The subconsciousness is a taciturn, diffident entity that prefers to allow its companion the consciousness sort out the daily signals the body receives, while the subconsciousness handles its own affairs quietly and unobtrusively. But this subconsciousness is no less able, and arguably more able, than its companion consciousness, and during sleep is when it chooses to demonstrate this prowess. Every night, it evinces itself in the form of the dreams it so gleefully creates, though these have not definitely shown their usefulness, contrary to the assertion of many poets. No, the true achievements of the subconsciousness are more often than not attributed to the consciousness; when it is worn-out from the stimulation of the day, the consciousness sleeps while the insomniac subconsciousness powers on, solving problems that its exhausted companion had given up on. When the consciousness awakes, refreshed, the subconsciousness often delivers with glee the solution to the problem it had been, without rest, working on ever since it had been presented with it and ever since the consciousness had dismissed it as unsolvable.
Oh, but Errenax, some may accuse me—from a linguist, you fancy yourself a psychologist! Will you not now go from psychologist to psychoanalyst? From psychoanalyst to philosopher?
As the idiom goes: hold your horses! For the subconsciousness is the epicenter of all linguistic phenomenons, the driver of all phrases, words, and constructions.
How many words are in your vocabulary? Fifty thousand? Sixty thousand? Maybe even seventy thousand? At this moment, are those seventy thousand words floating in the saliva underneath your tongue, and a slight tickle is all that it would take to spit them all out at once?
What are you aware of at this current moment? Perhaps the temperature of the room, perhaps the dryness of your eyes, perhaps your slowly beating heart; but, right now, is it not the words on this page? Are you thinking about anything else? Would it not only take a single word from me to make your brain switch its subjects? Where did that new, completely-formed subject come from? You weren’t conscious of it earlier, and you certainly didn’t create it with all its aspects on the spot.
What if I speak this word, changeling—what is in your mind now? No doubt with a buzz and a shrill, a black-skinned warm-blooded wasp with protruding canines has laid the eggs of its concept in your mind. So quickly does the image appear, just by my speaking the word, that you could not have formed it from scratch immediately. It was recalled from somewhere.
The consciousness is merely the surface of a lake. Your subconsciousness is everything that swims underneath, which comes up to breathe the moment you need it.
Thus, after I was woken up by the first rays of light from the morning sun on my face, I had understood, thanks to my ulterior subconscious thinking, not only the article I’d read the previous day, but the vital information it contained, in spite of all those trivialities and superfluities:
The ponies did not trust each other to maintain order; instead, they had installed a body, a parliament, to exercise in force the will of the monarch, in response to the voices of the majority. I did not learn as to the extent of the distribution of power in the parliamentary monarchy; that is to say, I did not learn whether it was the parliament or the monarch that held the power by law. That seemed to be a dubious matter, but one that I had no desire to investigate to a further end, and one that would ultimately be unimportant.
I needed resources, a bearing, a guide, but I had no idea of how to go about obtaining these things. How did ponies get the things they wanted? They clearly bartered with one another, but what was the standard of value? Whatever it was, I knew I had none of it, and I didn’t think I would be able to maintain my inconspicuousness very long without it. “We require value,” I shrilled upon waking up. “Have you discovered what that is?”
Immediately, my ears were bombarded with five different responses as each one of my brother and sister subordinates jumped on the opportunity to expound what they had learned while I had been dreaming. Evidently, none of them had slept, too excited as they had been; and, to my embarrassment, they had discovered quite a bit more than I had. The observations they had made were fairly extensive and informative, and they had quickly learned a few useful skills of survival with this information. With many chortles and a liberal use of the subjunctives of purpose and exhortation, they had this to say:
Each beast, pony, was a specialist in some industry, making a product, trading it for small pieces of a metal that was deemed by some authority—they knew not by whom, but I had a fairly good idea—to be highly valuable. They would then use those pieces of metal to trade for things that they could not make on their own, but which other specialists could. These pieces of metal were valuable in themselves, and my brother in squabbles found that he could obtain most of what he needed by absconding with the pieces that had been left unattended.
He had procured a map of the entire land with his skill and had dropped it next to my sleeping body on the roof of the tower. I woke to see it lying next to me, wrapped around a rock, presumably to keep the nighttime winds from carrying it away.
How much detail! It was resplendent in its colors and its precision, and the letters were written in a style that served, if nothing else, to give an added elegance to the whole image. Even the surrounding terrain was sketched in painstaking accuracy, as well as the notable landmarks one would encounter when moving across the land. But most remarkably, I couldn’t immediately locate where I was. This city was huge, visible from the sky at a few miles’ distance, even from above the cloud layer. Here I was, I thought, as I pointed my hoof to the settlement on the easternmost coast—Fillydelphia. Or was I in this one here, this Manehattan? No, that couldn’t be right, because there were mountains on the left here, and—there they were.
I had not seen them in the nighttime, but there they were, in the direction opposite the ocean—the west-northwest direction, according to the map. We had a mountain range back home, a much smaller one to be sure, and I had always regarded them as the pinnacle of the inanimate, just as I had regarded my brothers and sisters as the pinnacle of the sentient. Flying around their bases had been a favorite pastime of mine; I had never gone to their summits, much less flown any higher than the altitude of the tallest of the trees on their slopes, for I had thought that the magic, or whatever it was called, that their presence instilled in every living thing in their vicinity—a magic that strikes deep within the part of the body that contemplates the august, intoxicating the willing victim with a paralyzing sense of wonder and awe—that magic would be lost should I be able to surpass in height the mountain. It was one of those childish superstitions, one that I had not really ascribed too much value to but had nevertheless obeyed, having no desire to climb that high in the first place. But when I looked on these mountains now, from the top of this structure of iron, I felt . . . nothing. Nothing at all. It was just an amassment of rock, no more worthy of my attention than a tree or a blade of grass. I was quite busy, I remembered, and there were much more important things to do than to ogle the scenery . . .
Yes, that’s right, I had a mission to do. . . . How had I gotten so distracted from that in the first place? A distraction afflicting me, who could fly past hundreds of my brothers and sisters, reciting verb conjugations, my own voice drowning out their laughs, my personally esteemed task fixing itself to my mind which permitted to it no deviations? How could I—anyone, for that matter—ever be distracted when crucialities occupied every thought and deed? Was this not important now; was saving my family not important?
I shuddered as I looked back to the map. I was making a big deal over nothing. I was in a new land; that was all, and it’s perfectly understandable to be overwhelmed in a new land, intermingled—disguised—among a foreign species, trying to find out what they’re thinking and hoping they’re not thinking of you.
The notes in the margins heavily implied that the land that was cut off from the borders of this particular map were those territories out of the domain of the ponies. I ran my hoof across the map as I tried to locate the center, tried to find the heart of this beast, a place where the wasp could lay its eggs, so to speak. There: Canterlot, it was called. It was right in the center of the map.
The map had no reference scale. Was it within flying distance? As I felt an eastern wind blow through my ears, I thought: Yes, if there’s any time to move, it’s now. I would be carried by the wind and, like the latter half of my journey across the ocean, would glide effortlessly on the breeze.
I shrilled my thoughts to my unseen colleagues, who, judging by their responses, seemed to be enjoying themselves a marked amount. “Brother Commander,” I heard one respond, slightly louder than the rest, “is the distance too long and are we not numerous enough to form a line of communication?”
I judged the distance. It could work if we were willing to do a bit of flying back and forth. “We can,” I replied. I then arranged the order of the line and the time of departure for each segment of it, emphasizing that at least one of my brothers needed to stay in this city to watch the coast and the weather for the time when it was appropriate to call the rest of our family across the ocean.
When I felt a particularly strong breeze upon the roof the building, I spread my wings and allowed myself to be carried in its direction, athwart the mountains on my right, still clutching the map with my hooves, trying to minimize the damage to it as the air tore past. The mountains were on my right, I could see; I just needed to follow this bearing, and I would be in Canterlot by . . . well, that was slightly hard to say. But since I didn’t know what I would do when I got there, I was determined to enjoy the process of traveling, and it would certainly give me time to organize my thoughts.
*
I didn’t need the map after all. When I cleared the city limits, I saw it:
A long, gray fixture on the path, stretching out infinitely into the horizon, streaked past below me. And despite my attempts to see to the end of it, no matter how many miles of it ran under me, still it seemed to ever materialize from the forever distant, unreachable point where the sky and the earth joined each other. When I craned my head back to look at the distance I’d already covered, there I could see the structure racing away, meeting the opposite skyline, and vanishing into the firmament. For a brief moment, I contemplated the impossible, that the twenty kilometers of the structure that I could see, or whatever the combined distance it was between the horizon in front and the horizon behind—that the twenty kilometers of the structure were the only twenty kilometers, and as it disappeared behind me at that unseeable point, it was placed down afresh at the point in front, such that I could fly forever and never see anything but the exact same segment of matter underneath me.
When I examined the map closer, I could that this entity was definitely represented. In fact, I suddenly noticed, there were dozens of these gray lines stretching across the map, all going into Canterlot.
I dropped altitude under the mental pretense to see if there was maybe a bird or a squirrel I could catch for a meal, but what I was more interested in was this formation, clearly artificial in construction, that seemed to brace the earth’s skin like an irreparable scar.
I slowly stretched out my hoof as I sped past it, with the caution not unlike that a magpie exhibits when noticing something shiny on the carcass of a predator. I jerked my hoof back nervously two or three times before my heart pulsed with an ultimate beat; and, seemingly separate from my will, my hoof twitched an inch forward and touched the surface of the material.
Metal! That was all it was, not unlike the material from which the buildings were made. The ponies made this; there could be no doubt on this accord. But what was it? This land, with these creatures, seemed to always have a new concept to throw at me—and I noted, for the first time, clear as ever, that I had the desire to learn every single one, to scour the land for the rest of my life until I understood and could reproduce every new piece of technology that served the lives of this land’s inhabitants. Though, I was at a block, now; I could not even begin to conceive of the purpose of this new structure. It was easy to learn what purpose the buildings served; they were shelters, clearly, or served for storing property. But those at least had all their material concentrated in one place. This metal now in front of me was too long to be of any practical purpose. I looked around and noticed that the land was dead—no, not dead, just . . . full of nature, no settlements of any kind, no ponies in the fields, not even pegasi in the air above. I could hear the wind in my ears. There was something seriously wrong here, and I didn’t like the absence of movement, or . . .
What in the world was that? There, in the distance, I saw a black haze, an obscurity hazing the pleasant blue edge of the sky. I started with a spike of fear. A tornado, perhaps? No, the winds were too calm for that, and a brewing tornado gives such a distinctive smell that precautions can be taken long before it actually touches down.
I, with a few great strokes of my massive wings, managed to, through a struggle, regain my previous altitude. The haze was getting blacker, thicker, and much more massive. I was now aware of a growing rumbling sound, like that of the surf, but one much more violent, as if this unseen tide were attacking the shore with a preternatural relentlessness uncharacteristic of water. It was a cloud now, to be sure, but not one of the ocean or the sky. Something on earth was venting it, something that was hurtling toward me at a great speed . . .
When I finally noticed that the mass was moving toward me, there was no time to evade the cloud that it was spewing into my flight path. In an instant, the air around me went black. I couldn’t see! I took a shallow breath in a slight panic—and it was as if a flame had been lit in my bronchi. My throat, my chest, my ears, and my eyes burned! I coughed as hard as I could; but my reflexes got the better of me, and I inhaled again, deeper this time, with an enormous suffering that was amplified only by an utter bewilderment.
My left wing seized, and my right faltered, causing me to spin to the left, head-over-head, and it was only when I had cleared the smoke and saw the grass rising up to me at an alarming rate that I was aware I was falling; and I barely managed to get a wing stroke in at precisely the last second before I hit the ground, just enough to allow me to survive the fall with all my bones intact.
I should have been in an immense amount of pain; and, for a second, I was. But when I looked to my tormenter, I was struck in such a state of awe that I almost wished to be hit again:
I watched, as they sped past me at a velocity of an unfathomable magnitude, a line of metal boxes, as far to the left and right as I could see. They were fixed with wheels, like the carriages I had seen in Fillydelphia, and they had large, transparent square windows. I saw a multitude of colored bodies in those windows, and I saw a row of eyes staring out of them. These cars were so big and the line was so long that my mind immediately rejected the sight, for it could not accept that such massive entities could be made to move at such a speed—and I saw a pony, a juvenile, smile and wave a hoof at me from behind the window as she and the box hurtled by. I could only, sitting on the grass, use one hoof to wave back and the other to hold my jaw closed to keep in the drool.
When her face disappeared, I saw, hovering in the air, the black cloud that had engulfed me earlier. It did not follow the cars as they moved past but rather billowed and thinned where it had been vented, spouted forth by the first carriage which I could see continuing to leave its long trail far to the right as it rushed away.
I sat in my stupor for three or five minutes until the last car could be seen. The rumbling waned until it disappeared into the air, relinquishing the earth back to the quiet chirping of the birds.
Only then did I allow my amazement cede to my rationality. There must have been fifty, eighty boxes, each so massive that to move them at that speed it would take . . . I didn’t know what. I saw the cloud begin to disperse, and then I smacked my lips, trying to rid myself of that foul—yet slightly familiar—taste.
I knew that earthquakes could carve gorges; I knew that hurricanes could empty lakes; I knew that tornadoes could uproot trees, and I knew that lightning could split them in two. But I did not know what force of nature could cause something that massive, full of so many creatures, to hurdle down the plains so quickly, so inexorably, and so assuredly. Though I knew of no one who claimed to have the ability to manipulate such power, I had to conclude that it was magic. But, even so, such magic raised more questions than it did answers: What spell was it? Who had created it? Who had cast it? And who—what was that smell?
I moved my tongue across the roof of my mouth, trying to recall the smell to me. It was an old smell, not one that I had smelled often, but one that I knew and recognized. It made the nose wrinkle and the face cringe; it made the eyes water and the throat burn. It was an organic smell, but one that irritated, and it was—sulfur! Yes, it was the dioxides of sulfur and carbon!
There were only two sources that I knew of that gave off those smells, both of which associated with tremendous amounts of power. That was a volcano, when the wind carried the smell of the contents of their eruptions across the ocean, across the grass, to our homes, and the other . . . the other was—coal.
That is what it was. The burning of coal released energy, and—somehow—the ponies used that energy to move this thing.
They had harnessed the power of the volcano to move this mass that would have otherwise taken up its space lying in the littered earth, indolently waiting for someone to stub his toe on it. The ability of this species had not ceased to amaze me. The machine took in fuel and expelled carbon dioxide as a waste product—just like anything else that respired. They had turned that piece of metal into a living, moving, breathing creature.
“Brother Commander,” I heard my brother in squabbles shrill from a mile or so off, “are you alright?”
I laughed. “You should not be alarmed,” I responded, “for something wonderful is heading your way.”