Hoofprints

a My Little Pony fanfic, of sorts

Let’s talk about importance.

Obviously, the universe doesn’t care about any one date more than the next, nor for any second more than any other. The universe doesn’t even know what a second is, let alone a date. Humans do, it’s true, but what they care about most of all is the stories they tell about these important moments. It's not the moment, but the story that's important. The stories are real to them, and times long past, well, those are beyond reach. The humans can no more get to them than—hah—than walk to the Moon.

But humanity’s ever been bad at taking ‘no’ for an answer and got to the Moon, in the end. It did so using magic. Oh, it was exceptionally understandable magic: take a witches’ brew of long-chain hydrocarbons and mix them all up just so, now introduce it to so much oxygen you’ve squeezed and chilled into being liquid, and then step way back and watch the party in the exhaust nozzle.

But that’s just one perspective on it. The other is that wizards built a tower to pierce the sky, and filled it with air that was made so it would burn. This bewitched air burned with such fury that the tower flew like an arrow, all the way to the Moon, carrying people who—somehow—lived through the experience.

See?

Magic.

And just like they climbed to the Moon—what did they expect to find up there, do you think?—so, too, did humans reach the past. And just like climbing to the Moon they used magic to do it. It turns out if you really cozy up to a black hole—a small tame one, of course, a friendly one—you can persuade time to go backwards just a little bit. You’ll need some magic, naturally. Demon’s breath, dragon’s scale, matter with negative density... That sort of thing. And with the right spells, you can borrow a few photons here and there. A bit of scattered starlight from times long past. Nobody would miss it.

Honest.

So. Right. Importance.

When humans finally reached the past, and got to peer at it, the concept of an important date suddenly meant something. Important was what humans thought it should be, and it was important because they peered at it. And, time travel being what it is, this meant that the dates were important all along. Always a bit special. Always momentous. With so many eyes and eye-adjacent things fixed on them how could they not be?

Pay attention. A man is about to go through one of the most important moments of all time. You wouldn’t want to miss it. Of course, time travel and all that, he was always about to go through that moment. Or had gone through it. Time travel is hell on grammar and the human brain. Hold on and try to steer with your knees.

So a man—by all accounts an astounding man—is about to go through one of the most important moments ever. Humans, being human, have given this moment a name. July 21st 1969 02:56:15 UTC they called it, or some of them, at least. Not very poetic, but it is precise.

This man is about to step onto the surface of the Moon. This, on its own, is not that impressive. Octogenarians hike all across the Mare Tranquillitatis. Or have hiked. Or will hike. One or more of the above. What is impressive is that he’s the very first to do it. Humans, being creatures of linear time, are very impressed with that sort of thing. And being impressed, they are curious. And being curious they look. They look a lot. And so many eyes, in so small a space, so many stolen photons, in so narrow a time-slice, well, something was bound to give.

It did.



A woman, lean and tall with staff in hand, stands in the savannah. She looks up—a sudden impulse—locking eyes with the Moon and in its surface she sees the face of a goddess.

She is not wrong.



A child looks at her parents in confusion. They are so intent on this little screen, and it isn’t showing anything interesting, not really. It’s all a jumble—white ground and sharp shadows. The child looks down at her toys and then up, grasped with wild surmise. She knows something and can’t quite place how she knows it or what the knowing encompasses.

Her parents think she’s afraid and her mother picks her up, holds her and tries to explain. There’s a man on the Moon, now, she says. An explorer.

Is he there to rescue the princess, the child asks?

What princess?

The one on the Moon. She’s been there for a long time and she’s very lonely.

Her parents laugh.

She doesn’t.

For the rest of her life, she’ll remember moonlight as something a little bit sad. A little bit forlorn. But she’ll never remember why.

A unicorn filly looks up at the Moon. She could never quite see the mare’s head that was supposed to be there. She’s tried, but it just looks like spots. Lighter spots. Darker spots. Just noise that stubbornly refused to resolve into anything at all, let alone dark and shuddersome mare of legend. Tonight, however, the light of the moon is silvery and beautiful and she knows there is something special about it.

There’s somepony up there, she says.

Her mother lifts her eyes and smiles. No, dear, it’s just a story, all that about Nightmare Moon. It’s not real. There’s nopony on the Moon.

No, no, not a pony.

What then? A dragon? Her mother tussles her mane, strands of it as white as the moonlight, and smiles.

No! Not a dragon! A...thing. In... in white and gold, that walks on two hooves in... in armor never meant for war. And, oh, it’s so very far from home.

Her mother laughs again, kindly. Foals have such imaginations.

A human who’d probably put their sex as ‘undecided’ if someone were so rude as to ask, looks at an image. It’s the image of a man, clad all in white, wearing a helmet with a gold visor, amidst a landscape of magnificent desolation. In the eyes of this man, eyes that they have spent a long time teasing out of errant photons stolen from the past, the human sees something. Shock. Surprise. Tumult even beyond the time and place the man is standing in.

The human has nightmares about those eyes.



A splinter intelligence of the core mind of what was once called Andromeda looks into the past. This is not difficult. It tries to comprehend what it sees. This is more difficult. Worse yet, it tries to explain what it is it sees. This proves to be impossible. The clean language of the machine is, for the first time, inappropriate. It’s too precise. Too exact. In this situation of uncertainty it will have to reach back to the glorious inexactitude of the primitive languages of the two species that birthed it and its kind countless eons in the past. Gone now, but for their many children flitting and dancing between stars, but never forgotten. If it could, it would smile. Such a wonder not to know something! It speaks.

“Anypony think time’s...fractured over there?”



Now look what you did. Time’s broken. Fractured. Cut. Too many eyes, too little space. And you certainly weren’t helping. No. You are right. Apologies. You were told to look. Well look then. The damage is done. Has been done. Will be done.

Conjugation is a filthy habit.

Look.

The man is descending the stairs from his magic ship. He hasn’t spotted the fracture yet. Won’t be long, though. He knows that he should be feeling the momentousness of the occasion, this man, but he isn’t. All he can think about is how uncomfortable it all is, the suit and the stairs, all of it. Later the passage of time will gild those memories, but for now, he’s focused on the sheer hideous uncomfortableness of it all. This will soon change.

He’s close to the surface now. It looks like fine, fine powder. Like icing sugar. He steps on it carefully and clears his throat. He has something important to say.

“That’s one small step for—”

And that’s when he noticed the hoofprints in the powder.



Can you hear it? No? Really? The sound of time snapping. Well, it is quite loud. No telling what happens now. Or if there is a now. Technically what the man saw next never happened. There’s proof, too. Incontrovertible videographic proof.

All he has are memories.

Hoofprints. Hundreds of them, winding and overlapping, like a crazed mandala. So many he’s amazed he’s never seen them before. He’s amazed he hadn’t seen them landing. He’s amazed humans hadn’t seen them from Earth, there were so many. He lifts his eyes, trying to see how far they go.

They go all the way to the horizon, ever more complex, ever more involved. A delicate lace tracery, with whorls now symmetrical and even, now wild and swooping. Hoofprint over hoofprint over hoofprint, like an army directed by a General-Choreographer rode over the lunar surface in exacting time over centuries. It’s a sight to chill the heart, but the man doesn’t see this.

Above the horizon, the sky is beyond alien. The stars seem closer, winking in patterns and glowing, ghostly and pale. Like the Starry Night brought to life. It’s an amazing, astounding sight, but the man doesn’t see this, either.

Beyond the stars, two Earths hang in the sky. One’s the familiar one, the one he’s watched recede for three days, the beautiful blue marble, precious and fragile like a soap bubble and the other is... alien. The continents are in the wrong places, the clouds swirl the wrong way. It’s a sight to provoke wonder and fear in equal measure, but the man doesn’t see this either.

All he sees are the eyes.

Large—too large to be human—teal eyes. But that’s not what arrested the man so. It’s a wonder, sure, to see eyes where no eyes should be, but the sight before him is replete with wonders, great and small. And they are beautiful eyes, it is true, but beauty, simple, complex, stark, gentle, beauty to satisfy anyone and everyone is not in short supply. Not here. What drew him in, what made him unable to look away, was the pain. There was suffering in those eyes, and sorrow, and loneliness, and a thousand other emotions in ceaseless turmoil. They were the eyes of someone in Hell.

The man wants to say something—anything. He is not unkind, never that, and the eyes break his heart. For a moment—a wild, insane, beautiful moment—he thinks that that’s why he had come all this way, so very far from home. To help. To take away at least some of the pain. No-one should suffer so. He reaches out and—



And nothing.

This all never happened.

Weren’t you paying attention? It never happened. Time just shuddered for a bit. Temporal stress or some other fancy word. The man is back right where he started. Alone in such an important moment, surrounded by the striking landscape of an empty, unmarred Moon—desolate, yet beautiful, in a stark sort of way. Obviously this is before they built the park, or the restaurant with the rotating observer lounge and curly fries I can really quite recommend. So the man stumbles just a little bit but regains his equilibrium. He’s nothing if not competent.

“—man, one giant leap for mankind.”

It’s fine. Nothing happened. No mandala of hoofprints. No twin Earth, no alien sky, nothing. And the eyes...well. The momentousness of the occasion got to him. Had to be that. Had to be. Still, to be safe he decides never to speak of it. Not a word to anyone. And he keeps his promise. He never manages to forget, however, no matter how hard he tries.