Laughter on the Wind
In memory of Ray Bradbury
The ships from Earth arrived in the middle of a warm summer day, drifting down from the sky on tongues of golden fire. All across the quiet planet they landed, from the southern harbors to the frozen northlands, and the humans emerged from their metal cocoons into the fresh air. They were travelers now, since their old familiar homes had become mazes of spun steel and glass, filled with wires and concrete channels that shielded them from the hostile outside world. Artificial food and sterilized water sustained them during the journey, much as they lived their lives before the trip, but now was time to explore their new world and bend it to their will.
At the base of a majestic mountain crowned by an enormous city lay an unremarkable small village where a single ship had landed. A young girl emerged into the bright sunlight with her father beside her, and the two of them proceeded slowly down the dirt streets.
“Where are the ponies?” asked the girl. “I thought there would be at least a few of them still here.”
“I told you before,” said the father. “The ponies are all gone now.”
“The survey crews can’t have found all of them,” insisted the girl. “Maybe there are still some in the village.”
“We received a message right before landing,” said the father. “The ponies were excited to see us at first, but as the lead ships in our armada grew closer, they grew worried. Then one morning, they were all gone, along with every single pony and other intelligent creature across the entire planet.”
“But the sun!” The girl pointed up in the sky. “Without Princess Celestia—”
“When the ponies left, the sun and moon resumed a normal course,” said the father. “We don’t understand it either, but the scientists say the world is stable for us to colonize.”
“But no ponies.” The girl frowned and sat down on the edge of a fountain, which still sprayed water over a stone figure of a happy pony. She tilted her head to one side and added, “I think I can still hear them laughing.”
“It’s only the wind blowing the water.” Her father stood up and stretched, checking the glittering crystal weapon he carried on his hip. “Can I get you to stay here and not wander? A group of us are going into the forest to make certain the monsters have all vanished also. If it’s safe, I’ll take you there sometime later.”
She nodded, and waited until her father had walked out of sight before taking off her shoes and wriggling her toes in the grass. “It must have been so much fun to live here,” she said to herself. If she closed her eyes, she could imagine the ponies trotting down the paths and singing, eating at the cake-shaped building and drinking…
The water was cold, trickling between her fingers and making them numb, quite unlike the tepid stuff that flowed out of faucets. There were… things in the water, tiny dark flecks that did not move, like—
“Dirt,” she said. “It’s not just on the ground. They drank the stuff too.”
After a moment to think, she leaned over and let the water splash against her face. At home, she would have been punished for wasting water, but water was everywhere here. It even tasted, which she could not believe until she took a second drink and luxuriated in the sensation.
The next day when her father and several of the men traveled into the forest with burners and weapons, she explored the village. There were so many exciting places that were still safe, as her father had sternly lectured. There was a round building with the remnants of a clothing store, as well as several rough cloth scraps that she draped across her shipsuit and danced across the floor as if she were a princess of ponies herself. Then the next day when her father trudged back out into the forest again, she found the courage to enter the building that looked like a cake, and played with the pots and pans in the empty kitchen as if she were a food synthist, preparing nutrition packets for her friends.
Every place she went, she could hear the distant laughter of ponies, from the building that smelled like all kinds of animal poo, to the strange glass castle that loomed over the entire town and cast rainbows across it at sunset. Her father did not share her desire to explore the pony town, but made sure she returned to the Earth encampment of plastic inflatable buildings and foam furniture before it got dark every evening.
The rest of the humans felt comfortable in the familiar, cautiously going out into the green and growing world during the day, but scurrying back to safety when the sun began to set. Only a few of the children went with her to explore the buildings and statues, to taste the sweet red fruits straight from the trees, and to crawl through the quiet train sitting on steel rails. It was a great deal of fun, allowing youthful human laughter to be heard so loudly that any imagined pony voices faded into insignificance.
Every day there were more young humans who followed her into the pony town to sniff the unfamiliar flowers, play among the short buildings, and discover new things about the missing ponies. They interlinked daisies and wore them like crowns, chased the bouncing bunny rabbits through the grass, and even held their own impromptu parade down the dirt streets when one of them found a hidden cache of musical instruments tucked away in a tree for some odd reason. Several even peeled off their drab shipsuits and dove into the deep stream that curved around the town, splashing and laughing at their youthful daring.
Then at night when all the adults were sleeping, the children crept to the tops of their sterile plastic buildings and watched the sky, filled with brilliant stars and a massive glowing moon. They traded imaginary stories about the ponies who had lived all across the world and where they could have possibly gone, then sang quiet songs filled with laughter that drifted on the breeze like the night moths and bats that flitted through the darkness.
One day when her father was taking a break from the hard labor of clearing the dangerous forest, she went to him and told of a wonderful discovery the children had made. He followed his child to the spreading boughs of a huge oak tree from which improbable windows and a door sprouted, and stood in silence when she touched the sign in front that declared ‘Golden Oak Library - A Memorial.’
“Good morning.” An image of a purple pony with wings and a horn faded into view, giving the father a friendly smile. “I’m Princess Twilight Sparkle. Welcome to the Ponyville replica of the Golden Oak library, which we have left for you as a memorial to the power of friendship. It was here that I learned how to become friends with ponies very different from myself. Come inside and I’ll show you around. You’ll notice the shelves are empty, because we decided that you need the freedom to write your own stories of friendship and fill the entire library.”
“No!” said her father when she followed the projected image to open the library door. “We can’t trust it. The ponies vanished without a trace except for this… creation of theirs. They left the whole world to us. This has to be a trap.”
“But it’s the Princess,” she insisted with several of the other children around her for moral support. “She just wants to be friends.”
“Then why did the ponies flee?” he demanded, gesturing with his weapon. “My decision is final. Tomorrow, the men and I will return here and burn this trap to the ground, as well as the rest of the pony buildings. We need the space anyway for more construction since there are more ships arriving every day. Now, go! Return to your rooms.”
Dejected and defeated, the children returned to the human encampment. That night, the silver moonlight shone brighter than ever, surrounded by a gathering of artificial stars that turned into more descending human ships in the morning.
At first, the missing child was chalked up to the confusion caused by the arrival of the additional ships. Then other families reported they too were missing children, and the messages flew across the world from one settlement after another. A crowd of people gathered to burn the oak tree, but the father placed himself in front of it with his weapon drawn. Across the world, many others gathered to defend pony places in hopes that some hint of their missing children could be found, but no clue ever surfaced, despite intense study. The fear slowly faded when no other child vanished in the night, but it never went away totally, and humankind watched every remaining child with renewed vigilance.
And so it remained for many years, as the human settlements became villages, then towns, and finally vast cities stretching to the sky in mighty towers of steel and glass. In small corners and underground nitches, only a few remnants of the pony world endured, hidden by the offspring of the lost and guarded against any interference by other humans. It is said that if you remain very quiet in the vicinity of these last pockets of pony influence, you can hear the distant laughter of children as they dance down the streets with their friends and play in the distant world that no others can visit, except in their imagination.
Perhaps when the human ships rise into the sky and leave the world empty once again, the ponies will bring their young friends and emerge from wherever they have been hiding, so they might share their world with us.
Until that day, we will watch and wait for the sound of laughter on the wind.
