Chapter 4: Fake News
CANE WAS WORKING ALONE in the shop the day the lady with the blue shawl came in.
Ana, Donalta and Gatta were in Alleata buying groceries for the week. Usually only one of the women went, while the other stayed home to watch the shop. But after Cane’s impressive work helping create Project Better Bowl and save Terralogica, Ana had decided that he was ready to tend the shop on his own for a few hours.
Cane liked working in the shop. Selling pottery was a lot more interesting than making it. When a customer came in, he’d make a game of sizing them up, predicting what might interest them. Old women were usually looking for small, decorative items, especially the free Project Better Bowl bowls stacked on the counter next to a small Rabbitleaf vase with a sprig of flowers from the back yard. Families wanted full sets of plates or soup bowls, while teenagers on school trips bought souvenirs and small gifts for their parents or sweethearts. And sometimes a customer would surprise him and go against type completely, like the grumpy-looking man, a ringer for Scontro, who walked out with three narrow vases each sized to fit a single rose.
The woman with the blue shawl was about Ana and Donalta’s age, her hair pulled up in a bun and streaked with gray at the temples, but she had the kind of prim, stuffy air that would have made Ana say, “Why does she have to act so old,” if she had been around.
“Have you seen our serving platters?” Cane asked. “They’re a sure way to impress company.”
He walked over to the shelf with the platters and held one up for her to look at. The Rabbitleaf signature ran around the rim like a delicate vine.
The woman took a step back from the platter like it might bite her.
“Something else?” he asked, putting the platter down quickly. “We have a stack of sample bowls in the corner.”
“Actually—” The woman lowered her voice, looking side to side to see if anyone else was in the shop. “I had been hoping to buy some serving dishes, but now I’m concerned. How can I be sure that your pottery won’t cause LTS?”
“LTS?” Cane repeated the letters back, trying to make sense of them.
“Lost Time Syndrome.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Cane said. “I don’t think pottery causes any syndromes.”
Her lips tightened into a smug little smile. “Well, as a shop-owner, it’s your duty to be familiar with the issues concerning your customers. I hope you can find some better information.”
The woman turned on her heel and stomped to the door and slammed it shut behind her, even though it had been open. Cane opened it again, then stood in the doorway watching the end of her blue shawl bouncing over her back as she marched down the street away from the shop.
The moment Ana, Donalta, and Gatta walked through the door with their grocery cart full of vegetables and beans and flour, Cane began spilling out his story about the woman and what she had said. The mystery had him so distracted that he had barely made any sales since she left, just handed out a few of the free bowls and sold two small salad plates to a boy around his age on a school trip.
“Slow down, slow down,” Ana said, rolling the cart across the shop and parking it near the door to the kitchen. “What did she call it?”
“Lost Time Syndrome,” Cane said. “LTS for short. She said we should know what it is.”
“We can’t know what every bit of made-up gemella is all about,” Ana snorted. “It’s probably nothing.”
Cane looked at his mother, saw she wasn’t going to take his worries seriously, then turned his gaze to Donalta in an unvoiced plea for intervention.
“I don’t know, honey,” she said to Ana. “After all that trouble last spring, maybe we should tell Moderata.”
“Oh, all right,” Ana said. “As soon as we put these groceries away.”
“Gatta and I will put them away,” Donalta said. “You two should go now, before it’s dark.”
Ana sighed. She had imagined a relaxing evening cutting up vegetables for a stew, and now they needed to walk across town to Moderata’s house. Still, Cane and Donalta both had good sense about things, and if they thought were concerned about this new syndrome, whatever that was supposed to mean, there was probably a good reason.
Mayor M. was in the middle of her own cooking when Ana and Cane arrived. She escorted them into her kitchen, where she was slicing a pile of peppers and onions, and asked them to tell her about the urgent situation that they had mentioned at the front door.
Cane told her about the woman in the blue shawl.
“Oh, that.” Mayor M. wiped her hands on a towel. “Wait here a moment.”
She left the kitchen for a moment, then returned with a Newspost. She held it out for Ana and Cane to read. It was titled Alleata Newspost and had the village seal printed in its upper right-hand corner. The Newspost had a single article printed across the middle of the front page, which Ana read out loud.
Terralogica Pottery Linked to Lost Time Syndrome
The attractive but expensive pottery from the town of Terralogica, often used by rich people to signal their elite status, contains ingredients that may lead to Lost Time Syndrome (LTS) according to Dr. Prepotente. LTS is a serious condition that causes people to feel that time is slipping away from them. LTS sufferers report that they often intend to do something but then forget what it was. Or they may set aside time to complete a task such as cleaning the house or raking the yard, only to discover that the time has passed but the house has not been cleaned or the yard has not been raked.
Does this sound like you? Dr. Prepotente suggests that anyone experiencing symptoms of LTS should throw their Terralogica pottery in the garbage and not purchase any more. The doctor notes that other, more reasonably priced brands of pottery including Nemico pottery do not contain the dangerous ingredients, but are every bit as attractive. Customers are encouraged to choose Nemico pottery in order to stay safe from LTS.
“Who wrote that?” Cane asked, the moment Ana finished reading. “It’s not a real Newspost.”
“It’s not?” Ana asked. It looked real enough to her. Plus she’d never seen a fake Newspost; the possibility of such a thing had never occurred to her. “Where did it come from?”
“Penso gave it to me,” Mayor M. said. “He found it on his doorstep where a real Newspost would be. I was wondering whether we need to reconvene the Logician’s Council.”
Ana looked at Cane, who nodded.
“It seems like we should,” Ana said.
The council met the next evening.
“I’m sorry to take more of your time,” Mayor M greeted them. Everyone from the original Council had agreed to come, despite the short notice. “I wouldn’t have called you here if it wasn’t important.”
Mayor M. had passed the Newpost around before the meeting started. Grandma Lucy and Scontro both gasped when they read it. Stanca-Eth and Stufo-Eth didn’t say anything, just passed the paper with a quick head nod.
Grandma Lucy raised her hand the way Cane usually did, holding it high in the air but then speaking before being called on.
“Our pottery is causing the Lost Time Syndrome?” she asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ana said, as though she herself hadn’t been fooled when she first saw the Newspost the night before. “It’s a fake Newspost.”
“Fake?” Scontro snarled, like he’d never heard something so ridiculous. “Why do you say that? What’s your evidence?”
Ana looked at Cane. He was the one who had declared the post to be fake. She had accepted the premise pretty easily, since it made her feel much less queasy in her stomach than believing the pottery filling her home and every building she usually entered could be causing a horrible disease.
“Well, first look Alleata’s town seal at the top of the page,” Cane said. “It doesn’t look crisp, like a stamp. It looks more like they traced it or copied it, with shaky lines and no details. Also the name Alleata is smudged at the top of the page. I think they might have forgotten the second L and then put it back in after. Also, this Newspost only has one piece of news. Newsposts usually have a bunch of news items printed over a few pages, but this is just one page with one item on it.”
“And there’s something else, too,” Penso prompted. “The rhetorical triangle.”
“Ethos,” Cane answered, like it was a school quiz. “The writing lacks credibility. The way it keeps going on about how great Nemico is, when it’s just supposed to be an article about a supposed danger from Terralogica. That seems pretty biased.”
“And it has too much pathos,” Cugina said. “It’s all emotion, trying to make the reader upset. Was there any factual evidence about LTS being caused by our pottery?”
“The only evidence is the account of Dr. Prepotente,” Cane said. “Does anyone know who he is?”
Everyone shook their heads.
“I asked three different doctors in Alleata this morning,” Penso said. “None of them had heard of LTS outside of the Newspost, and none of them knew Dr. Prepotente. They don’t think it’s a real condition.”
“It sounds real to me,” Grandma Lucy said.
“I think I might have it,” Scontro said. “I was just telling my wife that I’ve been losing track of time. Like the other day I was planning to paint a full kiln’s worth of bowls. But then I knocked over the milk jug in my kitchen, so I had to clean that up. And then I saw a couple other dirty things in the kitchen and I cleaned those, too. Next thing I knew it was after dark and I hadn’t painted more than ten bowls.”
“That happens to everybody,” Ana said, exasperated. “That’s always happened.”
“Exactly,” said Grandma Lucy. “And we’ve always been surrounded by our pottery!”
“My sister Inaffi definitely has LTS,” Scontro said. “The other day she was supposed to visit for lunch but she never showed up. She claimed she forgot all about it.”
“Inaffi is just a flake!” Ana said. “Everyone knows that.”
Penso cleared his throat with a little ahem sound to get everyone to stop arguing.
“This is the problem with fake news,” he said. “It can be highly infectious. Once an idea gets into people’s heads, it can be difficult or impossible to get it out.”
“We need to do something,” said Mayor M. “We can’t just let whoever this is keep printing fake Newsposts.”
“I have an idea,” Cane said. “We should create our own fake Newsposts about Nemico. We could write that their pottery makes you get rashes on your hands!”
Ana and Grandma Lucy made excited sounds of approval.
“We can make one about Gemella, too,” Scontro said. “Just in case it was them.”
“Gemella is too busy worrying about the factory,” Stufo-Eth said from their spot behind everyone else.
Cane turned to look at Stufo-Eth. They looked calm and certain sitting next to Stanca-Eth. Cane wondered if Stufo-Eth was just guessing or if they knew something about the creation of the fake Newspost. No one asked what a factory was or what Stufo-Eth meant.
“Let’s review our core values,” Penso said, pointing on the scroll that still hung on the town meetinghouse wall.
Cane sighed. He knew exactly what Penso was getting at before he even looked over at the scroll:
Core Values
Terralogica believes good craftsmanship is worth doing and worth paying for.
Terralogica values honesty.
Terralogica avoids wastefulness.
Terralogica doesn’t insult others.
“My plan doesn’t fit,” Cane said. “It isn’t honest.”
“Maybe we could create our own Newsposts that do tell the truth,” Grandma Lucy said. “That Terralogica pottery doesn’t cause LTS.”
“And that LTS doesn’t exist,” Ana said.
“We can leave them around all the villages in Isola,” Scontro said. “For every one one of theirs, we’ll print ten of ours. We’ll drown them out!”
“Nope,” Cugina said. “Wasteful. That goes against our core values.”
Scontro muttered something under his breath about gemella core values.
“I don’t think our message that LTS is fake will look good on a bowl,” Ana said. “This is so confusing.”
Cane was confused, too. He looked up at Penso to see if he might have any ideas. Penso mouthed the words rhetorical triangle.
“Ethos,” he said, this time without raising his hand. “We need to show that our information is more credible than theirs.”
“It seems impossible,” Ana sighed. “Why would they believe us? Our words won’t carry any more weight than the ones on the fake Newspost.”
“Except for Mayor M.,” Cane said. “Mayors are the ones who write the Newsposts. But only for their own village.”
“We would need all the mayors to write Newsposts about this,” Grandma Lucy said. “But how can we reach all the mayors?”
“I can answer that,” Mayor M. said. “At the Summit of the Mayors. It’s twice a year, but the next one is in three weeks. All the mayors from across Isola come to discuss the news of our villages.”
“Not the mayor of Gemella,” Scontro said.
“Even the mayor of Gemella,” Mayor M. said. “All the mayors come to the summit.”
Scontro made a scoffing noise to show it was unimaginable that the mayors of Terralogica and Gemella could co-exist peacefully at the same summit. But when Mayor M. asked for three volunteers to accompany her, Scontro raised his hand. So did Ana and Cane.
“We will be the delegation, then,” Mayor M. said. “The council can create a proposal, and we will present it to the mayors.”
By the time Cane, Ana, Scontro and Mayor M. travelled to the summit, LTS was no longer an unfamiliar term in Terralogica. In fact, Cane couldn’t go a day in the shop without a tourist asking in hushed and concerned tones: Does your pottery cause LTS? Is there any way to prevent LTS while I’m using this?
Sometimes Cane would hear the customers advising each other: “I heard it’s only the green glaze that causes LTS.” Or, “I heard you need to soak it in water before you use it.”
Cane was getting pretty sick of the whole thing. He had never said a single phrase as many times as he said, “LTS is not a real condition” during those three weeks. He couldn’t wait for the summit and the chance to put their plan into action.
It took five hours in a horse-drawn carriage to reach the foot of Mount Vertice where the summit would be held. Cane had never been in a carriage before, never visited anyplace further than Alleata. They slept in the famously wealthy village of Piedi which hosted the summit. Cane had his own small sleeping quarters with a plain single bed and a shelf containing towels and soaps and moisturizing oils and anything else he might need. He’d never been anywhere so glamorous.
The summit was scheduled to last all day. The mayor’s guests were not allowed to listen to the summit, except for Terralogica’s report, which would take place in the afternoon. That’s when Ana, Cane and Scontro would be allowed to join Mayor M. to present the council’s proposal.
The village of Piedi had three-story buildings, paved roads filled with carriages, and a giant market like the one in Alleata but with a tall roof overhead to protect from rain. Ana, Cane and Scontro toured the village by foot while they waited for the afternoon session to begin. It was Cane’s job to carry the scroll that Mayor M. needed for her presentation, and he held the special carrying case carefully, making sure not to bend it or bang it against the vending carts and carriages in the streets.
“Look, Mom!” He pointed to a stone fountain in the middle of the town square. “It’s amazing here! I want to come back.”
“Well, you’ll have to become mayor, then,” Ana said, frowning. “People from Terralogica are potters, not travelers.”
Piedi was famous for its superior bread, and delicious smells of flour and yeast wafted out from the bakeries lining the streets. They bought a few sandwiches to eat in the town square, plus some loaves of bread for themselves and Mayor M. to take home.
After lunch, they walked to the summit building. A thick-necked guard walked them down a long hallway to the locked meeting room.
“Wait outside,” he said without smiling. Then he turned and walked back towards the building entrance, leaving them to wait in the dark hallway.
“He could have at least offered a chair,” Ana said, leaning against the wall. Cane slid down to the floor and sat with the scroll case on his lap, the cold stone chilling his legs through the fabric of his pants.
“I want to know if the mayor of Gemella is in there,” Scontro said.
“Of course,” Ana said. “All the mayors are there.”
Scontro crossed his arms over his chest and began pacing up and down the hallway, grumbling to himself.
His hatred hurts his logic, Cane thought, watching the heaviness of Scontro’s limbs as he trudged one direction and then the other. Cane supposedly hated Gemella, too—the war had killed his father, after all—but in truth, he had trouble feeling that hate the way he was supposed to. It was more like a fact than a feeling, something you could easily look up: Everyone in Terralogica hated everyone in Gemella, and presumably vice-versa. The two villages were mortal enemies, just like two plus two equaled four or Terralogica pots could not be broken.
Cane’s behind was about to go completely numb with cold, when the door finally swung open with a heavy creaking sound. The guard emerged—he must have used a different entrance—and let them into a giant room, almost as large as of the meeting hall in Terralogica. In the middle of the room was a giant table, with mayors sitting all around it, little signs on the table identifying their villages. There were over twenty of them, all different in appearance: men and women, old and young, from the baby faced mayor of Liscio to the tiny wrinkled woman in the corner, whose village sign Cane couldn’t see from this side of the room. None of them looked like Before People, Cane noticed, which wasn’t surprising; he’d never heard of a Before-Person being mayor.
The guard walked Ana, Cane and Scontro to a pair of seats behind Mayor M., who was just beginning to speak. Cane felt like standing after all that sitting on the floor, but he lowered himself onto the chair, leaning the scroll case gently against the wall next to him.
“Thank you for your time,” she addressed the other mayors. “I brought assistants to help me today, because Terralogica faces a new and dangerous threat. Fake Newsposts have circulated in neighboring villages claiming that our pottery causes something called Lost Time Syndrome.”
A murmur spread through the room.
“Yes,” said a mayor at the far side of the table, a man with a thick gray beard. The sign in front of the man said he was from the village of Barba, which meant he was leading the summit. Mayor M. had explained in the carriage that the Mayors took turns leading, and this was Barba’s turn. “I had hoped to ask you about that. We received those Newsposts in my village.”
“We did as well,” said a woman in a hat that looked like a bird’s nest. Her sign read Nido, a village that Cane had never heard of. In fact, he’d never heard of most of these villages, just a few like Alleata and Nonlontano. Cane searched the signs for the name Gemella but couldn’t seem to find it on any of the signs.
“Those Newsposts are fake,” said Mayor M. “Terralogica pottery does not cause any syndromes.”
“So then, can you tell us,” asked the mayor of Barba, “what is causing the LTS?”
“Yes,” said a few of the other mayors. “What’s causing it?”
Cane shook his head in amazement. He knew in theory that mayors weren’t any more clever than other people and that adults weren’t more logical than kids. Still it was shocking to see so many mayors—the people who ran every village in Isola—using such horrible reasoning.
“We don’t have any reason to believe LTS is a real condition,” Mayor M. said.
“Then why are we getting Newsposts about it?” asked the mayor of Barba. “We’ve all gotten them.”
“Those Newsposts did not come from your offices,” Mayor M. said. “Real Newsposts are always issued by the office of the mayor.”
“Moderata is right,” said the woman in the bird’s nest hat. “They can’t be real Newsposts if we didn’t produce them ourselves.”
“But then where did they come from?” asked the Mayor of Barba.
“We can’t be sure,” said Mayor M. “But we suspect we are being sabotaged by a group called Nemico.”
“Or possibly Gemella,” Scontro blurted out from his spot behind the Mayor M. There was a groan from around the room, as though the mayors were well aware of the animosity between the two villages. Cane scanned the mayors to his right, the row whose signs he couldn’t see, looking for traces of anger from whoever the mayor of Gemella might be, but all he saw were mildly annoyed expressions.
“I don’t think so,” said a man in suspenders. “Because we got those same Newsposts, but they weren’t about Terralogica. They were about Gemella.”
“We did as well,” said another mayor. “About how Gemella’s pottery causes LTS.”
Again the murmur spread through the room, the mayors whispering to one another. Cane wished he could whisper to someone, too, but neither his mother nor Scontro would know the answer to his question: why were the fake Newsposts also targeting Gemella?
“Regardless of who the fake Newsposts are about,” Mayor M. said, “we believe there needs to be a solution. Otherwise the credibility of our real Newsposts will be lost.”
“What do you suggest we do?” asked the mayor with the gray beard.
“We have a proposal,” Mayor M. said. “Cane, please bring the scroll.”
Cane rose from his seat and handed the scroll to Mayor M., relieved to have gotten it safely to its destination. Mayor M. opened the case and unrolled the scroll, revealing Gatta’s tidy brushwork.
“For all villages in Isola, we hereby propose the following,” Mayor M. read aloud.
All valid Newsposts will be posted in the window of the mayor’s office.
Any fake Newsposts will be given to the mayor.
Fake Newsposts will be posted in the window of the mayor’s office with a sign marking them as fake.
Anyone discovered producing or distributing fake Newsposts will make reparations by publically confessing at a village meeting, or else be banned from contributing information to valid Newsposts until they have confessed.
“With these measures in place,” Mayor M. said, “anyone who doubts the validity of a Newspost can easily verify whether it is real or fake by visiting the mayor’s office of their village. Those who create fake Newsposts will be held accountable for their actions.”
“Thank you for sharing your proposal,” said the Mayor of Barba. “Does anyone have any questions for the mayor of Terralogica?”
One mayor, a thin man with a shiny bald head, pursed his lips and let out a skeptical hmm before he spoke.
“Why should we all implement these measures?” asked the bald mayor. “This seems to be a problem affecting only Terralogica.”
“And Gemella,” said the man in suspenders.
“That’s right,” said a mayor with long red hair. She was wearing a blue shawl that reminded Cane of the customer who first asked him about LTS. “I’m against any new rules that don’t directly benefit my village.”
“I understand your reluctance,” Mayor M. said. “But if these measures aren’t adopted by all of Isola, every village risks losing the credibility of our Newsposts. The fake Newsposts might be about Terralogica, but they are being circulated in your villages. How will anyone in your village know truth from falsehoods unless you restore the credibility of your Newsposts?”
Some of the mayors nodded in agreement—the woman in the birds-nest hat, the young mayor of Liscio, the old woman with the wrinkled face. Others, like the bald man and the woman in the blue shawl, frowned and shook their heads. At least half the mayors would need to vote in agreement in order for the proposal to be accepted. Cane tried to estimate how many were for and against, based on facial expressions, but there were too many quick reactions to count.
“All right,” said the Mayor of Barba. “We will accept your proposal, to be voted on at the end of this meeting. We will now move on to the next village.”
The guard marched over from his post near the door and gestured for Cane, Ana and Scontro to follow him out of the room.
As they were leaving, the Mayor of Barba said, “Next we will hear from the Mayor of Gemella.”
“Thank you,” said a frail, quiet voice. Cane turned his head to see who it was: the tiny old woman with the face like a prune.
Her voice was almost too quiet to hear, but as Cane walked through the heavy door being held open by the security guard, he was almost certain he heard her say, “I’d like to speak to you all about the factory.”
Factory, Cane thought to himself. That word again, the one Stufo-Eth had used. Cane didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded like bad news.