Conversation 45: Mary
Industrial desert.
Technically, an industrial steppe, but with the way this one fared, it might as well be a desert.
It probably wouldn’t look quite so alien if it wasn’t so dark, but in daylight, I remember this place looking magnitudes uglier. Moonlight would be more picturesque, but the Moon had yet to rise. A vast plain, peppered with concrete roads covered by ever-present bleak dust and gleaming railways. Tiny utilitarian buildings and gigantic hangars, surrounded by many kilometers of barbed wire fence woven through ugly concrete posts. Skeletal steel frames sticking far up into the sky. Thick white smoke trails shining brightly in the spotlights.
A tower.
Two towers, one of them a white, narrow cone, like a horn standing on the wider end. A pyramid to human ambition. Such a shame this one didn’t work.
“I was starting to worry something happened, Luna. I expected you two days ago.” I called out into the night and turned around.
Theory confirmed: If I concentrate on a specific memory while falling asleep, Luna’s intervention results in a dream featuring the time and place of said memory. As usual, the bloody golden eye treats it as a mind-altering effect and stops the clock in an attempt to shut her out, while making the dream lucid. I’ve got no control over it, but I did get to pick the memory to start with.
Let’s hope the next step of the plan works as well, because I’m not entirely sure it’s supposed to.
“You have created quite a conundrum for me, Mary Clarissa,” Luna answered, stepping softly across the sandy ground. Her expression was uncharacteristically blank and controlled. “I must admit it has kept me busy beyond all expectations. Is this horrible fence here to keep you from destroying yet another tower?” she asked, carefully peeking in between the strings of barbed wire.
“It’s not a tower,” I replied. “Well, rather, that ugly gray thing is technically called a launch tower. But it moves, so I’m not sure it really qualifies. The white one is just a rocket.”
Luna pulled her head out of the fence and turned to look at me with a raised eyebrow. “Are you usually this manipulative with your friends?” she asked. “Maximum Plank admitted you told him to use exact words, but I find it difficult to believe you did not expect me to notice.”
“I’ll admit it was an indirect invitation to talk,” I said. Because that’s exactly what it was. “I told him to say ‘to go boldly where none have gone before’ because I was sure it would catch your attention.”
Technically, I could have gone to her directly, Luna left standing orders to admit me whenever I wish to talk. But then, I wouldn’t be able to illustrate my point.
“That was malicious of you,” Luna replied. Did I actually hear her voice wavering? “Why do you tempt me so? You heard from him first, you know what transpired in the Crystal Empire. Surely you understand why this is a secret. This research cannot be allowed.”
“Max told me his story,” I replied. “I would hear yours as well, if you’re up to telling it.”
According to Max, their uranium refining process was as simple as dissolving pitchblende in hydrochloric acid and inducing forced growth of a monocrystal of uranium dioxide with magic techniques very similar to the ones they use to grow their quartz buildings. The resulting crystal would be high purity uranium-235, because uranium-238 is far less magic-reactive. Do it twice and you get weapons grade enrichment, because every subsequent stage gets easier.
The process can have numerous industrial applications, so eventually, someone would try it on uranium again, just to see what happens, and a criticality accident of the kind that killed Merry Cutie would eventually follow. Uranium is used in ceramic glazes, and ponies love bright colors. The reasons to keep tight control over this branch of earth pony magic are obvious.
But the reason Sombra had to put the entire population to work wasn’t the refining process itself – a handful of specialists would be enough. It was the fact that ponies, accustomed to “farming” minerals in controlled conditions, were unprepared for actual mining on that kind of scale. Which they had to do, because uranium-238 prevents magical growth of uranium ores. Controlling known deposits would have been enough to prevent anyone else from making a bomb.
Something is missing.
“So that you can condemn our decisions?” Luna scoffed. “I think not. What we did was a horrible thing, there’s no denying that. More horrible still, for we must keep doing it.”
“The only one who can condemn anything here would be you,” I pointed out. “I am a nobody from nowhere. There’s no reason my opinion should matter, unless you decide it does. Never mind that I don’t actually have one.”
“Truly?” she asked, squinting at me.
I shrugged. “You haven’t told me your story.”
Luna sighed, and turned away from me to look at the rocket again. “What sort of journey is this vessel for?”
“Thirty metric tons to Lunar orbit,” I told her.
She chuckled. “What’s that in stone?”
What, firkin wasn’t obscure enough for you? “Five thousand, give or take.”
“This immense tower, to send a mere five thousand stone to orbit your moon?…” Luna asked, scrunching her face. “Surely you jest.”
“Almost all of it is fuel, and most of that gets expended even before the rocket exits the atmosphere,” I explained. “Our moon is the size of your entire Earth and is something like a thousand times further away. That’s the cost of living on a non-magical planet.”
She sighed again. It was a tense pause.
“Have you ever seen ponies go to war, Mary?” she asked.
“Just a few days ago.” Did she mean to impress me? It’s not working.
Luna laughed mirthlessly. “No, that was no war… The ponies of the Crystal Empire have always been a shining example of what a pony should be. Wise, peaceful, curious. Celebrating love and fellowship. Accepting. Too bad that most of the continent could not follow their example without us looking over their shoulders. It was a tumultuous time. I have had historians approach me since my return, and chose to turn their inquiries away. Far better that ponies remember their heroes, but keep the memory of their monsters consigned to obscurity.”
Their heroes. It’s almost like she doesn’t count herself among ponies. And yet, alicorns are what ponies can become, right?
“With the Crystal Empire gone, would anyone even bother making another bomb, even if they had the knowledge?” I wondered. “It’s a stupidly expensive way to get rid of your fellow pony, never mind the massive overkill. One who can put the entire available adult population to work in mines would get better results putting them all in armor. It’s not exactly work easy to conceal, either.”
“We only realized what was going on when we met the stallion himself,” Luna sighed. “It is counterintuitive, is it not? Yet there was a method to that madness. ‘King’ Sombra did not merely seek a bigger bite of Equestria, but to conquer the world entire. He was expecting us to raise the host of all our vassals and allies, and challenge him on an open field come spring. We would never even reach the gates. He would have wiped out the entire host in but an instant, and terrified, all the kingdoms of Equestria would bow before him. A solid plan, undone but by a happenstance and my sister’s stubbornness.”
She shivered. “I still remember it like it was yesterday. It… it might be ancient history for everypony, even for Celestia. For me, scant years have elapsed. I still remember how the burns used to itch. Had we a host with us, had we but a single pony, she would have tried to shield them too, and that would have been our end. As it is, we narrowly escaped igniting the very air itself. If there is even a slight chance that another such weapon—”
“Wait, what?” I interrupted. “Igniting air? Fission explosions don’t do that.”
Luna narrowed her eyes at me. “Surely you are educated enough in these arts to know that such a scenario is inevitable, given a high enough temperature.”
“I even know that fission is insufficient for the purpose,” I replied. I wonder how did she even suspect fusion was possible, given that the sun here is definitely not actually a star. Max never even mentioned the idea. “Such concerns are often floated, but I haven’t even heard of a world where they were tested and came out correct, it’s fairly universal physics.”
Luna raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”
“Energy losses through radiation always overtake the gain from reaction,” I stated. “Sustained pressure is required for sustained fusion, temperature isn’t enough. Have you checked with a specialist? Because I’m not anywhere as much of a polymath as I would like to be.”
That probably sounded condescending to her. “Where would thee have us find one, human?” Luna snapped, her beautiful face distorted by fury. “We spent moons trying to figure out what happened and how was it done, piecing together reports and letters collected from all across the realm! If Sombra didn’t choose to gloat and explain, we wouldn’t even know where to start our inquiries! And once we understood it, the mere chance that this was a possibility was enough! We face enough threats of extinction, we shall not permit ponies to increase their number!”
You don’t shout at princesses even when they deserve it. You don’t let them shout at you, either. I wonder, when was the last time anyone but Celestia seriously contradicted you, Luna? Now that we have our missing piece, it’s time to offer her a piece of my mind. Careful, not too much.
“Well, tell you what, your highness,” I hissed, leaning into her face. “Here’s my opinion, now that I actually have one. Let us assume, for a moment, that even one bomb might result in an atmospheric fire. Every adult crystal pony contributed to its construction. Hundreds have knowledge that can be used to do it. You would have to shut them all out, again, and that is the one thing Cadance will never let you do.”
“We won’t have to. Young Cadance sees reason and will keep the secret, as is her duty as a Princess of Equestria!” Luna spat back. “It’s nothing we haven’t done before!”
“Sure,” I agreed. “But even while the Crystal Empire was taking a time-out, ponies have been marching on, and now they’re back at the gates of whatever happens next. The truth is there, it just exists. Nothing you do will permanently change the laws of physics. How many fairytales do you remember where a truth hinted at in the beginning never comes back to bite the heroes at the end, Luna?”
“So what would you have us do, then?” she hissed. “Lie down and accept our fate?!”
“I would see to it that ponies spread through the stars, so that no matter what happens, no fate can befall all of them,” I said, raising a finger to punctuate. “I would endorse any research to further this goal and every madness that has a chance to get them there. Especially if I actually believed fusion fires are possible, because if they are, a stray particle might trigger one.”
“It’s easy for you to say that now. Going to the stars was barely a glimmer of an idea at the time!” Luna exclaimed.
I wonder why it was one at all. Hell, I’m still not sure why do the modern ponies have any spaceflight aspirations, they should be expecting to live within a solid crystal sphere.
“You don’t live at the time,” I declared. “You live now. It took me years to recognize how important that is.”
“Even so!” Luna spat back. “This is far too much power to put into the hooves of one pony, and no matter how many are involved in the construction of these foul things, it is one hoof that triggers them, one voice that gives the order.”
“And this is exactly an objection I originally expected you to make,” I grinned, taking a step back. “I have the perfect argument against it, just so you know.”
“Say your piece, then, Mary, don’t play with me, for I have no stomach for it,” Luna frowned. “There is no denying that you have unique insights, but that does not mean you get to be patronizing.”
“Let me tell you a story, then,” I said, circling around her to stand between her and the barbed wire fence. Keep the rocket in her field of view.
Luna smiled at me faintly, trailing me with her eyes. I know she likes when I tell her stories. I’m sure that if I didn’t have a huge supply, she would not be anywhere as eager to check on me so often.
“Far, far away,” I began, “there is a tree of worlds, where humans had finally, through no small amount of effort, put an end to all wars and violence between themselves. They swore off weapons and went to the stars, expecting that any species smart enough to do so too will greet them in peace.”
“Something tells me there’s a catch,” Luna frowned thoughtfully. “All your stories about humans seem to come with one.”
“Indeed,” I smirked. “There was a catch, for the first species they encountered, after colonizing the nearby stars, was the kzinti. Sort of like a tiger. Way taller than me, way heavier, all muscle and teeth and claws, hunts sapients for sport and calls them food, culture bent on honor and glory and war.”
“A dead ringer for some of the griffon tribes of old,” Luna commented. “We were fortunate that few espoused such views. The greedy ones are far more reasonable.”
“Kzinti also had telepaths, superior starships, and weapons galore,” I added. “And there were a lot more of them than humans.”
“I thought you said most human worlds have no magic to them,” Luna said.
“Inborn psychic abilities are somewhat more common than outright magic,” I explained. “Especially in worlds where humans go to the stars, for some reason… So those kzinti telepaths, they kept insisting that humans had no weapons, and barely even understood the concept anymore. And yet, the first encounter of a kzinti warship with a peaceful human colony ship ended with the destruction of the warship.”
Luna blinked in surprise. “Oh?”
“They did occupy one colony,” I admitted. “But once they got to Earth, the kzinti fleets were beaten back. And humans still did not have weapons. They even managed to strike back. Over the decades, four invasions were stopped. By the time the fifth invasion was ready, a more peaceful and powerful neighboring species took notice, and humans got the chance to turn the tables for good. There is one adage that emerged from the first Man-Kzin war, well remembered, and quoted even in stories far away from there. They call it the Kzinti Lesson.”
And now, the trick I was setting up ever since I went to sleep. The golden eye takes objection to Luna interfering in my dreams, and whatever power I might have had over them as a lucid dreamer is unavailable. But in Library terms, a lucid dream is a subsidiary story, and like every story, I can leave it. What I need to do is to stop on the threshold, so that I don’t wake up, but only just. With luck, this should force the eye to permit the dream time to proceed.
I clicked my heels three times.
There's no place like home...
There's no place like home...
There's no place stop here.
Behind my back I heard the hissing sounds and the tail end of the countdown, and involuntarily, my lips curled into a grin. It worked. I only have a few seconds until the eye catches up, but to show what I had to show, I only need about eighteen.
I knew the sequence of what happened next exactly, even though I couldn’t see it again, because I stood with my back to the rocket, intently watching for Luna’s reaction. The roar of the engines should have been deafening, but somehow, my voice carried clear over it anyway, and while Luna’s wide open eyes tracked the rocket, her ears pointed directly at me.
“A beam of light powerful enough to send a message to another star burns things to a crisp up close. A reaction’s drive efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive. Vehicles of peaceful exploration are powerful machines, easily repurposed. That was the Kzinti Lesson. Whether you burn kerosene or uranium to fuel your engines makes no difference at all.”
One of the thirty first stage engines exploded, and, having just cleared the tower, the rocket dipped to the side. The automatic engine balancing system tried to compensate and turned off several engines opposite it, but that still didn’t save the launch, as more and more engines went out.
“To go where none have gone before requires tremendous power, and power comes with no color. If you believe that none should have such power, you don’t get to go anywhere.”
The expression on Luna’s face was best described as that of a football fan who just saw her team’s goalkeeper fail to save a penalty shot. She opened her mouth for a pained yell, but I never heard it, as over two and a half thousand tons of rocket, kerosene and liquid oxygen crashed into the launchpad and exploded.
It was the shockwave that knocked me awake for good.
✶ ✶ ✶
I woke up alone in an empty train car, with lights dimmed to an almost total darkness. Right, we were going back to Ponyville.
Step one, tentative success. Even if I screw this story up into complete nonsense along the way, I can at least expect that after I go home, one day, eventually, ponies will go interplanetary, so no matter what kind of monster the universe throws at them, this will not be the end. Of course, because the Library deduplication rule says that every two given stories occur in the same world, unless this results in a logical contradiction, they’re just as likely to stumble into the Imperium of Man out there as they are to meet the United Federation of Planets. Or space ponies. Or nobody. But more colonies means more options regardless.
It’s lucky that Luna was already predisposed to such a course, and convincing her that it’s permissible was the limit of what I needed to do. But why is she predisposed to it? Lore seems to imply that the reason for her downfall was ‘jealousy.’ But there’s no way in hell she rebelled against her sister just because ponies didn’t love her enough. First chance she got, she put in an order for a selective visibility dress with Rarity, I was there. I’m pretty sure that if you put Luna on a pedestal, she’ll fall apart and run away after ten minutes.
Just what kind of history did this Equestria even have? It’s all smoke, mirrors and anachronisms, mangled and edited. Where did that Tirek come from? What else do they have in their sealed evil in a can collection?
Somewhere behind my back, a muffled sound of hooves on the carpet betrayed a pony trying to creep towards the sleeping car.
Moondancer went to sleep earlier. The royal guards found reasons to be in some other car even before I took the seat. It seems that over my short time in the Crystal Empire I have acquired a reputation not unlike Zecora’s, at least in some circles, so around me, they behave with excessive caution. Almost all of the Mane Six passed through before I fell asleep, which only leaves…
“Twilight, you don’t have to creep through a moving train,” I declared.
“I was sure you’d be asleep,” she smiled sheepishly, peeking over my shoulder. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
“Evil never sleeps,” I tossed back, “for there’s no rest for the wicked.”
“Did you mean to say you’re evil?” she wondered, sitting opposite me. “Or is it just another linguistic collision like the word ‘empire?’”
“It’s a figure of speech,” I explained. “Two, actually. Which I’ve misused for the sake of a bad, unfunny joke.”
Twilight chuckled. “It does sound a little funny. But I can’t quite place why.”
I lifted an eyebrow at her. “Don’t you have any proverbs about eternal vigilance against evil?”
“Not really,” Twilight replied, rubbing her chin with a hoof. Which looks funny when, strictly speaking, what ponies have can’t be called a chin. “Not paranoid, you said. We don’t really assume this sort of thing about ponies, at least, we try not to.”
“Well, humans do, at least, in my world,” I explained. “Kind of cultural. Which is why they say that evil never sleeps. If you relax,” I added, making the air quotes, “that’s the moment the abstract ‘evil’ will eat you.”
“But why would there be no rest for the wicked?” Twilight wondered. “I don’t see how these could be connected.”
“That’s completely unrelated,” I smirked. “It’s a separate quote from religious writing, part of a declaration of divine punishment. ‘People who do evil will have no peace.’ It gets taken out of context all the time. But taken together, don’t you think these two sayings match very well?”
Twilight stared at me in surprise. “But that makes it a loop! So people do evil, and through punishment they have no peace, so they never sleep, so they become cranky, and more evil, and more dangerous, presumably, so what’s the point of punishing them like that in the first place?! What kind of divinities do you humans even believe in?!”
“That’s the joke?” I shrugged. “Morbid absurdity of life is kind of a popular idea back home. I just used to meet people at all times of day, and often, out of sequence, so after I got tired of answering that no, I do sleep, sometimes, I started brushing them off with a joke.”
“But if you sleep, sometimes,” Twilight smiled, “that’s proof you’re not evil by that definition.”
“Considering that the universe seems to conspire to demonstrate how ethically ambiguous everything I do is?” I wondered. “I’m not sure it matters anymore whether I’m evil or not.”
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"Adam and No Eve" was about some sort of runaway chain fusion reaction, although I have some vague memory of it being something impossible like iron.
I'm curious at the logic behind the idea of showing Luna a failed launch would prompt her to allow research into dangerous technologies instead of holding her original position that it's better to suppress them all.
(though that strategy of suppressing information is highly laughable once information sharing is beyond a certain point. I'm surprised that Mary didn't use the excuse the original developers of the atomic bomb did, that you can't hide information on nuclear weapons by suppressing information because it's too obvious when the idea was put forward by one person and based on universal principles, such that if any one knows it can exist, they can work out how to make it and how it would work reasonably easily).
9063348
It’s all in this phrase, really:
“Whether you burn kerosene or uranium to fuel your engines makes no difference at all. … If you believe that none should have such power, you don’t get to go anywhere.”
Remember Conversation 8?
Mary doesn’t understand why did Luna say that, yet, but eventually, she’ll figure that out too.
9063389
Honestly I had assumed that was in reference to jumping stories on a whim; to be able to visit new places so easily, and to step outside bad situations just as easily. You can get all the benefits, and more, of space travel that way with less effort.
Luna, to me, seems like the perfect person to be a traveler like Mary and Rika. More so than Twilight Sparkle, at any rate.
ayy, did you pull that line from Isaac Arthur? People always forget being able to move at lightspeed implies tremendous power.
9065100
Which line, the Kzinti Lesson? The canonical formulation (“A reaction’s drive efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive.”) was coined by Larry Niven in Ringworld, although the actual story of the Man-Kzin wars is part of the shared universe which he himself mostly didn’t write.
Every other line here is Mary’s own idea.
Then again, they could just discover antigravity and take to the stars without the raw power of rocketry? Apparently it's only slightly harder to discover then slood, and they're certainly adorable enough to pull it off.
Mary convinces Luna that nuclear power is no more dangerous than any other method of space propulsion, and the most likely to get them extra-terrestrial colonies up and running before the next thing breaks out of Tartarus. Also she shows off just a bit. After all, she is talking to a real-life astronaut!
9067432
🎵 Now lead me to the stars,
Atomic flame ignite my heart! 🎵
9065880
Probably just bias, but I was watching Isaac's videos a few weeks back on how any ship that can casually do interstellar travel can never be considered weaponless due to the amount of energy required to accelerate a mass that quickly. Point a bit of that energy at a target instead of behind you and stuff gets vaporized.
To be fair Soviet moon rocket was somewhat extremely bad idea, they never had infrastructure advanced enough to build large enough to make a rocket a bit less complicated
9065880
I've always liked Schlock Mercenary's formulation of it:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magica really big bomb."I love Niven's works... The moment the kzinti we're mentioned I knew we were going for the com relay scene. It has been, and remains, one of my favorite sci-fi scene of all time... And posits a very relatable message about survival against all odds, even the ones we put upon ourselves.