, now it was time to lead. The only difference between visionaries and crazies was whether or not they succeeded—or, in some cases, failed nobly. Either way, he was going to try.
Dale walked outside. He couldn’t see many stars, but the gibbous moon hung low in the sky. Eagle 1 was still sitting there, somewhere in the Sea of Tranquility, quite possibly the most apt place for mankind’s first extraplanetary expedition to have landed. He’d be sure to bring that up when he talked to the aliens again. They were up there, too, and he wondered if they weren’t a little nervous about this meeting.
That night, he slept better than he had in a month. He was up before the sun, and it was a testament to his planning that he pulled out of his driveway fifteen minutes after getting out of bed.
It would be a lie to say that the trip to the Leelanau State Park or to North Fox passed without him having second thoughts, because he did, quite frequently. However, he brought himself out of them by naming famous explorers. Big Rapids had flown by in a mental debate about whether or not Pizarro counted as an explorer.
“You’ve been gone for over month, and you just come back and say everything’s going to be okay, but you’re leaving again tomorrow morning?” Bon Bon glared at her. “Do you expect me to even let you in?”
“It’s my house, too, Bons.” Lyra pushed past the sputtering pony and walked to the living room. It looked the same as ever, although her side of the couch looked forlorn. At least she could remedy that.
She flopped down on the couch, smiling as the cushion seemed to conform exactly to her body, but the smile was fleeting. Bon Bon stood in the doorway, anger in her blue eyes.
“It was guard business,” she said defensively. “I would have told you what—I really wish I could. But Celestia swore me to secrecy. It could change the whole fate of Equestria.”
“I’m sure.” She shook her head. “You’re always going off on one adventure or another, and you never tell me anything about it, you just do your own thing.”
“I told you all about dueling!”
“How was I supposed to understand it? You’re a unicorn, and I’m not!” Tears began welling in her eyes. “What am I supposed to believe?”
Lyra sighed. When Princess Celestia had told her that the jumping-off point was the Ponyville reservoir, she had been excited at the prospect of spending one day at home before she left again. Clearly, she was wrong; it would have been less stressful to have taken up Twilight’s offer of a room. “I’m sorry I came back,” she muttered, getting to her hooves. “It wasn’t a good idea.”
“No!” Bon Bon sniffed. “Don’t go! I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please—I was scared. I was scared you were gone, that you weren’t coming back.” She collapsed on the couch, her muzzle an inch from Lyra’s.
“I’m scared, too,” Lyra confessed. She closed her eyes, letting the familiar scents and sounds of their house fill her mind. She could almost—almost—forget what she was about to do. For all the guards and hoofmaidens and everything else in Canterlot, she felt less alone here.
“I am going somewhere very few ponies have ever visited,” she said softly. “I wish I wasn’t, but what’s done is done, and we can’t change the past.” She touched a hoof to Bon Bon’s withers. “I will do everything in my power to return, and I know that Celestia will try her very best if I fail. Even changelings could only keep me for so long.” She laughed bitterly. “Promise me if you see three red lights rise over the dam, you’ll run as far and as fast as you can. I can’t do this if I’m worried about you, too.”
Bon Bon nodded solemnly. “Will you ever tell me what’s going on?”
“Pinkie Pie promise.” She touched her free hoof to her eye.
Dale looked around his camp. His tent was set up, his firepit cleared. A folding table was secured under his dining fly, and any food which might have a scent was suspended from a tree limb in a bag—more out of a force of habit than anything else; there were no creatures other than raccoons and squirrels on the island which might take advantage of his food if he left it on the table, but he had been camping where there were bears, and old habits died hard.
Most of the day had been spent, but he decided that he would take a walk around the beach and get a feel for the lay of the land. He wanted to take special care to scout out any ambush spots. Naturally, in a forested wilderness, they abounded.
When the sun dropped below the treeline, he decided it was time to head back. He zipped his dining fly shut, and placed a fresh notebook out on the table. This one wasn’t going to be shown to the unicorn, if he could help it. He drew a quick sketch of the area surrounding the beach, with the most obvious potential ambush spots marked. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to give them more than a cursory glance before he made his way to the beach, and, if the creatures could teleport in separate groups—which they seemed to be able to do on Star Trek—he was hardly going to be able to prevent an ambush. He could, however, occasionally cast an eye towards the most obvious spots, and if someone were to appear in them he could—
Well, he didn’t know what he could do. A few hours of thought didn’t give him any ideas at all. In the case of an ambush, the best possible outcome was that he would make it to the canoe before they got to him, and they would have an unnatural fear of the water, and no ranged weapons, and he would paddle to freedom while they stood powerless on the shore. It sounded like a ridiculous plan, and one part of his mind was wishing he’d brought his gun.
When he slid into his sleeping bag and closed his eyes, sleep eluded him. The ground felt lumpier than usual, and the air colder, and he just couldn’t get comfortable. He would drift off, and then suddenly jerk awake again, imagining an angry horse holding a ray-gun in its hoof, somehow, and jabbering at him to get up. He envisioned his tent burning as he was led away in chains. He woke up trembling, sure that he was being vivisected on a lab table, bright lights shining in his eyes. Every time he pulled his travel alarm out of his pillowcase, it would seem as if only moments had passed. Finally, grumbling, he got out of his sleeping bag and walked over to the firepit.
As stressed as he was, his wilderness skills had not left him, and in a few minutes, he had started a new fire on the banked coals of the old one. He opened his cooler and pulled out a beer, popped the cap and idly flicked it into the fire, and then took a long drink. Sighing, he grabbed a stick and began poking at the fire, watching the sparks drift upwards. He followed them into the sky, watching the stars twinkling above, and wondered if there was a spaceship there, slowly floating above his head, somehow cloaked so that the government didn’t know it was there, filled with aliens watching his every move. Quadrupeds in lab coats, holding clipboards, jotting down notes. ‘Here we see the subject poking a stick in a fire. Possibly aggressive. Recommend immediate termination of subject.’ He sighed. He couldn’t decide if he was getting worked up over nothing, or if the next day would bring the moment that would change everything. Did John Paul stay up all night, tossing and turning, before the day he ascended to the papal throne? Or did he sleep a contented night’s sleep, knowing that all his hard work and sacrifice had paid off? Such thoughts were too deep for a retired machinist, he decided. Whatever happened tomorrow happened.
He didn’t sleep, but he drifted in a trance, completely oblivious to the moon tracking its path across the starry sky. The fire burned low, and he occasionally threw more wood on it, although he was unaware of having done so. If he had been asked, he would have denied it. He finally came back to awareness as the sky was beginning to lighten, believing that he had fallen asleep in front of the fire.
He boiled some water for oatmeal and coffee, deciding that he should at least eat breakfast. As soon as it was finished, he filled his thermos, then poured water on the fire until it was cool to the touch. He wasn’t sure when he would be back, and felt it was better to be safe than sorry. It would be just his luck that the meeting was going well, and then he accidentally burned down the island.
With a meal inside him, he went to the tent and changed into clean clothes, checking his pockets several times to make sure that he had nothing which might be misinterpreted in them, and grabbed the backpack that was full of the books he’d brought, as well as a stack of notebooks and a box of pens. He walked down to the beach, taking long steps, trying to get there before he changed his mind.
Lyra stood uncomfortably on a wooden raft floating in the center of Ponyville’s reservoir. Princess Celestia had chosen this location because there was nothing for several miles around that any substantial force could hide behind. She had made certain that the weatherponies had cleared the sky, save for some cloud observations posts. The weather patrol had set up a flight and ground exclusion zone around the entire area. In effect, Lyra was currently the only pony in a three-mile radius, a thought which made her distinctly uncomfortable. She had never been that far from everypony else before, as far as she knew. In the hills around her, a company of elite guards watched and waited, and the Wonderbolts were standing by to relay messages if needed. Princess Celestia was back in Canterlot, but could teleport in to collapse the spell instantly. Twilight was undoubtedly watching closely. Unicorns were standing by to shoot up three red lights, the signal that something had gone wrong. It would also most likely be Lyra’s death warrant if they made that signal, which was a thought she found particularly unsettling.
She could, she was sure, still back out without the princess thinking any less of her, and it would not be a lie to say that some part of her wanted to very badly. She didn’t know what she would encounter on the other side, and she couldn’t shake the knowledge that if it were bad enough, not only would Celestia not rescue her, but would, in fact, make rescue impossible. It was not a pleasant thought, especially when one had skipped breakfast.
She resisted the urge to check her saddlebags again to make certain she had packed everything she thought she would need. In fact, they had been gone over by both diarchs, Twilight Sparkle, and three ambassadors.
The only thing that was keeping her from shaking in her horseshoes was the slightly warm feel of the celestial magic that was wrapping around her own magic field, magic which had been given by the princess to ensure she had the strength to maintain the spell for several days, if necessary. They had agreed she should leave the other world after a full Equestrian day, but wanted to make sure that there was some reserve capacity just in case. She knew that there was likely a monitoring spell mixed in, but didn’t insult Princess Celestia by asking.
Taking one last look around the serene plains, she focused her thoughts, and closed her eyes. She visualized the spell flowing through the aether, the magical energies flowing along the leylines, and channeled the energy through her horn, braiding the three-part spell together as it wound up her horn. An observer would have been shocked to see her eyes flash a brilliant solar white for a moment before she stretched out into a glowing golden aqua tunnel which had just appeared in reality, and then she was gone.
In an instant, she was standing on the beach again, the comforting presence of the dome glowing around her. Lyra looked around carefully, to see if anything seemed out of place. It was still dark here; they knew that the solar cycle on this planet was not aligned with their own. Celestia had been able to come up with what they hoped was a workable calculation for the variation in solar time between the new world and their own after her brief stay on the new planet; unsurprisingly, she was quite adept at celestial mechanics.
The world was just as she remembered. Unfortunately, the dome blocked out scents and muffled sound, so she had to rely on vision alone to see if there were any traps waiting for her. A brief examination suggested that there were not, so she cast the second spell which would allow her to leave the bubble—in essence, this spell put a smaller, fur-tight bubble around her, and could pass through the main shield. The down side was that she was breathing artificial bubble-air, and would go through her magical reserves much faster.
She passed through the large dome, feeling the slippery tension of the spell as she crossed out of it. As soon as she was completely free, she relaxed the small shield around her nose and took a deep breath. The air smelled all right, but it was little thin, like the air around the Cloudeseum but she was patient, and waited several minutes before dispelling the shield altogether. She had no way of knowing if there were any long-term effects to exposure to the air, but at least there was enough oxygen to breathe without being uncomfortable.
She hadn’t smelled anything that seemed out of place, nor did she hear any unexpected sounds. She was slightly annoyed that the wind was coming off the water, since that made anything on the island behind her unsmellable, but there were a good thirty body lengths of sand between her and the small bluff that marked the end of the beach, which she hoped would give her enough time to put up a defensive spell if needed.
With time to kill before the creature and its kin arrived, she began to scratch out the alphabet on the beach. She had a small chalkboard with chalk in a mouth-holder, as well as parchment, quills, and ink, but she couldn’t fit the whole alphabet on the chalkboard, and didn’t want to use up the paper for such a mundane purpose. It would give them a starting point. Perhaps the creature would recognize it for what it was, which would mean it used a similar type. As she did, she was glad they had decided to go with the common alphabet, since it only had fourteen characters.