Ship of Fools - Chapter 5
Astroanamorphoscope
[Start at the beginning of the novel: Prologue.]
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Welcome back to Ship of Fools and thanks for reading!
We’re back on the Anóitoi, this time following flat-earther Clive Cuddleshanks as he tries to drum up interest in his astroanamorphoscope. (If you’re wondering what that is, it’s a fictional astronomical version of a real instrument, the anamorphoscope, a curved mirror that returns a distorted image to its normal shape.)
AFTER getting nowt from Marshall, Clive roamed the ballroom, box under one arm, spotting several other Flat-Earth Theorists. None of them could do him any good. Either he’d already appeared on their podcasts and videostreams with his astroanamorphoscope, or they were too minor to bother with. Marshall was the big time, with the largest platform of any FET. If Clive could get on there, maybe a venture capitalist would see his invention and provide funding to get his invention into production at last. Then maybe one day, instead of a globe in every classroom, the kids would have one of these, to see the world as it really was. And not only invented by a Manc, but produced in Manchester to boot, returning his home city to its former glory as a center of invention and industry. After years of working on the prototype, and then years more trying to raise capital for it, he felt he was at last on the brink of success. He just had to get it into the right hands, and this was the best opportunity he’d had in ages.
He spotted Lonnie Ester hiding behind a fern. No hope there, even though the bloke could have funded the device just for a lark, using only his pocket change. But it would be like trying to convince the devil not to trap human souls. He’d heard about how the billionaire ran his companies and had vowed to himself that, once the astroanamorphoscope was in production, his own workers would be treated far better.
What was the bastard doing here anyway? The thing he could never figure out about Ester and the other space tycoons was whether they really bought all their own shite. Back in the days when they were sending spaceships only into “LEO,” he’d thought maybe they were just deluded, like everyone who thought the sun rose and set on the horizon. They had to be sending those rockets somewhere; it could be they were sending them around in circles over the disk without realizing it. He hadn’t quite figured out the maths for how that would work, but that wasn’t his job. (He wasn’t among those who thought the capsules just crashed into remote stretches of ocean while the video feeds switched to convincing fakes.) But once they claimed to have bases on the moon — which didn’t exist, at least not as a round ball orbiting Earth — it became clear that they were charlatans, paid by NASA to promote its con game.
He kept scanning the room, and recognized Elizabeth Dare. She’d written that book featuring Marshall and other “conspiracy theorists.” Many of them were barmy, but Dare had always treated them with respect. Some flat-earthers with nothing better to do, the kind who gave the whole movement a bad name, had posted doctored clips taken from her talk show appearances, and he recognized her from those. She was a sound lass. She knew her science, unlike a spanner like Marshall, who only had his own beliefs to go on. And she never made her subjects look bad, unlike a lot of the mainstream media. Maybe it was worth a go. She might think the ’morphoscope was just quirky enough to merit a photo and some copy. No bad press and all…
“’scuse me, Ms. Dare?”
She turned to him, a little wary. “Hello.”
“’Allo, I’m Clive Cuddleshanks.” Sticking out his hand, which she took without hesitation. “Was wonderin’ if you ’ave a mo to look at me invention.” Patting the top of the box.
Just a hint of an eyeroll, a shadow of a glib retort considered then rejected. “Of course. What is it?”
He put the box down so he could remove the device, something like a helmet. “Astroanamorphoscope. Lets you see the sun and moon in their true positions.” He held it up for her to see.
“Their true positions?”
“Righ’. You know all abou’ refraction, of course.”
“Of course. It’s why we can still see the sun setting over the ocean when it’s actually gone beyond the horizon.”
“What most people don’t know is that there’s another type o’ refraction that bends light by a lot more than ’alf a degree. And this baby takes tha’ into account.”
“It looks like some kind of diving helmet.”
“It’s a bit bulky, I admi’, but it ’as to be, to fit all the mirrors.” He tilted it up so she could see inside. “Ground them meself, by the by.”
“And where would the sun and the moon appear if I put this on?”
“Far from their apparent positions, especially when risin’ or settin’. They just go in circles above the disk, they don’t come near the ’orizon at all.”
“Ah, so you’re a flat Ar… earther.”
“Now, now, it’s beneaf your reputation to hold tha’ against me, and unscientific to boot. I was ’opin’ you’d evaluate the ’morphoscope on its own merits.”
“Are you sure you haven’t just fiddled with these mirrors to make the sun and moon appear where you want them to?”
“Course not! I made careful calculations of the newly discovered distorting effects of the magnetosphere, many of which occur at the quantum level, then developed an algorithm to predict the location of the bodies based on time o’ day, time o’ year, variable strength of the magnetosphere, and, bang ho, there were the sun and moon, goin’ around the disk exactly like the Flat Earth model predicts. It was a perfect fit.”
Dare was looking at him with a wry smile now. “I’d love to explore your… interesting… ideas about electromagnetism, but first, why don’t you tell me more about yourself? Where are you from? Where did you develop the math skills to do something like this?”
“I’m from Manchester, case you couldn’t tell. Me da and ma ’ave a shop on Bury New Road, thought I’d follow ’em in it, but turned out I was a bit of a maphs prodigy. Go’ a scholarship to the Uni, readin’ Physics. Me ma was dead proud o’ me. But y’see, the deeper into physics you go, the more you see it’s just models, approximations like. Take refraction. If light can bend enough so that we’re seein’ the sun where we shouldna be able to, why can’t it bend a lot? Suddenly you can’t troost your own eyes.”
“But refraction is well understood, and the refracting properties of various media have been measured to the nth degree.”
“So you say, but what if there were a whole different way that light bends that no one’d ever taken into account? And then there’s the assumption that light travels in a straight line in the first place. So I started askin’ meself, what if all the measurements were wrong, goin’ all the way back to Brahe and Kepler? I started applyin’ this new refractive co-efficient to the old measurements…”
“I bet that went over well in the physics department.”
“Frew me out, di’n’ they? And that’s when I knew science’d become a sham. I’d grown up reading Carl Sagan. ’e said that the suppression of uncomfortable ideas has no place in science. But it’s become exactly what he said it shouldn’t, a religion wiv its own high priests. Commit ’eresy and you migh’ as well be burned at the stake.”
Clive thought he saw sympathy in her eyes. “So what did you do?”
“Spent the last ten years condooctin’ new measurements, refinin’ me algorithms, and buildin’ this ’ere prototype. If I could just get some funding to put it into production…”
“And so you were hoping to get some free publicity for it.”
“Righ’. Even if you called me mad as a ’atter, it might do some good just to get it in front of your readers.”
“It does look intriguing, I have to admit. Just the kind of color and human interest my editor sent me here to get. Do you mind if I take a picture?”
“Course not.”
She pulled out her phone and got a few shots of him holding the scope and closeups of the device itself.
Now to close the deal. “It’d be luvleh if you’d try it on, but the marine layer’s a bit thick to see the moon.”
“Maybe another time.”
“Sunrise tomorrow on the lido deck?”
Now she did roll her eyes. “Well, I suppose I won’t be up too late at this party. Why not?”
“Mint!” Another fella, wearing a cardigan of all things, was waiting politely for a chance to talk with her, so he said his goodbyes. He turned away, buzzin’ with the thought that tomorrow would be his big chance.
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 Liz will make of Clive’s strange invention?
Next up: Chapter 6, “No Coincidence,” another flashback chapter in which Liz heads to DC and the NASA archives, coming across a coincidence too strange to be coincidental.