Little Merman: Chapter 3

Lider said, “Imagination isn’t automatically a negative quality.”

Rhys gave him a slow smile. They were on the bullet train between Northern New York Territory and New Amsterdam. They sat side by side, knees and shoulders touching. Around them, the train’s transparent ceiling and sides showed off flashes of landscapes. Small towns. Bridges. Trees full of seasonal multi-colored leaves.

A momentary pass through a tunnel threw back their reflections: forty-year-old Rhys—dark hair (a little silvered now), dark eyes, a straight nose and wry mouth in a fawnish face, one that Lider (and others) called piratical. Thirty-ish Lider, red-brown hair above a sharp-cheeked face and firm tapered chin. Elvish, made more so by the temporary dimness. 

Yet entirely corporeal. Lider was a Cubus, a being formed from neutrinos. Though his sentience went back two hundred years, he hadn’t begun his path to corporeality until he met Rhys, about ten years earlier. He became fully corporeal after he and Rhys returned to Earth from the Mars Space Station. Rhys could lift his husband’s hand and brush his husband’s knee. He could, should they enter another tunnel, dip his head to kiss Lider’s neck.

Lider would give a pro forma protest about PDA—Lider did that—but he wouldn’t mind.

Lider said now, “If I couldn’t imagine a future with you, I couldn’t have tagged you.”

“That was faith, surely.” Rhys was only faintly teasing. He might be a full-blown married priest and a Monseigneur. Lider was the true believer.

“The two connect. The ability to think there’s more—more to come, more to be—aligns with the ability to imagine what that more could be.”

“Seems to me, Brae wasn’t imagining so much as trying to force an outcome.”

“But his desires started with…want, I guess. But the ability to imagine a want beyond food and sleep is a decent definition of sentience.”

Still smiling, Rhys slumped on the bench. They were in a general passenger carriage. They both eschewed VIP treatment, despite Vatican-embossed passports. The current carriage was sparsely populated, being mid-day. Commuters relied more on the shuttle between Albany and New Amsterdam.

Lider and Rhys liked trains. A train ride was a chance to lay out a problem, order what they’d learned. The shuttle wasn’t much shorter than the train anyway. With the train, they could board and sit and talk rather than stand in endless lines.

Lider, Rhys had been amused to note, was no better at standing still as a corporeal human than he’d been as a half-visible Cubus.

Even now, he unconsciously tapped one foot until Rhys set his foot on top of the tapping one. Lider gave him a half-lidded glance that lit up all Rhys’s insides.

Rhys said, “Do you think the RaykJanes are holding Brae somewhere?”

“No. I think Meke would have contacted us. Loyalty to his clan doesn’t go as far as undermining the Diplomatic Corps.

Rhys hummed agreement.

“We should still check,” Lider allowed. “Different cultures and all that. Siphons may not see their behavior as particularly unacceptable. Skirting the line. Not crossing it.”

“Agreed.”

“After we speak to Phillala.” Lider sounded resigned and Rhys grimaced. Neither of them were fond of cases that involved relationships-gone-bad, which was, Lider once pointed out, just about all of them.

We should find ourselves a jewelry heist to investigate.

Lider pulled up a biography of Phillala on a plastic sheet. It included a head shot—a smiling young woman with a heart-shaped face of arched brows and glittering eyes. A snub nose above bowed lips created a slightly incongruity, the fairy queen effect toned down to make her more relatable.

A captivating face if one went in for that sort of thing and ignored the hint of flippancy in the curled lips.

Rhys had a bio of Brae on his sheet. He glanced down at the head shot. Kyz was right. Brae was a beautiful young man. “Like a model,” Lider had said when he first saw the image, and he’d thrown Rhys a half-smile. Lider was kind enough to think Rhys was that handsome.

Rhys thought Brae looked rather like a medieval saint, the ones who were a step away from throwing themselves into fire or being shot full of arrows.

Was Phillala’s confidence—or what passed for confidence in a nineteen-year-old—the quality that drew Brae to her? Did Phillala offer a kind of harbor, safety, to Brae?

Did Brae know what he wanted? At nineteen, Rhys thought he wanted a partner, a future in business, and opportunities to travel. He’d minored in religion—that interest was always there—but he’d pictured himself attending board meetings, drawing up plans for life-altering medications related to cloned replacement organs.

Lider had a point about imagination. 

Only, within six years, Rhys was on his way to being a priest. He thought marriage was off the table. He was a Celibate With Exceptions priest, which meant he could engage sexually at designated time with Vatican-designated partners or at Cubi-Human Clubs. Nothing more profound. And then Lider came into his life—his dreams, at first, quite literally—on Rhys’s way to Mars.

I’m married now, but not at all to the person I imagined. And it didn’t happen the way I thought it would. I’ve traveled but far farther than anywhere on Earth or even the Moon.

Maybe faith was what filled the gap between imagination and reality.

Rhys said, “Does anyone have any reason to hurt Brae? Physically? Is he the villain in someone else’s story?”

He had to ask, and Lider was ready to answer. They had investigated murders as well as an attempted assassination.

“No,” Lider said. “He spent a few months at his clan’s company. Most Siphons do at some point. He started a degree in History—partly through tutors, partly on an actual campus. He’s a decent writer, produced a few articles on Siphon mythology. Some friends from college, but they speak about him more like an associate. Someone they met. Liked. But not close. No confidants.”

“What mythology did he focus on?”

“Medieval. Mermaids as sirens. Rarely seen. Difficult to approach. Amoral. His writing makes the usual connections: mermaids as symbolic water deities, possibly related to Siphons but not necessarily. He also dives into Faroe doctrines: Siphons as mixed entities. Colonies of nectaphores make a Siphon many beings at once.”

“So maybe he did go the religious route.”

“I reached out to Melody RaykJanes. She lives in the kingdom of Mercia. Frankie suggested her. Melody agreed to contact the clan associated with the Faroe Islands.”

“If he joined a cult—” Rhys began.

Years of sharing his head and his dreams with Lider had their effect. For Lider said—

“—that would be a tremendous relief.”

* * * 

They arrived at Grand Central, the name a holdover from when New Amsterdam was New York City. They collected their belongings, and Rhys tried not to be distracted by Lider’s charming clumsiness at picking up items and slinging a duffel bag over his shoulder. Lider was still accustoming himself to corporeality. He no longer shimmered at the edges; he was entirely solid. But his awe at strolling, at lifting packages, at touching surfaces reminded Rhys of why he became a priest in the first place.

We honor the Being who gives us so much pleasure.

They entered the concourse—trains to New Amsterdam communities further south; trains to New LaGuardia, where one could board shuttles for Europe or shuttles for the Moon. They strode through the crowd—families, business-oriented folks, Siphons, Anthros, tails tucked over their arms, the odd sidewalk preacher and busker. Lider sighed happily. Lider liked being one of a crowd, liked his supposed anonymity. Rhys supposed Lider had accomplished that end, but Lider’s unique self was endlessly non-anonymous to him.

They’d crossed nation-states when they entered New Amsterdam, so they paused at Customs and extended their passports for review.

“Rhys?”

Rhys glanced in the direction of the query and felt himself slow, pause, the way he did when startled.

Wade stood on the officially New Amsterdam side of Customs.

Rhys’s ex.