Sweetie Finemare had packed her three-year-old twin daughters into her big green car to take a trip into town for shopping. There was a promise of ice cream involved if her daughters could be good.
Her daughters were playing at being scientists like their mother.
“I figgered it out!” crowed Sundreamer. “I know what the Sun’s made of!”
Sweetie turned and glanced back at her daughter. “And what’s that, angel?”
“It’s made’a sun atoms!” the little filly cried out as if this was the most profound physical discovery of the century.
Sweetie smiled at Sundreamer. “Yes,” she said, “You’re absolutely right. It is.” She turned back to adjusting her rear-view mirror.
“Yeah,” agreed Moondreamer, “lots an’ lots a’ Sun atoms, cuz the Sun’s so big. An’ they all squish togther real hard cuz’ there’s so many of ‘em!”
Sweetie had the rear-view mirror adjusted, reached out the window, twiddled with the side one. “Uh huh,” she said. She had a happy warm feeling when her twin daughters played this game.
“An’ when they get squished they get all hot cuz’ a the pressure and cuz’ things can’t be in the same place. They get so hot they burn up an’ that’s why the Sun shines!” said Sundreamer, continuing Moondreamer’s thought as she so often did.
“Yes,” said Sweetie, pressing the starter button. “That they do.” The Exclusion Principle, she thought. Get nuclei close enough and they can merge. The reason why nuclear fusion is possible. They must have stayed up and heard one of my late-night discussions with some of the other lab rats.
The starter engine made a creaking complaint. Sweetie pressed the button again. More complaints.
“Oh …” Sweetie remembered the contents of her back seat “… horsefeathers,” she finished rather tamely.
“They wanna go boom!” commented Sundreamer, illustrating this with an explosive sound from her muzzle and a wide gesture with her forehooves that nearly clipped her dark-furred sister.
“Yeah, but they can’t, cuz they’re too heavy to each other,” pointed out Moondreamer, as if this was one over on the white foal. “Is gravity.” She intoned the word with vast solemnity.
Sweetie gave the gas pedal a very tiny tap, careful not to flood the engine. She waited, then pressed the starter again. A slightly more encouraging coughing sound, and the engine turned over a few times, then died.
Oh, please Megan, don’t let it be the battery, Sweetie prayed to the goddess in whom she did not really believe. There’s no one around to give me a boost, and my whole day will be shot
“The heat and gravity fight!” theorized Sundreamer. “Pow! Pow!” she clapped her hooves together to emphasize her point.
“Who wins?” asked Moondreamer, curious about the outcome of the battle.
“Well if the heat won the Sun would go boom and the Sun don’t go boom. If the gravity won the Sun would go all squish and … I don’t know what would happen …” the concept of a space-time singularity was – as yet – beyond Sundreamer’s grasp “…the Sun don’t go squish.” Theory had been overruled by observation.
Moondreamer sucked on the edge of one hoof and considered the problem, her eyes going big at the implications.
“Baby,” scoffed Sundreamer, from the lofty superiority of her twenty-eight minutes earlier birth. She had it on good authority from their mother that hoof-sucking was not a sign of maturity.
Moondreamer’s eyes flared with anger. “Am not!” she countered.
“Are too!”
“Not!”
“Too!”
“Not!”
“Too!”
“Not not not!”
“Too too too to zillion power!”
Altering her debating tactics, Moondreamer jumped on Sundreamer, little hooves flailing ineffectually but occasionally managing to contact her sister’s head. Sundreamer cried “Mommy!” and tried to push the dark foal off her, their conflict unintentionally-mirroring the greater conflict between heat and gravity being played out ninety-three million miles away from the backseat of their stalled car.
Sweetie whirled round in annoyance.
“Stop it!” she said, but the two foals just rolled from side to side of the back seat, forming a compact ball of mostly-harmless sibling violence . “Stop it!” she said louder. Finally she deployed the ultimate raison de la mere. “Stop it or I’ll turn this car right around and go home!”
Moondreamer stopped, detecting a flaw in her mother’s thesis. “But, Mommy,” she began.
“No buts! Stop fighting with your sister.”
“But, Mommy?” Moondreamer glanced out the car window.
“No – wait, what?” Sweetie realized that the younger twin had a specific point.
“We are home,” Moondreamer peered more intently at their standardized Family Quarters, from which the car had not moved an inch since the conversation began.
Sundreamer saw the same thing and giggled.
Sweetie tried to maintain her stern expression, but the feat was beyond her vast intellectual abilities. She started to snicker, then chuckle, then laughed along with her daughters.
“Heh, you’re right. You two little imps don’t let anyone put one over on you,” Sweetie finally admitted, grinning at them. "Not even me."
The foals smiled back.
“Now make nice with each other,” said Sweetie.
Moondreamer looked at her sister ruefully.
“Sorry I hit ya,” she said.
Sundreamer allowed that there had been provocation.
“Sorry I called you a baby.”
The two foals hugged, formally ending their argument. They fought sometimes, but they always made up in the end. That was part of being sisters.
Sweetie beamed at them, then turned back to her controls.
“Third time’s the charm,” Sweetie said, expressing a belief which she knew was contradicted by basic probability theory, but also aware that a car engine heats up as it attempts to start and that therefore each attempt is not entirely independent of the earlier ones. She pressed the button.
The car engine squealed, then started, then rose to a healthy muted roar as Sweetie fed it a carefully-measured flow of gas. She had always been almost as good with machinery as she was with physics, to the despair of those charged with security at the Project, and specifically to the despair of those who put undue faith in locking mechanisms.
“All right!” she said happily. “We’re in business! Next stop the grocery. And later … ice cream!”
“Ice cream!” shrieked the foals in exultant agreement with their mother’s postulate.
Sweetie released the parking brake, shoved the stick into forward gear, pressed down on the accelerator. Tires squealing, the car shot forward propelling the scientific trio into new adventures, with the promise of ice cream.
END.
Author's Note
This little story is based loosely on a conversation I had with my parents when I was about five. My understanding of astrophysics was at that time a bit behind those of Sundreamer and Moondreamer Finemare.
Which is nothing of which to be ashamed, really. At least I didn't still suck my thumb.
Technically, it's a sequel to Chapter 1: "I Have Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds" of Trinity. It may wind up incorporated in a modified form into the planned Chapter 3. Luna was just too insistent in my sleep for me not to run this scene now.
