One upon a time, in a land worlds away, there lived a people who looked on a Moon and Sun much like ours. But unlike ours, this moon and this sun heeded neither beck nor call of any who lived beneath them, no matter how great or powerful they were. So as this people grew and spread, they looked up at the Moon with wonder and awe. They tracked time by its courses, they saw in it powers both good and evil, and they dreamed ever of what it might be. As time passed, they began to dream that creatures might live on the moon, or might go there. And they envisaged creatures like themselves and creatures unlike themselves, and gods and wizards and monsters that might be there. But always for them, for those below, the moon was an unreachably distant dream.
In the fullness of time this people found ways to bring the heavens closer, at least in their sight, with tubes of glass and metal: telescopes, much like ours. And turning these upon the moon, they saw that the face that they had long seen looking down on them was made of craters and lakes. For a time, they thought of what sort of fish these lakes may have, but as their telescopes became bigger and better, they found that these lakes were dry. Further, through cleverness and perseverance, they found that the moon was airless and sterile: a silent, lifeless rock. Yet still they did wonder what it would be like to walk over that rock and see not the Moon but the Earth looking down on them.
And what they did next, I have difficulty saying, for it is not a thing that has ever been seen in our land, or had been known before in theirs. They fashioned birds of metal, that soared higher than any of flesh and feathers, but these rode on air and fans without a flap. And these took them ever higher, further up than any Pegasus or Griffon could manage, though of these kinds there were none left in that world. But as high as they went, the Moon was yet higher. They had discovered, as have we, that it was higher than the tallest of mountains piled up on itself 400 hundred times a thousand times. Though creatures without wings had taken to the air, still the moon was unreachable as ever.
Next they did something yet harder to explain. For they crafted great tubes of metal, with wings far too small to fly even in the manner of their metal birds. And the top of this tube they put a cone with some of their people in it, and in this tube they somehow made use of air and water, so that fire was thrown from the back. They sent these tubes up so high that they could not fall back to Earth without missing, and the tube fell from the cone, and the cone circled around like the Moon about Earth, or Earth about the Sun, until more fire sent the people in the cone back to Earth, landing in the sea. Many of these tubes they sent, and they proposed what not long before would have been unthinkable: to send some of their own to walk on the Moon.
First, they sent one of the cones around to moon, merely to look, to show that they could do that much. And then they made ready their tube. The Eagle, they called it, for far beyond any eagle they intended it to soar. And fire roared out the back, and tube fell from cone, and for three days they journeyed through the darkness and the light. Attached to the tip of the cone was a metal spider, large enough for two of three. So while one stayed with the ship (for thus they called it, saying that they moved through the void as a sailor might moe through the ocean), the other two went aboard this spider, and fire sent them down to the Moon. And that whole world held its breath as one far away counted how much of their magic air that made fire was left, until legs met soil. They sent images back home as though a movie as it was made, and one made a step both small and giant.
Now scarcely like their own kind they looked, for to live in the cold and the dark of that Moon they clad themselves in thick garments, with things like scuba tanks bound to them, and helmets sealed tight, with dark visors. Now, these people were much like minotaurs, but without tails, having two legs on which they walked and two with which they worked, though I had not cause to mention this before. Thus clad they looked like strange monsters, certainly to us and perhaps to them.
They rose a flag and gathered rocks and dust, then returned to their spider The spider shed its legs and returned to the cone, and the cone returned to Earth. Thus, by the strange hooves of their own they brought a piece of the heavens down to Earth, not by divine provenance, or perhaps I should say not merely by that, but by their ingenuity and their effort. Thus ever after would those people look back on that moment, and reflect on how the impossible might be made possible.
And here the tale stops, not because it ends here, as many tales written in books do, but because, in the manner of tales written in the world, this is all I know. But there does linger in my mind one more phrase, which I think is connected: “We came in peace for all mankind.”
Analysis:
This is the first story in this book whose kernel came to me in a dream, though I have attempted to make it a bit more sensible. Perhaps some readers will understand when I say that it seemed not like a dream, but like I was seeing something that really happened, albeit not to our world, though I suspect most readers will simply find this notion strange and ridiculous.
It is undeniable that a few things in this story are simply wrong, at least for our world. It has been hypothesized that there are other worlds, either magic [“Through the Looking Glass: Celestia and the Magic Mirror”, by Merry Carrol, who is a bit more definite on it than I would prefer], or simply elsewhere in space. Our moon does, in fact, have an atmosphere, though a thin on. A pony could breath on the Moon, though for most non-Pegasi it would be labored breathing, as the air there is approximately equivalent to that high in the atmosphere.
The Mare in the Moon legend is no guarantee of a breathable Lunar surface. If nothing else, Nightmare Moon may be in a sort of stasis that does not require air. Rather, that the moon has an atmosphere can be determined by careful observation of stars near the moon. When they pass within a certain distance of the moon, they are distorted. This is akin to how stars “twinkle” due to the passage of light through Earth's atmosphere. I will not go into the rather technical details of how we know it is breathable but thin. The interested reader may check for journal publications at their local library, particularly “On the Atmosphere of the Moon,” Airy Bubble, Equestria Astronomical Society Journal, vol 413, no. 3.
The reader may be aware that the air above Earth does eventually become unbreathable, setting an effective limit to flight. Actually, most birds are limited to a far lower height than this would necessitate. Pegasi and Griffons fly partially by magic, and thus can ascend to airs that would otherwise be too thin to sustain flight, though they are breathable. Balloons do not fair any better than the average bird, and in fact fare worse, since they require the air inside the balloon to be less dense than the air outside in order to rise. Dragons are assumed to have similar height limits to Pegasi and Griffons, but they are so poorly studied that as yet, no one is sure.
A strong enough flier may, for instance, carry an air tank with them and so ascend higher, but they soon find that even Pegasus flight cannot carry them indefinitely higher: the air will simply not sustain their flight, to say nothing of the difficulties of carrying an air tank. It is possible to briefly surpass this limit by building up momentum on an upward flight towards the break point, perhaps aided by others giving you a push. Even though one cannot fly further up by any amount of effort, if they are already moving upward, their inertia will carry them past this point. I have tried this technique myself. If you can get high enough, the pull of the Earth is less, and so it takes some time to fall back down unless one makes a conscious effort. If you can keep your wits about you, you can see the curve of the Earth as it falls away, a truly magnificent site. I believe this may be the heights the devices in the earlier part of the above story reached.
I should caution my Pegasus readers that this should NEVER be attempted alone. If your air runs out or malfunctions or if, like I once did, you attempt it without an air tank to reduce the weight and count on holding your breath, you are likely to lose consciousness. Without the air tank, this tends to happen well before you actually reach the powered flight height limit (trust me on this). It is also possible to go into shock from the odd changes and extreme temperatures up there. Interestingly, there is a point past which it becomes hotter as you go higher. This had been hypothesized, but recent high-altitude runs have successfully reached the edge of this zone. I have managed this myself. In fact, as of the time of writing I hold the 3rd highest recorded flight on record. The appropriately named High Flyer is number 2, while Cloud Brick holds the world record. Number 4 is held by Glenda Griffon, if the reader is curious.
But even with this method, one cannot reach heights so great that one misses on falling back towards Earth and so enters an orbit like that of the moon. It is fairly certain, from Fig Newton's Theory of Gravitation, that such orbits are possible, assuming there is a point where there is no air (and there seems to be), but we have yet to achieve this definitively. Hurling a small object on a high flight should not be able to achieve this, mathematically speaking, but when it has been attempted, the objects were not recovered, so some fringe theories hold that it has been achieved.
The metal birds from this tale did not seem to fly any higher than the aforementioned maximum height, so they are of limited impressiveness. The strange tubes, however, could go much further. I do not know what strange magic would allow water and air to yield fire, but I can only surmise that it is some sort of alchemical reaction, since I saw no trace of unicorn magic in that world. Unicorn magic is what most ponies mean when they say “magic”, though strictly speaking unicorn magic encompasses only a part of the magic continuum. My best guess on the process is as follows: it IS possible to isolate the components of water, Hydrogen and Oxygen, by magic or electricity, and later to recombine them. Recombining them requires an additional infusion of energy, but this process, aside from its difficulty, does not produce anywhere near the sort of thrust the tubes would require. From the impression I had of water and air being involved, though, I suspect these creatures had devised some clever way of modifying this base reaction to create a higher yield. This is, however, only a guess, and one which is rather lacking at that.
The creatures themselves, bipedal and tailless, have no counterpart in Equestria, or as far as we know, anywhere on Earth. Minotaurs and some dragons are bipedal, but they have tails and at any rate are far larger at maturity than these were. Unless I miss my guess, these creatures, while shorter than an average pony, were nonetheless somewhat smaller than Celestia, on average. Since tailless creatures and bipedal creatures are known to exist, though, it is not unthinkable that a tailless biped could exist somewhere.
I suppose my reader is now thinking I am very foolish indeed, applying such scrutiny to the fancies of a dream. However, it has given me a chance to touch on alchemy and biology, which I would not otherwise have done. Besides, my personal feelings on this particular matter aside, the exercise of applying scientific examination to flights of fancy can be entertaining in its own right. Still, I would not wish to bore or distract my readers too much with such musings, so I shall end this chapter here.