Phillala was a bright collection of movements, like fish fins catching light as they near the surface of a lake. She greeted Rhys and Lider with a wide smile, not a hint of discomfort.
Juwel was a composed woman of sparse elegant bones. She leaned back in the divan, legs crossed. She wasn't Phillala's parent—the relationship fell into the cousin category—but as a CFO in the family company, she bore all the authority of the RaykJanes's name.
She didn’t interrupt Lider as he aquired information from Phillala, but as Meke once said of his mother, Juwel RaykJanes could run a board meeting from the ocean floor.
Lider learned that Phillala was attending college. She helped the family company in the marketing department. She was hoping to go into the theater. Not as an actress. Costuming. She recently worked on a Lloyd Webber-Aristophanes production. "Classics," she said. Rhys would swear Lider’s eyes twitched. Phillala was speaking as if 1400 years didn't separate the two artists.
“Is a career why you broke your engagement?” Lider said, his tone friendly, interested.
On the other side of Phillala, Juwel turned her head and gave Lider a level stare.
“Not really,” Phillala said. “Brae was totally supportive of my goals. We just weren't on the same page, you know.”
Lider paused. He said gently, “Did Brae feel the same?”
Phillala seemed to consider. Rhys couldn’t image that the question hadn’t been posed to her already—not with the breach of promise suit looming—but perhaps never in Lider’s way, as an exercise of imagination. She had likely answered dozens of questions about what Brae said and what she said and what happened after that. Not many that rested on the query, What was going through Brae’s head?
“He was upset,” Phillala said. “And, you know, our break-up was sad. We were both sad. At first, I told him we needed to spend time apart and then I told him it wasn't going to work. I don’t blame him for anything,” she said quickly.
Frankly, if Phillala’s reporting could be trusted, she had done a better job of ending an incompatible relationship than Wade had. Wade had blamed Rhys’s character and Rhys’s wants and Rhys’s mindset for their dissolution.
Why did he come to meet me and Lider?
Lider contemplated Phillala, head slightly tilted. Rhys reminded himself not to besottedly stare at his husband’s slightly creased brow, the lips scrunched sideways in thought.
Lider said to Juwel and Phillala together, “Do you have any idea where Brae is?”
Juwel sighed softly. Rhys didn’t doubt that question had been asked of various RaykJanes a dozen times in a dozen different ways.
But no decent investigator wouldn’t ask the question. A decent investigator never assumed what ground had already been covered.
Phillala said, “He said he was going to the Great Lakes Duchy. He wanted to speak to the priest who led his ceremony. Or to his initiator,” Phillala said, sounding utterly blithe about her ex-fiancé having slept with another woman in order to be a male who preferred sleeping with women in the first place.
But of course, RaykJanes were not so plebian they confused marital fidelity with temple rituals. They didn’t go in for "sweetheart" initiations.
Rhys wondered if Brae did. Was he as conflicted as his parents and sister seemed to be—scorning RaykJanes’s morality on the one hand while copying RaykJanes’s social mores and performances on the other?
Rhys said, “Did Brae, ah, want to undergo another initiation?”
“He couldn’t, could he? I know a Siphon who tried and it didn’t take. Brae didn't say he wanted to do anything like that.”
Juwel RaykJanes had tensed. She relaxed at Phillala’s entirely curious and pleasant tone, then gave her relative a contemplative stare. Most sentient beings expect some degree of reflection or remorse or uncertainty after an upheaval.
If Phillala had felt more uncertainty, had waited, giving Brae time to realize that she and he were incompatible—
Would he have? Before the wedding?
Phillala said, “He was more religious than me. He told me all about his initiation ceremony, including the priest’s speech. I barely remember what my priest said. But Brae could quote his.”
And yet Brae’s parents and sister suggested that Brae was not susceptible to the offerings of a cult.
Lider said, “What did Brae quote?”
“Stuff about Siphon natures. Initiation is the product of unsullied choice based on one’s pure intent. That kind of stuff.”
Both Rhys and Lider stiffened. Lider might be more spiritual than Rhys, more interested in transcendent and godly matters. Neither of them cared for arguments based on purity or pursuits of same.
“Protestants,” Lider tended to mutter over parishioners’ OCD efforts to capture righteousness through good thoughts and good acts. Original sin, to Lider, was a release from constant perfectionism. You can only be as good as a moment requires. You will screw up.
Juwel RaykJanes said in her soft voice, “Faroe Doctrine.”
Rhys and Lider nodded. Faroe Doctrine insisted that Siphons, with their zooids—that shaped stems and legs, that allowed for breathing both under and above water—were inhabited by multiple “selves.”
Lider said, “Being multitudinous hardly guarantees purity.”
Juwel said, “Don’t all beliefs in the abstract tend towards utopian visions?”
Rhys laughed. She gave him an arched brow.
“Eden,” he said.
“Or space,” Juwel said, her eyes moving beyond Rhys.
Meke said, “My mother thinks I’m an idealist. But I ran off to the Mars Space Station for something other than a pure self.”
Juwel snorted. “Idealism comes in many forms.”
Rill matched Juwel’s snort and mirrored her smirk. Meke’s smile widened. Meke was a romantic at heart. And he loved his family. He wanted his lover and his mother to get along.
Perhaps that made him an idealist. But Rhys thought that Meke had searched for Rill on the Mars Space Station with his eyes wide open. He ended up being a decent diplomat. But Rill was his primary objective. And Meke took Rill as he found him. An idealist without blinders on.
Where does that leave me with Lider?
Phillala said to Meke, “Brae admired you. He wanted to do what you do—bring people together. Uh, harmony and all that.”
“He wasn’t too happy about my failures,” Meke said calmly. “Or what he perceived as my failures. Aim for 90% compliance—get 40% if I’m lucky. A success, in my book. Brae was, ah, disillusioned by unscripted imperfections.”
“Diplomacy without actual hard work,” Rill muttered.
“Or an inability to face reality,” Juwel said in support of Rill.
Juwel had opposed Meke and Rill’s relationship initially. Rhys assumed her objections ended when she realized her new son thought more like Juwel than most other people in her family.
Except Rill loved space, wanted to live in space. He was on Earth with Meke to ease his admittance into the family but only temporarily. Hence, Juwel’s acerbic comments about space being another Eden.
Would Meke and Rill compromise? Would the man who pursued love across a nine-month mission return with his lover to the Mars Space Station? Or would some other solution arise? A move to the Moon perhaps?
Whatever Rill and Meke decided, they were obviously taking the long-road, giving themselves time. Didn't everything eventually “come out in the wash,” a phrase that Siphons considered somewhat crass?
Maybe tragedy was simply the inability for a person to wait.
Was Brae somewhere waiting? Or had Brae gone and done something tragic?
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