//------------------------------// // 7. Topsides On The Ship Of The World // Story: Adrift Off Fiddler's Green: The Final Conversion Bureau Story // by Chatoyance //------------------------------// Adrift Off Fiddler's Green A C o n v e r s i o n B u r e a u S t o r y By Chatoyance 7. Topsides On The Ship Of The World Peony Garden focused on sewing her husband's kelp-leatherette vest. He had been roughhousing with the fillies near the big blackberry bush by the well in the rear of the plantation house. Somehow he had snagged his vest and torn the back of it. Diamond Dogs as a rule were very sentimental about their clothing and accoutrements, however old or shabby they might become. Diamond Dogs were very sentimental in general, about a lot of things. Most ponies never saw just how sweet they really were, underneath the apparent fierceness on the surface. Peony was exceptionally dextrous with her teeth and hooves (and wings!), and she was rightfully proud of her sewing skills. She was using both raised and detatched buttonhole stitches to create scallops and embroidered gemstone patterns to cover where the old, beloved vest had been ripped. There was no way to repair the garment such that the work would be invisible, so Peony had decided to create reinforcing decorations over the damage. Tumblebumble's vest already had many such bits of work upon it. It was a joke between them that one day it would be a vest not of kelp leather, but entirely of her embroidery. It was already edging into Ship Of Theseus territory as it was, but Tumble did not mind. Indeed, the more work she put into his old vest, the more he loved it and prized it as his single best possession. Peony felt a familiar special thrill go through her. It was something she did not often talk about. She was doing women's work. It was something no native Equestrian would ever feel, or even comprehend. When she had lived as a human, on earth, she had been 'Oliver Sachs', trapped in the body of a young boy, she had learned at an early age that admitting her true identity was social suicide and a ticket to pain. Her mother, Ophelia, had tried to shield and comfort her, but as a member of the Good Families, the three hundred or so richest elite that essentially owned the planet, the usual options for a person with her condition were considered... improper. Earth had been a planet ruled by patriarchy and sexism, and in that culture the divisions between gender and activity were often sharply drawn. In the flesh of a boy, Peony's interests and inclinations were nothing less than abomination. But her mother, at home, in private, had taught her incorrectly-bodied daughter basic skills that thrilled her not only because of her very real interest... but also because they were forbidden to her. During the incident of escaping the Human Masada and eventually being restored to life from stone, Peony had nearly been lost. Afraid to admit her inner truth even to Celestia, she had nearly been an irrecoverable casualty of the nightmare that had fatally injured most of the Everfree Six. She had felt such terror at being fully revealed that she had almost chosen annihilation rather than Conversion to save her life. But she had been shown acceptance and love beyond what was possible on earth, and in the end, had chosen to live. For more than ninety years, she had been beyond happy as a pink pegasus mare. But the echo of her deep childhood imprinting still sounded within her newfoal mind, and even now, with the earth and human culture so far removed, ancient attitudes still stirred within her. They were not bad, these faint echoes. Where an ordinary, native mare - or stallion - might perform a task like embroidery with no more thought than to the labor itself, Peony found within such things validation of her very identity. The warm, sweet feeling made her work pleasant in a way that only a newfoal like herself would understand, and made boring work into an almost divine pleasure. With every stitch, she sewed her own self together, reinforcing her inner truth, which in the end, had become her outer truth as well. "How Vest? Vest survive nightmare encounter? Or vest die sad death of blackberry doom?" Tumble leaned over Peony and gently kissed her poll. "All done!" Peony smiled, wide as the sky, and then bent her head and nipped off the thread she had pulled tight under a pressing hoof. She carefully snagged the needle the thread was attached to by allowing the tip to barely penetrate the inner curve of her hoof. Her inner hoof wall had hundreds of tiny pits were countless needles had been trapped in exactly the same way. Her farrier thought it was funny, when she had her hooves trimmed. 'So many little holes! You must sew all the time!' She didn't, of course, it just added up. Peony shook the needle free into the little tray in her sewing kit, and ran her hooves over the back of Tumble's vest. "I couldn't hide the tear, where I fixed it, so I did a pretty pattern. See? Gemstones and crescents and little leaves too!" She had done the embroidery in the same dark color as the material, the result was a bas-relief effect that could be seen in the light as she smoothed the vest. "Vest better than before! Must fall down more so that vest can achieve vest apotheosis!" Tumble, like most Diamond Dogs, was not a dumb beast as many ponies imagined. He was far more educated than the majority of Dogs, though. Diamond Dogs had not been one of princess Celestia's rescues. They were refugees that had forged their own way into Equestria hundreds of years ago, escaping the destruction of their home cosmos. Their initial interactions had not gone particularly well - indeed, some had been disastrous - and as a species they had withdrawn to avoid further trouble. Isolated, they kept to their own culture, and mostly did not socialize with the rest of Equestria. Because of the way Diamond Dog brains worked, their speech was unusual by pony standards, though efficient by their own. Many Dogs found ponies long-winded and officious. But over the decades, partly thanks to the arrival of the newfoals, more and more Diamond Dogs had been integrated into pony civilization. Peony had first met Tumblebumble in the Human Masada where he had been a servant in her home. She had fallen in love with him even then, but had not dared to express it. After her adventure, and her Conversion, she had tracked him down across the length of Equestria, and married him. "TUMBLE! TUMBLE! TUMBLE!" Clover was kicking her legs up like a gamboling goat, springing about the room. "TUMBLE! TUMBLE! TUMBLE!" She had followed her adopted uncle into the plantation house. For the past few days, the filly foal had been following the poor Dog everywhere, nearly all the time. "What need, little pony Clover?" Tumble picked up his vest in his large paws and carefully slipped it on. "TUMBLE! TUMBLE! TUMBLE!" Clover was easily excitable at the best of times. "What is it dear?" Peony was putting the needle she had dropped in the tray into a more secure spot. She used her teeth to carefully stick it into her tomato-shaped pin cushion. Clover stared at her Aunt Peony with wide eyes. "Jinx is playing with bunnies! Only th' bunnies aren't there!" Peony laughed. "The bunnies... aren't there?" Tumble straightened his vest, and flexed his huge torso. The vest still fit comfortably, despite being positively armored over in embroidery. "Is game. Pretend bunny. Tumble used to have pretend ruby on first collar. Nothing outshine pretend ruby!" "NO! NO! NO!" Clover had the particular agitation of the small when confounded by something they could not understand, compounded by adults who failed to have all the answers always. She stomped her hoof. "It's not a game! It's REAL not-there bunnies! And Jinx is playing with them and I don't know what they are because I tried to pet one and my hoof just went through it, so I tried to nuzzle it and I couldn't 'cause nothing was there only it was there and I don't know what! NOW DO SOMETHING!" Tumble and Peony gawked at the firm-set muzzle of the smallest Acres filly. For such a young pony, she was surprisingly intimidating. "What do you want us to do?" Peony gestured for Clover to come over for a hug, but she was having none of that. Apparently not-bunnies were something unsolved by hugs. "I don't know! You're the adults! Do adult stuff!" Adults mostly got in the way, except at dinner and when the bed got wet. And breakfast. And lunch. Or when anything weird happened. Or if you had a nightmare. Or when you wanted ice cream or a toy. Or your school saddlebags got busted falling out of the tree you weren't supposed to climb. And the boo-boo from falling out of the tree that you weren't supposed to climb. Clover felt sidetracked. "Do something about things!" "Want Tumble come look?" Clover shifted from hoof to hoof, impatient. "Want both of you to come look. Now!" Clover moved toward the door, still fussing. "Here, I'll come too. I could stand to stretch my legs anyway." Peony carefully moved the last of her sewing materials to the side, and clambered off of the couch. "Unmmm... been sitting too long." She stretched a hind leg out and flexed her hock. "That's better." "COME ONNN!" Clover had the front door open, letting all of the hot air in. "Clover, we're coming, but don't leave the door open, remember?" "COME! COME! COME!" Clover bounced on her hooves, in the open doorway. The issues of domestic thermal regulation mattered little in the face of not-bunnies. "We see what make little pony upset. Parental figure defined by active demonstration of caring responsibility even when is great disparity between apparent and real necessity." Tumble waited politely for Peony to move toward the door, and followed after her. "What?" Clover cocked her head. "Uncle and aunt come. We come see bunny." Clover nodded. "Then HURRY!" They found Jinx in the large back yard, behind the plantation house. She was trotting in a wide circle around the well. At first, she appeared to be alone, reacting only to her own imagination. But there was too much dust, dust that moved and bounced, rather than swirled or drifted in the breeze. Dust that followed and sometimes ran ahead of her. It wasn't dust. They - for there were many - were translucent like small puffs of dust, but they were not dust. Or cloud. Or anything Tumble or Peony had ever seen before. Bunnies, white, fuzzy bunnies, dozens and dozens of them, ran beside, behind, around and ahead of Jinx in her circular orbit of the well. They leaped and hopped and bounced and twirled. They seemed to know choreographic moves, which they delighted in performing as they ran. They looked like they were made of the clearest glass, or water, or heat shimmers in the air, but they were there, only they weren't there, and it was very easy to understand little Clover's fussing about. "Well, isn't that something!" Peony had never seen bunnies that were not really there before. It was clear they weren't solid, they seemed to have no issue running right through Jinx's legs. Occasionally, one would try to jump onto her back as she trotted, for a ride, only to fall through her torso back down to the ground. Sometimes they fell through the ground too, and presumably found a way back up topside again because the numbers remained constant. "Tumble is severely ontologically confused now." The Diamond Dog scratched his head with a massive paw. "Dog now forced to confront philosophical conflict between being and not-being in non-abstract manner. Much prefer simple game of fetch or nice bowl of food instead." "JINX!" Peony had suddenly realized that all the hairs along her withers right up to her poll were standing up. "Get away from those..." Peony blinked. "...um... not... bunnies! I don't think playing with them is a good idea!" Jinx stopped and the not-bunnies stopped with her, eventually. A few failed to notice the halt and ran on for a bit, then sheepishly returned to the group. "Hello Aunt Peony. Hello Uncle Tumble. Look! They have come back!" "Come back? Who... who has come back... what?" Peony shook her head. "Nevermind! Just get away from whatever those... aren't." Something about the not-really-there bunnies felt very upsetting to her. Something wasn't right, something she couldn't understand, and she felt a very rare feeling within Equestria. Fear. She was feeling... fear. She hadn't felt it in decades, and it was almost hard to recognize. No, not fear. Dread. Dread verging on terror. Oh, that was unusual! And unpleasant. "Let's... let's go inside, and leave... them... to their... whatever." Peony wanted the not-bunnies to not be... anywhere near her. She wanted that a lot. "Aunt. You don't understand. They live here. Or, they used to live here. They've just come back." "Tumble think Jinx should obey nice Aunt Peony now." Tumble had noticed his own hairs, quite a lot of them in fact, were standing up in solidarity with his wife's mane. "It's okay. Why are you acting so strangely? There are pictures of them all over the house!" Jinx smiled as several not-bunnies jumped through her back. They kept trying, as if they found it fun somehow. Tumble and Peony looked at each other. Neither had any idea what the older filly was referring to. "Plantain's show." Jinx observed the ongoing confusion in the face of the two adults. "Plantain's dancing bunnies came back. Partly. I don't think they are all the way here." Jinx did not notice the looks on her aunt and uncle's faces, because she was watching a translucent bunny in a top hat and a cape repeatedly swiping it's paws through her left hoof. "They can go right through stuff, and they can't make any sounds." Jinx looked up. "Maybe tomorrow they'll be able to touch things?" She seriously expected the adults to know. It had hit both Tumble and Peony at the same time, as they struggled to remember the stories about Crimson's sister and her traveling 'Happy Pony Show'. Aunt Peony now knew exactly why all the hairs along her back were standing up. The dusty photographs, all over the house. Old, old photographs, of a career that had ended long, long ago. Photographs of Plantain and her troupe, and her carefully trained, marching, dancing bunnies. Snow bunnies. There had been a terrible incident. Every single not-bunny on the lawn had been dead for more than sixty years. The one thing Frontpage had thought, when he had first seen the Tree Of Harmony, was that it did not look natural. Of course, nothing was precisely 'natural', in the earthly sense, when dealing with anything of the Equestrian cosmos. Equestria was not in any way 'natural' by terrestrial standards - Darwin had never visited Equestria, neither had Hawking or Einstein or even Copernicus for that matter. Equestria, top to bottom and through and through was a Created universe, spelled with a big capital letter 'C', the kind that connotes gods and demons and magic and myth. Certainly the two princesses were, at some level, eldritch entities - Frontpage had long ago been convinced that they were not ponies in the way that ordinary ponies were, and were likely not even properly made of flesh. They might certainly be confused with goddesses, of the ancient Greek sort, or perhaps even the very oldest sort, for they had literally made the world itself. But in making their cosmos out of Discord's absolute chaos, they had seemingly cribbed from earth in some manner, and so most of what was in Equestria bore only a faint resemblance to what a human might loosely call 'natural'. There was a sun, of sorts, in the crystal dome of the sky - that it was flat and glided across the dome was simply a fact. It looked like a sun, if a very overlarge one, and it brought light, and warmth and brightness into daily life. If not studied overlong, it could easily be accepted as ordinary. Likewise the moon and stars, which were such in name only, and the grasses and hills and forests and butterflies. Everything in Equestria was natural in seemingness only, and though all of it served the purpose of natural things, and looked roughly like natural things do, not a bit of it had come from uncaring, random natural process - every speck had been consciously, intelligently crafted. The pentagonal gateway that had grown from the roots of the Tree Of Harmony did not seem to be natural even by Equestrian standards. It had clearly grown, the way crystals do, right out of the substance of the great Tree, and somehow opened, in some direction no pony could hope to point to, into a darkness so profound that light itself seemed to vanish forever within it. The Tree Of Harmony was itself made of crystal, with thin, glassine struts for branches, and perfect, disk-shaped 'flowers' set upon them like components in a technorganic circuit board. The flowers looked like technology - the pattern within them was regular and geometric, and if studied carefully, finely ordered traceries of microscopic lines and connections could be discerned, running veinlike, through the very substance of them. Indeed, the entire Tree was built thus, and when Frontpage had been granted carefully supervised audience with the Tree in order to report upon it, he had noted how every part of it looked like some impossibly advanced organic crystalline technology - right out of a fanciful science fiction tale. This had been more than fifty years in the past, and he had speculated ever since on whether Equestrian magic was truly magic, or just sufficiently advanced technology. He had not been the least alone in that thought; it was commonplace among newfoal scientists of every kind. "Did you notice the hoofprints?" Crimson scraped at the ground with her foreleg. The soil inside the cave was curious, almost like clay, only it didn't stick to her hooves, and it wasn't messy. "The big hooves don't have frogs, and the size is singular. The hoof-boot of a princess. That's not surprising - this is all theirs. But... yeah, I noted the new tracks go straight in." Crimson studied the various parts of the glowing, pulsing tree. "Did you see the other tracks?" "Unless Luna has a pet Minotaur monster with a false deer leg, Discord escorted her. We're on the right trail." "I cannot say I am looking forward to the next part." The strange, pentagonal door made of crystal roots opened into what looked like the very definition of Nothing. Crimson shuddered. "D'ya want to go back?" "The way we came?" "There's only one path in or out." Crimson let her head droop and pawed at the ground. She snorted, softly, then raised her head. "A door is a door, I suppose. It must lead somewhere, despite appearances." "Yeah, but we're dealing with arcane Macaron here. This is some gris-gris chocolate we've gotten into." Frontpage pulled his canteen out of his saddlebags and held it by the strap. "Thirsty?" Frontpage carefully, slowly, approached the impossible door. "For knowledge, yeah." "Don't hold on too tightly... just in case." Frontpage looked back and nodded impressed approval. The mare was smart. She was ahead of him at every step. "My bite will be loose, and my hooves ready to run, I promise you." The blackness was astonishing. It was the blackest black that Frontpage had ever witnessed. He felt something almost like L’appel du vide staring into it. He almost chuckled at the thought that had appeared in his head... that it was undoubtedly staring right back. Frontpage made sure he had a loose, easy mouth-grip on the very end of the loop of canteen strap. He began to swing the canteen to and fro, his head turned to the side. The canteen swung closer and closer to the threshold of the crystal-root doorway. He carefully stepped forward making sure no part of his muzzle passed the edge of the doorframe. "Be careful!" Crimson had nightmare thoughts of earthly black-holes and air locks and other science-fiction sources of being sucked into oblivion. "Uhn-huhn..." Frontpage gave the canteen a very wide swing. Half of the canteen vanished then reappeared as it finished its arc through the black. He repeated the action again several times, to make sure. He backed away, and set the canteen down to study it. Crimson joined him. "It doesn't appear damaged." She sniffed the canteen, then gave the part that had entered the void a lick. "It isn't cold or anything." Her ears drooped. "Oh, that was silly of me. Considering." Frontpage nodded. "Next time you need to check temperature, hover your frog. It's surprisingly sensitive to heat and cold. If that's okay, try your pastern, right on the top part. If that's okay, use the bottom of your jaw, and then a lip if you are sure." "That... that is a very organized approach, Frontpage!" Frontpage grinned. "I was taught that by a native doctor. I'll leave you to imagine why I needed one." Crimson smiled back. "Well... we don't want to go back - probably can't, not safely, not at the moment anyway. And by the way, I agree with you. The Everfree is getting worse. I've only visited it once before, and that by direct teleport - and I'm completely convinced it's worse. We can't stay here indefinitely - I've been told that you can't trust anything in the Everfree, not the grass, not even the water. Only one direction left, I'm afraid." Frontpage noted his own ears. "I don't mind admitting that I am, actually, afraid." "Direct teleport?" Crimson was not over-eager to jump through a door of infinite blackness, however undamaging it was to helpless canteens. Frontpage blinked. "Uh... yeah. Got brought here by Celestia herself, long time back. "The Tree Of Harmony: We Visit Equestria's Oldest Spot! A Querier Exclusive! - I stood right over there..." Frontpage nodded towards the front of the cave where they had entered "... for most of it. I was allowed a peek up close, but every second of it I was being watched by her majesty. I felt as if I breathed wrong, the Wrath Of Equestria would fall on me. I think the only reason she allowed it was to stop crazy newfoals from... doing what we're doing now." "Was the doorway there, back then?" "No. The door's new." Frontpage looked over the roots. "The rumor is that the tree can grow things on its own, as needed. Whatever 'needed' means. Whatever any of this means." He took a step forward. "I'll go first, and then come back. If I can. If I don't, within a reasonable time, well... I'd suggest you wait. Luna and Discord went in here, it's likely they'll come back out. Eventually. In the mean time..." Frontpage shook off his saddlebags, and let them drop to the ground. "...you'll have double rations to survive on." "Frontpage!" He smiled as he approached the threshold of the doorway. Framed by crystal roots, cloaked by absolute darkness, and devoid of any backside, it was an impossible thing in a world of wonders. Anything could happen. "I want you should know something important, just in case." "Yes?" "You've got a swirling magnificent pair of flanks." Frontpage began a short run, and threw himself across the threshold.