Prologue: A Light Brighter Than Twelve Suns

On Getting to the Bottom of this “Equestrian” Business

A My Little Pony: Equestria Girls fanfic

By McPoodle

Prologue: A Light Brighter Than Twelve Suns

Transcript from the episode of Eyewitness to History with Truth Delver scheduled to air on April 12, 1981. It was never broadcast.

Welcome to Trinity, New Mexico. I am surrounded by hundreds of square miles of desert and scrubland, a place where Man was not meant to tread.
In 1598, when the American Southwest was still part of the Spanish Empire, a road was constructed for use by settlers and Christian missionaries, with the name of ‘El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro’—in English, ‘The Royal Road of the Interior’. It ran from Mexico City, one thousand miles [1600 km] south of where I am standing, and continued north to the lands of the Pueblo Indians, 225 miles [250 km] north from here. The road was a rugged but endurable passage for most of its route. The major bottleneck was the 120 mile [200 km] stretch that ran alongside the western curve of the Rio Grande, full of deep arroyos, canyons, and patches of quicksand. There was a shortcut that cut 30 miles [50 km] and three days off of the travel time, but that meant that travelers had to cross a blisteringly hot, dry expanse utterly devoid of any form of nourishment whatsoever. The typical journey would cost the life of at least one pack animal, if not the weakest of the humans daring the crossing. Not without reason was this expanse called ‘La Jornada del Muerto’—The Journey of Death. La Jornada was barren, mostly flat, almost uninhabited and on many sunny days, utterly windless. It was therefore the perfect spot to test the first atomic bomb. It was named Trinity by the head of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, for reasons that he declined to discuss.
By 1945, the last year of World War II, the scientists at Los Alamos, 210 miles [340 km] north of Trinity, had completed the designs of two different atomic bombs. The first one, nicknamed ‘Little Boy’, had a Uranium-235 core that was set off by firing a bullet of the same substance at it. Little Boy was capable of taking out a small town and was relatively simple to construct and detonate. The second bomb type, called ‘Fat Man’, had a Plutonium-239 core surrounded by a Uranium-238 shell. The plutonium was capable of a bigger explosion, enough to devastate a good-sized city, but it wasn’t as unstable as the U-235 core. To set it off, you needed to use an ‘implosion lens’—a set of perfectly-timed chemical explosions designed to compress the plutonium to critical density—and then hope that the explosion didn’t immediately destroy the U-238 shell, because that was necessary to reflect enough neutrons into the growing nuclear explosion to push that into a chain reaction.
The powers that be decided that only Fat Man would be impressive enough to pressure the Empire of Japan into surrendering unconditionally. And therefore it needed to be tested.
I have here a set of reproductions, of the security passes issued to the men and women who worked on the Manhattan Project, both at Los Alamos and also at Trinity. I’ll use them to tell the story of the Trinity test, by following three men and one woman who witnessed the first atomic explosion.
First, we have Model Forecast, one of America’s brightest meteorologists. Model joined the Manhattan Project in April of ‘45, specifically to determine the safest date to stage the test. After conducting numerous readings, he recommended the early mornings of either July 19th or 21st of 1945. He was overruled—President True Man would be attending the Potsdam Conference starting on July 17th, and he needed to have a successful test as an ace in the hole for his negotiations with General-Secretary Stalin over the shape of post-war Europe. Therefore, the test would be performed at 4 am on July 16th, come hell or high water.
At 9 pm on July 15th it started raining—hard. This was exactly what Model was afraid of, but that didn’t prevent everyone at the Baker control bunker from blaming him. Not only would rain make it nearly impossible to make observations of the bomb from a safe distance, it also raised the threat that any radioactive fallout from the bomb might be flushed to inhabited areas. The rain started dying down at midnight of July 16th, but it took a very long time to do so, stopping for ten minutes at a time, then starting back up again. At 3:30 am, with the storm still not finished, a decision had to be made. The military leader of Manhattan, General Leslie Groves, met with the scientific leader of Manhattan, Dr. Oppenheimer. Between them they decided that the test would be moved from 4 to 5:30 am, just a few minutes before sunrise. Said Groves to Model, ‘And will the sky be clear by then?’ Model answered, ‘Absolutely,’ to which Groves replied, ‘It had better be, because if 5:30 comes and there’s still a cloud in the sky, I will hang you.’
At this point Model Forecast had fulfilled his duty, so he chose to mingle with the rest of the scientists and soldiers at Baker. I should explain that three wooden bunkers were constructed for those observing and controlling the test. Each bunker was mostly buried under huge layers of earth, with the walls reinforced with concrete. The bunkers were placed 10,000 yards [5.7 miles, or 9.1 km] away from Ground Zero. The one 10,000 yards south was Baker, the control bunker. The north bunker was Able and the west bunker was Pittsburg.
One of the scientists waiting at Baker was Enrico Fermi, the Italian-born scientist who had created the first sustained nuclear reaction in 1942. On seeing the restlessness induced by the hour-and-a-half weather delay, Fermi proposed a betting pool, a particular passion of his. A few days ago, he had set one up on how powerful the explosion would be: Oppenheimer had bet that it would be equivalent to 200 tons of T.N.T., Cino Cycle, the head of the theoretical division at Los Alamos, had bet on 8,000 tons. For tonight’s pool, Fermi picked a much more macabre topic: what were the odds that the bomb, which would generate temperatures never before seen in the history of the planet, would be hot enough to ignite the atmosphere, wiping out all life on earth? Or maybe just New Mexico would be wiped off the face of the Earth—who wanted to put $10 down on that? The soldiers, and even some of the engineers, got rather nervous on hearing this talk, until they were reassured by Model Forecast that it was all an old joke of Fermi’s: You see, the question of ‘atmosphere ignition’ had come up from the moment scientists began to gather at Los Alamos in mid-1943. The question was assigned to Pr. Cycle, who passed it on to Gus Guiseman, the head of the Computation Group. Now in those days, actual electronic computers were few and far between, so the term ‘computer’ usually referred to a person (almost always a young woman) given the job of performing complex mathematical computations. Guiseman and ‘his girls’ had computed the ‘thermal opacity ratio of the fission reaction’ (whatever that means), and luckily for humanity it failed to generate a high enough temperature to trigger the deadly atmospheric chain reaction that Fermi had proposed. Model knew all this of course because Fermi had tried to terrorize him with the apocalyptic scenario within days of starting his job at Trinity.
The rain finally stopped at 4 am, thereby saving Model’s neck. A team drove out from Baker to Ground Zero at 5 am in a jeep to arm the bomb, returning at 5:10. That was when Samuel King Allison, one of the main organizers of the Manhattan project, began reading the world’s first countdown over Baker’s loudspeakers and shortwave radio.
At 5:25, Allison announced that there were five minutes left until detonation. At this point Model, along with all other non-essential personnel, left the safety of the bunker and lined up behind it, so that they’d have a chance to see this once-in-a-lifetime event for themselves. Following a protocol established by Infra Stellar, they all laid face down in the dirt, with their feet pointing towards Ground Zero. Hands were held over eyes, and placed next to each of them was the crude instrument they would use when instructed to watch the explosion: a pair of welder’s goggles inserted into a hole in a piece of sheet metal, with a little wooden handle mounted on the side to hold the assembly over your face. Behind them they could hear Allison’s voice over the loudspeaker, except when it was interrupted by the strains of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, breaking in from an Albuquerque radio station using the same frequency:
‘Zero minus ten seconds—ni—[dun-tun da dun-ta-dun! da]—six—five—four—three—two—one—Now!’
Ah, but what happened next is the ending of our story, and we’re not ready for that yet. Let’s put Model Forecast aside for now, rewind time, and look at the same events from a new perspective.
This is the security badge held by Gus Guiseman. Gus was a theoretical physicist, recently graduated with a Ph.D. from Princeton, but he was really good at almost any problem you threw at him. And so he ended up heading Computation, and when at the end of the project the human computers were replaced by the mechanical ones from IBM, he pretty much invented the concept of multi-tasking, the only way the machines would be able to do their highly complex calculations faster than the humans they were designed to replace.
Gus was on leave through most of June and into July of 1945. He came back just in time for Trinity. His designated gathering point was Compañía Hill, an observation post 20 miles [32 km] northwest of Ground Zero. This was where the non-scientific VIP’s were assembled, including Journey Scoop. Journey was a science reporter for the New York Times. He had attracted the attention of the officials at the Manhattan Project with his May 1940 headlining story about the state of nuclear research at the time, pulling together all sorts of clues to deduce that the world was on the verge of a new weapon, and that Nazi Germany stood a good chance of developing it first. He was of course wrong about his ultimate conclusion, but very close to being completely right about everything else. He was therefore approached to be the official reporter of both this test and afterwards the Nagasaki bombing (he was aboard the observation plane The Great Artiste for the latter operation).
Guiseman was late. Also, the only shortwave radio at Compañía Hill was busted, so nobody knew what was going on. Journey spent his time interviewing the other participants. Cino Cycle and Infra Stellar were both European immigrants and both were recent converts to Markism, with very similar marks: Cycle had the sun in cross-section, while Stellar had a sun dominated by its corona. So Journey asked them for their mark stories:
Cycle, born Hans Bethe, was a German physicist travelling through Europe on fellowships when he met and married his Jewish wife, leading him to take a job with Cornell University in America in 1935 (which is when he converted and changed his name). He soon became known as the nation’s leading theoretical physicist. (Einstein didn’t count by this point, as he was retired.) In 1938, at a conference dedicated to the topic, Cycle worked out the chain reactions that power stars, both in the sun and in larger stars. The publication of this work not only earned Cycle his mark, but also the Nobel Prize in 1967.
Stellar was a Jewish Hungarian, born as Ede Teller in 1908. His experience of the turbulence of that country in the 1920’s instilled a lifelong hatred of both sides fighting for the soul of the country: Fascism and Communism. He lost his foot in a streetcar accident soon after moving to Munich, Germany, in 1926. Like Cycle, he travelled around Europe, meeting Enrico Fermi as well as numerous other scientists. In 1935, he was able to escape Germany with his wife to become a professor at George Washington University. He joined the Manhattan Project in 1942. Soon afterward, in a conversation with Fermi, he got the idea of using the yet-to-be-created fission bomb to set off an even bigger bomb, the Hydrogen Bomb, or as he called it, ‘The Super’. From this point he became convinced that the atomic bomb was a waste of time in and of itself, and only the Super would be capable of winning the war. To prove that ‘the Goddess was on his side’, he converted to Markism, and immediately got his solar-themed mark. Stellar of course later became the father of the H-Bomb. It’s also generally agreed that the titular character of Doctor Strangelove was a devastating parody of the man (in all respects except being an ex-Nazi).
At 3:30, with the radio still broken, the guests at Compañía Hill thought the bomb was going to go off in a half hour, so a picnic breakfast was passed out for everyone to eat. Guiseman finally showed up as the meal was being concluded. He set himself to work on the radio and immediately fixed it, so now everyone knew they had another hour and a half to wait. Journey explained to the gathering that he had been tasked to write several alternative cover stories, to be used by regional radio stations and newspapers, to explain the upcoming explosion.
The first possibility was that the bomb would be a dud. That one was easy, as no story needed to be released. The next was an explosion so small that more people heard it than saw it: that would be passed off as a local earthquake. Next came the story for the most-desirable outcome, informing the public that an ammunition magazine at a nearby military base had gone off. And finally was the story that started with the ammunition magazine explosion, but included blanks for informing the public who had died in the accident. Of course, Journey admitted, if that last one was released, it would pretty much count as the obituary of everyone gathered at Trinity.
Time passed slowly. Guiseman fidgeted, wandered around, grabbed random items from people and started juggling them until demanded to stop, and asked repeatedly if anybody else had anything else to fix. Guiseman was a notorious troublemaker at Los Alamos, sending out ciphered letters just to mess with the government censors who opened and read every letter going in or out of the various Manhattan Project labs to make sure that no vital secrets were being revealed. On finding that the crucial paperwork, describing to any potential spy how to build an atomic bomb, were locked in file cabinets secured with nothing more than tumbler locks, Guiseman taught himself locksmithing, just so he could demonstrate how National Security could be compromised in ‘20 seconds flat’.
While Guiseman was trying to find something to do with himself, Stellar calmly applied heavy sunscreen to all of his exposed skin in the pre-dawn darkness, then passed the tube on to Cycle.
5:25 finally came, and with it the announcement that there was five minutes until detonation. Infra Stellar organized the group and arrayed them according to his protocol, all lying face down in the dirt. Guiseman lay there for a few seconds, before jumping to his feet. ‘This is stupid,’ he announced to the crowd. ‘If we’re going to be exposed to radiation from the explosion, then we will be completely exposed, regardless of how we orient ourselves. And I’m not using any welder’s goggles—I want to see this thing with my bare eyes.’
‘Don’t be a fool, Guiseman!’ Stellar cried out, his voice muffled by dirt. ‘At the very least, looking right at the bomb when it goes off will blind you for life!’
‘That is a lie, and you know it,’ Guiseman countered, as he walked over to a jeep that was pointed at Ground Zero and sat down in the driver’s seat. ‘True, the ultraviolet output of the explosion could cause permanent damage, but by watching it through this glass windshield, I will only be exposed to light from the visible spectrum. Under these circumstances, the worst that will happen is that I will be temporarily blinded.’
And so he sat, and waited. He didn’t have to wait long, until—
‘Zero minus ten seconds—ni—[dun-tun da dun-ta-dun! da]—six—five—four—three—two—one—Now!’
We are very nearly ready to tell what happened in the moments after that fateful ‘Now!’, but I have one more pair of eyewitnesses to history to introduce you to.
This is the security badge of the chemist Stable Solution. Stable was 25 years old in 1945. He was the designer of the electrical switching device behind the Fat Man implosion lens. He also had the dubious honor of being the last man to see the actual bomb before it exploded. In his own words, ‘Oppenheimer was really terribly worried about the fact that the thing was so complicated and so many people knew exactly how it was put together that it would be easy to sabotage. So he thought someone had better baby sit it right up until the moment it was fired. They asked for volunteers and as the youngest guy present, I was selected. I don’t know if it was that I was most expendable or best able to climb a 100-foot tower!’
Yes, the bomb was located inside a wooden shed mounted at the top of a 100 foot [30 m] tower. The reason it was mounted that high was because of plans to detonate the Japanese bombs at that altitude after being dropped from bomber planes.
Stable drove out to the tower at Ground Zero at 9 pm on July 15th. If you recall, this is precisely when it began raining cats and dogs. Stable had to climb to the top of that tower in pouring rain, and then try to dry out in the tiny shack at the top when he finally got there. The shack had open air windows letting the rain in, a naked light bulb to see by, a primitive telephone connected to an identical device at the base of the tower for communications, and assorted odds and ends left during the hurried construction of the site to amuse himself with. Oh, and finally there was the gadget—’gadget’ being the code word for discussing the bomb over channels that might be overheard by the enemy. The gadget was a metal sphere five feet [1.5 m] in diameter, its surface studded with bolts and crossed with electrical cables, all converging in a boxlike enclosure. That box was connected to another box at the bottom of the tower, and that box was connected to the Baker control bunker nearly six miles away by a thick strand of wires snaking south along the flat desert landscape.
Stable Solution sat right next to the bomb, trying not to think about what would happen if a stray lightning bolt happened to connect with the bomb or any of that six miles of electrical cables. For three hours, his job was to sit up there and guard the gadget from ‘Nazi saboteurs’. Oh, and to deal with any other catastrophes that might cause the bomb to go off before 4 am. He was trying to steady his nerves by reading a book by the light of that single naked light bulb the shed was equipped with, a book he had picked up in the humor section of the bookstore. The book wasn’t working.
At midnight of July 16th, the telephone installed in the shed suddenly started ringing, causing Stable to toss his book high in the air. ‘Uh—um, Solution here,’ he said into the phone.
‘This is Lt. Bush, standing a hundred feet below you. You’re hereby relieved.’
‘Oh thank the Goddess,’ Stable said, hanging up. He briefly tried to find the book in the piles of broken tools and other junk, but soon gave up. After turning off the light, he climbed down the ladder and through the continuing thunderstorm to meet with his replacement. Lt. Bush was no scientist, so he wasn’t allowed to go any closer to the bomb than the tent at the bottom of the tower. Stable got into his jeep, which was now parked next to Lt. Bush’s jeep—
And found that it failed to start. This should hardly be a surprise—the jeeps were used to regularly cover the 400 mile (650 km) round trip between Trinity and Los Alamos, had been exposed to the punishing heat of La Jornada, and now the sudden soaking rainstorm. It was a wonder that more of them hadn’t failed already.
He called the lieutenant out to help him look the jeep over. They couldn’t find anything obviously wrong with it, and yet it wouldn’t start. Too bad Gus Guiseman was nowhere near.
‘Well maybe I can take your jeep back to Baker?’ Stable suggested.
‘What, and leave me to out-run this thing if it goes off early?’ Bush asked. (Apparently, Lt. Bush had a high degree of confidence that he could out-drive an atomic explosion.)
‘Oh all right,’ Stable said. He turned on the short-wave radio in Bush’s jeep. ‘Solution to Baker. Solution to Baker. We have a little problem with a busted jeep. Could you please send another one out to pick me up?’
‘Negative, Solution,’ replied the voice of Samuel King Allison. ‘We currently have no jeeps to spare, and we need you out here on the panel. Look, you’re less than five minutes’ drive from here, so both of you drive back in the good jeep then Bush can return. We’ll keep our eyes out for anybody approaching the gadget.’
Stable and Bush agreed with this plan, and drove back. Then Bush returned to guard the gadget.
Stable’s night was not over. There were two men in control of whether the bomb would go off or not. Joe McKibben had a switch to flip at one minute before detonation that would automate the rest of the process. And Stable Solution was in control of the kill switch.
As soon as he sat down, Stable was confronted with a crisis, a crisis too crazy to be anything but true.
‘Pittsburg to all units,’ reported the shortwave radio. Just to remind you, Pittsburg was the name of the western bunker.
Stable looked around. It appeared that he was the designated radio voice of Baker now. He picked up the microphone and keyed it. ‘Baker. What’s on, Pittsburg?’ he asked.
‘Stand by, Baker. Some kinda trouble outside.’ Faintly, another sound could be heard over the radio. It sounded like a barking dog.
Another voice cut in: ‘Baker, are we holding?’ This was coming from Able, the third bunker.
Stable looked briefly back at a bored Oppenheimer before taking initiative. ‘Negative, Able. No hold. Pittsburg, get a line on that disturbance and report on the double. Wait, first do you have visibility? Over.’
‘Pittsburg here. Affirmative to visibility; the rain appears to have stopped for the time being. I’ll find out what’s going on outside and get back to you. Over.’
Yet another voice cut in, that of Lt. Bush: ‘Baker, this is Zero. The searchlight from Pittsburg has left the tower. I repeat: the tower is no longer illuminated. I’ll drive over there and find out what’s wrong.’ The sound of a jeep starting up and setting off could then be heard.
This got the attention of both Oppenheimer and General Groves, each of whom placed a hand on Stable’s shoulder.
A stressed-out Stable groaned in frustration. ‘Lieutenant, did you just turn your radio on? Pittsburg has matters under control. You will return to your post and not leave the tower unguarded. Do you copy? Lieutenant Bush, do you copy?’
The line from Pittsburg opened up, but all that could be heard was continual barking, which then sputtered into silence. A few seconds later, the voice of the western bunker returned: ‘Pittsburg to Baker. Just some buzzard raisin’ hell with the guard dog. I chased it away.’
Stable laughed nervously. ‘Roger, Pittsburg. Could you please check to see if a jeep is heading your way from Zero?’
‘Will do, Baker. Just give me a few seconds to relay your request up the ladder.’
‘Baker, this is Zero again. Searchlight is back on the tower, so I will be returning to my post. Also, my radio appears to have a malfunction—it’s turning itself off a few seconds after I stop talking. Please advise.’
‘Head back to Zero,’ Stable said quickly.
‘Roger,’ replied Lt. Bush.
Stable reached over and flicked a communication override switch. ‘You should now be hearing me from the speaker mounted at the base of the tower.’
‘Baker, I am still several hundred feet away from my post, so I couldn’t make out everything you said, but I’m guessin’ that you’ll be using the tower speaker to communicate?’
‘Affirmative.’
‘Understood, Baker. And, could you do something about this spotlight that’s following my every move? Over.’
Stable rolled his eyes, knowing full well that Pittsburg heard every word of that previous conversation, and could have put the light back at any moment. ‘Pittsburg, thank you kindly for your services,’ he said in the calmest voice he could muster. ‘You may now return your searchlight to the tower.’
‘All you had to do was ask, Baker,’ answered Pittsburg, accompanied by the sounds of raucous laughter in the background.
Stable slumped down as the two hands removed themselves from his shoulder.
‘Pittsburg to Able. One of our eyes just caught a movement on the tower. Can you confirm? Over.’
Stable suddenly felt like his veins were pumping ice-water instead of blood. He hovered his finger over the kill switch.
‘Negative, Pittsburg,’ answered Lt. Bush’s voice. ‘This is Zero, and there are no intruders here. And now I see Able’s searchlight, so I’ll get off the line.’
‘Able here. We see nobody on the tower or in the shack, raising doubts as to Pittsburg’s sobriety. We also see Bush waving his arms like Robinson Crusoe.’
Two voices cut in, speaking the same words at nearly the same time. ‘Hey, I heard that!’
Stable pulled briefly at his hair with the hand not about to flick the kill switch. ‘Cut the chatter, Zero and Pittsburg. Able, return your spotlight to its usual search pattern. Pittsburg, do you have anything further to say?’
‘I’m going to say it was another bird, Baker. Come to think of it, the colors were too mottled to be a person.’
‘Roger, Pittsburg,’ Stable said with a sigh of relief. ‘Glad to hear you say it.’
And so it was that a bird, probably a roadrunner given the setting, nearly sabotaged Project Trinity.
All of this was around midnight. Since Stable Solution is not going to do anything for several hours, let’s turn our attention to his wife, our final witness. Gillian Gesinek was born in a small town outside Prague in the Czech Republic, the daughter of an industrial chemist. Her family moved to Berlin to improve their fortunes, but soon became the victims of anti-Semitic threats after the rise of the Nazi Party, and relocated to Montclair, New Jersey, in 1933. She attended college at Bryn Mawr and after graduating in 1942 moved on to graduate work in chemistry at Harvard. A year later she married Stable Solution and converted to Markism, taking the name Precipitated Solution, or ‘Precip’ for short. She followed her husband to Los Alamos in 1944. Originally, she worked on studying the chemical properties of plutonium, but then the powers that be decided that such work ‘was too dangerous for a woman’ (specifically to their ability to bear children) and she was moved into the explosive lens unit, which while it was perfectly safe for her womb, stood an equal chance of killing her on any given day as her former job. Similarly when the idea of the Trinity test was proposed, General Groves put out a mandate that no women be allowed to participate, witness the test, or even be told that it was happening, to protect their delicate sensibilities. Precip was easily able to figure out what was going on, and organized a viewing party of herself, Betty Thomas and David Anderson in a car that she drove. Betty Thomas was the wife of Earl Thomas, a physicist who watched the test from Base Camp; David Anderson was a co-worker of Precip’s that wasn’t considered important enough to invite to the test. They stopped on the summit of Sandia Peak, a 10,000-foot [3 km] tall mountain located half-way between Los Alamos and Trinity, and therefore 110 miles [175 km] north of Ground Zero. They spent the night in sleeping bags waiting for a pre-dawn explosion. Precip didn’t have a shortwave radio in her car, so there was no way for her to monitor all of the communications going on between the bunkers, nor could she hear the countdown.
Returning to Stable Solution’s story, at 3:30 came the decision to delay the test; around this time the last of the scientists arrived at Baker from Base Camp. (Trinity Base Camp was located 10 miles [16 km] south of Ground Zero. It was where most of the Trinity personnel lived while the rest of the site was being set up, and where the mountains of food and especially water were sent on a weekly basis to keep them alive.) While Fermi was organizing his ‘end of the world’ betting pool, Oppenheimer made a bet with George Kistiakowsky, the dour Ukrainian scientist who designed the explosive lenses: if the bomb failed to go off, Kistiakowsky would have to pay Oppenheimer a month’s salary. If it worked, Oppenheimer owed Kistiakowsky $10. Kistiakowsky also bet on the 1,400 ton slot in Fermi’s explosive yield lottery.
At 4:30, the sun rose over Sandia Peak, and Precip and their party concluded that the bomb test had failed, as there was no way that it would be postponed later than sunrise. They had forgotten that the sun rises earlier the higher your elevation and that therefore it was still dark at Ground Zero. They took their time cleaning up and getting packed for the long drive back to Los Alamos.
At 5 am, Kistiakowsky, McKibben and a few others drove out to Ground Zero to arm the gadget from the base of the tower. Since the nearest mechanic with a security clearance was back in Los Alamos, it was decided that the busted jeep would be allowed to suffer the full brunt of the explosion, ‘as a test of the effect of the new weapon on American automotive technology.’ Two jeeps returned to Baker, along with Lt. Bush. The gadget was now alone, kept company only by the voice from the loudspeaker: ‘Zero minus twenty minutes.’ General Groves got into one of the just-returned jeeps to drive down to Base Camp. This was just in case the bomb turned out to be more powerful than was originally thought. Taking his place as military commander at Baker was Groves’ right-hand man, Brigadier Thomas Farrell.
Stable Solution stayed at his post, ready at any minute to abort the operation and shoulder the blame that would result if he made a bad call. At 5:29 am, he turned his head and noticed Oppenheimer standing next to Farrell, one hand tightly gripping a nearby post and barely breathing. ‘You know,’ Stable joked, ‘with all of this stress, it’s a wonder I don’t hit this switch with this twitchy hand of mine.’ Oppenheimer reacted by looking coldly around for somebody to replace Stable. ‘Kidding, kidding!’ Stable cried.
‘Zero minus ten seconds—ni—[dun-tun da dun-ta-dun! da]—six—five—four—three—two—one—Now!’
Despite their eyes being closed and covered, the majority of witnesses to the Trinity Test knew the instant when the bomb went off. That was because the entire landscape around them was suddenly illuminated by daylight. No, more than that—by the light of a dozen suns. Model Forecast’s first instinct was to check himself to be sure he was still alive. Despite the brilliant light, all was silent, thanks to the fact that the speed of light is so much faster than the speed of sound. The scientists at Baker cheered then formed a spontaneous conga line.
Gus Guiseman was the only person looking directly at the bomb when it went off. He took the precaution of covering one eye with his hand because, as he had predicted, that one exposed eye was temporarily blinded less than a second after detonation. ‘I don’t think I can describe what it was that I saw,’ he reported later. ‘It was like I suddenly had access to the entire light spectrum, from radio to gamma waves. I may have seen Creation itself, but it was far more likely that my optic nerve just went nuts due to sensory overload.’ He calmly switched eyes, and continued his observation.
Stable Solution was still inside Baker bunker when the bomb went off and the inside of the tight space was suddenly flooded with light from the open door. Oppenheimer turned to Fermi and merely said, ‘It worked,’ before Fermi raced outside.
Precip was sitting in the car reaching for the ignition key when the sky suddenly bloomed right through the windshield glass. The distant clouds rolled and boiled, turning every color of the rainbow.
That’s what Guiseman observed as well, a rapidly expanding cloud, the top of which glowed an otherworldly violet color, a color he knew full well to be caused by the massive ionization of the air caused by all of the radiation being produced by the explosion. (By the way, that particular color can’t be picked up with motion picture film, just in case you’re wondering why all the footage you see on TV of atomic explosions are more orange than purple.)
Twenty-seven seconds later, the shockwave caught up with Baker. To Model, it sounded like an express train had passed him by inches. Fermi used the wave to perform an experiment: he shredded up a piece of notebook paper and dropped the shreds slowly to the ground, both before and during the shockwave. Since there was no wind, he could use the displacement of the paper to calculate the energy of the bomb. The result of his calculations was 10,000 tons of T.N.T., making Cycle the winner of the betting pool. (Actually, Fermi turned out to be wrong—the true figure was 18,000 tons.) Kistiakowsky, who was on his way out of the bunker, was knocked over. He got right back up, turned to Oppenheimer who had emerged after him, and slapped the man on the back, exclaiming, ‘Oppie, you owe me ten dollars!’
By 5:45, a handful of observers at Baker had used the available jeeps to drive back to Base Camp. Stable Solution, who had been up for nearly 24 hours, headed straight for his bed and crashed. General Groves greeted Robert Oppenheimer, saying simply, ‘I am proud of you.’—his decision to put the mild scientist in control of the project had paid off. Groves’ assistant Brigadier Farrell shook his hand. ‘The war is over,’ he declared. ‘Yes, after we drop two of these on Japan,’ answered Groves.
Opinions on the test at Base Camp were all over the place. ‘My God, it’s beautiful!’ one witness exclaimed. Another replied, ‘No, it’s terrible.’ Kenneth Bainbridge, the man in charge of constructing the Trinity site, looked Oppenheimer in the face and proclaimed ‘Now we’re all sons of bitches.’ [Can I say that on TV? Could I get away with just a censor bleep?]
One of the VIPs at Base Camp was Charles Allen Thomas, vice-president of the Monsanto Corporation and director of chemical research. For the Manhattan Project, he developed techniques to purify polonium and beryllium for use as trigger materials. On witnessing the multi-colored detonation of Trinity’s bomb, he declared it to be ‘the single greatest event in the history of mankind.’ Later, he described the bomb as looking ‘like a giant mushroom; the stalk was the thousands of tons of sand being sucked up by the explosion; the top of the mushroom was a flowering ball of fire. It resembled a giant brain the convolutions of which were constantly changing.’
Oppenheimer’s reaction is the one that is most quoted; here I’ll give it in context, from an interview conducted years afterward: ‘We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita.
‘Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”
‘I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.’
Although that is the most-remembered reaction, I am more impressed by the words of George Kistiakowsky: ‘I am sure that at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the earth’s existence—the last men will see what we saw.’
5:45 was also the approximate time when the shockwave from the bomb finally reached Sandia Peak. The three observers in Precip’s car had faithfully waited until it arrived, sounding much like thunder. Then the car was started for real and the party drove back to civilization. At a diner near Albuquerque, the server asked them if they had seen the explosion in the southern sky, and they feigned ignorance. A day later Stable finally caught up with her at Los Alamos—he spent a couple days mostly sleeping. After she got back and thought about what she had seen, Precip signed a petition to have the next bomb exploded on an uninhabited island with the Japanese invited to watch, in hopes of ending the war without the devastating death toll of two atomic bombs. The petition disappeared before it ever reached anybody of authority.
A few years after the war, Stable and his wife were approached by a Japanese immigrant who assured them that the bomb they had worked on had saved lives, including members of his family living on the outskirts of Hiroshima. Precip resigned herself to the notion that the atomic bomb did more good than harm. Stable Solution’s faith on this point never wavered.

Hand-written addition to the above, added five years later:

The idea of doing an episode about Trinity was one that I pursued regularly ever since the 25th anniversary of the test in 1970. The government finally allowed me access to the location and a redacted set of official documents early in 1981. I never questioned the reason for the sudden change of heart—maybe it was because of who had just been elected President. Nevertheless, the general in charge of the base reserved the right of final review. Something in the episode offended him—perhaps my digs at Pr. Stellar—and as a result my tapes were confiscated, but not before I was able to get this transcript written up.
Despite the unusual candor I was greeted with in the early stages of my research, there was one story that I believe was deliberately withheld from me, a story I would have undoubtedly featured in the episode if I had only known it. I hereby present the final Eyewitness to History for the Trinity Test, July 16, 1945:
To begin with, Gus Guiseman arrived in Los Alamos, New Mexico on July 15th with plenty of time to reach Compañía Hill along with everyone else. What caused him to be late was a piece of paper left on his desk. Written on the paper was the number ‘1.8574583621’, the digits written with the air of one who has long since memorized them. The handwriting of the note, Gus was convinced, could have only come from one person: his Chief Computer.
Gus Guiseman’s Chief Computer was a Hopi Indian barely out of her teens, a tall and statuesque beauty that tended to dominate any room she was in. Guiseman used to claim that she glowed with a sort of inner light, as if she carried the warmth of the New Mexico desert wherever she went. Her appearance was very atypical of a member of her tribe: white skin with only a trace of pink coloration, and long hair separated into bands of multiple pastel colors. Adorned on her clothing at all times was a white badge the size of her hand, painted with her mark, a stylized sun. Her Markian name was of course Celestia, but to keep her straight from the others, we’ll call her Crystal, the English translation of her birth name and the name used most often by the scientists at Los Alamos, including her boss, Gus Guiseman.
There’s a lot I have to read into the terse account Guiseman left for posterity. For one thing, he does not explain why that number should have filled him with a feeling of dread, but his following actions make that point abundantly clear. He was under orders to arrive at Compañía Hill at midnight, but instead he called up Crystal’s priest, and practically forced him to get out of bed and go check on her. He waited a half hour for the reply call that informed him that Crystal had snuck out of her home in nearby Santa Fe a few hours earlier.
Gus always got along well with the ladies of Los Alamos, so he knew full well who was going to watch the bomb despite the official ban, and where. He called up Sawyer’s Hill, which in the winter was used by the scientists as their own private ski run, and got in contact with the group gathered there. They told him they hadn’t seen Crystal since the start of his leave of absence a month and a half earlier. He called a trailer camp outside Carrizozo, New Mexico, where Al and Elizabeth Graves were monitoring the air with a Geiger counter for the world’s first radioactive fallout, despite Liz being seven months pregnant—Crystal wasn’t there, either. He couldn’t contact Sandia Peak, where Precip Solution and her party were waiting (as they had no phones or radios), but he was able to call both Base Camp and Baker. Someone thought they had seen the Chief Computer at Base Camp, but that had been hours ago. Gus exceeded his authority by ordering the MPs to find her and put her under arrest, ostensibly for violating General Groves’ order about ‘no women at Trinity’. It turned out, though, that he was too late.
Crystal probably arrived at Ground Zero in the back of Stable Solution’s jeep, covered in the bright Hopi blankets that were ubiquitous at both Los Alamos and Trinity. She most certainly was the one to sabotage that jeep. The reason she did this was simple—with the maddening security precautions in place, the only place she could hide was under it.
Crystal in fact was the figure spotted by the man at the Pittsburg bunker climbing the ladder, but with the blankets she had wrapped around her, she was mistaken for the bird who had attacked Pittsburg’s guard dog, and had snuck into the shack at the top before that sighting could be collaborated. She had then probably used some bent nails and a broken hammer to cover up one or more windows with cardboard or perhaps the Army gray blanket she could have also taken from the jeep.
Gus Guiseman, having done everything he could from Los Alamos, then took a jeep down to Compañía Hill. He wanted to go further, to Base Camp to supervise the search for Crystal, but he had run out of time, as well as running out the patience of the security personnel at the site. The joking, the juggling—they were all ways he tried to cope with having no more control over the situation, of having a gut feeling that his employee was deliberately putting herself in danger, but being unable to do anything about it. And he made himself watch the Bomb, so he would never forget.
In September of 1945, two months after the Trinity Test and one month after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, General Groves, Robert Oppenheimer, Journey Scoop and a group of dignitaries visited Trinity Ground Zero. They all wore white canvas overshoes, to prevent them tracking radioactive fallout from the site. They were the first visitors who were not protected by the lumbering lead-lined tanks that had performed the original recognizance. For an area with a radius of a half-mile, the sand had been melted into a radioactive green glass dubbed ‘trinitite’. Every living thing within a mile was annihilated—even ants. The stench of death had lasted three weeks. The remains of the tower, the shack and the jeep were no more than a few random scraps of metal found embedded in the green glass. With the group of otherwise high-ranking government officials (and the official reporter) was Gus Guiseman, with no explanation given of why he was allowed to accompany them. Early on, he left the rest of the group to perform a personal search. It took him the better part of an hour, but he finally found what he was looking for, a remnant that had survived by some freak of nature. What he found was an object that Crystal held in almost as much reverence as her Mark plaque: her class ring from Santa Fe High School. When Gus dug it out of the trinitite, it had melted into the shape of an infinity symbol. This convinced him that his Chief Computer had truly died at Trinity.
Crystal’s priest had renounced his title in a note dated July 16th. He had fled over the Mexican border a day later, and was never seen again.
Of course, the core of the mystery is unresolved: why did this woman sneak her way through a massively-paranoid security system, climb up that hundred-foot ladder to come into the presence of the world’s first atomic bomb—and then just sit there for more than five hours, listening to Samuel King Allison’s countdown broadcast loudly through the speaker a hundred feet below her, waiting for it to explode?
It’s a mystery that will never have a definitive solution. If I may be presumptuous enough to go inside the mind of Gus Guiseman, it must have seemed a thing inevitable, fated to be. Crystal was the Iphigenia at Aulis of the Atomic Age, the innocent who had to die so that the Bomb might live.
But only the Goddess knows for sure.

This was followed by one final note in a different hand:

No you idiot—1.8574583621 is the thermal opacity ratio of the fission reaction—the result of the very first calculation that Gus and Crystal had performed together. If she had only botched that calculation, or convinced Gus to rely on the incorrect ratio calculated by Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn in 1938—one that was a hundred times bigger than the true figure—then the Manhattan Project would have been abandoned as being too dangerous to carry through, and perhaps the Cold War would never have started.
Celestia did what Celestia always does—she took responsibility for her actions, and when it’s far too late for a practical solution, she’ll always resort to the symbolic. Sabotaging the test would be ultimately pointless, so she gave herself up as a human sacrifice to atone for everything that would come out of the events of July 15, 1945—from the bombings of Japan already being planned on that date to the inevitable apocalyptic end to the Cold War that will overtake humanity any day now.

Author's Notes:

Welcome to "Equestrian Business", a reformulation of the Equestrian Girls setting into an alternate history of Earth that diverged from our own reality one thousand years ago. ~~Since I have only completed about half of it, I plan to publish one or two chapters every Thursday night for the thirty-five weeks [!] it will take to get the whole thing finished.~~

Although I have a plotline with a definite beginning, middle and ending all worked out, the primary purpose of "Equestrian Business" is to explore the setting. Therefore, if you decide to commit to reading it, be prepared for a somewhat leisurely pace and frequent diversions as I slowly answer all of the questions that this prologue hopefully raised in your mind. Who knows--maybe some of the side stories and characters will be the ones that stick with you when the main story finally reaches its conclusion.

Chapter 1: Breakfast Convocation

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Chapter 1: Breakfast Convocation

June 15, 1985. The Guiseman Residence, 25 miles west of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Pine Street in Glendale was a two-mile long stretch of near-identical ranch houses. From these comfortable domiciles, men and women married, had children, and went every day to jobs that gave their lives meaning. Or at least that was the goal that every normal American in 1985 strived for.

Halfway across the world, the Russians had similar goals for themselves; only their goals were to be achieved by Communism instead of by Capitalism.

This was how life was lived in the Atomic Age, a brief period of history which began in a New Mexico desert forty years earlier. And it was fated to end in a trans-Atlantic airliner 13 days in the future.

At the end of Pine Street in Glendale was an ordinary-looking house with an extraordinarily large mailbox. Most people’s mailboxes were designed to receive bills, while this one was designed to receive manuscripts. The manila envelopes arrived on a daily basis, stacked eight to ten high. All of those envelopes were addressed to Gus Guiseman.

Right next to the mailbox was a garbage can—that’s where most of the manila envelopes ended up. If they were addressed to “Nobel-Prize Winner Gus Guiseman” or “Renowned Genius Gus Guiseman” or “PLEASE READ ME, GUS GUISEMAN—THE FATE OF THE UNIVERSE DEPENDS ON IT!!!” they went right in the trash without even being opened. Without fail, these were the manuscripts that attempted to explain the secrets of the universe using paper clips and rubber bands. They would have had a better chance if they were sent to Art Bell instead.

On this particular date, only one manila envelope survived the purge: it was addressed to “Pr. Gus Guiseman”, and it was from GDS Incorporated. Gus had never heard of GDS Incorporated, but it at least looked like a legitimate business. Besides, the manila envelope from GDS had one definite use, as a makeshift holder to collect all the bills—Gus didn’t have the luxury of being able to toss those.

Gus in 1985 was a man of above average height, with pale pink skin and a halo of unruly graying hair. He had a large beak of a nose, slightly twisted from a decades-old fight, and bushy white eyebrows. He wore a plaid-patterned pair of pajamas and bare feet, and didn’t particularly care what anyone thought on seeing him like this.

Before turning to return to his house, Gus stopped to look at the wonderful world around him:

The sun, a ball of broiling plasma 150 million kilometers away, converting hydrogen to helium through the process of fusion—something it’s been doing for four-plus billion years, and will continue to do for another five or so billion years. The thin wispy strands of cirrus clouds in the upper atmosphere, composed of ice crystals that condensed from super-cooled droplets of water. Poplar and elm trees, stabilizing the soil with their root systems, and providing oxygen to the air. The leaves of those trees, dappling the sunlight on the sidewalk. The sidewalk, made from Portland cement, mixed with gravel, sand and water to form concrete, a complex crystallization process still not completely understood. But there’s also the structure of sunlight, and how little of the spectrum can be seen by the human eye, the sounds of the morning birds and what they mean, the feel of grass under his feet—photosynthesis, the Krebs cycle, the properties of the carbon atom with its nine different oxidation states, making it uniquely suited for underpinning the impossibility that is life…

With a happy sigh, Gus returned to his home. There his wife Gwen, a brunette of slightly below-average height with animated blue eyes, was scrambling some eggs. After kissing her on the cheek, Gus settled into his usual chair at the dinner table. He dropped the mail on the table to his left side, and unfolded the paper to look over the headlines.

The main headline was “President Shooter Unveils Tax Package”, which didn’t really concern him. On the other side of the fold was more disturbing news: Yuri Andropov, the former head of the KGB [a Russian acronym that translates to the “Committee for State Security”], was now the man running the Soviet Union.

“Breakfast is ready!” Gwen cried out. “Hurry up—we’re going to Synagogue right after.”

Seconds later Gus’ children, Gavin and Gloria, came down the stairs to join him at the table. Gavin was tall and thin, with pink skin, wiry brown hair and an unbroken nose and dark eyebrows that otherwise were exact copies of his father’s. In sharp contrast, Gloria had turquoise skin and short blue hair, a button nose and pencil-thin eyebrows. She was carrying a portable radio that she put down on the table to act as the morning’s entertainment.

“Good morning, Gavin. Good morning, little lady,” said Gwen.

Gus put down his paper to address his daughter. “You do know that you’ll have to start paying taxes now that you’ve come of age,” he joked.

Gloria picked up his paper to swat him on the head.

Gus took it back with an exaggerated huff. He noticed that the song the radio was playing was an upbeat reggae song. Then he worked out that the name of this particular upbeat reggae song was “Party at Ground Zero”.

Gus was convinced that he would never be able to figure out the Eighties.

As soon as they had taken their places, Gavin continued an argument that had obviously begun upstairs. “It doesn’t really make a difference, of course,” he said with a superior air. “The questionable benefits of that mark of yours can’t really stand up to the vagaries of the universe. Bad things happen to good people.”

“Right, but why do they happen?” Gloria countered. “Isn’t God supposed to be kind and just?”

“Ah, the question of theodicy.”

“Is that pronounced the-idiocy? Or perhaps the-odicy?” asked Gloria playfully. “As in Greek for ‘God is an idiot’, or Greek for ‘God likes to go on epic ten-year journeys in the Mediterranean’?”

“No, it’s about God’s reasoning,” Gavin answered with a scowl.

“Which we as faithful believers aren’t supposed to question,” Gloria countered jokingly.

“I’m serious!” Gavin protested. “Besides, according to Voltaire, it’s entirely possible that…”

This was the point when Gus had completely tuned out the conversation. “What have I done wrong?” he asked his wife melodramatically as she served out the breakfast she had finished making. “I was supposed to raise scientists and artists, not philosophers.”

The smile on his face faded as the plate of eggs, hash browns and toast was supplemented by a veritable pile of pills.

Looking for a distraction from the ongoing debate between his children, Gus’ eyes wandered over to the manila envelope…only to see Gwen trying to slide said envelope towards the nearby garbage can.

Gwen smiled sheepishly. “One of the rejects, right?”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Gus said, grabbing the envelope and tearing it open.

Gwen sighed and went to fill the plates of her children.

“There is something going on here,” Gus said that night, gesturing at the five page packet included in the envelope from GDS Incorporated. The day had passed, and the Guisemans were lying in bed together, Gus in his pajamas, and Gwen in a matching pair of her own. Both of them were wearing their reading glasses, although Gwen’s choice of nighttime reading material was a Harlequin romance.

She put down her book and took off her reading glasses. “Yes?” she asked in a resigned tone.

“This is a contract to buy out my share of artisanal plates from Ship’s Petroleum & Chemicals—my little chemistry project last year.”

Gwen nodded.

“This buyout offer is completely unnecessary—I already sold my rights to SP&C at the time, so why would somebody else want to buy them a second time? Unless they don’t want me collecting 20% anymore, without saying it outright. Are these mysterious buyers that sure they are going to make an enormous profit off of these things? The cover letter from Steady Ship manages to hint that they didn’t want to contact me at all—to try and cut me a check without explaining what it’s for. He wouldn’t stand for it, of course. Good old Ship. And the weirdest part is we never sold any plates to GDS Incorporated. We’ve only sold, like three plates total, and those were to private individuals.”

Gwen sighed deeply. “I told them not to bother you,” she said. “Looks like you’re getting involved despite them doing the right thing.”

“Gwen, were you hiding something from me?”

“Yes, Dear,” she admitted. “Gabe came to me back in March. He said he had been interviewed by GDS Incorporated to find out more about you.”

“About me?”

“Yes. They wanted to know if you would make a good consultant to hire on a sensitive chemical matter.”

Gus laughed. “Let me guess—he told them that ‘Chemistry is reserved for lesser beings—I wouldn’t even waste time calling them scientists, as only Physicists truly deserve the exalted descriptor.’” Gus dropped into an impersonation of Gabriel Gell-Mann, his co-worker at Caltech, using an exaggerated yet exact Eastern European accent, where the capital at the beginning of “Physicists” was clearly heard.

“Yes,” said Gwen with a laugh, “those were pretty much his exact words. He told me about it in hopes that I could convince them to back down after he failed. I went to the library to do my research, and I couldn’t really find anything about GDS, good or bad. Just that it’s run by Markists. But it certainly set off my smell detector.

“So I marched over there—they were working out of a crummy little five-story building in downtown L.A.—and gave them a piece of my mind.

“I told them that you probably would take the job if they made it sound interesting enough, but that didn’t change the fact that there were much better chemists out there if that was what they wanted. I accused them of wanting you purely because of how famous you are, and I guilted them into backing down.”

“You didn’t bring up the cancer, did you?” Gus asked in a small voice.

“I brought the x-rays with me,” Gwen said smugly.

Gus groaned.

“Admit it,” Gwen said. “Thanks to that Trinity test you just had to watch, you haven’t got that much time left to live. You’re lucky that the pills are keeping you pain-free and lucid, but that’s not going to last. Cancer is nasty, and liposarcoma in particular is extra-nasty. So I painted the whole picture: of you in a medically-induced coma with your wife and loving children surrounding you, wishing they could have had more time while you were off gallivanting with some fly-by-night glory-mongering corporation before it was too late. Or there’s the alternative to the coma: you screaming morning and night, the pain too intense to medicate without causing brain damage.”

“Enough, Gwen.”

“I convinced them to back down. And it looks like they held to their end of the deal. It’s your friend Steady Ship that wants you to get involved. And am I wrong? Would you have turned them down if they asked?”

Gus hung his head. “You know the answer to that. When I see a mystery, I just have to chase after it until I find a solution. And Steady does look like he’s in a real pickle here. GDS has enough money to buy his company outright if he puts up a struggle.” Gus picked up the letter and flipped through a couple of pages. “It says here that they’re going to do their final testing this Tuesday. I can have Gabe taking over the teaching for what’s left of the quarter, and get plane tickets to Neighagra for tomorrow night—enough time to talk to Steady. And then I’ll come right back.”

“Gus,” Gwen said flatly. “Tomorrow is Father’s Day.”

“Oh…right. Alright, I’ll leave on Monday morning.”

“See? I was right. Do you really have to do this?” Gwen asked desperately, reaching out and grasping Gus gently by the shoulders. “It’s just some lousy plates. You can’t save the world with plates!”

Gus looked away. “But…you can’t deny that it needs saving. Andropov became Secretary-General yesterday. The Butcher of Bucharest! That man was single-handedly responsible for crushing the anti-Soviet uprisings in both Hungary and Czechoslovakia. He locked both Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn in insane asylums after pushing through a law defining the desire for reform as a type of mental illness! It’s Gaddafi all over again, only this time it won’t be plane hijackings and nightclub bombings, but total nuclear annihilation!”

Gwen pulled her husband into a hug. “And saner heads will prevail, just like always.” She paused for a bit before nervously continuing. “Besides, if we really are looking at the ‘End of Days’, as the Christians call it, shouldn’t you be here with your family? Using Caltech’s resources to find a nuclear solution to a nuclear problem?”

Gus pulled away from the embrace. “It’s no good. I’ve spent decades on all the obvious paths, and there’s no way out. Stellar wants me to sign off on his solution, a top-secret project that I expect the President to announce to the world any day now. But I looked it over thoroughly—it’s Stellar’s usual brand of madness, and the only possible way it can prevent World War III is if both sides invest in it so thoroughly that they bankrupt themselves trying to pay for it.

“No, the solution has to come from somewhere unexpected, somewhere no one can predict. And maybe, maybe if I’m lucky, it’s going to be this Tuesday and some lousy plates. I’ll go down there, take a look, and be right back. Twenty four hour trip at most.”

Gwen flopped back into bed and turned off her light without saying another word.

She knew in her gut that he wasn’t coming back, and there was nothing she could do to stop him.

Interlude: An Editorial and Its Rebuttal

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Interlude: An Editorial and Its Rebuttal

The following is a transcript of a paid political editorial given by Roger Wilkins of The Washington Post which aired on KCBS-LA at 2:30 am on June 16, 1985, after being postponed twice from its intended airing time of 10 am on October 27, 1984. It was accompanied by the instrumental track “Lucifer” by the Alan Parsons Project added by the station management—not that this was supposed to influence your opinion at all while listening to it.

On November 4^th, 1980, Far Shooter was elected to be the 40^th President of the United States by an overwhelming margin. Many Democrats crossed party lines to vote for him, including myself. At the time, I and many others believed that putting a Markist in the Oval Office was the right thing to do, that someone dedicated to the cause of peace instead of war could do much to calm this troubled world in which we live in. But President Shooter’s confrontations with a petty African dictator soon revealed just how petty our own elected leader could get, and how far he was willing to subvert democracy in order to get what he wanted. These events have been sadly under-reported by the American press, leading to a false belief in the man’s abilities in the wake of his re-election.
Shooter began his presidency on a promising note. The American hostages held in Tehran were released on the day of his inauguration, the result of non-stop negotiating by his team during the very period when conventional wisdom dictated that a newly-elected president should concentrate on building his slate of Cabinet nominees. A revolutionary ‘treaty’ with OPEC followed in early February, leading to the end of America’s catastrophic ‘stagflation’ and the dropping of gas prices by more than $2 a gallon less than two months later.
In June, President Shooter announced a ceasefire in Northern Ireland, and in July he personally walked across the DMZ before getting the leaders of North and South Korea to sit together at the same table for the first time in more than a decade. At this point, the rapid turn-around in the American economy accompanied by his accomplishments abroad had more than satisfied his campaign promises. And then he turned his sights to the Palestinian situation.
President Carter had already accomplished a great deal in the area with the Camp David Accords, but President Shooter announced to the nation his intentions of going beyond that, of finding a two-state solution that all sides could agree on. Perhaps he could have done it, if it wasn’t for a Libyan by the name of Muammar Gaddafi.
Gaddafi was a revolutionary who took over his native Libya in 1969 and transformed it into a socialist state, with himself as ‘Brotherly Leader and Guide to the Revolution’. By nationalizing the nascent oil industry and claiming all of its proceeds, he made himself one of the richest men on earth. From there, he took on wider ambitions of forming a pan-African union, exerting more-or-less total control of Chad, Tunisia and other surrounding nations, and even attempting to join the Warsaw Pact without success. He had just formed an alliance with Syria, and used this as an excuse to butt into the delicate negotiations over the status of Palestine in December of 1980. He soon bullied the Arab states into backing out of peace talks and in a BBC interview on January 3^rd of 1981, publicly mocked Shooter’s status as a disreputable leader and a ‘multi-colored freak’.
The day after the interview aired, Shooter sent U.S. fighter carriers into the Gulf of Sidra. Legally, the gulf was in international waters, but Gaddafi had always treated it as being under Libyan sovereignty. All that ships travelling through the gulf had to do to avoid harassment was to fly the Libyan flag next to their own. This was hardly a matter worthy of wasting American manpower on, but President Shooter went ahead anyway. He sent his carriers in with big American flags and no Libyan ones, the Libyan navy investigated, and before you knew it two Libyan jets had been shot down. Shooter proclaimed ‘another victory for democracy’, and went back to trying to lure the Arabs back to the negotiating table. But Gaddafi was a petty man.
On September 5^th of 1981, Palestinian terrorists belonging to the Abu Nidel terrorist group took over Pan Am Flight 73 while it was waiting to take off in the Pakistani capital of Karachi. During the takeover, the crew managed to escape, and the plans of the terrorists turned from using the plane to rescue imprisoned Palestinians in Cyprus to killing their hostages one by one until the government of Cyprus agreed to release those same prisoners. Eventually, the terrorists were captured, but not before 43 of the 360 passengers had been killed. In the resulting trial in November of 1983, it was revealed that Abu Nidel did not possess the funds to pull off a foreign operation like this. It turned out that the necessary funding came from a single source: Muammar Gaddafi, who provided the money on condition that the terrorists kill the American passengers first. Again in a BBC interview, Gaddafi admitted that the accusations were true, and cursed the incompetence of the terrorists in letting 42 of the American passengers get away with their lives.
Shooter retaliated in February of 1984, although this time his actions were more justified and better met the threat to America that the Libyan leader had now become: American purchases of Libyan oil were outlawed, and all Libyan assets in America were frozen. If Gaddafi was going to misuse how he spent his country’s money, then a good deal of that money would be taken from him.
Gaddafi’s response was to send three Libyan terrorists to the West Berlin La Belle discothèque, which they blew up on April 5^th, 1984, killing 10 people. The nightclub was a favorite spot for American off-duty service members in West Berlin. The next day, CIA operatives intercepted a Telex communication directly from Gaddafi’s second home in Benghazi congratulating the trio on the killing of the most-prominent of the victims: Far Shooter’s estranged stand-up comedian son, Ron Reagan Jr. Gaddafi reveled in how Ron Reagan begged for his life, and how the terrorists took over an hour to kill him.
This was a vile and reprehensible act. If someone had done that to my son, or to yours, it might be understandable that we would want to turn to an act of violence against the man responsible. But Far Shooter was no mere man; he was and still is the President of the United States of America, which should put him above us commoners who elected him. Of all the actions open to him, he took the most extreme, the most-likely to provoke a horrible reaction from the rest of the world: on April 15^th, he ordered the most-powerful nuclear weapon in our arsenal to be dropped on Muammar Gaddafi’s head. Now Gaddafi was currently hiding in the middle of Libya’s immense desert, so a bomb that would have killed millions if dropped on a major metropolitan area only wound up killing 50 or so Libyans. None of those Libyans was Muammar Gaddafi, so on top of proving he was as petty as his enemy, the President also proved that he was incompetent, or at least that the sources of his intelligence were. Along with Gaddafi’s body double and dozens of innocent Bedouins, the list of victims included Hanna Gaddafi, Muammar’s four-year old daughter.
Less than a month later, Chad revolutionaries invaded Libya and defeated the Libyan army at Maaten al-Sarra. This humiliation immediately led to the breakup of Gaddafi’s pan-African union, his most-cherished dream. For once, Gaddafi did not respond with an act of petty violence, but instead one of devastating knowledge: he assisted a team of international reporters in uncovering proof that not only did the Chadian army receive funding and training from the CIA, but also that the CIA had been at work all around the world and from the moment President Shooter was sworn in; supporting revolutionary groups in secret using funding diverted from other projects approved by Congress. Let me make this clear: the president who ran on a policy of being the ultimate peace-maker was secretly responsible for half of the world’s wars, all with the insane, unachievable goal of destabilizing the Soviet Union, a nation that Far Shooter scrupulously avoided saying anything about during his term as president.
This is not a man who deserves to be elected to a second term. You’ll notice that I’ve said nothing about his domestic policies, as they are the kind that are always supported by the Republican Party when they are in power, to be condemned as always by the Democratic Party when they are not in power. No, this is something that goes beyond partisanship, a massive flaw in the character of this man.
Far Shooter responded to Gaddafi’s allegations by publically turning firmly against the Soviet Union, calling it the ‘root of all evil in the world today’ and completely abandoning all claims of ever being a peacemaker. He said that he was funding the Contras, the Mujahedeen, UNITA, and a dozen other groups of doubtful morality for our own good, and that we could trust him to do the right thing, bypassing the ‘messiness’ of Washington D.C. politics by not telling Congressmen—or the public—of what they really didn’t need to know. Well, I have another name for Washington D.C. politics, and that name is ‘democracy’. We cannot allow this man to get away with so much gross hypocrisy. And so I am asking you to go to the polls in two weeks and send a clear message that we will not accept so petty a man as this as the leader of the free world.

The television station that aired that editorial then immediately followed it with an encore broadcast of the President’s Address to the Markist Historical Society of Ireland from earlier that day, an address that was meant to convey to the world how America would react to Yuri Andropov becoming leader of the Soviet Union (accompanied by “Themes from Rambo: First Blood Part Two”):

We are approaching the end of a bloody century plagued by a terrible political invention—totalitarianism. Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy's enemies have refined their instruments of repression. Yet optimism is in order because day by day democracy is proving itself to be a not at all fragile flower. From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than thirty years to establish their legitimacy. But none—not one regime—has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.
Historians looking back at our time will note the consistent restraint and peaceful intentions of the West. They will note that it was the democracies who refused to use the threat of their nuclear monopoly in the Forties and early Fifties for territorial or imperial gain. Had that nuclear monopoly been in the hands of the Communist world, the map of Europe—indeed, the world—would look very different today. And certainly they will note it was not the democracies that invaded Afghanistan or suppressed Polish Solidarity or used chemical and toxin warfare in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia.
If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly. We see around us today the marks of our terrible dilemma—predictions of doomsday, antinuclear demonstrations, an arms race in which the West must, for its own protection, be an unwilling participant. At the same time we see totalitarian forces in the world who seek subversion and conflict around the globe to further their barbarous assault on the human spirit. What, then, is our course? Must civilization perish in a hail of fiery atoms? Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil?
Our enemies must understand this: We will never give away our freedom. We will never abandon our belief in a Higher Power—whether that be God or Goddess. And we will never stop searching for a genuine peace.
Let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing a Higher Power. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the State, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.
It was C.S. Lewis who, in his unforgettable ‘Screwtape Letters,’ wrote: ‘The greatest evil is not done now…in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is…not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result, but it is conceived and ordered; moved, seconded, carried and minuted in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.’
[An image of Yuri Andropov, the very picture of a ‘quiet man with a white collar and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks’ appears on the screen.]
Well, because these ‘quiet men’ do not ‘raise their voices,’ because they sometimes speak in soothing tones of brotherhood and peace, because, like other dictators before them, they’re always making ‘their final territorial demand,’ some would have us accept them at their word and accommodate ourselves to their aggressive impulses. But if history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.
So let me speak truth to power: Our struggle is nothing less than that of Right vs. Wrong, Good vs. Evil. And the Soviet Union is most certainly an evil empire, among the most evil this world has ever witnessed.
While America’s military strength is important, let me add here that I’ve always maintained that the struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.
Whittaker Chambers, the Christian whose own religious conversion made him a witness to one of the terrible traumas of our time, the Hiss-Chambers case, wrote that the crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which the West is indifferent to God, the degree to which it collaborates in Communism’s attempt to make man stand alone without God. And then he said, for Marxism-Leninism is actually the second-oldest faith, first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with the words of temptation, ‘Ye shall be as gods.’
The Western world can answer this challenge, he wrote, ‘but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as Communism’s faith in Man.’
I believe we shall rise to the challenge. I believe that Communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written—that the march of freedom and democracy will, in our own lifetimes, leave Communism on the Ash-Heap of History, as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people. I believe this because the source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual. And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man. For in the words of Isaiah: ‘He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might He increased strength. But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary.’
Yes, change your world. One of our founding fathers and the author of the immortal Common Sense, Firebrand, said, ‘We have it within our power to begin the world over again.’ We can do it, doing together what no one spiritual organization could do by itself. Let us have a crusade for freedom.
May the Goddess bless you, and thank you very much.

Chapter 2: Chemistry Test

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Chapter 2: Chemistry Test

June 18, 1984. Regional office for Ship’s Petroleum & Chemicals, Neighagra Falls [Niagara Falls], New York.

Zero minus 10 days.

“It says here that you graduated from the University of Chicago in 1978, Mr. Catalyst,” Steady Ship drawled, looking up from his desk at the young man with orange skin and green hair dressed in a white lab coat. “Who was your freshman chemistry teacher?” The CEO of SP&C was a fat man with a small pair of spectacles at the end of this round nose, his skin lemon yellow and his thinning hair turquoise.

Mr. Catalyst tried desperately not to roll his eyes as he tried to remember the answer to the question. In a chair placed against the back wall sat Truth Delver, flanked on either side by his assistants Gnosi and Meridiem; all three of them shared equal looks of growing exasperation.

Delver was a gentle-looking man, with blue-green eyes, short neatly-combed hair that was nearly fluorescent in its blueness, and chalk-white skin. The skin was matched with a spotless white suit with bowtie, shoes, and kid gloves, leaving only his head exposed. The fingers of his gloved hands were interlaced over his crossed knees while he was sitting. His mark of a magnifying glass over an ancient parchment was monogrammed on his lapel. “Mr. Ship, the chemical inspection must take place today, as per our contract,” he gently reminded the CEO.

“Yes, and I have final say on who will perform that inspection,” said Mr. Ship as he casually inspected his fingernails.

At that moment, Gus Guiseman barged into the office wearing his own lab coat. It was noticeably more stained than Mr. Catalyst’s. “Hello, am I late?” he asked impishly. Tucked under one arm were stacked a half-dozen of the plates he had invented.

“And the chemist I want is Professor Gus Guiseman,” Mr. Ship said before anyone had a chance to react.

Gnosi’s lips silently mouthed out the words “Oh, no.” Gnosi Augur was a man barely into his twenties, with extremely pale yellow skin, yellow-orange hair, and pale blue eyes that would normally belong on an albino. He was a tall man, but perpetually hunched over in an attempt not to be noticed. He had been the one on the receiving end of Gwen Guiseman’s outrage over the attempt by GDS to hire her husband.

With his part in the negotiations at an end, Mr. Ship started packing his things into a briefcase.

“As you wish, Mr. Ship,” Delver said calmly. “Meridiem, Gnosi, could you please head over to the school and see how the chamber’s preparations are proceeding? You can inform Miss Point that we will be ready for her between 1:00 and 1:30.” After the pair had left, he reached into his satchel and removed a stack of typewritten pages more than a centimeter in thickness before finally standing to face the newcomer. “Professor Guiseman, what a pleasure it is to finally meet you. My name is Truth Delver, and I represent the GDS Corporation.” He gingerly extended a white-gloved hand.

“And it is an honor to meet you, Mr. Delver!” Gus exclaimed, grabbing onto Delver’s hand and shaking it vigorously before noting his obvious discomfort and letting go. “I’ve been watching your TV show with my kids for years. I dare say I learned more about world history from Eyewitness to History than I was ever taught by any teacher.”

“Oh, well I am flattered to hear that,” Delver replied. “And a bit disappointed at the American public education system.”

“I am curious to know why GDS employed your services,” Gus said, suppressing his instinct to slap an arm around the other man’s back by tightly grasping his hands behind his back. “Are you to be their spokesman?”

Delver smiled slyly. “I’d be happy to answer all of your questions, once you’ve signed off on this non-disclosure agreement.”

Gus looked down at the massive pile of paper with distaste. “No,” he said simply. “I’m not signing it.”

“Are you sure?” asked Delver.

“Positive.”

“Is there a problem?” Mr. Ship asked eagerly as he stepped between them. “Because if my chosen chemist is having reservations at such an early stage, that would be cause for cancelling the contract.”

“There is no problem at all,” Delver replied crisply. “The professor will simply be forced to obey my instructions, no matter how bizarre, without knowing the reason for them…until he breaks down and signs the NDA. For someone with his reputation, I give him an hour.”

Gus frowned. “You underestimate me, Sir. I will gladly follow your instructions without question, and afterwards I will submit a complete report of my opinion to my good friend Steady. And then he will make the final determination of whether this already-suspicious deal will go through or not. Now, shall we proceed?”

Delver nodded curtly. “We shall.”

Gus looked around him at the chemical lab that Delver had taken him to. “Alright,” he said as he put down his plates, “this place will do.” Each plate was a flat hexagon of unglazed ceramic, bone-white in color and 25 cm in diameter. If you didn’t look at them very closely, you’d swear they were made of cheap plastic.

“I only need two tests performed to know for sure if your ‘artisanal plaques’ are adequate for our uses,” Delver explained, “and only the first test is chemical in nature, so you will simply be witnessing the other one. What I need to know first of all is: what is the melting point of your product?”

“Ah, well I didn’t have the equipment at the time I invented them to make that determination, so I just assumed it to be around 1500 °C like other ceramics with similar properties,” Gus replied. “So you need the exact figure?”

“Yes.”

Gus placed one of the plates face-down on the lab table, handed over a pair of safety goggles and put on his own, and then picked up a nearby hammer and smashed the plate to smithereens. He then collected some of the resulting dust in a small crucible, which he placed with a metal probe into a chemical oven before turning it on. “That display over there shows the temperature of the ceramic dust,” he explained as he removed his goggles. “It will rise at a constant rate until the melting point is reached, at which point the temperature will remain steady while the heat input instead is used to melt the dust, before rising once more. This other display will measure the amount of heat absorbed during the phase transition. It will take about thirty minutes for this device to get high enough to give us results. So perhaps we can talk until then.”

Delver removed his own goggles before silently pulling the tome-like NDA out of his briefcase.

“Oh, we don’t have to talk about the plates,” Gus said, waving his hands in the air. “I was more curious about your former career. What made you get into television instead of academics?”

Delver leaned against a table as he thought back. “I’ve always gotten along well with showy types, and the local station was certainly the showiest place in Canterlot when I was growing up. I had a friend who wanted to be a producer and nobody willing to trust their careers to his uncertain future, so I agreed to be his guinea pig. We had no intention of creating a show that the networks would actually get into a bidding war over, but there you are.”

“Wait, Canterlot’s firmly in Markist territory, right?”

“Yes.”

“So why was there any doubt? Didn’t your friend have a TV-related mark?”

“No, as a matter of fact he was a Christian—one of the very few to live in Canterlot. It was an odd thing, seeing the usual prejudice in reverse.”

“Huh,” was all Gus could say in response. After glancing over at the oven’s displays he continued. “What would you say your favorite episode was of Eyewitness to History?”

“Of the ones that aired, I’d definitely say the one on Gudea of Lagash. The research and the chance to walk on the very sites central to so many faiths and legends was something very special to me. That was in 1973. I met Saddam Hussein, the current president, at that time.”

“What did you think of him?”

“A dangerous and crazy man. If we didn’t need Iraq as a bulwark against Iran I’d tell President Shooter to have nothing whatsoever to do with him.”

“You deal with a lot of crazy people?” Gus asked with a grin.

“Far more than I’d like,” Delver admitted. “May I ask you a question?”

“Fire away.”

“However did a nuclear physicist get around to inventing dinnerware?”

Gus smiled. “I’m insatiably curious. About anything and everything. After I had settled down at Caltech, putting out revolutionary papers every decade or so, I found that it wasn’t enough. I started asking professors in other disciplines if they minded me sitting in on their classes. From there, I used my contacts among my former graduate students to get consulting gigs with various local tech businesses, and honed a reputation for telling things like they are, and finding solutions for some tricky real world problems. Then came SP&C’s little ‘mishap’ in 1983.”

“The ‘Poisoning of Bittsburg’ [Pittsburg]?” asked Delver.

“The same. The company’s stocks were in free fall when Steady Ship announced that he was taking personal responsibility for the oil spill, and that he was hiring me for a full year to root out any problems I could find, completely unrestricted. That investigation took me nine months, as I traveled up and down the country doing interviews and writing up my report. After I submitted it, Mr. Ship was so pleased with my thoroughness that he invited me to use the remaining time in my contract to poke my nose anywhere else in the company I wanted to go. He was hoping I might find some gross inefficiencies that could be corrected.

“I was giving myself an unguided tour of Ship’s R&D facility outside Neighagra Falls—just down the road from here, in fact—when I discovered a lone engineer by the name of Steady State (no relation to the CEO). Mr. State was trying to perfect a machine to manufacture cheap dinner plates out of unwanted petroleum derivatives. A team at Fillydelphia State had developed the process, but it turned out to be far too finicky to be easily streamlined. When the process was methodically performed in a lab, it took two days and succeeded 92% of the time. Mr. State’s machine was doing the same process in less than two hours, but with only a 60% success rate. Not only was that an unacceptable amount of waste, it also destroyed the hoped-for cost savings in using the machine as opposed to just disposing of the materials in a responsible manner.

“What caught my eye were the rejects, just sitting in a big garbage can waiting to be thrown out. Half of them were so soft that I could crumple them in my hand, while the other half were brittle, and broke into some really sharp shards. Those rejects had pretty obviously crystallized, but the crystals appeared to be five-sided, which is kind of rare in nature. So I took some of those pieces over to the really-excellent X-ray crystallography setup that the Neighagra Falls facility had, and that allowed me to see that what I had was a genuine penteract quasicrystal.”

“I suppose that’s a big deal?” asked Delver.

“You bet it is,” Gus answered. “Quasicrystals have only recently been discovered, and they’re all the rage in materials science. I just happened to read George Grectman’s paper on the subject, and the mathematical aspects really appealed to me. Quasicrystals are different from ordinary crystals in being regular, but not periodic in their microscopic structure.” Gus spent a moment looking around for a chalkboard or other surface to write out his thoughts. Failing that, he tried in vain to show what he was thinking of with his bare hands. “That is to say that a crystal of salt, for example, is made up of millions of tiny cubes…fused to each other. Table sugar is made from hexagonal pillars, graphite is made of flat hexagons, and so on. Quasicrystals, on the other hand, are not one shape repeated over and over again, but two or more different shapes fitting together to form a repeating pattern. Mathematically, you can turn a quasicrystal into something with a single repeating shape, but only by imagining that the shape exists in a higher dimension.”

This last fact got Delver’s attention.

Gus paused for only a moment before continuing. “Grectman’s aluminum-manganese alloy had a structure that made far more sense in five dimensions than it did in three. Now of course I should emphasize that I never thought of these higher dimensions as being real, but merely abstract—Grectman’s crystal looked like a five-dimensional shape as seen with three-dimensional eyes, but obviously it was just an extraordinarily complex three-dimensional mineral.”

Delver rolled his eyes.

Gus pondered this for a bit before continuing. “Now my crystals (or I suppose I should say Mr. State’s reject crystals) really took the cake. Not only were they the first organic quasicrystals, as far as I knew, but they also came dangerously close to being, not a five- or even six-dimensional construct, but rather a full twelve-dimensional construct in their simplest form. And as the universe as we currently understand it is twelve-dimensional, that really pulled at me. I wanted to tweak this crystal, bend it ever-so-slightly, until I had a perfect twelve-dimensional crystal. But thinking in twelve dimensions is hard, even with the help of Ship’s supercomputer that I may have borrowed without permission. One day I was practicing polyrhythms on my bongos when it suddenly came to me: how to redirect the crystal shaping techniques I learned at—” He suddenly stopped himself.

“Yes?” asked Delver.

“I can’t tell you,” Gus said coldly. “I’m bound by the terms of a non-disclosure agreement. Now you see why I don’t want to sign yours—it gets in the way of good storytelling. What I can tell you is that it was an undisclosed number of years ago, when I assisted an undisclosed company in a project I can’t tell you about, other than the fact that it obviously failed. All I was allowed to take out of the experience was a few new chemical techniques that I thought I’d never had a use for. Except now I did have a use for them.

“So I talked Mr. State into letting me have a little corner of his lab, and I did some chemical doping of the plastic waste products, similar to what you do when you’re making semiconductors, and when I was done I had,”—he reached over to pick up an un-smashed plate—“well, one of these. It was no longer crystalline or even quasi-crystalline in appearance, but it was nearly indestructible under reasonable kitchen conditions, stain-proof and oven and dishwasher safe. In short, it was exactly the plate that Steady State was looking for, but with three little problems: it was a bit on the small side, it was flat instead of a bit concave like a plate is supposed to be, and it completely dissolved into mush if you left it covered with any weak acid overnight—even orange juice was enough to do it. That last one, of course, proved to be the real kicker, because nobody is going to buy a plate that will dissolve in orange juice, no matter how cheap it is. And if you try to coat it in something to protect it, well there go your cost savings again. For a moment there, I really thought I had wasted my time.”

“Well I can assure you that what you have done is a tremendous benefit to all mankind, Pr. Guiseman, although of course I cannot tell you how. By the way, shouldn’t you have results by now?”

“Hmm? Oh, yes.” He tuned to look at the oven’s twin gauges and froze. “This can’t be right.”

Delver allowed the ghost of a grin to dance across his face. “Oh? What do they say?”

“They say that the oven has supplied all the heat it safely can, and the temperature of the ceramic has gone down in the meantime. Stand back, I’m going to override the safeties and open it up.”

The two men moved to one side before Gus reached out and prodded a button, causing the lid of the device to pop open. They then cautiously approached the oven, which didn’t seem to be giving off any heat at all.

Putting on a leather glove, Gus grabbed a pair of tongs and removed the crucible, then dumped the dust on the counter. After gingerly poking the substance through the glove, he tore it off and touched it with a bare finger. “I need a lot more heat,” he concluded, his eyes glazed.

“Well,” said Delver smugly, “what a coincidence that this building is an old smelting plant.”

Delver led the non-responsive professor down the stairs to another room equipped with an induction furnace rated to 3000 °C, with the controls located on the other side of a thick insulating wall. “Try putting one of your plates in there,” he suggested.

“You knew this was going to happen,” Gus accused him as he did as he was told and started the furnace.

“Yes.”

“But…how? That stuff turns into wet cardboard when I pour orange juice on it! How is it possibly such a colossal sink for energy?”

“No idea,” said Delver with a shrug. “But I’ve got my suspicions. Suspicions I can’t share until you sign the NDA.”

Gus stared at the paper pile, clearly tempted. Then he violently shook his head. “No, I am going to figure this out.” He looked around, and was gratified to see that this room at least was equipped with a chalkboard, which he immediately began sketching on. “Now here is the molecular structure, with the assumed bond energies. But they must be orders of magnitude higher. So suppose…”

“Yes…?”

“No, that’s impossible! I’ll need to get that actual melting point before I can proceed.”

“Well, while you’re doing that, do you mind telling me how you discovered the artisanal properties of your plates?”

“Oh, nothing incredibly inspired,” Gus answered. “I still had some free time to spend, and I wasn’t willing to let the plates go as failures just like that, so I threw a whole battery of tests at them to see if I could find any redeeming properties.

“I confirmed that a plate wouldn’t melt at temperatures up to 200 degrees Celsius (just so long as there was nothing acidic in the oven at the same time). That I could take the temperature down to -50 degrees and even if I did it super-fast, it wouldn’t fracture. The other tests I thought of gave me some pretty boring results, until I thought to apply electricity to the plates.

“That’s when I found out that these plates had two very distinct sides, although they appeared identical in all tests before this point. If you applied an electrical current to the bottom of the plate, the whole thing changed color. From the original bone white to titanium white, pitch black, turquoise, fire engine red, sky or midnight blue, orange, purple, violet, any bright color you could name, I could find the precise electrical current to produce, by varying the frequency, intensity and duration of the pulse. The only colors I couldn’t get were the drab ones: browns, tans and faded grays.

“The other side of the plates was even more interesting. Now when I applied electricity, I didn’t change the entire plate’s color, but only an area concentrated around the electrical source itself. In effect, I could draw and paint on this side, depicting any design my limited artistic ability could come up with.

“I was happy to have found what I was looking for—a reason not to throw the plates in the trash. I figured I had something that artists could play with, and that was how I represented the matter to company President Ship. I think he was just really happy that I had helped his company escape bankruptcy, so he wrote up a rather generous contract where I gave him ownership of my plate-making technique in return for 20% of the profits. Trust me when I say that I didn’t really need the money, so there was no reason for me to fight for any more than that. So I packed my bags and moved back to Glendale to reunite with my family. I certainly didn’t think I had invented a ‘benefit to mankind’.”

Delver’s response was a mysterious smile. “Your furnace is shutting down.”

“Not again!” Gus ran over to the controls. “I’m disengaging the safeties, this time to give the sample all the heat we’ve got.”

“This building has its own generator, which has been substantially improved upon after GDS bought the building,” Delver explained. “You should be able to double the heat input.”

“Then that is what I’ll do!” Gus exclaimed.

A few minutes later, he shook his head incredulously as he pointed at the video display showing the interior of the furnace. “That plate should be a 5000 °C vapor by now, yet I see water ice crystals forming on it! And now…”

“It’s fading away, isn’t it?” asked Delver with a knowing grin.

“Yes, but not fading as in sublimating into vapor; it’s literally fading from sight. What is happening?!”

The furnace took that moment to fail utterly, cracking open and emitting a blast of superheated steam that should have ripped through the insulating wall and killed the two men, but was instead sucked into the growing ball of blackness inside the furnace.

“This is the crucial phase,” Delver confided to the despairing professor. “Pull it out now while I get the drapes open.”

Gus grabbed the tongs and picked up the plate, not because it was too hot to touch but because it was now so cold that the gases in the atmosphere were turning to ice on contact. At least, that’s what Gus assumed was happening based on the cracking sounds he was hearing, as the plate was engulfed in a meter-wide sphere of inky blackness that was quickly growing.

“Hold it outside the window,” Delver instructed. “Hurry!”

Gus did as he was told, even as he lost feeling in his invisible hands.

Outside, the sun itself seemed to dim slightly for just a moment.

And suddenly the sphere of blackness was gone, and left held in the tongs was a gleaming plate of pearlescent pinkish white.

Gus gingerly put the plate down on a nearby table before racing over to his chalkboard. “It wasn’t a simulation!” he concluded. “The molecules really do bend their bonds through all twelve dimensions! That,” he said, pointing at the plate they had just created, “is not really a solid at all, but an entirely new state of matter. What are you going to do with it?”

Delver pointed silently at the ever-present NDA.

“No!” Gus cried with a wavering voice. “I’ll figure this out myself. I just need to study it.”

“Well to do that you’ll need more than one plate to play with.”

“I can’t make another,” Gus countered. “You saw what happened to the furnace.”

“Come with me.”

“That’s a pizza oven,” observed Gus. “What’s a pizza oven doing in an abandoned smelting plant? No wait, don’t tell me—your NDA told you that you’d need it. But what’s this going to do that an induction furnace can’t?”

“Oh, an induction furnace would have worked as well, but it would have been a case of overkill,” said Delver. “I find that having a finished plate as a catalyst makes the process much easier—so easy that this oven is perfect…and a lot cheaper to replace if we break it.”

Gus placed both the gleaming plate he had created and another of the dull artisanal plaques in the oven together.

“350 °F [175 °C] for five minutes,” instructed Delver. “Same as you would to heat up a slice.”

Five minutes later, Gus pulled a growing ball of blackness out of the pizza oven and “cured” it by exposure to sunlight.

He spent the next half hour doing everything in his power to try and destroy it.

The new plate was now immune to acid, to bases, to extremes in heat and coldness. It could not be demolished with a sledgehammer. Even tying a stick of dynamite to it and setting it off in the middle of the empty parking lot behind the building did nothing. (“I always wanted to try that,” Delver had said while handing over the dynamite.)

“You know, when I hold it the right way, I almost think I can see through it,” Gus told Delver. “I think I’ll try electricity next.”

“I think you should wait for the results of the second test I require,” said Delver.

“What second test?”

The two men found themselves at Neighagra Falls High School, specifically the gym. At one end of the basketball court, a young woman with blue skin and white hair was playing Horse, making the basket seven out of ten times. At the other end of the court was a small cubical room that had been constructed out of prefabricated pieces of clear hard plastic in the last couple of hours. A door at one end opened into an airlock made of a more rubbery plastic. Visible inside the clear room was a couch and a pillow. Standing and watching over everything was Delver’s two assistants. Gnosi was operating a video camera on a tripod that was pointed at the couch. A small green cylinder was attached to the cube via a pair of rubber hoses.

The teenager ran over to the two men as soon as she saw them. “Are we going to do this, or not?” she demanded.

“Yes, we’re going to ‘do this’,” Delver replied. “But watch what you say, as we have an unbeliever here who didn’t sign the non-disclosure agreement. In fact, I was thinking of having him administer the test, if that’s alright with you.”

The tall girl turned to give Gus the once-over. “All right,” she reluctantly concluded. “But let’s get this straight.” She held up her right hand. “I don’t know a thing about you, old man. You could be a pervert for all I know. When I’m out cold you’re allowed to touch this hand, and nothing else. Understand? Because my Daddy’s the Northeast lawyer for Ship and he can put you in a world of pain if you try something, especially with that camera over there recording everything for posterity.”

“I understand perfectly, Miss…”

“Point. Miss Trilogy Point. Although I hope to change the first name to ‘Three’ if this all works out like I hope.” She turned to Delver. “So, Father, what do I do first?”

“Go in there and make yourself comfortable,” said Delver, pointing inside the plastic cube.

Gus waited until the girl was out of earshot before asking Delver about his title.

“I went into the Markist clergy while the show was still airing. You could say I was introduced to a new purpose late in life.”

Miss Point knocked on the inner wall of the cube. “Hey, I have to get to classes after this, you know!” she shouted.

“Professor Guiseman, please turn on the gas cylinder,” Delver instructed. “Just a single turn should be sufficient.”

The girl quickly scrambled onto the couch as Gus approached the cylinder. She pointed at her right hand, and then at Gus’ head, a clearly threatening look in her eyes. Five seconds later, she was completely unconscious, and her right hand was trailing down on the bottom of the cube.

“Now go in there and touch her hand to the plate.”

“Hold on, aren’t we going to drain that knock-out gas first?” Gus asked.

“Why should we? It’s totally harmless to you.”

“Well, what was it?”

“The smoke produced by burning hay,” volunteered Gnosi.

“That stuff doesn’t do anything!” Gus exclaimed.

“To you,” Meridiem insisted. “To us it does the same as it did to her.” Meridiem Tempest was a small woman, yellow dress over pale green skin, long turquoise and white striped hair and piercing orange eyes that looked like the centers of sunflowers. Sewn into the side of Meridiem’s shirt was the design of a yellow hourglass.

“I’m human, you’re human—what’s the difference?” asked Gus. “And why does hay smoke have so many health regulations around it anyway?”

“Because you’re a gr—” Meridiem started to say.

“Watch what you say, child,” Delver warned her.

“Oh, right,” said Meridiem.

Gus stared at the pair of them until he was sure he wasn’t getting any more answers. “Alright, fine, I’m going in,” he said. He walked over to the airlock, and used it to enter the cube. Besides a bit of teariness in his eyes from the smoke, he didn’t feel any different breathing in the altered atmosphere.

“Make sure you angle the plate towards the camera!” Delver exclaimed as he placed himself next to Gnosi at the camera.

Gus kneeled, tilted the plate so it faced straight on to the camera, and very carefully lifted the sleeping girl’s hand so that it just touched the edge of the plate. “Is this enough, or do you need more…coverage?”

The moment the girl’s fingers were applied to the plate, it turned the exact same shade as her skin. As he held the hand in place, he felt surges of something akin to electricity passing through her skin and into him, and into the plate. The surges should have been painful, but instead were mildly pleasant. Each surge was accompanied by another color being added to the plate in a particular pattern. After the fifth surge, the pattern of a flaming basketball was complete. This was immediately followed by a bright flash of light, which caused the plate to revert from shiny to dull (and vulnerable to orange juice), while still retaining the same colors and design.

On a signal from Delver, Gus exited the chamber the way he came. Once outside, he intently studied the plate. The new colors each looked like they completely penetrated it from front to back.

While he had been doing this, Meridiem had been at the controls of an oxygen tank, which pumped the smoky air through a duct and out of the roof. Gradually, Miss Point came back to her senses, after which she wobbled out the airlock and into the comparatively fresh air of the gymnasium. As soon as she saw the plate, she snatched it out of Gus’ hands and studied it intently.

“Yes!” she exclaimed with a fist pump. “I knew it!” With the enthusiasm of a girl half her age (or half her amount of cynicism), she ran over to a bucket full of basketballs at the other end of the gym from the net and began sinking basket after basket without fail.

“You got all that?” Delver asked Gnosi, who nodded in the affirmative. Delver felt a tap on his shoulder.

He turned around to have a heavy stack of signed non-disclosure agreements dropped into his arms.

“Tell…me…everything!” Gus Guiseman pleaded.

Interlude: In a Galaxy Far, Far Away...

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Interlude: In a Galaxy Far, Far Away…

Excerpts from a televised speech given by President Far Shooter to the nation on June 18, 1985:

My fellow Americans, thank you for sharing your time with me tonight. The subject I wish to discuss with you, peace and national security, is both timely and important. Tomorrow morning I will present a radically revised defense budget to Congress, a budget that must pass, for the fate of the entire world is at stake. That is why I am asking you to face the most basic duty that any President and any people share: the duty to protect and strengthen the peace.
The defense policy of the United States is based on a simple premise: The United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor. We maintain our strength in order to deter and defend against aggression - to preserve freedom and peace.
Since the dawn of the atomic age, we have sought to reduce the risk of war by maintaining a strong deterrent and by seeking genuine arms control. This strategy of deterrence has not changed. It still works. But what it takes to maintain deterrence has changed. It took one kind of military force to deter an attack when we had far more nuclear weapons than any other power; it takes another kind now that the Soviets, for example, have enough accurate and powerful nuclear weapons to destroy virtually all of our missiles on the ground.
For twenty years, the Soviet Union has been accumulating enormous military might. They didn't stop when their forces exceeded all requirements of a legitimate defensive capability. And they haven't stopped now.
During the past decade and a half, the Soviets have built up a massive arsenal of new strategic nuclear weapons — weapons that can strike directly at the United States.
As an example, the United States introduced its last new intercontinental ballistic missile, the Minuteman III, in 1969, and we are now dismantling our even older Titan missiles. But what has the Soviet Union done in these intervening years? Well, since 1969, the Soviet Union has built five new classes of ICBM's, and upgraded these eight times. As a result, their missiles are much more powerful and accurate than they were several years ago and they continue to develop more, while ours are increasingly obsolete.
There was a time when we were able to offset superior Soviet numbers with higher quality. But today they are building weapons as sophisticated and modern as our own. I could have asked Congress to close this gap, to match every one of their missiles with one of our own. But I now believe that this is a fool’s game. It is not without a certain sense of justice that our current deterrent policy of Mutually Assured Destruction has the acronym of M.A.D. In recent months my advisors, consisting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and over a score of the best scientists and engineers in the country, led by Professor Infra Stellar, the father of the H-Bomb, have come up with an alternative, called the Strategic Defense Initiative, or S.D.I. With it, we can end the threat of nuclear war forever, by countering the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive, letting us turn to the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base and that have given us the quality of life we enjoy today.
What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their safety did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?
I am so confident that this system will end the Cold War once and for all that I am willing to share its design with the Soviets, once we get it into operation. After all, if they have nothing to fear from us, why would they have any reason to attack us?
Of course, this vision of peace will not be cheap, and there are many in this country still wedded to the notion of our two nations locked in a tense standoff ending in a final shootout, like the ending of many a Western that I starred in when I was an actor. Well it seems that nobody wants to watch Westerns anymore. Maybe that is a sign that we wish to find other, better ways to resolve our conflicts.
To the Americans watching me speak, I ask of you: is this a vision worthy of your taxpayer dollars, and worthy of the support of your Representative and Senator? And to Secretary-General Andropov, who I know is also watching this speech, I ask you to prove me wrong when I called your domain an ‘evil empire’, to prove that you are no longer the man you once were, by lending your support to the Strategic Defense Initiative, a means of finally seeing true international peace in our lifetimes.
My fellow Americans, tonight we are launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history. There will be risks. But I believe we can do it. As we cross this threshold, I ask for your prayers and your support. Thank you, good night and may God or Goddess bless you.

Chapter 3: Dinner Conversation

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Chapter 3: Dinner Conversation

Gus wanted to call his wife and tell her that he’d be spending an indefinite period of time performing an insane research project, he really did.

It was just that he kept missing the phone every time he grabbed for it.

So he decided to go down to the bar at the far end of the hotel’s restaurant and get drunk instead. Only he didn’t make it out of the restaurant.

“Gus? Gus Guiseman? Is that you?”

Gus turned to see two men sitting at opposite ends of a booth. He was sure he knew both of them, but he could only recall the name of one of them. “Freeman? What are you doing out here?”

“Attending the annual meeting of the Federation of American Scientists, like I do every year.” Freeman Dyson was a tall man, seemingly aged in advance of his years. In particular, it appeared as if the rest of his face had shrunk, leaving an oversized set of ears and a nose. His thinning once-golden hair was brushed carelessly atop his head. The eyebrows encircling his sunken blue eyes were practically gone, making the bony ridges below the skin that much more visible. He spoke with an English accent. “You remember Pending Theory?”

Gus grabbed Pending’s hand and shook it vigorously. “Pending! It’s been ages! How’s the world of physics been treating you?”

Pending Theory was a small man with golden skin and dark brown hair. A small pin on his lapel showed his mark to be an old fashioned quill pen being used to write something in cursive. “I, uh…never ended up getting into physics, remember? I got my degree in mathematics instead.”

“Oh.”

“I’m actually President of the University of Oregon now.”

“Oh. Oh! Congratulations! I’m sure it’s much more interesting than a boring career in physics.”

“Of course,” said Pending. He didn’t sound very convinced of the truth of his words.

“Do you mind if I join you?” Gus asked. “You haven’t eaten already, have you?”

“Not at all,” said Freeman, getting up to let Gus sit between them.

Just then Delver was led by a waiter right past them.

“He looks familiar,” Pending confided to Gus.

“That’s Truth Delver, the TV historian,” Gus told Pending. “I just met him today.”

“Well invite him over,” said Freeman. “Otherwise we’ll be stuck talking shop all night.”

“Delver, over here! Come join the party—I was just telling them about you.”

“Oh, hello, Gus. Who are your friends?”

“Take a seat. These are Freeman Dyson, Professor of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Learning in Princeton, and Pending Theory, President of the University of Oregon. Oh, and you don’t mind me calling you ‘Delver’ instead of ‘Truth’, do you?”

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance. And I do prefer ‘Delver’ in casual conversation—‘Truth’ I’ve found is rather too intimidating.”

“Where are your students?”

“Gnosi and Meridiem have decided to see the Falls at night.”

The men ordered their meals at that point.

“I believe I saw your episode dedicated to Windsor Castle,” said Freeman. “I learned some things I never knew about the place, and I practically grew up in its shadow.”

“Did you now?” asked Delver. “Have you lived in America long?”

“Since ’47. Gus here was practically the first American I met.”

“Really!”

“I received a Commonwealth Fellowship to study at Cornell under Cino Cycle, and everything was brand new to me, as I was not only changing countries, but also disciplines: from mathematics to physics. I was giving myself a tour of the campus, when who should I bump into but Mr. Guiseman here, who immediately applied the full charm offensive against me.

“What can I say? Gus Guiseman was and is the most utterly American person I have ever met. There was nothing of the systematic to him, nothing of the contemplative. At least not in the public self that he presented. Everything was spark and sizzle with him then.”

“You make it sound like I’m a fraud, or that I was one,” Gus groused. “I’ll have you know that I have always been 100% authentic to myself.”

“Oh, I’m sure you believe that,” Freeman said calmly. “And please, don’t be insulted—the world needs people like you, or else where would the crazy but true new ideas ever come from? Back then, though, you took it too far, to the point where it got in the way. No sooner would you come up with one brilliant theory and start developing it, before you would put it aside to work on another brilliant idea that barged into your mind. As a result, you never finished anything.”

“If you say so,” said Gus doubtfully. “So, what else do you think about me?”

“I think there’s a good chance that you never would have gotten that Nobel without me there to grab you by the shoulders and steer you in the proper direction.”

Gus opened his mouth to object, but then closed it and thought carefully. “You’re probably right,” he finally concluded. “Not that getting the Nobel Prize was entirely a good thing in my life.”

“Now of course you’ve mellowed considerably since moving out to California, but in your heart I believe that you are like most geniuses I have ever met: overgrown children, the lot of them.”

“I’m much better now,” Gus said, his arms crossed. “You just ask Gabe.” He thought for a moment. “Or better yet, don’t. He’s biased.”

Delver laughed. “I suppose I’m opening a can of worms, but what exactly did he get the Nobel Prize for?”

“For working out the interaction between radiation and matter,” Gus answered glibly.

Freeman and Pending gave him a look.

“What? It certainly sounds clever, and it’s less rude than my previous answer when asked to explain it in a single sentence, which was: If I was able to explain it to laymen in a single sentence, then it wouldn’t be worthy of a Nobel Prize.”

“Well maybe you can try explaining it in more than one sentence.”

“It was like this,” Freeman began. “In 1947, there was a problem that everyone in our tiny branch of theoretical physics was obsessing over, the fact that the equations describing the universe as we knew it blew up into infinities every time we tried to use them to match up with the latest experimental results. Another physicist had come up with an answer to this problem—it was very vigorous, very formal, and very, very slow. I suppose with the supercomputers we have today nobody would have quibbled with Schwinger’s method and he would have shared his Nobel with a lot fewer people. But back in the late 40’s his method was simply unusable.

“Guiseman on the other hand had an alternate method. Of course he had an alternate method—he bragged about deriving a completely new alternative to the quadratic equation back when he was in middle school that he insisted on using whenever possible, and his calculus looked like it came from Mars. He even had his own symbols for sine, cosine and tangent, because he didn’t like having these little words being the only English in his equations. It just so happened that this time his alternate versions of Schwinger’s equations were easier to use than the originals. I tried to promote them, but they were full of counter-intuitive ideas like reverse time travel that turned everyone off. To try and sell Guiseman’s ideas better, I tried to come up with some way of illustrating them. Gus saw what I was trying to do and once again came up with a much better alternative—the Guiseman Diagrams that they use to teach particle physics to high school students to this very day. And the diagrams got Guiseman his share of the 1965 Nobel.”

“‘His share’? Didn’t you get any part of that prize?”

“No. The Institute has this rule about not giving a Nobel Prize out to more than three people for the same thing. And Tomonaga did far more to deserve his share than I ever did. Besides, they don’t call Newton’s Laws ‘Newton-and-Halley’s Laws’, despite the fact that without Edmund Halley, the Principia would never have been published. In any case, I’ve managed to pick up my own collection of prizes through the years.”

By this time dinner had arrived—steak for Freeman, chicken for Gus, pasta for Pending and a vegetarian dish for Delver.

After they had finished, Delver turned to Pending. “And how do you know Gus?” he asked. “I hired him to consult with me, and I want to see what I’ve gotten myself into.”

Pending Theory smiled. “I met Dr. Guiseman at Los Alamos. I was a graduate student in physics, while he was recently graduated.”

“Did you have the opportunity to work with him often?”

“Oh yes,” said Gus before Pending had a chance to answer. “He was in Cino Cycle’s theoretical division, the same as me. My job was to tackle all of the tough calculations with my team of calculators—”

“Your team of pretty, teenage girl calculators,” added Pending. “So of course we’d find every excuse imaginable to walk our calculations over and chat with them.”

“And I was always the one guarding the door to their room like a guard dog,” said Gus. “I had an awful lot of anxious mothers to answer to.”

The others laughed at the joke.

“Yes, I consulted with Gus plenty of times to run calculations for the Project. But in addition, I was working on my graduate thesis when I had the time, and I thought to use him as a sounding board.” The smile left Pending’s face. “That turned out to be a big mistake.”

Gus winced. The others didn’t appear to notice.

“It did?” asked Delver.

“Yes. Now don’t hold this against Gus—he meant well, he just didn’t know the devastating effect his genius could have on someone who wasn’t quite as smart as he thought I was.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I had what I thought was a completely new theory about treating positrons as if they were electrons that moved backward in time, and how this would resolve certain differences between how such particles moved in a particle detector compared to existing theory. It turned out I didn’t have to explain my theory to Gus in any detail, because he had already come up with it. And furthermore, he had thought it out in such detail that he had already proven that it couldn’t possibly be true. He explained his reasoning to me, and I couldn’t find a hole in it, so I now had nothing to graduate with when the war ended and I went back to Princeton. That’s the reason I switched from physics to mathematics.

“It turned out that Gus’s objection was wrong. It was based on an experiment whose results were later proved to be way off. It turned out that happened a lot with experiments in the 30’s—the experimental physicists had equipment that was an order of magnitude less accurate than they thought they were. And Gus took his positron theory, refined it, and shared that Nobel Prize for it. I looked at that paper that earned his prize and I wish I could have taken my stab in the dark as far as he did—I really do. But I just can’t say it. Compared to me, that man was a giant. And he still is.”

“Look, Pending, I’m sorry,” said Gus. “The last thing I’d want to do is to intimidate someone who asked for my help.”

“Yeah, but you do,” Pending said, somewhat severely. “There’s a reason that none of your students have gone on to do anything truly significant in physics. Most of them change fields, like I did. I’ve made it a bit of a hobby of mine to collect accounts of all the times that you’ve proven some other physicist wrong. It’s a pretty long file. For example, there was this seminar that Caltech put on back in the 60’s on the subject of quasars, which had just been discovered. Willy Fowler presents his findings about this absolutely new thing, an object the size of a star giving out as much light as an entire galaxy, and he admits that he has no idea how this thing is working. The next day, the very next day, you corner Fowler on the halls of Caltech, and tell him that if he studies these quasars a bit more, he’ll discover that they’re gravitationally unstable. And of course it turns out that you’re right. Fowler confronts you, demanding to know how you could possibly have figured out that fact from the very little data that Fowler had presented in the seminar. And you admit that a few years ago, you had imagined an object with the properties of a quasar, just for fun, and worked out that imaginary object’s properties in a hundred-page paper. Fowler demanded that you publish that paper, now that the objection that the object didn’t exist no longer stood in the way. And you said something noncommittal, and walked away. You never published that paper. Half a world away, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar did write that paper on the properties of quasars, knowing nothing about your work, and he won a Nobel Prize for it. And I’m left wondering how much was missing from Chandrasekhar’s much shorter paper that was in your dashed-off masterpiece, moldering in a desk somewhere. What do you want? What’s holding you back? Are you afraid of swallowing nuclear physics whole, leaving nothing for us common mortals?”

“I…well…” Gus stammered. “That paper, it wasn’t complete. You couldn’t really get anything big out of it.”

“But you could,” Freeman pointed out coldly. “Chandrasekhar’s paper on quasars laid the groundwork for a whole new field of astrophysics. A field you could have led. And I know for a fact this isn’t the first time you’ve backed down from the brink of revolutionizing the field. I have a theory, that you just can’t stand confrontation.”

“Well that’s ridiculous,” countered Gus. “I stand up for my beliefs all the time.”

“Sure,” said Freeman. “You stand up against blowhards and ignoramuses. Easy targets who have nothing to defend themselves with but their power, which is nothing against the force of your combined assault of common sense and simple logic. But when you are truly up against your peers, against people you respect? People who may or may not be wrong, but because of hard-to-interpret facts, not ego? The idea of losing against that is too much for you. I’m telling you this as a friend, Gus. That book you just published? Surely You’re Joking Mr. Guiseman? That got you the respect of the general public, but if you truly want to win over your fellow physicists, you really need to put your opinions out there in the form of papers. Even if you’re wrong.”

“Especially if you’re wrong,” offered Pending. “The idea out there is that you’re a sore loser, and a bit of a coward.”

Gus said nothing.

“When the Senate witch-hunt had Oppenheimer in their cross-hairs, where were you?” asked Freeman.

“Now that’s not fair,” said Gus. “I was on sabbatical in Brazil, teaching the latest advances to college physics professors.”

“And none of those professors bothered to tell you what was going on back in America? I’m sure at least one of them would have been keeping track, and it was very well covered in the press.”

Gus said nothing.

“And what about the Federation of American Scientists?” asked Pending. “Why haven’t you ever joined? Why have you never shown up to any of our anti-nuclear protests? Do you think the military use of atomic power is a good thing?”

“Well no,” said Gus. “I just don’t think that protesting does any good. In fact, public protests in the wake of Three Mile Island are the reason why the peaceful use of atomic energy has ground to a halt in this country. But no protest has ever made a dent in the number of our nuclear missiles. And it never will.”

“You could show up anyway,” said Freeman. “Even an empty gesture has meaning. And you, with your new-found popularity, could mean an awful lot, maybe not to the government, but certainly to the populace.”

“Sure,” Gus said with a scowl as he rose to his feet, “and then I have to go back the next day to Caltech, where half of the physicists are hawks. It’s not worth it. And neither is this conversation.” After dropping a couple of twenty-dollar bills on the table, he pushed his way out and walked back towards the elevators.

“Well, at least he isn’t getting drunk,” remarked Pending.

“Congratulations,” Freeman said, turning to Delver. “You’ve just witnessed the rarely-seen grumpy side to Professor Guiseman. Keep telling him how brilliant he is and you’ll probably be fine. Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Delver: I have the utmost respect for Gus Guiseman. It’s just that I’m disappointed that he doesn’t fully live up to his incredible potential.” He looked down at the recently delivered bill, and used a pen to write out everyone’s shares after an infinitesimal pause to perform the calculations in his head. “Is there anything else you’d like to ask us?”

Delver stared in the direction that Gus had departed for several seconds, a disappointed frown on his face. With a sigh, he looked back at the others. “Are there a lot of Markists in physics?” he asked.

“Yes,” answered Freeman. “Although I resist the stereotype that most of the remainder are atheists. I for one am a practicing Christian.”

“Really?” Delver said, glancing at Gus’ vacated seat.

“Yes, and we get along wonderfully, tonight’s evidence to the contrary.”

“But…he’s pretty emphatic about his atheism.”

Dyson raised an invisible eyebrow. He collected himself for a few moments (watching as Delver took Gus’ place as the one squirming in his chair) before finally replying. “I believe that God created this universe, and that He created us. He endowed us with a sense of wonder and curiosity. The former is how we know that God exists. The latter is how we explore this universe, understand it, and use that knowledge to leave our mark on the universe, a mark that I am convinced will be mostly for good, for in doing this we will be emulating our Creator. But we will never understand Him, because He is incomprehensible.

“I have a problem with any Christian who claims that they know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what God’s intentions are. I believe that putting ‘certainty’ and ‘religion’ in the same sentence is an act of lunacy. I am a scientist, not because I want to know how everything works, or because I want to remove all mystery out of the universe, but because I believe that mystery is infinite, and the more we study it, the better we as humans become because of what we learn.

“Gus Guiseman’s beliefs are not that different from mine when you come down to it. There is no God at the summit in Gus’ mind, but other than that, there is the same reverence for mystery. Gus was in an interview with the BBC in 1981, and he was asked how he felt as an atheist not knowing what would happen to his soul after he died. And he said—”

“‘I don’t have to know an answer,’” Pending Theory quoted from memory. “‘I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, about being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.’” He laughed brokenly. “I really need to let him go.”

“I wish there were more atheists like him.”

Interlude: The Empire Contemplates Striking Back

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Interlude: The Empire Contemplates Striking Back

That night and half a world away, a group known as the Politburo met in a long and narrow room in the heart of the Kremlin in Moscow to advise Secretary-General Andropov on how best to reply to President Shooter’s latest speech. The average age of the dozen men in mostly rumpled gray suits was 68, although most of them looked at least a decade older than they really were. Only three of their number was born after the Russian Revolution.

“This session will come to order,” announced Nikolai Tikhonov, Andropov’s dull-looking second in command and the oldest member at age 80.

“Where’s the Secretary General?” asked Heydar Aliyev, a sharp-eyed man with a healthy tan.

“The Secretary is indisposed this evening,” Tikhonov explained as he unconsciously adjusted his tie. “However, he insisted that the meeting this evening continue regardless, to gauge your opinions on how we should respond to the American President’s overtures.”

The other members of the group nervously exchanged glances. The Politburo was always used to rubber-stamping the Secretary General’s opinions. To ask for their own opinions—well, what happened if they picked the wrong one?

Tikhonov turned to a bespectacled man with perpetually pursed lips. “Minister Gromyko, what is your opinion on the accuracy of the speech? If it’s a bluff, that will make our response much easier.”

Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko started polishing his glasses as he tried to buy some time. “Well in my opinion,” he said, stretching out his words, “American Presidents are still stuck dealing with the fallout of the Nixon presidency.”

“Now there was a president we could work with,” said Grigory Romanov, interrupting Gromyko. Romanov looked a bit like Rudolph Valentino might have if he had lived into his sixties, with a permanently arched brow and slicked-back hair. “Not to mention easy to manipulate.”

“As I was saying,” Gromyko continued, ignoring Romanov entirely, “Far Shooter wouldn’t dare to utter a lie that outrageous to his own people. Best-case scenario, he has been deluded into thinking this scheme is feasible.”

Tikhonov nodded in acknowledgement. “And the Americans themselves seem to be split on whether to believe this scheme is true. Their Newsweek magazine has already given it the spiteful nickname of ‘Star Wars’, after a popular fantasy of the prior decade. Marshal Ustinov, what would be the consequences if this program was real?”

“Dire, extremely dire,” answered Minister of Defense (and WWII war hero) Dimitri Ustinov, the only member of the group to wear a military uniform instead of a suit. “Most of my rocketry group was of the opinion that S.D.I. was impossible, especially the X-ray laser, but I knew that answer would be no use to the Secretary General, so I approached RYaN to get their opinion.”

A few members of the Politburo rolled their eyes at this point. The RYaN committee (“RYN” being the Russian acronym for “Nuclear Missile Attack”) had been put together by Andropov as a direct response to Far Shooter’s declaration that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire”; its goal was to prove that America was planning a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union, and to warn Andropov of the exact moment when that was about to happen, to give him the best chance to react.

Marshal Ustinov donned a pair of square-rimmed glasses as he consulted a page of typewritten figures. “I was given the following scenario, which seems to check out:

“First, the Americans build a space defense system capable of stopping our entire arsenal, and we build a matching system capable of stopping their entire arsenal. Assuming that the American government absorbs the development costs (as Far Shooter promised in his speech), construction would still cost us in the neighborhood of 250 billion rubles. This means that both governments’ defense budgets would be depleted.”

“Where did you get this estimate?” asked Tikhonov.

“We asked the American Chiefs of Staff, followed by the leader of the opposition party in Congress, and then averaged the two figures,” Ustinov replied.

“Second,” he continued, “the American economy would recover faster than our own. Sorry, Nikolai,” he said to Tikhonov, who happened to be the chief economic planner for the Soviet Union, “but it’s true.”

“No,” Tikhonov said with a sigh, “I agree. Carry on.”

“Third, America builds 200 more ICBMs, at a price of 150 million rubles. They can do this in less than a year. Thanks to our spies, we would know they were doing this from the moment the funds were allocated. However, to counter 200 ICBMs purely with space defense measures would cost 500 million rubles and would take us three years to finish. This inevitably leads to Step Four: Before we’ve had the chance to catch up, America launches a first strike at the Soviet Union, and we retaliate, sending our entire arsenals at each other. Their space defense would take out all of our missiles, while our space defense would take out all but let’s say 125 ICBMs and the 1250 nuclear warheads that they contain. Which would be enough to take out all of our major cities.

“Conclusion: Contrary to President Shooter’s assertions, the Strategic Defense Initiative will not end the Cold War. It will definitely win the war, for whoever can spend their money faster. And that’s why I recommend we strike now, while we still have a numerical advantage over the Americans.”

This statement caused an uproar among the membership in the room.

“Order, order!” Tikhonov cried out. “Comrade Gorbachev, I believe you have a rebuttal to Marshall Ustinov’s suggestion?”

Mikhail Gorbachev, at age 54, was the youngest man in the room. He was more clearly balding than most of the others, or perhaps he was the only one who didn’t spend thousands of rubles on undetectable hairpieces. His most obvious physical feature was the burgundy birthmark on the top of his head, shaped like a hand-drill, or perhaps like a key.

“I would like to remind my fellow members that there is a considerable difference between us losing World War III after being hit with 1250 warheads and everybody losing World War III as a result of 10,000 warheads being exchanged. The former marks the end of Russia and Communism, the latter marks The End, full stop.”

“Well perhaps a world ruled by the Americans doesn’t deserve to survive at all,” Ustinov said as a petulant rejoinder.

As the others were considering this there was a loud pounding at the door.

Tikhonov shook his head in exasperation before getting up and answering the door. “This had better be good, Viktor,” he said to the 62-year old aide standing outside (also in a rumpled gray suit).

“It’s the Secretary General,” Viktor told the others. “He’s been taken to Central Clinical.”

“The hospital!” exclaimed Gromyko. “What happened?”

“He asked for some time alone to examine a report on the economy. He heard him cry out, and we found him on the floor, in…well, it was a mess, let me leave it like that.”

“Not very surprising,” said Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, another hero of World War II and the one member that most carried himself like a movie star. “I helped put that report together, and the results are rather shocking.”

Tikhonov dismissed Viktor then returned to his seat with a sigh. “We were supposed to cover that report in tomorrow’s meeting, but it’s clear now that we’ll have to get it out of the way if we have any hope of giving the Secretary General a solid recommendation when he recovers from his current condition.”

“The long and the short of it is that the Soviet economy is poised for a complete and catastrophic collapse sometime before the end of this century,” said Shcherbytsky. “The problem dates back at least twenty years, but the moment of opportunity for reversing the trend ended during the latest Five Year Plan.”

“Which of course was my handiwork,” Tikhonov said grimly. “Very well. If you need a scapegoat for this disaster, I place myself fully at your disposal—you may have my resignation, and if that isn’t enough, go ahead and purge me. I only ask that you spare my family.” As he said this, he lowered his head down onto the symbolic chopping block.

Gorbachev reached out to raise him back up. “We don’t purge people anymore, Nikolai.”

“Unfortunately,” muttered Romanov.

“And a good deal of the blame goes with how much we’ve been sending to our allies to put down American-inspired insurrections,” Gromyko added. “Besides, somebody needs to lead the country until Andropov recovers.”

Tikhonov looked around him carefully, to see if anybody visibly wanted him to carry through on his offer to resign. “I’ll lead this committee for as long as you have confidence in me, and not one day longer. So, S.D.I.?”

Marshal Ustinov sighed. “I suppose I could put RYaN’s four-step scenario in a form simple enough for American voters to understand. Reword it so the Soviet Union is the dastardly first striker instead of America. And then feed it to the American Democratic Party through channels they think are loyal. That should generate enough confusion to keep it from being funded for at least a year.”

“I agree with Comrade Gromyko that the economy’s problems cannot be entirely blamed on Comrade Tikhonov,” said Shcherbytsky. “This matter with President Shooter definitely takes priority, for now.”

“Are we in agreement on both motions?” Tikhonov asked the group. “Any objections? The motions are hereby carried, and this meeting is now adjourned.”

Chapter 4: Markism for Unbelievers

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Chapter 4: Markism for Unbelievers

June 19, 1984.

Zero minus 9 days.

“Hey, Ed? It’s Gus. I’m not calling at a bad time, am I? Good. Look, about this research trip I’m on? It’s going to get a lot longer. Yes, I do remember what you told me about signing up with fly-by-night companies, but I really think I can do some good here. Yes, real science. Yes…look, that business with the U.F.O. spotters was just that one time, and I’m not going to make a dumb mistake like that again. Yes, yes I promise I’ll keep it out of the press if it turns out that I was wrong. Yeah, Gabe was fine with covering my classes for as long as it takes—I asked him before I left. He only threw two books at me, tops, and he wasn’t even aiming for my head! So we’re good, Ed? Ed, you…you’re not crying, are you? Look, I’ll make it up to you, I promise. No, I do. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ve got a limo lined up for me and everything. Alright? Alright? Alright.”

Gus hung up the hotel phone. “He took it even worse than Gwen did,” he commented to Delver, who was waiting outside the door of his room. He picked up his travel bag and followed the priest out of the building. “Any reason for the limo, by the way? A plane trip to Canterlot would be a lot faster.”

“You wanted to know about my faith, didn’t you?” Delver asked. “It’s rather hard to discuss secrets known to less than fifty people on the entire planet in a crowded airplane. A three-day car trip in a secure vehicle, on the other hand…”

Gus smiled. “And here I was thinking that our dinner companions last night might have made you regret taking me on.”

“Nobody’s perfect Gus, not even Markists.” He laughed rather awkwardly to make it abundantly clear that the last statement was supposed to be a joke. “So far, I still think I can trust you with my students. That’s the most important thing, since they’re the ones running the experiments.”

“Oh…right,” Gus said, realizing that he knew nearly nothing about either of Delver’s assistants. While he wasn’t looking, Gnosi snatched away his overnight bag and packed it into the trunk of the limo.

After getting acquainted with their driver, Gus, Delver and his two assistants climbed into the limousine. Gus sat next to Gnosi and across from Delver and Meridiem. Delver reached over to a plastic bar at the bottom of the glass separating the passenger compartment from the driver and pulled it up, covering the glass with a black panel. Pointing at an intercom, he explained that it was now the only way the driver would be able to hear them.

“I’m Gnosi, and this is Meridiem Tempest,” the older student said, holding out his hand.

Gus did a double take. “How’s your name spelled?”

“G-N-O-S-I.”

“I see. That’s got to be awkward during introductions.”

“You have no idea,” the young man said dryly.

After an awkward silence and a nudge from Gnosi, Meridiem was the next to shake Gus’ hand, gripping for only a brief moment before practically yanking the hand back. Afterwards, she turned to look out the window.

“I take it you’re both theology students,” said Gus.

“Yes, I hope to put my special talent to use in counseling,” said Gnosi.

“Oh, and what is your ‘special talent’?” asked Gus.

“I can…well…” Gnosi shrunk back. “I’ve never got a good reaction talking to unbelievers. Maybe when we get to Canterlot I can show you, and then you’ll understand.”

“Alright,” Gus said with a shrug. “And what do you hope to do, Miss Tempest? Does it have to do with your ‘special talent’?”

Meridiem sighed, still looking out the tinted window of the limousine. “My special talent is a waste of time.”

Gnosi chuckled, which caused Meridiem to roll her eyes. She turned back around, although she kept her eyes on Gnosi instead of Gus as she held up a pendant hanging around her neck that showed her hourglass mark. “Literally, it’s a waste of time,” she said. “So I don’t think I can use it in the ministry. Maybe I can be a secretary.”

“Or an administrator,” Gus joked. “They’re all really good at wasting time.”

Meridiem shot him a glare so cold that it took his breath away.

Before he had a chance to respond, Delver started loudly laughing at the joke, carrying on for nearly a minute before stopping himself to think. “Let me see…how should I cover this? Markism 101.”

“How about the way you taught us?” Meridiem asked, having gone back to window staring.

“Only about five times faster,” added Gnosi with a smile.

“Don’t leave anything out, even the stuff you might not believe wholeheartedly yourself,” said Gus. “With the bizarre physics we are dealing with, anything could turn out to be true, or a distorted version of the truth. Or at the very least wildly entertaining.”

“All right,” said Delver. “Why don’t you start by telling me everything you know about Markism?”

“Me?” asked Gus. “Not that much—religion generally doesn’t interest me. If it keeps you from going nuts when trying to comprehend the immensity and randomness of the universe, then good for you—as long as it doesn’t involve telling me what to do or think. So, Markism…pretty much an American religion, I think. I’ve travelled a lot, mostly to physics seminars, and the only place I remember seeing folks with rainbow-colored skin and hair (that wasn’t obviously dyed) was in the U.S. of A. As for American Markists, the distribution is pretty bunched up. There are a handful of states where the majority have brightly-colored skin, with a minority of pinks and darker shades. And there’s a bunch of other states that are mostly pink-to-brown with a scattering of greens and blues. Even states that brag about being 50/50 are really more like half 98% Markist towns interspersed with half 98% Christian towns.

“The second thing I know about is the stigma. You guys are big on getting along and the rights of animals—horses in particular, and that’s gotten translated into accusations of cowardice, especially every time America goes to war and most of you guys hold back. Believe me, as a Jew I understand. Like you, people only have to look at me to know what I am. And it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference that I haven’t actually believed in anything in decades—I’m still a Jew to them, with all the prejudices that are attached.

“You guys are really big on harmony. That word shows up all the time with you, to the point where I’m pretty sure it has a couple of hidden meanings the rest of us aren’t privy to.

“And finally, there’s the business with the marks, the visual shorthand you use for yourselves. Everyone gets one during adolescence and something changes when you get one. Not every single time, but often enough to seem way more than a coincidence.

“For example, take my daughter, Gloria.” Gus pulled out his wallet and showed the other three her picture—in doing this, he had finally succeeded in attracting Meridiem’s attention. “She’s adopted, obviously, and her birth parents were Markists, equally obviously. When she was old enough, I insisted that she research her birth religion, so she could have the facts to deal with the stigma issue I mentioned previously. A few years later she had some disturbing dreams—which, as a non-believer she did the right thing in not telling me anything about—and went to the local priest. A couple hours later, she came back to us with her mark, which she then put away and never showed to anyone else as far as I know. Gloria is very serious about her Judaism, you see. Everyone else in my home is, as a matter of fact. Which is very weird to me, as my faith is supposed to be passed down by the female side of the family, and my wife was Christian before meeting me. But that’s beside the point.

“What I mean to say is that my daughter had two passions before getting her mark: the cello, and photography. It goes against my core values as a supportive and loyal father to say this, but she wasn’t very good at either one. She was good enough to do either activity for fun for the rest of her life, but not good enough to get paid. Until she got her flashbulb mark. Now every picture she takes makes a mockery of the wall it’s hung on, because it belongs in the Smithsonian. Her compositions and lighting are perfect, and even the most stubborn subject bares his soul to her through the lens of her disposable camera. This sort of thing is the miracle which sustains your religion throughout all of the ugliness it has been subjected to through history.

“I don’t think there’s anything else I can add to that. So, let me hear the rest of it.”

“In the beginning was the Goddess, and the Goddess was perfection,” Delver intoned in a deep voice. “She created a Perfect World of Harmony so that She might have followers to practice and spread that perfection throughout time and space. And so She made followers, in Her own image, and all was right and good for a time.

“The Demoness looked upon this world, and She was jealous. So She invaded the Perfect World of Harmony, and attempted to change it into her own world. Goddess and Demoness fought for control, and in the end, the Goddess won, and the Demoness was cast out of the Perfect World, never to return.” Delver turned his head, looking off in the distance. “Now during this battle a mirror shard, a piece of the Perfect World, was broken off and lost to corruption. It was cast aside and left to rot. This Earth we live on is that very shard. The Goddess holds Earth in contempt, and has nothing but disgust for the evil and follies of mankind. But the Markists, the true followers of the Goddess, persist in upholding Her values, in the hope that we might someday purify the human race, and bring this Earth back into perfection, so She might accept us into Her arms once again.” Delver sighed and looked away. “That’s still the way they teach it to the toddlers. Nobody truly believes in it anymore, and I think that’s a good thing. It reeks too much of self-loathing and puritanism for my tastes. Besides, I think it more accurate to say that the Goddess has a full-time job governing her original World, and respects the free will thing we have going on here, even if She doesn’t seem so keen to allow it to spread to Her own subjects.”

“OK, I think I remember hearing something vaguely similar applied to Christianity a few years ago,” Gus interjected, “when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.”

“You mean Gnosticism?” asked Gnosi.

“Um, I think so,” said Gus. “That and the Parable of the Cave by Plato.”

“Fair enough,” said Delver. “Now we move past what is taught to our own believers and dig into the Sacred Secrets. To begin with, the Goddess doesn’t look like a human. In fact, there are no humans on the Perfect World.”

“Aliens?” Gus asked incredulously.

“Perhaps,” answered Delver, “but that makes the fact we can converse with our Goddess rather unlikely. The Perfect World has houses with doors and windows, towns and cities, farms that churn butter. They have teacups, Gus.”

On seeing the professor still having trouble understanding what Delver was implying, Meridiem reluctantly continued. “For every Markist, there is a matching individual on their world. Marks are part of their biology. All the Marking ceremony does is to temporarily strengthen the bond between the pair so that knowledge of the mark might be passed between them.”

“It’s an alternate Earth?” Gus ventured.

“That’s our best guess,” said Delver.

“But alternate universes are not supposed to be physically possible.”

“Why’s that?” asked Gnosi.

“Because this universe is the superimposed sum of all possible universes,” explained Gus.

“Sum Over Histories,” said Meridiem quietly. “I minored in Particle Physics,” she said by way of explanation, “and we spent one day in class going over the theory and trying it out.”

“But I can’t see any other way to explain the similarities,” countered Gnosi. “Could you explain the concept in terms a theologian could understand?”

Gus rolled his eyes. “Couldn’t you do it?” he asked Meridiem.

Meridiem’s face went white as she suddenly found herself on the spot. “I…uh, well…it’s the sum of the square roots of the probabilities for each possible outcome, only they aren’t exactly probabilities…I’m really no good at explaining complex concepts.”

“Gus, could you please help them out?” Delver asked.

Gus paused for a moment as he tried to come up with an excuse—he hated teaching Physics 101 for exactly this reason. But then he thought back to some of the things his friends confronted him with last night and took a deep breath. “Alright. Have you ever heard of the two-slit experiment?”

“I’ve heard of it…” Gnosi said in a way that clearly meant he had no idea what it actually meant.

Gus looked in vain for a chalkboard before continuing. “OK, imagine you have a barrier with a screen behind it, and you cut two slits into the barrier, and then you shine light at it. Normally, you’d get two beams of light on the screen. Now imagine instead you have the same setup stuck into a pool of water, the slits are about a centimeter wide each, and they are two centimeters apart. You’ve got a layer of florescent dye floating on top of the water. You use a fin attached to a motor at one end of the pool to generate a constant stream of waves, and then you turn out the lights and focus only on how the glowing dye washes up against the far wall of the tank. The dye will deposit above and below the resting level of the water some of the time, when a wave crest or trough hits the wall. Or, it will deposit higher or lower than the magnitude of the waves, when two wave crests or two waves hit the wall at the same time and reinforce each other—that’s reinforcement. And finally, some of the dye will end up right at the water level, either because the wave hit it right between a wave and a trough, or because a crest and a trough both hit the wall at the same time, and cancelled each other out—that’s interference. The overall pattern of the dye, where it bunches up the most vs. where it is thinnest, is called an ‘interference pattern’.

Gus closed one eye then held up his two index fingers, peering out between them. He then slowly moved his fingers closer together. “Now if you go back to the light version, you make the slits really thin, and put them only a few micrometers apart from one another, you get a similar interference pattern, proving that light can act like a wave.”

“Alright, I guess I can accept that,” said Gnosi. “But where do alternate realities come in?”

“Imagine turning down the intensity of that light source. Down and down and down, until the grid of detectors that we’re using instead of a screen pick up each individual photon. Light is now behaving like a stream of particles. But if we keep this extremely-weak light source on for a few hours, we still end up with an interference pattern. The individual photons strike the grid in seemingly-random positions, but the more photons we get, the more the results look like the exact same interference pattern. The problem is: if the photons are coming in one at a time, what are they interfering with?”

“I…what…are you sure that’s what happens?” Gnosi asked. “It doesn’t make any sense. Maybe there’s more than one photon in each ‘drop’ of light.”

“Okay, well in that case we can try yet another version of the experiment, only using electrons. We can measure mass and charge now, so we’re absolutely certain we’re sending only one electron through the two slits at a time. And still we get an interference pattern, one that shows that electrons also act like waves. So again: what is an individual electron interfering with? It must be interfering with other electrons, but across time. But that also raises objections.

“So try looking at it like this: A particle comes out of the emitter. It could go this way,”—pointing up and to the right—“or it could go that way”—pointing down and to the left. “Or it could go through the first slot, or the second, or it could curve around and strike the emitter. Take every possible path that the particle could go, thousands of them, maybe even millions. And calculate the probability that the particle would follow that particular path. But these aren’t regular probabilities; they are probability amplitudes, which I won’t even try to explain, other than to say you can get one from the other. So you take each outcome, weighted by its probability amplitude, and you add them all up, and the result is what that particle will do. This is Sum Over Histories.

“Sum Over Histories works, so that means there can’t be alternate realities.”

“Okay, you had me until that last part,” said Gnosi.

Gus took in a deep breath, closing his eyes as he collected himself. “It comes down to definitions,” he finally explained. “What is an alternate reality, but a world that differs from our own by some quantum-mechanical change? You want a world without Hitler? Well the decision by his parents not to conceive is at its root a change where a particular pair of electrons travel in a particular way in a pair of brains, and that is quantum mechanical. Sum Over Histories means that the particular variation you’re thinking of somehow split itself off from regular reality, creating an alternate reality without Adolf Hitler. But that possibility was already one of the multiple possibilities that was summed to create our reality. That one can’t exist, because it died to create this one. Now do you understand me?”

“I suppose so,” Gnosi said with a sulk. “But without alternate realities, how can you explain the similarities between Equestria and Earth?”

“I can’t,” Gus said with a shrug. “Yet. Once I get a chance to perform a few experiments, I might be able to come up with a working theory. It’s probably the first thing I’ll do when I get to that lab of yours. So how else are the two worlds similar?”

“Well for one thing, Equestria is mostly populated by creatures, both intelligent and not, that we consider to be mythological here on Earth. Dragons, minotaurs, unicorns and pegasi are among the dominant species. The Goddess Herself resembles a cross between a unicorn and a pegasus.”

“Only She’s horse-sized,” added Meridiem. “The majority of unicorns and pegasi are half her size, and call themselves ponies, alongside a group called ‘earth ponies’ that lack ‘accessories’, but make up for it with increased strength and endurance.”

“Only the ponies have counterparts that are Markists, and only ponies have marks,” Delver continued. “This means that we know far more about the ponies than we do about the other races. They call their land, or perhaps their entire planet ‘Equestria’.”

“You understand that all this is completely ridiculous, right?” asked Gus.

“That’s part of why it’s not general knowledge.”

“Yeah,” said Gus with a laugh, “I can imagine how much worse it would be for you guys if everyone knew about the tiny horses. I suppose you’re going to say that explains the bit about the hay smoke. Actually in that case, what does that make my ‘Perfect World’ counterpart?”

“A griffon,” answered Gnosi. On seeing the blank look on Gus’ face, he added, “That’s a creature with the front half of an eagle, and the back half of a lion.”

Gus shrugged. “Kind of weird, but less ridiculous than ponies, I guess. So how did this religion get started?”

Chapter 5: Markist History, Part 1

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Chapter 5: Markist History, Part 1

At this point, Delver went into full-scale storytelling mode. “Before your discovery, all the mark plaques in the world came from a single source: a meteor bigger than this car which crashed to Earth in the year 1010. Picture the scene if you will: On the plains of northern Syria, two of the most ruthless rulers of the era faced off in battle to determine who would rule the Middle East: the Byzantine Empire or the Fatimid Caliphate.

“Byzantine Emperor Basil II was crowned at the age of five in 963, dominated by advisers and generals that soon tore the empire apart in civil war. Basil bided his time until his eighteenth birthday then ruthlessly put down the rebellions. He attempted to take back land taken from the empire by the Bulgars in 986, but was defeated by an army led by Bulgar Emperor Samuel, leading to yet another revolt back home and the loss of his entire army to an usurper. Basil married his sister to the Tsar of Russia, and in this way gained the loyalty of the Varangian Guard, the backbone of the Byzantine army for the next five centuries. With the Varangians, he assumed total control, crushing the traitorous nobility under heavy taxation. By all accounts he was a simple man who preferred the company of soldiers to living in the imperial palace. He liked to roll his side whiskers between his fingers when he was thinking. He mumbled when he tried to give speeches, but had an infectious laugh. With his tall torso and short legs, he looked much better on horseback than he did in person.

“Fatamid Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah was born in Cairo in 985, and succeeded his father in 996, at the age of eleven. Just as with Emperor Basil, there was some civil strife over who would have ultimate power during Al-Hakim’s minority, ending in the Year 1000, like Basil’s minority did, with a bloody purge. In his solo rule, Al-Hakim sought to be an exemplary ruler to his Shiite subjects, while being an enemy to both the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, as well as to the Jews and Christians within his domain. In this later activity, he was acting against the traditions of hundreds of years of seeing such believers as ‘People of the Book’ to be gently persuaded to convert, instead outlawing the creation of the wine used in religious rites and in 1009 ordering the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the act which not only was the reason used nearly a century later by Pope Urban II to convince Christian rulers to join the Crusades, but which also triggered Emperor Basil to invade. These actions gave him the name ‘The Mad Caliph’ in the annals of Christian historians, while among his Muslim subjects grew a sect that came to see him as a sort of god, the Druze. He was a thin man, clean-shaven, with a gaze that seemed to see abstractions and eternities more easily than actual facts and individuals. He wasn’t particularly tall, but carried himself like a giant.

“The two armies met at Aleppo, on the shortest day of the year. Both armies were enormous, and both used religious rhetoric to whip their numbers into a blood-thirsty frenzy. And then at dawn, as both armies were rushing towards each other, this great flaming sphere fell out of the sun and embedded itself into the ground right between them.

“The soldiers fled in terror. The generals and their superiors, the Emperor and the Caliph, stayed to ponder this obvious omen. As the stone glowed yellow like gold, it was thought to be a sign from God. The two leaders met on the battlefield, shook hands, and left as firm allies. What each one did in the wake of this miracle was vastly different.

“Basil II invaded Bulgaria for a second time in 1014. At Kleidon his Varangians defeated an army of 45,000, leaving only 15,000 alive as prisoners of war. Basil ordered that of these prisoners, 999 out of every 1000 be blinded, with the lone exception having only one of his eyes put out. These fifteen one-eyed men were then left to lead 14,985 fully-blind soldiers back to the Bulgarian capital of Prespa. The shock of seeing what happened to his men gave Emperor Samuel a fatal heart attack. For this act of barbarism against his fellow Christians, Basil II has gone down in history as Boulgaroktonos—the Bulgar Slayer. He extended Byzantine sovereignty into Croatia, the Crimea, Georgia and Armenia. He was trying to conquer Sicily when he died in 1025.

“Al-Hakim immediately stopped his persecution of Christians and Jews. He tried to reconcile with Caliph Al-Qadir of Baghdad, to which Al-Qadir reacted by having his holy men publish a manifesto accusing the Fatimids of being of Jewish descent and Al-Hakim himself of being a secret Christian. After a decade of being demonized by his enemies and deified by his over-enthusiastic followers, the Caliph of Cairo walked out of the gates of his birth city into the desert wastes on February 12, 1021. He was never seen again.”

Delver held up his hand, cradling an imaginary stone. “What about the meteorite?” he asked. “Well Aleppo was in a territory that changed possession between Byzantines and Fatimids multiple times during this period, and no matter who was in charge, they could count on a man named al-Asfar to be a thorn in their sides. He claimed to be a devout dervish (at least when a Muslim ruler was in charge) but in fact was simply an opportunist out to get whatever he could. In the wake of the ‘non battle’ of Aleppo, al-Asfar came out to the field and inspected the still yellow-hot stone. He came back a few days later with a makeshift iron box on wheels with a door in front that he carefully rolled the stone into using poles.”

“A smart move,” commented Gus. “A hunk of iron glowing yellow hot would have a surface temperature of around 1000 °C.”

“Al-Asfar stuck a couple of long poles on the side,” Delver continued, “and hired some slaves to push and pull the box around.

“Al-Asfar rolled his box up to the walls of Aleppo, and demanded that the city surrender to him, or else face the wrath of his ‘sun stone’. The city, quite used to transfers of power, did what it was told. And before long al-Asfar had carved out a little kingdom for himself in Syria. His pattern would remain the same: walk up to a city in the predawn hours, open the little door in the box so everyone could see the glow, demand surrender, and then spend a few days in debauchery and plunder before moving on to the next city. Soon there was a second iron box being pushed around by slaves. This one was smaller, and was filled with gold and jewels instead of a meteor. Al-Asfar kept all the treasure. When the slaves asked what their reward was for pushing the heavy box around, he skinned their leader alive then answered the rest of them with the whip.

“When he reached the port city of Acre in northern Israel, the governor had the gall to call al-Asfar on his bluff, daring him to use his stone to level the city. The brigand had no idea how to handle this, so he got himself thoroughly drunk and fell asleep. His slaves took this opportunity to stab him to death then ran off with the box containing all the money. The next day, the governor ventured out to al-Asfar’s camp, figured out what happened, and loudly proclaimed himself victor of the ‘battle’. He then had the sun stone transferred to the top of a tower that was constructed for it on the eastern corner of the ramparts, so it could be seen by travelers coming upon the city at sunrise. Decades passed, and eventually the stone had changed color from yellow to red—”

“Meaning that it was only 700 °C instead of 1000 °C,” Gus added.

“Yes,” said Delver. “In an official ceremony in the year 1070, it was transferred to a new rampart on the western side of the city, so it lined up with the sunset now instead of the sunrise. It should be noted that in all this time, no one had ever touched the stone with their bare skin.

“In 1189, during the Third Crusade, the city of Acre was put under siege. The army of Saladin surrounded the Crusader army, thereby besieging the besiegers. In June of 1191, King Richard I ‘The Lionheart’ of England arrived, a man who was an expert at siege warfare. The final attack was on July 11th. By this point the supports of the ‘Sun Tower’ had been undermined by projectile fire, and so it was decided to deliberately collapse it upon the besiegers—to smite the Crusaders with the power of Allah. King Richard, at the forefront of the siege, was the one to be struck by the falling stone, knocked from the ladder he was climbing and onto the ground. The troops were so infuriated by this insult to their king that they carried the day, and followed their victory with a gruesome sack of the city.

“Richard, it turned out, was relatively unharmed from his fall, and in the wake of his army’s victory he insisted on inspecting the object which had been thrown at him. By this date it no longer glowed, but still radiated a detectable amount of heat. Richard removed his metal glove and touched the stone with his bare hand, and immediately fell unconscious.

“King Philip II Augustus of France lent his finest bloodletters, and yet not even that was enough to cure King Richard of his deathlike slumber. His body was moved to his ship, and he was surrounded at all times by priests praying for his soul. Finally he awoke on the 15th, but seemed to be in a daze. After regaining his strength he demanded to speak with Saladin, carrying wisdom from ‘beyond the grave’.

“Saladin had been very reluctant to meet with the Crusaders before now, partially for fear of deception, but mostly from the realization that the Crusaders had outfought him, and knew that any negotiations made now would act to make his losses permanent. But he had his share of superstitions, so he agreed to Richard’s request. He—”

Delver stopped on realizing that the limo had pulled up to the Holiday Inn in Toledo, Ohio, where they would be staying the night. “Richard and Saladin made peace,” he quickly summarized, “and everyone was amazed at Richard’s change in character. Tomorrow I’ll cover how Markism as a religion was born, and its effect on English history.”

Chapter 6: Confrontation in a Small Hotel Room

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Chapter 6: Confrontation in a Small Hotel Room

Dinner was taken at a café that bragged about their steaks.

Gus got a hamburger. “Oh, I remember the days I could eat steak without consequences,” he said sadly patting his belly.

Delver, Gnosi and Meridiem all ordered vegetarian.

“That isn’t a requirement for all Markists, is it?” Gus asked as they waited for their food.

“No,” answered Delver. “There is a general concern that any animals we eat died humanely, but nothing more than that, at least for laity. For priests, however, strict vegetarianism is seen as a sign of piety, much like celibacy among Catholic priests. Personally I just see it as a test of obedience—if you have enough willpower to stop eating bacon, then you’ve proven you can be trusted with the Sacred Secrets.”

“Second question,” Gus prompted after a laugh. “Who else was in the running for my job?”

“I beg your pardon?” asked Delver.

“Well, you interviewed a few people to find out more about me. Why would you do that unless you were making up your mind who to offer the job to? I just want to know if I beat out Linus Pauling or not.”

“No, it was always just you,” Delver explained. “The point of the interviews was to convince my boss to drop his objections.”

Gus smiled mischievously. “Well if you’re a bishop, then that means your boss is an archbishop. I gotta say, I never thought I’d reach the glorious height of offending an archbishop! What did I possibly do to get on his naughty list?”

“You’re right that my superior is an archbishop, in fact the only remaining archbishop in the Markist religion, the archbishop of Baltimare [Baltimore]. And he got his opinion of you from your FBI file: ‘possible communist, possible anarchist, and most certainly…’”

Delver looked around at Gnosi and Meridiem, cueing all three to complete the quotation: “‘Too smart for his own good.’”

Gus had a good belly laugh at that. “I dearly hope that last part ends up being my epitaph,” he said.

He noticed that Meridiem’s grin at uttering the assessment soon faded into her usual glumness.

“As for the more-serious charges, the communism one was for you not testifying against Oppenheimer in 1954 and the anarchist one was tied to your safe-cracking activities at Las Alamos.

“I refuted the communism charge by quoting arch-patriot Wernher von Braun: ‘In England, Oppenheimer would have been knighted.’ And as for the safe-cracking, that was you pointing out an obvious security hole to people with no sense of humor. That got me to the point where I only had to perform a security clearance, complete with interviews, before he allowed me to have anything to do with you. And as your wife probably told you, we ended up dropping the matter anyway.”

“Speaking of which, what business does even an archbishop have to gain access to classified FBI files?”

“‘It turns out there are certain perks that come from having one of our own in the Oval Office,’” Delver said, quoting the archbishop. “I’ve just got to hope that he doesn’t decide to drop in one day and interview you in person.”

“What? I can be good.”

“It wouldn’t help,” Delver said with a shake of his head. “The Archbishop strongly believes that science has no business mixing with religion. If it wasn’t for…a powerful friend on my side, my research lab would have been shut down years ago.”

It was at that point that the group’s meals arrived, ending their conversation.

& & &

That night, Gus was in his room, reading The Best of the Journal of Irreproducible Results when there was a knock at the door. Seeing as he was still dressed, he merely had to make sure his hair wasn’t too “mad scientist” before opening the door.

Standing before him was Meridiem Tempest, wearing a trench coat that appeared to be covering at least three layers of clothing.

The air conditioning in the hotel was turned up a little high, but Gus still thought this was over-kill.

“Can we talk?” she asked.

“If it will clear the air between us, then by all means,” Gus said, stepping aside to let her in. He started to close the door, but then on second thought left it open.

Meridiem sat in an office chair at the far end of the hotel room and then waited for Gus to sit on the edge of the bed opposite her. “It’s about something Mary Louise Bell said in her interview.”

“My second wife.”

“Yes.”

“Well in general I would say that for anything bad she says about me, half are outright lies, and the other half only slightly exaggerated truth.” He put on a rueful smile. “Whatever else I can say about her? She was and is one of the smartest women I have ever met, so she’d certainly be clever enough to lace her worst accusations with truth. So, what did she tell you?”

“She said you slept with your students. Is that true?”

Gus was quiet for several moments, looking Meridiem coolly in the eyes. “I engaged in several affairs between the years of 1948 and 1963, a period that overlaps in its entirety with my marriage with Mary Louise. I don’t deny that I was mostly at fault for our divorce. Were some of them students? Yes. But they wanted it as much as I did. You have to understand it was a different era—the Eighties appear to me to be a moral throwback compared to the swinging era of the Fifties and Sixties. I hope I’m not offending you.”

“I’m not offended.”

“Good. Then you can understand that we were just having fun. And from ’52 to ’56, when I was married to Mary Louise, I refrained from approaching my female students at all, to keep them from being tarnished with the false accusation of being a ‘home wrecker’. Does that satisfy you?”

“No,” Meridiem said simply.

“Well, let me assure you that I did not coerce them. If I found a student attractive, I’d find a moment when we were alone together to let her know how I felt, and I made it very clear that she could say no, and it wouldn’t affect her negatively in any way. And there were a few young women who said no to me, and I held to my word. And none of them have come to me or a newspaper afterwards, to say that I did something wrong.”

Meridiem was quiet for nearly a minute before relying. “Well, that’s not as bad as I feared, but I gotta tell you something: you did coerce them. You didn’t think you were, but you were. I speak from experience.

“I was the only female in my graduate physics classes. I had to constantly deal with the prejudices of my classmates—that I was only there because I was pretty, or that I must be a lesbian, or that there was something wrong with me. Because ‘good girls’ didn’t do science. And this feeling of disapproval hit me anytime I told someone else what I was studying. Even from a lot of Markists. So, without any social support, I was utterly dependent on the fairness of my teachers, something I could never be sure of getting.

“I had had a rough year, with bad financial planning on my part forcing me to take two jobs to afford my third year, when I had my biggest and hardest course load. And then my father died, and my mother remarried almost immediately to the man she had been cheating with for years. My new step-father was the teacher of the class I was having the most trouble with. He was willing to tutor me for free. Only it wasn’t free at all.”

Gus began to feel rather uncomfortable.

“I’ll skip past the After-School Special part of the story. Eventually, far too late, I tried to break it off. And he flunked me. I appealed to my mother, and rather than believe that her husband was a monster, she threw me out of the house.

“That man was a hero in the town I grew up in—he single-handedly saved three thousand jobs when the local factory shut down a decade ago. There was no way that a ‘tramp who gave away her virginity’ would be believed, not against him. So I dropped out, moved to Canterlot, and started over.”

She looked up at him and smiled. “And then I had my nervous breakdown, and Gnosi pulled me out, but that’s a story for another day. What I’m saying is that people that age think they understand how the world works, and they don’t bother to ask around to see if they are wrong or not. I’m positive that I’m not the only young woman in a male-dominated field who believed that the only way to succeed was to sell our bodies. The only thing that makes you different is that you didn’t stoop so low to take advantage of the power you had been given by dumb girls like me.”

“I…I don’t know what to say,” Gus replied. “I had no idea.”

“Oh, I’m sure some of them were just as sexually liberated as you thought they were. But I seriously doubt that all of them were like that.”

“Well…I’ll seek them out. Find out what happened. And apologize. This late in the game, it’s all I can do.”

Meridiem nodded and got up. “Yes,” she said. She held out her hand for Gus to shake. “I’m glad we got that settled. I’m a lot more comfortable with working with you now. Well good night, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Good night.”

The door closed. Gus went to the bathroom, took his handful of pills, got undressed, went to bed, and turned out the light.

He lay there for several hours in the dark, reviewing his memories.

Interlude: White Hot War

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Interlude: White Hot War

The Kremlin, June 19, 1985.

Marshal Dimitri Ustinov, Minister of Defense for the Soviet Union, walked slowly down a random hallway, his attention centered on the contents of a manila folder.

He was quickly joined by Grigory Romanov, the man responsible for coordinating the USSR’s industries and in particular, its military-industrial complex. He looked around to be sure they were alone before speaking. “Have you heard the latest about Andopov?”

“No,” said Ustinov, not looking up.

“Liposarcoma. Tumor bigger than a football. I got the lead surgeon to tell me everything. He’s got six months, at the most. Thinks he got it from observing nuclear tests.”

Ustinov grunted before turning over a page in the folder. “Andropov used to go to every one of those tests in the Forties and Fifties, got far closer to Ground Zero than the scientists said was safe. It’s how he first came to Stalin’s attention. He owned his career to those tests. If he had been honest about his condition six months ago, we never would have elected him secretary general.”

“Thanks to that economic report, Tikhonov is completely discredited. I think that opens a clear path for you to become Andropov’s successor.”

Ustinov stopped for just a moment to think this over then resumed walking. “Gorbachev has a substantial following.”

“Gorbachev is weak,” insisted Romanov. “And he seems just as flummoxed about Far Shooter as the rest of us.” He pulled a paperback out of his coat pocket and placed it in the open folder. “If you started predicting and countering his moves, that should be enough to guarantee the election.”

Ustinov picked up the book. “The Elements of Harmony,” he read aloud in English. “The holy book of the Markists?”

“Closest thing they have to one,” explained Romanov.

Ustinov stopped, tucked the folder under one arm, and hefted the book in his free hand before flipping through the pages. “Doesn’t look that bad. You know, I made myself read the entire Quran before we invaded Afghanistan. Wanted to have a better understanding of the people I’d be dealing with. But I’m perfectly happy where I am. Why don’t you go after the position yourself? You’ve got more than enough ideas on how to run the Union.”

“I’m a Romanov,” the other man said with a shrug. “There’s no way that a Romanov will ever be trusted with supreme power in Russia ever again. And besides—”

Hearing footsteps approaching, the two men ceased their semi-treasonous talk of replacing Andropov. Ustinov slipped the suspect book he had been given into his coat pocket.

After a few seconds, the pair was approached by Andrei Gromyko (Minister of Foreign Affairs) and Viktor Chebrikov (Andropov’s successor as head of the KGB, a big step up from being a glorified messenger boy just the day before).

“Greetings, comrades,” said Chebrikov.

“Greetings,” Romanov replied, with a nod of the head. “Congratulations on your new position.”

“I will do my utmost to be worthy of it. So, have you heard the news about our dear Secretary-General?”

“Not too bad, I hope?” Romanov asked, his face a perfect projection of hope.

“Not good—he’s in a medically induced coma,” said Gromyko. “We’ll know the exact diagnosis tomorrow. It’s a bad piece of timing. Have you heard the latest about Far Shooter?”

“What did he do now?” Romanov asked.

“He’s been shot.”

“Shot?!” Romanov and Ustinov exclaimed in unison.

“Yes, he is currently under observation. His bodyguards did an excellent job; he was only grazed across the temple. Actually, the blow to his head when he fell was more severe—there’s some talk of possible brain damage.”

“Who was responsible?” asked Romanov, before turning to Chebrikov. “Were we behind it?”

Chebrikov laughed. “If the KGB wanted to take out the American president, we’d be fools not to take care of the vice president at the same time. No, this was an American lone wolf, an anti-Markist fanatic who got lucky.”

“Why would we need to take out the Vice President?” asked Romanov.

“Because he’s One Bush,” answered Chebrikov, “the former director of the CIA, and the one Markist in government more virulently anti-Communist than the President.”

“His name is actually ‘One Bush’?” asked Marshal Ustinov.

“That’s nothing,” said Gromyko. “He has three sons with names just as odd. All together they are One Bush, Two Bush, Red Bush and Blue Bush. I hear that Blue Bush is rather the odd duck of the family.”

“I’ll never understand this Markist business for as long as I live,” said Chebrikov.

An awkward moment of silence enveloped the quartet, during which Ustinov unconsciously reached down and patted the pocket containing The Elements of Harmony.

“So,” Gromyko finally said, pointing at Ustinov’s folder. “Have you got any news for us, or is that classified?”

“Oh!” Ustinov exclaimed, looking down at it. “NATO is conducting a training exercise in the north Pacific—the largest gathering of ships and personnel in military history.”

“A ‘training exercise’?!” exclaimed Romanov. “Do the Americans think we are stupid? Do they think we have forgotten that just such a ‘training exercise’—Operation Barbarossa—was how Adolf Hitler disguised his invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941?” The war survivor slammed a fist into his hand. “Not this time, not this time!”

Marshal Ustinov nodded in agreement before continuing. “Obviously, the clear goal of this exercise is to provoke our military into doing something stupid—they are sending their fighter jets right up to the border of our airspace before turning around at the last possible second, over and over again.” He pointed to one particular photograph. “We have definite proof that they flew over the Kurile Islands last night, ‘by accident’.”

“How do you plan to respond?” asked Gromyko.

“I’ll propose to the Politburo that we send the exact same number and corresponding type of aircraft over the Aleutian Islands,” Ustinov replied.

“Sounds reasonable,” said Romanov.

“Furthermore,” Ustinov said, pointing at a photograph of an aircraft carrier covered with a tarp, “America is shipping new Pershing II missiles to Western Europe, missiles capable of destroying any of our missile silos or command bunkers in the western Soviet Union within six minutes of being launched, and able to be relocated at will, and be launched within minutes of that relocation.” The photograph had the stamp “RYaN” in the corner.

“We…we can’t counter that,” said Chebrikov in shock. “America won’t even need S.D.I. to win the war now. An American first strike is guaranteed to succeed.”

“And this is the moment when our leadership is paralyzed, and theirs is run by a war fanatic,” concluded Romanov. “Face it, comrades: the Cold War has suddenly become hot—thoroughly white hot.”

& & &

The near-incursions of Soviet airspace continued long into the night of June 19^th.

High above, a network of satellites known as Oko (Russian for “Eye”) monitored the airspace above America for the telltale infrared signature of a nuclear launch. The satellites, like the rest of the Soviet space program, operated as much on willpower as solid engineering. The network took a decade from conception to become operational, and were plagued with bugs, mostly of the computer variety in the monitoring stations outside Moscow and near the Pacific coast, but those were all fixed now. But there was one bug that had not manifested before the night of June 19^th, a bug caused by sunlight reflecting off the tops of high-altitude clouds over North Dakota at precisely the wrong angle.

Receiving the data from those satellites was another network, this one of bunkers dug far beneath the earth of both cities and farmland. Each bunker was a tiny bastion of bureaucratic conformity: the same clean walls and standardized prints of quiet landscapes, the same brands of state-built heaters and air conditioners to warm or cool, the same color of blue-white fluorescent light. Inside these rooms were clean-shaven men with white collars and perfectly-trimmed nails, men trained to be quiet and follow the one supreme order: to answer missile with missile, to use Mutually-Assured Destruction to guarantee the peace.

The American network of underground bunkers was developed independently, but was almost entirely identical to the Soviet network.

Stanislav Petrov, a 45-year old lieutenant colonel from Vladivostok, was the officer on duty at the Moscow bunker just after midnight—4 pm in North Dakota—when the Oko network announced that the Americans had just launched a missile over the North Pole towards the Soviet Union, accompanied by the loud howl of a warning klaxon. The computer network reported that the chance that this was a legitimate launch was 100%, after going through 30 levels of cross-checking. There was no way this was a fault of the bunker computers.

Petrov stared long and hard at this display. A first strike—the beginning of the end of the world—that consisted of only one missile. A missile that would strike its target in 35 minutes. There were only two ways to validate the data from Oko: visual confirmation from Oko’s cameras, or ground radar. The pictures relayed by the satellites showed random sparkles and glare from the late afternoon American sun, but no telltale puffs of smoke from a launch. But the pictures were low resolution, easy to misread—in short, fallible. Ground radar was not, but ground radar couldn’t see over the horizon. Petrov switched off the alarm as the other men in the bunker stared at him. He stood there in the tense silence and waited, and waited, for better pictures from Oko, for radar confirmation, his hand resting on the phone to Central Command. One call, and the Soviet war machine would awaken, answering that lone missile with thousands of theirs.

Then the alarm went off again. There was a second missile, followed by a third, a fourth and a fifth. The new missiles had all been launched from the same location in North Dakota.

The phone rang. It was Marshal Ustinov himself, and he wanted to know whether this was an actual attack or not.

It still didn’t make sense to Petrov—why only five missiles? He thought about how much damage five missiles would cause: hundreds of deaths, a handful of Soviet missile silos incapacitated. And then he thought about the damage that would be caused by the entire Soviet arsenal, even if the Americans never launched another missile after those five: hundreds of millions of deaths in a matter of seconds, the planet permanently poisoned. The Soviet Union victorious, only to slide into radiation poisoning and death within a decade.

He calmly told the Marshal that it was a bug, despite the fact this bug appeared to be impossible. The klaxons rang around him, but Petrov stood his ground.

Finally, fifteen minutes later, the ground radar network failed to pick up any of the North Dakotan missiles. And five minutes after that, the missiles disappeared from Oko’s sensors. The sun had moved just enough to remove the reflections. They were just a bug.

The next day, Marshal Ustinov signed the paperwork firing Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov and smearing his reputation so badly that nobody would ever believe anything he said ever again. Of course he signed it. If the Politburo was unwilling to admit that their supreme leader was in a coma that he was never going to awaken from, they weren’t about to admit, to their own people or to the world, that their vaunted early warning system could be fooled by some rogue clouds.

“In the old days, we would have had him sent to the gulags,” groused Romanov when Ustinov told him the story.

“Yes, yes,” agreed Ustinov wearily.

“But you still have a long-term problem. A tried and true Communist Party member failed to recommend war out of cowardice.”

“The problem is that a man has to choose to start war,” said Ustinov. “I’m having devices installed in all of our monitoring bunkers, to invert the decision. When the right conditions are met, they will automatically start the countdown to launch, and it will be up to the bunker officers to countermand that decision if it is mistaken—and face the consequences. The system should be in place before the Pershing II missiles are installed.”

“Congratulations!” Romanov exclaimed, slapping Ustinov on the back. “With these machines, we finally have a counter to the inevitable American first strike! They’ll never know what hit them!”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Ustinov mumbled in reply.

That night, Marshall Ustinov picked up the Quran for the first time since 1979, and started reading passages at random. He told himself he did it because he needed something boring to fall asleep to.

The next day, he started reading The Elements of Harmony.

Chapter 7: Markism in England and America

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Chapter 7: Markism in England and America

June 20, 1985.

Zero minus 8 days.

Bishop Truth Delver and his group didn’t find out about President Shooter’s brush with death until the next morning. They of course had no idea about that other brush with death, the one that had imperiled the whole of humanity just a few hours ago. The group rejoined in the limousine to continue their journey to Canterlot, spending nearly an hour in quiet contemplation.

Eventually Gus uttered a huge sigh and looked Delver in the eye. “I suppose we shouldn’t waste too much more of this expensive alone time. So what happened after King Richard woke up?”

The bishop took a moment to collect himself. “England in 1189 ruled more of what we think of as France than the nominal king of France did, and Richard, growing up in Aquitaine, spoke French more fluently than English,” Delver began.

“Hold on,” Gus interrupted. “I’ll admit the history lesson yesterday was pretty interesting, but not particularly useful for our research, which I want to get to the moment we arrive at your lab. As it is, I suspect we’d have to circle America five or six times before we got to the present day. Am I right?”

Delver shrugged. “Probably. I just really love history.”

“Well, give me the capsule version.”

Delver sighed. “All right. But I still have a little bit to say about Richard I before I can skip ahead.

“It’s pretty obvious that the king had a vision when he touched the sun stone. He possessed the body of his pony counterpart, a brave and heroic prince named Blueblood. The Goddess figured this out, and for the first and only time, was forgiving of his accidental crime—apparently bodily possession is something that happens often enough to ponies for there to be specific laws forbidding it. In the time before the effect of the stone wore off and he was returned to his own body, King Richard was taught the tenets of Harmony, and when he came back to his Earthly existence—with Blueblood’s mark printed on the surface of the sun stone as proof of his vision—he determined to live by those tenets. He never wrote his experiences down, but there’s an account from nearly a hundred years later that claims to tell what happened. You may have encountered a painting depicting the central scene from that story: Fall of a Jousting Pony.”

When Gus shook his head, Gnosi produced a large coffee table book and opened it to a bookmarked page. It appeared to be a lesser work of Rubens or one of his followers, a sketch that had only partially been filled in with paint. The central figure was a pure white pony with a yellow mane and tail, covered with a traditional caparison, caught in the act of tripping over something and falling on his face. The pony had a remarkably human expression of surprise, and his eyes were directed to the upper right corner of the painting. But all that can be seen in that corner was the light of the setting sun, turning the sky into stripes of pale pink, blue and green. Also missing from the painting was any sign of the pony’s rider, despite the fact that a jousting lance was floating on the far side of the pony, in a position to be held by a rider if a rider was ever drawn in.

“The artist was a Christian from Flanders,” Gnosi explained, “and so he was given his commission without being told what it represented. But as you can see, the cloth covering the pony has a compass symbol over the pony’s flank, which is the mark of both the Blueblood pony family as well as the English royal family starting with Richard, their counterparts. The lance is positioned so that it forms the horn of this secret unicorn. And the sky colors are the colors of the Goddess’ mane.” He looked over to Delver to continue his story.

“When Richard was interviewed by his priests, he claimed to have received ‘a new way of thinking’ from God. He certainly didn’t mention a goddess pony, or that he had left the Christian religion. These were secrets he kept from the public to his grave. In all outward respects, he remained faithful.

“His first act on returning to England was to summon his brother John, who he then forced to undergo the same wrenching experience that he did. In this way, he hoped to keep his new secret religion confined to the royal family, the ‘touching of the Stone’ to be a coming of age ceremony from then on.

“Richard was succeeded by John as king in 1205. John kept just as silent about his Equestrian experience with contemporary priest-historians as Richard, but modern-day Markist historians believe that he probably rejected it as a hallucination. He was an extremely practical and self-centered man, the closest thing to an atheist as the age was able to produce.

“Around 1210, King John rewarded his closest follower, William Longespée, with the opportunity to touch a piece of the Stone—regardless of what he himself believed, the nobility had decided that something special happened to those who touched it, and were jealous that only royalty were allowed to do it. Because it was only a piece, Longespée did not possess his counterpart, and did not have a vision. All that happened was his mark appearing on the plaque he touched.

“Word soon got out, and soon the entire English aristocracy wanted plaques of their own. They saw them as divine affirmation of their status as the rightful rulers of the land. John responded by charging through the nose for the experience. This was one of the hundreds of aggravations that led to Magna Carta.

“Magna Carta has a number of ‘secret’ clauses in it that are not taught in most history classes, mostly because the document is held in such high regard by fans of democracy. For example there was a bit in there about expelling the Jews out of England, which I imagine you probably already know about.”

Gus shrugged. “I don’t go out of my way to collect anti-Semitic insults. I wouldn’t have time to do anything else with my life if I did.”

“Right,” said Delver, abashed. “Well there’s another clause in there demanding that John distribute pieces of the sun stone so that the aristocracy—and only the aristocracy—could get mark plaques in perpetuity. As a result, the sun stone ceased to exist, split up into dozens of pieces. The royal family alone retained a piece big enough so that anytime somebody touched it, they would end up possessing a pony, thereby getting the ‘full’ marking experience. Needless to say, the Goddess was not happy with humans continuing to violate Her wish that Her ponies retain their autonomy.

“So now there were two forms of Markism in England: a proto-religion among the royal family, and a minor miracle among the aristocracy—a miracle believed to be Christian in origin.

“Since I’m telling the short version, I won’t go over the details, but gradually the tenets of Markism were leaked to the aristocracy, and the English people at large. In the early stages, they were thought to be ways to be a better Christian, but over time, the evidence that marking not only revealed one’s true essence, but endowed oneself with abilities just this side of miraculous gave the English people the growing conviction that Markism was something much more. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until the days of the Protestant Reformation that anyone was daring to declare out loud the existence of a Goddess.

“In the 1360’s, Henry Percy, Warden of the Marches, had made a reputation for himself as a fierce fighter against the Scots, despite following Markist teachings in other respects. His career was tragically cut short when he fell in the Battle of Annandale in early 1377. Before word of his death had reached London, the new English king Richard II sent a letter making Henry the Earl of Northumberland. Henry’s widow, Lady Margaret, had no intention of giving up the title just because the intended recipient was dead. Visibly pregnant with Henry’s son, she gathered his followers together, dissolved his lion mark plaque in lemon juice and drank it, thereby symbolically imbuing her son with the heroic qualities of his father. The night before giving birth, she had a vivid dream ending with a mysterious voice pronouncing the name she must give her son: Hotspur. He was born with dark blue skin and light blue hair, the war colors of the Picts. This was all seen as highly significant, especially when Hotspur’s mark ended up being a literal hot spur, and before too long after reaching his majority he had become the virtual king of northern England. With his herald leading his forces into battle…”—Delver suddenly caught himself—“somebody you don’t need to know anything else about, he built up a string of unstoppable victories. He eventually died at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 fighting against the future King Henry V, which I won’t cover in detail because this is the short version. The point is that after Hotspur’s death, mothers throughout England began ingesting mark plaques so they might learn the correct Markist names to give their children, and so they might be born with the same colorful complexions as their Perfect World counterparts—not that anybody would admit out loud to believing such outrageous concepts as the ‘Perfect World’ at that point.”

“Now that is interesting,” remarked Gus. “If all Markists have inactivated plaque compounds in their blood, and probably absorbed into their bones as well, what would happen if it were activated?”

Meridiem and Gnosi shared a significant look. “You wouldn’t believe us if we told you,” Meridiem finally said.

“I agree,” Delver said. “We’ll have to find a way to book you some time in the Solarium.”

“Very well,” said Gus with obvious disappointment. “Another question: If everyone was using Markist names by the Fifteenth Century, why do the kings at the very least still have Christian names? Elizabeth I, Henry VIII, George III, and so on?”

“Because their fellow monarchs refused to take seriously anybody named King Blueblood XIV, that’s why. Also as you’ll see, Markism would eventually fall out of favor in England, and when that happened everybody suddenly dug up their Christian names for themselves and their ancestors and started pretending that they had never even heard of Markism. But let me tell you how that happened first.”

“Between the Thirteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, the pieces of the sun stone got smaller and smaller, until the lesser families were no longer able to mark plaques by just touching them. Also, the religion—and it was a religion by now—had spread pretty far among the common people, spreading out the stones even further. It was the alchemist Hair Splitter in 1691 who discovered that hay smoke, which was considered toxic to Markists, would induce a marking trance in low enough concentrations, finally making the ceremony available to the general public. Unfortunately, the experiments accidentally claimed his life and since he hadn’t published his findings, they were lost until the first Prime Minister of Great Britain discovered them in 1725…and passed them off as his own as a way to bolster his popularity among the masses. It would be two centuries before the true discoverer would be revealed.

“We’ll now skip ahead to 1865. Secularism had been growing in popularity as an alternative to both Markism and Christianity, but both soon fell before a growing tide of Spiritualism. Among Christians, this new movement was dedicated to making contact with the spirits of the dead, but for Markism, it was an obsession with Equestria, experimenting with near-lethal doses of hay smoke and narcotics to induce longer and longer periods of pony possession. Equestria was declared to be a far superior world to the grim industrial setting of contemporary England, so well described by authors such as Charles Dickens. The stated goal of this group was to leave this world entirely, and become ponies permanently. As many as 1100 humans managed to take over pony bodies in this way.

“It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the Goddess did not like this turn of events one bit. After failing to use both reason and pleading to stop the possessions, She felt She had no choice but to turn to drastic action. In an event known as the British Eviction of 1865, she forced every one of these invading souls back into their bodies. Well, not all of them back into their proper bodies, but most of them did at least retain their species and gender, but not necessarily their race or class. Oh and there were consistent rumors made by his political opponents that Lord Palmerston switched bodies with a foul-tempered mongoose kept in the London Zoo. The Goddess also made sure to make her displeasure known in a vivid dream she gave to every Markist in Britain on July 7th, a vision traumatizing enough to fill up the nation’s insane asylums for years to come. Markism in Great Britain pretty much ceased to exist on July 8, 1865.”

“Wow!” declared Gus, his expression equal parts shock and amusement. “I’ll make a note for my experiments not to try anything unless I have it from you that it won’t tick off this goddess of yours.”

“Well, to give Her credit, She had been telling humans not to take over her subject’s brains for hundreds of years, and yet the royals at the very least continued to take over Bluebloods’ like clockwork. Even an immortal like Her would have to lose Her temper eventually.”

“So am I correct in assuming that the color effects of ingesting dissolved plaques wears off if it is not maintained? After all, I’ve visited England before, and the only tinted people I ever saw were American tourists.”

“Correct,” answered Delver. “It takes two generations for the effects to completely fade, although after the first generation, the descendants stop having the marking dream.

“So let’s back up and go over the history of Markism in America. Unlike most of the other English groups that immigrated to the American colonies, Markists weren’t fleeing from anything. As a result, they tended to be appointed to positions of power. When the Revolution broke out, the majority of Markists felt that they couldn’t betray King George. After all, his counterpart was a prince of Equestria, and the Goddess styled Herself a princess, so surely that meant they were related, right? That was certainly the impression that the royals had managed to give their subjects, and if it wasn’t for the large minority of Christians in England, they probably would have avoided that nasty English Civil War and subsequent curtailing of royal power. This same pro-British attitude kept American Markists out of the War of 1812, but when it came to the American Civil War, Markist teachings put them firmly against slavery (and animal cruelty), so they formed a significant fraction of the Northern armies.

“American Markism fractured in the wake of The British Eviction. American Spiritualism for whatever reason was restricted to Christians only and no American Markist received that dreadful vision from the Goddess. Nevertheless, many people left the faith at this time, including the vast majority of Markists in other English colonies. Others in America tried to change the faith in various ways, seeing if Markism could exist without marking trances, for example. (It couldn’t.)

“There had been a lot of prejudice against Markists in America, culminating in the anti-Markist riots of 1843, led by a political party with the remarkably descriptive name of the Know-Nothings. This group put laws into place that still stand, forcing us to put Christian versions of most place names after the Markist names in any publications meant for a wider audience, even if that location had been predominantly Markist for centuries.

“In response to this persistent animosity, the sect that eventually became the official American Markist Church put into place a policy of repressing most of the facts about the religion that before then had been public knowledge.”

Delver bowed his head. “I consider this to be the last significant act of the Church hierarchy between that time and this. True Man was our first Markist president, dogged throughout his term by accusations that he was taking orders from King George VI, and Far Shooter is our second. And so I conclude my history.”

“Thank you for all that information, Delver,” said Gus. “And here’s hoping we start a new era of your faith’s history starting the day after tomorrow.”

Chapter 8: Goddess in the Flesh

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Chapter 8: Goddess in the Flesh

That night the Archbishop of Baltimare [Baltimore] learned that Bishop Delver was transporting the arch scientist and unbeliever Gus Guiseman to Canterlot in a limo on the church’s dime, and promptly rescinded funding. And so the last leg of the trip was taken via Greyhound bus.

Since discussion of the secrets of the faith was out of the question, Gus spent the first part of the trip going over his notes on the bizarre properties of the penteract quasicrystal he had created. After a lunch break and a nap, he took to looking out the window at the towns and cities he passed through.

This section of Illinois had been settled in the decades immediately surrounding the Civil War, and it showed. In the Christian towns he passed through, there never failed to be a statue of some native-son general sitting astride a rearing horse (or a lieutenant borrowing the general’s horse—it’s not like you could tell the difference). As the same sculptor appeared to be responsible for all of these statues, they soon started to blend into one another in Gus’ head. When they passed through a Markist town, the same marble horse could be seen in the town center—minus the rider.

Once they crossed the state border into New Brass Sky [Nebraska], the number of Christian communities dropped to zero. Advertising posters showed exclusively Markist men, women and children happily consuming their wares instead of Christian with minority Markist as had been the norm in Illinois. Gus light-heartedly mused that somebody born and raised in the great state of New Brass Sky might not even know that Christians and Jews existed in the world.

Finally the bus entered the state capital of Canterlot. Like most communities in the state, it had never had a Christian name, so there was no name in square brackets following it on the signs. As the bus pulled into the station, Gus noticed a teenage girl waiting for them. The streaks of color in her long hair seemed oddly familiar.

As he stepped off the bus and craned his neck to get a better look at her, Delver suddenly appeared in front of him. “Look Gus, before you get mad at me, you have to know that there was one really important thing I wasn’t allowed to tell you earlier. As in, ‘only four people on the entire planet are officially allowed to know’ important. Alright?”

“Sure, sure,” said Gus, pushing the minister aside. Twenty feet [6 m] behind him was the girl, pink skin and pastel hair, wearing a simple pink sun dress over white boots. She was standing on the platform with her hands clasped in front of her and with an eager grin on her face. As she walked forward, the crowd parted effortlessly around her, like Moses parting the Red Sea.

It was her—Crystal, his doomed assistant from 1945. He was sure of it. Yet she was visibly younger than he remembered her.

“You…” Gus managed to get out in a near whisper, as time seemed to slow to a crawl. With a distinct effort, he tore his eyes away, looking around him for evidence to prove or disprove the impossibility he was witnessing. What he immediately noticed was that everybody’s eyes were upon her. No matter what they were doing, every man, woman and child seemed to find themselves compelled to look upon this woman’s face every few seconds, as if they needed to continuously confirm that this miracle was still in their midst.

And there was something ineffably miraculous around her. She walked like she didn’t quite touch the ground and her hair seemed to float and perhaps even flow very slowly around her head. The station exterior was in late-afternoon shadow, and yet she was easier to see than the others, like she had a hidden spotlight shining on her and her alone.

“Professor Guiseman, let me introduce you to my friend Celestia, who’s spent her whole life in Canterlot. Celestia, this is the scientist I told you about.”

“Sure, sure,” said Crystal dismissively.

No, it’s not her after all, thought Gus to himself as he extended his hand. “Ce…lestia, was it?” he asked.

“Have a good time while you stay here and stuff,” the teenage girl said, briefly taking and shaking the older man’s hand, her eyes fixed on Bishop Delver’s the whole time.

Gus looked at the touched hand in wonder. At that moment, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the contact had turned it into gold or something equally impossible. “Thank you,” he whispered.

Hearing this, Celestia finally glanced his way for a moment before rolling her eyes. Evidently, not only was his reaction a common one for those meeting her for the first time, but she was also getting a little tired of it. “Luna,” she called out over her shoulder, “would you like to welcome Father Delver back in person?”

“No, I’m good,” said a voice that Gus had some trouble locating. If Celestia was the bright center of Canterlot, then Luna resided in a spot that seemed farthest from it. The bench she was sitting on seemed to be under a broken light bulb, since she was so hard to see. She alone of everyone in the station seemed to be immune to Celestia’s spell, never once looking up from the paperback copy of Childhood’s End she was reading.

Gus looked back at Celestia, to see that she was staring intently at him. The effect was quite unnerving, and for a moment he almost felt himself compelled to apologize for whatever fault the girl had suddenly found in him.

“Wait a second,” she declared. “You’ve met one of me before, haven’t you?”

Gus took a moment to try and fail to parse the strange construction she had just used. “I knew someone who looked and sounded much like you, yes.”

“What was her name?”

“Ah…Crystal.”

“I knew it!” Celestia cried out. She hooked her arm around those of Gus and Delver, and immediately started pulling them in the direction of the parking lot. “Come on, I need to talk to both of you.”

Luna put a slip of paper into her book and stood up.

“Meridiem, could you take my sister back home?” Celestia asked sweetly. “I need some privacy.” The sweetness ended before her utterance did, leaving the last word in a pool of bitterness.

Luna scowled, but said nothing as she followed Gnosi and Meridiem off in a separate direction.

“Alright, I think I’ve got the wording right for this: Father Delver, I order you to tell Gus Guiseman everything secret about me.” There was a brief moment of panic as she considered the full import of her words. “About Celestia in general,” she corrected. “Not me specifically.”

The three of them were sitting in a soundproof group confessional room inside the heart of Canterlot’s main Markist church.

Delver took in a big breath before he began. “Alright, you remember how I told you about the circumstances around Hotspur Percy’s birth in 1377?”

Gus nodded his head.

“Well soon after marrying the Baron de Ros, Lady Percy gave birth to a daughter…who looked exactly like her”—pointing at the girl sitting across from them—“and who was also named Celestia. She didn’t need to touch a sun stone, because when she turned thirteen she knew that her mark was the sun. She was the herald to her brother’s army and did her best to treat anyone who got sick or wounded on the battlefield. She came down with a rather nasty staph infection and died on the night before her brother was defeated and killed.

“Seven years later, another Celestia was born, to a family of Markist sailors in Dover. This Celestia had none of the memories of her predecessor, but in appearance and basic personality was identical. A decade after she died, another one was born in another part of the country. And so the pattern has persisted until the present day. The gap might be as much as fifty years between the death of one Celestia and the birth of another, but usually it’s less than a decade. Otherwise, in any particular year, there’s always a Celestia. They eventually started taking other names, to try and assert their individuality. This one decided to buck the trend and stick with ‘Celestia’.

“The set of twenty-one Celestias act as the most bizarre twin study of all time. The majority of them are even-tempered, natural leaders or teachers, women who work to truly be exemplars of the Markist ideals, to make the world a better place than it was when they showed up.”

Celestia turned up her nose and waved her hand dismissively. “I’ll get around to that stuff when I grow up. Besides, you’re doing such a good job right now that I don’t want to make you look bad when I inevitably show you up.”

Delver ignored her. “Some of them have exhibited strange powers, powers designed to serve the immediate needs of that generation of Markists. Celestia I appeared to have genuine healing abilities, abilities that did not extend to herself. The third Celestia’s voice compelled all who heard it to obey, but that power could be broken by the strong minded. She tried and failed to prevent the outbreak of the War of the Roses in 1455.

“The seventh Celestia, who called herself Belle, was a weather witch, who by exerting her power to the utmost was able to defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588.”

The Celestia sitting next to them rolled her eyes, knowing full well what was coming.

“Wait, seriously?” Gus asked.

“Most certainly,” answered Delver. “In fact, she became so popular as a result of this miraculous act that the people rejected Queen Elizabeth I, and demanded that Belle become their queen.”

“How come I never heard of this?”

“Well, she never got around to getting crowned, so that means she doesn’t have to be included in the official list of British monarchs. I mean, did you know that the future King Louis VIII of France was proclaimed King of England by the barons rebelling against King John and had control of half of England for almost two years? No of course you haven’t, because no Englishman would ever admit that England was once ruled by a Frenchman.” Delver’s triumphant grin fled on seeing the looks on his listeners’ faces. “Oh…right. Wandering again.

“Anyway, Elizabeth became Queen Belle’s handmaiden, and ensured that she got anything she wanted, and I do mean anything. For you see Belle was the worst of the Celestias. She let the power go completely to her head, and the daily business of England ground to a halt as everyone’s lives were re-oriented to satisfying every petty whim of hers. People started to regret taking the crown away from Elizabeth.”

“This doesn’t sound at all like the Queen Elizabeth I thought I knew. She was supposed to be the smartest and shrewdest monarch England ever had.”

“And she was. Elizabeth gave Belle everything she had ever dreamed of growing up as a street beggar on the streets of Canterbury. Especially cake, which turned out to be Belle’s fatal weakness. By 1590 she had eaten herself to death, and Elizabeth was once more Queen of England, more popular than she had ever been before the Armada’s defeat.

“Now, I’ve been leaving out the primary purpose of all of the Celestias, but surely you’ve figured that out by now.”

Delver gestured towards Celestia, and in particular, her hair.

Gus’ eyes boggled. “The Goddess’ name is Celestia!” he said with a gasp.

“Got it in one!” Celestia said with a giggle. “But did you have to bring up Queen Belle? She makes me look bad.”

“That’s why I always bring her up,” Delver said with a mischievous grin.

Celestia groaned before collecting herself and continuing where Delver left off. “We exist to be the voice for Princess Celestia. Every time she’s had to tell anything to us humans, she’s taken one of us over to do it. And always apologizes afterwards for her hypocrisy.”

“And so what fantastic ability do you have?” Gus asked.

“Nothing earth-shattering,” she said with a shrug. “A natural 18 Charisma, in O&O terms. And I can read books in the dark.”

“And the cause of both of these abilities is because…?” Delver prompted.

“Because nothing. That part is none of his business,” Celestia said. “And I don’t like talking about it.”

“Every part of Markism is his business,” Delver insisted. “And considering that he’s planning on prodding the barrier between worlds…”

“You are?” Celestia asked.

“I am?” Gus asked, at nearly the same time. Then he thought for a bit. “Well, if I can get away with it…”

“Don’t. Just…don’t. Something really important to the Princess is coming up in twenty-five years, which for her is practically an eye-blink. This puts her even more on edge than usual.”

“And you know this because…?” Deliver prompted.

Celestia sighed deeply. “I’m pretty sure I share her dreams,” she said. “And her nightmares.” Her eyes became unfocused as she looked out over an imaginary landscape.

“I thought Equestria was an idyllic little paradise under the Princess’ rule,” Gus said. “What’s left for her to have nightmares about?”

“The ponies she allowed herself to love and watch age and die before her eyes,” Celestia said in a small voice. “The mare she betrayed, for whom she’s risking everything in a desperate gambit where she for once will have to surrender control if she hopes to succeed…” She smirked. “And I can’t seem to stop myself from telling anyone who asks all about them, regardless of how weak they make me look. Almost as if I’m doing what she can’t.

“She wakes up most mornings in tears.” Gritting her teeth over the words that had just left her lips, Celestia glared at Delver, but he just looked at her calmly, so she instead faced Gus. “Like I said, I don’t like talking about it, so I’m preemptively changing the subject. Tell me about my predecessor Crystal—we have almost nothing in the library on her.”

Gus put his hands behind his head as he thought back. “Smart. Really smart. And really forgiving—my fellow scientists never let her forget that she was an Indian half-blood, and therefore inferior to them. I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t always treat her like she deserved, at least until after she disappeared back to Santa Fe for a week to prove how indispensable she had become. And then a year later I replaced her with a computer anyway…” Gus sighed and refused to make eye contact with Crystal’s doppelganger. “She threw her life away at Trinity a few months later.”

“Yeah, that’s the part I do know,” Celestia said with a nod. “Did she have any inexplicable abilities that you can remember?”

“Just her near-perfect accuracy at mental mathematics at high speeds. But she was only incrementally better than the girls she supervised, most of whom were Markists like herself. Those kind of mental tricks are standard for you guys; I don’t remember her doing anything impossible physically.”

Celestia sighed. “Fine. I hope you’re better at science than at character analysis.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Gus said wryly.

“Hmm…I wonder…” Celestia mused, rubbing her chin as she gazed into Gus’ eyes. “I read your book, like I suppose everybody else has, but you never really answered one question: Do you have any regrets about giving birth to the Bomb? Other than what happened to my predecessor?”

“I apologize on Celestia’s behalf if you consider the question to be rude,” said Delver, stepping in front of Celestia. “You don’t have to answer it.”

Celestia roughly shoved the elder man aside. “I’d still like an answer. Just because a question is rude doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve to be answered. If the world comes to a violent end in my lifetime, it’s going to be at least partially your fault.”

“Step aside, Delver. I’ll answer the question. The answer is no, I have no regrets whatsoever.” It was obviously a question Gus had been confronted with many times in the years since Trinity, and repetition had honed his reply into a tone of glib certainty. “Mankind will always invent, and mankind will also always misuse those inventions. The former is our best trait, our way of making headway against a senseless universe. The latter is an unfortunate sign of our emotional immaturity as a race, something we’ll get past eventually, but only from surviving our mistakes.

“And make no mistake on this point: the secret to atomic energy was going to be discovered sometime in the Twentieth Century, either by Americans or by somebody else. This discovery, via Manhattan, ended one war and gave birth to another, a Cold War that may yet end with mutually-assured destruction. But if geniuses like Einstein had never been born, it could have been much worse.”

“How?” asked Celestia.

“Imagine the atomic bomb used to start a war instead of end one. In the heat of war, there would be fewer excuses made to not use the Bomb immediately and repeatedly. The result would be the certainty of self-extinction instead of the strong probability we face right now.

“Given that the project would have gone forward with or without me, to want out in retrospect is the act of a coward. I will not shirk the responsibility for unleashing the ‘atomic beast’ by merely being somewhere else at the moment of creation. Humanity at its best and worst did this, and I will not abstain from that responsibility. Besides, that was the time when I had Arline by my side, and I will not give those years up for anything.”

Celestia looked over at Delver, a question on her lips.

“Arline is the name of Gus’ first wife.”

“She died a month before the first bomb was tested,” Gus explained, “of tuberculosis.”

A shocked Celestia looked back and forth between the two men. “Did you know this?” she asked Delver.

“Yes.”

“And does he know…?”

Delver raised an eyebrow.

“No, of course he doesn’t,” concluded Celestia. “Let me see if I have the chronology down: Your wife died in 1945?”

“Yes,” Gus answered coldly. “That’s a brutal student you have there, Delver.”

“She didn’t get it from me.”

Celestia ignored the side conversation. “And the cure was invented three years later. Did you take her somewhere dry? That could have kept her alive long enough to have saved her.”

Gus pressed his lips together tightly and then took a deep breath to regain his temper. “She was staying in a sanitarium in Santa Fe, only a few miles away from where I was working on Manhattan. She got the best that money could buy, but it wasn’t enough.” He closed his eyes and sighed. “You have to understand, Arline was already diagnosed in 1942, when we married, and her life expectancy then was only two years, so every day after that was a treasure. I…I could only kiss her on the cheek at the marriage ceremony, and of course we never got more intimate than that, or else I would have been infected as well.

“No, I have no problem with her dying in 1945. What I do have a problem with is how long it took medical science to develop the streptomycin treatment in the first place.”

This appeared to be another subject about which Gus Guiseman had thought long and hard. But in contrast with his Manhattan answer, this one was a good deal more heated.

“The line of research that led to the TB cure began with the discovery of penicillin in 1928. The chemical product of a soil bacterium was found to be effective against a deadly disease. If medicine was a proper science at that time, like physics was, instead of being a form of glorified quackery, then that discovery would have led to field trials of penicillin in the Thirties instead of the Forties, Merck would have gone ahead with their soil bacteria study a decade earlier—”

“And your first wife would still be alive,” Delver concluded. “Believe me, I understand. I myself was among the first to be given the treatment back in 1948 following the completion of the trials and I owe my life to streptomycin.”

“Oh,” said Gus, taken aback. “I had no idea you were a TB survivor. Does that have anything to do with your…” He gestured towards Delver’s gloved hands.

“My touch aversion? Indirectly, although it’s more tied to how I got my mark.”

“And that’s the other thing I want to ask about,” said Celestia, “your mark story.”

Gus immediately got up. “Well if you’re done with me, I’d better give you your privacy.”

“You haven’t told it to him yet?” Celestia asked.

“It’s…not a story I like telling that often,” Delver admitted in a low voice.

“Oh, but you’re perfectly alright dragging my dreams out for his personal inspection,” Celestia replied with a huff. “Well I’m going to use your own words against you: If ‘every part of Markism is his business’, then he has to know your mark story.”

“Really?” challenged Delver.

“Really.” She then turned to face the other man in the room. “Professor Guiseman, I’m betting that Father Delver here has told you all kinds of incredible stories about Equestria.”

Gus nodded.

“And as a man of science, I’m betting you don’t believe in most of it. I mean, magical pony doppelgangers?” she asked with a twinkle in her eye. “There’s no way that part could be true, right?”

“It is kind of out there,” Gus admitted.

“Well the bishop here saw Equestria with his own eyes,” Celestia told him. “Are you sure you don’t want to hear the story? I can save my questions for after.”

Gus sat back down. “If you’re up to it,” he told Delver.

Delver looked around him, nervous for the first time that Gus could remember. “Well…” he began, then stopped himself. “It was…” He sighed. “It’s a really ugly story. Celestia practically had to force it out of me. I…I don’t know if I want to relive it again.”

“How about this?” Celestia asked Delver after a few moments of thought. “Let’s say that I tell the story, with your help. I’ve been thinking recently about how it must have looked from the other side—what the ponies thought of your visit. If we tell it that way, it leaves most of the unpleasantness out.”

Delver considered this proposal before nodding. “Alright, you can tell it your way. How does it begin?”

Chapter 9: Delver's Mark

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Chapter 9: Delver’s Mark

Manehattan is the most vibrant city in all Equestria, the city that never sleeps. I think of it like the big city in those screwball comedies from the 1930’s: His Girl Friday, My Man Forge, that sort of thing, where everybody talks fast and smart and nobody cares what your religion or sex is.

“Um, where did you get this from?” Deliver interrupted. “I never saw the pony version of New York City.”

“Dreams,” Celestia said idly, waving a hand in the air. “Continuing on…”

On the twelfth story of a high-rise building in Manehattan is the headquarters for Polo House, the publishing firm. Polo’s chief editor has invited a new writer in to discuss changes to her manuscript before it can be published. The writer’s name is A. K. Yearling, and the novel being considered has the title of The Cursed Medallion.
‘Congratulations, A. K.,’ the editor began. ‘I believe you have the makings of a great series of adventure fiction for young readers. However, that is not the story that you have submitted to me. This story is frankly unpublishable, for quite a long list of reasons. If you are willing to make the changes that I suggest, then we will be happy to write up a six-book deal for your first series. Or, you could attempt to sell your very serious and somewhat disturbing adult novel with juvenile elements to one of the other publishing houses, although I strongly suspect that they’ve already rejected it. There simply isn’t a market for this book as you wrote it.’
The author settled back into her all-enveloping cloak as she considered. ‘I will admit that the story got away from me in parts. And perhaps some changes would be the safest way to proceed. Alright, I’m willing to at least consider your list.’
‘Excellent!’ replied the editor. ‘Let’s go over my objections one at a time.
‘First of all, the setting: Seaddle and the newly-discovered Amarezon Jungle in the 950’s, right after the end of the Great Griffon-Dragon War. I think that right there is the primary mistake of the entire work. It was a very grim and morally-compromised time, as you made abundantly clear. Many ponies had violated the Princess’ strong recommendation not to assist either side in the War, and had been disillusioned to discover how ruthless both sides in the conflict had become in their urgent desire to win at all costs, and that disillusionment had bled into their post-War lives. I realize you use this setting to excuse the actions of Pr. Villainpants—

“‘Professor Villainpants’?” Gus asked incredulously.

“Well, he won’t tell me the guy’s name!” Celestia replied.

“That’s because this pony had a human counterpart who was nothing like him, and I refuse to compromise his reputation with my story,” explained Delver. “Now where did you get this post-War silliness from? Equestria would never have had a war. Unless you’re implying that you got that tidbit from the Princess’ dreams as well?”

“Look, do you want to take over this story?” Celestia asked, pointedly refusing to answer Delver’s question.

“…No.”

“And I haven’t said anything that directly contradicts your story, so let me tell this my way, OK?”

‘Pr. Villainpants, a once idealistic scholar who had turned to fencing archeological artifacts for a living in order to pay off his exorbitant gambling addiction. So far, he had kept his double life a secret from the university that employed him, and especially from his doctoral student, a newly-marked pegasus named Daring Do.
‘Now see, this part I like. I just don’t see a reason to use an era of Equestrian history that most ponies would rather pretend never happened. The villain is a villain, and up to now he was low-key enough to get away with it. That works just fine for juveniles.
‘Next, Daring Do herself. I think you characterized her just right, naïve initially but quickly figuring her way out of the web of lies that she had been enveloped in. I also like her friendship with the doomed pegasus orphan Truth Delver.’
‘Well you see that was a major reason for setting the story in the 950’s,’ A. K. Yearling replied. ‘The study of the deadly Wasting Disease had finally begun to advance, thanks to the invention of magic infusion technology. Now a disease that claimed its young victims within a year of infection could have its most deadly symptom—magic draining—removed entirely, revealing the mundane respiratory disease hiding behind it. The drain had ensured that this was one of the few diseases immune to magical treatment, and there was hope that by studying patients like Truth Delver, a non-magical cure could be found, one that would end the threat of Wasting Disease once and for all.’
The editor steepled her hooves. ‘Yes, yes, I know that historically this all happened in the 950’s, but besides the stigma attached to that decade in particular, I feel that there is a problem tying a series that hopefully could span many, many years to any specific period. Already the 950’s are so long ago that it seems unlikely that Daring Do and Pr. Villainpants could still be around and chasing after treasures into the present day.’
‘Alright, I’ll concede that,’ Yearling said with reluctance. ‘Maybe I could change it to a fictional disease, one that still couldn’t be cured magically and which required magical treatment just to keep its victims alive.’
‘Of course. So, Daring witnesses her mentor meeting with a mysterious noblepony in the shadows and shortly afterwards the recently-translated inscriptions she and Truth had been working on mysteriously disappeared. Daring is framed for the destruction of priceless artifacts and arrested. Truth completes the translation of one final inscription that fills him with panic, and then an assassin disguised as a nurse tries to finish him off. This is terrific stuff, A. K., terrific, but kind of dark. I think we can get away with it if we make the assassin a griffon instead of a pony.’

“Oh sure, blame the griffons. They’re always ruining everything.”

Celestia looked questioningly at Gus before turning to Delver. “Did I hit a nerve or something?”

“Well I do think you’re getting bogged down in details. Continue the story.”

‘Unaware of the attack on Truth, Daring proves that the evidence against her is faked and is released from prison. She spends her last bit equipping herself before racing over to the Amarezon to get to the bottom of the conspiracy. She discovers the professor unearthing the long lost Medallion of Life, accompanied by Prince Bronze Heart—the traitorous brother of that generation’s Blueblood. Bronze Heart’s thugs discover Daring Do, leading to a fight that Daring is about to lose, when she is suddenly rescued by Truth Delver.
‘Flash back to Truth fighting for his life. The weak pegasus is thrown into the magic infuser machine, temporarily charging the pony with so much magic that he easily defeats his attacker and flies all the way to the Amarezon.’

“What, seriously?” asked Gus, interrupting the story. “If the pony counterpart of you had this awful disease, how could he have flown from Seaddle [Seattle] to the Amazon all by himself, even with a ‘magic infusion’? And how could he have shown up in time to make a difference?”

“That’s because in Equestria the Amarezon is only about fifty miles [80 km] east of Seaddle’s city limits, despite having a completely different climate.”

“What?!”

“It’s magic, Pr. Guiseman. You just have to accept that logic doesn’t apply in these cases.”

Gus crossed his arms. “I can accept it, but I don’t have to like it.”

‘Truth joins up with Daring and at first he is easily able to fight off any number of goons. He confides in Daring his discovery—that the Medallion was the direct cause of the fall of the Amerezon Civilization that created it, and if it is not removed from exposure to sunlight immediately, it could mean the end for all ponykind.
‘Prince Bronze Heart not only disregards this warning, he begins a ceremony designed to concentrate the artifact’s dark power within himself. Daring disrupts the ceremony, causing the artifact to discharge its power harmlessly. But Truth had dangerously over-exerted himself, and he falls right out of the sky. Daring tries to save him, but she’s too late—Truth has become the latest victim of the Wasting Disease.
‘This is too dark, especially considering the events I’ll cover next. I think it’s best if Truth raises an alarm and the assassin escapes. Truth remains at the hospital, and he most certainly doesn’t die. Maybe he has been teaching his translation skills to Daring, and she’s able to put together the fatal inscription herself as she’s spying on the villains. And that’s why she’s discovered. Everything would work out just as well without imperiled foals and especially with no dying foals.
‘But let’s go over what happens next, so I can outline how the story can still work without killing Truth. In your version, Daring sneaks off and spends several days alone, deeply traumatized by what happened to a pony she considers her little brother. And then…Truth Deliver rises from the dead.’ She gave a look of obvious distaste to the author.
‘Yes, but that was the whole point of the Medallion of Life,’ Yearling protested. ‘It not only prevented anyone under its influence from dying, but it also started reversing death in its vicinity. That’s why Truth came back to life.’
‘Alright, but consider the implications. Somepony coming back to life—that’s horror, not adventure. No parent is going to allow their impressionable foal to read a story with that kind of plot twist. And not only that, but it’s not even Truth who truly comes back, but some bizarre alien. That’s the stuff of nightmares.
‘Why’d you even need to introduce that plot twist? I mean, I still would have objected, but it would have been a lot simpler if he came back as a zompony, or as himself with some amnesia. But this alien—also coincidentally named Truth Delver—comes completely out of left field. I mean…a world without magic? Where ponies get their cutie marks through a secret ceremony? And the alien subjects himself to this ceremony because he was among the first to get the newly-discovered cure to “tuberculosis”—supposedly another name for Wasting Disease, but he overdosed himself on ‘hay smoke’ causing him to accidentally take over the body of his Equestrian duplicate’s corpse and…no foal reading this is possibly going to go along with all of this nonsense!
‘It would be so much simpler to just have Truth awaken without his memory, but still be the same Truth Delver. (Except of course that it’s even easier to remove Truth entirely from this part of the story.) But in any case, the amnesiac Truth wanders into the camp of the villains, who adopt him and try to indoctrinate him into their cause. The Professor does this out of guilt for being partially responsible for his death. The Prince does this to study the revived pegasus.
‘In my mind, this whole scene is just another attempt to make these villains sympathetic, which is just not going to work considering their ultimate plan. And yes, I do think we need that rant from Bronze Heart where he claims that the Princess is deliberately withholding immortality from the unicorn master race that deserves it. It’s a good insane villain speech, so move it back to the preparations for the ceremony prior to Daring being discovered.
‘You have the alien Truth gradually discover the nature of Equestria, which is an odd section that looks like it’s written for foreigners or something. I mean, you even explain the differences between unicorns, pegasi and earth ponies, for Celestia’s sake! And all that talk about Truth flying, as if…the alien couldn’t fly, could he?’
‘No.’
‘…OK, you know what? This alien thing could be interesting, but in a story all its own. Like maybe in the second or third story, Daring discovers this misshapen block of unidentifiable wood, and donates it to a famous artist, who carves it into the shape of a pegasus foal. And then on Nightmare Night it comes to life, possessed by this alien. See, I found a way for you to include these ideas after asking you to rip them heartlessly out of this story we’re talking about today.
‘The alien Truth soon figures out that his two “father figures” are absolutely up to no good, and one night goes flying to find the Daring Do that he’s been told is the one trying to steal Villainpants’ glory and doom all ponykind. And Daring, being so close to the original Truth, easily sees through the alien’s attempts to pretend to be the original. They reconcile and come up with a plan.
‘The next day is when the ceremony is ready to be repeated. The Prince brings in a balloon, to make it harder for the ceremony to be interrupted, and brings in lots of winged mercenaries to protect him. And…this part gets really, really ugly. Any particular reason for this?’
‘Well, there’s been a lot of debate recently about whether ponies would be better off if they were all immortal or not,’ Yearling answered. ‘Rather than weigh in with yet another opinion, I pointed out a scenario where nobody would want immortality: if that deathlessness was extended to all life, not just ponies. Every disease, every parasite living in your gut or in your tear ducts, all of them impossible to kill and voraciously hungry. You can heal the damage, but only after the fact. Of course a scenario like that was going to get ugly. Imagine being digested from the inside out…’
‘I don’t have to imagine, Miss Yearling, as you have so gracefully described that process happening in full detail to Prince Bronze Heart, and starting to happen to Truth, who is grappling with him at the moment the curse changes from alicorn-level magic to oatmeal-ification.
‘And then of course when the medallion is destroyed, Truth immediately starts dying, which means we get another lovely description, of what it is like to decay into fertilizer in fast motion, while still being alive to feel all of it. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to eat chocolate lava cake again by the way.’
Yearling merely shrugged. “What can I say? I have a good head for descriptive detail.”
‘So in the end Truth forces himself to hold together long enough to describe how to find and prepare the “streptomycin treatment” that cures Wasting Disease. The act of explaining earns Truth—the possessed body as well as the alien himself—a cutie mark of a magnifying glass examining a historical document. This allows him to die, his mission fulfilled. And so ends a section that was deeply, vilely unacceptable for Polo House’s target audience.
‘So how about this: We are introducing the world to Daring Do. So for this story only, take it easy. No complicated subplots, no mind-boggling plot twists, and no gory endings. Spend half the book with Daring and Truth in his hospital bed, bonding over their translations and Truth’s disease which is kind of Wasting Disease but not really. Together, they figure out what Villainpants is up to, and Daring reluctantly leaves her friend because she’s the only one who can save the world. The Prince gives his speech—although maybe use a made-up unicorn supremacist instead of the actual royal traitor from that era that nopony wants to talk about nowadays—and we go right to the fight with the balloon. The Prince goes all powerful, and then the Wasting Disease-replacement germs he caught when he hired that assassin are suddenly energized enough to strike him down. Daring rushes the artifact back into the buried pyramid, and as the whole place is collapsing, she retrieves one last inscription which contains the cure to the disease, so nobody really dies and the Prince is reformed offstage by the Princess and everypony lives happily ever after. Well?’
Yearling is furiously taking notes. ‘I think I can work with most of that. Can you give me a month to get you another draft?’
‘Better make it two. We have to get to work on our big advertising campaign for Daring Do, after all.’

Chapter 10: Q&A

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Chapter 10: Q&A

“Wow,” said Gus after nearly a minute of silence contemplating the parts of the story that Celestia had elided over. “That must have scarred you for life.”

“It did,” answered a weary Delver holding up his gloved hands. “I can’t touch anything living anymore without feeling it simultaneously rot and burrow into my flesh in my mind’s eye.”

Gus looked uncomfortable as he prepared his next question. “Now I don’t want you to think that I’m doubting you, but did you come out of this experience with any kind of proof that it actually happened, and wasn’t just a hallucination?”

Delver sighed. “Gus, I knew nothing about ponies going into that experience—that stuff was top secret, and I was just some kid. And yet my descriptions exactly match up with the appearances of earth ponies, unicorns and pegasi. I met the brother of a Prince Blueblood, despite having no idea what that meant. And they mentioned Princess Celestia, which was and still is the biggest secret of the entire church. It was a name I had never heard before.

“I got into this whole mess because I was late getting my mark, because I was convinced that it would be in the realm of medical research. I got enough details of the process out of my friends that I thought I could force the issue. I snuck into the church late one night, turned on the gas, and crawled into the booth. I was in a coma for more than a week. And then came the aftermath:

“My experiences changed the course of my life. I could never get into medicine after what I had gone through. But I had gotten my mark in explaining and I loved far-off places, so I soon found myself immersed in history—which I loved—so that was how I dedicated my future.

“At the same time, I had discovered the secret of the marking ceremony, which led to a second career in the Markist Church. Once I had climbed high enough in the hierarchy to learn about counterparts, I sought to find out about the ponies I had met during my brief visit to Equestria.

“Prince Bronze Heart was almost certainly…ah, but I don’t want to get into Royal Family squabbles. I already told you about the human version of ‘Pr. Villainpants’—I consulted with him many times in the early years of my TV show before his passing, and of course I never told him what I knew. As for Daring Do? I found her burial plot in the Canterlot cemetery. She had jumped off of the roof of her house at the age of three. A pegasus would have survived that jump. And so I learned once more that the lives of counterparts are not linked to each other—after all, my parents were alive in this world, but dead in that one.

“I did a lot of thinking about the pony versions of Daring Do and that unnamed professor. Being exposed to such a powerful artifact, I imagined that they were now immortal, or at least that they aged far more slowly than the ponies around them. They were now locked in a perpetual cycle of competing for the same magical relics of lost civilizations, again and again for all time. So I sat down and wrote an adventure for these two: Daring Do and the Temple of Fate, under a pseudonym. It wasn’t very good. But the paperback sales were enough for Polo House to launch a series, by whoever was willing to take up that pseudonym. Eventually one of them liked writing the series so much that she changed her name to legally be A. K. Yearling. The Daring Do series has done far better under her than it ever did with my one contribution, so I wish her the best.

“Now, I believe you had some questions for me?” Delver asked Celestia.

“Yes, I wanted to know if you ever saw the sun rise or set during your time in Equestria. Princess Celestia is said to control the sun on that world, and I was wondering if you ever noticed the motion of the sun to be the slightest bit jerky, especially at those times.”

“No, I’m afraid not,” answered Delver. “We were in a jungle, so I couldn’t ever see the horizon. And I don’t remember it ever moving oddly during the rest of the day—not that I was looking out for anything like that.”

“Not even when you were flying?”

“Nope.”

“What about any other heavenly bodies? Did the stars look different?”

“I specifically remember looking at the stars on the third night, as it was becoming less and less likely that I was dreaming. And the stars I saw were normal for the night’s sky over Canterlot around February. Which is a bit odd, as it was mid-June when all this took place, and I saw no evidence whatsoever that it was winter in Equestria, even tropical-forest-Equestria.”

“Oh,” said Celestia, clearly disappointed. “Sorry for bothering you.”

“Wait!” exclaimed Delver. “There was one more thing: the Moon.”

“The Moon?”

“Yes, the Moon. It didn’t have the same markings as our Moon. It was the same apparent size in the sky, but its markings very clearly portrayed a unicorn mare in profile. And…” (he closed his eyes to improve the memory) “…and yes, the Moon very clearly moved in stops and starts.”

“That’s very interesting,” said Celestia. “I’m not sure who moves the Equestrian Moon around, though.”

“Princess Celestia,” Gus said matter-of-factly.

“How can you be so sure?” asked Delver.

“Because ‘celestia’ is Latin for ‘sky’, which implies she moves everything in the heavens.”

“It is?” asked Delver.

Gus was speechless. “You’re a bishop,” he finally said. “How can you not know Latin?”

“Because I’m a Markist,” Delver replied. “They don’t teach us Latin growing up.”

“Not even to learn etymology?”

“What does Latin have to do with insects?” asked Celestia.

Gus groaned. “And there goes my hope that the Markist educational system might be better than the one used in the rest of America. I suppose that means I’m the first person to ever ask the following question: How often have any of the prior Celestias on this world had Lunas as sisters?”

“Never,” answered Celestia. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, ‘luna’ is Latin for ‘moon’, so it makes sense that—”

Gus was interrupted as Celestia suddenly shot to her feet, knocking over her chair. “I’ve got to go,” she said, before rushing out the door.

Delver and Gus shared a puzzled look at the slowly closing door.

Chapter 11: Library Research

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Chapter 11: Library Research

Celestia slowed her desperate run into a deliberate speed walk as she entered the church library. After making sure that the librarian had seen her, she made her way back to the reference section. She quickly found a thick book entitled Markist Biographical Dictionary (1377-1876), Volume 22: Index. She grabbed a pencil and piece of scrap paper, and flipped to the end of the L’s.

There were no entries for “Luna”.

She flipped back to the C’s, and easily found the five Celestias who had lived and died before 1876 that had kept their birth names.

Celestia walked over to the desk of the librarian, Canna Table. “Mrs. Table?” she asked. “Do you know if there’s any kind of ‘reverse index’ for the Biographical Dictionary? So I can look up somebody by their first name?”

“Well, why don’t we take a look together?” the lady with skin the color of aged porcelain answered. She slowly made her way over to a group of low tables with small drawers stacked atop them. She approached one such drawer, pulled it out, and stepped through the punched index cards it contained before carefully withdrawing one. “Here we go,” she said, walking with the card and Celestia in tow back to the reference section. “An inverse index to the original edition and first supplement, written as a thesis project by B. Bookman in 1922.” She pulled out a hand-bound volume with cardboard covers, the title in the form of a fading typewritten label that was peeling off of the front. “Give that back to me when you’re done, so I can re-stick that title. And be careful with it!”

“I will,” said Celestia, carefully taking the volume from Mrs. Table and returning to her…table.

Opening the book to the L’s, she soon found the Lunas.

All thirty-five of them: Luna [Adams], Luna [Ashley-Cooper], Luna [Baldwin], Luna [Beaufort], Luna [Blackwood], Luna [Boyd], Luna [Cavendish], Luna [Cooper], Luna [Churchill], Luna [Cornish], and twenty five more.

All individuals with “Luna” as their only name, just like the “Celestia”s.

And yet nobody has ever noticed them before, thought Celestia. They have to be important, because none of them died before the age of three. This was highly unusual—the dictionary was ridiculously thorough in including all Markists to have died before 1877 anywhere in the British Empire, and of course all Markists were given their names at birth. Celestia remembered that infant mortality from the Middle Ages was something like 25%, and it didn’t drop below 10% in developed countries until the Twentieth Century.

But that was not a statistic applied to anyone named Luna. Like the Celestias, the Lunas were spared infant mortality. They were special.

But that didn’t mean they were spared any misfortune. After borrowing a calculator from Mrs. Table, Celestia was able to determine the ages of death: 16, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 14, 13, 15, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 14, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 14, 13, 14, 13, 13, 15, 13, 13, 15, 13, 14, 13, 13, 13, 13 and 13. The reason there were so many fewer Celestias than Lunas was because the average life expectancy of a Celestia was 60 years. The Lunas only made it to 13 unless they were ridiculously lucky.

Luna—Celestia’s Luna—turned 13 in two days.

The Celestias got their mark at the age of 13. 13 years and 5 days, to be exact. And if the Equestrian Luna was meant to be the Princess’ unnamed sister, the one who became the Demoness Nightmare Moon, as referenced endlessly by the dreams that the human Celestia could never tell to anybody…

After wiping the tears from her eyes, Celestia got up and retrieved all the volumes of the Biographical Dictionary (original and first supplement), laid them out on four different tables, and started looking up entries in chronological order. The vast majority were in the same format as the first:

[Beaufort], Luna. (2 April 1381 – 7 April 1394). Member of the English nobility. Mark: white crescent moon on a midnight blue background. Bluish-grey skin, sapphire blue and Persian blue hair. Loving daughter of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford.

And that was it—no cause of death listed at all. Like it shamed the Faith to admit how she died. But later centuries were not so discreet.

Luna [Thomas] (18 August 1577 — 23 August 1590) was burnt as a witch after wandering into a Catholic town—surely there was more to the story than just that. Luna [Keyes] (27 September 1599 – 2 October 1602) was killed by the men of Staveley when they caught her trying to burn down the town. Luna [Cavendish] (11 December 1670 – 6 May 1684) was committed to Bedlam after attacking the Lord Mayor of London with a carving knife at the age of 13 (and 5 days), and it was in Bedlam that she died a year later, after numerous attempts to kill her handlers and fellow inmates. Further tales of mental disintegration continued, and with the presence of exact birthdates, the exact age of each mental breakdown, if not outright death, could definitely be pinpointed: Age 13 and 5 days.

Celestia had seven days. Seven days to save a sister she had ignored all her life from madness and death.

“It’s not fair,” Celestia muttered to herself as she kept reading.

And then there was Luna [Adams]. As documented in the first supplement of the Biographical Dictionary, this Luna was visiting a military training camp in Kansas with her father Resolute Skipper on February 28, 1918—America had entered World War I a year earlier, and Camp Funston was one of several locations where soldiers were being frantically trained before being shipped to Europe. Funston was also the location where Markist conscientious objectors were being detained, and Resolute was there as part of a government committee ensuring their fair treatment.

That night, Luna disappeared from the home the family was staying at. A few hours later, “with the eyes of a madwoman,” she had attempted to break into the camp infirmary. It took a dozen men to take her down. She was put into a straightjacket and shipped to Danvers State Insane Asylum, where she was committed under the diagnosis of “dementia praecox” on March 5th. (That was apparently the term for what was now known as juvenile-onset degenerative schizophrenia.) The whole time she was bragging to anyone who would listen about how she had almost caused “the end of the world”.

And there was a possibility that her claim was not completely ridiculous. In the aftermath of Luna’s rampage, affairs at the camp were thoroughly re-organized. As a result, one of the Markists being held at Camp Funston, Clean Sweep, was allowed to act against an extremely virulent strain of the flu that he had identified in one of the quarantined patients; he called it “Spanish Influenza”, after a song popular at the time. Thanks to Clean Sweep’s efforts, that strain was isolated and eliminated. There is no telling how many people around the world might have gotten sick from Spanish Influenza if not for him and, indirectly, Luna.

Luna [Adams] died in Danvers Asylum on November 9, 1921, almost four years after being committed—a record for the Lunas. She spent all of that time screaming her lungs out and attempting to kill everyone around her, although she seemed somewhat calmer in absolute darkness. Also, she left behind a diary containing entries right up to her breakdown.

Celestia needed to read that diary. She asked Mrs. Table if she could track it down. Mrs. Table countered that it would be a lot of work, and unlikely to succeed. Celestia said “please” and flashed her most-pitiful pout at the helpless librarian. Mrs. Table began the first of thirty-two calls to libraries around the United States, eventually finding a copy at the University of South Carolina’s legal library, a legacy donation from 1962 that the library had no idea what to do with. It would become the exclusive property of the Canterlot Church Library when it arrived by post in a week—the very same day as Luna’s scheduled breakdown. Not even Celestia’s charm powers could sway a stern Presbyterian on the other end of a staticky phone line, so Celestia had to rely on a higher force than herself to provide her only hope in saving her sister from a horrible fate: the U.S. Postal Service.

She decided to tell no one of what she had discovered; convinced she could handle this crisis on her own. Princess Celestia would be so proud.

Or perhaps she’d be in utter despair that her namesake was following right in her hoofsteps.

Interlude: Toy Plane (Part One)

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Interlude: Toy Plane (Part One)

Minister for Defense Ustinov pulled his black VAZ-2101 automobile into an improvised parking spot behind the brick apartment building in the early Moscow evening. He had exchanged his pea-green army coat for a plain woolen coat of the same color. After reaching up to adjust a hat that wasn’t there, he used the key provided for him to unlock the back door and walk in.

After climbing two flights of rickety stairs, he walked down a short corridor to room 305 and knocked: KNOCK…KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK.

The door opened to the extent allowed by its chain, to reveal Viktor Chebrikov, head of the KGB. Chebrikov looked around for a moment to be sure nobody else was around before unchaining and opening the door.

Ustinov removed his heavy coat, folding it carefully and resting it on the back of a couch, before taking in the dark and dank apartment. The most prominent aspect was the smell: Chinese take-out. Sitting before the lone window of the apartment was a woman dressed all in black. A few feet away from her, a man also dressed in black was seated at a desk, transcribing everything the woman said to him on an old typewriter. The woman was equipped with a telescope on a stand. The telescope was pointed at the apartment building across the street, where a family was loading their belongings into a battered truck. A couple of armed men were there to ensure that the move went as planned, and that the family being forced to move didn’t skip out on their last rent check.

“Welcome, Comrade,” said Chebrikov, speaking quietly so not to disturb the work of his two subordinates.

Ustinov walked over to the window and peered down. He easily recognized the head of the family doing the moving as Stanislov Petrov, the man he had been forced to humiliate as punishment for how he saved the world. “What are you doing here?” Ustinov asked Chebrikov. “I didn’t think an operation like this would interest you.”

“On the contrary,” Chebrikov replied. “The psychological aspects are why I got into the business in the first place.” He joined Ustinov at the window. “Petrov down there was a perfect example of a loyal Party member. Now he’s labeled as a traitor by everyone around him, with no explanation available as to what he did wrong. How long before he breaks, and becomes the traitor everyone tells him he is? And what of his wife and son?”

With a frown, Ustinov turned back to the window. He could see Petrov being berated by his wife, in front of a small crowd of witnesses, yet the man did not strike her down and put her in her place, as any proper Russian of his generation would. After a few seconds, he walked away from her, and kneeled down next to a young boy.

“‘There, there,’ said Stanislav,” the woman in black said, reading Petrov’s lips through the telescope. “‘We can get you another plane.’ ‘But that one was special’, answered Yuri, pointing at the house. ‘That one won the war.’”

Ustinov walked over to the desk and reached out for the pile of what had been transcribed so far. “May I?” he asked.

Chebrikov instead gave him a manila folder. “Here,” he said. “Konstantin wrote up this summary while the family was sleeping.”

Ustinov looked over the report, detailing the steady disintegration of the Petrov household since he was denounced. He had already been fired from the job he had taken after losing his position with the bunker, a result of his employer finally finding out how he had lost his last job. His wife was the one pushing him to strike back against his masters, but he had always quietly resisted her suggestions. The boy had retreated into playing war against the Americans with his toys.

At least in that particular struggle the Soviets always emerged victorious.

Ustinov glanced from the report over to the current transcript. Its current last line was “‘But that one was special,’ answered Yuri, pointing at the house. ‘That one won the war.’”

Stanislav Petrov had named his son after the Secretary General.

As he was finishing the report, Ustinov heard the squelch of tires scraping over cobblestones. He got up to see that Stanislav Petrov was speaking with a man in a brand-new car who had pulled up beside them. Stanislav briefly hugged the man then summoned his family to join him inside the car. At the same time, a man emerged from the car to pay off the landlord’s thugs, plant an envelope on the steps, and to finally climb into the cab of the truck.

“‘Thank you, thank you,’” the woman in black said, reading Stanislav’s lips as he spoke to the driver. To his wife and son, he explained that “‘Comrade Mikhail is going to take care of everything.’”

Ustinov grabbed control of the telescope to get a good look at the car’s driver as the two vehicles set out, a driver who looked right at him and winked before setting off. “Impossible!” he cried, but it was not: the family had just been rescued from poverty by none other than fellow Politburo member Mikhail Gorbachev.

Chebrikov had pulled out a pair of binoculars to make the same observation. “Well, that will change the conclusion of the report,” he observed dryly. According to that document, the family was on their way to a smaller apartment that they might be able to afford for a few more months before their meager savings finally ran out.

He looked up to see that Chebrikov was putting on his coat. “You’re going to tell me to drop the case, aren’t you?” he asked. “Politics always gets in the way of the good cases. And by the way, there’s nothing in Petrov’s file that said he had any connection to anyone in power. I want you to know that I wouldn’t make a mistake that basic.”

“I believe you,” Ustinov said, as he picked up his own coat.

The envelope on the porch step was addressed to Marshal Ustinov personally. It contained a typewritten document.

“Could I please do one thing before we close this?” Chebrikov asked, standing carefully so that he didn’t have a line of sight to Gorbachev’s document.

Ustinov said nothing, tucking the document back into the envelope and following Chebrikov into the apartment building.

Empty apartments always looked so small. There didn’t seem to be enough room for a single man to live comfortably, much less a family that included a rambunctious little boy.

“Happy?” Ustinov asked, gesturing at the bare walls around him. “There’s nothing really to see here.”

“You’d be surprised,” Chebrikov replied, his attention focused on a smudge on one wall. He started walking a circuit around the small living room, his hand dragging along just under the level of the apartment’s window. “A phone number written down because you didn’t happen to have anything nearby to write on, a hole punched through plaster or glass in anger…” He stopped with a smile as the wooden floorboard under his shoe squeaked. “Or a loose floorboard used to hide something too important to have on your person in broad daylight.” He used a pocket knife to dislodge the piece of wood and remove it. With a frown he removed a small toy made out of aluminum. “Or maybe you find out why that boy was crying so much,” he said, turning and offering the object to Ustinov. “Here—give it to Gorbachev the next time you see him. Maybe even mention that I found it, so that this mess doesn’t lose me my job.”

Ustinov looked the toy over—it was a model of a Mikoyan MiG-31 combat jet plane. The toy had obviously seen much use, as the painted insignia had all been rubbed off.

The silence in the room began to build. “Does your son have any toys like that?” Chebrikov finally asked.

“All I have is a niece,” Ustinov replied.

“So? Maybe she’ll grow up to be a fighter pilot.”

With a shrug, Ustinov put the toy in his pocket, where it rested against the copy of The Elements of Harmony that he had only recently completed reading. “I’ll clear things up with Comrade Gorbachev.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh, and you might as well send me the only copy of the final report. To properly dispose of.”

“Of course, Comrade Ustinov.” A minute later, Chebrikov chuckled. “I had an arms dealer lined up.”

“What?”

“An arms dealer. In case you wanted to see how far this case could have gone. To see if we could have gotten Petrov into a gulag.”

“We don’t send people to gulags anymore,” Ustinov replied wearily.

“If you say so.”

The marshal was met by an official Soviet Army vehicle outside. It turned out that he had been needed for the past few hours.

The Americans were at it again.

Marshal Ustinov spent the drive over reading and re-reading the document Mikhail Gorbachev had left for him.

I am aware that you’re having Comrade Petrov watched. He was a friend of mine from primary school.
I understand why you have acted the way you have against him, and like you, I consider the needs and reputation of the Soviet Union to be paramount. It is therefore my intention that the Petrovs disappear from public attention. They will move back to Vladivostok, a town with many Petrovs. I know Stanislav, and I vouch that he will never again speak of his actions, until such time as the government sees fit to reveal them. But you may disagree with me.
I therefore give you the power with this document to act against me. You are an honorable man, Marshal. If you honestly believe that my actions are disloyal to the cause of Communism, then you have a document with my signature, my seal, written on my stationary with my typewriter. Make whatever changes you see fit to convict me of treason. But I am confident that you will do no such thing.
I trust in your kindness, in your generosity. This is the right thing to do.
Yours, hopefully in friendship,
~Mikhail
P.S. I requested an hour on Programme 1 at midnight tonight. Why not stay up and watch? It should be good for some laughter, at least.

Ustinov put down the letter with a frown. Not only had Gorbachev left the decision in his hands, but thanks to his readings of The Elements of Harmony over the last few days, it was also obvious that he was outing himself as a secret Markist.

What Gorbachev had done was a direct challenge to his authority, to the authority and reputation of the Soviet Union itself. And by all appearances, he had put his career on the line for no higher cause…than friendship.

Interlude: Toy Plane (Part Two)

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Interlude: Toy Plane (Part 2)

Marshal Ustinov arrived at the command bunker at 8:30 pm. He still hadn’t decided what to do with Gorbachev, or the Petrovs.

Waiting for him was Grigory Romanov, Russia's chief industrialist.

“Who let you in?” Ustinov asked as an aide helped him put his usual military coat back on.

“Oh don’t mind me,” said Romanov. “I’m just a real fan of military engagements. Plus you owe me.”

Ustinov rolled his eyes. “Stay out of the way, and keep your mouth shut,” he instructed. He turned to a nameless subordinate. “Give me a timeline,” he instructed, as he made his way deeper into the compound.

“The plane entered Pacific Soviet airspace ninety minutes ago,” the bespectacled little man answered. “It managed to cross Kamchatka before we could get any aircraft scrambled.”

Ustinov checked his notes. “We had a missile test scheduled to occur in Kamchatka today. Did they interfere with it?”

“No, but they were obviously spying on it.”

“Obviously,” chimed in Romanov, earning him a warning glare from Ustinov.

“It left Soviet airspace, but re-entered south of Sakhalin Island,” the aide explained as the group finally reached the control room. “We have three Su-15s and a MiG-23 on intercept.”

Ustinov strode to the front of the room and picked up a microphone. “This is Marshal Ustinov to Far East Air. Do you have positive identification?”

“This is Commander Kamensky to Marshal Ustinov. We have matters well in hand here. There is no need for your intervention at this time.”

Ustinov looked down at the table, where a report outlining all of the times Far East Air Command had failed to stop the multiple American incursions over the Kuriles were documented. “I wouldn’t be too sure of that, Commander. I repeat: do you have positive identification?”

“This is General Kornukov, speaking in support of my superior, Commander Kamensky. Target has already flown over Kamchatka and refused to identify itself or respond to our warning fire. Its course puts it on a direct path to bomb crucial air fields. Proactive retaliation is demanded under the circumstances!”

Ustinov reached into the pocket of his coat to hide a clenching fist, and was surprised to discover that both book and toy had been transferred from his civilian coat. He pulled the toy jet out and examined it in the dim light of the command center. “Well do me a favor and describe it, alright? Describe this plane so fast that your jets are only now able to catch up with it. Demonstrate that it’s obviously an American interceptor, and I’ll give you complete freedom to deal with it.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line.

“It has…blinking lights,” answered the reluctant voice of General Kornukov. “And two rows of windows.”

Ustinov dropped the toy plane to grip the microphone with both hands. “That is no jet, comrades, it’s a Boeing, a passenger plane that has wandered off course. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the pilot was unable to even recognize our warning fire. Under no circumstances are you to—”

“It’s slowing down!” exclaimed an anonymous tracker in the room.

“Target is climbing,” explained a new voice. “I’m overshooting it, but don’t worry, I think I know how to take it out.”

“Stand down! Stand down!” ordered Marshal Ustinov. “It’s a civilian plane.”

“A civilian plane that was probably altered into being a bomber,” suggested Romanov. “Better shoot it down to be sure.”

“You will stand down, that is a direct order!” insisted Ustinov. He then pointed at Romanov. “And get that civilian out of the room!”

“You’re making a grave mistake!” cried Romanov as a pair of military police grabbed him and started dragging him away. “I decide who the next Secretary-General will be, and it sure as hell won’t be some pansy who’s unable to stand up to American aggression! You’re finished, Marshal Ustinov. You hear me, finished!”

“I’ve got it locked on target, Sir,” pleaded the pilot. “Please, Sir. We’ve been humiliated so many times before. Please let me do something for the honor of the Soviet Union.”

“What’s your name, son?”

“Genadi. Major Genadi Osipovich. And I’m running out of time to make the shot.”

“Genadi,” Ustinov said gently. “As a pilot of the Soviet Air Force, you are trained on your observation skills. When you overflew the target, you were probably pretty close, yes?”

“Yes, I was less than 30 meters.”

“And when you flew over the windows of this possibly-converted bomber, what did you see inside?”

“I couldn’t see inside.”

“What about the tail insignia?”

“It…it was red. A sort of stylized bird in a red circle.”

“Korean Air Lines!” exclaimed the bespectacled aide.

Ustinov nodded. “Exactly, it’s the insignia of Korean Air Lines. Now the Americans are a great number of things, but they are not cowards. They would not hide behind an ally’s corporate logo when sneaking into this country to provoke a war. They would use American Airlines, or United, and any of the other brands based on American soil. What I am saying is that this is exactly what it appears to be, an unfortunate mistake by a civilian airliner. And we do not shoot down civilians. Is that understood?”

“U…understood, Sir,” said a clearly-shaken Genadi Osipovich.

“Now, why don’t you position yourself where the pilot can clearly see you, so they can realize their mistake and correct their course? And General Kornukov?”

“…Yes?”

“Perhaps you can forward me a complete report by tomorrow on how a commercial airliner was able to elude the Far East Air Force while flying in a straight line?”

“…Our radar is down.”

Marshal Ustinov sat roughly down in a nearby swivel chair. “Excuse me?”

“An arctic gale blew down our radar a week ago, and we haven’t been able to complete repairs,” explained General Kornukov in an abashed voice.

The Marshal fought to restrain his anger. “If our radar was down, why did you proceed with the missile test?”

“…Because it wouldn’t make us look good if we delayed the test.”

“And how much better would it make us look if we shot down a defenseless civilian airliner filled with who knows how many hundreds of innocent men, women and children?!” Ustinov demanded.

“...Not very good?”

Ustinov didn’t even bother to answer the question. Instead he got up, put down the microphone, and walked out of the room.

It was only when he had left the control room that he realized that he had made the exact same call as Stanislov Petrov had.

Marshal Ustinov didn’t know how many hours he had been driving around the streets of Moscow. Eventually he found himself in the parking lot of Central Clinical Hospital.

The members of the Politburo had all taken their turns sitting at Secretary-General Andropov’s bedside during his coma, so Ustinov knew where he was being kept. So after finding out when visiting hours began, he went into the nearest waiting room and sat down. At this late hour, he had the room entirely to himself.

On the waiting room's mounted television, Gorbachev was making his late-night broadcast. It was after the station should have gotten off the air, just as he had promised in his letter. Ustinov wondered how many insomniacs there might be in Moscow right now who were actually staying up to watch. Regardless of the man's audacity, he was sitting calmly in the news anchor's seat like it belonged to him.

“It seems to me that the best way to answer American inanity is not to sink to their level, but to prove ourselves to be the adults in the room,” he was saying. “The Pershing missiles are an obvious provocation—we should quietly point this out, with perhaps a reminder of what happened when we sent our missiles to Cuba in 1962. The American public, in contrast with many of their leaders, seem like a peaceful people, just as we Russians would prefer an honorable peace to war.

“It doesn’t take a genius to see why there is a disconnect between the American people and their president, and that’s because there are secrets being kept. And not even secrets that would be useful to keep from us and from their own people, but petty secrets, secrets of shame. It will not surprise you to learn that the Politburo have our own share of petty secrets we keep from you, the people of the Soviet Union. I pledge to do my part to expose any secret that will not do lasting harm to our great nation, a process I’m calling ‘glasnost’. This, alongside perestroika [reform] I believe to be the best way that our Union might move forward into the Twenty-First Century. In these ways I hope to truly be a comrade of the people, instead of merely their leader.”

While Gorbachev was making this speech, a text crawl underneath was summarizing the world news that would usually be delivered when the station went back on the air the next day: President Far Shooter still in the hospital, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi survives his fourth assassination attempt, and the Vega 1 lander successfully touched down on the surface of Venus.

Marshal Ustinov found that he was easily able to follow both speech and news feed. It seemed like a useful way to convey information, and he wondered if it would catch on in the future.

…And then the station finally ended its news day and went off the air. It would still be seven more hours before Ustinov could see how the Secretary General was doing.

He stared at nothing for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, with a deep sigh, he pulled The Elements of Harmony out of his pocket, and started up where he had left off on his second pass through the book: on the subject of war.

Mud was Sergeant Ustinov’s primary memory of WWII. That, and his continuing failure to keep his ever-diminishing squad safe from the Germans.

They had been lucky enough to miss most of the Battle of Stalingrad, but once the Nazi retreat began, Sergeant Ustinov’s work really began. First the commissioned officers were picked off by German snipers, leaving him in charge. And then they crossed the border into Ukraine, into the territories the enemy had firmly occupied before the failed invasion of Mother Russia.

What they had seen had sickened them. The Germans were not merely conquerors, replacing the leaders of the territories they had taken by combat. No, instead they were monsters: killing or raping anything that moved. And then there were the huge Jewish populations of Eastern Europe, shipped off by the millions to be exterminated like vermin.

As a result of this utter contempt for all non-Aryans, the retreating Nazi army had to fight its way through an incensed population eager for revenge. And despite that fact they took every opportunity to lay cruel booby-traps behind them, traps that the pursuing Russian troops continually fell afoul of, or slowed them down enough for the German sniper to have his way with them. Each trap was inevitably followed by a mocking sign planted on the side of the road with rhyming Russian stanzas. Soon Ustinov’s men were just as infuriated with the Germans as the Ukrainians were, just as willing to see them as inhuman, just as the Germans had been treating everyone else, were still treating everyone else, despite the obvious evidence piling up as to who was going to win this war.

They found Fritz buried under a shaking pile of snow shortly after crossing the Pripyat at Cherkasy. He had a rusty bayonet wound in his side, and he spoke perfect Russian. On being dug up, he surrendered himself as a prisoner of war. To the Sergeant, it was obvious that he was telling the truth when he told them that he had become as sick of his people’s acts as everyone else had, and was trying his best to escape the war entirely. For Ustinov, the proof of this was his memories of the handwriting of those mocking signs, each one shakier than the last, the last few peppered with spots of blood—punishment for balking at the words he was being ordered to translate. But the soldiers saw an easy target: if Fritz had written the signs, then surely he had planned the traps as well. His hand was so sure (now), so that must mean he was the sniper as well.

Matters came to a head in the city of Vinnitsa. This was the point where Ustinov’s squad had caught up with the Eastern Front. Ustinov’s excuses that he was merely holding Fritz captive until they could reach the proper authorities to try him could no longer hold water because here was the rest of the Russian Army, busy using any available wall for use by the firing squad.

While his men waited their turn to use the kangaroo court, Ustinov spent time with Fritz, hearing stories of his travels before the war, and of all the Russian friends he had made in the 30’s—not an easy time for a German to travel freely in the young Soviet Union. Ustinov arranged for Fritz to tell fairy tales to the children of Vinnitsa, so many of whom had been orphaned by the Nazis in ‘43, or before that by the Stalinist purge of ’38. The rest of his free time was treating his men to as much rich food as they could stand, followed by bringing them to the front of the crowd watching the firing squad, to catch every squalid detail of deaths both exact and horrifically botched.

Eventually, Fritz was duly tried and convicted of the crime of being a German, of obeying orders when the alternative was torture followed by death followed by desecration of the corpse. The Sergeant gave a bloodthirsty speech to the ravenous jury, convincing them that a hanging, if done in just the wrong way, was infinitely more agonizing a death than that by firing squad, and they had agreed. After that, it was a simple matter to arrange for a rotted rope. Fritz gagged and turned blue before the rope failed, and the soldiers, finally gutted on German suffering, turned and walked away. Ustinov’s group left Vinnitsa the next week, headed by a green general who got himself shot a few days later. And Fritz presumably lived the rest of his life in Vinnitsa, telling stories and making friends.

Waking up, Marshal Ustinov reflected that this was the first time he had thought about poor Fritz since 1944. Overall, he decided that Markism was a wonderful dream, a dream worth pursuing even if human nature made it absolutely impossible that it ever be completely realized.

In this way, it was exactly like Communism.

“He’s awake! He’s awake! The Secretary General is awake!”

Ustinov looked over at the clock. Visiting hours were due to start in less than five minutes. He got up from the waiting room chair he had been sleeping in, worked out the kinks in his back, put on his pea-green coat, and made his way to Yuri Andropov’s hospital room.

The Marshal waited patiently outside while doctors and nurses saw to their revived patient. Several pieces of equipment were removed from the room, to be replaced by others he didn’t recognize. Those items that stayed were all familiar to him—there was little else he could do during his long visits of the comatose patient besides examine the various beeping and dripping machines, and interrogate hapless nurses and aides to learn what each of them did. As with his handling of Fritz, his learning the Quran before the Afghan War, or his study of the Elements of Harmony, it all formed a pattern in Dimitri Ustinov’s life: he always had to have some measure of control in every situation, no matter how helpless. Or failing that, superior understanding.

“Marshal? Is that you Marshal?” came a weak voice from within the hospital room after the doctors and their crews had finally vacated.

Ustinov walked in. “Yes, Secretary-General, it is me.”

Secretary-General Andropov looked awful. All the blood had drained out of his face, leaving his lips blue and his skin that grayish-blue color you see in meat beginning to spoil. The whites of his eyes were pink, and clouded over. And most of his hair had fallen out. When he heard the military man approaching, he reached out blindly to grasp weakly upon his hands. “Now is not the time to waste with titles, Comrade. Is there anybody else from the Politburo here?”

Ustinov looked down upon the clammy bony fingers resting atop his hands—it felt like being held by a corpse. “Not yet,” he answered his leader. “I can summon them if you’d like.”

“Don’t bother. You’re the only one of them I respect. The rest are equal parts back-biters and capitalist scum.” He had to stop for a coughing fit, if the faint wheezes he was able to summon up were even deserving of the term. “They told me the truth.”

“The truth?”

“That I’m never getting out of this white-washed room. The Soviet Union is in a crisis, the worst we’ve faced since Hitler. That Far Shooter has us on the ropes. And the only person I trust to take care of him is you.”

Marshal Ustinov stepped back, removing his hands from their unpleasant embrace. “I must respectfully decline,” Ustinov said. “All I know is troop movement, tactics. How to win battles. And if you remember, my track record at that has not been very good lately.”

“And that’s exactly what we need at this moment in history! You remember how we stopped Hungary from falling to the capitalists in ’56?”

“Actually, that was just you,” Ustinov said, trying to suppress his memories of the official records of the purge, with their exact account of how brutally the aborted revolution was crushed.

“And then Prague in ’68, Kabul in ’79, Warsaw in ’81,” Andropov continued, reciting the name of atrocity after atrocity. “It took us, together, to bring in the tanks, again and again, to save the Communist cause and remind our allies who was in charge. And in between, crushing the dissidents and breaking the wills of sovereign people, because only after they’ve been broken can they be indoctrinated into the truth of world-wide Communism. Well now it’s Moscow in ’85, and it will take more than tanks to crush the Far Shooters and Thatchers on the outside, and the Romanovs and Gorbachevs on the inside. It will take you! Marshal, you’ve all I’ve got! Are you sure you won’t reconsider?”

Ustinov shook his head. And then, realizing that the half-blind Andropov probably couldn’t see his gesture, he said, “No.”

The man in the hospital bed sighed. “Then you leave me no choice. I had hoped that you would make the decision, so the world would know that it was the act of a living man facing up to reality, instead of the act of a corpse that doesn’t know that it’s dead yet. Marshal, I order you to initiate a nuclear first strike against the Americans.”

Ustinov felt his blood suddenly turn nearly as cold as Andropov’s. “What?! How can you do such a thing?”

“It’s the only way out, Marshal. The only way to bring those arrogant Westerners to their knees, along with everyone else who’s been mocking us for decades and that American president with his crazy religion. I just know he’s the one who gave me this cancer! They think we’re weak and pathetic, Marshal. They make fun of us behind our back, and plot how to dismember our great empire when the Soviet Union finally collapses and Communism finally dies. But I’ll show them! If we can’t win, then everybody dies! Everybody dies!”

Ustinov heard the sound of footsteps approaching. The footsteps of the other members of the Politburo, or perhaps just a doctor or nurse—somebody who would have no choice but to carry Andropov’s words out of the hospital. Out of the hospital and into reality.

Ustinov shut the door of the little room and turned the lock. “I wish I were a Markist,” he said, walking up to the morphine drip running into Andropov’s arm.

“Eh? What was that?” asked Andropov. “Why aren’t you busy launching missiles?”

“I said I wish I was a Markist,” repeated Ustinov as he opened up the valve on the drip-line. “At least long enough to come up with a non-violent solution to this problem.”

“Marshal, stop!” Andropov pleaded. “I ordered you to destroy the world. That is a direct order by the lord and master of the Soviet Union, the supreme leader of the Communist World!”

“But perhaps this is more like the Great Patriotic War,” Ustinov mused, “where only violence can save us.” He stepped away and watched the drug drain into Andropov’s vein.

Andropov pulled weakly at the taped-on tube, but he was too weak, and quickly growing weaker. “You…you traitor!” he gasped. “The Americans will turn this world into a wasteland…enslave with their money and culture…and you’ll wish…you’ll wish that you had ended this rotten world while…it was…still…pure…”

Ustinov waited several minutes to see if the Secretary General would say anything else. He then calmly walked over to the door, unlocked it, and pulled it open.

Instantly a whole barrage of men and women pushed their way in, equal parts medical professionals and political big-wigs. Only then, over the confused shouting, did Ustinov notice the competing wails of the various monitors attached to the unconscious body of Yuri Andropov.

It was easy for Marshal Ustinov to sneak out of the room without being noticed.

Dimitri Ustinov had not murdered Yuri Andropov, in the sense of terminating his life signs.

But Yuri Andropov would never wake again.

And within twenty-four hours, Dimitri Ustinov will have left the land of his birth and greatest triumphs, never to return.

A pity that he didn’t think to order the dismantling of the automated system he had put in place in the wake of Stanislav Petrov’s brave decision not to launch the missiles under his authority. With the dilapidated command structure he left behind, such an order probably would have been carried out without anyone realizing that it had been issued by a traitor to the Soviet Union.

As it was, the only thing standing between earth and Armageddon was a creaky Russian computer.

Chapter 12: Let the Science Begin!

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Chapter 12: Let the Science Begin!

At a small home in Canterlot, a family dinner was interrupted by a round of furious knocking at the front door.

The matriarch of the family, Thorned Rose, answered the door, nose in the air and eyes closed. “I’m sorry,” she began, “but we are simply not available until after we have completed our ritual of breaking bread together.” Then she opened her eyes, and instantly fell to her knees. “Oh, I am dreadfully sorry, Celestia. You know of course that that was just a joke, yes? One that definitely doesn’t apply to you.”

“An innocent misunderstanding,” said Celestia with a smile. “May I speak with your daughter?”

“Of course…Yellow, get your butt over here right now! She’ll be along any moment now.”

“Gods, you don’t have to yell, Mo—oh hi, Celestia! What brings you here? Not that you aren’t welcome to show up at any time—”

“Day or night!” Thorned Rose helpfully added.

A dismissive glance from Celestia caused her to retreat back into the house, metaphorical tail between her legs.

Yellow Rose was a tall thin girl, yellow skinned and orange haired, with said hair styled in a vague cloud style that could be said to resemble a rose only if you were far-sighted and had lost your glasses. She was wearing a stiff white dress with starched collars, and matching white stockings and penny-loafers.

“I came to invite you to my sister’s birthday party this Sunday,” Celestia said, handing over an elaborate card, one of a set of one hundred that the local print shop had run up for her free of charge ten minutes after they were supposed to have closed for the day.

Yellow Rose took the card without looking. “Oh right, your sister—I remember her. I’ll get her something goth-y. Or would you prefer if I got her a music box to replace the one you said you wanted?”

Celestia shook her head angrily. “What? No, get a present for her, something she’d actually like, not a present that you expect me to steal. What do you take me for?”

“Well, that’s what you told me to do last year,” Yellow said in a small voice. She instantly regretted saying it.

“Well…I…but…that was last year. This year is special. This year we’re actually making her happy.”

“Well alright, I’ll try, but it won’t be easy,” Yellow said, shuffling one shoe on the carpet. “I don’t really have anything in common with your sister. None of your friends do.”

“Yes, I know,” Celestia said, looking away. “I don’t suppose you know if Luna has any friends I could invite?”

“Who?” Yellow asked, bewildered. Then she looked down at the card. “Oh, is that her name? No, I don’t think she has any friends. She’s kinda creepy.”

“Yes, I know,” Celestia said with a sigh, then turned on her heel and made her way down the porch steps and towards the street. “Get her…an astronomy book. I know she has one already, but it’s old. Get her a new one. And use dark wrapping paper—not the stuff you use around me.” She turned to face the other girl. “This Sunday has to go perfectly. I need you to ignore all of my sister’s weirdness and help her have fun for one afternoon. It’s really important to me. And I swear I’ll make it up to you.”

“Um…OK. See you then, Celestia!”

“Sure,” Celestia said with a wave of her hand, before stalking off towards the next house on her mental list.

Yellow stood at the doorway, her eyes fixed on the retreating form of Celestia, until the girl had turned a corner. Then she sighed happily for getting attention, any kind of attention, from the great and powerful Celestia. She looked down at the card, rubbing it gently.

“Anything you say, Celestia,” she whispered to herself, before slowly closing the door.

Celestia entered the Delver townhouse a couple hours later, heading straight to the refrigerator to make herself a sandwich from the leftovers of his dinner. She ate with a scowl on her face. Grabbing a notepad, she started making notes concerning who she had coerced into attending Luna’s party, and her utter inability to find anybody who would admit to being her friend independent of being Celestia’s friend.

Gradually it dawned on her that there was a conversation going on in the living room, and one of the speakers was Pr. Guiseman. On realizing this, Celestia got up, cleaned up her plate and her face, and joined the others.

She found Delver, Gnosi, Meridiem and Gus engaged in a game of Risk.

“Good evening,” she said.

The four of them looked at her.

“You missed dinner,” Delver said with a disappointed tone. “We waited as long as possible.”

“Sorry, something came up,” Celestia said. “I completely forgot to send out invitations for Luna’s birthday, and I figured waiting until tomorrow would inconvenience the guests trying to buy presents beforehand.”

Delver sighed. “Yes, I suppose that is acceptable, but why didn’t you tell me?”

“I got caught up in the moment,” Celestia said, with a helpless shrug.

Delver gave her a disappointed look for a few moments until turning back to the board. “Well I hope you found something to eat.”

“I did. Pr. Guiseman has a hotel room to stay in, right?”

“That’s right,” said Gus, picking up a thick orange beverage and taking a sip. “I’ve got my things already there, and I’ll head back after this game. I wouldn’t want to interrupt your privacy.”

“Oh, it’s no bother,” said Celestia. “In fact, I was wondering: is there a particular reason why your family hasn’t joined you in Canterlot?”

“My family?” Gus looked over at Delver. “I didn’t think that was allowed.”

Delver rubbed his chin. “Well to be honest, I didn’t even think of it. Assuming you keep your work confined to the lab, and hold to the NDA, I don’t see any reason not to have them visit.”

“Excellent!” Celestia exclaimed, picking up a nearby phone and shoving it into Gus’ hands. “Why don’t you call them up right now, and then I can arrange the plane tickets. They can be here by this time tomorrow!”

“Tomorrow?” Gus asked.

“Just in time for Luna’s birthday! You’ve got kids, right?”

“Well yes,” Gus said reluctantly. “But they’re several years older than Luna.”

Celestia looked way, cursing inwardly, before regaining control of her emotions. “Well, I didn’t mean to pressure you or anything.” She took in a deep breath and let it out. “I was sincere, however, in my wish that you not be unnecessarily separated from your family. You’re doing a great thing for us, and for Markism in general, so I think it’s only right.”

“Well…” Gus said, considering the offer. “This is a good time for them to get out of town for a week or two, and we haven’t been on a vacation together in years, so sure, I’ll make that call.” He took another sip of his drink before picking up the phone.

“Great!” Celestia exclaimed.

A few minutes later, Gus confirmed that his family was interested in a week-long visit. Celestia then grabbed the phone and called Round Trip, owner of the Canterlot travel agency, getting him to book airline and bus tickets to get the family in and out of town, and finally the Canterlot Inn, to book the necessary room on the same floor that Gus was staying in.

“You know, you don’t have to call everybody at night to get what you want,” Delver said.

“Yeah, but they’re always so very happy to help me, no matter what the hour is,” Celestia countered.

Delver only rolled his eyes.

“Well, with that settled, I guess I’ll go to bed now. Goodnight, Father, Meridiem, Gnosi. And Pr. Guiseman.”

“Goodnight,” the four others chorused.

Celestia went up the stairs to the second floor, passed by Luna on the way down. Neither said a word to the other.

“I’m going out to check on the bat colony at Grover Street,” Luna announced. She was gone before anyone had a chance to comment.

A belated Celestia rushed out of her room and to the top of the stairs. “Have fun!” she called out too late to be heard. Then she shook her head and returned to her room.

Gus looked up to the second floor, and then over to the door that Luna had just vacated. “I didn’t want to say anything while either one of them was in the room, but I take it that you’re their legal guardian,” he said.

“Yes,” said Delver. “Their birth parents died in a car accident on the way back from the hospital after Luna’s birth. Neither one of the girls remember them. I like to believe I have a relationship like Atticus Finch has with his children in To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“So it was your decision to tell Celestia from an early age that she ran the Markist religion?”

“Yes.”

“And have you regretted it yet?”

“On a near daily basis.”

June 22, 1985.

Zero minus 6 days.

Gus had been told that the lab Delver’s students were using for their experiments was located in the basement of the Markist church, and the church was within walking distance of the hotel, as was “most anyplace worth going downtown”, as the bellhop put it.

Gus stopped, puzzled, as he walked out of the hotel lobby and into the sunlight. Something seemed off about the light. He felt like he was in the middle of a solar eclipse, except for the fact the sun shone in the sky unobstructed. After a few moments, he decided to pass it off as another new side-effect to his regimen of medication, like the doozy his intestines has put him through the night before.

Before he knew it, he had reached his destination. The church was a long tall building, painted in a bright red and gleaming white and decorated with gold leaf along the eaves. Abstract paintings composed of stained glass could be found along the upper story, and the roof was mostly a skylight. Rather appropriate, Gus decided, considering that it was built to honor a sun goddess. And as for the shape and color, well it was a gigantic stable, but with the same relationship to a common stable as a fairy-tale castle has to a peasant’s hovel. Next to the building was what at first glance appeared to be a greenhouse, except that the walls were made of green-painted siding instead of glass. It looked tall enough to house a full-sized tree or two. And next to the pseudo-greenhouse was a miniature electrical power station. Gus could only assume that it was for the use of the lab.

Meridiem was waiting for him just inside the main building. “I hope you slept well,” she said.

Gus shrugged. “I won’t let one bad night’s sleep stop me from finally seeing some physical proof that everything you’ve been telling me over the past three days isn’t built on a house of cards. Where’s the Bishop?”

Meridiem gestured towards a back room. “He’s catching up on everything he’s missed while he was gone. Oh, and he’s also putting together his presentation for the Markist Historical Society of England. A group of us will be flying out to London next week. We, uh, didn’t anticipate you showing up, and he really can’t back out this close to the date of the conference.”

“Oh don’t worry about that,” Gus assured her. “I’ll have my family here, after all, so I’d probably want to entertain them while they’re here instead of working.”

“Good idea. I’ll write up a list of places to see before we leave. Now if you would follow me…”

& & &

The majority of the basement was separated into two rooms by a partition that included plenty of windows. The smaller room had plenty of desk space for writing; a couple of A/V carts each holding a television and a VCR, to monitor videos; an Apple Macintosh home computer with a whopping 512 kilobytes of RAM, for documenting the experiments; and finally a whiteboard, for working out ideas. The larger room was mostly empty.

Gnosi Augur was waiting for Gus in the smaller room, in front of one of A/V carts. Gus sat down beside him in another chair.

“I’ll double-check the equipment,” Meridiem said as she opened the door at one end of the partition. “I’ve seen the stuff he’s going to show you too many times to count.”

“Alright, walk me through what you’ve done so far,” said Gus.

“The question I set out to answer was what precisely was happening during the Marking ceremony,” Gnosi began. “The traditional explanation was a spiritual link between the two counterparts. I was forbidden from performing the ceremony with anyone who wasn’t ready for their mark, which was to keep from antagonizing the Princess. So I set up all kinds of monitoring equipment to see if I could catch anything interesting. Almost immediately, I detected some temperature fluctuations, so I asked Celestia to get me a thermal imaging camera. It was a few months before I had an opportunity to use it, but when I did, this was the result.”

Gnosi depressed the play button on the unit, and a false-color image appeared on the screen, which he immediately paused. “At first, I had tried to heat up the plaques, because I was looking for temperatures slightly below room temperature, but they just soaked up the heat like a sponge. So instead I stored them in the liquid nitrogen I was using to cool the camera.” He pointed to the purplish-black circle on one side of the screen. “The point was to get a good contrast against the phenomenon I was looking for.” He un-paused the video. “This is in slow motion. A bed was assembled in the test chamber and the subject was allowed to go to sleep naturally—I didn’t want to use hay smoke because that would mean I’d have to be wearing breathing apparatus. The worst that could happen is that the ceremony would fail, in which case I would have to repeat the process with a gas mask, but luckily it worked once I stacked three plates together.”

The moment the slowly-moving white hand of the subject was touched to the stack of plaques, two things happened: First, the color of the top-most plaque rapidly changed color as it absorbed heat from the hand. And secondly, a thick gray vapor entered the screen from the upper right corner and was sucked into the plate under the hand. The timestamps in the corner of the screen suddenly started incrementing faster.

“I’ve got the full film with everything in slow motion,” Gnosi explained. “This is the version I plan to use for presentations—assuming I’m ever allowed to make a presentation. Suffice it say that 38 seconds passed.”

After a few seconds, the timestamps dropped back into slow motion as the gray mist emerged from out of the plaque, and exited the screen in the same direction it came from. “And that was the moment when the subject woke up. During this time, the top plaque changed colors and displayed the subject’s mark, but that doesn’t show up in thermal.” The film ended, and Gnosi stopped the player.

“I can assure you that neither I nor the subject was breathing in the direction of the plate or the camera, and the video camera I had set up showed nothing where that gray shape is in the thermal video. Eventually I had the chance to repeat the experiment, and this time I made sure to position the camera to include more of the subject.”

Gnosi swapped out videotapes, and started playing the second recording. This one clearly showed not only the hand, but a figure (presumably Gnosi) crouched down holding the hand, as well as the subject’s arm, torso and head. As Gus watched, the subject’s hand was touched to the plaque, and the same thick tendril of gray matter emerged from the subject’s forehead before being pulled across and into the plaque. There was another time skip of around half a minute, and then the process reversed itself, with the gray substance diving into the subject’s forehead.

“So what is that?” Gus asked after the video ended.

“I believe it’s a human soul.”

Gus crossed his arms. “Really,” he said, unimpressed.

“This one I can show you,” Gnosi said, getting up.

The two crossed over into the test chamber, where Meridiem had set up two chairs facing each other. The thermal camera was pointing at the chairs, looking like a rather boxy video camera, but with a pair of hoses leading to a box freezer, which in turn was connected to a battery of liquid nitrogen canisters. A wire led from the camera to another television set, which showed a live thermal image of the chairs.

Gnosi instructed Gus to sit in one chair, and Gnosi sat opposite him. He pulled a pendant out from under his shirt, depicting an eye inside a five-pointed star. “This is my mark,” he explained. “It is the symbol for astral projection. Now I haven’t had that many Marking ceremonies to study since making that video, but what little I’ve been able to observe so far makes it appear that what is happening is identical to astral projection.”

“I don’t believe in—” Gus began in a tired voice.

“I was expecting you to say that, which is why I’m going to give you a demonstration. You’ll notice that the temperature in here is 30°C, as warm as a summer’s day. That makes it easier to detect my spirit, which is closer to 20°. Keep your eye on the camera.”

With a sigh, Gus did as he was told. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gnosi close his eyes and massage his temples with both hands. And then he felt something settle on his arm. It felt like a thick fog, only warmer, like tepid water. He looked at his arm, and saw nothing there, then turned to the television, where he saw the familiar grey substance resting on his arm. It looked like an anaconda constructed out of smoke, and its tail came out of Gnosi’s forehead. Gus reached up with his free hand, and by following the temperature gradients, confirmed that there was indeed an invisible something coming out of the young man’s head that was demonstrably cooler than the outside air. “All right, I’m convinced,” Gus said in a shaky voice. Immediately, the cool touch on his arm vanished, and Gnosi opened his eyes. “So, then what happened?”

“I found that I could use my ability to initiate the ceremony, without completing it. And that opened up some real interesting findings, which I’ll show you now. When we do this, it’s important that you remain as quiet as possible unless Meridiem or I tell you otherwise. The normal ceremony opens the gateway between worlds for mere moments, while we’ll be opening it for nearly a full minute.”

Gus nodded in understanding. He looked over at a small table, upon which Meridiem had placed several pieces of equipment. She unfolded one such piece into a modified music stand, which she set up between the two chairs. A second object attached to Gnosi’s chair, extending the arm rest. She then walked over to the refrigerator, put on a pair of rubber gloves, and retrieved a stack consisting of five of the plaques that Gus and Delver had made back in Neighagra Falls before they had left. She placed the stack vertically atop the music stand and secured it with rubber bands, as Gnosi positioned his hand on the arm rest so it was only centimeters away from the closest plaque. There was a little plate resting on a depression in the arm rest, into which Meridiem dropped a pile of chad produced by using a standard hole punch on tissue paper. Finally, she repositioned the television so that Gus could watch both it and what was happening with the plaques at the same time.

“Ready?” asked Gnosi.

Gus signaled with thumbs up.

Gnosi closed his eyes and brought his free hand up to his temple to help him concentrate. He then lightly touched the plaque with one finger.

On the screen, Gus saw Gnosi’s spirit emerge and approach the plaque, but it was held back from entering as Gnosi visibly increased his concentration.

The little pieces of paper near his hand wobbled, many of them standing up on end. And then they started being pulled towards the spot covered by Gnosi’s depressed finger.

Gus leaned forward in fascination. After signaling to Meridiem what he wanted to do and getting her permission, he brought his hand up next to the plaque, and was able to feel the suction pulling at his fingertips. Meridiem placed a hand on Gnosi’s shoulder and squeezed gently. This was apparently some sort of signal, because Gnosi brought his spirit tendril even closer to the plaque in response. This action in turn increased the suction to the point that a single chad flew up to cover the spot under his finger. Looking back and forth between screen and plaque, Gus saw the suction increased still more, causing the center of the small piece of tissue paper to pull slightly into the surface of the plate. Meridiem removed her hand from Gnosi’s shoulder, and Gnosi then pulled the tendril back, causing the chad to drift down to the ground.

Meridiem at this point removed the plate of chad, and picked up a long microphone connected to a small amplifier. Plugged into the amplifier was a pair of over-ear headphones, which she handed to Gus. She then brought the end of the microphone next to the plaque.

Gus put on the headphones, and began adjusting the gain on the microphone. As Gnosi’s spirit was once again brought close to the plaque, the whistling sound of air being sucked into the plate could be heard, but eventually other sounds as well: indistinct shouting and splashing.

A minute later, Meridiem patted Gnosi’s shoulder, which was the signal for him to end the experiment. The experience looked to have winded him a bit. “Well?” he asked.

“I had no idea it was that straightforward,” Gus said, removing the headphones. “I thought we’d have phasing issues, but the evidence suggests that a plaque opens an actual physical portal between worlds when activated, with the entrance on this side being a hole about a millimeter across. I assume that was Equestria I heard?”

“Yes,” said Meridiem. “Although I doubt you heard anything uniquely ‘pony’.”

“Well it certainly means something, unless you’re trying to hoax me. But I felt that suction, and there’s no easy way to fake that with this setup.

“More interesting is that the sounds I heard were open. It wasn’t muffled or full of echoes. You see, I had feared that if there were a portal, it might open up inside the brain of your counterpart, severely limiting the kinds of experiments we could try.”

“And what was the other me doing?”

“If I had to make a guess, I’d say he was at an outdoor swimming pool, based on the acoustics.”

“Good,” said Gnosi. “We both like to swim in the summer. That means we can do the last experiment.”

& & &

Again, the finger was touched to the plate, and the invisible spirit was used to open the portal to Equestria. Gus had a fine string 10 cm long tied to one finger—it was the same color as Gnosi’s hair. The finger and thumb of his other hand were coated with lavender chalk, a strong contrast to the string. With the shotgun microphone in position, Gus listened until it was clear that Gnosi’s pony counterpart had dived underwater, and then he positioned the string next to the portal entrance as Gnosi’s spirit was brought close. The suction pulled the string into the plate, threading through until it stopped. Gus reached forward and pinched the string right where it entered the plate with his chalk-covered fingers, then yanked it back out just before Gnosi withdrew his spirit. The string was then placed on a piece of blotter paper.

The last centimeter of the thread was clearly wet. There was three centimeters of dry thread between the end of the wetness and the beginning of the chalk mark.

“Why three centimeters?” Gus asked. “If this is just a portal like you read about in science fiction, the section exposed to Equestria”—he pointed at the wet part of the string—“and the section exposed to Earth”—he pointed at the chalk-marked part of the string—“should be touching. Unless…unless…” He got up, crossed into the smaller room, and started drawing on the whiteboard. A curious Gnosi and Meridiem followed.

“You’ve been arguing that Equestria is a parallel Earth,” he said, drawing two circles that were nearly touching each other. “What if instead they are actually two worlds in different spatial dimensions, separated by only three centimeters?”

“I don’t get you,” said Gnosi.

“Well imagine it in two dimensions instead of three.” He saw a box in a corner containing the rest of the activated plaques, and removed two of them. One he placed on the table, and from Gnosi’s sleeve he plucked a chad, which he placed on the plaque. He then used his finger to slide the chad around. “Imagine that the world is a flat disk instead of a sphere, and you’re a flat, two-dimensional being, like this paper punch here. You can move forward and back, left and right, but you have no idea what ‘up’ or ‘down’ are. Now here is Equestria.” He picked up the second plaque, and carefully lowered it until it was almost touching the bottom plaque. “Equestria is centimeters away, but two-dimensional you can’t see it.”

“Sure he can,” said Meridiem playfully, reaching forward between the two plaques and turning the paper circle so it was on edge, and now touching both “worlds”.

“Well that’s cheating,” said Gus. “But you get what I’m saying.

“The universe is twelve dimensional. Three dimensions are the ones of space that we’re familiar with, and time is a fourth dimension. That leaves eight more. Most of them are empty dimensions, curled up little things with no size to them, just there to redirect energy under particular circumstances. But testing dimensions is in its infancy. It’s entirely possible that one of those ‘empty’ dimensions is not empty at all. And that fifth dimension is how Equestria can be so close to Earth without us seeing it.”

“Okay,” said Gnosi. “So Equestria is right next door. But if the only way these two worlds can touch each other is through millimeter-size holes that usually open for only a second or two per lifetime, how does that make Equestria so like Earth?”

“Or vice-versa?” asked Meridiem.

“For that, I can only speculate, and throw some pseudo-science at you. Maybe it’s right, maybe it’s something completely different. Hopefully, we can come up with experiments to be sure.

“So let’s start with cultural similarities: the teacups, us speaking the same language, that sort of thing. All of those things were created by thinking creatures, humans on this end and ponies over there. Thought itself operates through quantum theory—in short, the complexity of the human brain is only possible because our synapses manage to play every trick in the quantum physics textbook. All that stuff I told you earlier about waveforms overlapping, events with partial probabilities, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Theorem, that sort of thing. Just as your personality emerges from the field of subatomic particles jostling around inside your brain, perhaps it’s possible that the minds of all thinking beings on the planet are also able to coalesce into a larger gestalt. I mean, if astral projection is possible, and if anyone can project well enough to go visit their Equestrian counterpart for a few minutes, then this idea of Gaia, the mind of the Earth itself, rises to the level of possibility.

“This Gaia consciousness, well it’s not really conscious at all. Not the way you or I are. Does it have any influence on any individual mind? Well considering the sorts of things that humans do to each other, you wouldn’t think so, but I think there is an influence, on an unconscious level. Carl Jung believed in something called the ‘collective unconscious’—maybe Gaia is that, or what is called ‘race memory’.

“Now if Gaia exists, then so should a corresponding spirit of Equestria, and from how you describe Equestrian society, I’m betting that their equivalent to Gaia is much more influential.”

“That sounds like Harmony,” said Meridiem.

“OK, Harmony. Now finally, imagine the interaction between Gaia and Harmony, and how that mingling filters down into the level of individual thoughts. I think that this is why the two worlds are so similar, at least on a cultural level.

“Now as for physical similarities, the reason why we have similar species, that’s a bit harder. Maybe the presence of magic allows Harmony to really change Equestria to mirror Earth. Or maybe magic is manifesting itself here on Earth, but in extremely subtle ways on the genetic level, to nudge Earth species closer to Equestrian forms. Or maybe it’s a 70/30 mix—70% for Equestria, because that world has more magic.”

“So how would you test that?”

“…I have no idea.” He then turned to Meridiem. “So, what’s your research about?”

“I’m trying to stop time.”

Chapter 13: Exactly as Advertised

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Chapter 13: Exactly as Advertised

It took a few moments for Gus to pick his jaw back up. “Alright,” he said slowly, “I think I’d like to see that.”

“Follow me, then,” said Meridiem.

She led the other two up out of the basement, out of the church altogether, and across to the building that looked like a greenhouse.

“As you’ve seen, some of us are lucky enough to have abilities granted by our marks that are within the realm of possibility,” she told Gus. “The rest of us have had to deal with the nagging feeling that our true potential will never be realized. Only the priesthood knows that this feeling is not an illusion, that our counterparts can literally do pretty much anything their mark gives them.

“There have been legends, disregarded by unbelievers but embraced by Markists, of moments when one’s mark is fully realized. To us today, these stories often resemble superhero origin stories—and there are many who believe that that’s exactly where those comic book stories originated from. Someone struck by lightning, or falling into a raging fire, and instead of dying they somehow convert this fatal dose of energy into power.” Meridiem’s eyes lit up. “And suddenly you have Markists who have super strength, super speed, able to fly—that’s the most common one—if only for a few moments, long enough to save the life of a loved one.”

“They usually died immediately afterwards of their wounds,” added Gnosi. “They don’t put that in the comic books.”

“Father Delver collected these stories,” continued Meridiem. “He meticulously collated them, trying to distinguish truth from fiction. His experiments with plaques revealed the mechanism: the same substance, in our bones, a sink for near infinite amounts of energy, and after absorbing enough of it, able to release it in a way that somehow warps the very laws of physics, without itself being fatal.”

“Warping the laws of physics? No, that’s not what’s probably happening,” said Gus.

“You have an explanation?” asked Gnosi.

“Well it comes back to quantum physics,” he explained. “The world of quantum physics is made up of nothing but probabilities. Put a pot of water on the stove, and the energy you add to the system in the form of the burner increases the range of possible outcomes. Without the heat, the water could sit in a room-temperature room for a million years, evaporating until reaching equilibrium, and then never changing again. But with heat, you not only get the overwhelming probability that the water will boil, but also an infinitesimal chance that the energy will shove the water molecules together in just such a way that it will spontaneously freeze instead. Now I’m talking about a tiny, tiny chance here—you’d have to boil one pot for every atom in the universe and check them all once a second for every second the universe has existed to get about three of them to freeze for one second each.

“But imagine applying one thousand times the amount of heat in a stove burner. A million times, a billion times. That much energy breaks the standard equations, like traveling near the speed of light breaks the Newtonian laws of motion. With that kind of energy in your pots of water you could have the water in one of them spontaneously turning into lime green Jell-O. Another couple orders of magnitude and a pot might turn into a kitten! I mean, we already have virtual particles out there in the void, so why not?!” He noticed the two students looking at him oddly, less for what he had said than for the manic way he had said it, and he took a moment to calm down. “But continue your story.”

“Right,” said Meridiem with a smile. “Father Delver realized that there was one form of energy that all Markists could handle with no ill effects: sunlight.” She gestured up to the sun, looking right at it.

“Wait, so you’re saying that Markists can’t get sunburn? And…and you’re not affected by bright light?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” answered Gnosi. “The specific blend of frequencies in natural sunlight filtered through Earth’s atmosphere—yes, we are completely immune to harm from that. But we can be blinded by artificial light that is sufficiently different from sunlight in its frequency distribution.”

“This realization was the origin of the Solarium: the one place on Earth where a Markist…can truly be free.” She opened the door with a key, and beckoned the physicist in.

The room inside was searingly white to an insane degree, but Gus found that his vision adjusting nearly instantly. “Wait a moment,” he said in realization. “That ‘orange smoothie’ you gave me last night—did that have dissolved plaque in it?”

“Yes,” said Meridiem. “In a small way, you’re one of us now. Don’t expect a cutie mark, though.”

Meridiem excused herself to step into a closet-sized room with even more solar lamps on top shining in.

“She’s charging up,” Gnosi explained to Gus. “Soaking up enough sunlight through every square inch of her skin for what she wants to show you.”

“Wait, so you mean she’s taking off her clothes in there?” Gus asked.

“Yes, but let me ruin whatever mental image you might have by telling you from my own experience that right now she looks like Peter Boyle did in that one scene in Young Frankenstein when he was being hit by lightning.”

“You mean that scene when you could see his skull glowing through his face?” Gus asked with a grimace.

“Yeah. Now imagine that with every bone in your body. She’ll know she’s full up when she stops looking like the ‘visible woman’ model.”

Gus took a moment to think of another subject—any other subject. “You can project your mind outside your body without using the Solarium—what can you do when you’re…charged?”

“I can enter into other people’s minds,” Gnosi answered. “But I can only do it with their permission,” he added quickly in response to Gus’ look of utter horror. “I used it on Meridiem, to help her work through her abuse. It’s the reason she’s as stable as she is. It’s why I wish to go into therapy after I graduate. Even if I’m never allowed into the Solarium again, I’ve learned so much about how the human mind works from visiting others that I think the experience will be invaluable for use in traditional psychotherapy.”

“And no one you’ve—I’m sorry, I can’t think of a better name for it—invaded ever had a problem with it?”

“No,” said Gnosi simply. “Because we’re Markists.

“Markists don’t really believe in privacy—or at the very least, Markist priests don’t. Ponies and Markists alike exist to carry out the Goddess’ plan: to spread harmony throughout the universe. We have no firm evidence, but given how the Goddess has always been able to figure out whatever humanity is up to when she contacts us through a Celestia, we are led to believe that She can read minds, to see how well her subjects are carrying out her directive. If Her own people have no such thing as privacy, why should we?”

“Well if you’re asking for a personal reason,” Gus responded, “it’s because I don’t believe that anyone—even a Goddess—would be able to resist exploiting that knowledge for their own personal gain, to judge us for our thoughts instead of our actions. And that is my definition of ‘hell on earth’.”

“Fine, I’ll leave all your precious secrets to yourself,” Gnosi joked. “Speaking of which: the Solarium is the one secret everybody keeps from Celestia, OK?”

Gus imagined a glowing Celestia with a hangover stopping the rotation of the Earth so she could sleep in for a few hours, and readily agreed.

Gus took the time to look around him. Inside the tall room he spotted a young man juggling small spheres constructed entirely of fire. A woman was pulling a strand of water out of a pool and tying it in knots like it was made of rope. A couple were laying their hands on a small bush—Gus didn’t see anything obvious happening, but perhaps this particular trick was slower than the others. Somebody was engaging in what looked like a standard warm-up routine with a punching bag—except the bag was made of concrete. And three people were flying in the air above his head.

While he was doing this, Gnosi had gone over to one of a set of footlockers set against a wall to remove some equipment. Meridiem emerged from the charging chamber (fully dressed) and joined him, then gestured to Gus. From this spot, they were mostly out of view of the other students.

“Alright, are you ready for this?” Meridiem asked Gus. “I gotta tell you, I haven’t quite got the business of stopping time completely worked out, but I expect you’ll be able to give me pointers.”

“Are you kidding?” asked Gus. “Sure, I’ve worked with theories of reverse time, but I never considered how to stop time, because I never thought I’d come close to having the means to do it!”

“Yeah, but you can imagine it, right?” countered Meridiem. “Look, let me show you what I’ve got so far.” She manhandled the professor so he was facing away from her. Gnosi then positioned himself in front of Gus and held up a wall clock half a meter across, the kind that advanced the second hand with an audible “thock!” every second. “I’ve got to be touching your skin for you to be included in the effect,” she explained, “and I’ll be glowing like a strobe light, so that’s why I’m behind you.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

Meridiem grabbed onto one of Gus’ bare arms with each hand and moment later the ambient light in the room shifted to red. The second hand of the clock lurched forward with a deafening “THUMP!”, then hung for nearly a minute before racing halfway around the clock face with a set of audibly fading ticks as the light went back to normal. At the same time, Gus felt his heart pounding in his chest and an overwhelming feeling like the walls of the room were bending inward to crush him. And finally, he did catch a wild multi-colored light show in the corner of his eye, coming from behind him.

Meridiem released Gus and sat down on an ornamental rock, catching her breath. “I’m usually able to hold it for a lot longer than that,” she said by way of apology.

“Well you definitely did something,” Gus said, turning to face her. “But I’m not exactly sure I can tell you how to get better at it. I mean, what are you doing: reciting some Latin incantation in your head? Waving your fingers…er, toes…in some complex pattern?”

“I’m just imagining everything stopping,” Meridiem said. “I’m calling upon the memory of the moment I understood my mark, the moment when my life was falling apart and the one thing I wanted more than anything was for everything around me to stop long enough for me to collect myself.”

Gus gave her a sympathetic look—thanks to that conversation in his hotel room, he knew far more about the moment Meridiem was referring to than he felt comfortable with. Turning away, he started pacing. “So it’s a mental construct. But you’re not only imagining an effect, but also drawing on an emotional experience. Are both aspects necessary?”

“I don’t need memories for mine,” said Gnosi. “I just picture what I want to do, whether it’s projecting my spirit or joining my thoughts to Meridiem’s.”

Gus led the other two back to the common area. “Let’s get a few more data points. Excuse me, fliers? Could I have a moment of your time?”

The two women and one man descended from the sky. Two of them hovered in the air just above the ground, while the third one landed.

“I’m wondering what precisely you think about when you want to fly?”

“I imagine that I have invisible wings,” the hovering woman said. Gus noticed that she did not remain motionless in the sky, but bobbed first up and then down, like a hovering bird with a wide wingspan. Her stance was leaning over a bit, again as if she was being supported by invisible wings attached to her shoulder blades.

“Ditto,” said the hovering man, who appeared to be her brother. His bobs were smaller than his sister’s, but more rapid, suggesting a hummingbird’s wings instead of a buzzard’s.

“And I just imagine directing anti-gravity waves in whatever direction I wish to go,” said the last woman, a bit nerdier-looking that the other two. Unlike them, she was absolutely motionless, and also sitting in an imaginary chair, at least for now.

Gus thanked them and let them get back to their play. “Alright, so it looked like it doesn’t matter what you imagine, just so long as it’s convincing. And that means you don’t really know what it means to stop time.”

“You’re right,” admitted Meridiem. “I can work it out intellectually: time quantized like energy and atomic orbits, and living in the infinite moments between ticks of the atomic clock, but I can’t know what it feels like.”

“A pity,” said Gus. “My particular ‘superpower’, if you want to call it that, consists of the ability to perfectly imagine anything I can write an equation for. But of course I lack the ability to actually bring my imagination to life through the power of thought alone. While you can do it, but can’t imagine it.”

Gus looked over to Gnosi, and then back to Meridiem. And then he looked again. “No,” he said. “It can’t be that easy.”

“What?” asked Gnosi and Meridiem in unison.

“Meridiem, could you imagine a space compartmentalized from the rest of your mind, a space that no stray thoughts could ever get into?”

Meridiem looked over at Gnosi for a moment. “I’ve constructed a safe place, for times when my nightmares threaten to overwhelm me.”

“Then we can do this safely. Gnosi, if you can go into Meridiem’s mind, might it not be possible that you can take me with you?”

Gnosi’s eyes went wide. “I never even considered the possibility. I’d essentially be pulling you into my mind, and then taking you with me into Meridiem’s mind. Mary, what do you think?”

“Yeah, I think I can hold you at arm’s length, mentally.”

“But I thought the idea of someone entering your mind repulsed you?” Gnosi asked Gus.

“In the abstract, yes,” answered Gus. “But first, I trust you. And second, the temptation to mess with the laws of nature, even if second-hand, is just too overwhelming to resist. I am going to regret this, I know, so let’s do this quick before I get cold feet.”

“I promise you that neither of us will see any thoughts that you don’t want us to see,” Gnosi vowed.

& & &

The three of them sat down in a circle, their legs crossed. They joined arms, and each leaned forward until their heads were touching.

Gus closed his eyes and waited. The sounds around him abruptly disappeared, to be replaced by the distant sound of a music box playing a tune which he was unfamiliar with.

“You can open your eyes, Professor Guiseman.”

Gus opened his eyes to see that he was now in a small room, only a couple meters to a side. The walls were covered with wallpaper whose pattern consisted of faded patchwork. The ceiling was covered by sky blue muslin dotted with green stars, and the floor was varnished oak. Meridiem and Gus floated in the air before him. Like the traditional images of ghosts, they sort of faded away between their waists and their knees. Gus looked down to see that he was in a similar state, but he rather stubbornly summoned his legs back into existence so he could stand instead of float. He smiled on realizing how easily he was able to manipulate his surroundings by force of will.

“Alright to start with, you can’t just freeze the entire universe, because it’s too big and the energy requirements are too much.”

“I already thought of that,” said Meridiem. “I freeze a sphere about ten meters across. The effect is actively using energy, so it can never extend beyond the walls of the Solarium.”

“Now the next difficulty is how we are able to breathe in this confined space, and beyond that, every other biological need while time is stopped. So instead imagine that we are something like this—beings of pure thought, but nevertheless able to manipulate objects through telekinesis. By merely imagining that we’re solid, that sort of takes care of all of the senses.”

“OK, I can see all of that,” said Meridiem. “But how do you actually stop time, and how to do you start it back up again?”

“So imagine the world at the atomic level,” Gus said, and with a thought, the room around them expanded until the air molecules were visible around them, shooting around, colliding with each other and, for one particular molecule of O2 merely floating in front of them in the form of two overlapping transparent gray spheres, vibrating in place.

“Imagine you can see entropy,” Gus instructed them. The world of careening molecules picked up an orange sheen. The orange was leaking out of the center of each atom, and pooling in complex ways between the various molecules.

“The increase of net entropy is time, on the molecular level. Now this is the hard part: imagine having hands unconstrained by the three dimensions of space. You’re wrapping your hands around this molecule to push the entropy back in, but you’re also doing the same to every molecule at once, and also a giant set of hands forming the sphere that defines the boundary of your time stoppage. And then you squeeze.” The squeezing could be felt more than seen, using an entropy sense that no living thing actually possessed. The orange was squeezed into the molecules and into the outer sphere. It solidified into a shell ten meters out (an infinite distance at this scale) and spread it out until the gaseous entropy became light, the red light of stopped time. Every molecule stopped right where it was, and their 10-meter radius universe waited.

“That’s what I think stopping time would feel like,” Gus concluded.

Meridiem looked around her, nodding. “I can see it,” she said. “And you’d reverse it like this…” And she gently pushed the red light back into orange clouds and disintegrated the distant barrier into a million shards of space-time that instantly dissolved into nothingness.

Gus took them back to macroscopic scale, and watched as Meridiem practiced stopping and starting time in this imaginary environment. Meridiem set herself the goal of being able to perform the abstractions mentally, to set up all the effects and then release them at once, stopping and starting time on a dime. When she was satisfied that she completely understood what she was doing, she signaled Gnosi to put his and Gus’ minds back into their respective heads.

& & &

Gus leaned back, away from the circle. He mentally inspected himself to be absolutely sure he was in the correct body before rejoining the huddle.

“Do you need to get charged again?” Gnosi asked.

“No,” said Meridiem. “I was being very wasteful of energy before. I mean, it’s not like I’ll ever be able to do this outside the Solarium, but I think it should be a lot easier, assuming this method works as well as it did in my imagination.” She once again joined arms with the two men, and then closed her eyes to concentrate.

The world shifted to red. Gus looked around, to see that the three fliers who were still in the air were now suspended. The nearby water fountain was still.

“Go ahead and look around,” Meridiem instructed, standing up. “We only need to be touching when I stop or start time. Otherwise, you can go anywhere within a ten meter radius of me. I don’t even need to concentrate to maintain the effect.”

Gus raised a finger in the air. “Question: What would happen if you forgot to touch me when you started time back up again?”

Meridiem thought for a bit. “Well I guess that would mean that you would be trapped in the same instant for the rest of eternity?”

“Might I make it a rule that you take very careful roll calls when manipulating time?” a rather nervous Gus asked.

“Yes, that sounds like a good idea. Now go and satisfy your curiosity. I promise I won’t forget you.”

Gus got up and stared at her for a bit, before finally walking over to the pool for some experimentation. He found he could push his hands into the water, but it had the consistency of mercury. Logically, it should be completely solid, but if that were true, then there would be trouble pushing through the very air, so he had no problem with the current arrangement. He pulled a blob of water out, leaving a scoop visible in the surface of the pool. As he walked with the blob, he felt a resistance to moving it, and noticed that the blob soon heated up. He reasoned that the blob had picked up a considerable amount of momentum from his actions, and that if time were to restart, it would go flying off in the direction that he was pulling it at tremendous speed. He wrapped his other hand around the blob in the direction of its momentum and pushed gently causing the blob to cool back down. Now he felt that if time were to restart, the blob would just drop straight down. Leaving the blob hovering in mid-air, he walked over to a partially-open janitor’s closet, grabbed a large sponge, and positioned it under the blob. Then with a second thought he used his hands on both sponge and door to arrest their momentum, so they couldn’t go flying the moment time returned to normal.

Gnosi meanwhile had made his way across the Solarium until he reached the edge of time-stopped space. He rapped on the red shell a few times with his knuckles then tried to peer through it, but found that it was completely opaque. He then turned around and reported these findings to Gus.

“So how long do you think you could keep this up?” Gus asked Meridiem, who had spent the time merely sitting on the edge of the pool and looking around her.

“Indefinitely, I think,” she said. “I don’t feel the slightest bit tired.”

Gnosi took a trowel from the janitorial closet and stuck it into the back pocket of the fire-bender. “Alright, I think that’s enough for now.”

The three of them walked back to the place where they had sat down earlier. Gus could dimly see three shadows sitting, their arms linked. They sat down and replaced those shadows, and time started once again.

There was a splash as the blob of water fell onto the sponge.

“Thank you,” Meridiem said to Gus, grasping his hand with both of hers. “I’m finally able to realize my destiny.”

“You’re welcome,” replied Gus. “Thanks to Gnosi, I think you may well be the first of my students to completely understand my teachings on the first try.” He looked over at the happy fliers. “I just wish you were able to practice your abilities outside of this one location.”

“Are you kidding?” asked Gnosi. “The day Archbishop Shepherd saw what was going on here, he nearly had a stroke. You’re the first person who wasn’t a third year seminary student who has even been allowed to know this place exists! Although I hate to admit it, but he has a point.”

“Everyone else sees you as merely weird,” said Gus. “And what some of you can do with your marks can be dismissed as exaggeration. But if this got out, that would make you the superior race in the eyes of the fearful. A superior race that would have to be wiped out before you did the same to us.”

“And this is the world we are tasked with reforming!” Meridiem whispered, tears running down her cheeks. “Why does it have to be so hard? Why is it that creatures as weak as us, with hearts as easily broken as us, have to have the job of bringing friendship to them?” She pointed at the exit. “They’re all so horrible! They kill, and they destroy beauty everywhere they go! In Equestria, every conflict, whether between individuals or nations, can be solved with kindness and understanding, while on Earth, the only language that anyone ever understands is violence!”

Gus placed a hand on Meridiem’s shoulder, and another on Gnosi’s, who was watching her outburst with sad understanding. “Children, listen to me. You’re human too, just as human as all of them outside. The potential for hate and distrust is in you, same as them. Your youth gives you the naiveté to think you can make a difference, while the majority of the world has given up on ideals and turned to the goal of ‘every man for himself’. But the important thing is that young idealists can make a difference and they have, again and again. You know your history, you know that the world was once much worse than it is now, particularly if you weren’t born a king or a lord. Dream the impossible, and even outside the Solarium, you will be able to make it come true. Look at my generation—do you think that Richard I before his conversion would have hesitated for one moment to use atomic weapons to conquer the Holy Land if he had access to them? We have the ability to end history ten times over, and an enemy that so thoroughly deserves it in the eyes of our leaders—and we haven’t. There’s nothing that breaks my heart more than seeing young people giving up, so please don’t, for my sake.”

“Alright,” Meridiem said with a small smile, “we won’t.”

At that moment, the man who was playing with fire made his way past them towards the exit. He reached into his back pocket and removed the trowel. “Hey! Where did this come from?” he exclaimed.

Interlude: The Enemy of My Enemy

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Interlude: The Enemy of My Enemy

A television with attached VCR had been dragged into the meeting room of the Soviet Politburo.

“I know we need to discuss the fallout from Comrade Ustinov’s defection—”

“That man is no ‘comrade’ of anyone in the Soviet Union!” bellowed Grigory Romanov.

“—But I thought you’d want to see this first,” Andrei Gromyko concluded meekly. “It was inadvertently recorded prior to the start of an American talk show, and was never meant for broadcast.” He inserted a tape into the machine and started it.

The video showed a small set with two chairs facing each other. Sitting in the right-hand chair was President Far Shooter, being attended by a makeup woman. He looked to be fully recovered from his assassination attempt of only three days prior. There was the sound of laughter from crewmembers not visible on screen. From the smug expression on Shooter’s face, it appeared that he just successfully delivered a joke.

“Unbelievable!” exclaimed Nikolay Tikhonov. “The man’s in his seventies, and he’s just been shot! How can he be sitting there like nothing’s wrong!”

“Quiet! You’re going to miss the worst part,” hissed Gromyko.

“If I could have your attention, I have a vitally important statement to make,” Far Shooter said with a twinkle in his eye. “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia and all other Demoness-spawned nations forever. We begin bombing in five minutes!” The tape ended after that.

Silence descended upon the Politburo.

“And this is the President of the United States?!” demanded Romanov.

“You do all know that he was joking,” Viktor Chebrikov said dryly.

Heydor Aliyev rose to his feet. “Of course we all know that he’s joking! The point is that he considers our annihilation to be funny in the first place! I don’t know about you, but this is the last straw! With the deliberate provocations surrounding the Kuriles and the Pershing II missiles—which will arrive on Europe’s shores in four days—it has become abundantly clear that this buffoon is a threat not only to the Soviet Union, but to his own country and the rest of the world!” Aliyev was the head of the regional K.G.B. for Azerbeijan, and as such he reported to Union K.G.B. chief Chebrikov.

Mikhail Gorbachev leaned back in his chair. “And what do you propose we do about it?” he asked. “According to Gromyko’s latest report, he has a nearly ninety percent approval rating among his own people. The only thing we can do against him that would have long-term advantage to us is to discredit him, and we don’t have anything left to tar him with.”

“We might not,” countered Aliyev, “but I think we all know someone who can.” He walked over to the VCR and switched the Far Shooter tape for one in his possession before returning to his place at the table. “I have anticipated this moment for a long time…”

The video showed a windowless room, with the sound of air conditioning in the background. There was a clean executive desk and a cushy chair behind it. The man behind the camera walked around the desk to sit down, and fix the screen with his gaze. “Good day, comrades,” he said in perfect Russian.

It was Muammar Gaddafi.

Aliyev sat back in his chair, ignoring the glares of the others.

“I do not believe I need to introduce myself to your illustrious company,” said the Libyan leader. “You all know that I and I alone have humiliated President Shooter in the past, and I have a plan to utterly destroy him in the eyes of the world and his own people. I believe I can get him, if not outright impeached, then marked so strongly as the coward”—with this word the hatred Gaddafi bore towards Shooter truly shone through—“he truly is that he will be a ‘lame duck’ for the remainder of his days in office. And all I need is two little things from you, two things that not even my riches can buy. I am confident that you can provide me with these items in a way that is untraceable, so that what I am planning could never be tracked back to you. I am willing to take the entire risk for this operation. And just in case you doubt my abilities, look to the headline on the world’s newspapers and television networks for June 23rd, to see what I am capable of even without your assistance.

“I have sent the complete details of my plan along to my dear friend Aliyev, and I eagerly await your reply.” He sat there for a few seconds, looking presidential, then got up with a shrug and walked over to the camera to turn it off.

“Well, what do you think?” asked Aliyev. He passed around copies of the typewritten plan Gaddafi had supplied him with.

“This…this is suicide!” exclaimed Gorbachev, pointing at the page.

“Do we truly have no other options?” asked Tikhonov.

Aliyev gestured to Chebrikov, who opened a report he had been carrying. “This year’s Able Archer exercise is slated to begin in a week, just as the Pershing missiles get into position. According to our spy within NATO, the Pershings will definitely be included in the exercise. Furthermore, President Shooter will be in Brussels in time for the traditional conclusion, to be met by Prime Minister Thatcher and West German Chancellor Kohl.”

Able Archer was the name of an annual training exercise carried out by NATO forces, to test readiness in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The “traditional conclusion” was the simulated launch of the West’s entire nuclear arsenal at the Soviets.

“The Americans and British have been sending an unprecedented number of coded messages across the Atlantic in preparation for these exercises,” Chebrikov continued, “using an encryption that we have yet to crack. Knowing of our suspicions, they have never done anything like this prior to an Able Archer. The only reason for all three Western leaders to join together during this operation instead of wiring in their fake launch authorizations is to make it clear that this is not in fact a fake authorization. It is the opinion of RYaN, to which I concur, that Able Archer ’85 is intended to be the cover for a nuclear first strike on Soviet installations with their Pershing II missiles, a strike that we will be helpless to respond to unless we strike first, and thereby show ourselves as the villains to history. Therefore our only hope of staving off the end of the Soviet Union is the plan that Comrade Gaddafi presents to us.”

Tikhonov sighed in defeat. “All in favor of investigating the feasibility of Gaddafi’s plan, and our chances of not being implicated in it?”

All hands but one rose.

“All against?”

No votes.

“And one abstention by Gorbachev. Now then, to move on to this Ustinov matter—have we gotten all the necessary codes that he had access to changed? What about any other knowledge that he can now use against us?”

The meeting proceeded on from there, with Aliyev—and later Gaddafi—left grinning in triumph.

Chapter 14: Luna's Birthday

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Chapter 14: Luna’s Birthday

Gus stood inside Canterlot’s bus station that night, awaiting the arrival of his family. He was staring at a large paper map of the United States that was mounted on one wall over a piece of corkboard. A small cup attached to the wall contained colored push pins, which visitors were invited to use to mark where they had come from to visit New Brass Sky’s capital city.

After staring for a few minutes at the map, Gus shook his head. “Not going to make it,” he muttered under his breath.

“Who’s not going to make it?” asked Luna.

“Oh!” shouted Gus in surprise, turning on her. She was the first person (after the ticket taker) that he had seen out and about since sunset. “You snuck up on me.”

“No, I just walked,” said Luna in a dull voice. “My sister is the one who lugs a brass band behind her every step she takes.” She was wearing dark clothing over a pair of rugged boots, and hanging from her shoulder was a large camera case.

“Ha, funny.”

“So who’s not going to make it?” Luna pressed.

“Canterlot,” Gus answered calmly, pointing at the map. “In the event of nuclear war, everyone in this town will be atomized.”

Luna looked incredulously between the man and the map. “Does part of your ‘smart-guy’ education involve memorizing who lives and who dies in every American city in the event of World War III?”

“Look, it’s simple,” Gus explained. “A ten kiloton nuke will kill everyone within a half-mile radius on impact. The radioactive fallout will kill anyone exposed to it within a year, unless you’re treated immediately. And that particular danger zone reaches as much as twenty miles from the impact site, depending on the prevailing winds. Being caught within a hundred miles in the first forty-eight hours is going to put you in…well basically the same boat I’m in, where you’re going to have to say goodbye to the last twenty or more years of your life expectancy.”

Luna stared intently at the physicist’s face, wondering how he could contemplate such horrors with a calm expression.

“In the case of a limited nuclear exchange, the latest theories believe that you should strike at population centers instead of the enemy’s arsenal. That way you can drive them to surrender or else cause the collapse of their command structure. So in the case of a five hundred warhead scenario, you’d spread out the missiles to take out this area, from Boston to Richmond.” He reached forward to draw a series of overlapping fifty-mile wide circles on the map with the tip of his fingernail.

In Luna’s mind, she saw the map as the Goddess’ eye view of the country. Each circle described by Pr. Guiseman fell into the core of the earth, revealing a blinding white circle of annihilation.

“From there you’ve got the remaining major cities of the U.S.”

Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, Atlanta, Savannah. Huntsville, Birmingham and Montgomery. Tallahassee, Miami and cities up and down both coasts of the Florida peninsula. Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Little Rock and Oklahoma City. A dozen sites in Texas. Kansas City, Springfield, Chicago, Indianapolis, Columbus, Pittsburg. Minneapolis-St. Paul. Denver. Seattle, Olympia, Salem. A stretch reaching from Reno through Sacramento and down the California coast to San Diego. Salt Lake City, Los Vegas, Phoenix and Santa Fe.

“Looks like we survive so far,” Luna said in a shaky voice.

“Well, those are just the countervalue targets,” Gus explained. “In a full-scale war, you finally have enough warheads in play to hope to take out the enemy missile silos and command centers. So for example here”—he outlined a huge area around Cheyenne, Wyoming—“that would get nearly fifty missiles alone. There are also the silos here, here and here.” This took out western Washington and significant parts of Montana and North Dakota. “And in particular…here.” He stabbed a finger down just to the east of Canterlot. “One silo, one missile. Enough to poison half the town, and doom the other half.”

“So, we wouldn’t survive,” Luna said sadly. “What about you? What about your family?”

“Oh, we live in Glendale,” Gus said, pointing to its location. “We’d be taken out along with Los Angeles. But Miss Luna, you don’t understand—when it comes to World War III and the long term, there are no survivors. You want to be taken out in the first few days. Because what happens in the days and months afterward, is so much worse. Imagine the sun disappearing from sight for years. All the vegetation dies, and because the soil is poisoned, it never grows back. A winter starts that never ends. Everything would die.” He turned his head to see that the long-awaited bus had finally arrived. “Look, I’m sorry if I laid it on rather thick. Just…forget I said anything. This is definitely a case when ignorance really is bliss.”

Luna said nothing as Gus walked over to greet his family, her unfocused eyes pointed in the direction of an unending sea of nuclear-irradiated white as it slowly curdled into black rot.

It was the first time the darkness had ever betrayed her.

“Excuse me, Miss?”

Luna pulled herself out of her shocked reverie to face the young woman addressing her. “Yes?”

“Are you Luna? I’m Gloria Guiseman—the Professor’s daughter.”

Luna looked down at the extended hand before reaching out to shake it. “Nice to meet you,” she murmured.

Gloria gestured at Luna’s camera case. “So, are you a photographer?”

Luna looked down at the case. “Well, I try, but there aren’t many books in the library that cover the subject of night photography.”

Gloria’s eyes seemed to sparkle with excitement. “Would you like me to give you a few pointers? I find it to be a very interesting field.”

Luna took a moment to look around her, to confirm that a young woman who wasn’t all that much older than her was actually engaging her in friendly conversation…with Celestia nowhere around to force them to do it. “Yes, I’d be glad for any pointers. My main problem is holding the camera still enough to get a detailed image.”

“Hmm…what kinds of exposure times are you using?”

Gus walked by, pulling a cart containing the family’s luggage, and accompanied by his wife and son. “Be sure to catch up with us at the hotel when you’re finished Dear,” he told Gloria. “Are you going to be alright, Luna?”

“I will now, Professor. You raised a good daughter.”

Gloria blushed.

“I’m afraid that my wife did all the heavy lifting in that department,” said Gus.

Gwen stepped forward to grab the handle of the cart from his hand. “I accept your compliment,” she said cheekily. “And don’t take too long, Gloria.”

“I won’t!”

She turned to have Luna present her with her camera. “Well, what do you think?”

Their conversation went on for several more minutes.

June 23, 1985.

Zero minus 5 days.

Celestia watched the party develop from behind the second floor railing. People were greeting her sister as they entered the house, putting their presents with dark wrapping paper in a pile, engaging in relaxed small talk with each other—or visibly awkward small talk with her sister.

Luna…seemed happy? It was always so hard for Celestia to tell. The way she’d talk about speckled frogs caught by the light of her flashlight, or the shapes of far-off nebulas in the night sky: that was happiness for Luna. But she never raised her voice. On the contrary, she became even smaller and harder to hear when she was most happy, like she knew in her heart that showing too much joy would invite the retribution of the Goddess—usually in the form of some thoughtless action on Celestia’s part. A concert they all had to go to instead of a planetary convergence, a loud headache-inducing party because Celestia got insecure about whether she was a good person again.

Maybe she just…didn’t like people? Celestia knew what an introvert was in theory, but the idea was nearly incomprehensible to her. The love and adoration of the masses was to her like sunlight was to a heliotropic flower, and far more important than such boring substances as air, water or food. No, Luna just needed something to connect her with her legions of would-be friends.

Celestia turned and walked into Luna’s bedroom. It was OK—the door was open. She made her way over to her record player and collection of albums. (Funny thing—Luna’s turntable had a headphone jack, and she actually used it! Celestia on the other hand believed the purpose of a stereo was to share your perfect taste in music with the rest of humanity, which was why her speakers were pointed out the window instead of inside.)

Slowly, she flipped through the albums, then with a frown she went back and flipped through them again. Where was the metal? Where was the punk? Celestia knew the only reason Luna didn’t have any piercings was because Father Delver strictly forbade it before the age of 18, but surely she would have expressed her rebellion against the status quo via appropriate albums purchased from…but then she remembered. The only music store in town was run by Blue Note, who believed the only good music died with Buddy Holly, Big Bopper and Richie Valens in 1959. There was no way that he would let anyone buy any genre invented in the past decade, and it would be a few years before Luna would be allowed to get anything she wanted by mail order. Celestia considered letting her use her Columbia Record Club subscription, just once, as an extra birthday present.

(FYI: Celestia was completely ignorant of Luna’s actual collection of metal and punk, in the form of audio cassette recordings taken from distant radio stations and stashed in a shoebox under Luna’s bed.)

In the meantime, though, Celestia was stuck with a quite paltry selection of titles. Tarkus, by Emerson, Lake & Palmer—notable for the cover image of a giant armadillo that had spontaneously evolved into a tank. The Age of Plastic by The Buggles, with such song titles as “Video Killed the Radio Star” and “Elstree”, named for a forgotten British film studio (“Elstree, remember me / I had a part in a B movie … Now I work for the BBC / Life is not what it used to be”). Depressing.

There was one album that was already on the turntable: The Best of Blondie. Now that was more like it. Celestia turned on the player, donned the over-the-ear headphones, and dropped the needle at random. The sound of drums frantically pounding took her breath away. Debbie Harry sang of dreaming, and of a date with the man of her dreams: “I never met him. I’ll never forget him.” If the singer was Luna, the only lover she would ever meet would be equally imaginary.

Celestia had to lift the needle at that point. She didn’t know why she was crying.

& & &

After taking a moment in the bathroom to put herself back together, Celestia grabbed the Blondie record and went downstairs, making a beeline to the stereo system in the family room. She had no intention of playing “Dreaming”, but maybe “Call Me” or “Heart of Glass”—oh wait, “Heart of Glass” had “ass” snuck into the last verse—she’d probably get in trouble if she played that one.

She got the record started and turned around to see what effect it would have. What she saw was all of the children looking at the adults, who were all clustered around the television set. One of them waved a hand at her to turn down the music. With a sigh, she complied then walked over to see what the commotion was about.

“This is Dan Rather with the latest news on the OPEC Crisis.

“Less than an hour ago, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries announced a complete re-write of their charter, putting them under the control of the League of Arab States. As part of this re-organization, they elected as president the mastermind behind the change, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The states of Ecuador and Gabon announced their withdrawal from the union in protest. Here is an excerpt of the speech President Gaddafi made upon accepting his new position.”

The video showed a room with two long tables extending away from the camera, joined near the back of the room by a short transverse table, behind which stood Muammar Gaddafi in a business suit. Behind him was a draped backdrop, in front of which were poles displaying the flags of the OPEC member states. Mostly balding men sat behind the two long tables, most in Western business attire, but a few in traditional Bedouin robes. All eyes were on the new president.

The camera cut to a close-up shot as he began speaking in Arabic, with subtitles appearing beneath him: “The era in which the Arab-speaking nations will tolerate the existence of the illegal squatter state of Israel are at an end. Henceforth, no petroleum products from any member of OPEC will be sold to any country that does not sign a pledge to forevermore abstain from defending Israel in any way from its Allah-foreordained destruction. The same penalty will apply to any nation that does not immediately cut all economic and political ties to Israel’s principal arms merchant: The United States of America!”

Rather’s image appeared on the screen as he continued his reporting. “Parliaments in nearly a dozen countries around the world have called emergency sessions to seriously consider dropping all ties to this country in order to preserve their current petroleum rates. Martin Mussgnug, leader of the National Democratic Party in West Germany, declared that ‘considering that it is currently being run by a member of a bizarre religious cult, perhaps it would be best to abandon America until its people come to their senses and elect an atheist or at least a Christian.’

“Domestically, economic experts have projected that the price of gasoline at the pumps could jump up to more than $5 a gallon.”

An inset picture showed a white-haired man in glasses, identified as Senator Gravel of Alaska. “I have warned the American people for more than a decade of the consequences of not developing an Alaskan pipeline. The Markist-environmentalist lobby have blocked me at every turn, but now you can surely see the consequences of surrendering control of such a vital resource into the hands of a foreign power with interests opposed to ours.”

Rather resumed reporting. “The oil fields of Texas and of the various non-OPEC oil-producing states are expected to make up the difference eventually, but with the historic low rates President Shooter negotiated with OPEC in 1980, production had been reduced so far that it may be five to six years before prices stabilize.

“Speaking of the President, he was expected to address the nation on this crisis nearly an hour ago from the White House, but has remained strangely silent.” Rather then held aloft a reel of audio tape. “CBS News was sent this tape, alleged to be an unauthorized recording of President Shooter suffering a nervous breakdown on hearing the news. The identification of the voice as that of the President is highly suspect, and in addition it is laced with language utterly inappropriate for broadcast at this hour.” Consulting a written transcript, he continued: “The recorded voice also declared that ‘OPEC has surrendered its right to exist as sovereign nations’, that they were all ‘agents of the Demoness’, and that he would ‘nuke the Islam out of them’. The European states considering abandoning ties to the U.S. were called ‘ungrateful wenches’ who should…” (he peered at the transcript in shock) “perform unspeakable acts on a daily basis in gratitude for America saving their…unmentionables in World War II.

“I have known Far Shooter since his days as Governor of California, and he would never, under any provocation, utter words such as those. This tape in my opinion is a fake, a fake that I would not at all be surprised was created by the orders of Muammar Gaddafi himself in his never-ending feud with the President.

“Well, until such time as we do get an address from the President, or any significant updates, we now return you to coverage of the Detroit Grand Prix, already in progress.”

The party immediately broke up, with panicked parents grabbing the nearest child to rush out, buy a giant barrel, and “fill it up with enough gasoline to last through the Return of the Goddess.” Any words of wisdom that Father Delver attempted to apply to the situation were ignored. In the rush to grab everyone’s articles of clothing, the paper decorations of stars and planets taped to the walls were torn down, unopened presents were snatched up and taken away, and the throw rug ended up on top of the piano.

Luna looked around her at the remains of her party, and stormed up to her room, slamming the door loudly behind her. A few seconds later she stormed back downstairs, grabbed the Best of Blondie record with a glare at Celestia, and stomped back upstairs with an even louder slammed door.

Celestia sat down numbly in the nearest couch. She now had less than five days to save her sister from her imminent breakdown, a breakdown which, if previous cases were to be believed, might just involve trying to stop her from trying to massacre everybody in Canterlot.

Delver rested his hand on Celestia’s shoulder. “I’m sorry the party you organized so meticulously had to end like this,” he told her. “But cheer up. You’ll have a perfect chance to make it up to her when we fly to London for the conference tomorrow.”

The conference. The Markist Historical Society Conference. Celestia had worked out the itinerary just last week, trying to find time to see every London landmark she had ever seen in a movie or read in a book. The Peter Pan monument in Kensington Gardens was to be a highlight. All that London sightseeing was scheduled for June 27th. The early morning of June 28th was when Father Delver, his two personal students and two adored step children were expected to be sleeping their way across the Atlantic on a Pan-Am flight.

But that was the exact moment when Luna was scheduled to transform into a hockey-mask wearing, chainsaw-wielding psycho killer!

(Well, that was the way that Celestia was picturing Luna’s breakdown prior to getting that Luna [Adams] journal to study—she had seen way too many slasher films for her own good.)

Celestia had plans for how to Luna-proof their house. She doubted she could Luna-proof a jumbo jet.

Celestia looked up to her step-father with her most winning smile. “Yeah, about that trip…”

Chapter 15: The Flight to London

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Chapter 15: The Flight to London

June 24, 1985.

Zero minus 4 days.

The next day Luna rushed to get everything packed for the trip. Celestia took one look at the pile of bags and whistled sharply, summoning Truth Delver’s maid, Butterfly. She whispered something in Butterfly’s ear, and then the maid grabbed up the pile and whisked it out of the room.

Celestia took her sister downstairs, where people were walking in and out of the house moving luggage into a small bus for a trip that would start here, drive out to the airport outside town, fly to a transfer in New York City, and finally cross the ocean by plane to London. Luna tried in vain to see any sign of her luggage, or Butterfly.

Luna walked outside to the bus, followed cautiously by Celestia. She was about to board when she was stopped by Gwen Guiseman, who was already inside.

“Luna, I want to take this moment to thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you have given me…given us. This is truly a chance for us to renew our marriage, in the homeland of my family. I’ve already arranged for my brother to meet us when we arrive, and it’s been decades since I’ve seen his face. I swear I’ll find something wonderful in London to give you as a small token of my gratitude.”

“Yeah, what she said,” Gus added from the seat on the bus beside Gwen.

“What…?” Luna asked, in a voice too small to be heard.

“I’m afraid we’ve got to get going,” Father Delver said, closing the door of the bus in front of Luna’s face. “I echo Mrs. Guiseman’s sentiments. It’s a wonderful sacrifice that both of you have so generously decided to make for our guests. Now Celestia, I want you to promise you won’t abuse the staff too much while we are gone. And if anything goes wrong, you know who to call.”

“Of course, Father,” Celestia with a chipper smile.

“Alright then.” He stood there for a moment, his arms moving awkwardly, as if wanting to initiate a hug that he was simply incapable of completing. “I’ll see you on Saturday.” He entered the passenger compartment of the bus, and a moment later it drove away.

Luna stood there in shock for a moment, her hand still extended as if to grab onto the body of the bus and climb inside. She lowered her arm, stood up straight, and slowly turned to look at the grinning Celestia.

She looked into Celestia’s eyes, and said nothing. She just waited, and waited, and waited until her sister’s false smile finally started to crack, and then…

“What. Just. Happened?”

“Oh! Well we just volunteered our tickets to the Guisemans, so they can have a romantic vacation together.”

More silence.

“And by ‘we’ you mean…?”

“‘I’,” Celestia said in a smaller voice. “I mean ‘I’.”

“As usual. Why?”

Celestia collected herself and stood up tall. “I did my research, and London is a really awful place when you get down to it. There’s crime in broad daylight, and pollution like you wouldn’t believe, and everybody’s terribly prejudiced against Markists. And I realized that, well not only did the Guisemans desperately need this trip to save their failing marriage, but also that this would be a perfect chance for us to bond together. Yup, this week, just the two of us, doing all the stuff that you want to do!” She turned and strode back into the house, Luna following behind her.

“I’m not a child, Tia—I thought that was the whole point of my birthday yesterday, to make that official. I can handle a dangerous city, especially with everybody else in our little group. And I saw just as much of the Guisemans’ relationship as you did, and I think that while yes, the Professor certainly takes his wife for granted, they are nowhere near the point of needing a trip to ‘save their failing marriage’. And since when do you ever let me do the things I want to do?”

By this time Celestia had led her sister back to her room, where Butterfly was dutifully unpacking all of Luna’s luggage back into her dresser.

“Yeah, well that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” countered Celestia. “I’ve been treating you like an annoying little kid, and that’s wrong! So I’m here for you. Or…or not, if you want to be alone. And hey! I saw how well you got along with the Professor’s daughter, so this would be the perfect opportunity to improve that friendship. After all, she’s probably going to be pretty lonely, being stuck in a new town without her parents…”

Luna turned on her, seething. “The only reason she’s in that position is because you…gave…away…my…ticket!”

Celestia stepped back in shock. She had never failed to sway somebody else to her opinion before. “I…well…you can’t leave! You’re too important to this town! Without you, everything would fall apart!”

“You just described yourself!” Luna cried. “Whereas for me, I am nothing! In London, I would finally be in a place where someone other than me stays up past ten. Someplace with people who won’t think I’m a freak, just because I’m not you! I was going to try and get permission to go to a Bounce House concert scheduled during the trip!”

“Bounce House?!” Celestia cried out in horror. “Don’t you mean Bounce House of Tartarus?! They’re a Demoness-worshipping cult! Am I too late—are you already insane?”

Butterfly decided that this was a good time to get out of Luna’s bedroom and relocate herself to someplace where she couldn’t be found.

“What? No! I knew that you of all people wouldn’t understand! That Tartarus pre-show business was a joke they gave up years ago!”

“But their songs! They sing songs about sacrificing animals and overthrowing governments!”

“Yes, to demonstrate the delusions of teenagers rebelling against authority without knowing what to replace that authority with. Bounce House songs are some of the most brilliant works of poetry I have ever heard.”

“Well…that just proves that you shouldn’t be allowed to go, as you’re clearly too immature to make rational decisions about threats to the religion.”

“Well you should know, considering that Father tells you everything while keeping me in the dark!”

“But you looove the dark!” Celestia teased.

Luna stepped forward, fire in her eyes.

“Hey, what are you—” Celestia protested.

Luna then shoved her sister out of the room and slammed the door in her face so hard that it partially splintered.

Celestia reeled back, her hand over her face. “I think you broke my nose!” (It was lightly bruised at worst.)

“Good!!”

Celestia screamed her frustration into the air, then loudly marched over to her room and slammed her own door shut.

Twice.

Gwen Guiseman didn’t take well to flying. She hyperventilated all the way from Central NBS Regional to JFK International. She tried to get drunk at the airport, but only succeeded in throwing up.

“Are you sure it’s a good idea to continue the trip?” Delver asked Gus privately. “I’m sure I can get you tickets back to Canterlot if she’s not going to make it.”

“Don’t worry,” said Gus, patting his carry-on bag. “I’ve got something that does the trick. I couldn’t use it before because that stewardess was watching us like a hawk.” He smiled. “And I should know, being part-hawk. Or owl. Or whatever my bird half’s supposed to be.”

Delver looked down at Gus’ bag. “And is your little solution legal?”

Gus wiggled his hand. “Not exactly.”

“I’m going to pretend I don’t know you when the security forces arrive—I’m telling you that in advance.”

“Relax! I’m a physicist—I know what I’m doing.”

& & &

Gus waited until the “wear seatbelts” sign had been turned off in the plane to get up and retrieve his bag. From within it he removed a small rectangular device—a combination cassette player/radio. As Delver watched curiously from the other side of the aisle, Gus opened up a tool bag, used a screwdriver to pry the miniature stereo open and then proceeded to go to town with the complicated array of wires and components within. Delver was fairly sure that no store-bought stereo had nearly that many wires and transistors inside of it. He saw Gus detach several wires ending in alligator clips and reconnect them to new points. He did this all very quickly, with the air of one who has performed this exact operation many times before. When he was done he snapped the sides of the device back together, inserted six double-A batteries, and then donned a pair of portable headphones plugged into the device and started working his way through the radio’s tuner. He looked down at his plane ticket in confirmation then handed the device and headphones over to his very grateful wife, who put the headwear on and immediately seemed much calmer. She tucked the device under the plane-issued blanket she was wearing.

Delver got up and crossed the aisle way so he could quietly ask what it was that Gus had actually done.

“Gwen’s flying fear stems from a lack of control,” Gus told him in a whisper. “I just modified that radio so that she can hear the chatter between the captain and air traffic control.”

Delver looked between a smug Gus and the utterly relaxed Gwen, who was quickly nodding off to sleep to the droning sound of the plane’s captain reading off his current course and clearances. Then he turned wordlessly to return to his seat.

“So what was that?” asked Meridiem, who was sitting next to Gnosi in the seat behind Delver’s.

“You’re better off not knowing, to avoid charges of aiding and abetting,” Delver replied, only half facetiously.

& & &

A few hours later, Gus was awakened from his own slumber by an elbow in the ribs from his wife. “Prepare yourself for bad news,” she told him.

A few seconds later, the voice of the captain broadcast over the intercom. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. It appears that our landing, which would have been a full half-hour before schedule, is going to be delayed by forces beyond our control. An anti-American protest has spilled out onto the tarmac, and is currently being contained by the police. As soon as all of the protesters have been removed, we will be free to land.”

That’s when Gus remembered that this was the day that the long-promised Pershing II missiles from America were scheduled to arrive via naval convoy only a few miles from here before heading across Europe to West Germany.

“And so it begins…” he muttered darkly to himself.

Chapter 16: Bounce House of Tartarus

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Chapter 16: Bounce House of Tartarus

June 25, 1985.
Zero minus 3 days.

Celestia woke up uncharacteristically late. After getting dressed, she tried Luna’s door—it was still locked.

She knocked on the door. “Luna, can we talk?”

She was answered by the sound of music blaring out of a stereo. “I was born inside a cage” began an abrasive song with the title of “I’m So Bad”.

“That’s Bounce House, by the way!” Luna’s voice shouted through the door.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Celestia muttered, before turning to head downstairs.

& & &

Gloria Guiseman was on her way to the Delver house to see if Luna was available. She was soon joined by Yellow Rose.

“Hi, Gloria is it?” Yellow asked. “I think I saw you at…Celestia’s sister’s party yesterday.”

“Yes, that’s me,” said Gloria. “Are you going to visit Luna as well?”

“Yes, Luna! No, I mean, I’m mostly going to visit Celestia but sure, I guess I can check up on Luna as well.”

They turned a corner to see several people gathered in front of the house they were heading towards. An open window was projecting music that the crowd was clearly there to critique; a happy little song about how much the singer loves underage girls.

“Oh wow!” the two girls exclaimed as one, although with different intonations.

“I…think I hear my mother!” Yellow Rose exclaimed, in a panic. A second later she was running back home.

“Is that Bounce House?!” Gloria exclaimed, in delight. A second later she was knocking on the front door. She noticed that an angry elderly man was already standing in front of the door, silently fuming.

A beleaguered Butterfly answered the door, a pair of earmuffs on to block out the loud music.

“I’m sorry, Blue Note,” she said, addressing the man, “but Celestia says that her sister can play whatever she wants, and as we both know, what Celestia says, goes.”

“There ought to be a law!” Blue Note bellowed, before turning and stomping away.

Butterfly removed her muffs. “Can I help you?” she asked Gloria.

“Is there any way I can see Luna today?” she asked.

“I’m sorry, but Luna is not seeing anybody today.”

“Oh. That’s too bad. Well, can you at least tell her that I really dig her choice in music? I used to go to Bounce House concerts in L.A. all the time with my mom, and they are totally radical!”

“‘Totally radical’? Alright, I’ll tell her that.”

After the door was gently closed in her face, Gloria walked over to a porch swing to sit down—she had a feeling that Luna was about to change her ‘no visitors’ policy.

& & &

Celestia spent the rest of her day stewing in her room. She reluctantly admitted that it was a good thing that Luna had finally made a friend of her own, and that they liked blaring loud—and offensive—music at maximum volume and laughing at whispered jokes that were probably only 33% or so at her expense. But maybe just friendship wasn’t enough. All those other Lunas probably had friends before they snapped.

Celestia really wished she had that diary of an earlier Luna that she had ordered through the library. At least that way she could prepare herself.

As it was, what could she do that was different from any other concerned friend or family member of a Luna over the past seven centuries of failure? What could she say that hadn’t been said hundreds of times before, every time in vain?

Well…there was one thing that no Luna had ever been told before.

“Are you sure you can’t stay a minute longer?” she heard the voice of Luna beg from her just-opened door.

“‘Fraid not,” Gloria’s voice responded, followed by a yawn. “I still haven’t gotten used to my hotel bed yet.”

“Well maybe you can spend the night here, and use my bed!”

An awkward silence followed.

“Um…”

“Yeah, forget I said anything. Wanna meet up tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

Celestia opened her door to wave at Gloria as she walked by.

Her sister turned her head to look coldly at her.

“Luna…?”

SLAM!

Undeterred, Celestia walked over to the door.

The music did not immediately start up—Luna was probably looking for another album she hadn’t played yet.

Celestia delivered her words clearly and loudly, right through the door. “The Princess is an immortal horse-like creature, about as tall as Father Delver, with a long horn and enormous wings. She has my colors, because she’s my duplicate, and also my name. Twelve hundred years ago, she and her sister, Luna, were asked to rule over the divided tribes of unicorns, pegasi and earth ponies.”

The door suddenly opened. “You just made that up,” Luna challenged her.

“It’s absolutely true,” Celestia countered, her hands clasped behind her back as she rocked on her heels. “I know it because I have access to her memories when we’re both sleeping.”

Luna scratched her head. “But…horses?”

“They call themselves ‘ponies’, actually.”

“That’s even more ridiculous!”

“But it feels right, doesn’t it?” Celestia asked. She leaned forward, her eyes sparkling.

Luna gently pushed her back with one hand. “Really?” She turned and walked back into her room, but left the door open.

Celestia stood outside the door but continued speaking, undeterred. “Both Celestia and Luna were named princesses, so that they might be equal with each other. Princess Celestia naturally possessed the talent of bringing about the sunrise, while Princess Luna controlled the moon and stars. Together, they fought off many threats to the land of Equestria—”

“—Where the ‘ponies’ lived?”

“Yes. But with peace came disaster, because young Princess Celestia believed all the ponies who told her how awesome she was, while Princess Luna was left in the shadows, neglected by a whole herd of ponies who slept away the nighttime hours.”

Luna turned around. “OK.”

“OK?”

“OK, I’ll accept you telling me all of the Markist secrets as partial apology for giving those tickets away. Now come in here before somebody overhears you.”

With a triumphant grin, Celestia entered Luna’s room, closing the door behind her.

“Now how come I never hear about the Princess’ sister in Harmony class?”

“I was just getting to that,” answered Celestia. “Princess Luna was mad at being neglected, so mad that she turned to dark magic to become powerful enough to get revenge on her clueless sister Princess Celestia…”

When two tribes go to war,
One is all that you can score.

A favorite tactic of crowds protesting the transport of nuclear missiles across the south of Britain was the playing of anti-war songs at maximum volume over portable boom boxes. “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood was a particular favorite.

Another effect of the protests was that most traffic on the streets of London had ground to a standstill. Luckily Gwen’s brother Ashley knew all the back ways to get Delver, Meridiem, Gnosi, Gus and Gwen to their hotel.

“I don’t remember it ever being this bad on previous visits,” Gus remarked as he got out of the car. “Although from what I’ve heard from my artist friends, I wouldn’t be half surprised to see tanks rolling down the roads to ‘maintain law and order’, as the Soviets liked to say.”

Ashley opened up the trunk and took out a couple of bags. “Yes well, the ‘Iron Lady’ likes to keep a tight ship, especially in the eyes of American visitors. That’s Prime Minster Thatcher to you Yanks.”

Gnosi brought their attention to a nearby newspaper dispenser for The Sun, which had the headline “Soviets Ship Bomb-Toting Revolutionaries to U.K. Disguised as ‘Protestors’.” Under this in smaller print were the words “Our Advice: Kick ‘Em in the Arse!” “And I thought the American press was bad!” he exclaimed.

“Nobody pays any attention to The Sun anymore,” Ashley countered. “Well, except for the topless girl on page 3 of every issue.”

“Really, Ashley?”

“A man has needs, Sis!”

Delver walked by with his own luggage, shaking his head. “Well the protests don’t really impact me,” he told them, “because the conference is in this very hotel. What are you going to do with your time?”

Gwen looked eagerly at Ashley, who nodded back to her. “I’ve got just the thing planned out.”

“Do I even want to know?” Gus asked.

A mimeographed poster was thrust into his hands, declaring the “1985 World Sell-Out Tour” for Bounce House, performing outside Stonehenge tomorrow. The letters of the band’s name were written in bones and snakes, with the O’s in particular replaced by skulls. Not as well reproduced in the background were the wild hairstyles and glowing eyes of the founders of the band, “The Brothers”.

“I preferred not knowing,” Gus said, deadpan.

Father Delver caught one look at the poster and raised one gloved hand to push it away—and the other to keep his assistants at arm’s reach. “You’re adults and not being part of the Faith, I can have no say in which forms of entertainment you wish to attend,” he said. “Just do me a favor and don’t tell any of us what it was like, alright?”

“And what will you be doing?” Gus asked Meridiem and Gnosi.

“After helping Father Delver with his speech, Gnosi and I are going to do some sightseeing,” said Meridiem.

A truck of rowdy youths drove by, blaring out some more of “Two Tribes”:

Are we living in a land
Where sex and horror are the new gods?
Yeah.

& & &

June 26, 1985.
Zero minus 2 days.

Gnosi and Meridiem worked their way down Celestia’s “must-see” list, starting with Kensington Gardens. They never got to Peter Pan’s statue, however, because the whole place was overrun with baby carriages. Apparently, the very first “pram” (as they were called in British vernacular) was invented 250 years ago to the day in this very park, and prams and pram merchandise were everywhere. It was an odd break from the otherwise inescapable protests.

A few hours later, the pair was waiting in line for a double-decker bus tour. Before they knew it, they found themselves surrounded by a group of young protesters. Hearing the group begin singing “Land of Confusion” by Genesis, a song with lyrics that seemed to have some Markist sympathies, Gnosi and Meridiem joined in with full voice, their eyes closed.

When the song ended and they opened their eyes again, the pair found that they were surrounded.

“That was great!” one of the shaggy-haired protesters proclaimed.

“Are you really both Markists?”

“And is it true that all Markists have perfect pitch?”

“Yeah, we’re Markists,” Meridiem admitted in a quiet voice.

“What was that?”

“We’re Markists!” Gnosi repeated louder, earning a cheer from the crowd.

A young man put his hand on Meridiem’s shoulder. “Look, don’t let anyone tell you different, but this country was much better run when you guys were in charge.”

“Oh, well…thanks!”

“Do you want to go marching with us?”

“Gee, I dunno…” Gnosi equivocated.

“Let’s do it!” Meridiem cried, grabbing Gnosi by the hand and pulling him in the direction of the docks.

This earned another cheer from the crowd.

The next song played was “It’s a Mistake” by Men at Work.

& & &

By the time the protesters reached the docks, the Pershing II missiles had already crossed the English Channel and were being rushed into position. Able Archer ’85 had already begun, sending unarmed armies scrambling across the face of Europe, to show their readiness to fight the final war against Soviet aggression.

& & &

140 kilometers away, the Bounce House World Sell-Out Concert started at sunset with a bang, with actors dressed up as Christian devils and a woman in a black body stocking wearing a placard labelling her as “The Demoness” cavorting on the large improvised stage, shouting labor slogans. Gus suspected that most of the jokes he failed to get were anti-Thatcher, at least the ones that weren’t obviously aimed at President Far Shooter as Thatcher’s toady. Gus didn’t really enjoy himself—it wasn’t that the politics expressed weren’t roughly the way that Gus himself voted, but rather the crudity of the exercise that turned him off, right down to the malformed plastic genitalia that everybody wore. Gwen and Ashley, on the other hand, had a ball.

The opening song described a vision of a world on fire. No pedophilia, no delighting in how much you offend everyone around you, just a mainstream song about the end of the world. As a result, the reactions of Gus, his wife and his brother-in-law were precisely the opposite of their reactions to the pre-show: “This music is awful!” Gwen exclaimed. “It expresses the kind of opinions that anyone can agree with. Where’s the irony? The breaking of taboos?”

“They really have sold out,” Ashley remarked. “Must be all that soundtrack money.”

“Well personally I think this is the first song of theirs I’ve ever heard that I actually like,” said Gus.

The siblings pummeled him with their Día de Muertos pillows for that.

There's a smile on my face,
For everyone...
There's a place in the stars,
For when you get old.

& & &

The concert ended with a bang, although not the one intended by the band. The British Army showed up along with the police, and started trying to arrest everyone for an illegal assembly that included indecent (plastic) exposure. They even brought tanks. Several members of the public lay down in front of the tanks to allow the members of Bounce House to escape, sans their instruments and special effects equipment. The tanks in turn knocked over a couple of the standing stones to avoid running anybody over.

The Brothers found themselves sitting in the back of an unmarked white van bouncing its way across the English countryside, separated from their bandmates. The two of them were both noticeable for their pale skin and bright red hair.

“How’s that for a final farewell?” asked the younger brother and chief singer for Bounce House, who went under the stage name of Scorpan—a name that he had no business using, much less knowing, as it was one of the secrets of the Markist religion that not even Delver or Celestia knew about.

“Well you have nothing to complain about,” sulked the elder brother, who called himself Tirek—he was the one responsible for the satirical pre-show. “You’ve got enough soundtrack deals to last you into the next century. What am I supposed to do now?”

“Keep making independent films?” suggested Scorpan.

“Nobody ever watches them.”

Scorpan looked around him at the floor of the van, which was littered with the various objects that rabid fans had thrown onto the stage during the concert. He fished out a cardboard box depicting a Christ-like figure, his back to the viewer, holding a staff to part the raging waters. It was a video game, named “Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar”. He handed the box over to his brother. “You know, this ‘Lord British’ guy has become plenty famous making video games that let him preach his beliefs to the masses. Have you ever thought about branching out?”

Tirek looked over the box, hefting it in his oversized hand. “You know…I just might.”

Chapter 17: The Education of Luna

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Chapter 17: The Education of Luna

June 27, 1985.
Zero minus 1 day.

Let me regale you with a series of concentric place names: Massachusetts, Boston, Beacon Hill, and the corner of John Hancock Avenue and Mount Vernon Place—it was in this spot that the subject of this Education was born. All of these are places of power, places of American history. And now a family to receive this child, a family that doesn’t even need to be named, as merely the titles earned by its members are enough: One was author of the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, later first Vice President and second President of these United States. Another was the key diplomat behind the Treaty of Ghent, true author of the ‘Monroe Doctrine’—the greatest Secretary of State in American history and later the U.S. Representative who fought more than any other for the end of slavery…the fact that he was also America’s sixth President is merely an afterthought in the biography of this great man. From these two descended innumerable diplomats, including one who single-handedly kept Great Britain out of America’s Civil War, thereby saving the cause of freedom. From this family of eminently great men descended one who had all the weight of destiny prepared well before birth, a destiny that was wrenched into uselessness by the accident of gender, for Luna was born a girl instead of a boy.
Her father was one who knew well the weight of suffering, losing his mother and sister at an early age, and watching his beloved wife pass in the pangs of childbirth. This man had only a limited amount of love to give, and after these losses, all that was left was spent on the family’s first and primary love: that of America. Luna eventually came to understand this fact, that there would be none who would ever truly love her, and that there were those like her father who couldn’t even bear to look at her because her physical resemblance to the departed Dusky Flyer. Neither love nor friendship were meant for one such as Luna. Her duty was to witness the world and someday, perhaps at the crucial moment, apply the weight of her bent and broken destiny upon the fate of millions.

So began The Education of Luna [Adams], as the highly-pretentious memoir written between 1916 and 1918 was titled. Celestia knew that there was no chance that she was going to read the whole thing before she ran out of time with her sister.

Speaking of which, the last two days had been spent by Celestia running her throat raw telling Luna each and every secret of the Faith that she could remember, with but one exception: the knowledge of what was going to happen to Luna in about twelve hours. On this subject she was split: would knowing what would happen make Luna better able to fight it, or would the long string of failures cause her to give up from the start?

So instead she had focused on Princess Luna’s experience, how she had made the decision to invite the Nightmare into herself to become strong enough to overthrow her sister, only to be horrified at seeing the literal meaning of the terms she agreed to: the deaths of innocents, the terrorizing of the populace, now trapped in a body that she couldn’t control.

Celestia presented this explanation as fact, when she knew it was only the weak speculation of Princess Celestia centuries after the fact, when she could finally bear to think about what happened in something resembling an objective point of view. It was the perspective chosen because it offered hope that Princess Luna might one day be freed from the Nightmare, instead of the all-too-likely alternative, that Princess Luna had become Nightmare Moon, irreversibly, and that this inescapable fate was the one prescribed for all of the human Lunas, until the end of time.

Celestia excused herself from Luna’s presence, saying that she needed to rest her throat while she read a good book. She was of course skimming the book rather than reading it, looking for ways that the historical Luna differed from her sister, and what mistakes she made that might be avoided this time.

After trying her best to skim through the words of the long-dead Luna [Adams], Celestia despaired of ever extracting anything of value in less than a day. Here is an example, a passage that delighted in using as many words as possible to say “I got a chronic sickness as a child, and ended up weak, scrawny and introverted”:

As a means of variation from a normal type, sickness in childhood ought to have a certain value not to be classed under any fitness or unfitness of natural selection; and especially scarlet fever affected girls seriously, both physically and in character, though they might through life puzzle themselves to decide whether it had fitted or unfitted them for success; but this fever of young Luna took greater and greater importance in her eyes, from the point of view of education, the longer she lived. At first, the effect was physical. She fell behind her contemporaries two or three inches in height, and proportionally in bone and weight. Her character and processes of mind seemed to share in this fining-down process of scale. She was not good in any form of physical confrontation, and her nerves were even more delicate than girls’ nerves were thought to be. She exaggerated these weaknesses as she grew older. The habit of doubt; of distrusting her own judgment and of totally rejecting the judgment of the world; the tendency to regard every question as open; the hesitation to act except as a choice of evils; the shirking of responsibility; the love of line, form, quality; the horror of ennui; the passion for companionship and the inability to actually make friends—all these are well-known qualities of New England character in no way peculiar to individuals but in this instance they seemed to be stimulated by the fever, and poor Luna could never make up her mind whether, on the whole, the change of character was morbid or healthy, good or bad for her purpose. Her fellow women were the type; she was the variation.

Slowly, agonizingly, Celestia pieced together the story of a girl who wanted friendship, but was too shy and too nocturnal in her habits to ever make friends. Most of her attempts to approach others were so incredibly tentative that the targets of her affection probably didn’t even know that she existed at the end of the endeavor. And all the while her father became more and more famous, and more and more distant.

Celestia checked the clock, to see that it was time for Luna’s dinner. Her meal was usually left on a table outside her door, to be eaten at her leisure. Seeing that it was still there and uneaten, Celestia snuck over with a small vial containing a blue liquid and poured it into Luna’s iced milk, stirring it around until the color faded. She then snuck back into her room just before Luna’s door opened. Celestia waited breathlessly in her room until she heard the sounds of loud snoring coming from next door, then let out a breath of relief.

Having a few hours left before midnight, Celestia skipped ahead in Luna [Adams]’ journal. The War had started, and her father, now a U.S. Senator, bent all his efforts to keep his country neutral. He was visiting a munitions factory with her when she was struck by the stark efficiency of the plant. Here, she realized, was the future: greater and greater industrialization, resulting in the men and women of power becoming the great decision-makers, while the faceless masses became ever more anonymous and replaceable, like the parts in the assembly line. She watched as a machine ripped the leg off of a mechanic, and the machine was not even stopped, the bullets being packaged now coated in a thin sheen of human blood. So ended the continuous narrative that began with the account of her birth on page 1.

In the series of journal entries that followed, Luna [Adams] became increasingly bitter, seeking out stories of the atrocities of World War I to feed her growing conviction that humanity was diseased and no longer worthy of rule over planet Earth. And then suddenly with the turning of the page, the neat lines of typewritten text were replaced with a reproduction of Luna’s own delicate and immaculate handwriting, just before it disintegrated:

…and so the young men of America are packaged neatly together for their journey to the killing fields of Europe, there to hunt and kill like their primitive
I
My mark!
what is ?
stay
out
nooooo
I
At last, I am in control again! This world advances so very quickly. Already I can see the opportunity I have long awaited, to strike and sever! With one stroke, I can feed on so much suffering! Farewell, journal, farewell forever. But know this, feeble survivors, that your doom was the work of I, the Nightmare. Your weak and pitiful day has finally reached its end, and THE NIGHT of eternal suffering and pain
WILL
LAST
FOREVER!!

The final paragraphs were more etched into the page than written, the paper visibly ripped by the force of the pen’s nub. It was also a completely different style of handwriting. But what Celestia saw most clearly was a mind—cynical but still at heart hopeful—being obliterated by pure evil.

There was a knock at Celestia’s bedroom door. “What is it?!” she asked, allowing too much of her frustration to leak into her words.

“It’s…it’s your little Butterfly, Mistress Celestia,” a terrified voice replied.

With a huff and a roll of her eyes, Celestia got up and opened the door. “What is it?” she demanded.

“I was…I was wondering, if…”

“Spit it out!”

Butterfly handed over the envelope she had been holding and ran away in tears.

Celestia gesticulated to the heavens. “I don’t have time for this!” she exclaimed. Then she looked at the envelope, addressed from the same university library that had sent her the diary, and quickly ripped it open.

A cover letter explained that the packet of paper contained within was found inserted into the Education of Luna [Adams] that had been sent to her. At first, the packet had been thrown away, but a day later the librarian had reconsidered and decided to send it along, having recognized the author as an alumni of the school and a famous psychologist. Celestia recognized it as the man who had signed Luna [Adams] into Danvers’ mental institution on March 5, 1918.

I never knew Luna when she was sane, so I am immensely grateful to have this volume to see what she once was.
The Luna I was most acquainted with was a bloodthirsty monster with the single-minded obsession of killing or maiming as many people as she possibly could. Even in a straightjacket, she was capable of beating or scratching up any poor soul who came into contact with her unknowing of her true nature. She exhibited a strength and cunning that I would have thought completely foreign to a member of her illustrious family. She also seemed able to ignore the incredible pain that must have accompanied the damage to her corneas that she exhibited on being admitted to Danvers, damage that of course she never allowed us to treat properly.
The only exception to this behavior that I could induce came when she was introduced to an environment of pitch darkness. Under those conditions, she would show a remarkable change of character, wailing in misery about all of those she had hurt in daylight, and apparently convinced that she had exterminated the majority of the human race immediately prior to her commitment. Indeed, under these circumstances the danger was not that she would harm others, but herself.
Under the pressures of having to deal with Luna’s two personalities, it was eventually decided to keep her in darkness permanently. Unfortunately, adequate care was not taken in ensuring her safety, and in 1921 she deliberately choked herself to death on a chicken bone—a slip up even more egregious considering that she was supposed to be on a strictly vegetarian diet. For this mistake, I will never forgive myself—we had progressed quite far in my treatment of her condition (via yelling through the door), and she had finally accepted that she had not in fact wiped out the majority of humanity. It was the combination of the mistake with the chicken bone combined with her learning that one of the attendants she had attacked by daylight years earlier had finally died of an infection brought on by her wound that led to her successful suicide.
I have never encountered another patient with the peculiar combination of symptoms displayed by Luna, but I hope to write up an anonymous account in the near future that will allow some mental health worker to eventually succeed where I have failed.

After some thought, Celestia got up and tracked down Butterfly, who was hiding behind the washing machine.

“Butterfly!” she ordered.

“Y…yes, Mistress?”

“I need the key to Luna’s room. Her very life depends on it.”

“I…but Mistress…did you call Father Delver to get his permission?”

“We have no time—the last night has already begun! Please, Butterfly—I’ll accept total responsibility.”

“…You said her life was on the line?”

& & &

Celestia got the key from Butterfly. She set up a chair beside Luna’s bedroom where Butterfly, bundled in blankets, could get a few hours sleep until Celestia needed her for the next part of her plan.

Celestia used the key to open Luna’s door and stepped inside, illuminating the room with her own inner glow. She saw her sister sprawled across the bed, the window pulled open. Celestia closed and locked the window then swung the closet door open after confirming that the bedroom key also worked on it. After making sure there was a clear path from bed to closet, she arranged Luna’s limbs to make room on the bed, and lay down beside her, carefully wrapping her arms around Luna’s torso.

“Please let this work!” she prayed to the Princess, and then began her vigil.

But her hours of intense book-reading finally took their toll, and she was sound asleep within the next ten minutes.

Late that night in Frankfurt, West Germany, Pan Am Flight 103 set off for its long flight to Detroit, U.S.A., with stopovers planned in London and New York City. Secured within its cargo hold were the Soviet Union’s “two little things” that Gaddafi had asked for: a fully armed nuclear warhead, and the top-secret shielding that would make that warhead impossible for ordinary inspections to detect. Together, the “gadget” was indistinguishable from a casket.

A few hours later, Air Force One took off from an undisclosed location. Its destination was a small town in Belgium named Casteau, the chosen location from which the Able Archer ’85 exercise was being coordinated.

The intersection of the flight paths of these two aircraft was scheduled to occur at 7 am local time, over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. This would be the precise place and time that the Atomic Age…and indeed, humanity itself, was fated to meet its end.

Chapter 18: The Woman in Black

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Chapter 18: The Woman in Black

June 28, 1985.
Zero Minus 2 Hours.

“British Armed Forces Prevent Human Sacrifice at Stonehenge”, the headline of The Sun read the next day. The photo accompanying the story was so poorly done that the baby supposedly being prepared for sacrifice on a toppled plinth must have been ten feet tall to be in scale. The paper had been left behind by its original reader, probably in disgust.

Gus Guiseman dropped the newspaper in shock. “I forgot to get anything for Celestia or Luna!” he exclaimed. He was standing with the rest of the American tourists in the Terminal 3 Concourse of Heathrow Airport, awaiting the arrival of Pan-Am Flight 103 to New York City. He had a good excuse for his forgetfulness—it wasn’t even dawn yet, and the hectic events surrounding the concert the night before had completely exhausted him.

“Don’t worry,” Gwen assured him. “I had Ashley pick up a few things before we even got here. They’re packed in the luggage.”

Gus pouted. “I really ought to get something myself.”

Gwen smiled. “You just want an excuse to browse the duty-free shops. Well go along, but keep an eye on the time. The plane should be here within an hour.”

Gus began the long trek back into the main part of Heathrow.

Gwen then looked over at Meridiem and Gnosi. “Do you mind following him? I’d rather not have this be the fifth plane we miss over the course of our marriage because Gus got sucked into a science magazine.”

& & &

After briefly getting himself lost in an issue of Omni, Gus wandered through the various shops, seeking out something that wouldn’t be too tacky. He eventually found a small stuffed owl that made a startled “hoo” sound when you turned it upside down; which just left Celestia. He turned a corner when he suddenly found himself face-to-face with…her.

The short hunched woman in the stiff black dress had been showing up for years at the lectures he had given during his numerous visits to Japan starting in the mid-1960’s. She was always in the back of the hall, wearing a veil over her face, and yet he always had the feeling that she was staring intently at him. Not once had she ever approached him before or after a lecture, or even left him some sort of note explaining her presence. He could almost trace the passage of the years in the way her physical condition deteriorated over time, her straight posture bending over, her faint shaking becoming more and more noticeable.

And now, half a world away from her home, here they were face to face.

Through the veil, Gus saw one eye go wide. The other eye could not match this action, as it was physically unable to. The entire left side of the woman’s face was scarred with deep red lesions.

Gus stepped back in shock, but then it all became clear. Her age, those particular injuries—she was one of the survivors of the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945. She obviously had wanted to confront him over his part in her suffering.

And Gus was perfectly willing to put up with whatever she had to say. His conscience was clear; if having her berate him in a public place would help set her mind at ease, he was willing to endure the mother of all tongue lashings.

But instead, all she did was shove an object into his hands, and quickly hobble away.

Gus looked down at it. It was a tall white umbrella with a blue trim. Again, Gus recognized this object: the woman had always carried a white umbrella of some kind in each of her visits—it started as a fashion statement, and ended up as a cheap cane. “Wait!” he cried out. “Don’t you need this?”

The woman said something that was hard to make out with her accent and the damage to her mouth. But it might have been “Keep it. And please—don’t give it to me again. It’s not worth it.”

Gnosi and Meridiem ran up to him from the next aisle. “Professor, are you all right?” the young woman asked him.

Gus sighed. “I’m fine. I just hope she got what she wanted out of that encounter. Did Gwen send you two to keep an eye on me?”

Meridiem nodded guiltily.

Gus looked down at his shopping bag, then up at the clock. “This will just take a minute.” With the two students in tow, he went back to where he found the owl and bought a matching mourning dove, then returned to the concourse, swinging the handle of his new white umbrella back and forth with his free hand.

Something about the object felt wrong, but he couldn’t put a finger on what.

& & &

Back in the concourse, Gus sat down with a frown. He handed his bag of purchases to his curious wife without a word then started to study the inner mechanism of the white umbrella.

Gwen looked over at the umbrella for a moment. “You didn’t get that for Delver’s girls, did you?”

“No, I guess it’s for me,” Gus replied.

Gnosi, who had also been staring intently at the umbrella ever since he first set eyes on it, finally spoke up. “I wonder if that woman was at Kensington Gardens yesterday.”

“I don’t remember seeing her,” Meridiem replied. “But there were a lot of people at that park. And they’ve probably been selling that umbrella there since the beginning of the year.”

“Kensington Gardens?” Gus asked. He finally examined the outside of the umbrella. Written around the edge were the words “All Prams Come from Kensington Gardens. 1735-1985.”

“A ‘pram’ is what the locals call a baby carriage,” Gnosi helpfully explained.

“Yes, I know that. What has me mystified is why an umbrella obviously manufactured this year is already in such awful condition. I can’t even open it fully.”

“It must be a cheap souvenir that got caught in a rain shower or something,” said Gnosi. “Well, you can always have the one I bought—it’s still in its plastic wrapper.”

“You’re offering me the umbrella you bought for yourself?”

“No offence, but if all ‘Kensington Pram-iversary’ umbrellas are that badly made, then I think I’m better off with the worn umbrella I have at home. That woman’s nowhere around—you could just toss it.” He gestured towards a nearby trash bin.

“What woman?” asked Gwen.

“Somebody who had cause to be mad at me. And I think I’ll hold onto this broken one for now.”

A few minutes later, the group was approached by a broad-shouldered, middle-aged man in a thick pea green coat. The man was flanked on either side by men in black suits.

“Excuse me,” the man in the coat said with a Russian accent.

Gus winked at his wife. “They find me everywhere,” he whispered to her. “Yes, I am who you think I am,” he said. “Would you like me to sign something?”

“What?” the man said in confusion. “No, I’d like to speak to your Markist friends over there.”

“Oh,” Gus said, visibly deflating.

Gwen snickered. A moment later her eyes went wide as she recognized the man.

“How can we help you, Sir?” Delver asked.

“I was wondering what the procedure was for joining your faith.”

“If you’re boarding this flight, I happen to know that there is a Harmony Center in JFK that can help you. And if you’re sitting in my vicinity in the plane, I’d be happy to tell you anything you’d like to know.”

“Thank you for your time.”

“The name’s Delver. I’m a Markist bishop. We Markists exist to make the world a happier place.”

“That is certainly what I have heard…Father Delver. I would appreciate speaking with you. But if we don’t see each other again, I wish you a pleasant flight.”

“The same to you, my friend!”

Gwen waited until the trio of men had returned to their corner of the waiting area to address the others. “Do you know who that was?”

“Who?” asked Gus.

“Marshal Ustinov, the head of the Soviet army! I heard he just defected a few days ago.”

Gus looked appraisingly at the large man and his obvious American handlers. His presence on this flight had just made it a target in the eyes of the Soviet Union.

Chapter 19: Zero Hour, Part One

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Chapter 19: Zero Hour, Part One

Fifteen minutes later the plane finally boarded, starting with the flight crew—Gus noticed that the captain had a far-off look and a completely blank expression. After about ten minutes, the Russian general, his handlers, and a few other special cases were allowed to board, followed shortly afterwards by Delver’s party and the rest of the First Class passengers. Gus entered the plane through a door just forward of the wings. Immediately in front of them upon entering was a spiral staircase. From experience, Gus knew that at the top of those stairs was the crew flight deck (to the fore) and the First Class lounge (to the aft). This upper floor was what gave Boeing 747 airplanes their distinctive forward “humps”. Instead of going up, Gus turned left, walking into the nose of the plane where half of the First Class seats were. Behind the staircase was the First Class restroom, and behind that were the rest of the First Class seats. Beyond that was the velvet curtain that separated First Class from Business Class and Economy, where passengers had to squeeze into sections of three or four tightly-packed seats.

Unlike those cramped sections, First Class seats were arranged in widely-spaced pairs. Gus and Gwen sat together, with Delver sitting by himself, and Gnosi and Meridiem sitting behind him. On the other side of the cabin sat Marshall Ustinov and his handlers. Ustinov was already chatting up a stewardess in hopes of being allowed to sit next to Delver and talk more about Markism.

An hour into the flight, Gus Guiseman was trying to catch up on some sleep when he was suddenly shaken by Gwen. One look at her deathly pallor told him that she had a very good reason for awakening him.

Gwen pulled the modified radio out from under her blanket. Just as before, it had been tuned to the cockpit’s frequency. She then pulled out the headphone plug so that he could hear.

“I will say nothing more until I hear from the Commander in Chief.” It was the voice of the captain, recognizable from his pre-flight speech.

A few seconds passed. The next voice that Gus heard was that of President Far Shooter. He was trying to be pleasant, but there was an obvious undertone of annoyance in his voice. “This is Far Shooter. I’m impressed that you would go this far just to hear my voice. I’m sorry that I can’t get you my autograph or any—”

“Listen very carefully, Mr. President,” the captain cut in. “I will not repeat this message.”

Gus looked carefully over at his wife. All of this was odd, but hardly worth waking him for. He suspected that something had happened earlier in the conversation to make her this worried. He noticed that several other passengers were leaning their way to overhear the conversation, some asking each other what was going on.

There was a faint hiss then in the radio’s speakers—Gus supposed that the captain had started playing a portable tape player into his microphone. “Good morning, Mr. Shooter. You are hearing the recorded voice of Muammar Gaddafi. I have employed Captain Bridges here to administer a test. A test of your competence to rule the most powerful of the Western nations.”

There was pandemonium then, both in the First Class cabin that the Guisemans were in, as well as by the crew surrounding the President.

One of the passengers in Flight 103 peering out the window suddenly pointed. “Is that Air Force One?” Others turned to their windows to try and confirm this statement.

Gaddafi had left a pause in the tape, anticipating some kind of reaction. “By now,” he continued under a lot of audio interference, “the good captain has activated the remote control to remove the lead shielding. You see, there is a nuclear warhead in the baggage compartment of this plane. With the shielding removed, you can easily confirm that I am in fact telling the truth.”

After another calculated pause, Gaddafi resumed his speech, which was still competing with a loud hiss to be heard. “At this point you have three choices. Choice Number One is to send your fighter bomber escort to destroy this plane. You will survive, but not only will you kill all 250 passengers and crew of Captain Bridge’s plane, but you will also almost certainly detonate the bomb, and as you are right now flying over Glasgow, that will also claim the lives of 1.5 million people. By this choice, you will have proved to the world how easily a ‘tin-pot dictator’, as you once called me, was able to egg you into a deadly rage. You may try to claim afterwards that you stood me down, that you would ‘never agree to the demands of a terrorist’. But will you be able to live with yourself afterwards?

“Choice Number Two: You run away, like the yellow-bellied pig-dog that you are. The bomb will automatically go off at precisely 7 am, killing the same number of people as before. But this time, you will be revealed to the world as a coward, and your days as a respected leader will be over.

“Or you could decide on Choice Number Three, thereby proving that you are the hero that you always say that you are. This means that you will allow Captain Bridges to follow you out to the North Atlantic, so that when the bomb goes off at 7 am, the only lives lost will be those in two planes: this one, and yours.

“I have spoken my piece. Now make your decision, and may your worthless female creator have mercy on your soul.”

“Captain Bridges, let’s fly west while I think this over,” the President spoke in a steely voice. “In the meantime, might I ask what drives a decent man to such a despicable act?”

“I’m dying, Mr. President,” the voice of the Captain answered. “And there’s nothing anybody can do about it. I’ve gambled away all the money I have, so this is my only way of taking care of my family after I die.”

“And what about the lives that you are condemning by your actions?”

“I learned a long time ago that the only lives that matter are the ones that belong to me,” the Captain answered, in a voice devoid of compassion. “Besides, what has America ever done for me? I say let every other country in the world go to Hell for all I care.” There was a click as he turned off the radio.

The thinner of the two men in black was now huddled next to the Guisemans. “That hiss,” he said in a low but insistent voice, “does it mean…”

Gus finished making a quick adjustment to the guts of the portable radio, causing it to start pinging instead of hissing “Yes, that hiss means that there is a nuclear bomb on board this aircraft.” He swung the antenna around, until the pings sped up just a bit. “And it’s located right under the flooring, halfway between this point and the tail of the plane.”

The First Class passengers began to panic.

Marshal Ustinov rose to his feet, a solid figure of confidence, and the crowd hushed. “We have an advantage right now,” he told them. “We alone have the power to stop this, but only if we have the element of surprise.”

The two men in black finally introduced themselves: the larger man was Agent Gamble, and the smaller one was Agent Proctor.

“It’s 6:45,” said Agent Gamble. “I propose we break into the cabin, take down the captain, and find out if he has some kind of control for disabling the bomb. Professor Guiseman—”

“You did recognize me!”

“Hush!” (That was Gwen.)

“You will use your improvised device to find the bomb. There should be a door under the carpet in the stewardess’ compartment behind the First Class restroom—it leads to the only part of the baggage section accessible during flight. If you can find and disable the bomb yourself, that’s great. Otherwise, wait for me. Everyone else put on your seatbelts. Things will probably get bumpy in here until we’re able to activate the autopilot.”

Father Delver stood up. “I should inform the other passengers.”

“We don’t have that much time,” the man in black warned.

“You go ahead with your daring plan, gentlemen. I can take care of myself.”

Gnosi looked over at Meridiem. “There are so many ways this could go wrong.”

Meridiem, who had been holding her hands to her temples for several minutes now, looked up at him crossly. “Well, if you can talk Professor Guiseman into converting his radio into a miniature Solarium, maybe I could do something! But until I have enough power, I’m helpless!”

The two government men made their way up the stairs to the lounge, which appeared to be deserted. Gus was right behind them with his radio turned off and Gwen, rather insistently, was right behind Gus. And Ustinov was behind Gwen.

It was a miracle that the entire First Class wasn’t on that staircase, Gus reflected wryly.

“It’s not locked,” Agent Proctor whispered, pointing at the door to the flight deck.

Just then, they heard the sound of a soft moan behind them. A flight attendant was lying down in a corner, her arms clutched around her stomach.

Agent Gamble knelt down beside her. “Are you alright?” he whispered.

“I…I think the Captain poisoned me. Poisoned all of us. He handed out these little bottles when the flight began. Said…it was his anniversary.”

Gus signaled to Gwen to take a look at the stewardess. “There are probably four of five more somewhere on board,” he explained. He saw the two agents preparing to ram the door. “Hold on! I think I can help.” Popping the radio back open, he returned it to its previous configuration.

“Flight 103? I have made my decision,” said the voice of President Far Shooter on the radio.

“And that is?” answered Captain Bridges.

“Air Force One will follow you out to the North Atlantic. Only, does it have to be the North Atlantic? We’re still closer to the east coast of Scotland than the west—why can’t we fly over the North Sea instead? There’s less chance of anyone on the ground being hurt if—”

“No change in plan. If Gaddafi wants us to fly to the North Atlantic, then the North Atlantic it will be. Continue on your present coordinates until—”

Gus held up a couple of wires. “Now!” He pressed them together the same time the two men rushed the door. An audible screech could be heard from within.

The Captain cried out in pain and threw away his headset. Seconds later, he had been pinned by the larger of the two agents. The brief struggle had caused the plane to pitch down, causing screams to reverberate up and down the entire plane before Agent Proctor succeeded in engaging the autopilot. It took a long twenty seconds for the plane to right itself. During this time Agent Proctor had put on the captain’s former headset to inform first Air Force One and then the local air traffic control about what had just happened.

Entering the cockpit, Marshal Ustinov took a moment to look at the unconscious bodies of the first officer, flight engineer and a second flight attendant. They had been tied up with packing twine by Captain Bridges, just in case one of them woke up. Ustinov untied one of them and gave the twine to Agent Gamble, who used it to immobilize Captain Bridges. Ustinov then sat down in the first officer’s seat so he could speak with the Captain. “We heard quite a bit of what you had to say to the American President,” he told him. “And I’m afraid you will not be able to keep your family safe if the bomb in this plane detonates.”

“What do you mean?” the captain asked, doubtful.

“Because of my mistakes, the next atomic explosion that occurs will start World War III.”

“A likely story! And even if it were true, I have Colonel Gaddafi’s word, ‘as reward to one who turned away from the faithless land of his birth’, that my family has been hidden in a Scottish village so remote, no bomb will ever reach them.”

Agent Proctor finished consulting the flight maps. “And does the name of this little remote village happen to be Lockerbie?”

“H…how did you know?”

“You obviously haven’t flown this route before,” the agent said, pointing at the town right below them, “because that is Lockerbie, Scotland.”

Immediately after seeing that his trick had worked, Gus went back downstairs and to the location Agent Proctor had told him about. He found the edge of a carpet fragment and removed it, revealing the door in the floor. He opened it and descended a ladder into the chamber below. On the way down he heard the Captain scream a string of very inventive profanities.

“Stacy, is that you?” a voice weakly floated up from below.

“No, I’m one of the passengers,” Gus explained. “The Captain’s kind of lost his head.” At the bottom of the ladder he found a young man with curly hair, his arms wrapped around his knees. He looked like he had been drugged.

“Really?” the man asked. “I mean, that bottle he gave me made me throw up, but I didn’t think that made him crazy or anything.”

Gus looked around. The chamber down here was big, but he figured it was still less than a third of the total baggage space in the plane. From the numerous animal sounds, he assumed that this section was for keeping any baggage that had to be monitored, and that the drugged man’s job was to watch it. As he reconfigured the radio as a radiation direction finder again, he asked, “Did you happen to see or hear anything odd in the past five minutes?”

“Yeah, that casket over there popped open. That’s when the headache started—don’t get too close.”

Gus picked up a crowbar, a grim look on his face. “Go upstairs,” he instructed the baggage handler. “And warn anybody that wants to come down that it’s going to be rather ‘hot’ for the next few minutes.” Backing up his statement was the fact that the animals closest to the casket weren’t making a sound—they were all laying down in their carriers, trying to summon enough strength to keep breathing.

With every step towards the casket, Gus became more and more disoriented, but he forced himself to keep going. When he finally reached it, he flipped the lid open.

That’s when he blacked out.

& & &

He woke up near the stairs leading up, 15 meters away from the casket. He was lying face up on the floor, with Agent Gamble looking down at him.

“Are you alright?”

Gus put a hand to his head as he slowly rose to his feet. “I’ll recover. So, what happened with the Captain? Did he agree to cooperate?”

“Oh he definitely wanted to cooperate,” Agent Gamble explained, “but other than a one-button remote control to remove the shielding, he wasn’t given any other way of controlling the bomb. Speaking of which…” He squared his shoulders and pulled out a pair of wire cutters.

“Be careful!” Gus cried. “That thing is giving out a dangerous amount of radiation.”

“Dangerous is my job,” Agent Gamble assured him. “What were you planning to do, anyway? Assuming you didn’t black out?”

“Cut every single wire at the same time?”

The agent sighed. “You’ve done plenty, Professor Guiseman. Now go back to your wife.”

Gus spent a moment trying to think of any way he could assist, any way that he could actually do something for once against one of the devices he considered his ill-begotten children. And then with a sigh he turned and began slowly climbing the ladder.

Agent Gamble circled around and approached the casket from the side where the lead-lined lid could act to partially shield him from the radiation. He looked over at a nearby wall clock to see how much time he had. He gave a sigh of relief that it was about to turn from 6:49 to 6:50 am.

Muammar Gaddafi promised that the bomb wouldn’t go off until 7 am.

He lied.

At 6:50 am precisely, the entire plane suddenly lurched downwards as the bomb exploded, causing Gus to fly upwards until he slammed into the ceiling of the First Class cabin. Luckily for him, he didn’t slam into the ceiling head-first. Unfortunately for him, his bent-over posture at the moment the bomb detonated meant that he hit it hard on his left hip.

This was followed by a seeming eternity of darkness.

Chapter 20: Dead End

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Chapter 20: Dead End

Gus suddenly found himself in the “safe space” inside Meridiem’s head. A brief sense of overwhelming pain quickly faded.

“You should be OK now,” Gnosi told him. “Well technically, feel well. You’ll still need medical treatment when we get out of this. If we get out of this.”

“You put a mental block on the pain, I’m guessing,” Gus concluded. “So what about the rule that you could only do this with my permission?”

“If I took the time to ask you, we would have both been atomized before you could reply. Besides, I have access to a lot more power than usual.”

Gus stood up from the cross-legged position he had awoken in. “Is that how you were able to stop time?” he asked Meridiem.

Meridiem nodded. “And now we need you to help us figure out what to do.”

“What about Father Delver?”

“He was knocked unconscious from the initial shock,” Gnosi reported. “The damage must have been severe, because I couldn’t revive him.”

“Anybody else?”

“We were the only Markists on the flight. And that drink we gave you with dissolved Mark plaque is the only reason we could include you.”

“So no chance of including Gwen.”

“Sorry, Professor.”

Gus sighed and closed his eyes for a few moments to think. Then he opened them to take a good look at his two companions. “You both look pretty tired. How long was it between when you initially stopped time and when you included me?”

“Subjectively? I’d say ten, maybe fifteen minutes.”

“Then the rings under your eyes is not merely fatigue, but the first sign of radiation poisoning.”

“We had no choice,” Meridiem explained. “We had to start time for an instant before we could stop it again with you.”

“And we already went through the same process with Father Delver,” added Gnosi.

“So the first order of business is to set up some sort of shielding,” Gus told them.

“But shields are not part of my special talent,” said Meridiem.

“Sure they are. You’re stopping time by erecting a shield where time works differently inside than outside. A shield that blocks radiation should be child’s play compared to that.” Gus summoned up his trusty chalkboard. “The theory would look like this…”

Gus and Meridiem spent a few minutes going over equations and visualizations, while Gnosi poked around the curtains in Meridiem’s imaginary bedroom.

“Well that should keep us alive for now,” Meridiem said, signaling Gnosi to join them once again. “But we still don’t have any options for how to rescue ourselves.”

Gus frowned. “It’s not that you have no options…just that you think the options you do have are all bad. Let’s list them and see if they have any redeeming aspects that we can use.” He wiped the chalkboard.

Gnosi rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, the first option would be to give up and start time again.”

Gus wrote down the words “1. Start Time”. He then asked, “What would the consequences of this decision be?”

“Everyone in the plane would die,” said Meridiem sadly, ticking off points on her fingers, “followed by everyone in Air Force One, followed by a few hundred people on the ground dying instantly, followed finally by tens of thousands of people dying long-term from radiation poisoning.”

For the moment, Gus decided to hold back the news he had overheard from Marshal Ustinov, that this one bomb might be enough to start World War III. “Alright. What’s the second option?”

“There’s got to be a hatch in the baggage compartment that can be opened from inside,” said Gnosi.

“I’m pretty sure I saw one,” Gus confirmed.

“Then in that case, we open the hatch and push the bomb outside. But all that would do—”

Gus raised a hand to stop him while using the other hand to write “2. Push Bomb Outside, Then Start Time”. “OK, now you can go over the consequences.”

“Pretty much the same as Option #1,” said Gnosi. “The bomb wouldn’t start falling until Mary started time, and we’d all be dead before it fell out of range.”

“The third option is that I push the bomb all the way to the ground,” said Meridiem.

“That’s not—” Gnosi started to say.

“The Professor wants all options, and this is one.”

Gus finished writing the option down. “And then what would happen?” he asked in a neutral tone.

“I’d die, even more people on the ground would die, the plane would crash, and there would be a few survivors, although they’d probably be pretty bad off with the fall, the explosion and the radiation,” said Meridiem. “There’s a chance that Air Force One might survive.”

“Any chance that we could help?” Gus suggested. “Maybe push the bomb into the sea? My goal right now in brainstorming is to minimize the number of dead and injured, even if that means sacrificing our own lives.”

“Hold on,” Meridiem said, and she then disappeared. A moment later, she returned. “I’ve just tested the shield you taught me, and it definitely gets weaker the closer I get to the bomb.”

“Are you sure you can’t strengthen it some more?” asked Gus.

“No. The same energy I’m trying to block also powers everything I’m doing, so it has to be at least semi-permeable. So there’s no way to get rid of that weakness. Anyone who rides on the bomb is going to be weakened pretty quickly. I don’t know if we’d be able to push it any distance after getting it on the ground before we’d all collapse.”

“Can you push it up into space?”

“When I say I can push the bomb ‘down’, I mean letting gravity affect it incrementally. I can’t push it up.”

“And this missile has no rocket attached. So basically, these are our only options.” Gus stepped back to look at the board for a few seconds then shook his head. “No, nope, nada. None of these are acceptable. I want to save everybody.”

“But how?” Gnosi and Meridiem asked in unison.

“By changing the rules.”

Chapter 21: Going Backward, Part One

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Chapter 21: Going Backward, Part One

“Gnosi, your power clearly has levels to it,” Gus told him. “There are things you can do all the time, things you can do in the Solarium, and things like invading my mind without my permission that need the power of an exploding nuclear bomb to achieve.”

Gnosi crossed his arms. “Would you rather I left you there?”

“Well that depends on if we succeed or fail in saving everybody or not.”

Gnosi shrugged. “Alright, levels. So what?”

“So I’m going to say that Meridiem here has levels as well. And the power she gains from having a nuclear bomb exploding as a power source is time travel.”

“Time travel?”

“Sure! You’ve got an hourglass mark, which signifies time.” Gus looked hopefully into Meridiem’s doubtful eyes. “The least you can do is try it.”

“Well…alright. How do I do it?”

Gus rubbed his hands together eagerly before turning to the board. “Let me show you some formulas…”

Gus, Gnosi and Meridiem appeared back on Pan Am Flight 103, between the First Class restroom and the velvet curtain.

It was not a pretty sight. In the bloody red tint of stop-time, people were frozen in the act of panicking. The nose of the plane was tilted downwards. Cracks in the floor showed that the plane was in the act of breaking into at least two pieces somewhere past the curtain. Gus wanted to get up and explore past the curtain, but found that the damage to his hip was too severe. Gnosi dashed to Gus’ seat and returned with the white umbrella.

Using the umbrella as a cane, Gus hobbled over to the curtain. He had a hard time making out what was on the other side, thanks to a blinding light emanating from the cracks—the light of the bomb. He saw that Delver had been positioned carefully in the aisle away from the cracks. Finding that his proximity to the bomb was making it a little hard to breathe, he retreated back to First Class and looked up the spiral staircase. There he could see Gwen lying down near a Pan Am stewardess. He didn’t like the angle of her neck. He tried to climb the stairs, but found he couldn’t in his current condition.

“Gnosi?” he asked. “Could you go up there and see if my wife’s alright? I can’t go up there.”

“We’d have to start and stop time again to really see if she’s fine.”

“Just do your best with time stopped.”

“Alright.” He went up and took a look, before going into the cockpit, looking around, and finally climbing back down. “Nothing’s broken, if that’s what you’re worried about. But she’s beat up pretty bad. I think I saw Air Force One on the radar display. She’s around five miles to the northeast—8 kilometers. And our altitude is 20,000 feet, or 6 kilometers.”

The three of them found a spot on the carpet in the middle of the First Class compartment, sat down in a circle, and clasped their arms together. Despite the uncomfortable angle, they were able to get into a comfortable position, largely by use of those arm-clasps.

“I’d like you to take us back twenty-four hours,” Gus instructed Meridiem, “and put us in back in the same Heathrow concourse we left from, behind that one pillar that was next to the restrooms, so we won’t attract that much attention.”

“Professor?” asked Meridiem.

“Actually, what am I thinking? Put us right in the middle of the concourse where everyone can see us! That way they’ll have to believe us when we say we came from the future!”

“Professor!”

“Yes?”

“I can’t teleport! It’s not part of my mark.”

Gus sighed. “The Earth revolves on its axis,” he said patiently. “The Earth goes around the Sun. The Sun orbits the Milky Way Galaxy, which moves in mysterious ways through the Cosmos. Any act of time travel automatically involves teleportation. Otherwise, you’d end up in empty space. Besides, any time travel story worth its salt takes you not only to the important dates, but also the important places.”

“In that case, how do I do it?”

“Disengage the spatial coordinates from the temporal ones. Then stick the new coordinates back in after the time jump.”

“Would it help if you imagined you were the TARDIS?” Gnosi asked.

“No,” Meridiem replied, sticking her tongue out briefly. “Alright, let’s try this…”

As she concentrated, the redness in the air became even more intense. The floor beneath them began lifting towards a more horizontal orientation, and people and objects began drifting back into their pre-explosion positions. But this only went on for a few seconds before stalling. The world around them shook, then blurred, before finally reverting to stopped time.

“I…can’t,” Meridiem said between gasps. “I can’t store enough energy to leave the explosion, either in space or time.”

“Then we’re trapped?” asked Gnosi.

“Not necessarily,” said Gus, chewing on a thumbnail in thought. “What if we traveled to another nuclear explosion, one in the past? Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union exploded thousands of test bombs underground since World War II. If we could leave a lasting message behind at one of them, that would tell authorities what was going to happen today, and then this bombing could be prevented.”

“Wouldn’t that be a time paradox?” asked Gnosi.

“Well we don’t even know if it’s possible yet. What do you think, Meridiem?”

Meridiem signaled to them that she still had to recover from her latest attempt.

With an exasperated snort, Gnosi brought them all into Meridiem’s head and healed her.

“You can only do that so many times before there’ll be some sort of nasty consequence, you know,” Meridiem scolded.

“I know,” Gnosi said with a cheeky smile. “So? What do you think of Pr. Guiseman’s latest suggestion?”

For once, Meridiem was the first to the chalkboard. “I suppose the first problem is to find these explosions. It would be like developing a new sense, like we did for reversing entropy.” She drew a stick figure version of herself on the board, with wavy lines coming into her head, some of which had little explosions on the end. She then wrote and corrected some simple equations. “Something like this, Professor?”

“Yes, that should work. I like the cheat that allows you to see the topography surrounding each site.”

“It’s not a cheat. The surface of the Earth is just being illuminated by the light of the explosion.”

“The entire Earth. It’s a cheat. But don’t let that stop you—magic-wise, I bet it’s a very small use of energy.”

“Finding bombs is a mental ability?” asked Gnosi. “If that’s the case, then you should be able to use it in here as well.”

“Hmm…” Meridiem squinted her eyes and slowly turned in a circle, moving her head around to see in all directions. “There’s one,” she said, pointing out a window. “No, wait…that’s a nuclear power plant, inside of a submarine on the other side of the Arctic Circle from us. We’re not only not going to be able to communicate from inside there; we also won’t be able to fit.”

“And the radiation being so close would kill us,” added Gus acidly.

“Well yes, of course. I’ll look for sources that are not so constrained spatially.” After a few seconds she pointed in a new direction, the angle a few degrees above horizontal. “What’s that? All I’m detecting is a power source, with no map around it.”

“It’s probably the sun,” said Gus.

“Oh, right. Plenty of power there, but again, no way for us to deliver a message. Also helps me calibrate my distances. So I can definitely conclude that the sun is the only other power source I can use within about a light year of us. Now if I added time as a fourth dimension…” She dropped her pointing arm in shock. “The future…I see another explosion northwest of Canterlot fifteen minutes from now, and then another one in central Asia a few minutes after that, and another one and another one…thousands of explosions, covering all the major cities on Earth, all in less than twenty-four hours. And then…nothing.”

The natural light in Meridiem’s imaginary room seemed to dim, like a cloud had passed in front of the sun.

Gnosi looked nervously around him, peering into the shadowy corners of the room as if expecting to see Death herself hiding in one of them.

“It’s as I feared,” Gus said after several moments. “With all the recent tension between the superpowers, this rogue explosion was enough to trigger World War III. Well now we have to fix this problem. The stakes are too high for us to give up. Now, do you think you can cast your glance backward this time?”

“Y…yes,” Meridiem said, shaking her head up and down a bit more than was warranted. She looked around her once again, her eyes out of focus. “Two days ago,” she said. “Underground. A little more than three quarters of the way between Canterlot and the Pacific.”

“Nevada Testing Grounds, most probably,” said Gus.

“The one before that was ten days ago. Also underground. In the middle of Russia—I don’t know enough geography to be more exact than that. I guess that’s the Soviet nuclear tests?”

“Correct,” said Gus.

“Question,” asked Gnosi. “What’s to stop us from going to one of these tests, getting as far away from the explosion as we can, and then starting time back up with your radiation shield in place?”

Meridiem and Gus both went to the chalkboard.

“The shield is tied to my mark,” Meridiem finally concluded. “If I’m not stopping or traveling through time, then I can’t create a shield.”

“And I can guarantee that we won’t be far enough away from the explosion to survive,” added Gus. “Now if we happen to discover a fallout shelter inside the radius of where Meridiem can go, then we can try jumping in there the moment time starts—that would definitely be a possibility.”

“…But don’t plan on it,” concluded Gnosi. After thinking a bit, he came up with another objection. “We weren’t getting hurt in the Solarium.”

“Solar energy appears to be harmless to you,” said Gus. “The energy of an exploding nuclear weapon…not so much.”

“And keeping the shield up alongside stopping time requires a lot more energy that I could get from the Solarium,” said Meridiem.

“Indeed,” said Gus. “Now as long as we’re in this mental space, we have all the time to plan out exactly what we’re going to do…”

& & &

After spending nearly an hour of subjective time planning in the little room in Meridiem’s head, the trio emerged back into the stop-time of Pan Am Flight 103. Gnosi fished through the stowed luggage compartments of First Class until he found a suitable backpack to steal. Meridiem and Gus (supported by his umbrella-cane) collected up several magazines to put into the backpack—especially Time and Newsweek. These were for use as proof that they were from the future. A variety of other objects were looted from passenger baggage for possible use in their travels, including a Polaroid instant camera.

“Now as a responsible adult, I need to remind you to feel guilty for all these acts of petty theft,” Gus told them.

“Then why do you have such a big grin on your face?” Gnosi asked.

“Oh, no reason,” Gus replied, before shoving a stolen Cadbury chocolate bar into his pocket.

At one of the stations that the flight attendants used, Gus took some Pan Am stationary and a pen and wrote up a letter asking the reader for help and describing the timeline of what happened to Flight 103. While he was doing this, he asked Gnosi to retrieve the little remote control that the Captain had used to open the casket containing the bomb. He took it apart and added the details of what he found to the letter. After reading it over and making a few corrections, the three of them set to work making several copies of it each.

Their plan was to find someone caught in a nuclear explosion, move that victim as far away from the blast as the limitations of Meridiem’s powers would allow, and leave them with a magazine and a copy of the letter. If that wasn’t enough to save them—not to mention the whole of humanity—then they would pick another explosion and repeat the process, over and over again until they succeeded.

Gnosi looked up from the letter he was copying—a difficult feat considering the dim red lighting they were stuck with. “I just thought of something: If we succeed in preventing this plane from being bombed, then it will stop being a power source. So how do we get back to it? Or is this a plan were we have to sacrifice ourselves to save humanity? I…I’m not against it; it’s pretty much the ultimate representation of Markist values. I’d…just like to know beforehand.”

“I have no intention of throwing my life away if I can think my way out of it,” Gus replied. “No, we’re going to be able to get out of this because alternate universes are impossible.”

“I don’t follow.”

“The moment we succeed in changing history, everyone on Earth will want to snap into a new timeline. But because we are time travelers, our existence in the past will prevent that new timeline from taking effect. Meridiem, you’ll feel this as an incredible pull towards our anchor, towards this place and time. All you have to do is let go, and all three of us will find ourselves back on this plane, on this very spot on the carpet. We just have to make sure that your anchor is relative to the plane, as it will probably be in a different location without a mad captain flying it.”

“Anchor!” Meridiem exclaimed.

A moment later, they were back in Meridiem’s room, watching her work out the equations to anchor her to the plane at 6:50 am on June 28th of 1985.

Chapter 22: Going Backward, Part Two

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Chapter 22: Going Backward, Part Two

On their second attempt at time travel, Meridiem discovered that she couldn’t skip back in the past, but had to travel through every moment in-between. At least she could control the speed.

That meant that they had to go to the Sun first before they could reach their destination.

“This is ridiculous,” Gnosi commented as they waited inside an opaque bubble on the surface of the sun. “Why is it easy to jump 146 million kilometers in space and two days in time, but impossible to go six kilometers down and one day back?”

“Energy consumption,” muttered Meridiem, concentrating on five or six things at the same time.

“And why is it perfectly safe bathing in the unimaginable radiation sea of the sun, while getting too close to a hundred kiloton bomb is enough to kill us?”

Meridiem gave an exasperated glance over to Gus.

“Because,” Gus answered, “the energy of the sun is a relative constant, while a nuclear explosion is constantly increasing. This instability is hard to handle, even in stop time. Now there’s some interesting work in mathematics going on in recent years, something called ‘chaos theory’, but I was never able to wrap my head around it. A pity, because we could probably model a perfect radiation shield that let in enough energy to power time manipulation if either of us knew it. The sun has fluctuations as well, but as a percentage of total output these are small enough that the current shield model can easily handle them. Plus you Markists seem to have a natural affinity for sunlight, something I’d love to study in the lab when we get back from all this. Any other questions?”

Gnosi shrugged. “Don’t mind me. I’m just trying to be useful—you two are doing all the hard work.”

“Sorry to make things worse,” Meridiem announced, “but I just figured out that I can’t go forward in time, only back.”

“I was afraid of that,” Gus said. “My equations had the limitation that you can only fast-travel through any one moment in time once. I was hoping by not telling you that the rule wouldn’t apply.”

“So if for example we pass 1980 to try 1975 and later discover we should have stopped at 1980, it will have become impossible?” asked Gnosi.

“Yes, unless we change history, which removes the limitation.”

“That’s just great!”

“Hey, maybe we’ll get this done on the first try, and don’t have to worry about missed opportunities!” Gus said with a cocky grin.

“In any case,” Meridiem warned the group, “brace yourselves.”

10:03 am on June 26, 1985. Nevada Test Site, Yucca Flat, Area 2. 381 meters underground.

From the bright light of the sun, the three travelers suddenly found themselves in seeming blackness.

For a moment, Gus was driven to his knees, his mind so fogged that it seemed he had forgotten how to stand. With an effort, he raised himself up on his cane. He was going to retrieve a flashlight from his pocket, but he needn’t have bothered, as he found he was soon able to see quite well from the light of a nuclear explosion. It was only in contrast to the sun that this bright light was momentarily too dim to see by. He found that Meridiem and Gnosi had also been knocked off their feet. Unlike him, they were easily able to stand unaided.

The group looked around. They were in a narrow, rocky chamber. The walls and ceiling were gouged out into deep spiral cuts, looking as if they had been routed out by heavy machinery in the recent past. The bomb, a large cylinder measuring a meter wide by three meters long, occupied most of the space in the chamber. A maze of cables and pipes surrounding the bomb trailed out of sight, into the depths of a tunnel.

“I’ve never actually seen one of these sites in person,” Gus commented.

Gnosi meanwhile removed his backpack and handed the necessary paperwork to Meridiem. “Good luck,” he said.

“Thanks.”

After getting the flashlight from Gus, she started crawling down the tunnel. Gnosi sat down to wait, while Gus decided that getting up was too much work, and so remained leaning on the umbrella.

After a while, Gus noticed that he was growing weaker. He tried edging farther away from the bomb, but it was a very small chamber, and there was no way that he’d be able to escape the way that Meridiem had gone. He was about to tell Gnosi to go himself, when Meridiem returned, her arms clutched to her chest. Seeing the look of distress on Gus’ face, she took them all back to the safety of the Sun.

“Well?” asked Gnosi. “Any luck?”

Meridiem shook her head. “The tunnel got too narrow long before I reached the limit of how far I could go. I did find a few things, though.” She opened her arms to show them her discoveries. “This lantern, which appears to be in good working order.”

“Well at least we’ll be safe from grues now,” remarked Gnosi with a knowing smile.

“From what?” asked Gus.

“Never mind. Anything else?”

“A walkie-talkie.”

Gus took the item from Meridiem in order to examine it. “Wow, this is an antique,” he said. He pointed to a worn brass label on its bottom. “See? Made in 1956. Now if we ever figured out how to start time during an explosion without being incinerated, we could use this to communicate with the outside world.”

Both items were placed inside Gnosi’s backpack.

“That’s a big ‘if’,” commented Meridiem. “The bigger issue is that hit we took coming in, and the damage you two took from being too close.”

“What damage?” Gnosi asked.

“Take a look at your face,” Meridiem said, handing him her pocket compact.

Gnosi opened the compact and used the mirror to inspect himself. He found that his cheeks and forehead were splotched with broken blood vessels under the skin.

“Going forward,” Meridiem continued, “we’ll need to find explosions where we can be far enough away not to get hurt. Also, we need to know for sure that there’s someone there we can contact. All I was able to rescue was this little lizard.” From her pocket she produced the creature, still frozen in time and mostly curled in on itself. It would be about 4 in [10 cm] long if stretched out from nose to tail. The thin tail was a bright sky blue, while the body was brown with white and black stripes running from nose to back legs. The legs were quite short compared to the proportions of the rest of its body.

“It’s a skink,” said Gnosi, taking it to look it over. “They have this neat defense mechanism: if a predator bites onto the bright blue tail, they can detach it and run away, then regrow a new tail a few months later.”

“Too bad we can’t escape a bomb blast by jettisoning a useless body part,” commented Gus.

“He looked so cute and defenseless!” said Meridiem. “I couldn’t just leave him there.”

“No, I suppose not,” said Gnosi, handing the reptile back to Meridiem, who slipped it back into her pocket.

“Getting back on topic, we need to be able to detect people as well as explosions,” said Gus.

“I don’t know how you’re going to justify doing that with my mark,” said Meridiem.

“I don’t have to,” said Gus. “Instead, we’re going to use your mark.”

“My mark?” asked Gnosi.

They found themselves once again in Meridiem’s mental room.

“From here, you should be able to combine your powers,” Gus explained. Pointing at Meridiem, he said, “You can detect power sources.” Turning to Gnosi, he added, “And you can detect souls.”

“Oh!” Gnosi exclaimed. “I guess I can.” He held his hand out to Meridiem. “Want to give it a try?”

& & &

“So what about Three Mile Island?”

“Not enough radiation released. We’d be stuck inside the reactor, and nothing we’d leave behind would survive long enough to be found.”

“We could at least give it a shot.”

“Well that’s the thing—every time we visit a new location, we’re going to take a radiation hit as I get my shield adjusted. So basically we can only make a handful of visits before…”

“Keeling over?”

“Basically. Therefore, we need to go for the best bets.”

11:33 am on October 30, 1961. Mityushikha Bay Testing Range on the island of Severny, part of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago of Russia, far north of the Arctic Circle.

This time they had plenty of free space, since this test was conducted above ground. The explosion, as seen from the ground was like a second sun, if the sun happened to fill most of the sky above your head.

“That’s got to be the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” Gnosi commented in a small voice.

“Tsar Bomba,” Gus said, nodding grimly to himself. “60 megatons, the biggest man-made explosion of all time.” He noticed that it was getting harder to breathe.

“So, which way?” Meridiem asked Gnosi.

Gnosi collected himself. “Uh…that way.” He led them towards the coast. “Watch your step.”

Gus had expected that the warning was in reference to gopher holes, but as they continued onward, what they found were small frozen rodents, more and more of them as they got closer to the island’s edge.

In a few minutes they had reached the edge of a cliff. At one time, this was a river bed, the location of a waterfall spilling an unnamed river into the Arctic Sea.

There still was a waterfall here, but not one made of water. Instead it was the rodents, numbering in the hundreds or thousands, all blindly diving off of the cliff side to their doom.

“Are they running away from the bomb?” Meridiem asked, looking over the edge in horror.

“They’re lemmings,” Gnosi explained dispassionately. “Pushed into madness and suicide by population pressure. They were doing this long before Man came here.” He sighed. “And now humanity is doing the same thing.”

“Don’t go asking if we deserve to be saved again,” Gus warned him sternly. “Now is there a man on this island, or not?”

Gnosi nodded in acknowledgement. “Over here.”

& & &

Twenty minutes of slow trekking later—punctuated by two visits to Meridiem’s mental room so Gnosi could heal them of their accumulated exhaustion—they finally reached a shelter, where a lone man was staring out of a window with welder’s goggles over his eyes.

Gus opened the door of the shelter. “At last!” he exclaimed. “We have found our savior…”

“I can’t go in, there’s not enough power for me,” Meridiem reported, finding herself stopped by an invisible force at the boundary of the door. “That means that this man would have survived the blast, along with anything you give him.” She noticed that Gus hadn’t moved. “Professor? What’s wrong?”

“Him,” Gus answered. “Why did it have to be him?”

The frozen observer’s nametag identified him as “Юрий Андропов”, which was Cyrillic for “Yuri Andropov”.

Gnosi confirmed that nobody else on the entire archipelago was close enough for Meridiem to reach without running out of power. They could start time, pulling Meridiem into the shelter, and thereby survive themselves. But they would be in the custody of one of the most virulent Communists in history.

They left their materials with him anyway before leaving. To no one’s surprise, this act failed to change history.

Chapter 23: Going Backward, Part Three

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Chapter 23: Going Backward, Part Three

“Nagasaki,” declared Meridiem with finality. “Bigger bomb, more victims to save.”

“To deliver our message to,” Gnosi corrected.

“Same thing,” insisted Meridiem. “After seeing all of those lemmings, I’m not going to let another living thing die to these nuclear horrors than I have to.”

“Well I have no opinion one way or the other,” said Gnosi. “What do you think, Professor?”

Gus was staring absently into the interior of the Sun. “Hmm?” he said finally. “I suppose Nagasaki is as good as any other.”

There was one other bombing site he could have suggested, the one he had witnessed in person. There was even a person there, ready to be rescued.

But what if Crystal didn’t want to be rescued? There was no other reason for her to have deliberately gone into that shack but suicide, regardless of the reasons he had spun for reporters and for Father Delver. And what other reason would she have killed herself, but because of him? He had known in some dim corner of his mind that she had a crush on him, but all he could think about at the time was his precious Arline, dying slowly of tuberculosis in her hospital bed in Albuquerque. If he had said something to Crystal, if he had let her down gently or introduced her to one of the single chemistry assistants, maybe she would have lived. Maybe she would have been the Celestia that had greeted him at the station in Canterlot instead of her petty, self-absorbed reincarnation.

To go back to Trinity would have meant starting and re-stopping time in order to convince her to live. It would have meant trying to manipulate her love for him in order to get her to relay their message down through four decades. If he didn’t do it, that would be the end for humanity. And Gus didn’t think he had it in him to do it. Of all the bold-faced lies he had told to get a woman to do what he wanted, this would have been both the noblest in purpose and the foulest in his heart. Because he would have to betray Arline to do it.

And he just couldn’t. Even with 4.85 billion souls on the line, he couldn’t do it.

11:01 am on August 9, 1945. Nagasaki, Japan.

They were directly beneath an exploding bomb again. This one was a pea compared the building-sized monstrosity that was Tsar Bomba.

Gus looked down at his feet, which were crunching in sand. They were in a playground, adjacent to a school. Looking up, he saw several empty swings frozen in various positions, put there by a capricious breeze. Behind the swings was a long low building. The windows of the building were adorned with flowers and birds made from origami.

Turning his head, Gus saw mounds of freshly-dug earth, next to a crude hole in the ground. It was a shelter, there to protect civilians against American bombing raids. It was obvious that the shelter was not dug anywhere deep enough to protect against this bomb.

In another direction, Gus could see children frozen in place, laughing and running after dragonflies with little jars in their hands. The teachers that should be supervising them were instead digging a second shelter—apparently the first one wasn’t big enough to save everyone.

“That one,” Meridiem announced, pointing towards the swings.

Gus saw a girl that he missed between the swings, younger than the rest. Her face was frozen in an expression of near-hysterical glee. She was flat on her stomach in the sand, with a spray going up into her face. Clutched triumphantly in her hands was a bottle containing a caught dragonfly. As he watched, Meridiem and Gnosi walked over, picked up the human statue, and begin walking down a street, away from the bomb.

“Come along, Professor,” Meridiem called over her shoulder. “We want to be at the very limit of my range before we try talking to her.”

Gus looked around him, taking in the happy children and worried adults, none of whom had any idea what was about to happen to them. With a deep sigh, he started trudging down the road after the two Markists.

& & &

Nagasaki seemed like a city out of another time. There were no cars to be seen, only horse-drawn carriages and people on bicycles, going about their day without a care in the world. Factories could be seen towards the outskirts, but frozen in time; you could almost ignore the smoke they produced. Those factories were the reason the city was a target, as they supplied a significant portion of Imperial Japan’s navy. The trio with their kidnapped child crossed a pair of railroad tracks, with the locomotive frozen as it was just about to make the crossing.

It was on an old bridge crossing a curving river that Meridiem finally reached her limit. “Alright,” she said, panting a little. “Everyone link hands.” The Japanese girl was propped so she was standing instead of lying down. Meridiem grabbed onto one of her hands while supporting her back, and Gnosi did the same from her other side. Gus then linked arms with the two after carefully planting his umbrella on the ground in front of him.

For a brief instant, the sky flashed from red to blue and back again. The pea of blinding light expanded to the size of a lemon before freezing once again.

For a moment, it seemed that the girl was still frozen. Then her eyes flitted about her, taking in the sudden change in scenery and the strange people who were holding on to her. The glass jar dropped out of her hands, forgotten, as she took in a breath to scream.

Gnosi and Meridiem released the girl in tandem, and she turned to run away. At that moment, the skink in Meridiem’s pocket darted out and made its escape by running down the length of the umbrella. Meridiem tried to catch it, but grabbed the umbrella a split-second too late. The skink then found a crack between the sidewalk and the edge of the stone bridge, and wedged itself inside.

The girl stopped and turned her head, her expression softening from fear to curiosity. Her attention was fixed on the umbrella.

Noticing this, Meridiem slowly picked up the object and then held it out towards the girl. “Do you want this?” she asked in a gentle voice. “Don’t worry; we’re here to save you. We need you to deliver a message.”

The girl’s eyes were still riveted on the umbrella, now in her possession. Her mouth opened into a little “o” for a few moments, and then she humbly hugged it tight and smiled shyly.

“Does she even know English?” Gnosi asked.

“Success!” cried Meridiem, beckoning for Gnosi to hand her a magazine and letter.

“Is it, though?” Gnosi asked, suddenly lowering himself to his knees. He slapped his hands roughly together a few times. “I can’t feel my hands.”

Meridiem looked down. “Neither can I,” she said with a shrug. “But we changed history—we must have.”

“Do you feel a pull back to 1985?” Gus asked doubtfully.

“Well no, but maybe it takes a while to kick in.”

“And maybe the chances of a little girl holding onto a few pieces of paper in a language she can’t read are too low to be worth considering.”

“Then we rescue somebody else,” Meridiem insisted. “An adult.”

“Who would look at us and see only the enemy,” Gus said wearily.

“Then we keep trying. We move every single inhabitant of Nagasaki to safety, if that’s what it takes.”

“And what if that isn’t enough?” Gus insisted. “What if we drop dead on the third or fourth try?”

“She’s going to keep the umbrella,” said Gnosi in alarm. And indeed, the girl was slowly wandering away, umbrella still hugged to her bosom, looking around her and trying to figure out where she was.

“I’ll find another cane,” Gus said.

“No you don’t get it,” said Gnosi, standing up and pointing at the girl. “She’s going to keep that umbrella her entire life before growing up to become the veiled woman who gave it back to you at Heathrow in 1985. And then we’re going to give it back to her in 1945 so she can give it back to you, over and over and over again.” He ran over and roughly snatched the umbrella away from the girl, causing her to fall down on her rear and start bawling.

“Gnosi!” Meridiem exclaimed. “How could you do something so cruel?”

He held the umbrella up to them. “Don’t you see? This umbrella isn’t cheap; it’s hundreds of years old. It’s proof positive that we’re in a time loop! We’ve been trying to save the world this way dozens of times, and failing every single time.”

“Are you turning your back on Kindness?” Meridiem demanded.

“Yes, when it’s just cruelty in disguise. We’re taking her away from her friends, away from her family, from everyone she’s ever known. She will be scarred, not only physically but mentally, over not only what the bomb did to her, but also us, who rescue her only to drop dead immediately afterwards. What kind of life is that? Especially since we’ll still fail to save the human race?”

“But what other choice do we have?” Meridiem begged. “Do you think Hiroshima is going to be any different? Who else do we have?”

“We have one more,” Gus said, towering over the two bickering students. He snatched the umbrella roughly from Gnosi. “Get out that instant camera and get ready to take a picture.” He hobbled over to the crying girl, using the wall of the bridge to support himself. He then kneeled and presented the object to her laid across his arms. “Will you accept this sword of a noble samurai warrior?” he asked, being sure to emphasize the Japanese word with what was as close to the correct pronunciation as possible.

The girl dried her tears on the edge of her school uniform. “Samurai?” she asked, tilting her head sideways. Then she snatched up the object with a happy cry and started swinging it in the air a few times, before running up and giving Gus a quick hug—a hug captured on film by Gnosi.

Gnosi and Meridiem joined Gus so he could examine the picture. The girl and elderly man on the bridge were perfectly framed, with the impossible image of an atomic bomb caught in mid-explosion hovering over their heads.

The girl, seeing the picture, stretched out her hands for the camera.

“Greedy little thing, isn’t she?” Gnosi observed with a smile. He handed her the Polaroid SLR 680 instant camera, and watched as she turned it around every possible way. “I bet she’s going to break it.”

That was when she found the shutter button. She took a couple pictures of their feet before finally getting it pointed the right way and getting a photo of Gus flanked by Meridiem and Gnosi. Handing the camera back to Gnosi, she picked up the initially gray photo and yelled at it, then began jumping up and down in excitement as it began to self-develop.

While she was doing this, Gus dug a felt-tip pen out of Gnosi’s backpack. “Could you get me her name?” he asked.

“Kimiko Mineko,” said Gnosi. “I got it off of a boarding pass she dropped at the airport.”

The girl briefly looked up at them in recognition on hearing her name.

Gus wrote the name at the bottom of the photo depicting her and him, before putting it in the backpack. He held out his hand towards the girl, moving the pen with his other hand in a writing motion.

Kimiko looked warily between her picture and the old man, before reluctantly surrendering it.

Gus turned the photo over then wrote something on the back. He blew on the writing for a few seconds to make sure it was dry then gave the photo back to her.

Kimiko glanced at the writing for a moment before tucking the photo into the vest of her school uniform.

Gus tossed the pen back into Gnosi’s backpack, then reached out and grabbed the hands of both Markists. “Now I need you to put her back in the timestream—start and stop time again.”

Meridiem looked at him with uncertainty. “It will be another radiation hit.”

“Just do it.”

With a shrug, Meridiem obeyed.

The trio fell to the ground. The explosion was now the size of half the sky. The area under the blast was hard to see, obscured by heat waves.

“Do…either of you have…strength enough to move?” Gus asked.

Meridiem wearily raised her hand.

“Then get the girl under the bridge. There’s a small chance that she might drown, but at least this time she won’t suffer as much from radiation poisoning as she would if we just left her exposed.”

“What are you going to do with that picture you kept?” Gnosi asked while Meridiem carried out her instructions.

“We’re taking her family away from her, so it’s only just that I do what I can to get her a new family who loves her.”

After Meridiem had returned, he instructed her and Gnosi to hold hands with him. “We only have one more destination left to us. I’m…going to need you to do all the talking.”

Chapter 24: Going Back to Trinity

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Chapter 24: Going Back to Trinity

The trio found themselves back on the surface of the Sun, utterly exhausted. Gnosi tried to bring them into Meridiem’s inner sanctum, but found he lacked the strength to do it.

“Let’s…let’s just rest a bit here,” Meridiem said, lowering herself down to the “ground” of their little bubble.

Gus and Gnosi also sat down, and waited to get better. And waited…and waited.

“It’s no use,” Gus said after several minutes.

“Why are we even tired?” Meridiem said with as much annoyance as she could muster in her weakened state. “We’re not even in our bodies when time is stopped.”

“But we’re still tied to our brains, and those have taken a…a lot of radiation damage,” said Gnosi.

Meridiem’s body started slowly swaying. “I…I don’t think I can keep this up. It’s like there’s this big red thing pressing down on my fore…head.” She closed her eyes and began falling over.

In desperation, Gnosi reached out and grabbed her, his eyes closed with concentration. Two seconds later, he collapsed.

Meridiem opened her eyes and sat back up. “Thanks, Gnosi, I feel much better now. Gnosi? Gnosi!” She shook his body, attempting to wake him up, but in vain. “Professor, I can’t wake up Gnosi!”

Gus willed his eyes to go back in focus to look at the pair. “Well, if he’s unconscious, you’d have to start time back up so he can recover, same as with Father Delver on the plane.”

“But I can’t start time anywhere! What do we do?”

Gus took hold of Gnosi’s limp hand and reached out for Meridium’s. “We go to where this whole business started,” he told her.

5:29:21 am on July 16th, 1945. Trinity, New Mexico.

A metal shack, twelve feet by twelve feet by six feet (3.6 m x 3.6 m x 1.8 m), rested on the top of a hundred-foot (30.5 m) tall scaffold. Its oak floor was littered with discarded bits of rope, pulleys and other hardware, and a paperback book, propped against a corner. A dark light bulb hung from the ceiling. The only exit was a door in one wall.

In the middle of the floor rested a five-foot (1.5-m) diameter sphere. Its surface was studded with bolts and crossed with electrical cables, all converging in a boxlike enclosure nearby. Sitting cross-legged next to the sphere was a tall young woman wrapped in blankets, her eyes closed and her hands resting on the sphere. Her skin was a slightly pinkish white, and her long hair the colors of pale cerulean, turquoise, cobalt and heliotrope. Despite the scene being frozen in time, she and especially her hair almost seemed to be moving.

The sphere had already ruptured on the side opposite the young woman, letting out blinding light in a pattern that resembled raindrops glistening in the sunlight.

And then three people materialized out of nowhere and fell right on top of her.

For the briefest instant, time started and stopped. This caused the skin of the metal sphere to unwrap itself like a Christmas orange, filling half of the room with light.

The white skinned woman looked around her in shock. She stared at the half-exploded bomb, at the red light that bathed the room, and at her fingers as she experimentally wiggled them. Then she turned on the three interlopers in a rage. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“Hello, Crystal,” Gus said in a small and nervous voice. “Long time, no see.”

The young woman, Crystal, finally noticed the poor physical condition of the visitors. “Oh!” she exclaimed. With a wave of her hand, a crystalline wall appeared, dividing the exploding half of the room from the intact half. She frowned at how much light was still visible through the translucent barrier, and it obediently darkened enough for everyone to see clearly. She then rose out of her blankets. The woman was wearing a simple white tunic dress tied with a sky-blue sash, trimmed with eagle feathers dyed in red and white stripes. Another sash, longer and wider, was draped over one shoulder, decorated in a complex pattern of vertical and horizontal stripes and stepped mountain figures, colored red, white, black and green. A golden pendant depicting her sun mark hung around her neck. She helped Gus to his feet, looking him over in wonder. “Mr. Guiseman?” she asked. “Are you looking for your son?”

Gus laughed. “I suppose I do look an awful lot like my father right now, but no, it’s me, and I always told you to call me ‘Gus’.” He took a deep breath to prepare himself for his pitch; one that he had little confidence would work. “I come from—”

“The future, obviously,” Crystal interrupted. “And you have this Markist here to help you travel through time.” She pointed at the hourglass applique pattern on Meridiem’s shirt. “And your friend…!”

Meridiem remained on the ground, her arms around Gnosi. “We can’t wake him,” she explained.

“I wish I could do something,” Crystal said sadly. “But my powers don’t extend to biology. It’s just too complex for me.”

“I know what you mean,” Meridiem replied. “I don’t know what I’d do without Professor Guiseman helping me with the concepts.”

“So he finally became a professor, huh?” Crystal asked with a smile.

Gus decided that Meridiem might have a better chance to convince Crystal to abandon her planned suicide better than he could, so he made the few steps he could away from them as best he could with his damaged hip. Before him was the wall of the shack, where an army blanket had been nailed over an open window. He pushed it out of the way. Outside, he could see miles of barren desert stretching to the horizon, gray and still in readiness for the dawn. Black roads radiated outward from this spot like the hands of a great clock. Alongside one of the roads was a frozen blue and red dot with a dust trail behind it—the ubiquitous roadrunner bird.

Even after all these decades, he knew this location so well. He remembered seeing the scaffold being built, the whole business with…ah, there it was. “Jumbo”, a steel jug 25 feet long and 10 feet in diameter (7.5 m x 3 m) with walls 14 inches (35 cm) thick, suspended inside a tower 800 yards (732 m) away. It had been commissioned during a moment of weakness, when it was thought that the TNT part of the test would succeed but the atomic part would not, leading to radioactive (and hard to produce) plutonium being blasted all over the place. So some genius thought to put the entire bomb inside a container strong enough to contain the explosion. It cost $12 million dollars to build, weighed 214 tons (194 t), and brought rail traffic to a halt when it was transported from Ohio to Trinity. By the time it had arrived, Gus and Crystal had already proven that a successful test would have obliterated the shell if it had actually been used, causing far more damage than the naked bomb. Gus remembered finding Jumbo after the explosion, completely intact and nearly a mile away. He thought about having Crystal hide inside it to survive the explosion, but then realized the shock waves would probably still smash her bones to powder.

Thoughts of the past turned his eyes north, in the direction of Albuquerque. He was so close…100 miles and exactly one month earlier, his precious Arline was still alive. In his tear-filled eyes he could see his dying wife plain as day, lying in her army bed at the sanitarium, in his arms. To the last, she was only interested in his happiness, in how he would handle her death.

He felt a hand rest on his shoulder. “Gus, why are you here?”

He looked around to see Crystal staring at him. “I might ask you the same thing.” He sighed. “It isn’t me, is it?”

Crystal laughed. “Oh, Gus. You still think you’re the center of the universe.” Her smile disappeared. “I’ll admit I had a crush on you, until that day I followed you to Albuquerque and saw you with your wife. I knew then that I didn’t have a chance. No, I’m here to make up for my mistake.”

“What mistake?” asked Gus.

“1.8574583621,” Crystal recited. “The thermal opacity ratio of the fission reaction. The first equation we ever worked out together. I faked it.”

“You…faked it? What does that even mean?”

Crystal waved a hand, and the red in the room shifted to white.

“No!” Meridiem cried out in terror.

“Don’t worry,” Crystal told her soothingly. “Time is still stopped. I was just getting tired of the tint.”

“Your power!” Gus exclaimed. “Your special ability as a Celestia!”

Crystal shrugged. “I’ve always been able to do this. Nobody explained it to me. Basically, if I can write it out as an equation, I can manipulate it with my mind. I stopped time for the first time when I was ten. I never came up with a workable formula for time travel though, so congratulations on that.”

“So the thermal opacity ratio?” prompted Gus.

Crystal sighed. “All those formulas from the last decade were right. A successful atomic explosion would have ignited the atmosphere and wiped out all life on earth. If I did nothing and let you discover the correct ratio, the Manhattan Project would have been abandoned.

“But we were at war! I may have been safe with my tribe, isolated both from world events and from the prejudice of my fellow Americans, but I couldn’t ignore the stories you and the other scientists told of what was happening in Europe, of gathering armies, of total war…of the concentration camps… I couldn’t allow that to continue. A single bomb, capable of wiping out a city…the death toll would be horrific, but nothing compared to a world where the Axis powers won the war. So I changed the ratio. Every time we did a test, I changed the ratio, and the test worked.

“And then we visited Oak Ridge.” She turned to face Meridiem, who was taking this story in with rapt attention. “Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was where the pure uranium was being prepared for us. Gus found all kinds of safety violations. I found a plant on the edge of destroying the world. Because if they had an accident that led to criticality, that would have been an explosion I wouldn’t have known to fix. And that explosion would have ended all life on the planet.”

“Well technically speaking, atmospheric ignition only would have taken out all land-based life,” Gus said. “Most life in the sea would have survived.”

Crystal shook her head incredulously. “When did you get so morbid?” She didn’t wait to hear an answer. “I knew then that to save humanity from my mistake, I had to set the ratio permanently. And I didn’t know how.

“The answer finally came to me in a dream, delivered by a sorrowful white horse with my hair colors: If I died while setting the ratio, then and only then would it stick. I can’t explain to you why, but I just knew that the dream was truth. So that’s why I’m here. I haven’t done anything else of worth in my life, and I can’t really see myself doing anything. The only ability I had that I could tell anyone about had been replaced by machines. And outside the Hopi, women are second-class citizens.”

Gus looked discerningly at her for a minute. “You should have told me,” he said finally. “Between us, I’m sure we would have come up with something. Just like I’m going to do right now.” His eyes roved about until he found a broken chalkboard. He propped it up, grabbed a piece of chalk, and started writing. “What you effectively want is something like a Euclidean postulate, the mathematical version of ‘God said this, so it has to be so.’ The easiest way I can think of to do that is to modify the conditions present at the time of the Big Bang—”

“The what?” asked Crystal.

“Right, it only got that name in ’49. You’d think of it as Lemaître’s Primeval Atom Theory.”

“That theory’s true?”

“Almost certainly. All fundamental constants crystallized out of chaos in the first millisecond after the ‘primeval atom’ exploded.” He wrote a bunch more equations on the board then began explaining what the terms meant.

Crystal’s face lit up. “That is true!” she exclaimed. “Or nearly enough.” She stepped forward to tweak the formula Gus had written. “I can tell when a formula accurately describes reality or not,” she explained. She wrote a final formula underneath. “And if I implement this change, the ratio becomes permanent, without any further input from me.” She put her hands to her temples and stared intently at the formula.

Gus suddenly stepped in her way. “Not just yet!” he exclaimed. “There’s still the small matter of why we’re here.”

“That sounds pretty simple,” Meridiem said, gently resting Gnosi’s body on the ground and rising to her feet. “We give Crystal here the evidence she needs to prevent our deaths in 1985, as well as that photograph to save Kimiko, and then she can use her own time stopping power to get away from the explosion.”

Crystal looked down at her feet. “Yeah, there’s a jeep down there that I could use to drive all the way home, with no one the wiser. I could ask Father Tailor for help.”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Gus, gesturing at Crystal’s equation. “We can do more than set up the status quo. Why don’t we end the Cold War, right here and now?”

“A ‘cold’ war?” asked Crystal. Before either of the other two had a chance to explain, she started working it out for herself. “Like the confrontation between the British and Russian empires in the last century, as described in the novel Kim by Rudyard Kipling. A standoff where the first overt act of war would overwhelm the entire world. Only in this case, between the United States and…the Soviet Union. Everyone knows that there’s a Soviet spy at Los Alamos—the authorities think it’s you, Gus. Because of all of your trips to Albuquerque.”

“Actually, it turned out to be Fuchs, my driver.”

“Makes sense. And if both sides have bombs, and both sides pursue their respective ideologies regardless of the consequence…a cold war of that magnitude could end just as badly as atmospheric ignition! What do we do?”

“We do this,” Gus said, as he made extensive changes to Crystal’s formula.

Crystal looked it over for a few seconds. “That inversely ties the ratio to the amount of radiation in the atmosphere. So that every bomb that anybody sets off, whether for war or for testing, radically reduces the yields of all subsequent explosions—”

“So by 1985, all atomic weapons are effectively useless.”

“What about the sun?” asked an incredulous Meridiem. “Isn’t it powered by one continuous atomic explosion?”

“This is only affecting fission, the splitting of heavy atoms,” Gus explained. “The process of fusion, which powers both the hydrogen bomb and the sun, is unaffected. But on Earth, the only way to set off a hydrogen bomb is to use a fission bomb first. By hobbling fission, we stop all man-made atomic or nuclear weapons.”

“What about peaceful uses of atomic energy?” asked Meridiem. “Are we just going to give up on that? What about nuclear-powered submarines? Or the unmanned probes we sent out to explore the solar system?”

“We’re going to do that?” Crystal asked in awe.

“Alright, so we need a containment function,” Gus said, examining his work. He erased the top half of the board. “So how about something like this? It would make it so the reaction shuts down if it goes critical.”

“I don’t see how that would work,” Crystal said. “You’d need to make atmospheric radiation levels have an instantaneous effect on shielded uranium or plutonium. How do you propose to do that?”

“Sum Over Histories?” Meridiem suggested.

“Sum Over Histories,” Gus said with a smile. He twirled the chalk between his fingers before writing once more.

& & &

Gus and Meridiem stood at the top of the tower, watching as Crystal made her way down the ladder. Meridiem tucked the paperback book she found into Gnosi’s backpack. “More souvenirs,” she said by way of explanation.

“More like time travel turns people into kleptomaniacs,” Gus countered with a grin. “I forgot to ask: did any of what we just did work?”

“Yes,” said Meridiem. “I felt the tug of altered history pulling us ever since you wrote your first equation on that board. So what’s going to happen to Crystal?”

“Look.”

As they watched, Crystal reached the ground. Her first act was to take off the class ring she was wearing and toss it straight up. The tiny object flew in a curved arc until it ended up balanced right on top of “Jumbo”.

“I knew I should have asked her to join the Los Alamos baseball team. Anyway, that was to trick me into thinking she died when I searched this area in September of ‘45. In reality, she and her priest will be leaving the country, probably to Brazil.”

“Does she have to leave?” asked Meridiem.

“We thought it best. There was too much evidence that she was at Trinity, so that would have raised too many questions. It was her idea, actually.”

“I don’t care what she said about being unable to affect biology. I’m convinced she cured both of us—how else would you be able to do so well with those equations?”

Gus smiled sadly at her. “That is the result of an entirely different form of magic: the one known as Hope. So don’t be mistaken: there will be a price to pay for saving the world.” Re-entering the shack, he settled himself down next to Gnosi’s unconscious body. Looking over at the bomb, he reached out his hand to pat it lightly. “Goodbye, old friend,” he whispered.

Meridiem took a good look around her. “Yeah, I think I’m ready to go back to the new 1985,” she said to no one in particular. She grabbed hands with her two companions and in a flash, they both disappeared. The crystalline barrier that was dividing the room in half remained intact.

& & &

A hundred feet below them, Crystal started the jeep and drove for the gates. She then slowed to a halt next to the time-frozen roadrunner. Getting out of the jeep, she picked the animal up, dropped it into the back of her vehicle, and climbed back in and drove westward.

“I’m gonna call you Meep!”

& & &

An immeasurable number of seconds later, time started back up, and the Trinity tower was obliterated. Jumbo was launched into the sky, and a shining ring of silver-plated steel tried to twist itself into an infinity symbol, but at the last moment the end broke open, forming the shape of the Greek letter alpha: the symbol of new beginnings.

Chapter 25: Zero Hour, Part Two

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Chapter 25: Zero Hour, Part Two

June 28, 1985. Canterlot, New Brass Sky.
Zero Hour.

Celestia wasn’t sure when she had fallen asleep. She was awake now. She found herself lying on her back on Luna’s bed, with Luna’s knees straddling her stomach. Powerful hands were wrapped around Celestia’s windpipe, and steadily squeezing.

“Die!” whispered Luna, her face mere inches away from Celestia’s.

Only it wasn’t just Luna. The look on her face was one of pure cruelty, and the pupils of her eyes had contracted into slits. This was Luna…possessed by Nightmare Moon.

“Lu…na!” Celestia tried to say, reaching up to try and break the stranglehold. “Why?”

“‘Why?’” Nightmare Moon asked incredulously. “If not for you, I would be on that flying machine, in the perfect position to kill tens of millions of you pathetic humans! For every soul that dies in fear and suffering by my hooves, I grow stronger! Strong enough to breed, strong enough to infect every world in the galaxy! And you ruined it! The least I can do in return is take your tiny little life.” Compared to Luna, her voice was confident and aristocratic, the voice of the self-proclaimed Empress of the Night. “So, ‘great and powerful’ Celestia, do you have any last words?” She relaxed her grip slightly and leaned forward to hear her victim’s expected groveling.

“I love you, Luna.”

“What?!”

Celestia took that moment of confusion to twist herself and kick out, causing her to fall off the bed and out of the Nightmare’s grip.

Nightmare Moon rose into a crouch, screaming in rage.

“Luna? Luna are you in there?” Celestia pleaded, backing her way towards the open closet door.

Nightmare Moon tapped the side of her head. “Oh, she’s in here, all right. I’m making her watch every last second of your impending murder.”

“Well, you have to catch me first,” Celestia taunted.

Luna rushed forward, but was surprised on meeting no resistance. Celestia tumbled backwards to land both of them in the closet in a heap.

“Now, Butterfly!” she cried.

The maid, who had been startled awake by the Nightmare’s scream, opened the door, a flashlight in one hand. Without hesitation, she slammed the closet door shut and locked it. After taking a moment to catch her breath, Butterfly moved the chair that was outside the room so that it was backed up against the closet door, and cautiously sat down.

“Only open the door for Mistress Celestia,” she whispered, repeating the instructions she had been given. “Don’t do anything Mistress Luna says until Mistress Celestia says that it’s safe.”

The Nightmare viciously shoved an elbow into Celestia’s gut, robbing her of breath. “What did that accomplish?” she demanded.

“Now you can’t hurt anybody else,” Celestia told her between gasps. She kicked out with a foot to cover the crack under the closet door with a towel. “And now that it’s completely dark…”

Nightmare Moon smiled victoriously, revealing a row of serrated fangs. “What darkness? I can see just fine!”

Celestia realized to her dismay that there was one source of light preventing Luna from gaining control over her body: the light Celestia herself gave off on a constant basis.

“That was a clever plan you had there, ‘Sister’,” Nightmare Moon purred. She had pinned Celestia to the ground with her knees and elbows. “And when your light goes out, Luna will regain control…with her hands around your lifeless corpse.”

Celestia suddenly realized what she had to do. And for one brief moment of cowardice, she tried to think of any way to get out of this alive other than doing that.

But that moment passed. She would have said something clever, but Nightmare Moon was busy slamming Celestia’s head into the thin-layer-of-carpet-over-solid-concrete floor over and over again. So she merely thought the words instead: If you want my light so badly, then take it—it’s yours.

And with that, Celestia willed the Light of the Princess from her mind into her sister’s. For Celestia, the Light took the form of a literal glow and the charisma to make anybody do what she wanted. She had long suspected that if Luna had it, the effects would be entirely different, but hadn’t the slightest idea of the details. Unfortunately she had no time to observe the effects before passing out.

Luna stopped screaming. She had been doing that, and the mental equivalent of kicking and biting, ever since she had awoken at midnight to find herself no longer in control of her body. She still didn’t have that control, but there was no longer an evil spirit holding her back.

She found herself floating in a strange black sea, with bright white pearls floating around her. Her attention was drawn to one of them at random, and that attention alone was enough to make it drift towards her, or her towards it—it was hard to tell. When it got close enough, she suddenly knew that the pearl was a dream, a dream belonging to Blue Note, the owner of the record store. She didn’t know how she knew these things—she just did. What she couldn’t do was to see the actual content of the dream, just its emotional overtones: nostalgia for the music of the past, and fear and hatred for music of today.

She allowed herself to drift around. There was a dream by Yellow Rose: worried about her self-worth, and terrified that Celestia might decide one day to turn her own friends against her, for no better reason other than wanting to see the look on her face. She tried to find a dream by Gloria or Gavin Guiseman, but failed. Either they were both awake, or this strange new power of Luna’s was confined to the dreams of Markists only. So she just started mindlessly sampling. What she learned was something she had never suspected: everyone she knew was afraid. Most of them had control of their fears, so they were only in the background of their dreams, but every dream had at least one fear in it. And the most common fear was fear of the dark, or fear of the unknown.

Luna was not afraid of either of those things. She was stronger than all of the people she had cowed away from, the people she thought would judge her as a freak because she preferred the dark and the strange to daylight and normalcy. A sudden determination filled Luna, and she willed herself to open her eyes.

She was in her closet. And she was bruised in quite a few places from her sister’s counter attacks. There was something trembling in her arms. Even though it was pitch black, Luna could see—she now had another new ability, one that was somewhere between night vision and heat vision. And the thing that was trembling was her sister. “Celestia? Celestia, are you alright? It’s me, Luna.”

“You’re back,” Celestia replied in a weak voice. “I guess it worked.”

“Yes,” Luna replied, “I guess it did.” She did not tell her sister that she still felt the Nightmare inside her head, safely restrained now thanks to Celestia’s gift. Was it a permanent part of her now?

She felt that Celestia was still shaking in her arms. “You’re safe now, Celestia,” she assured her, running a hand along her long hair. “There’s nothing to be scared of anymore.”

“I…I can’t help it, Luna. I’m…afraid of the dark. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it. And without the light, it feels like this whole closet is constricting me, like the whole weight of the world is on my chest, trying to stop me from breathing. But…you’re the important one right now. My little fears don’t matter.”

“We can leave the closet…turn on the light?”

Celestia thought back to the words of Luna [Adams]’ therapist. Even if Luna thought that the Nightmare was gone, the slightest ray of light could bring her roaring back. She had to keep her here, at least until morning. If the Nightmare came back then…well then Celestia would admit defeat and get some help at last. “No…I’m fine. I need to get used to this, now that I’m no longer my own night light. Let’s turn this into a closet sleepover!”

Luna laughed, and mussed her sister’s hair. “You knew all of this was going to happen, didn’t you?” she chided her with a smile on her face.

“What?! I…well…yes,” Celestia admitted. “How did you know?”

“The bit with the closet was too clever by half.”

Celestia sighed. “Yes, Luna.”

“What am I going to do with you?”

Celestia was taken aback by the tone in those words. While clearly playful, they were spoken from a position of authority. And Celestia knew herself to have changed—her irrational confidence was gone. The universe was a mess of choices now, and she no longer knew which one was the right one. And…she didn’t have a problem with this. “Whatever you want, Princess,” she said, joyfully. “Now what do you want to do first?”

Luna felt an inner glow on hearing her new title. Things were going to change in Canterlot come the morning. But in the meantime… “Call me…for a ride,” she sang softly. “Call me, call me for some overtime.”

With a smile, Celestia took the next line: “Call me…”

“Call me…” Luna echoed.

“…My love. Call me, call me for a sweet design.”

“Call me…”

“For your…”

“Lover’s…”

“Alibi!” they sang in chorus, before falling into laughter.

“I love you, Luna.”

“I love you too, Celestia. Next verse—are you ready to find out how badly you can mangle your Bitalian and Prench?”

“Bring it on!”

“Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, he speaks the languages of love…”

“Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, amore, Charmin me, Charmin me.”

“The toilet paper?! It’s supposed to be ‘chiamami’!”

“I bet you don’t even know what…‘chiamami’ means!”

“I…shut up!”

“No, you shut up!”

This led to a tickle fight, for which Luna had an unfair advantage. And so passed the rest of the long night.

Chapter 26: New Meetings...

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Chapter 26: New Meetings…

Butterfly was roughly awakened from her dreams by a steady knocking on the closet door behind her. She jumped to her feet and looked around her for anything she could use as a weapon. All she was able to find was the shipping container that a poster had come in. Wielding the cardboard tube like a baseball bat, she put her hand on the door. “Who is it?” she demanded.

“Butterfly, it’s me, Luna. Let us out.”

“Oh no. Sorry, Mistress Luna, but just this once I’m only answering to your sister.”

“I…I’m here, Butterfly. It’s Celestia. You can let us out.”

The maid tilted her head in confusion. “Is…is that really you, Mistress Celestia? You sound different.”

“Yes, it’s me. Could you please let us out?”

Butterfly stepped back in shock. Celestia had never used the word “please” in that tone before—a tone that suggested that she was actually free to refuse the request if she wished. After a brief prayer to the Goddess that she wasn’t making a horrible mistake, she unlocked the door and took several strides backwards, her improvised weapon raised high. “It’s unlocked,” she said in a shaky voice.

The closet door swung open, revealing two tired and bedraggled teenagers.

“You’re alright!” Butterfly exclaimed. “You’re both alright!” She rushed forward to embrace them both. “Oh! And you’re both hurt! I’m taking you both to the emergency room!”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” Celestia insisted. “A little iodine and some ice packs, and we’ll be good as new.”

“Nonsense!” Butterfly countered, grabbing them both by the wrists and dragging them to their feet. “I’m giving you ten minutes to get dressed, and then we’re going.”

“Yes, Butterfly,” the two sisters answered in chorus.

With a final nod of her head, Butterfly marched out of Luna’s room, and closed the door behind her.

It suddenly occurred to her that this was the first time she had ever been able to go against Celestia’s will before. She began to think of all of the times over the past decade that the girl had humiliated her, shamed her, browbeat her into doing whatever she wanted, only to talk Father Delver and the others into thinking that it was the maid’s fault as an evil influence. After the first few times, the priest had stopped believing the child’s stories, but it still hurt.

For the first time in her life, the meek little servant allowed herself to feel resentment for her mistress.

& & &

Butterfly and the two sisters arrived at the emergency room. Luna insisted that Celestia, who had the worse injuries, should be seen to first.

Luna went around and spoke to the various patients waiting to be seen. None of them had life-threatening ailments, but all of them were scared and uncertain. She did her best to calm their fears and give them confidence.

She sat down with a sense of accomplishment. Seeing the television remote next to her, she used it to turn up the volume. It was broadcasting the news.

This whole time, Butterfly was sitting in her own corner, brooding.

Suddenly Luna stood up and pointed at the TV. The reporter was standing in Heathrow Airport, and Father Delver was visible in the background of the shot. The story was of an airplane that nearly blew up.

In a rush, Luna remembered the details of Nightmare Moon’s plan, a plan that matched up with what she was hearing. A madman had put a nuclear bomb on the plane that Father Delver, his assistants and the Guisemans were taking back to America.

Luna paced back and forth, trying in vain to see more of the airport around the figure of the droning news reporter. She thought she recognized a very upset Mrs. Guiseman, but saw no trace of the Professor, Meridiem or Gnosi.

Celestia re-entered the waiting room, her head wrapped in bandages. “What is it?” she asked, seeing how worried Luna was.

“The plane, the plane!” Luna exclaimed, pointing at the television.

For one brief moment, Celestia thought that her sister was watching a re-run of Fantasy Island. Then she remembered Nightmare Moon’s words, and rushed to join her. “Are they alright?”

“I think so,” Luna told her. “The plane never took off.”

“What do we do?”

“They’re probably on the next flight home,” Butterfly assured them, having been roused from her thoughts by Luna’s outburst. She too was able to see Father Delver in the back of the shot.

The emergency room doctor poked his head out of the door. “Luna, would you come back here please?”

“Oh, right. Tell me if anything new happens.”

“Will do!”

A few seconds later, Celestia found herself alone. It was the first time since midnight that she had time to think for herself. She looked around her nervously at the other patients—she and Luna had just jumped ahead of all of them in line when they showed up. Were they angry at her for doing that? And what about all the other times she had been so mean to them? If they found out how powerless she was now, would they gang up on her to get their revenge?

Celestia pulled her legs up onto the chair, curling up into a ball.

& & &

There was a message waiting for them on their state-of-the-art answering machine when they got home.

“Celestia? Luna? This is Delver.” He sounded both tired and confused. “Our flight was cancelled, as you might have heard. The thing is, Professor Guiseman, Gnosi and Meridiem all got very sick and had to be taken to the hospital. I’m afraid I can’t tell you the details, as I don’t understand them myself. We’re at the Goddess of Mercy Hospital in London, and I’ve already been informed that Archbishop Shepherd is flying over to take care of things. You two can stay in Canterlot if you insist, but I could really use you by my side. It might be quite a while and…and…we might not all be coming back. I already called Gus’ children. Just…do what you think is best.”

As soon as the message was over, Luna picked up the phone and called the hotel. “They’re almost finished packing,” she told her elder sister. “I told them we would take care of paying for the flight. Now what’s Round Trip’s number?”

Together, they booked a flight for five to London.

“Including me?” asked Butterfly.

“Of course,” Luna explained. “We can’t depend on Gloria and Gavin to be our chaperones the whole time, and Father Delver’s sure to be busy as well. Have you ever been to London?”

“I’ve never been on a plane before,” Butterfly replied. “I do want to see how Father Delver is doing, and I am rather fond of his students but…” (as she stood up straight) “…if I see him, it’s to put in my notice. I can’t take this anymore. No…I can’t take you anymore.” And she pointed at Celestia.

The girl visibly wilted. “I…I understand. I’ve been awful to you for as long as I remember. And…and I’m going to make it up to you. I read in an article that Markist maids are in high demand in the U.K. With my recommendation, I’m sure I can get you a great job. If you don’t mind moving to a new country.”

“I…I don’t know what to say!” exclaimed Butterfly. She expected anything from a tongue-lashing to a physical beating in response to defying Celestia, but a heartfelt apology was certainly a surprise. “This is all so fast!”

“Not to mention that it’s probably not going to be that easy for an American to just get a job like that immediately after crossing borders,” Luna added cynically.

“Well, you’ll have plenty of time to think it over while we’re there,” said Celestia. “And if you instead want to go back to America, we’ll pay your ticket. It’s the least we can do after all you’ve done for us.”

Butterfly nodded, too full of emotion to say anything.

& & &

There were a few other details to take care of. Luna called the editor of Canterlot’s daily newspaper, and informed him of the highlights. That should take care of anyone in town curious as to where they had gone.

After confirming with Celestia that Gnosi had no living relatives, Luna attempted to call Meridiem’s mother and step-father. Unfortunately it was the latter who answered the phone and when he was informed that his step-daughter was possibly dying, he laughed and said that she deserved it for not giving him the respect he deserved—his actual reply was far more vulgar, but that was the gist of it.

And with that, the pair was finally free to make their delayed trip to London.

A few hours later, the two sets of siblings and their somewhat-superfluous chaperone found themselves on layover at JFK International Airport. Luna reminded Celestia that there was probably some sort of VIP lounge they could wait in, and after asking around they found a room named after the Archbishop. And who should be waiting inside but the man himself.

“Ah, there you are,” an icy voice addressed them. Guardian Shepherd was a tall man, with piercing sky blue eyes. His skin and hair were both the color of bleached wool. “I was expecting you at least to show up sooner or later,” he said, staring at Celestia. “You just can’t resist getting yourself into trouble.”

After seeing Butterfly lead the two Guiseman siblings to seat themselves as far away from the archbishop as possible, Celestia advanced on Shepherd, trying her best to still her pounding heart. She looked down to see that Luna had taken a hand in her own, and tried to take strength from that fact. “W…ell, there obviously is some sort of trouble, seeing as you’re heading to London yourself.”

Shepherd sighed. “You know for once, I don’t think you have anything to do with this particular mess.”

“What mess?” asked Luna.

Shepherd looked over at Luna with some degree of surprise. “Luna, is it?” he asked.

“Yes, Your Eminence.”

“Stepping out of your sister’s shadow for once, I see. Good! She needs every check and balance imaginable.” He looked between the pair judging their trustworthiness. Finally, he gestured for them to get closer to them. “One of Delver’s two students—I don’t know which one yet—somehow managed to teleport them both, plus Professor Guiseman, from the concourse at Heathrow and into the plane, where a crime team was collecting evidence. Both the disappearance and reappearance were witnessed by dozens of non-Markists.” He leaned away from them to add in a normal voice. “Oh, and all three of them are now suffering from severe radiation poisoning, but they’ve already been sent to one of the three best hospitals in the world for that particular ailment, so I don’t need to handle that problem.”

Celestia and Luna exchanged shocked expressions. “We don’t know anything about…that, honest,” Celesta said. “But if you think there’s anything I can do to help…”

“I doubt it,” Shepherd replied. He took a moment to take in their injuries. “So, what happened to you two? Did the elder sister finally cross the line with the younger?”

The sisters shared another silent conversation, before Celestia spoke. “Your Eminence, if you are unaware of the history of the Lunas, then I suppose I’ll have to write up a report for your review. Between the two of us, we managed to avert the crisis this time, but it would definitely be best if you knew the full details.”

Archbishop Shepherd raised one eyebrow.

“…After the current crisis is resolved,” added Luna.

“Very well. Now you two go off and eat some free cookies or something. I’m still working on my press release, designed to be buried by more interesting news the moment it comes out.”

& & &

A half hour later, word finally went out that their flight for London was approaching, leading the group of six to make their way from the VIP lounge to the concourse.

As soon as they arrived, the Archbishop excused himself to speak to an aging man in a brown jacket. The two were evidently good friends.

“I didn’t know he got along well with any non-Markists,” Celestia confided in Luna.

The remaining five spent the next few minutes silently people-watching.

& & &

On the plane, Celestia and Luna found themselves sitting behind the Archbishop, with Butterfly behind them and the Archbishop’s friend sitting next to him. Gloria and Gavin were some distance away, but still in First Class.

Knowing that Archbishop Shepherd’s powers of manipulation were second only to Celestia’s before she gave them up, this came as no surprise.

“This is Nicholas Meyer,” the Archbishop finally said to the sisters, after some prodding. “He’s an author, screenwriter and director.”

“Oh I know you!” Celestia exclaimed. “You were the one that got Father Delver into television.”

“That’s right,” Meyer replied. “We met at the University of Canterlot. I don’t know where I’d be today if not for him.”

“So what have you been doing lately?” Luna asked.

“This man is the best author of Sherlock Holmes stories living today,” Shepherd gushed. “I’ve been a fan ever since The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.” He waved a hand dismissively. “He’s also directed some genre pictures.”

Meyer shrugged. “The fans seem to like them.”

“Are you going to London to see Father Delver as well?” Celestia asked.

“I didn’t even know he was in London,” Meyer answered. “No, I’m transferring to another flight at Heathrow, final destination: the Netherlands. I’ve got a…delivery to make.” He patted an attaché case that was in his lap. “I’ve just finished work on a ground-breaking TV miniseries, and there’s somebody I’d like to see it before it’s going to be broadcast.”

“Oh, what is it? When is it going to air?” Celestia asked.

Meyer smiled mysteriously. “I’m sorry, but I’m not permitted to say anything at this time. Be assured, though, that when it airs, you’ll know it.”

“Non-disclosure agreement?” asked Celestia.

“Yes. Aren’t you a little young to know about such things?”

“No, they’re more common than you might think in our field.”

Chapter 27: ...And Old Ones

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Chapter 27: …And Old Ones

The rest of the flight passed uneventfully. On arriving in London, Archbishop Shepherd got the two sets of siblings and their chaperone deluxe suites in a hotel less than a block away from the Goddess of Mercy hospital and cancelling their previous ones. After a meal and a change of clothes, they finally made their way to the hospital.

In a spacious waiting room, they reunited with Father Delver and Gwen Guiseman, with much tears exchanged between Gwen and her children. Also waiting there was a veiled woman in a blue dress, two younger men, and an older woman who appeared to be their mother. Celestia remembered seeing the mother and two sons on their flight over, in Coach.

Archbishop Shepherd pulled Father (and Bishop) Delver aside, and soon the two were off in a private room to make their plans.

“Hello, I’m Goanna Guiseman, Gus’ sister,” the older woman introduced herself, “and these are my children: Greg, Gordon and Kim.”

“Kimmy!” Gloria and Gavin exclaimed as one, giving a strong hug to the woman in the veil. “Cousin Kimiko was our favorite baby sitter growing up,” Gloria explained to Celestia and Luna. “She’s been living in London for the past five years, working as an English teacher.”

“I fulfilled my promise,” Kim Guiseman said proudly, most of a grin visible on the twisted face under the veil. With a sigh, she added, “but it was not enough for Uncle Gus.”

Archbishop Shepherd left the hospital soon afterwards, in order to return to Heathrow Airport and speak with the authorities there. He returned to his hotel room late that night.

The next morning, after visiting hours had begun, he returned to Goddess of Mercy Hospital. On walking by, he noticed that Gus Guiseman’s room was full up with relatives, with several others in the waiting room until their turn came around.

After learning that the conditions of the three patients had not changed, he contemplated his next move. He wanted to review his press release one more time before leaving it with the Times of London. Rather than waste time going back to his hotel, he could use the waiting room, but there was too much conversation going on.

He walked over to Meridiem’s hospital room, only to find that it too was full. Among the occupants was Father Delver, Butterfly, Gwen Guiseman, and a woman that that looked somewhat familiar…

“…And when I finally got him to admit what that phone call was about,” the woman was telling the others, “I declared that I was going to London, and there was nothing he could do to stop me. And by the Goddess did he ever get mad! We had a huge shouting match, during which he as much as admitted that he…that he did horrible things to my daughter, and was willing to do the same to me if I dared to disobey him.”

“What did you do?” Butterfly asked.

“I head-butted him out of a three-story window,” Meridiem’s mother told them, “and came straight here. I wonder if there’s a warrant out for my arrest?”

Shepherd sighed and got a business card out of an inner pocket. “Here’s my lawyer’s number. You’re better off calling sooner rather than later.”

With that, he stepped next door, to Gnosi’s hospital room, which was devoid of guests. Like Meridiem and Gus, Gnosi was unconscious. Meridiem and Gnosi had been put into medical comas in order to recover from radiation poisoning. Gus’ case…was more complicated.

Shepherd sat down next to Gnosi’s bed and reviewed his proposed release. Eventually, he was satisfied that it succeeded in taking what should be a cut-and-dry miracle and obfuscate it to the point that nobody would know what actually happened.

“I just wish I knew what actually happened,” Shepherd said to no one in particular.

“I might be able to help you with that,” Gwen said from the doorway. When Shepherd made no move to stop her, she took a seat next to the Archbishop. “I know for a fact that all three of them travelled through time, to 1945 and back,” she told him. After a few moments she grinned and added, “I notice you’re not telling me that I’m crazy.”

“I’m waiting to see what kind of proof you have for that outrageous statement first,” Shepherd replied.

Gwen reached into her purse. From her wallet, she removed two photographs, and handed the first to the Archbishop. “This is a copy of a photo that Goanna Guiseman received in the mail in late 1945, from a post office box in Rio de Janeiro. It was a Polaroid instant photo, of a type that wouldn’t even be invented for the next thirty years.”

Shepherd examined the photo, then had a double-take and examined it closer. It showed a young Japanese girl, Gus Guiseman in the very clothes he was hospitalized in, and an exploding bomb. The girl’s name was helpfully provided on the bottom of the photo. “It…well I guess if what you say about the film and the year is true, it can’t be a fake, but I’m sure that somebody would have thought so at the time.”

“You’re right,” Gwen replied, “and that someone was Goanna’s brother Gus. He thought it was a cruel joke designed to chastise him for his part in the Japanese bombings. He thought the old man in the photo was a manipulated image of their father, who was at that time in the last year of his life. Goanna insisted that they go to Japan and hunt down this girl, and when she found her she fell in love. It took a few years, but eventually Goanna adopted Kimiko. Kimiko then showed her new mother two other things which the mysterious man in the photo gave her. The first was a second photo.” Gwen then gave Archbishop Shepherd another copied photo, this one showing the girl, 1985 Gus Guiseman, and 1985 Meridium and Gnosi. “And the second was an umbrella manufactured in 1985.

“Gus meanwhile turned the problem around in his head every which way, but was unable to solve it, so he never spoke of it again,” Gwen said with a laugh. “As a result, when I married him, I never knew that there was anything unusual about Aunt Kim’s adoption.”

She became much more serious for the next part of her story. “In 1978, Gus collapsed on the street. He was hospitalized, and diagnosed with liposarcoma, and given only two years to live. I…didn’t take the news so well.

“That was when Goanna took me aside and told me everything I’ve told you. She also showed me the contents of a package sent from the same mysterious Brazilian P.O. Box. It contained an issue of People magazine dated June of 1985, and a letter. The letter described Pan Am Flight 103, which was destined to be destroyed by a nuclear bomb on June 28, 1985, unless somebody acted to change history. Kim had already volunteered to move to London for that very purpose.”

Gwen paused to look down at her hands before continuing. “Once I was convinced that this all wasn’t science fiction, I found that I was willing to live with it. My Gus would live five years longer than predicted, and then he would save hundreds or even thousands of lives by travelling through time, something that he had been dreaming of doing since he was a little boy. And so all the members of his family entered into a conspiracy to keep the truth from him, so that those last seven years of his life would be as happy for him as possible. I think that he at least suspected that we were up to something.

“I had no idea how it would happen. For one thing, Gus was just a small step removed from a classic mad scientist, so maybe he’d whip up a time machine in the garage one day. Or maybe some natural phenomenon would sweep him up, and he’d somehow use his knowledge of science to master it. But one thing I was sure of: he was never going to come back to me.

“I always knew that Gus’ trip would kill him—it was too much to ask in this cruel world of ours for something so wonderful to not have a price. When I finally had an opportunity to meet the two Markists in Kim’s photo, I did everything I could in the short time we had together to become their best friends, to thank them in any small way I could think of in return for what they were going to give up. My Gus had had a long and rewarding life, and thanks to that little book of his, he had finally achieved literary immortality. But Meridiem and Gnosi were too young to die. I’m glad that they appear to be recovering.”

Shepherd rested his hand on Gwen’s. “I am truly sorry for what you have gone through, Mrs. Guiseman. But you mustn’t give up hope—this is one of the world’s leading hospitals, and they have already done a remarkable job with Gnosi here and Meridiem…”

Gwen smiled sadly. “I’m sorry, Archbishop, but my husband has cancer, and the radiation he was exposed to pushed it out of remission and into overdrive. It is only by giving him near-lethal doses of narcotics that he is being kept out of unbearable pain, and his condition continues to deteriorate. Short of a miracle, there is no way to save him.”

Interlude: The Day After

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Interlude: The Day After

President Far Shooter emerged from a small hut that had been constructed outside the small village of Casteau, Belgium. Between the trees of the old forest, men (and the occasional woman) in military fatigues dashed from hut to hut, carrying messages. Able Archer ’85 was proceeding according to plan, which is to say that it was a diplomatic disaster. All attempts to stop the illusory Soviet Army from stopping its conquest of Central Europe had failed, as had attempts to quell the invasion via limited troop maneuvers. By dawn the next day, he, Prime Minister Thatcher and President Kohl would issue orders for the final escalation. Imaginary missiles would fly, and the Soviet Union would collapse. And the world would finally be free…until the exercise ended, and the sad state of reality would reinstate itself.

Two people were waiting for him. The first was the man he had left outside so he could watch his little TV movie: Nicholas Meyer. The other was his assigned aide de camp for the exercise.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Meyer, but this takes priority,” he said.

“Of course, Mr. President.” Meyer stepped back to allow the other two their privacy.

The aide whispered something into Shooter’s ear, pointing at the next hut down and handing over a file folder. Shooter shook his head and pointed at another hut. “I’ll be over in five minutes.”

The aide nodded and walked quickly over to the hut he had originally pointed out.

The President turned and strode over to Meyer, putting an arm around his shoulder. “That was a fine film you put together there, a fine film.” He held up a pair of video tapes held together by a rubber band. “And that’s not just my opinion—the Little Lady was in complete agreement. Did you keep that same team of yours when making it?”

“The one where I’m pretty much the only non-Markist? The very same. We work well together.”

“I don’t know why you don’t convert, Nick. You’re a better Markist than several members I could name.”

“Well, I’m rather fond of my Christian name…and skin color.”

Far Shooter laughed out loud.

“So…you have no objections to having it aired?” Meyer asked meekly.

“Oh no, of course not! And even if I did, this is a democracy. It is not, nor should it ever be, my place to say what opinions can or cannot be aired in public.”

“Well I ask because the Joint Chiefs were concerned about the fact that neither side is clearly to blame in the film for the launching of missiles.”

President Shooter laughed. “Well that’s because they’re not in the motion picture business. Now I may have never had the skills to direct…” He looked pointedly at Meyer.

“Oh, but you made up for it by being such a good political director!”

“True, true. But in any case, we know the power of ambiguity. The hawks watching it will declare that the Soviets shot first, and the doves will say it was us. Which means both of them will like it.”

“Err…yes.”

“Now would you like these back?” Far Shooter asked, holding out the videotapes. “Don’t know how paranoid ABC might be about leaks.”

“No, those are yours to keep,” said Meyer. “I’ll be on my way now. You look rather busy.”

“True, true. If you have the time, I’d recommend you visit one of the chocolate factories. And avoid the legalized drug dealers.”

Meyer paused for a moment to see if the man before him was completely serious. “Of course,” he finally said. He managed to refrain from adding “…Dad” and an eye roll afterwards.

Far Shooter walked into the small metal hut.

“Privetstviya, Prezident Shooter,” a voice spoke from right next to the door.

“Greetings, President Shooter,” a woman’s voice echoed.

The President turned to see a large man sitting in a chair. His trench coat and trilby hat had been discarded, revealing the characteristic birthmark on his forehead. Standing next to him was a thin young woman with red hair and orange skin.

Shooter bowed slightly. “Good day to you, Mr. Gorbachev, Ms. Meaning.”

The translator smiled on being recognized.

Mikhail Gorbachev rose to shake the American President’s hand then followed him over to a table.

“Would you care for anything to drink?” President Shooter asked, gesturing to a mini-bar behind the table.

The translator relayed the request, and came back with Gorbachev’s answer: “Just water is fine.”

Far Shooter poured glasses of ice water for all three of them, and gestured for them to sit. “What brings you to Belgium?” he asked.

True Meaning relayed the question to Gorbachev. A few seconds later, she translated the Russian’s answer: “I would just like the opportunity to ask you some questions, in a strictly informal setting.”

“Questions about…?” He waited patiently for the translation to proceed.

“Questions about your constant provocations to my country.” It was obvious that Ms. Meaning had stated Gorbachev’s words quite a bit more calmly than Gorbachev himself had stated them originally.

Far Shooter placed his hands on one knee and smiled indulgently. “Perhaps, since this is an unofficial meeting, where none of us will be repeating the exact words spoken here to anybody else…we can resort to a little game?”

It took a few moments for Ms. Meaning to figure out the best way to translate that sentence into understandable Russian, and even after she performed the translation, Gorbachev took the time to question her on some of her choices. He knew English, after all—it was just that he wasn’t particularly proficient at it.

Finally, he crafted a reply: “I agree, so what sort of ‘game’ do you propose?”

“Let us pretend that we are merely citizens of our two nations. Two patient, rational citizens, who don’t need to waste time with emotional outbursts if one of us insults the other’s national pride.”

Gorbachev thought this over, before replying through Ms. Meaning to say “Very well. Mr. President—”

“Ah, ah, ah!” Far Shooter said with a wag of one finger. “I am merely Mr. Shooter for the purposes of this conversation.”

Gorbachev rolled his eyes before he had even heard the full translation. “Very well. Mr. Shooter, the Russian people, of whom I am an ordinary member, are distressed over your…over your nation’s recent actions against us. Again and again, America has seemed willing to start a nuclear war with us. Why is this? What has changed compared to the state of relations under previous presidents and general secretaries?”

Far Shooter listened calmly, first to Gobachev’s original Russian, and then to Ms. Meaning’s impassioned translation. Finally he spoke, his tone deliberately quiet in contrast to the heat of the words he used. “You have to admit, Mr. Gorbachev, that the Soviet Union’s current leader is not the same as his immediate predecessors. Secretary-General Andropov has a great deal of blood on his hands, and if he was allowed to act as he wished, it would inevitably lead to the shedding of even more blood, not only of his own people, but of anybody who got in his way.

“Under these circumstances, the American President has decided to act the part of the madman, much like Secretary-General Khrushchev did in his time. For if the Americans are acting irrationally, then it is to the Soviet Union’s immense benefit if they acted the part of the rational party, the party pointing out America’s insane behavior and setting out by example that they are the better nation.

“And the better nation does not torture or oppress their own people.”

President Shooter refilled his glass while waiting for his words to be translated.

Mikhail Gorbachev, once he comprehended Far Shooter’s answer, was flabbergasted. He spoke rapidly to his translator, forcing her to question him to be sure of what he truly wanted to say. “I am still confused,” she said, relaying his words. “These provocations go beyond feigned madness, into legitimate causes for war. How can you be so certain that you have not already pushed affairs past the point of no return?”

“So it’s true that the Politburo is running the country now.”

True Meaning blanched. What she had heard so far was the common gossip of anyone following contemporary politics. But this latest revelation was way above her security clearance.

“Thank you, Ms. Meaning,” Gorbachev told her in thickly-accented English. “I think I can…proceed from this point alone.”

“My men will have a little form for you to fill out, Ms. Meaning,” Far Shooter said, rising to escort her to the door. “And you can be assured that I will remember your excellent work.”

“Th…thank you, Mr. President.”

The two men waited until the door had closed behind her.

“Go ahead and take your time answering me, Mr. Gorbachev,” Far Shooter said, timing his speech to be slower than before. “I know what it’s like to be at the wrong end of a language gap, as a certain Mexican-American labor leader taught me on more than one occasion.”

Thus reassured, Mikhail Gorbachev took his time crafting his next statement in English. “I assume that former Marshal Ustinov told you of the state of Secretary-General Andropov?”

“He did.”

“And why would this fact have any bearing on the matter?”

“Because Andropov, like all supreme leaders of the USSR, knows something that the Politburo does not. This I also learned from Ustinov’s report.” Far Shooter waited until Gorbachev had completely assimilated his words before continuing. “Do you know why he defected?”

“He had a disagreement with Andropov over how to respond to you,” Gorbachev said with some contempt.

“No, that was the public reason for his defection, one designed to make him the sole villain in this drama. The true reason is that he had a fundamental disagreement with the Red Army, of a secret that they have been hoarding to themselves and the secretary general ever since the days of the Stalinist Purges. The biggest secret of the entire Cold War.”

Gorbachev was getting tired of the American President’s flair for melodrama. After waiting nearly a minute, he finally took the bait and said, “And what is this big secret?”

“That the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals are totally worthless. No weapon today has any more power than is contained in its detonator.”

“O chem ty govorish? …What? How?” Gorbachev was on the edge of his seat.

“Nobody knows,” Far Shooter answered, leaning back in his chair.

“But…Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini Atoll, Pérvaya mólniya, Snezhok…those really happened. You couldn’t possibly fake those detonations!”

“Oh they happened. But each one was weaker than the last, weaker than any known theory could compute. And that weakening over time could not be reversed, not by anything thought of by the most brilliant minds of either of our two nations.” The President smiled. “It’s almost as if a Higher Power stepped in to save us both from mutual annihilation. So it is that we have reached the point where we can only pretend we have the ability to ‘nuke the Reds into the Stone Age’, as a certain American general once advised one of my predecessors. You believe me, don’t you?”

Gorbachev tried desperately to wrap his head around this revelation. “How has something this big been kept secret so long?”

“Oh, it hasn’t. It’s been blurted out a half-dozen times in my lifetime alone. You probably even remember some prominent scientist shouting it out from the rooftops. But without either a believable explanation or confirmation by authority, nobody is willing to believe something that outlandish.”

Gorbachev spent more time thinking. “So why don’t you reveal the truth?”

Far Shooter smiled. “Mikhail, you’re our favored candidate to replace Andropov for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is your intelligence. You figure it out.”

“Well, if the world believes that our two nations can only resolve our differences by wiping out all life on the planet, then that means we won’t ever be expected to directly fight each other. Meaning efforts like the Space Race and smaller proxy wars replace the large death toll of a direct conventional war. I still don’t like it, though—it’s dishonest. And that’s even assuming that this whole ‘secret’ business is true.”

“Oh it’s true, Mr. Gorbachev, as I hope you’ll have the chance to find out directly.”

“But there is one additional disadvantage to this—the pressure by our own people to use those weapons. It’s something that I’ve witnessed first-hand with the Politburo.”

“Yes, that is a problem,” Far Shooter said. “I’m at least lucky to have Markists in my population. A group of them recently made a movie to broadcast, called The Day After. It depicts what the result of a nuclear war might look like in an ordinary American town—if the bombs still worked the way they did back in the 40’s. I hope it will have an effect on the public debate. Nothing could be more wonderful than if peace was forced upon us by our own people. That reminds me…” The President got up and walked over to a satchel, removing a pair of videotapes. “Here’s a copy of that very film—I recommend you watch it, perhaps suggest that a Russian studio create a film showing the Russian version of the same tragedy?”

Gorbachev took the tapes. “You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

The President walked to the door of the small room. “Was there anything else you wished to ask me about?”

Gorbachev stood up. “No, that’s more than enough information to me. Although…can you do me a favor, and never mention that ‘preference’ business again?”

“Oh of course, Mr. Gorbachev. After all, I’m sure we’ll find plenty of legitimate reasons to disagree with each other if you succeed in taking over before my term ends.”

The two men shook hands. The Russian put his concealing garments back on and left.

It would be nearly a year before the two men would meet again.

Chapter 28: Waiting

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Chapter 28: Waiting

Two months passed.

Celestia and Luna took up volunteer work caring for the numerous children of the hospital. Luna continued to develop her skill at counseling, while Celestia discovered a talent for teaching.

Finally, Meridiem woke up.

“Mother…?”

“Merry! Merry, you’ve come back! Praise the Goddess!”

When the doctor came to check on her, Meridiem’s first question was about the states of Gnosi and Pr. Guiseman. She was told that Gnosi was due to wake up himself any day now. As for Gus Guiseman, his condition had only worsened since he was brought in.

Another week passed. Meridiem was able to walk short distances without getting winded, while Gnosi, now awake, was still confined to a wheelchair for now. Archbishop Shepherd arranged for a meeting in an out-of-the-way waiting room with Father Delver. There the young man was filled in on what had happened in 1945 Trinity. And of something that was different in the 1985 they returned to.

“…So you’re telling me he’s dead? My Uncle Pitch?” Gnosi was flabbergasted. “He called me a week before the flight.”

“Not in this reality,” Delver grimly explained. “Pitchblende Smith died twenty-three years ago. He was pretty high up in the plutonium production hierarchy at Hanford. So high that the details of his death are all tied up in red tape.”

“Even with the perks granted me under the Far Shooter administration, I haven’t been able to find anything,” Shepherd added. “He was known as an arch-patriot…based on what you’ve told me, it’s possible that he snapped when he discovered the Cold War he was fighting was a lie.”

Gnosi shook his head as he took it all in.

“And that’s not all,” said Meridiem. “You…proposed to me, the night before the flight.”

“Only I didn’t,” Gnosi protested. “Neither of us remembers having done that.”

“And that’s because it wasn’t us,” said Meridiem. “It was the versions of us that grew up in this changed world.”

“I guess…with Uncle Pitch’s death hanging over me, I would have wanted to push forward our relationship instead of wait until I got a position in the ministry,” said Gnosi. “We can call it off if you’d like.”

“I…I don’t mind getting married early,” Meridiem said shyly. “Not after what we’ve been through. Father Delver said that he was going to cover half the costs, as a way of thanking us for what we’ve done with our research.”

“Considering you saved the world, I’d be happy to pick up the whole bill,” said the Archbishop. “It’s just a pity we can’t do something for Professor Guiseman.”

“Have you considered using a solarium?” asked Gnosi with some heat. “We’ve more than proven that it unlocks all kinds of powers in Markists.”

Archbishop Shepherd smiled. “Meridiem’s already informed me that the Archbishop you remember was rather bull-headed when it came to science. I had a change of heart after the President confided in me about the ‘miracle’ of diminishing atomic yields right after his inauguration. Sorry I couldn’t tell you about that before now, Delver.”

“As a matter of national security, I understand.”

“Now I won’t say that I’m still not cautious about who should be told about your team’s discoveries, but I’m not blind to possibilities. There’s been a solarium in this very hospital for the past four years, and it’s in near-constant use by our doctors with healing powers, on believer and non-believer patient alike.”

“Really?” asked Gnosi.

“I’ll arrange a tour. Of course, the patients are all heavily sedated during the procedures, so they don’t see anything that might get us in trouble with non-Markists.”

“You have changed then.”

“Yes, I’ve found all kinds of changes between the history we remembered and this new one,” said Meridiem. “Some came from what we did, but most of them seem to be random events that went the other way with a re-rolling of the cosmic dice. I’m sure the Professor would be delighted to study the differences.” She sighed as she thought of Gus’ current state. “I wish I could have met our prior selves. In a way, we killed them when we snapped back to 1985—they had subtly-different hopes and dreams than us, and now they no longer exist.”

“Frankly, I expected that I’d gain a new set of memories when I woke up,” Gnosi admitted.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Meridiem vowed. “I’m never travelling through time again.”

Celestia and Luna looked in on the hospital room where the Professor was being kept, an array of equipment attached to him both to monitor his condition and to maintain it as best was possible with late Twentieth Century science.

Over the past few days the greatest minds in physics had come through that little room to pay their respects. Currently sitting at the back of the room was Gabriel Gell-Mann, Gus’ co-worker in theoretical particle physics at Caltech. He looked like the stereotypical idea of a kindly Jewish grandfather, marred by a perpetual scowl. He had a round face, round-rimmed glasses, and white hair in tiny round curls. His bushy eyebrows retained their original brownish hue. When he deigned to speak to his inferiors, he did it with a thick Eastern European accent, even as his words were better English than the speech of many native-born Americans. And he was dressed in a tweed suit that was probably last in fashion a decade before he was even born. The shape of his nose and the sharp glint hiding in his eyes made the two sisters think more than anything of a bird of prey.

It was Goanna Guiseman’s turn to speak. “My earliest memory was of standing in my crib and tugging on Gus’ hair,” she began. She was leaning against one wall, her hands in her pockets. Her two sons were sitting next to her, and her stepdaughter was standing next to Gell-Mann, looking down at him with an indulgent smile. “I was about two years old and he was teaching me how to count. If I got the number right, he let me tug on his hair and put on a silly face to make me laugh. He was nine years older than me, and even then he’d spend his spare time walking through town with a screwdriver in his back-pocket, offering to fix people’s busted radios.

“When I was five, Giddy hired me to work in his electronics lab, for two cents a week. That was my nickname for him—Giddy—because he was just so happy when fiddling with things and wondering about the universe. My job was to throw the switches that he couldn’t reach. Sometimes I’d stick my finger in a spark gap for fun. When we were lying in bed waiting to go to sleep he’d tell me things. Like the fact that our dog, the waffle iron, and even I myself were made of wiggling little atoms. I’d ask him to get me a glass of water, and he’d tie a piece of string around the rim and whip it around in a circle to demonstrate centrifugal force. Thanks to him, I knew the names of all of the planets in order before I entered kindergarten. When we were waiting at the doctor’s office, he’d trace the corner of a picture frame and recite the Pythagorean Theorem. He said it like it was the most beautiful poem, and soon I could recite it right along with him. Imagine my surprise when I found out what it actually was!”

She closed her eyes as the next memory washed over her. “One night, he pulled me out of bed and dragged me a couple blocks to a nearby golf course, to see the night sky on fire. He told me that nobody knew what that was, or where it came from. And I fell in love with it. I was eight years old, and I knew right then that I would be the scientist who would explain the Northern Lights.”

She opened her eyes then, pausing to skip over the decades when it seemed her brother was the only person in a sexist world who supported her dreams of becoming a scientist. “A couple years after I got my PhD, I was working at the Lamont Observatory at Columbia University when the data from the first spacecraft to fly through Earth’s magnetosphere was delivered to us. I was on the verge of my goal, of understanding how auroras worked. I wanted to call up Gus at Caltech and share my excitement, but I knew, I just knew, that if I told him anything he’d figure the whole thing out first, because well, by then he was the Great Gus Guiseman. So instead I struck a deal with him. I said, ‘Look, I don’t want us to compete, so let’s divide up physics between us. I’ll take auroras and you take the rest of the Universe.’ And he said ‘OK!’”

The assembled group of listeners laughed, with a couple of murmurs of “That’s just like Gus.” Goanna’s stepdaughter Kim spoke up then, saying, “Why don’t you tell the bird story?”

Gell-Mann’s scowl deepened, just as Kim knew it would.

“Alright,” said Goanna. “Our family, like many Jewish families on Long Island, spent our summers in resorts in the Catskill Mountains. And on weekends our father would take Gus on long nature walks where they tried to understand the things they saw in the woods—I was too young at the time to go with them.

“One day one of the other kids pointed at a particular bird and asked him what it was called. And Gus replied that he had no idea. So the other kids teased him, saying his father had never taught him what a brown-throated thrush was.

“It turned out that they had talked about that very bird. ‘See that bird?’ my father had said to Gus. ‘It’s a Spencer’s warbler. Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese it’s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of the bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.’ And that was the lesson that Gus learned from his father—how to see the world in a scientific way, to see beyond labels to true principles.”

Gell-Mann sighed deeply and theatrically.

Goanna Guiseman smiled. “Do you have something to add, Gabe?”

The professor rose to his feet, hooking a thumb into the inner pocket of his lapel, a stance known to his students as his ‘lecturing pose’. “Not to overly disrespect the sickly,” he said, “but that story, which I have heard Professor Guiseman tell ad nauseam, is exactly what kept him from accomplishing more with his potential than he has.

“First of all, the bird in question was obviously a white-breasted nuthatch, scientific name Sitta carolinensis. The foreign translations you gave were all nonsense—that bird is a saltapalo blanco in Spanish, a sittelle à poitrine blanche in French, a Carolinakleiber in German, a bái xiōng jīwěijiǔ in Chinese, and so on.

“So yes, any one of those names is ‘just’ a label, but without a label, where can we hang all the facts we find out about something? The name is the basis of communication. Without it, we are all lost in the wilderness of our own minds, unable to combine our insights into a greater whole. Gus chasing after ten new ways to calculate something that we’ve already figured out how to calculate is him faithfully following this broken lesson, again and again and again. It’s only because he was such a genius that he was able occasionally to emerge from this thicket to actually contribute something useful to the field of Physics.” It was obvious from the way he pronounced the word that Pr. Gell-Mann always said “Physics” with a capital “P”.

“And this curiosity about absolutely everything—is it such a crime to be a specialist in this day and age? This is not the Fifteenth Century, after all, and every one of you here in this room with a degree will agree with me that there simply aren’t enough hours in a day to devote to more than our chosen fields. Gus Guiseman is a beloved figure—thanks to that ridiculous book of his, and a hero to any number of iconoclastic young men and women, but he could have been a giant, a second Einstein, if he could have just applied himself. He could have changed the world.”

He sighed once again as he returned to his seat. “But I’m just a grumpy old man. Go back to your happy stories.”

& & &

As the stories were being told, a manuscript was being passed from one member of Gus’ family to another. The few who had read it already quickly passed it along with a sad look. Many of those who read it for the first time broke out into silent tears before they finished. Celestia and Luna noted and wondered what the document might contain.

After a quiet consultation with Gloria and Gavin, Gwen walked over and held the document out for them to take. “After everything you’ve done for my husband and…considering his condition, I think you deserve to read this. It’s…a side of Gus that he didn’t like others to know about.” She turned and re-joined her children.

Celestia and Luna leaned in to examine the yellowed document. A Post-It note in the corner read “This was written sixteen months after the death of Arline Guiseman. It was sealed in an envelope and never mentioned to another soul. It was discovered by accident in April of 1983, and not opened until Gus’ final diagnosis was revealed.”

October 17, 1946
D’Arline,
I adore you, sweetheart.
I know how much you like to hear that — but I don't only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.
It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you — almost two years but I know you'll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing.
But now I know, my darling wife, that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you.
I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you — I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do? We started to learn to make clothes together — or learn Chinese — or getting a movie projector. Can't I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the ‘idea-woman’ and general instigator of all our wild adventures.
When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true — you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else — but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.
I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don't want to be in my way. I'll bet you are surprised that I don't even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can't help it, darling, nor can I — I don't understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don't want to remain alone — but in two or three meetings they all seem as ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.
My darling wife, I do adore you.
I love my wife. My wife is dead.
Gus.
PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don't know your new address.

Celestia glowered as she put down the letter. “That’s it!” she declared in a low voice. “We’re going to save the Professor.”

Luna was taken aback—it was the first sign of her sister’s old personality since the Nightmare’s emergence. “The best medical minds of the planet have done everything possible for the poor man. What can we do that they can’t? Cheat Death?”

“Yes,” Celestia said with a determined little smile. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

Chapter 29: Dea Caeli

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Chapter 29: Dea Cæli

Princess Celestia walked slowly across the surface of the Moon, her head low in thought. Although this world was a bright beacon of light to the inhabitants of Equestria, that light could not be seen from here. From here, the Moon was a world of gray shapes against darker gray surroundings. Every step of the alicorn’s hooves kicked up a choking cloud of dust.

To the ancient unicorn mages who first explored this distant world with their magic and used it to move the Sphere of Stars, the Moon was assigned the role of the Middle Realm of the Dead, between the Fields of the Blessed and the Torments of Tartarus. The Moon was where the dead that had failed to fulfil their cutie mark but who had not broken the Laws of Harmony were forced to spend eternity. These same unicorn mystics declared it to be the Nexus of Worlds, the place where all possible realities met and canceled each other out. When Equestria met its inevitable end, they solemnly predicted, it would become a twin wasteland to the Moon.

There was nopony left in Equestria who still believed in that particular cosmology. Nopony but Celestia. She spent most nights in a semi-conscious state, half protecting her subjects from the evils of the night, and half wandering this Pony Purgatory, forever searching for the sister she had banished here.

Most nights she found nothing. The other nights were the ones that ended in sobbing…or screaming.

On this particular night, Princess Celestia’s dream search ended abruptly when she came across a very green hedge made of holly, which was being used to conceal a number of humans from view.

The Princess raised her head, and sighed deeply. She wasn’t sure of the exact mechanism, but apparently it was absurdly easy for humans to invade her dreams, and hers alone. Perhaps because of that “Nexus of Worlds” business.

Princess Celestia slowed her approach towards the ridiculous hedgerow to prepare herself. With one significant set of exceptions, the humans who made it into her dreams all wanted one thing from her: power to dominate their enemies. They would try to get this power through flattery or by laughable attempts to outsmart or humiliate her. In every case, Celestia knew that giving a human what they wanted would result in their own self destruction. Only once had she been provoked so far as make the irrevocable decision to actually give a supplicant what he wanted. That was nearly four hundred years ago, and humans had still not solved the mystery of what happened to Roanoke Colony, much less how to end their unceasing torment. It made for yet another mistake for her to dwell on.

The Princess suddenly stopped as she realized that the hedge before her contained multiple humans.

That had never happened before.

Ceelstia took to the air, swiftly flying to where she was an intimidating height above the tiny shrubbery. A blinding light shown down and the bellow of her Royal Canterlot Voice made itself felt as much as heard as she said, “PRESENT YOURSELVES, HUMANS.”

The human Celestia popped into view, dressed in a simple white smock. “Greetings, Your Royal Highness,” she said with a simple bow. “My apologies for intruding on your dreams.”

The alicorn landed, and the light reduced itself to a bearable level. “Your intrusion is forgiven, Celestia,” she replied with a slight tip of her head. Her counterparts never failed to give her precisely the right degree of deference. The Princess was still unsure of the motives of the still-hidden humans, but she trusted that they were being kept in check. “Do you come to seek a boon from me? Or are you perhaps here to ask me a question? Think carefully, child, because this is the one and only time in your lifetime you are permitted to approach me like this.” There was a rather precise formula that had been developed for meetings between Celestias.

“I am well aware of that fact, Your Highness,” the human said, stepping forward out of the hedge. She had kept with the formula to this point, but here was where she went off-script. “I am uncertain if what I wish to ask for is permitted. Therefore, I wish to use my time to inform you of two facts I think you will find useful, and merely request a favor afterwards, a favor you may freely refuse.”

The Princess raised an eyebrow. This human Celestia was entirely too clever for her own good. Her words about being uncertain were an obvious ruse, as she showed a complete confidence in all of her actions. This was a con, the Princess was almost certain of it. “I’m listening,” she said, after it had become clear that her counterpart was waiting on some sort of response from her.

At a signal from the human Celestia, another human stood up from her crouched position inside the holly hedge wearing another smock, this one of midnight blue. “This is my sister…”

“…Luna,” the Princess said in a quiet voice.

“Yes,” the teenager said. “There have been Lunas through the entire history of Markism, and I believe you were never informed of this fact.”

The expression on the alicorn’s face was enough to confirm that statement.

Luna stepped forward, forcing herself to maintain eye contact with the dazed being before her. “All of my predecessors were lost to madness at the time of their Marking. I was the first of my line to be born the sister of a Celestia. She…saved me.” She reached out to take her sister’s hand in her own.

“I know that our situation is but a poor reflection of your own,” the human Celestia addressed her counterpart. “But I hoped to give you a small measure of hope that you too might re-unite with your sister in the near future.”

The Princess smiled gently as collected herself. “You were right: that was indeed a piece of information useful to me. What is the other thing you wish me to know?”

With another signal, an adult human dressed in a white suit with white gloves emerged from the hedge. Upon reaching the lunar surface, he lowered himself to his knees. “I am Truth Delver,” he said, “and I wish to confess to the crime of possessing my counterpart.” His hands clasped tightly together and his eyes were focused on the ground.

“When did this happen?” Princess Celestia asked sternly.

“Thirty one years, seven months and twelve days ago.”

“You are mistaken. I have a spell to detect human possessions, so I would know.”

“He…he was dead at the time,” Delver added, shrinking even further into himself.

“I see. Perhaps you should tell me the whole story.”

And so he did.

& & &

“I cannot hold you responsible for an act of unintentional possession,” Princess Celestia said on the conclusion of the grisly tale. “And it is clear that you have suffered mental punishment far in excess of what you might think you deserve. Truth Delver, I absolve you of blame, and furthermore commend you for providing Equestria with the cure to wasting disease. Assuming your story is true, you are responsible for saving the lives of thousands of ponies to date, and tens of thousands more in the centuries to come.”

The human Celestia reached out a hand to raise Truth Delver to his feet. “I asked my stepfather to tell you this tale because I hope it establishes a precedent. In a hospital on Earth a human named Gus Guiseman is dying of a form of cancer called liposarcoma. If you know of a natural cure to this disease, I would like you to share it with us, so we might be able to save him.”

Princess Celestia knew that name, thanks to the heartfelt—and heart-breaking—confession by the Human Celestia’s predecessor forty years earlier. And now she was being asked to cure that worthy human of a deadly disease.

If this was Equestria, and the petition came from her little ponies, the Princess wouldn’t hesitate for a single moment. But these were humans, a race with no innate knowledge of Harmony. They could be good, but they could also be very, very bad. Not even her own counterparts were immune to the siren song of power. The fact that this petition was so worthy on the surface made it even more suspect in her mind, considering how many times humans had tried to trick her—maybe they schemed to turn the requested cure into yet another planet-destroying bomb? After all, her counterpart was still clearly holding something back from her. This Celestia would have to be tested. “Who else did you bring into my dream?” she asked.

The hedge suddenly disappeared, revealing two human males.

“This is Gnosi,” said the teenage Celestia. “His special talent is how we were all able to appear in your dream. And this is Arbus, one of the researchers working on Gus’ case.” Arbus was a gray-skinned young man with dark green hair. As the lone human in the group who had no idea of the Goddess’ true nature an hour ago, he was obviously the most nervous.

The Princess pointed a hoof at Arbus. “And I assume you thought he would get his talent in re-creating this cure?”

“That was the general idea, yes,” the teenager confirmed.

“This Gus Guiseman—is he a believer?”

“No, he is a man of no fixed religion,” admitted Luna.

“Then why should I help him?” the Princess asked.

Arbus opened his mouth. He wished to inform the Princess that this particular cancer affected a great many Markists, and a cure would be a boon to them.

At the same moment Gnosi opened his mouth. He wished to inform the Princess that Gus Guiseman was only dying of this illness because he sacrificed his life to save all of humanity, including all of the Markists.

Each of them was stopped by Celestia’s hand covering their mouths.

“Gus Guiseman is my friend,” Teenage Celestia said with conviction, staring her counterpart down. “No further answer should be needed.”

The Princess stared at the teenager for a few more moments to make sure she wouldn’t break, and then smiled. “That is indeed the correct answer. Now Arbus, I need you to describe this disease in some detail using laypony terms, as I know of no such ailment with the name of ‘cancer’ or ‘lipo…sarcoma’.

“After you have done this, I will spend the next day confirming what you have told me. If you are the true source of wasting disease’ cure, Mr. Delver, I will work to make sure that your counterpart at least gets some form of official recognition. If ponies have cured ‘liposarcoma’ naturally, and if this cure cannot be easily converted into a dangerous substance, then I will give you that cure. That means I give you permission to visit my dreams tomorrow night. And that concludes our business for tonight. Oh and Celestia?”

“Yes, Your Highness?”

“Thank you for your compassion.”

& & &

The humans faded out of Princess Celestia’s dream, leaving her alone once more on the surface of the Moon. She walked off in a random direction, feeling as if a great weight had been lifted off of her shoulders. As she walked, she was unaware of the trail of vibrant plants she was leaving in her wake.

Chapter 30: The Greatest Markist

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Chapter 30: The Greatest Markist

We didn’t start the fire.
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning.

Gus Guiseman’s recovery was near-instantaneous. Within a week of being administered the experimental treatment, he was ready to be discharged. His story was covered prominently by the BBC.

Not all the news seen on the hospital TV recently had been as good. Three days ago, after the Soviet Politburo had finally admitted that Secretary-General Andropov was suffering from the same form of cancer as Pr. Guiseman, Arbus Rhiza had been flown to Moscow with his cure. Unfortunately, Andropov’s case turned out to be much worse that Gus’. All the cure gave him was a peaceful end to his suffering. So now the Central Committee of the Soviet Party was busy behind closed doors picking his successor.

The next day the Space Shuttle Challenger had blown up during lift-off. The explosion had claimed the lives of all seven astronauts aboard, including Christa McAuliffe, scheduled to be the first teacher in space.

And the day after that, a pair of videotapes had arrived in the mail from Canterlot, containing the recently-aired miniseries The Day After. By the time it was over there wasn’t a dry eye in the room—despite the fact that most of the watchers were aware that the catastrophe they had witnessed was now completely impossible.

Gus was already aware of the impact the program had had in America when it had been broadcast, in the form of heart-felt discussions and growing demands that the nuclear stockpiles of all sides in the current stand-off be reduced drastically before some accident or madman caused an event such as was depicted in the show from happening in real life.

In more positive news, Kim had managed to get a job for the former maid, Butterfly. It wasn’t much, but it promised to lead to something much better once she had earned her British citizenship. And the prominent Soviet defector Marshal Ustinov had converted to Markism in a public ceremony, taking the new name Stalwart Sentinel. As that particular news story ended, all eyes fixed on Gus.

“Oh, no! I’m too old to pick a new religion to reject,” Gus sputtered.

“With all you know?” asked Father Delver incredulously.

“Especially with all I know!” Gus replied.

There was a frenzy of activity as Gus’ family helped him pack.

Standing at the doorway, Archbishop Shepherd was already on his way out. “I’m surprised that the whole of Marksistdom hasn’t collapsed in your absence,” he said facetiously to Celestia, causing her to merely shrug. He was getting rather disappointed by her lack of smart remarks.

“Have we missed anything?” Gus asked Gwen. “I’d hate to fly all the way back home, only to find we left a beloved toothbrush or waffle iron behind.”

“I almost can’t believe we’re going home,” mused Gwen. “I might have to chain you to the bed when we return, to keep you from going on adventures.”

“Believe me,” swore Gus, “after that last adventure, I’m finally ready to settle down and thoroughly appreciate the family I have.”

“Speaking of family, you’re all invited to our wedding,” announced Meridiem, her hand clasped in Gnosi’s. “It’s scheduled for the 15th at noon in the Canterlot Church of the Goddess.”

“So you’re certain this time?” asked Gavin. “After the last two cancellations…”

“Yes, we’re sure this time,” said Gnosi.

“Of course we’ll be there,” said Gwen. She was surprised by Gus reaching out for her hand. She turned to see that he was lowered on one knee.

“I was thinking…” he said shyly. “Gnosi and Meridiem’s wedding gave me the idea… Technically, I’m not the man you married twenty-five years ago.”

“Gus, we discussed this!”

“That’s not the only reason! I also want to make it clear, to you, to the world, to…God, I guess…that I take this marriage seriously. That it…gives me life. I’d like for us to renew our vows.”

“Gus, I…I don’t know what to say!”

“Well, if you’re going to take time to think about it, I think I’ll lower my other knee. I was kinda getting a cramp.”

Gwen roughly pulled Gus to his feet with a laugh. “Yes, of course I’ll renew my vows with you. You’re my life, too, as I told you ten thousand times during your coma.”

Gus waved a hand idly. “Stuff said during comas doesn’t count. I’m pretty sure it’s in the Talmud somewhere.” He looked over Gwen’s shoulder, to see an imposing woman in black standing at the hospital room door, pointing at him accusingly.

Then he blinked, and the accuser turned into his niece, Kim.

“I have to get back to teaching tomorrow,” she said as she crossed the room to reach him. “But this is for you.”

Gus looked down at the typewritten set of pages. “‘The Story of My Life’?” he read the title aloud.

“I figured you had some catching up to do, to get acquainted with the ‘me’ you created in 1945. From the looks you give me sometimes…”

Gus put his arm around her shoulder. “Thank you, Kim. I’ll be sure to read this on the flight.”

& & &

“Meep meep!”

Meridiem glanced over at the television, where the Road Runner cartoon character had just raced across the screen. This turned out to be the beginning of a commercial.

“Welcome to the start of the Cellular Revolution,” a man’s voice announced as footage showed business people talking to each other with shoe-sized phones. “Those who think that getting a car phone is not for them haven’t kept up with the industry of Cellular Radio Telephones.

“The day is coming when everyone on the go will be able to communicate with Cellular Phones, such as this model made by Unitec, which only weighs two pounds [1 kg]! Unitec envisions the day when people using cellular phones will be as commonplace as someone checking time on an electronic watch, figuring on an electronic calculator, or programming on an electronic computer.

“So join the Cellular Revolution, with a Unitec Cellular Radio Telephone.”

The commercial concluded with the Road Runner racing by, a cellular phone pack slung around its shoulder. A line of tiny print next to the Warner Brothers logo provided permission to use the character.

Meridiem pointed up at the screen. “Excuse me; does anybody know anything about this Unitec company? Is it British?”

“No, it’s Brazilian,” said Gwen. “Never could figure out why a Brazilian company would have an American road runner as their mascot.”

“I never heard of them,” remarked Gnosi.

“Me neither,” said Gus.

“Really?” asked Delver. “They’re only the number two semiconductor company in the world.”

“When were they founded?” asked Gus.

“I dunno,” said Delver. “Late Forties? They were making instant cameras in the 50’s and miniature TVs in the 60’s.”

“Anything else they’re famous for?”

“NASA uses them a lot,” said Goanna Guiseman. “I heard that both Voyager probes have Unitec chips for brains.”

“Don’t you think that’s odd?” asked Gus.

“What?”

“NASA using a foreign company for anything they could get domestically.”

“I never really thought about it,” said Goanna. “Are you saying that Unitec is run by some exceptionally-trustworthy American?”

“Probably not currently. But certainly founded by one,” said Gus.

“Are you saying…?” asked Meridiem.

“If anybody could pull it off, it would be a Celestia,” said Gus.

“What did I do now?” asked Celestia.

“Not you…your predecessor. We think we’ve figured out what she did with the rest of her life.”

& & &

Gwen looked at the clock. “Is that the time? We’ve got to go now!”

At that moment the room’s phone rang. Gwen raised up a hand to stop Gus, then picked it up. “Now’s not a good time,” she said.

There was a lot of excited talking on the other end of the line.

“Well yes, that does sound important, but surely you can get…”

More excited talking.

“I see…hold on a moment.” Gwen put down the phone and lowered her head in defeat. “It’s William Graham, a former student of yours from Caltech. I don’t suppose you remember him?”

“Graham? William Graham? Hm…no,” said Gus.

“He also worked at Hughes when you were giving your lectures there.”

“The same place Steady Ship heard about me? Doesn’t strike a spark somehow.”

“He’s the current head of NASA.”

“Oh that William Graham! What does he want?”

“He wants you to join the committee investigating the Challenger disaster.”

Gus was tempted for a brief moment, but he managed to resist. “A committee? That’s politics. And don’t we have a flight to get to?”

Gwen put her hands on Gus’ shoulders. “Gus, people died. They had enough time to know that they were doomed, and that there was nothing they could do about it. Nothing like that should ever happen again.”

“But…I thought you wanted me at home.”

“I can’t really change who I married. I married a scientist who wanted to change the world. And I doubt that even saving the whole world once would be enough for him. Go say ‘yes’ and get a flight to Washington. Hopefully we’ll get to see you on TV.”

Gus smiled broadly and pulled Gwen into a bear hug. “Did I ever tell you that you’re the best?”

“Not often enough.”

Gus picked up the phone and began talking with William Graham. His friends and the other members of his family took their turns giving him a hug as they left the room.

“I don’t care what he says,” Celestia told her sister as they walked out. “Gus Guiseman’s the greatest Markist of our time.”

We didn’t start the fire.
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it.

—Spoken like a true Markist.

Epilogue: Full Circle

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Epilogue: Full Circle

August 25, 2018

The old man in the long brown coat waited patiently as the guard at the Grand Harmony Hotel and Business Center checked his ID. The man swayed slightly every few seconds as his balance adjusted, and he needed a cane to walk confidently. He wore a porkpie hat to cover a head mostly devoid of hair, and glasses to help him to see. But behind those glasses his eyes twinkled with the same undimmed genius of Gus Guiseman.

He was one hundred years old.

“Everything checks out,” the purple guard told him, returning his card. “You’re a little late.”

Gus shrugged. “Blame the airlines. Now which way am I supposed to go?”

The guard pointed towards a distant pair of double doors.

“Welcome back to Canterlot!” the guard said as the scientist began walking away.

“It’s good to be back,” Gus said, raising a hand briefly in the air.

As he walked, he saw dozens of people stop what they were doing to stare at him. All of them were Markists. How long had it been since he had seen so many Markists in one place? Ten years? Twenty? No, at least thirty. Back then, there still was a Cold War. It was right after Gorbachev had become Secretary General.

Poor Gorbachev. The Soviet Union had collapsed in less than five years despite every reform he had introduced. Collapsed perhaps because of every reform he had introduced.

Today, Russia was in some ways better than it had been under Andropov, and some ways worse—the same as you could say for most countries over a span of thirty-three years. The Markists would certainly consider Russia in the “win” column: their financial investments in 1991 had prevented the total collapse of the economy. Russia currently had the third-largest population of Markist citizens on Earth. And native son and convert Stalwart Sentinel had been elected Russia’s president in 1996.

This line of rumination brought Gus to the double doors. The usher waiting there opened it and gestured him inside with a bow.

Gus shook his head in amusement and entered the darkened ballroom.

The lights rose to reveal about half of all the Markist clergy in the world, thousands of individuals, all of them cheering for him. Thanks to the solar lamps installed in the skylight five stories above him, about a third of the crowd was floating. Others were wreathed in fire or water (or jelly?) and Gus even caught one young woman in the act of teleporting from one side of the ballroom to the other.

Gus smiled inwardly. He knew that it was inevitable that the larger clergy would eventually find out about what Truth Delver’s team had discovered, just as it was equally inevitable that, in a few more years, the general public would find out the truth as well. He was just glad that this group at least had handled it well.

Gus looked around him. This was a lousy location from which to address this crowd. And then he looked up at the balcony two stories above him—that would be perfect. Perhaps the guard had been pointing at the elevator that was next to the double doors? “Oops,” he muttered to himself.

“Professor Guiseman?”

He looked over to see two teenage girls, both adorned with large, feathery wings. “If you’ll allow us?” the one with blue skin and rainbow hair asked, holding out one hand toward him and gesturing upwards with the other.

Gus chuckled. “Sure, why not?” he replied.

Gently but firmly, the bold blue girl and the more reticent yellow girl lifted Gus up until he reached the balcony, causing the cheering from the crowd to get even louder.

Upon regaining his footing, Gus raised a hand to signal his audience to quiet down, and took the chance to look among them from his new vantage point. He failed to see any other Markists with wings.

“Good evening, Priests and Priestesses,” he began, speaking into the microphone that had been set up for him. “I was asked to give a presentation tonight regarding my researches into the scientific underpinnings behind this intriguing faith of yours. The obvious route would have been to write up a scientific paper and then read it out loud to you. But, as I am presently restricted from submitting said paper to any scientific publications, and as the lot of you are obviously not scientists, I decided on a different tack. I’m going to tell you the story, the story of a lowly circle of ceramic.

“The year was 1983, and I had just done a favor for the president of a certain chemical company. In return, he allowed me the free run of the place. Well I was giving myself an unguided tour of their R&D facility when I discovered a lone engineer who was trying to make the perfect dinner plate…”

& & &

After he finished his speech, Gus Guiseman was escorted to a smaller room, where he shook a lot of hands and engaged in small talk:

“Professor Guiseman! The world of Markism is eternally in your debt.” He got that one at lot.

“Professor Guiseman! I remember seeing you in the Challenger hearings on TV when I was a kid. Seeing you demonstrate the cause of the explosion using a rubber O-ring and a glass of ice water in a matter of seconds is what got me into physics.” That alone made the whole trip worthwhile.

“Professor Guiseman! Can you sign my copy of What Do You Care What Other People Think? I have all ten of your books.”

“Professor Guiseman! Could you sign my copy of Looking at Physics? I never would have passed tenth grade physics without it.” The former student was referring to the textbook that Gus had co-authored in 2000. Sure, the Markist Church was responsible for getting it adopted by the New Brass Sky public school curriculum in 2003 as a way of thanking him for his contributions to the faith, but it was soon afterward adopted by most of the other states as well, purely on merit.

“Professor Guiseman! Is it true that you’re on the short list for the Nobel Prize in Physics this year?” To which his reply was “I sure hope not.” Gus had spent the decade of 1986 to 1996 actually concentrating on his profession for once, pulling out all the really crazy ideas that he had squirrelled away and getting them published. The two dozen papers that resulted laid the groundwork for a grand universal theory of the universe, revolutionized more than one field of physics, and launched the careers of all of his co-authors who weren’t already famous. Two of the papers were co-authored with his coworker, Gabriel Gell-Mann, and one was co-authored with Stephen Hawking. Privately, Gus referred to the set as the ‘Harmony Papers’. He suspected that they would result in a Nobel Prize for someone, but he sincerely hoped that when that happened he would be dead.

He had been so enthusiastic in writing them that he did something he never allowed himself to do before: publish something scientific that he wasn’t one hundred percent certain would later be proved to be true. When, in 1996, an inter-disciplinary team of mathematicians and scientists concluded that eight of the papers had been based on faulty math or overturned experiments and the press had demanded an explanation, Gus had merely shrugged and said, “Noffony’s perfect.” The “lisp” was of course corrected for the permanent record.

Two young men approaching Gus brought him out of his reverie. “Is it true that you played yourself on Futurama?” one of them asked. Clearly a bet was on the line.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he replied. “In 2003 I played the head in a jar of Professor Gell-Mann, my co-worker. It was sort of a prank.”

After some grumbling, a sum of money changed hands.

“Did you say Professor Gell-Mann?” asked the young woman with the signed textbook, inserting herself back into the conversation. “The inventor of quarks? I saw an interview with him recently. He must have been so mad!”

“He was,” Gus replied with a chuckle. “He sent me and Fox a list of 32 mistakes I and the animators had made impersonating him in the thirty seconds his character was on screen. Privately, though, he confessed that it was the only time in recent memory that anybody had pronounced his name correctly.”

And so it went for Gus. Along the way he was fed a rather forgettable meal.

He kept looking around for Truth Delver until he finally remembered: The bishop had died more than fifteen years earlier, after a petty fight with Celestia. The funeral was the last time Gus had been in Canterlot, and it fell to Gus to comfort the two sisters on their loss. The three of them had been exchanging letters ever since—Gus still had trouble believing that the bratty little Celestia he had met on the train station was actually a high school principal now.

Meridiem Tempest and Gnosi Augur had been spotted briefly visiting the room to wave at Gus before becoming their own center of attention; unsurprising, considering that the married couple had been the official overseers and priests of the Canterlot Church of the Goddess since 1992. The moment when they had taken their new positions marked the point when continuing research into the scientific aspects of the religion had been turned over to a new generation of theology students. Discoveries during this period had been a slow incremental build on the initial collection of research projects. For example, theology students with flying marks learned how to survive their falls from deadly heights when outside the Solarium. (The answer: Depending on what mental mechanism they used to control their flight, they could take up to a five-story drop without breaking any bones. Of course, they would then be required to fake breaking those bones to avoid the suspicion of unbelievers.)

Gus’ wandering eye finally took in a group of teenagers in the back of the room that was clearly watching and talking about him amongst themselves. The group included the two “angels” he had met earlier, now devoid of their wings. Another individual, a young woman with purple skin and hair, was staring at him with a manic intensity—he expected a perpetual motion proposal out of her.

Standing at their side was Principal Celestia.

The group waited until all of the other attendees had left the room before approaching.

“Celestia! It’s good to see you after all this time,” Gus said warmly, shaking her hand. “How’s your sister?”

“Quite well, thanks. How’s your family faring?”

“Gustine gave us another great-grandson this past October.”

“Is that great-grandson number ten?”

“Eleven. So, who have you brought to see me this evening?”

Principal Celestia went through the list of names, starting with Sunset Shimmer and ending with Twilight Sparkle—the crazy one. Twilight of course had a dog-eared copy of The Pleasure of Finding Things Out for him to sign.

“It is a great honor to meet you, Professor Guiseman,” said Sunset Shimmer. “We’d like to ask for your help, if you have the time.”

“My help in what, young lady?”

“In helping us understand a new form of magic. You see, there’s been a crossover of magic from the Equestrian realm—”

“More like the crossing over of actual ponies from Equestria,” interjected a pink-on-pink young woman named Pinkie Pie. “With lots of wicked world-threatening and giant rainbow explosions!”

“I got better,” Sunset and Twilight both muttered at the same time.

“Sunset here has been doing a fantastic job gathering data and doing experiments to see how this new magic works,” the blonde-on-orange girl named Applejack added. “We just need somebody who can organize all of that into some definite rules.”

“So we can say for sure that none of this is a threat,” Celestia concluded. “It’s becoming increasingly obvious that we can’t keep these changes a secret forever, so we hope to be prepared for any potential backlash.”

Gus turned to the girl with the fiery hairstyle. “You’ve been gathering the data?”

“Yes, Professor,” Sunset said meekly. “But I’ll gladly defer to your judgement regarding anything that might not have been gathered correctly.”

Gus reached out to gently lift up her chin. “Don’t belittle yourself, Miss Shimmer. Without a good experimentalist, where would us theoreticians be?”

“So you’ll take the job?” Fluttershy asked.

“A whole new form of magic?” asked Gus, as he took a seat facing the others. “I certainly would like to take a crack at it. Now, start at the beginning. And then tell…me…everything.”

Credits and Acknowledgements

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Credits and Acknowledgements

This story would not exist without the help of my editors, lordelliot and Sage Wolf. More than just grammar and spelling corrections, they contributed crucial story ideas and even the names of the main characters. You have all of my gratitude for your efforts over the past ten months.

The initial inspiration for this story came from two sources: The first was the fanfic “Oversaturation” by FanOfMostEverything. The early part of that story includes a mention of how humans in the Equestria Girls setting discovered the symbols (cutie marks) they used to decorate their clothes. The description looked suspiciously like a Mystery Cult ceremony as practiced by the Ancient Greeks, and that fired my imagination. The second inspiration was a series of articles by The Digital Antiquarian exploring the Infocom game Trinity (1986). I was reminded of how disappointing the ending of that game was, and I realized that in this post-Cold War era, a much better ending would be more deserved. And then I realized that I could use my elaborate Equestria Girls setting to pull this off, and finally get another one of my personal heroes into a fanfic.

The human characters of (Principal) Celestia, (Vice Principal) Luna, and the location of Canterlot all come from the media franchise My Little Pony: Equestria Girls, created by Meghan McCarthy for Hasbro as a spin-off of their My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic franchise. It’s not certain which individual is the intellectual caretaker of the franchise going forward, although I’m hoping it’s Nick Confalone.

The alicorn character Celestia and her sister Luna come from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, as well as Daring Do and her series of books.

The extrapolation of these characters and setting back to the year 1985 is the work of my imagination, and if the implied connections between current and past versions don’t make sense to you, then that is entirely my fault—sorry.

The original character that I named Kimiko Mineko comes from Trinity (1986). Again, I took a lot of liberties with her.

The characters of Truth Delver, Mr. Catalyst, Steady Ship, Steady State, Trilogy Point, Meridiem Tempest, Gnosi Augur, Crystal, Thorned Rose and her daughter Yellow, Agents Proctor and Gamble, Round Trip, Archbishop Guardian Shepherd, Butterfly the maid, Blue Note, Father Tailor and Arbus Rhiza are original.

All remaining characters are based on real people—I’ll name them in the notes for each chapter.

The Cold War crisis described over the course of this story more or less happened as described; only it happened in 1983 instead of 1985—I moved the year so it could be after the publication of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! My primary sources for the crisis were Wikipedia’s article on Able Archer 83 (and everything linked from there) and the British TV documentary 1983: The Brink of Apocalypse, which is available on YouTube. The Cold War as a whole was covered by the gaming site The Digital Antiquarian’s series on Trinity: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.

Prologue: A Light Brighter Than a Dozen Suns

The primary sources for the Trinity Test narrative were The Manhattan Project’s webpage, the Atomic Heritage Foundation’s list of eyewitness accounts, Gene Dannen’s list of eyewitness accounts, and People’s 1995 article by David Grogan. Most of what is described in this chapter happened as described.

The parts about the roadrunner and the character of Crystal are fictional, the former taken from the Infocom computer game Trinity (1986), written by Brian Moriarty.

Model Forecast was based on Jack Hubbard. President True Man was based on Harry S. Truman. Cino Cycle was based on Hans Bethe.

Gus Guiseman was based on Richard Feynman. (He’s the main character, so he gets his own paragraph.)

Infra Stellar was based on Edward Teller (and he was one of the inspirations for Doctor Strangelove). Journey Scoop was based on William Laurence. Stable Solution was based on Donald Hornig.

Robinson Crusoe was the main character in a novel from 1719, a castaway who spent nearly thirty years on a desert island.

Precipitated Solution was based on Lilli Hornig. Her maiden name of Gillian Gesinek is also made up to go with the “griffon names start with G” rule; she was actually born Lilli Schwenk.

Most of the “hand-written” section is made up. I had originally intended for the author of the “final note” to be the bratty human Celestia, but I never could find a moment when she could have come across the transcript and known what a “thermal opacity ratio of the fission reaction” actually is. So make up some catty time traveler as the author if you really must have someone.

Oh, and I hope most of the readers picked up the connection between that ratio and Fermi’s betting pool about the bomb igniting the atmosphere. This was the key plot point of the Trinity game as well. My source for the physics of this possibility comes from this Stanford University essay.

Chapter 1: Breakfast Convocation

I suppose I could have dug up Richard Feynman’s actual Glendale address in 1985, but I thought that was taking invasion of privacy just a little bit too far, so I looked on a map and picked Pine Street at random.

Art Bell was the host of the call-in radio show Coast to Coast AM from 1984 to 2006. It had a strong focus on eye-witness reports of supernatural events and discussions of conspiracy theories.

GDS Incorporated is fictional. The initials don’t stand for anything, and are supposed to evoke the word “gods”.

Gwen Guiseman was based on Richard Feynman’s third wife, Gwen Feynman. Gavin and Gloria Guiseman were based on Carl and Michelle Feynman. Michelle was actually 17 in 1985, so having her graduate from high school in that year in my story was not completely unbelievable. However, she doesn’t have turquoise skin or blue hair in real life.

President Far Shooter was based on Ronald Reagan. The narrator of the story takes a strongly positive stance on his actions; my own opinion of the man is more nuanced.

Yuri Andropov actually became Secretary General of the Soviet Union on November 10, 1982, not June 14, 1985.

“Party at Ground Zero” was a song by the ska band Fishbone. It was actually released on September 21, 1985, so there’s no way it can be playing on the radio on June 14. The music video I linked to was directed by Henry Selick, who would go on to direct The Nightmare Before Christmas.

The theodicy argument was an obvious way to get Voltaire in, and to contrast him with Guiseman.

Harlequin is the name of a once-independent publisher (now part of HarperCollins) known for the publication of cheap paperback romance novels.

Ship’s Petroleum and Chemicals is a fictional company. The Poisoning of Bitsburg is supposed to evoke the numerous oil spills of the period, culminating in the Exxon Valdez in 1989.

Gabriel Gell-Mann was based on Feynman’s co-worker at Caltech, Murrey Gell-Mann. He was the man who worked out the existence of quarks in 1964.

Interlude: An Editorial and Its Rebuttal

The editorial is made up, but Roger Wilkins was an actual journalist for The Washington Post in 1985—I hope I didn’t overstate my bounds by putting words in his mouth.

“Lucifer” is an instrumental track by The Alan Parsons Project, released on August 27, 1979. The YouTube video linked is the visual creation of the poster, Eduardo Vivona. I picked this particular video for being unnerving and evoking fears of nuclear armageddon, not because I agreed entirely with its message.

Here are the parts of the editorial that actually happened in the real world: Ronald Reagan being elected 40th President of the United States on November 4, 1980. The release of 52 hostages held by Iran on January 20, 1981, the day of Reagan’s inauguration. The Camp David Accords of September 17, 1978. Muammar Gaddafi taking over Libya as Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution on September 1, 1969. American fighter jets engage with Libyan jets in the Gulf of Sidra on August 19, 1981. The hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73 on September 5, 1986 (not 1981) by Abu Nidel, followed by their trial in June of 1988 (not November of 1983)—the role of Gaddafi in the event has long been suspected, but never admitted to nor proven in a court of law. The American embargo on Libyan oil started in March 1982, followed by the removal of all American business relations with Libya in January 1986 (conflated to February of 1984). The bombing of the West Berlin disco La Belle on April 5, 1986 (not 1984)—Ron Reagan, Jr. was not among the victims. The retaliatory strokes on Tripoli and Bengazi on April 15, 1986 (not 1984, and not involving nuclear missiles). The bombing was reported to have resulted in the death of Hanna Gaddafi, but there is suspicion if she actually died, or if in fact she ever actually existed. The Battle of Maaten al-Sarra on September 5, 1987, leading to the expulsion of Libya from Chad, and the fact that the Americans covertly supported the Chadians.

The fact that President Reagan was spending covert funds around the world, with the long-term goal of toppling the Soviet Union, is established by “The Peacetime War: Caspar Weinberger in Reagan’s Pentagon”, an article for The Atlantic written by Nicholas Lemann in October of 1984. The link I posted may or may not work—considering that the article is pretty much the Republican Party’s narrative of how America won the Cold War, I’m amazed that it’s not easier to obtain.

Pan American World Airways, commonly known as “Pan Am”, was the principal international air carrier in the United States between its founding in 1927 and its collapse in 1991. It was founded by the merger of three existing companies, with Juan Trippe as its first CEO. In 1964, Pan Am set up a waiting list of passengers for its first flight to the moon, expected at the time to occur around the year 2000. For this reason, the spaceplane that was featured in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) flew for Pan Am.

The score to Rambo: First Blood Part Two was composed by Jerry Goldsmith. The film was released on May 22, 1985. The particular recording by the City of Prague Philharmonic that I linked to was made in 1998.

The speech that I attribute to the “Markist Historical Society of Ireland” is actually excerpts from Reagan’s Westminster Speech of June 8, 1982 (the “ash heap of history” speech), followed by excerpts from his speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida of March 8, 1983 (the “evil empire” speech—it starts with “Our enemies must understand this”). I deliberately made the “evil empire” part even more provocative than the original, and added the Markist elements.

Firebrand was based on Thomas Paine.

Liposarcoma is a cancer of the fat cells.

Chapter 2: Chemistry Test

Gudea of Lagash ruled his city-state around 2135 B.C. A famous diorite statue of him sitting in a ceremonial robe can be found in the Louvre. President Saddam Hussein of Iraq was in 1985 still an ally of the United States against their enemy the Ayatollah of Iran.

George Grectman was based on Dan Shechtman, the man who discovered the first natural quasicrystal, which earned him a Nobel Prize in 2011.

“Polyrhythms on the bongos”—Feynman was known for his bongo playing, which pushed past Western traditions into the playing styles of Africa and South America. In fact, book publishers constantly pushed to have a picture of him drumming put on the covers of his memoirs, under the theory that nobody would want to read what a boring physicist had to say about anything, but they’d read anything written by a bongo-playing nutjob. He always turned them down.

Interlude: In a Galaxy Far, Far Away…

The title is from the opening crawl to Star Wars (1977) in honor of the fact that this is about the “Star Wars” speech and its aftermath.

The speech is again just a set of excerpts from an actual speech by President Reagan (with slight doctoring), which in the real world was given on March 23, 1983. The linked propaganda video was made shortly afterwards.

Chapter 3: Dinner Conversation

Most of the criticisms made of Guiseman (Feynman) in this chapter are true.

Freemon Dyson is an actual theoretical physicist, and a member of the Federation of American Scientists. Pending Theory was based on Paul Olum. “Schwinger” is Julian Schwinger, and “Tomanaga” is Sin-Itiro Tomanaga, the co-winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 alongside Richard Feynman.

“Newton and Halley”: Edmund Halley was the primary supporter of Isaac Newton when he was writing his work Principia on the nature of gravity. He later went on to prove that several observations of comets over the centuries were actually the same comet, which was then named after him.

The Three Mile Island accident involved the release of radioactive water vapor from a commercial nuclear power plant on March 28, 1979. The resulting protests led to the end of construction for such power plants in the United States.

Dyson’s statement on his faith is taken from a review of The God of Hope and the End of the World by John Polkinghorne.

The 1981 BBC interview: it was with Christopher Sykes, and led to the BBC documentary The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Here’s a YouTube video that concludes with that quote.

The British Broadcasting Corporation is the public service broadcaster for the United Kingdom. It was founded as a radio service in 1922 by John Reith with the directive to “inform, educate and entertain”—in that order.

Interlude: The Empire Contemplates Striking Back

Everything in the Politburo chapters is speculation. I used the names of actual Politburo members during the 1983 crisis, and did my best to guess what their opinions were, but I can’t imagine I got much of it right. In particular, Dimitri Ustinov never defected to the United States, but remained a loyal communist until the day he died, on December 20, 1984.

The title of the chapter references Star Wars’ sequel, The Empire Strikes Back (1981).

Richard Nixon: President of the United States from 1969-1974. Forced to resign over the investigation into how he tried to steal the 1972 election.

Rudolph Valentino was a handsome movie actor from the 1920’s. He died at the age of 31.

There’s a lot of glib talk about how SDI either caused the USSR to collapse just from its proposal, or how it was meant to be a US-only tool to make war impossible. I tried to spell out my understanding of how the technology would have been a threat to the status quo even if it were freely shared with the Soviet Union, as President Reagan had promised.

Andropov collapses: This actually happened in February of 1983, not June of 1985.

Chapter 4: Markism for Unbelievers

“Ed” was Edward C. Stone, the chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy at Caltech from 1983 to 1988.

Meridiem: “My special talent is a waste of time.” Heh.

Gloria Guiseman: Michelle Feynman’s occupation is as a photographer.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were a set of manuscripts discovered in 1946, dating back to a few centuries on either side of Christ’s birth. They were written by a strict Jewish sect that Gnostics believe influenced their own religion.

Gnosticism is a branch of Christianity that had its height in the Second Century AD. It believed in a duality between wicked materialism and enlightened spirituality, with salvation being granted through the transmission of secret knowledge. By comparison, Plato’s Parable of the Cave, taken from his work The Republic (380 BC) taught that knowledge of the senses was only a reflection of the true reality, where everything is ideal and perfect. Markism as I have crafted it is designed to be a sort of Greek Mystery Religion that incorporates all of those ideas while being centered on Friendship Is Magic’s friendship lessons.

Chapter 5: Markist History, Part 1

The year 1010 was selected to be a thousand years before the premiere of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic in 2010. The Battle of Aleppo in that year is fictional. Most of the rest of the chapter was based on fact.

Chapter 6: Confrontation in a Small Hotel Room

Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 for working out how chemical bonds worked on the atomic level. He then won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962 for being a leader of the nuclear disarmament movement. In many ways he was the Richard Feynman of chemistry.

“If it wasn’t for…a powerful friend on my side”: Celestia. Just in case you thought I had some other character in my pocket that I was saving for a sequel or something.

The Journal of Irreproducible Results is a bimonthly magazine that posts joke scientific papers. The “Best of” compilation was published in 1983.

Not much to say about the rest of the chapter.

Interlude: White Hot War

In the real world, Yuri Andropov’s collapse was in February 1983. He moved into Central Clinical Hospital in August, and he died on February 9, 1984. The illness and death were the result of multiple diseases of the kidneys, not liposarcoma. The change in diagnosis is to match his ailment with Gus Guiseman’s/Richard Feynman’s, and to tie it directly to his observation of nuclear testing in his earlier years.

The Elements of Harmony: I have no idea what’s in this book outside of what I’ve revealed.

The Romanovs: The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia prior to the Russian Revolution. Grigory Romanov was not at all closely related to this branch of the family, and in fact in the real world, he was Gorbachev’s main rival to become Secretary General in 1985.

The shooting of Far Shooter: On March 30, 1981 a man named John Hinkley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Reagan. A bullet grazed his rib and entered his left lung, causing it to partially collapse. Despite being seventy years old, he was able to leave the hospital less than two weeks later, although it was more like six months before he completely recovered.

One Bush, Two Bush, Red Bush, Blue Bush: A reference to the Dr. Seuss book One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, and corresponding with George H.W. Bush (Ronald Reagan’s vice president and eventual successor), George W. Bush (eldest son and later President as well), Jeb Bush (second son and governor of Florida) and Neil Bush (third son and Texas businessman). The joke is that American political parties are often identified by color: red for Republicans, and blue for Democrats. There are no Democratic members of the Bush family. Oh and there’s also a third Bush son, Marvin, but that ruins the joke.

The North Pacific training exercise: This was FleetEx ’83, an operation involving three American carrier battle groups located just off the coast of the Soviet Union, described by its organizer as “the largest fleet exercise conducted by the Pacific Fleet since World War II”. The goal was to deliberately provoke the Soviets by flying aircraft over their airspace, in order to study their response. It took place between March 29 and April 17 of 1983.

Operation Barbarossa: The means by which Hitler began the invasion of his supposed ally the Soviet Union. The plan was named after the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa who, like King Arthur, was reputed to be sleeping eternally under one of several German mountains until the moment when he would rise and lead his people to restore the greatness of the Fatherland.

The overflights of both the Kurile and Aleutian Islands: These happened on April 4 and 5, 1983.

Pershing II missiles heading for Europe: This would correspond to late summer of 1983 in our timeline.

The development of events in the world arena demands from us the highest vigilance, restraint, firmness and unremitting attention to the strengthening of the country's defense capability... Perhaps never before in the postwar decades has the situation in the world arena been as tense as it is now... Comrades! The international situation at present is white hot, thoroughly white hot.

The above quote was part of a public address made by Grigory Romanov to the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on November 5, 1983, in reference to Operation Able Archer.

Stanislav Petrov actually did save the world as described. He just did it on September 26, 1983 instead of June 19, 1985.

Gulag: A Soviet forced-labor prison camp, where enemies of the State were sent off to be forgotten. The Gulag system was at its height under Stalin.

Ustinov’s electronic war machine: This is meant to invoke both the Doomsday Machine from Dr. Strangelove (1964) and WOPR from WarGames (1983)—note that the latter was also created in response to someone failing to start World War III when they were supposed to.

Chapter 7: Markism in England and America

Fall of a Jousting Pony, by Rubens or one of his followers: Horses in the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens often appear to have as much agency as the humans, and show particularly human emotions. See for example A Hunt of Lions, Tigers and Leopards (1615-18) and The Battle of the Standard (c.1603).

William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury: Illegitimate son of King Henry II, and therefore King John’s half-brother. He died in 1226 and was buried in Salisbury Cathedral. Apropos of nothing, when Longespée’s tomb was opened in 1791 for study, a well-preserved dead rat was found inside his skull. That rat can now be found on display at the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum.

Magna Carta was signed in 1215.

There was no Battle of Annandale in 1377. Annandale was a historic district of Scotland, in the area that was frequently contended between the Scots and the English. I needed for Henry Percy to die before accepting the title of Earl of Northumberland in that year. The coat of arms of the Percy family consists of a blue lion on a yellow field.

Henry “Hotspur” Percy is a major character in Shakespeare’s play Henry IV, Part 1. He was actually born in 1364, not 1377. In 1403 he rebelled against his king, planning to split the country in three between himself, his brother-in-law Sir Edmund Mortimer (a man with a better claim to the English throne on paper than the actual king) and Owen Glendower (a claimant to the recently-conquered land of Wales). That rebellion collapsed at Shrewsbury, against the forces of King Henry IV and his son Prince Henry.

Hair Splitter: Robert Boyle, the first modern chemist. His studies of the properties of gases let to the formulation of Boyle’s Law.

The First Prime Minister of Great Britain stealing credit: Sir Robert Walpole. I discovered the “Extra History” series of YouTube videos while writing this chapter—can you tell?

July 7, 1865: A date with no particular importance in British history. In America, it’s the date when the surviving members of the group that plotted to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln were executed.

Lord Palmerston: Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1855 – 1858 and 1859 – 1865.

The Know-Nothings: In our world, a group dedicated to anti-immigrant and anti-Indian activities. The only reason why anybody knows about this group is their participation in the New York Draft Riots of 1863 (see the film Gangs of New York (2002)—Bill the Butcher was the local leader of the Know-Nothings).

True Man, accused of taking orders from King George VI: In the run-up to the election of John F. Kennedy, America’s first Catholic President, there was a persistent smear campaign that he would be more loyal to the Pope than to the interests of his own people.

Chapter 8: Goddess in the Flesh

The Archbishop of Baltimare: Bishop Truth Delver’s boss, as mentioned in Chapter 6.

Greyhound Lines, Inc.: Founded in 1914, this company is America’s largest operator of motorcoaches. Its primary job is to provide cheap transportation between cities.

Equestrian statues: In case you were wondering what a statue with a rearing horse was doing outside a high school.

Celestia’s first appearance: To be anachronistically accompanied by “Maria” (1999) by Blondie (“She’s like a millionaire, walkin’ on imported air”).

“If Celestia was the bright center of Canterlot, then Luna resided in a spot that seemed farthest from it”: Paraphrase of the line “If there’s a bright center of the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from” from Star Wars (1979).

Childhood’s End: 1953 science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke, about a group of aliens that show up one day to mark the beginning of the end of humanity as a species. In other words, a very Luna book.

Celestia I’s lineage: I needed for Hotspur Percy’s father to die before he was born (as opposed to outliving him), which meant that Hotspur couldn’t have a younger full sister. So I switched the order of Lady Margaret’s two marriages, and effectively moved daughter Margaret Percy over to be Celestia (Margaret) de Ros instead.

War of the Roses: Civil war between rival branches of the English royal family, lasting from 1455 to 1487.

The Spanish Armada: The attempt by Spanish King Philip II to conquer England, defeated by a combination of a naval battle and a devastating storm.

Elizabeth: Queen Elizabeth I, queen from 1558 to 1603.

Louis VIII of France: While still only Prince of France, was proclaimed King of England by the barons opposing King John in May of 1216, but never crowned. These barons changed sides when John died in October of that year, in order to support his son Henry III. In September of 1217 after three devastating defeats, Louis was forced to sign the Treaty of Lambeth, where in return for 10,000 marks payment he stated that he had never been the legitimate king of England.

O&O: Ogres and Oubliettes, the obvious stand-in for Dungeons & Dragons. Characters in the game have their abilities on a scale where humans have scores between 3 and 18 (generated by rolling three six-sided dice and adding up the values). A natural 18 Charisma (“natural” meaning that there are no magical items worn to influence the score) therefore represents the pinnacle of human charm.

I really don’t have to go into the Nightmare Moon stuff, right?

Albert Einstein, whose equation of E = mc² laid the theoretical foundation for the atomic bomb. During much of his lifetime he was the most famous scientist to have ever lived. He also penned an influential letter to President Truman convincing him to go forward with the Manhattan Project.

Merck: Name of the corporation that developed and manufactured many biological cures in the mid-Twentieth Century.

Chapter 9: Delver’s Mark

My Man Forge: The Markist version of My Man Godfrey (1936, directed by Gregory La Cava). His Girl Friday (1936) was directed by Howard Hawks. Friday had no problem with the existence of a smart female reporter, and in fact actively sabotaged her attempt to settle down as a betrayal of her character. Godfrey is about class relations, and so it’s easy to imagine the title character as a Markist instead a derelict.

I believe Polo House is my original name for Yearling’s publisher, but I would not at all be surprised to be proven wrong.

The Great Griffon-Dragon War: My analogue for World War II, although one where the griffons’ actions are only a little less reprehensible than the dragons’. Ponies volunteered to fight for both sides, losing a good deal of their innocence along the way.

Pr. Villainpants: Cabelleron, obviously. As he currently has no canon backstory, I’m leaning on that of Cabelleron’s inspiration: Belloq from the Indiana Jones franchise, with my own changes on top of that.

Prince Bronze Heart: In 1936, the British King Edward VIII abdicated his crown so he could marry the love of his life, the divorcée Wallis Simpson. His brother became King George VI, and Edward became the Duke of Windsor. The next year, the couple visited Hitler and showed some sympathy for how the Fuhrer ran his country. This led to the creation of “Operation Willi”, a Nazi plot for what would happen when they inevitably conquered the United Kingdom: King George would be overthrown, and the Duke of Windsor would get his crown back as Hitler’s puppet. News of the plot leaked, and Duke Edward seemed to be seriously considering jumping on the “take the crown back” bandwagon, so he was sent to be governor of the Bahamas for the length of World War II.

The Amarezon is right next to Seaddle: If you pay attention to the map segment from Daring Do’s first episode and compare it to the current map of Equestria, that sure appears to be the case.

Chapter 10: Q&A

“What does Latin have to do with insects?”: The study of insects is entomology, which of course sounds a lot like “etymology”.

Chapter 11: Library Research

Canna Table is my name for Vinyl Scratch’s mother. In my headcanon, the pony version of her was librarian of Golden Oak Library before Twilight Sparkle. (The name is meant to evoke the musical term cantabile.)

B. Bookman: His first name was Book, and his pony counterpart was named Book Bookpony.

Luna [Beaufort]: I mentioned that Celestia I was tied to the Percy family, which tried to overthrow King Henry IV. The Beauforts were Henry’s half-siblings, children of his father John of Gaunt and his mistress Katherine Swynford. The last of them was born in 1379, so I added Luna as a fifth sibling, born two years later. The parents married in 1396, and the children were legally legitimized in 1397—three years after Luna went mad and had to be put down like a rabid dog.

For the other families that a Luna was born into, I tried to pick last names typical of each era.

Danvers State Insane Asylum: An actual asylum located in northern Massachusetts. It is the location where the prefrontal lobotomy was invented.

Clean Sweep: A fictional character, as in our reality there was no one to stop Spanish Influenza from sweeping the globe. By the way, the Epidemic of 1918 was called “Spanish” because that was the only country suffering from it that didn’t try to cover up its existence.

Interlude: Toy Plane (Part One)

VAZ-2101: A compact sedan introduced in 1970.

MiG-31: A supersonic interceptor aircraft first deployed in 1982. It was designed to take out any threats—missiles or jets—trying to sneak into Soviet airspace.

Gorbachev never did anything to save Petrov from his fate in the real world, so far as I can tell. But our Gorbachev also was not a closet Markist.

Interlude: Toy Plane (Part 2)

Su-15: A twinjet supersonic interceptor aircraft first deployed in 1965.

MiG-23: The predecessor to the MiG-31.

The first part of this chapter covers Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which in our world wandered into Soviet airspace and was shot down on September 1, 1983, killing all 23 crew and 246 passengers. The Politburo that was running the Soviet Union in the wake of Secretary-General Andopov’s collapse tried to cover up their blame, and President Reagan thoroughly condemned them for their reprehensible actions. This in turn led to fears that Reagan would use this incident as justification for a nuclear first strike, fears that fed into the paranoia surrounding Able Archer 83.

Gorbachev’s television address: My attempt to summarize his political beliefs as Secretary General.

The news ticker: The idea of scrolling news headlines across the bottom of the screen comes from the stock ticker, that stream of continuously-printed paper that reported live stock prices. The New York Times started displaying scrolling headlines outside its office at Times Square in 1928. NBC tried using a news ticker with the Today Show in 1952, but it was soon discontinued. CNN Headline News brought it back in 1989 for its original purpose of showing stock prices, and ESPN started using it for showing sports scores in 1995. Its use for news headlines didn’t become prevalent until the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when a panicked public demanded instantaneous updates on the developing situation.

Chapter 12: Let the Science Begin!

Risk is a strategy board game invented in 1957 by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse. It was sold by Parker Brothers from 1959 to 1991, when the whole company was bought by Hasbro.

To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel written by 1960 by Harper Lee. The protagonist of the book is the girl narrator’s widowed father, the honorable lawyer Atticus Finch.

A Video Cassette Recorder, or VCR, is an ancient device for recording videos, in an analog format! It’s true, I swear!

The Macintosh is a home computer first sold in 1984 by the Apple Corporation. The Macintosh 512K was the second version of the computer sold, with the memory quadrupled from the 128 kilobytes included in the original. It was sold from late 1984 to early 1986.

Carl Jung was a Swiss psychoanalyst who lived from 1875 to 1961. He was a student of Sigmund Freud, but then branched out into a number of original areas. One of his more controversial ideas was that all human beings shared the same set of not only instincts, but also ideas ingrained in the mind, the collective unconscious. Race memory is a mostly-discredited concept that entire memories have been passed down from the distant past of our species.

Chapter 13: Exactly as Advertised

Jell-O was invented by Pearle Bixby Wait in 1897. It was bought by Genesee Pure Food Company in 1899. During the period from 1925 to 1927, Genesee was caught up in a series of buyouts that led to the creation of General Foods. In 1990, General Foods was absorbed by Kraft Foods. The lime green flavor was introduced in 1930, and has become the stereotypical flavor of the dessert.

A virtual particle is when energy spontaneously converts into a particle, which then turns back into energy so fast that it is impossible to detect. Virtual particles are a major part of Feynman Diagrams, allowing all kinds of interactions to occur that would otherwise seem impossible. It’s the physics equivalent of a short-term loan, and its use looks suspiciously like magic, at least to me.

Young Frankenstein is a 1974 horror parody of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein written by Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder and directed by Mel Brooks. The Monster in the film was played by Peter Boyle. Here’s a YouTube clip that includes the glowing head effect.

The Visible Man and Visible Woman are a pair of educational toys made by Skillcraft. Each model includes a plastic skeleton and organs that are assembled inside a clear plastic skin.

The music box tune: One of the earworms that have been haunting the back of my head since childhood was the commercial jingle for the Holly Hobbie Oven. Luckily for your sanity, I failed to find it online. The safe room that Meridiem creates is based on Holly Hobbie décor. 2020 UPDATE: Oh my God, I found it—click this link to upload it permanently into your brain.

Interlude: The Enemy of My Enemy

“We begin bombing in five minutes”: This was an actual joke made by President Reagan prior to his weekly Saturday radio address to National Public Radio on August 11, 1984—minus the words “and all other Demoness-spawned nations”. It was not meant to be heard, and led the Soviet Far East Army to go on alert for thirty minutes when it was leaked.

Chapter 14: Luna’s Birthday

“It was the first time the darkness had ever betrayed her”: I realize now that growing up with the seeming inevitability of World War III and nuclear winter hanging over my head is the reason why I am so horrified by Nightmare Moon’s “night will last forever” speech, and why I am convinced despite all evidence offered up by later episodes that if she had won, it would mean the eventual death of all life on the planet.

1959: On February 3, 1959, during a tour of the American Midwest, the three singers Buddy Holly, J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson and Richie Valens chartered a small plane in Clear Lake, Iowa, to get to their next concert. The plane crashed soon after takeoff, killing all three passengers as well as the pilot, Roger Peterson. Singer-songwriter Don McLean used the event in his song “American Pie” to mark the moment when rock music started sucking, calling it “The Day the Music Died”.

The Columbia Record Club was a service that allowed customers to buy records through the mail. It was known for frequent promotions where certain records could be obtained for free or for one cent. And unlike record clubs run by other recording labels, Columbia had licensing deals that allowed it to sell popular records made by anyone. The club was founded in 1955 and was an immediate success, selling 10% of all of Columbia’s records in 1963. The sale of music through the club had pretty much ceased by 2001, the year that Columbia House was sold to the first of a long list of internet companies. By this time the primary attraction of the Columbia House brand were the series of videos that they sold on a “similar” model to the record club. “Similar” in this case because they advertised the same way and got you in with a free video, but different in that you were then locked into a contract where you got videos every month whether you liked it or not, and had your bank account automatically debited to pay for it. And also their customer list was continually being stolen because the long list of internet companies all sucked at security. The Columbia House brand has declared bankruptcy at least twice, but apparently still exists as of 2018.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer was the world’s premier progressive rock band; their album Tarkus was released in 1971, with the weird cover art painted by William Neal. Progressive Rock was a genre fusing classical music with rock—as an example, here’s ELP’s cover of “Hoedown” from Aaron Copland’s Rodeo. I don’t know that it was ever incredibly popular, but it existed from 1966 until the 1980s (and I suppose you could be stubborn and insist that it never actually died). Being a fan of both classical music and 70’s rock, I guess I can call myself a fan, but I definitely draw the line at the longer and more pretentious works—exactly the earsores that most people think of when they hear the words “prog rock”, if they recognize the term at all. FYI, quite a few popular rock bands of the mid- to late-80’s started as prog rock bands, including Boston, Journey, Genesis, Kansas, Foreigner and Styx.

New wave emerged as a genre of rock in the late 70’s, out of punk rock with some progressive and pop rock influences. It was noted for being deliberately quirky and with a high reliance on synthesizers. The genre pretty much lived and died on the new MTV channel—“Video Killed the Radio Star” by new wave group The Buggles was the first video ever played on the channel, and the majority of music videos played before 1987 were made by new wave groups…mostly because their videos were weirder than anybody else’s. The Age of Plastic (1980) was The Buggles’ first album.

The Best of Blondie was released in 1981. Blondie themselves was a rock band that straddled the line between punk and new wave, and was founded by lead singer Debbie Harry and lead guitarist Chris Stein in 1974. I consider Clem Burke to be one of the greatest rock drummers to have ever lived, and the linked performance of “Dreaming” (1979) to be one of his best performances.

Dan Rather was the news anchor for the CBS Evening News from 1981 until 2005.

Mike Gravel was a US Senator for Alaska from 1969 – 1981.

Chapter 15: The Flight to London

Bounce House of Tartarus: The band Oingo Boingo, original name “The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo”, started as an experimental theater group founded by Richard Elfman in 1972 and based out of Los Angeles. In 1976, Richard surrendered ownership of the group to his brother Danny, so he could pursue a career in filmmaking. Under Danny’s leadership, the group shrunk down and became a new wave rock band, completing the transition in 1979 with a record contract. From 1979 – 1984 the band made whatever songs they felt like, not carrying who they offended along the way: the song “Little Girls” is pretty clearly told from the point of view of a pedophile, but the same album had a song called “Capitalism” attacking the shallow socialism preached by most other contemporary bands. In 1985, the band changed record labels and their priorities. Their songs now appeared in lots of movies (“Weird Science”, “Dead Man’s Party”, “Just Another Day” and “Stay”) and the attempts to court controversy stopped. This was also when Danny Elfman began scoring movies, rising to become one of the most popular film composers of the 80’s and 90’s (Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, The Nightmare Before Christmas and practically everything else associated with Tim Burton, Darkman, Sommersby, the “March of the Dead” from Army of Darkness, Black Beauty, Dolores Clairborne, Men In Black—can you tell I’m a huge Danny Elfman fan?).

NBS: New Brass Sky, in case that wasn’t obvious.

Pershing II missiles arrive in United Kingdom: In our world, this happened on November 14, 1983. The Able Archer exercise ended on November 11th. Obviously, switching the order of these two events is much more dramatic.

Chapter 16: Bounce House of Tartarus

“I’m So Bad”: Here’s the song on YouTube. I honestly don’t really care for the “edgy” Oingo Boingo.

A happy little song about how much the singer loves underage girls [i.e. “Little Girls”]: As the music video shows, Danny Elfman is way too good at making creepy faces.

Frankie Goes to Hollywood was a British rock band that spanned several genres, including new wave. They started their career similarly to Oingo Boingo, with the controversy-attracting “Relax”. In this case, the song actually attracted a public uproar, which led the song to shoot to Number One in the singles charts. Their follow up, which also went to Number One, was “Two Tribes”, released in May 1984. The music video includes actors impersonating Ronald Reagan and Konstantin Chernenko engaging in a bout of mud wrestling. (Chernenko was Andropov’s short-lived successor and Gorbachev’s predecessor as Secretary General of the Soviet Union. In this story, I skip straight from Andropov to Gorbachev.)

The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979, and governed until 1990. This period corresponds with a strong turn to conservativism in the country. Her actions were strongly opposed by the artist community, leading to her demonization. I suppose you could argue that these actions saved her country from complete economic collapse, but she wasn’t above using a whole host of dirty tricks to accomplish this goal. The title of “Iron Lady” came from her years leading the Parliamentary Opposition from 1975 – 1979, when an anti-U.S.S.R. speech was lambasted by a Soviet Army newspaper, comparing her to “Iron Chancellor” Otto Bismarck of Imperial Germany. She immediately embraced the term, and it has since been applied to any strong-willed female politician.

The Sun is a tabloid newspaper. More like the tabloid newspaper, since this was the one that invented the techniques used by all of the others, and in some cases stooping even lower—like the photo of a topless girl on Page 3 of every issue. During the Thatcher administration, The Sun consistently backed the party line with fear-mongering and wild conspiracy theories.

World Sell-Out Tour: Oingo Boingo fans can pretty much be divided into two groups: those who believe the band sold out in their 1985 album Dead Man’s Party, and those whose love of Oingo Boingo is constrained to Dead Man’s Party. (I’m in the latter group.)

Stonehenge: There are all kinds of things I could say about Stonehenge and the Druids, but all that you can really say for sure is that nobody knew who they were…or what they were doing…

Prams and Kensington Gardens: The Infocom game Trinity begins in Kensington Gardens, where World War III suddenly breaks out during the player’s London vacation. The player survives by following a roadrunner through a magical portal. One of the puzzles involves using a pram. The ancestor of the pram was invented in 1733 by William Kent—two years early to have a 250th anniversary in 1985. And although walking prams through Kensington Gardens has always been popular, the pram was not invented there.

Kensington Gardens themselves was once the western section of Hyde Park. Hyde Park was a forest owned by Westminster Abbey since the days of the Norman Conquest. In 1536, King Henry VIII obtained the park for himself, and had it set up as a deer hunting park for royalty. It was opened to the public in 1637. In 1738, Queen Caroline had the western section converted into a landscape garden. In 1902, J. M. Barrie wrote an odd little novel called The Little White Bird, about the narrator’s attempts to manipulate the lives of two strangers he bumps into one day—he arranges for them to meet, fall in love, get married and have a son, at which point he pretty much claims the child as his own under the title of godfather. Large parts of the novel consist of stories the narrator tells to this boy, and in these stories are the first appearance of the character of Peter Pan, who would become much more famous in the play Barrie wrote in 1906. In The Little White Bird, Peter Pan lives with the other fairies in Kensington Gardens, coming out at night after the park is closed to the public to go on adventures. For this reason, the artist George Frampton created a statue of Peter Pan which was placed in Kensington Gardens and is one of the park’s primary attractions.

Genesis was an English rock band founded in 1967 with lead singer Peter Gabriel. They started out playing folk rock and moved on to prog rock before Gabriel left in 1974. Drummer Phil Collins became the new lead singer, and led the band towards being more popular into the 1980s. The single “Land of Confusion” was released in 1986, making it a bit anachronistic for his story. The song is a call to the common people to fight for peace despite the obfuscation of the world’s leaders.

Men at Work was an Australian new wave band, founded in 1979. “It’s a Mistake” is a 1983 single about military paranoia causing World War III.

“A world on fire”: The Oingo Boingo song “Just Another Day” (from Dead Man’s Party) is about a man convinced the world is about to blow up.

“The concert ended with a bang”: “Dead Man’s Party”.

Ultima was a series of popular role-playing computer games that started in 1981. The creator of the games was Richard Garriot, who went under the name Lord British. Ultima IV came out in 1984 and differed from its predecessors in moving away from a simple good-vs-evil structure into a game that attempts to shape the morality of the person playing the game, just the kind of ambitious goal that might attract an independent movie director into becoming a game producer.

Chapter 17: The Education of Luna

The quotes in this chapter are modeled after The Education of Henry Adams (written in 1907, widely published in 1918), an autobiographical work by the great-grandson of John Adams that won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize, and was called the most important non-fiction work of the century by The Modern Library—I would rate Toynbee’s Study of History at the very least as more important myself. It’s written in the third person, is quite self-important, and concerns itself with the inadequacy of a Nineteenth Century American education to handle the rapid changes of the Twentieth Century. That sickness quote was taken nearly word-for-word, with only the genders changed. The Education has some good ideas and storytelling, but a fair amount of it is a slog.

“Author of the original draft of the Declaration of Independence”: John Adams. I’m leaving out the names because the Adams family are Markists, and I didn’t want to invent new names for all of them.

“Key diplomat behind the Treaty of Ghent”: John Quincy Adams.

“One who single-handedly kept Great Britain out of America’s Civil War”: Charles Francis Adams, Sr.—the father of Henry Adams. This is an interesting aspect of the Civil War that is almost never included in the standard story—if the British had gone along with their economic interests in siding with the Confederacy, I don’t know how the Union could have won. Also, he died in 1886, so he had nothing to do with World War I. Henry Adams himself had a stroke in 1912 and died in 1918, so he had nothing to do with the War either.

Dusky Flyer: Adams’ mother Abagail Brooks Adams actually died when he was 51 years old.

The assembly line: The climax of The Education of Henry Adams was a description of an electrical power plant, and the possibilities which the author was able to foresee from it. I went with a more depressing contemporary development for Luna’s version.

“Damage to [Luna’s] corneas”: In other words, she had Nightmare Moon’s eyes.

Pan Am Flight 103: On December 1, 1988, this flight ended with the detonation of a (conventional) bomb, causing the plane to crash outside Lockerbie, Scotland, killing everyone on board and eleven more people on the ground—Air Force One was nowhere in the vicinity. An inquiry in 1991 pinned the blame for the bombing on two men working under orders from Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The state of Libya finally got around to accepting responsibility in 2003. As always with these sorts of tragedies, the evidence is not completely airtight, and therefore there are theories that other parties might be to blame. As far as this story’s concerned, however, it’s all Gaddafi.

Chapter 18: The Woman in Black

Heathrow is London’s main international airport, and one of the world’s busiest. It was opened as London Airport in 1946, and got its current name in 1966. It’s named after the former London suburb where it was built.

Omni was a monthly magazine that covered science news while also including science fiction. It was founded by Kathy Keeton and Bob Guccione and lasted from 1978 to 1997. It was also published in both the United States and United Kingdom, which is why I picked it for this scene.

The old woman in black comes from a character in the game Trinity. The player first encounters her in Kensington Gardens, and ends up taking her prized umbrella after she loses it. Later in the game, after you learn the secret of time travel, the umbrella saves your life when you suddenly find yourself falling from a height into Nagasaki just before its bombing. You give the umbrella to a little girl to get the solution to a later puzzle, and thus create a time loop, as the girl obviously survives the bomb and grows up to become the old woman.

John F. Kennedy is the primary international airport for New York City. It was opened in 1948 as Idlewild Airport, and was renamed to JFK in 1963, in the wake of the president’s assassination.

Chapter 19: Zero Hour, Part One

Pan Am Flight 103 was on a Boeing 747-121 aircraft. Here’s a diagram of the related 747-100.

Procter & Gamble is a company selling a wide range of cleaning agents and personal care products (and in 1985, also foods, snacks and beverages). It was founded in 1837 by William Procter and James Gamble. Popular brands under the P&G umbrella include Bounty paper towels, Charmin toilet paper, Gillette razors, Pampers diapers, Tide laundry detergent and Vicks cough syrup; and in 1985 included Crush soda, Duncan Hines cake mixes, Folgers instant coffee, Jif peanut butter and Pringles potato chips. Oh and by mentioning Charmin here, I don’t have to repeat myself in Chapter 25.

Chapter 20: Dead End—no references

Chapter 21: Going Backward, Part One

TARDIS: The time-travel device used in Doctor Who.

Time is an American weekly news magazine, created by Briton Hadden and Henry Luce in 1923. It is owned by Time Inc. Newsweek is another American weekly news magazine, created in 1933 by Thomas J. C. Martyn, a former editor for Time. In 1985, it was owned by The Washington Post Company; today it’s owned by IBT Media/Newsweek Media Group.

Polaroid cameras were made by the Polaroid Corporation, founded by Edwin H. Land in 1937. The company was known for making polarized lenses until 1972, when Land invented the first instant camera. The company went bankrupt in 2001, a victim of the worldwide switch to digital cameras. I later identify the specific camera “borrowed” as an SLR 680, which was made from 1982 until 1987. As this is my second time sneaking a Polaroid instant camera into one of my stories, I’m including a video showing the 680 in use, in case I managed to make any of you kids curious.

Cadbury is a British candy company, known especially for their chocolates. It was founded by John Cadbury in 1824.

Chapter 22: Going Backward, Part Two

Chaos theory has a history dating back into the Nineteenth Century, but its current form was created by Edward Lorenz and Benoit Mandelbrot in the early 1960’s. Major conferences on the subject were first organized in the late 1970’s. The field reached popular consciousness with James Gleick’s book Chaos: Making a New Science (1987), which led to its inclusion in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990).

In the game Trinity, the player steps through a strange portal in Kensington Gardens to find themselves in a strange fairyland dominated by gigantic mushrooms, running in a band from east to west. Each mushroom represents a nuclear explosion. The player learns how to navigate this world, and by entering specific mushrooms, is able to visit the sites of various nuclear explosions. Most of these sites are reproduced here as places that our trio of protagonists visit, starting with the Nevada Test Site explosion.

A grue is a fictional creature that lives in the dark and eats people. It was invented by Jack Vance for his Dying Earth series of books (1950 – 1984), and borrowed by Dave Lebling for use in Infocom’s first game, Zork (1979). In the game, the grue existed to keep players from trying to navigate without a light source, as that would have been a pain to program, hence the familiar descriptor: “It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.” The most-common light source in Zork is a brass lantern.

The Three Mile Island accident was covered back in Chapter 3—don’t you remember?

The Soviet bomb test in Trinity was not identified, but it did involve lemmings jumping off a cliff into the ocean as a powerful bit of symbolism, and Novaya Zemlya is the closest any Soviet site got to having a sea for anything to jump into. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have any cliffs, though.

(In real life, Andropov was nowhere near Tsar Bomba when it went off. And the idea that lemmings commit mass suicide when their numbers get too high was made up by a film crew for the Disney nature documentary White Wilderness in 1958.)

Chapter 23: Going Backward, Part Three

The descriptions of Nagasaki and Trinity are taken almost word-for-word from Trinity by Brian Moriarty.

In the game, the skink doesn’t get to hide in a crack in the bridge. Instead, the player is required to murder the poor creature with his or her bare hands, for no purpose that I can tell other than to obtain a perfect score. And for the symbolism, of course.

Godzilla is a monster created by Ishirō Honda for his 1954 film of the same name. Why am I explaining Godzilla when he didn’t get mentioned in the chapter? No reason…

The umbrella again: To Brian Moriarty in 1987, mankind’s extinction in World War III seemed inevitable. And so the goal of the game is not to go to Trinity and prevent the first explosion. Instead there’s some mumbo jumbo about altering the blast so it doesn’t wipe New Mexico off the face of the earth, and then the player finds themselves back in Kensington Gardens, poised to enter the portal again and repeat the sequence of events again and again for all eternity—this state of affairs is called “winning”. But with the Cold War over, the idea of truly winning the game of Trinity becomes imaginable, and that’s what I’m doing with this story. The first step in doing that is breaking the time loop.

Kimiko Mineko: The character had no name in the game, so I went through the list of survivors of Nagasaki, and got the first and last names from there (Kimiko Moriyama and Do-oh Mineko).

Chapter 24: Going Back to Trinity

Crystal’s clothing was taken from the ceremonial dress of the Hopi tribe, as depicted in Ceremonial Costumes of the Pueblo Indians (1991 by Virginia More Roediger). I would not be the least surprised if I got my research wrong and ended up with something deeply offensive. Please let me know if I did, and I’ll try to fix it.

Parts of the descriptions in this chapter come from the same sources as the Prologue; for example, the stuff about “Jumbo”.

In 1925, Georges Lemaître published a scientific paper where he used a flaw in Einstein’s General Relativity equations to suggest that the universe was expanding, which meant that it must have started as a “primeval atom”. Einstein himself solved the same flaw in a way that kept the universe constant, neither growing nor shrinking, and so Lemaître’s theory was not very popular until the 1930’s, when Edwin Hubble observed that the universe was indeed expanding. The concept was dubbed the “Big Bang theory” in 1949 by Fred Hoyle as a form of contempt, but as so often happens, the supporters of the theory soon adopted the mocking term as their own.

Kim is a novel by Rudyard Kipling, written in 1901. It won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The story is about an orphaned Irish boy who grew up in India, moving effortlessly from one culture to another. As he grows up he becomes embroiled in the “Great Game”, the Nineteenth Century cold war between the United Kingdom and Russia.

Klaus Fuchs was a German physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. He was also a spy for the Soviet Union.

The paperback book: The book that Stable Solution/Donald Hornig was reading in the tin shack while guarding the bomb at Trinity was the Desert Island Decameron (1945), edited by H. Allen Smith. The book was a collection of funny essays and stories, designed to entertain the American soldier in World War II during his moments of down time. I wanted to include a more substantial reference, but I wasn’t able to get a hold of a copy of the book, digital or paperback, to quote from. So instead I’m referencing the fact that all of Infocom’s heroes were basically packrats, stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down in hopes that it might be used to solve a puzzle. Well in both Trinity the game and Equestrian Business the novel, the Desert Island Decameron has no use whatsoever (well, it holds the bookmark, which is vitally important to “winning” the game, but the book itself is useless).

Chapter 25: Zero Hour, Part Two

“Call Me”: Here’s the requisite YouTube video of this 1980 Blondie single.

Chapter 26: New Meetings…

“Da plane! Da plane!” was a memorable catchphrase from the introduction to the American television show Fantasy Island. The show was in re-runs in 1985.

Telephone answering machines had been used by corporations and the rich since 1949, but they didn’t become cheap enough for mass consumption until 1984.

The Goddess of Mercy Hospital in London: I wasn’t thinking of a specific London hospital that this one replaced, but I guess the Royal London Hospital works as well as any.

Nicholas Meyer is best-known today in nerd circles for being the director (and uncredited co-writer) of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). He first became famous for writing (in my opinion) the best Sherlock Holmes novel not written by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974)—he wrote two more Holmes novels after that, but I never read them. He got his filmmaking diploma from the University of Iowa, so having him work on television in Canterlot is not that much of a stretch. He directed Time After Time (1979), about H. G. Wells chasing Jack the Ripper through time to present day San Francisco.

“A ground-breaking TV miniseries”: The Day After, which in our world aired on November 20, 1983, within days of the conclusion of Able Archer ’83.

Chapter 27: …And Old Ones

Goanna Guiseman: Based on Richard Feynman’s sister Joan. She’s an astrophysicist who has made important contributions to the understanding of the aurora, and the effect of the solar wind on Earth’s climate.

The Times is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It was founded in 1785 as The Daily Universal Register by John Walter, and changed to its current name in 1788. The paper originated “The Times” as a newspaper title and it invented the Times Roman typeface. It is owned by News UK, which itself is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Despite its uptight and proper reputation, it is thus run by the same people who run The Sun.

Interlude: The Day After

“A certain Mexican-American labor leader”: A reference to Cesar Chavez, who negotiated with Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California.

“O chem ty govorish?”: Russian for “What are you talking about?”

Hiroshima: Site of the first atomic bomb dropped on wartime Japan, on August 6, 1945.

Nagasaki: August 9, 1945.

Bikini Atoll: The site of 23 nuclear tests. The first was on July 1, 1946. The fourth, Castle Bravo, was the first public test of a hydrogen bomb, detonated on March 1, 1954.

Pérvaya mólniya: Russian for “First Lightning”—the codename for the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb test in 1949. The West knows it as RDS-1.

Snezhok: Russian for “Snowball”—the codename of a 1954 Soviet nuclear test at Totskoye.

In his 1965 autobiography, United States Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis Lemay declared that the proper response to North Vietnamese provocation would be to demand that they “draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.”

Chapter 28: Waiting

Hanford, Washington was the location of a complex used to produce radioactive materials for bombs, starting with the Trinity test. It was mostly shut down by 1971, with a lone plutonium-producing reactor running until 1987.

The stories told about Gus/Richard Feynman in this chapter are pretty much true, including Gell-Mann’s opinion of the “bird story”.

Chapter 29: Dea Cæli

The title is a play on “deux ex machina”, or “God of the Machine”. It means “Goddess of the Heavens”.

Roanoke Colony: I’ll let you look that one up yourself.

Arbus Rhiza: An arbuscular mycorrhiza is a symbiotic relationship between the roots of a vascular plant and a fungus. The fungus helps the plant to capture various nutrients, while the plant supplies the fungus with carbon. We pretty much wouldn’t have anything in the way of land plants without this form of symbiosis. The relationship between plant and fungus is still not that well understood, so I made the leap to suggest that the Cure to Cancer may well come from studying it.

Chapter 30: The Greatest Markist

“We Didn’t Start the Fire” is a 1989 song by 40-year old Billy Joel, listing the major events that occurred during his lifetime.

The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on January 26, 1986.

The Talmud is a collection of the teachings and opinions of thousands of rabbis during the four-century period starting just before the fall of the Second Temple in AD 70, which forms the basis of Rabbinic Judaism. The first complete edition was printed in 1523.

The Road Runner is a cartoon character created by Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese for Warner Brothers cartoons in 1949.

Cellular Radio Telephones: Taken from this Motorola commercial.

Epilogue: Full Circle

Since I don’t really have anything to comment on here, let me wrap up a few historical loose ends:

Mikhail Gorbachev became Secretary General of the Soviet Union on February 5, 1986. As he had promised, he reorganized the state to be more open, both with its own people and in its relations with other states. His first official meeting with President Far Shooter was on March 26th of that year. He demanded the shutdown of Star Wars. What he got was the replacement of the Pershing II missiles with the more powerful B61 missiles. Since the B61s removed the mobility advantage of the Pershing IIs, the net result was to reduce the possibility for thermonuclear war, which was exactly what Gorbachev (publically) and Far Shooter (privately) wanted in the first place.

As the historic meeting came to a close, microphones captured this conversation between the two world leaders:

Gorbachev: So, do you still think of the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’?
Far Shooter: No. No I do not.

& & &

Muammar Gaddafi, Brotherly Leader for Life for Libya and President of OPEC, was arrested on live TV like a common criminal from the manor in southern Scotland that he had rented to witness the nuclear annihilation of Air Force One on June 28, 1985. From there he was put on trial before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands.

The trial lasted nine years. The reason for the delay was not the matter of evidence—it was absurdly easy to prove that Gaddafi had used his nation’s oil riches to fund multiple acts of terrorism against the citizens of over thirty countries. No the problem was the precedent that would be set by a guilty verdict. It was one thing to put away Nazi lieutenants in the Nuremberg Trials for following the orders of a dead Adolf Hitler; quite another to lock away an acting head of state, especially considering how many other acting heads of state were guilty of criminal acts. And then there was the matter of where that nuclear bomb had come from—the truth would be very bad for the Soviet Union, which explains the two attempts on Gaddafi’s life during the trial. But in the end, Muammar Gaddafi survived long enough to be acquitted on a technicality.

During those nine years, the Soviet Union fell, along with the vast majority of communist countries. Libya had long since become a democratic state after a successful revolution led by a baker. As for OPEC, once the Soviet pressure relented they quickly restored the old way of running things. So Gaddafi finished his trial to find himself without a home and without a fortune. He was bounced around from the home of one schemer after another, all planning to use him as a pawn like he used to do to others in his glory days. And he was too desperate to do anything but put up with it. He is believed to have died of gangrene in 1998, but by this late date, nobody cared enough about him to bother to get the facts straight.

& & &

Far Shooter’s presidency ended in January 1989. After him, control of the presidency see-sawed between the two political parties. Two more Markists were elected, both members of the Bush family and both Republicans. Several Markists appeared in the Democratic primaries, but none reached the general election.

…And that’s my massively-complex re-imagining of the Equestria Girls setting as an alternate universe to our own world, in the hope that an infinite number of crossovers with both history and contemporary fiction might be attempted. A world where the highest ideals of the brony community are projected back a thousand years into the past, with the chance to shape the history of the world in ways both large and small.

To be honest, I highly doubt that anybody else will ever do anything with this setting. But you are more than welcome to take what you’ve read and run with it.

Edit, Five Years Later: Alright, I'll do it myself...