A Child Behind a Telescope
Twinkleshine had barely started kindergarten when she first met the universe. Like most first meetings, it had been awkward, not under the best of circumstances, and a single instant that ignited a lifelong passion, which would inevitably end with late nights and concerned parents.
But that hadn’t happened yet. In fact, they were the ones who’d coaxed her gently out of the house, into a garden that was dark, cold, and miserable. She’d cried because she was supposed to be comfy in bed. She hadn’t understood why they’d gone on and on about stars and things, or why they’d waved binoculars about and stared upwards.
True, she liked the night sky. It wasn’t bright or hot like the sun. It was kinder on the eyes, and in later years did wonders for her skin, or at least she believed it did, which presumably was just as good.
They’d given her the binoculars and pointed. Moaning, she’d put them on and looked.
And she saw her first planet.
What had been yet another dot in the sky – one star among stars – became a face. One storm-spot stared back at her like the eye of a creature caught going about its natural business by a wildlife watcher. Bands of colour crossed the face and tinier dots hovered nearby. Moons, she learned later: at the time she’d thought they were babies.
Her parents had gone on and on, but she was no longer listening. She saw a new world, and the new world saw her. She barely noticed the cold, though she caught a cold the next morning.
So it began.
When she was old enough to learn her ABC’s, she got a book from her parents’ shelves. Sadly, they only had the one space encyclopaedia, and she couldn’t understand half the words, but here, she was sure, was a code, behind which hid the secret to a wonderland high in the sky.
She learned that telescopes were better than binoculars, and pestered her parents for one. She wanted to set it up right there and then, on the night after her birthday, but she fumbled with the stand and had to get Mom and Dad to do it for her. Finding something to look at took far too long. So long that it hurt.
For the first time in her life, Twinkleshine jutted her jaw. A tiny jaw, not used to jutting, and against a big world, so used to jutting jaws it probably kept catalogues.
The struggle began, night after night, but she could command the telescope now and the struggle ended when the planets became her friends. Jovia. Mercuria. Saturnalia with her cute “hat”, later revealed to be planetary rings. The book became her third parent, telling her of stranger things beyond, just out of reach of her simple telescope. Come the next night, she tried looking at a random star. It just looked like a smudge no matter how much she focused.
Was the book lying?
No. Never.
Next day, the book’s following page revealed the answer. She pestered her parents for a telescope with greater magnificent-cation, and got one once she’d figured out how to pronounce "magnification".
So she'd tried it, and what had she found? One star became many stars, all clustered together: seven sisters!
The idea and the sight made her giggle, as she stood out on yet another night and ignored her parents calling her in. Eventually, they picked her telescope up and brought it in, forcing her to follow. They chuckled. They weren’t bad ponies. Just concerned, was all.
But there were more secrets in the book. They had a refractor telescope, it said. Too many colours were distorting the images she was seeing. Indeed, she had noticed a strange tinge around the images. Blue on one side, yellow on the other.
Why?
She turned the page, and of course the book had the answer: light beams, crisscrossing through the focusing lens. Because it was hard to align them perfectly.
Perfectly.
Ha! Twinkleshine demanded perfection.
She pestered her parents, but by then she was well into the preliminary studies of unicornhood, and they were shaking their heads sadly. So she saved the allowance money they gave her, forgoing chocolates and dresses and, for one strange year when they became popular, pogs.
When she was old enough to read classics, she bought more astronomy books to keep her company, and they invaded her bookshelf. Then one day, she walked into a special shop she found in the high street of Canterlot and, facing a confused shopkeeper, slapped the money on the counter and pointed at what she wanted. She hadn’t gotten the hang of talking to strangers yet.
The reflector telescope met her that night. She set the lot up and focused the mirrors inside with the tuning knobs outside. Sure enough, the blue and the yellow were gone, though she wasn’t quite used to looking down a scope sticking out of the side.
Next day, some weird unicorn said hello to her in class.
Now, Twinkleshine didn’t know how to deal with suddenly being helloed, but she dreaded the thought of being rude, so she waved back as though hoping not to get helloed again. For her troubles, she ended up with the filly sitting next to her in the canteen and talking non-stop about nothing interesting. Twinkleshine couldn’t stop her, not that she wanted to risk her reputation by trying.
Somehow in all that, her so-called new friend came home with her. Somehow, this so-called new friend found the telescope and talked even more about that. And somehow, horrifyingly, that night when Twinkleshine set up, she had to cut her stargazing in half and let her so-called new friend have a look too. That shut her up for a bit.
It was quite nice.
But Twinkleshine didn’t invite her again. Night time was her time alone.
When she was old enough to apply for Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns, Twinkleshine learned about altazimuth mounting – what she had now – and the much slower but more refined equatorial mounting system. The book said it was better. Ergo, she bought one from the shop.
It was heavier. It had weights on it. It moved weirdly, as though not happy with the straight lines she tried to force on it. And it took ages to set up right; she had to keep finding the north star as a reference. But once she set it up that night… What a difference! Lines were replaced with smooth, curving angles – her new friends ascension and declination, or Sideways and Upsy, as she called them in her head.
Upsy was pretty straightforward – she just used degrees of angle – but Sideways was really weird. She could use degrees, of course, but she preferred to use arcseconds, arcminutes, archours; Twinkleshine started thinking of that dimension of space as time coming the other way. Made her feel like she was standing on a clock.
Within her chest, happiness bloomed in an unfamiliar garden.
And then was trampled on. Later, that weird unicorn kept asking after her telescope in class. Yet Twinkleshine's efforts to turn away or shut her out, if anything, made Twinkleshine feel ground into the dirt. That weird unicorn didn't even seem to notice.
Yes, she was annoying. On the other hoof –
No one else asked after her telescope. No one, not even her parents, who were starting to give her funny looks whenever they caught her reading the books or cleaning the lenses.
The flower grew back. Maybe it would help?
So, out of the blue, she invited her friend over. It was just a one-off, and so was the next night, and so was the next night, and so was the next night…
And she told her unicorn friend about her oldest friend the night sky, via her friendly challenger the ever-changing telescope.
From that moment on, the nights spent outside grew longer and longer. She wasn’t sure, after a few months, why or when this had happened exactly. Her weird unicorn friend always joined her.
Odder still, her parents no longer pestered her about staying up late. Oddest of all. Perhaps they’d just given up. She had stood her ground one of the nights when they began circling around the point, and nothing more was said from thereon out.
Her unicorn friend – Minute, or something – was someone to talk to.
And who talked back, Twinkleshine added hurriedly. Minute became a second Twinkleshine, and Twinkleshine saw on her friend’s beaming smile and wide eyes the moment of discovery: reborn, but this time seen from the outside.
They spent more and more nights out, for longer and longer. Even through Celestia's School, they invented and learned names for the stars. Twinkleshine wanted to tell Minute everything and didn’t dare try until, suddenly, she did. In that instant, Minute – Minuette, now – learned about Sideways and Upsy. The laughter had been gentle. Twinkleshine breathed again.
Both of them found the constellations, tracked the planets, saw the stars, and were dazzled by their first meteor shower: blazing rain. Minuette had tried taking a picture. Every night.
Sooner or later, both of them had to consider the upcoming exams. Afterwards, they'd have to pick specialist subjects. Minuette wanted to study a double course: History and Applied Chronology. Twinkleshine only had eyes for Astrophysics, the closest she could get to pure astronomy.
Her telescope gained greater aperture; she went to her shop and found the right Nag-ler eyepiece, wider and able to swallow more light. That changed everything; for the first time, the sky was well and truly lit up with stars hitherto undiscovered by her eye. She licked her lips and had to blink every time she peered into the eyepiece.
The haunting ghost of the exams claimed them. Papers, textbooks, dummy exams, lecture scribblings: Twinkleshine was ambushed and ambushed and ambushed over and over and over again. She was losing the night to her bedroom full of revision notes.
Each night, Minuette tried to see more and more. Each night, Twinkleshine took longer and longer before granting her a turn. She did schoolwork during her stargazing. She hunted stars – blue ones, red ones, yellow ones, giant ones, supergiants, dwarfs, twins, clusters, masses, maybe even whole galaxies, all with names, histories, spectral types, luminosities… as though looking for one to help her. Or save her.
Minuette tried to look, and got a bit pushy. She knocked the telescope over.
Twinkleshine snapped.
She said things. How her friend talked too much. How she got in the way. How she'd just knocked the telescope, and it'd take ages to set up, and anyway shouldn't she be studying for her subjects instead of going out socializing with all the other unicorns in their class? They couldn't smile their way through it or take pictures or talk as though that'd solve anything. No: proper, serious revision. That was important!
Silence for the rest of the night. Minuette went home early. Unusually, not smiling.
The next night, Minuette didn’t show up at all.
That night, her parents cheered up and talked to her more heartily at dinner. But she found her mind focusing less on stars and galaxies, masses and candelas, and more and more, however painfully, on Minuette.
In the end, Twinkleshine stopped going outside too. Besides, it was too cold, and too dark, and too miserable.
No, she belonged where it was safe.
It didn't last long. She was desperate.
One night before the final exams of the year, Twinkleshine got too hot and blinded by white paper, and went out into the night with her telescope. If she set it up in exactly the same way and looked for the exact same things as that night, then maybe, just maybe, she could do it again. Properly this time.
She couldn’t focus on much, though. Just the ever-familiar planets and a couple of bright white giants.
Under the red glow of her filtered torch – red light was essential to stop her burning her eyes in the dark with anything else – she pored over her star charts.
Found nothing.
Alas, the universe didn’t talk. She wished it would talk. Say something to keep her calm and steady, so she didn’t stammer so much trying to tell it she existed. There were no obligations. There was just… there-ness. The universe had grander plans than the cares of one silly little filly with a tube full of mirrors.
She went in early. For once, her parents didn’t smile or say anything over dinner. Small mercies.
Trying to distract herself, she ferreted through some old Hearth's Warming lists. One of the things listed was a laser.
Of course: she'd wanted a laser to point at the sky. A proper finder's laser, not just the finder’s scope she’d used when the telescope itself was too focused and narrow to navigate with. But lasers were expensive. Her weekly allowances were over by now. Not that her parents had said anything. It was what they didn’t say that told her all she needed to know. And what clothes they couldn’t afford. And how they looked against the backdrop of Canterlot.
Vaguely, she wondered what Minuette's parents were like. She'd never met them. She'd never gone round.
She didn't sleep that night. She didn't deserve to, and her filly heart knew it.
Exam day.
The revenge of the tutors.
The day when those who didn’t know were tortured by those who didn’t care.
Her mane was frazzled. Her mind fell to pieces. She pressed the pencil down so hard she left grooves on the desk, and the lead snapped and she had to put her hoof up for a replacement.
No one had talked to her after the test, not even those few unicorns she knew from the other departments. Lyra, or whatever her name was. Lemon… something or other… and the other one, what’s-her-face…
She managed to shuffle her way home, and had locked herself in her room, which suddenly wasn’t warm enough, or bright enough, to burn away the misery.
She wanted to go out that night, but knew she'd get no comfort. Perhaps it was the laser she wanted; at least that was what she tried telling herself. Or perhaps what she really wanted, most of all, was a magic telescope. One of those ones that found the stars for her. That even took pictures for her.
Pictures…
Sighing, she got up and traipsed out of the house. No point denying anything. What had she got to lose by now?
Minuette’s house was smaller than hers. Twinkleshine didn't knock for a good few minutes. Instead, she gawped at how Minuette had never mentioned anything like this to her in all the time they'd spent together.
But knock she did. Once. Rehearsing her apology over and over.
When Minuette opened the front door, it turned out to be dusty beyond the threshold. There were even cobwebs in the corners of the hall.
This was nothing compared to Minuette herself, though. Her mane was a mass of spikes. Her face had bags under the eyes – no, a pair of camper’s backpacks.
Minuette invited her in before Twinkleshine could even say "sorry". A phantom smile briefly faded across her muzzle. No one else was home. They simply let her get on with it.
Papers carpeted the floor, and Twinkleshine had to tiptoe through the lot.
They had orange juice. In silence.
For several minutes. Not looking at each other.
Eventually, they talked. Slowly at first. Like strangers.
Then for longer. Like strangers who’d found a history to talk about.
Then they met each other all over again; Twinkleshine talked of space, Minuette of time.
Finally, without any explicit signs or sayings, the last few months hadn’t happened. Sorrow and forgiveness weren't there one moment, and then had always been there the next. What had looked like two stars drifting apart was, in fact, a true binary system, merely curling along their natural orbits back towards each other. It was just a matter of where the telescope was pointing. A matter of perspective.
That night, Twinkleshine introduced Minuette to the planet with the babies. Minuette, as usual, tried taking a picture.
They reconnected with Sideways and Upsy – ascension and declination, Twinkleshine insisted, but Minuette called them Sideways and Upsy anyway.
What Minuette said stuck with her for the rest of her life. Or at least Twinkleshine felt it should do. In between adjusting the telescope along smooth curves, Twinkleshine said that the universe wasn’t kind, or gentle, or warm. She’d learned that now.
What Minuette said...
Well, Minuette pointed out that they, technically, were part of the universe. So logically, bits of the universe were kind, and gentle, and warm. It was just a matter of perspective.
Then she took a picture of the moon, because it was there and she had a camera and what was the question again?
Twinkleshine reflected that the night sky – cold, dark, and mostly empty though it seemed – was full of wonders. She’d always known. It was just nice to remember there were wonders closer to earth, in the warm and the light, where she could talk and laugh and hear someone talk and laugh back.
That night, after Twinkleshine added some more members to her star catalogue, Minuette introduced her to the history of science. They talked for ages, and in the end suggested going to a party together for Lyra, or someone-or-other. As Minuette said, there were always more friends to meet.
