Ship of Fools - Chapter 23
Orbital Motion
[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.
Penny and Clive have arrived at Penny’s grandfather’s place in the desert, and now Clive is getting some distinctly unmixed signals from Penny.
Here’s a content warning you might want to skip if you don’t want spoilers. But if content warnings are important to you, here it is: this chapter contains an explicit sex scene (the only one in the novel). It exists more for laughs than titillation. Puns over prurience!
“ARE YOU SURE you kids won’t spend the night?” Ben Himmelstein asked. “It’s a long drive to San Diego.”
Clive had just met the old man that afternoon but already liked him, despite their different beliefs.
“No, Oppa, I told you,” Penny said. “I’m teaching four classes tomorrow afternoon.”
“Ah, well, at least you helped me finish off the brisket. Ruthie’s recipe never disappoints, but I can’t eat it all myself.” It was the second night of Hanukkah, and they’d each taken a turn lighting a candle on Ben’s menorah. “I just worry about you driving so late.”
“I promise, if I get tired I’ll pull over and we’ll camp.” Was that a grin she was directing Clive’s way?
Ben looked from her to Clive and back. “Ah, youth. I’m sure you’ll enjoy yourselves.” Which didn’t make Penny blush at all; she was definitely grinning at Clive now. The fact that he didn’t have his own sleeping bag or any other camping gear made him wonder where he was going to sleep. He’d seen the bed in Penny’s camper van and it would only accommodate two people who knew each other extremely well. But her smile was dispelling any doubts on that score.
The truth was, his head was spinning. Just that morning he’d been surrounded by the peace and solitude of the Grand Canyon, and now that seemed to belong to another life, after everything that had happened that day. They’d arrived in late afternoon, after a stop in the heart of Las Vegas for a refill of biodiesel — “No fossil fuels for me,” said Penny, which explained the smell of day-old chips Clive had noticed the minute he’d climbed in. Arriving at Ben’s house in a community that was little more than a wide spot in the road, surrounded by nothing but a few strange trees and miles of hostile desert, Penny had given her “Oppa” a quick hug, then headed straight for a shower, leaving Clive to get to know Ben on his own. It was awkward, not to say tense, at first.
“I’ve warned her not to pick up hitchhikers, but does she listen to an old man?” Ben complained. “But you seem nice enough.” He still eyed Clive skeptically. “You’re not an axe-murderer, are you?”
Clive snorted. “If anyone’s likely to ’ave an ax about ’em, it’s Penny.”
“And don’t you forget it.” Wagging a finger at him. “She can take care of herself, as she keeps reminding me. I’ve talked myself hoarse telling her not to travel in the Zone by herself, but does it do any good? They’re no fans of the Chosen People over there, let me tell you.”
“I found tha’ out on me own, actually.” Clive told him about the Red Glasses with their Jew Alert and Holocaust Truth modules. “And yet they claim not to be Nazis or white supremacists.”
The old man scoffed. “That and two bucks…”
Ben had wanted to know more about the ’morphoscope and the flat earth, but seemed no more convinced than Penny had. Clive asked him about his own conspiracy theory, which he seemed surprisingly uninvested in. Soon Ben was showing him old documents and photos. The evidence for a completely different type of moon landing hoax was interesting, not to say compelling. Ben seemed to halfway think it was all a load of bollocks, but for different reasons than Clive’s — the moon wasn’t what people thought it was, much smaller and much closer, so there’d be no landing on it. Maybe Ben was just a normie who’d had this story dumped on him.
It helped that they’d both met Elizabeth Dare. Ben had a high opinion of her, though her article had actually increased his belief in the Herzog-driven hoax. “I never asked her to keep my name out of it, and she didn’t have to portray me as such a kook. If she felt that was necessary, someone must have spooked her. And if anyone that powerful wants to keep it a secret, there must be something to it.”
He seemed chagrined that his granddaughter was anti-vax. “If she’d only known anyone struck down by polio, as I did, she wouldn’t fall for it.”
“Fall for what?” Penny asked, emerging from the back of the house in an old bathrobe of Ben’s, toweling her hair, even more radiant with the layers of dust scrubbed off.
“You kids and your conspiracy theories. You’ve had it too easy, is what. You never had to worry about losing your life or your health to a random disease. It makes it easy to just believe whatever you want, as if there are no consequences.”
“Oppa…”
“The 1960s is when it all began to change, with all of that questioning authority. Not to say that some of the conspiracies weren’t real. We got into at least two wars on false pretenses, and of course no Black or Jew can be unaware of the conspiracies carried out against us. But at some point you have to exercise some judgment, don’t be so credulous of incredulity.”
“Be skeptical of skepticism?” Clive offered.
“Like you are with your moon landing story?” Penny demanded.
“You know I have my doubts about that.” He looked at Clive and then back at her. “And don’t tell me you’re going to fall for this flat-earth BS.”
“Of course not! I’m going to take him to the coast and show him. It’s so obvious.”
Clive scoffed. “If you’re finking of showin’ me a ship disappearin’ over the ’orizon, I know all about tha’. Modern optics’ve shown it doesn’t ’appen.”
“Only in the world of YouTube.”
A tense silence followed, broken by Ben. “Looks like we have ourselves a Mexican standoff.”
“Oppa!”
“I know, I shouldn’t call it that, but those were always my favorite scenes to shoot, even without guns. Three people in equal opposition, the audience never knew what was going to happen next.”
“So, wha’ ’appens next?” Clive asked. All he knew was he liked it much better when Penny was smiling at him, not frowning, as she was doing now. He shrugged, hoping to ease the tension. There were times when he wished he’d never doubted the roundness of the Earth.
“It’s Hanukkah. We’ll put our differences aside, light the candles and say the blessings, and then I’ll heat up the brisket and make a batch of latkes. A glass of wine and talk of other things and it will all be fine.”
“As long as you have something besides Manischewitz,” Penny said, half grinning. “That stuff has driven families apart.”
As they went in to light the candles, Ben said, “I’m glad to see you haven’t desecrated your body with more of those tattoos.” Clive gathered from his tone that he wasn’t too serious.
“None where I can show you!” Penny teased.
Ben was right, their mood did lighten with the lighting of the candles. Clive didn’t usually celebrate, but he’d found the ceremony quite moving, especially the way the candle light made Penny’s skin glow. But then the candles had burned down, the dinner dishes had all been washed, and Penny had changed into a sundress covered in a weather-worn Patagonia jumper. She seemed anxious to leave.
“I’ll text you when we get home, Oppa, but that probably won’t be until tomorrow.”
“Ah, another sleepless night. I thought those days were done when your mother and uncle left home.”
Penny gave him a kiss, Clive shook his hand, with a wish that they’d meet again, and then they were back in the camper van, its headlights tunneling through the desert night.
It wasn’t long before Penny pulled the van off the paved highway and onto a sandy jeep track leading into low desert hills. Strange bushes and tan or black boulders loomed up in the spill of the headlights. “You know this place?” he asked, wondering what he’d gotten himself into now.
“Yeah, I’ve got a spot I like to camp up here. Oppa’s place is a little cramped.” She looked over at him. “What? You seem worried.”
“Me? Nah.” Nothing to worry about except a flat tire, a thrown axle, a cracked oil pan, the water running out, or worse, coming across the crazed psycho-killers and Nazis the place supposedly teemed with.
But after a mile or two, Penny pulled the van into a wide spot away from the jeep track. “Here we are,” she said, hopping out and opening the side door of the van. She pulled out an armful of firewood and an oil drain pan, a metal one. And yes, she did have a hand axe. “Come on, grab those,” she said, pointing with the axe at a couple of folding camp chairs.
In ten minutes, she had a fire going in the pan — “keeps the desert clean,” she said — and they were staring into it, each nursing a beer, the IPAs Americans seemed to enjoy. If Penny felt any rancor over their disagreements at her grandfather’s, she didn’t show it.
“We can set the tent up if you need your privacy,” she said, showing no inclination to get up and do it.
“Oh, no, wouldn’t want to trouble you. Wha’ever you’re comfortable wiv, really.”
She grinned and took another sip of her beer. After a moment of fiddling with her phone, that song was playing again, and she was singing along, only with different words than the original.
“Two little feet, to get me ’cross the campsite” — getting up and walking toward him, her dress swaying.
“My little hand to knock upon your door” — her hand stroking from his cheek down to his chest. “I was down in that canyon so long, surrounded by all that yin, now I need some yang. Do you mind sharing some of your male energy with me?”
He’d never heard it put quite like that before. “You think you needed to ask?”
“Consent is important.” She grinned, sitting astride him. “My little thing for your little thing… Ah, not so little after all,” she said, grinning, then kissing him.
The singer went on without her: “A big love, to lift us up once more,” but Clive was hardly paying attention by that point.
She sat up straighter and pulled her jumper and dress over her head in one go. There was no bra to be undone, and no knickers to get into either. Low on her belly was another tattoo, the same Star of David/Tree of Life design he’d seen in the van, the tree’s roots forming a heart-shape — or vulva-shape! — pointing down toward the vital spot. She leaned over him so her breasts dangled above his face, twin orbs in his personal firmament. “See, round,” she said, brushing her nipples across his lips and cheeks.
“Mm-hmm,” was all he could manage.
She got up and turned around, still straddling him, and bent over to show him her ass. “See? Round,” she said, grabbing his hand and placing it on one round, toned cheek.
She was still grinding against him and he thought he was going to fall out of his chair. He’d already dropped his beer and could hear it foaming into the desert sand.
She turned around and knelt before him, undoing his kecks. She pulled his cock out and ran her finger around the head of it. “Round, see?” Her round eyes gazing up at him, a smile on her lips. “All this roundness, in us and around us, how can Gaia not be round? It’s just a law of nature, isn’t it?”
“Well…” Shut it, Clive, this is no time to argue.
“I mean, making love with a woman is sort of like making love to Gaia herself, isn’t it?” Still her finger going around and around the head of his shaft. “Where all life begins, right? At least, that’s how it’s felt whenever I’ve been with a woman.”
It was all he could do not to share his male energy with her right then.
When they were done — several times over, really; he’d never met anyone with Penny’s frank sexual appetite — they lay covered in a down bag on top of two sleeping pads and looked at the stars. She knew all the constellations and which stars, nebulae, and galaxies were part of them. She pointed at Orion and said, “Do you see how he’s aiming at Saturn?” He hadn’t even known that bright “star” was Saturn, to which she reacted with surprise.
“Too cloudy most o’ the time where I come from, innit? Plus, city lights.”
“And you were too busy tinkering and doing math, I bet.” She poked him in the ribs. “Look at Saturn. How do you explain its retrograde motion? I mean, even my astrologer friends know about planets in retrograde.”
“Spent all me time on the sun and the moon.”
“Ah, convenient. How about the Southern Cross? Ever seen it?”
“Wha’, and you ’ave?”
“Sure, I was on a climbing trip to Patagonia once, which was amazing, and not just because of the spectacular mountains. The stars are all different down there. No Polaris, no Cassiopeia, no Big Dipper. And here’s what’s freaky — they go clockwise around the southern celestial pole, not counter-clockwise.”
“Yeah, freaky.”
“But not freaky, when you consider I was standing on the other side of a rotating ball. Then it all makes sense. But how do you explain it, Mr. Flat Earth?”
He was too happy and spent to argue, or even consider an explanation.
Later, some time in the wee hours, he had to get up to pee. A waning crescent moon had risen, still bright enough to light his way over to some bushes. When he returned, Penny was awake, looking at the moon, her shoulders bare, with the sleeping bag tucked underneath her arms.
“There’s Luna,” she said, pointing. “You can see it’s a ball, right? And you can tell the sun is somewhere over there” — pointing east, below the horizon — “lighting up one side like a flashlight would. You see that line where light and shadow meet? It’s curved, because Luna is round in all directions. And if the moon is round, why isn’t the Earth?”
He got in beside her and kissed her shoulder, her skin radiant in the soft moonlight. “All I can see is, you’ve got a good nickname. The moon does make you glow.”
“Don’t try and change the subject. Look at the moon, not at me. Now try to feel where the sun is. Imagine how it’s all moving together.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Now imagine how we’re moving with it. Doesn’t it just feel like we’re on a spinning ball moving through space?”
That was the strangest argument for a round Earth he’d ever heard. Usually it was just pictures from space and ships sailing over the horizon. But he didn’t want to think about any of that right now. He didn’t want to think.
He snuggled up against her and pretended to fall straight to sleep.
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.
What do you think? Was this just a one-night stand, or is there something more here? And can a couple with such differing beliefs have a future?
Next up: Chapter 24, “The Ice Wall,” in which Liz, Sarge, and their companions arrive at a wall of ice. But is it the Ice Wall? And if not, where else can they go to find it?