by Mary Bowers
When he ran out of the broader subject headings, he went on to describe the many wonders of ParaCon: the workshops, the Activities Lounge, and the True Hauntings Open Mic, scheduled for Saturday night. “And this year, please, people, only factual, documented and verifiable encounters. Prepare to be challenged.” He gazed around sternly. “Also, as so many of you suggested last year, there will be a Zone of Silence over there by the rest rooms, in what was once a cloak room. Comfortable chairs have been provided, there is minimal lighting, and those who need to meditate or simply need a moment of quiet repose may retreat to that room. The door has been lined with sound-absorbing material, and silence will be vigorously enforced.”
Still no Orwell Quest.
The crowd wasn’t impatient, though, so I began to relax. Ed had them in the palm of his hand, and that was all I cared about. I checked my watch. Ed had been talking for 25 minutes straight with no dead air or signs of drying up. He did glance around the hall piercingly from time to time, searching for Orwell, but for the last 5 or 10 minutes he hadn’t even bothered to do that, and it occurred to me that if Mr. Quest was lurking somewhere waiting for the crowd to start calling for him, he’d miscalculated.
He must have thought so too, because it was at that moment that a voice interrupted Ed from the back of the room.
Ed had been on a roll. “And thus it is,” he was saying, “that the Flat Earth Society has earned our respect, as they point out the differing perceptions of silicon- vs. other-based life forms, and the space in which they –“
“The Hollow Earth Society has something to say about that,” a relaxed, unselfconscious male voice said. Heads swiveled to the back of the room as the voice went on conversationally. “Let us not forget that Cyrus Teed gave his life for the cause. Personally I consider it arrogance to claim concordance with the perceptions of anything-based life forms, my own included, but many disagree, and I can’t disagree with them without being arrogant myself. I think everyone will agree.”
Orwell Quest was among us.
* * * * *
He was sitting in the back row, slumping behind Nostradamus, whose draped and capped form would have hidden a mountain gorilla. Nostradamus obligingly hunkered to the side to reveal the guest of honor, smiling at everybody else’s surprise. Obviously, he had been in on the gag.
He spoke to the room as a whole in the same way one would speak to friends gathered around the fireplace at home. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t look at anybody in particular. His posture was that of a man who had been sitting in the same place for hours, relaxing and enjoying an intimate evening with friends.
The seat Ed had reserved for me was off to the side of the front row, so I had a good view of everything. As I watched the man, gently shaking my head, I had to hand it to him. Among a throng of intellectual sack racers, he was hopping along faster than any of them and not even breaking a sweat, or looking particularly interested.
Once the audience was over its surprise, it erupted in cheers. When I looked back at the stage to see how Ed was taking it, he was draped bonelessly over the podium with an adoring smile on his face, gazing to the back of the room. He looked at me and I just had to smile. I mouthed the words, “Good job!” and he grinned and gave me a thumbs up.
The crowd was calling for Orwell to take the stage, and in an interval of breathlessness he said, “Is that really necessary? It’s so much nicer to have eyes at a level.” He said it like he actually meant it.
At that, the crowd went wilder, and he ambled to his feet like a sleepy bear.
He was a comfortably shaggy man, well-fed but not overstuffed. He wore a suit that didn’t fit him, but didn’t seem to restrict him in any way, and the collar of his shirt was crooked. His hair had needed a trim last week and hadn’t gotten it, and was about 50% gray, 50% dark brown. He was clean-shaven. His eyes were brown and as blank as a newborn’s. He glanced directly at me as he passed and gave me a slow wink. I was as startled as if he had pinched me. Why me? I wondered, but maybe he’d been scattering winks all along the aisle as I’d been turned the other way to look at Ed. I’d never met the man, and as far as I knew he didn’t know who I was, either.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Orwell Quest,” Ed said into the microphone, and the top nearly came off the building.
Approaching the podium, Quest said, “Thank you, Ed. Thank you indeed. Yes. Thank you so much.” He turned to his audience and charmed them into forgetting Ed had ever existed, as my friend slid away from the stage and moved silently into the aisle chair next to me. I looked back to the man of the hour and tried to hang with him as he took all of us on a tour of the universe that only occasionally touched on solid ground.
* * * * *
I won’t recount his speech for you. I won’t even summarize it. Most people are familiar with his circumlocutions because the mass media are crazy about him. He doesn’t have a website because (he says) he doesn’t trust invisible things, whether human, alien or cyber. If you’ve been living in a cave and actually never heard of him, and after hearing how he treated Ed you still want to know about him, I refer you to his book Everything, which, as the title implies, is everything he has to say on every subject. It’s slightly over 1,000 pages long and is not available as an e-book because, obviously, that would be invisible. He says he will never write another book because that’s all he had to say. However, the world certainly isn’t going to hold him to that. According to Ed, he’s the holy grail of literary and booking agents, which made me wonder what Vanessa did to get an on-camera interview with him, not to mention go to the head of the Quest entourage.
They say that some Ponzi schemers are so good they don’t have to look for customers; the suckers come begging for their money to be taken, and they feel lucky when it is. Orwell Quest seemed to work that way: he didn’t do anything overt to get anybody’s attention, but somehow the world found him irresistible. And I noticed that frequently, as people at ParaCon debated one another, one guy would quote a passage from Everything to prove his point only to have the other guy pull out another quote from Everything that just as convincingly proved the opposite.
I tried to whisper in Edson’s ear from time to time as Orwell spoke, but he was rapt. So I sat through the speech, tuning in and tuning out, until the speaker paused for so long that suddenly the audience realized he was through. He had actually walked away from the podium by the time they caught on.
He got as far as Ed and me when everyone in the room rose and gave him a standing ovation. Orwell froze like a startled fawn. He looked this way and that, trying to see who had walked in. Over the din, I shouted, “They liked your speech.” Then he smiled a little and waved. If it was an act, it was flawless; if it was genuine, he was nothing but a child.
People began to edge up around him, but he seemed not to notice. I wondered what the people who claimed to see auras were seeing, because there seemed to be an invisible barrier around him about three feet wide, keeping people at a distance out of pure awe.
“There you are,” he said to me, as if he’d been waiting his whole life to meet me. He looked around at the floor and the chairs beside me, then said, “And where is the cat?”
I sagged in dismay. As he focused on me the awe-barrier seemed to weaken and people began to move in on him, firing off questions from all directions at once. He blinked a bit as he noticed them, then he seemed to let the bond between us loosen, regretfully. Just before turning to his fans he leaned in, laid a hand lightly on my arm and said, “We’ll talk later. Over coffee? And cake, of course.”
Those close enough to hear gasped, then they gazed at me as if his touch had turned me into gold.
He turned away and was swallowed up by the crowd.
Chapter 9
“That went well,” Ed said as Orwell drew the crowd away.
“Really?” Having to introduce a speaker that you’re not really sure is there would seem to me like things going haywire, but I guess Ed is used to unpredictable people. He w
as glowing like a birthday boy, so I let it pass.
“Have you seen Vanessa?” he said absently, scanning the room. “She’s usually hovering around Orwell, keeping the riffraff away.”
“Hah. You don’t like her either. You saw her little exhibition right before your speech, didn’t you? She’s probably drawing a bead on Orwell right now.”
He looked around, frowning. “I don’t see her. And as for my not liking her, nobody does. Except Orwell, apparently. She’s only been with him about six months. Give him time.”
“You don’t think she’ll last?”
He shrugged. “He may be giving her time to get the biography done, but probably not. He doesn’t usually have practical motives. She may amuse him on some level. One day she won’t amuse him anymore, and he’ll gently edge her out. Oh, here comes Sparky and the gang.”
A giggle escaped me, and I quoted the last bit back to him with a question mark.
“Actually, that was the name of their show,” he said.
“What show?”
“Sparky and the Gang. You know.” He lowered his voice, because a trio of energetic-looking oddballs was headed our way with Sparky in the lead. “They took challenges from the viewers and built useless contraptions. Perpetual motion machines. Ghost containment systems. Self-driving cars. Robotic pets.”
“A reality show? I never heard of it.”
“It wasn’t on for long. It’s a shame, really, because Sparky is a clever mechanic. It got off to a good start. They even managed to get Orwell to do a cameo, which really put them on the map. But after that Vanessa interviewed them for one of her documentaries and made them look like idiots – no, worse – phonies. The show got cancelled. Don’t mention it to them. It wasn’t that long ago, and it’s still painful.”
“I bet.”
By that time the trio was with us and, raising his voice to penetrate the din, he said, “You’ve already met Sparky, Taylor. This is Phineas Van Cleef –“
A young man with loose, glossy brown hair, stepped up, took my hand in the European fashion and kissed the air over it, murmuring, “Charmed.” His long hair tickled my hand as it brushed over it.
“And this is Ricky Larson.”
A boyishly handsome blond man grinned, shook hands with me and said, “Nice to meet you, ma’am.”
They were all skinny and about the same age: say around 30. Sparky was still kind of punked out, with tight jeans and a sleeveless Sparky and the Gang tee shirt. Ricky looked clean-cut and collegiate in nicely-fitted jeans and a polo shirt, and Phineas was in a vintage black suit with a rosebud in his lapel. They were a perfect assortment: a blond, a redhead and a brunette, with distinct personas and fresh good looks. They seemed to have been put together by Central Casting: The cool one, the cute one, and the urbane one.
“So you’re the cat lady,” Phineas said.
“Hey, watch it, PVC,” Sparky said. “Taylor doesn’t like to talk about Bastet, isn’t that right, Taylor?”
“Don’t call me PVC,” Phineas snarled. It seemed like a joke that was getting old. “That’s plastic. I’m real.”
“Whatever.” Sparky was obviously enjoying himself. “But that’s right, right Taylor? You’re like, still learning to deal with it. Possession is only for the young, am I right?”
“What makes you think I’m possessed?” I snapped.
“It was in Ed’s book, under the chapter heading, ‘Denial.’ So how’s that going? Have you accepted it yet?” He hunkered down and made eye contact, like he really cared.
“Ed, I’d like a word with you,” I said, turning sharply away from Sparky.
“Have you guys seen Vanessa?” Ed said quickly.
“You mean she’s not attached to the back of Orwell’s neck, like a boil?” Phineas drawled. He made an artless gesture. “If she’s not around Orwell, she has ceased to exist. His words are her nectar, his thoughts are her prayers.”
“And his money is like a gentle rain always falling on the top of her head,” Ricky added. They all snickered. “Who cares where she is? Orwell was over by the crystals booth the last time I saw him, and Phin’s right – where Orwell goes, she goes, especially in a crowd like this. She always keeps both hands on the leash.”
“You’re probably right,” Ed said, stretching up to try to see over heads. “I need to check with her about Orwell’s schedule for the weekend. He said he’d conduct a symposium on fish rain, and a lot of people have been asking about it, but I haven’t been able to nail Vanessa down about the time. Really, it’s vexing. I wouldn’t have put up with it from anybody else. I asked for it about six times, but she never got back to me, and now the conference has started and we have other workshops going; it’s going to be a mess, because whenever Orwell declares he’s ready, the workshops will empty out and everybody will try to get into Orwell’s class at once.”
“Have it out here in the main hall,” I said. He ignored me. He was wallowing in indignation, and he wanted sympathy, not suggestions.
“We’ll just have to work it out somehow. Now that he’s here, I can ask him directly. Not that he’ll know.”
Usually I try not to get sucked in, but this time I just had to ask. “Fish rain?”
Ed shrugged, still looking around. “Or frog rain.”
“Anemones,” Sparky added helpfully.
“Eels are the worst,” Phineas said with a shudder.
I ran out of patience. “What the heck are you guys talking about?”
Ed finally focused on me. “You know. The people of a peaceful village are going about their day when all of a sudden a storm blows up and the next thing they know, fish are falling on their heads.”
“What?”
“It happens over and over, and it has throughout history. It’s true, I assure you. May 28, 1881. Worcester, England. Not only fish and eels but crabs and periwinkles.” He straightened his glasses and stared at me earnestly. “Orwell is particularly fascinated by this type of event. It happens so consistently, and yet nobody knows why. It’s even been known to happen when no storm is occurring at all, out of a clear blue sky. It’s well documented. I could name other instances.”
“That’s all right,” I said quickly. I frowned. Something had stirred at the back of my mind, and I seemed to remember reading about a town that had been bombarded with frogs, somewhere in the western United States. “Yeah,” I grudgingly conceded, “I think I’ve heard about things like that.”
“Orwell has dedicated many hours of his life, years of his life, working away in dusty libraries and newspaper morgues, gathering material on that type of event.”
“Trying to figure out why they happen?” I asked.
Ed considered. “I think what fascinates him is that they do happen. I’ve actually never heard of him postulating an explanation.”
Phineas raised his index finger. “A true scholar gathers facts without demanding the reward of an explanation. That pleasure may be left to the next generation, or even the next. That’s why he developed the concept of Cake, and its corollary, the Extra Frosting Extravagance. Life is short, and death puts an end to all researches, no matter how worthy.”
“Cake?” I said.
“Chapter 229,” he said impatiently. “The last chapter of Everything. It’s only four words long, excluding the chapter heading, which is ‘Principles of Life.’ It reads: ‘Bread. Cake. Extra Frosting.’ It’s beautiful. You see, it strips the complexities of life down to those three elegant concepts: Bread, which has been interpreted to mean work, Cake, which many believe represents justice, and Extra Frosting, which I personally regard as luck.”
I wondered where sex and death fit in, but I wasn’t about to say anything.
“Or persistence,” Ricky said. “Even brute force. I think the fact that Vanessa Court has been put in charge of applying the extra frosting lends credence to the latter.”
“That may be valid,” Phineas allowed, though he didn’t appreciate the interruption. Before he could gather breath to
go on, he was interrupted again, this time by Sparky.
“Don’t forget that Vanessa has also been appointed the official taster of the cake. That says to me that the extra frosting represents death, since she’s checking it for poison.” He looked perfectly serious, even grim. They all did.
They had lost me, but I had caught on to one thing: Cake. Orwell Quest had invited me to have cake with him. I began to wonder if he meant actual cake, or something else altogether.
“What’s this about poison?” I asked.
Phineas glared at me, tired of being interrupted. “There was no poison! At least, Gavin says there wasn’t. One night a few months ago, after Orwell finished a large meal topped off by cake, he got sick. He decided the cake had been poisoned, and he wouldn’t eat it anymore. That got him so depressed that Vanessa offered to be the official taster, so he could have cake again. Ever since, before Orwell is served a slice of cake, Vanessa eats one first to make sure it’s safe.”
“Everybody knows that,” Ricky said.
“I didn’t,” Ed said. When I looked at him in surprise, he added, “Oh, I know about Cake, as a concept, but I never heard that Orwell had been poisoned.”
Phineas writhed. “I told you –“
Ricky interrupted. “Gavin refused to include the incident in the monthly newsletter. Only those very close to the group know about it.”
“I didn’t realize you three were that close to the group,” Ed said. “Since you are, could you talk to Vanessa and ask if Orwell is still willing to give a talk about fish rain?”
“I said we were close to the group,” Ricky said. “I didn’t say anything about Vanessa.”
Sparky chimed in, leering at Ricky. “I don’t know, hot stuff. There was a time when I thought Vanessa and you . . . .”
“Please! She’s old enough to be my grandmother.”
“As for fish rain,” Phineas said, calling the class to order, “Orwell may actually have given us an explanation, though as usual, he presented it as speculation. In Everything, he postulated a positional vortex, either atmospheric or planetary. And he pointed out that no one has yet explained magnetism.”
