Ship of Fools - Chapter 21
Not Your Average Flat-Earther
[Start at the beginning of the novel: Prologue.]
[Go to the Table of Contents.]
Welcome back to Ship of Fools, my satire about a science journalist trying to make sense of conspiracy theorists, flat-earthers, moon-landing deniers, New Agers, and more.
Remember “Glow,” whom we met briefly in the previous chapter? Here she is, done with her Grand Canyon adventure and now headed back to California. Who might she meet along the way?
Music for the beginning of the chapter: Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube
Music to listen to toward the end of the chapter: Apple Music | Spotify | YouTube
PENELOPE “Moonglow” Himmelstein had just pulled through the Nevada border station to re-enter the US when she saw John Lennon — post-Beatles, medium-length-hair-and-sideburns John Lennon — hitching a ride at the side of the freeway. He was wearing a blue polo and long khaki pants, odd for a hot day. Of course she had to pull over, and not just because she hadn’t spoken to anyone for a week — well, except for that Creationist rafting group, but that was just for a few minutes.
She rolled to a stop next to him and slid down the passenger window. “Need a lift, John?”
He blinked at her from behind his granny glasses. “John?”
“You mean you’re not the reincarnation of my favorite Beatle?” Trying not to laugh, but she was afraid it came out as a smirk.
“What? Oh, ha ha. No, I’m Clive Cuddleshanks.”
“So, do you need a ride, Clive?”
“Ta, tha’ would be luvleh.”
She popped the side door for him and he threw his carry-on suitcase into the jumble back there, then carefully set down the box he was carrying.
“I’m Penelope,” she said as he settled into the passenger seat. “My friends call me Moonglow, or just Glo. But I guess you can call me Penny, because, you know…” She supposed it didn’t matter that Penny Lane was a McCartney tune, she still thought of John from the video.
“Oh, yeah, righ’.” At least he laughed, and his eyes had something of John’s gleeful spirit.
“You must get that all the time.”
“Only over ’ere, to tell you the troof.”
“So what brings you over — and to the Zone, no less?” She looked at him and his eyes darted away.
“You know, business…there was a convention…marketing my…” He trailed off, staring out at the desert.
“Are you all right? You seem a little spacey. Do you need some water?”
“Yeah, I’m dead gaggin’.”
She handed him her titanium water container. “Here, I hope you don’t mind sharing. I don’t do plastic bottles.”
He took a long pull, then handed it back. “Ta very much.”
She pulled the van back onto the freeway. “So what went wrong?”
“Wrong?” His eyes darted back to her, then away.
“Most business travelers don’t end up hitching through the desert.”
“Oh, righ’. It’s… complica’ed.”
“Mm-hmmm.” Just her luck, a week spent mostly alone in the Canyon, and she had to pick up a taciturn Brit. “Well, where are you headed then?”
“Los Angeles, I s’pose. Then back ’ome.” Now he just seemed dejected.
“I can take you as far as Vegas, but then I’m heading over toward Death Valley to visit my grandfather.”
“That would be great. So where are you coming from? You don’t live in the Zone, do you?” He was eying her pendants dangling from the rearview mirror, one a standard multi-faith symbol, the other a Magen David-Tree of Life mash-up.
“God no. Just visiting.”
“Oh, good. But you don’t worry about, you know…” Gesturing toward the pendants.
“Being a Jewish pagan amongst all those Mormon fundamentalists? Nah, they need tourist money too much to keep us away.”
“So where did you visit?”
“I was in the Grand Canyon for a week.”
“So was I! But only for a couple o’ days. That Cape Royal…” He shook his head and whistled.
“Really? Then I was just a few thousand feet below you. And now we meet here. It must be fate.”
He looked over at her, impressed or shocked. “So you were serious when you said you were in the canyon. Not by yourself, I ’ope.”
“Sure. It’s the only way to commune with the Ancients.”
“The Ancients?”
“Their old cliff dwellings and rock houses are down there.”
Half her consciousness was still down there, too, in the dreamtime of the Canyon. After five days, the place had soaked into her and now she was having the usual trouble readjusting to the world of cars and highways and cities. Soul-lag, she called it. She’d hoped a conversation with a stranger would provide an antidote.
“So wha’, you go and camp in these cliff ’ouses?”
“No! That would be sacrilege. I just camp in view of them and think about the people who came before.”
“But isn’t it dangerous, hiking by yourself?”
“Sure, the trail’s steep and the off-trail bits are rugged, but what we’re doing right now is more dangerous. And if I fall and break a leg…well, them’s the breaks, as they say.”
The conversation lapsed and they spent some time staring out at the desert. “Cor, look at tha’,” Clive muttered, shaking his head.
“Big, isn’t it? First time?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t have a mental breakdown on me now.” He gave her a quizzical look. “A lot of people, first time they’re actually in it, can’t handle the challenge to their view of themselves and their place in the universe. If you’re accustomed to cities and towns or even a nice cozy forest, it can be a real ego-crusher. Just what a lot of people need, really, but some can’t handle it.”
“I can see tha’. But me ego doesn’t need any more crushin’ righ’ now.”
“I actually find it comforting. Kind of like looking at the stars, puts humanity and our petty troubles into perspective.”
He only smirked at that, she wasn’t sure why.
After a bit more staring at the desert, she asked, “So what’s in the box?”
“The box?” He sounded so hopeless. “That’s… that’s me astroanamorphoscope.”
“Astro-what? Sounds interesting, whatever it is.”
And then it all came out. He was a flat-earther, which explained the smirk. She’d run into a few of them before — how could she help it, considering her beliefs and her profession? Most of her friends were seekers of one sort or another, looking for any kind of hidden, arcane truth behind the everyday one. One had told her he liked her nickname and guessed she must know the truth about the moon — that it cast its own light, a cooling light. Which just sounded bat-shit crazy. She’d spent enough time looking at Luna in all her phases to see that it was an orb reflecting light from a different source — the sun, obvs.
This is what she loved about gazing at the planets and the stars, that if you looked at them long enough, you could see the patterns for yourself, see how they moved together in three-dimensional space. And not just see it, but feel it in your body, a much deeper kind of knowing than brain knowledge. It made her feel more a part of everything, to think that the same laws that held her here on Gaia, and that created the waves she loved to surf on, were the ones governing the universe. It all made sense — in both senses! — and it helped her own life make sense. Then for someone to tell her all of that was some sort of hoax — it wasn’t just an argument about facts, but a personal affront to her beliefs.
And the universe most flat-earthers believed in — if you could even call it that — was so cramped, with no distant stars or galaxies, and even the sun and the moon were supposed to be just a few thousand miles above the Earth, with some sort of dome enclosing it all. Her entire being rebelled at the thought. How many nights had she spent gazing up at the stars in wonder at the infinite distances of it all? Where was the sense of wonder on a flat earth covered by a dome? Her crown chakra shrank to contemplate it, as if that dome was pressing down on the top of her head. And plus, if there was nothing beyond the dome, how would the ETs visit? If they existed. Penny was agnostic on that, though it was nice to think that life on Earth wasn’t the only life in the universe.
But Clive seemed different from your average flat-earther, smarter, certainly smarter than she was about math. He hadn’t come at it from a general distrust of science, as the other flat-earthers she knew had done, and he hadn’t migrated over from other conspiracy beliefs either. It was just where the math had led him, or so he claimed, combined with the strangeness of physics — and there was plenty strange there, when you got into string theory and such. But how could such an obviously smart person come to believe something so obviously wrong? He must have started off with a false premise, was all. Maybe that refractive property of electromagnetism he kept talking about, which meant the sun and moon were never where she thought they were.
And then he got to the part where the people in the Zone had basically stolen his invention. It explained his stand-offishness at the beginning — of course he didn’t want to admit he’d been duped. Now that he was talking about it, the wry way he described his own foolishness was charming. At least he didn’t seem completely lacking in self-awareness.
“Maybe it’s a good thing,” she said when he was through.
“Wha’? How d’ye reckon?”
“Well, it sounds like you came out of it with a good chunk of cash.”
“But for ten years of me life!”
“And you’re what, thirty? Not too late to start over.”
He scoffed at that.
“Look, I’m from California, the land of starting over. You can drop this whole flat earth thing and do something else, maybe go back and get your degree.”
“Bu’ why…”
“Because you’re wrong. Gaia isn’t flat, which you’d realize if you just got out a bit, traveled more, and looked around. A-round, get it?”
He didn’t laugh at the bad pun, maybe because he was gaping as if someone, maybe her, had hit him with a two-by-four.
“You’re not used to people telling you you’re wrong, are you?”
“Wha’, and you are?”
“Sure. Goes with being blond and female. Men are happy to explain how things actually are while telling me I should smile more. Which is funny, since I’m pretty happy, and smile a lot of the time.”
He didn’t have anything to say to that.
“Look, I’ve got an idea — why don’t you come with me to my oppa’s? He’s got some conspiracy-adjacent ideas, or at least evidence, so you and he have something in common. Then I could drop you in San Berdoo and you could get a train into LA. Or…”
She paused to consider. He wasn’t quite what she’d imagined when she’d stopped to pick up a John Lennon look-alike, but his eyes still looked dreamy behind those granny glasses, with something of John’s trickstery glint about them when he smiled or laughed. And the wounded puppy look he had right now only added to the effect. “Or you could come with me down to San Diego, and I’ll show you the Earth is round in about five minutes. I can see how that would be a challenge to your world view, but there could be… compensations.”
He considered for a moment. “I could do…”
“Wait. You’re vaccinated, aren’t you? I don’t usually do them, but anyone who visits my Oppa has to have their COVID-3 shot.”
“Yeah, for sure. But you’re anti-vax? And you’re just after telling me ’ow wrong I am?” He was smirking again, with that wry gleam in his eye.
She guessed she deserved it, after challenging his beliefs. But she had solid reasons for hers. “Sure. Why’s it so hard to believe mega-corps would risk our health just to make money? I mean, history is filled with plenty of examples.” The list of bad corporate behavior while mangling or covering up science was long — from tobacco to sugar to opioids to CO2 — too long to go into without sounding half-crazed. “Why is it easier to believe they’d lie about the Earth being round than about the safety of their vaccines?”
“You still ’aven’t said owt about the vaccines themselves, ’ave you?”
“They’re not natural, and that’s enough for me. I’d rather let my own immune system fight off the diseases.”
“Because tha’ worked so well wiv polio and smallpox.”
She didn’t like where this was going, they’d been getting along so well before. But she didn’t want to back down. “Sure, those are the poster diseases the pro-vax corporations use to sell us on all the rest. But there are so many now. Maybe a few are worth the risk, but you can’t vaccinate against everything. At some point, all of that cure becomes worse than the disease.”
“But you still get your COVID shot.”
“I figure that one is worth the risk. What’s a little more mercury if I get to see my Oppa?”
Her music stream came to the rescue, switching to a favorite song she had to sing along with. “Two little feet, to carry me across the mountain…”
“’Oo’s this then?”
“Greg Brown? Shoulda-been poet laureate at the turn of the century. I hear the voice of the Ancient Ones/chanting magic words from a different time…”
The van putted through the desert, self-driven semis passing on left and right.
“We have no knowledge and so we have stuff and
stuff with no knowledge is never enough to get you there
it just won't get you there”
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this chapter, please give it a like, a share, a restack, or a comment. And if you really enjoyed it, I hope you’ll buy me a coffee or upgrade to a paid subscription.
Who do you think will win the debate, the flat-earther or the anti-vaxxer? And who’s familiar with Greg Brown?
Next up: Chapter 22, “Outnumbered and Outgunned,” in which Slim and Shorty discover that for every action, there is an opposite but sometimes more extreme reaction.