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Crown Vic to a Parallel World: Stolen Love The third and final installment of the ongoing adventures of Church Philips
4
The Gallery
I accepted Paul's empty cup from him and set it with mine to see to later. The old man seemed tired, and we had several hours before dinner, so I planned to take him directly to his apartment to rest until then. We didn't get far though, because when he got up from the island and turned toward the opposite wall of the apartment, his eyes fell on the bookcase against it.
Instead of dry, medical tombs, which is what the bookshelves in Shawn's Epistylium apartment held, these shelves held memories. Many of the memories were in the form of framed photos, but there was more, much more. Along with the photos, were certificates of accomplishment, awards, diplomas and degrees, and several trophies.
"What do we have here?" Paul asked brightly. "It looks like photos and keepsakes." He crossed the room to the shelves and peered at the eye-level shelf. This one held a dozen or so small, black frames arranged around a centrally located, larger picture. "May I?" He asked with his hand raised to the shelf and hovering just short of touching the largest of the framed photos.
"Sure." I said and Paul immediately picked up the photo to examine.
The photo Paul had selected was of Shawn and me at our wedding. We were in the garden of the ceremonial hall in front of a wall of white flowers, each of us dressed in our lavender suits, and we were kissing. The moment captured by the photo showed Shawn and I from our midsections up, and close together as I bent down slightly to lower my face to his.
My right shoulder was just about touching Shawn's left and my left was toward the camera, and far enough away from his right, for the eye of the camera to see our white shirt fronts. Shawn had his right hand on my left breast and was just about to shove me away from him because, what the eye of the camera didn't see, was my right hand under the tail of his jacket, squeezing his left ass cheek.
It was my favorite photo of us because of the moment it showed. Shawn's face below his eyes was all about kissing me, but his eyes smiled at mine with the humor he felt when I grabbed him below the waist. I liked to think that my eyes showed the mischief of the action and the consuming love that I felt at that moment, and every moment after.
Paul ran his hand around the picture frame as he looked at the photo. "The church would tell me that this picture shows something sinful, but you look so happy together. How can something that brings two people such joy be a sin?" Paul put the picture back on the shelf and glanced over the rest of them. "And look at all the people you've managed to make happy." He observed and selected another frame.
The next one he picked was a recent one. It was a photo of Mary and Bem together with their two-year old son. It was a candid shot that showed Mary using her telekinesis to dazzle her blond and laughing child with a cloud of shining, multi-colored stones while her doting husband looked on. "Ah," Paul said when he recognized the couple, "the Ecclesia family. That was quite a gesture by your friend and your sister to name themselves after you."
Paul was talking about the name Ecclesia' that Mary and Bem had chosen as their married name on Solum. Mary didn't want to be a Philips or a Thompson anymore and Bem didn't want Mary to take his last name of Custos either. He'd called his last name, the name of his old life.'
Bem had come up with the idea to pick a new last name and the couple had chosen a name that meant `church' in Latin. Bem had said that since he owed his happiness to me, it was only right that he and my sister do something to honor me for bringing the two of them together. I told them that they should pick a name that made them happy, and not to worry about me. They'd said my name made them happy and insisted on using it. I cried when they announced it officially at their wedding ceremony.
Mary and Bem both wanted their own children, but didn't want to alienate Hannah and Leah. In an attempt at being very careful of everyone's feelings, they waited until the twins were away at school before getting pregnant with their first child, little Tobit. The couple had named him for a minor biblical figure whose importance wasn't clear to me. Paul seemed to understand, though and approved of the name. "He looks like his father, but I see Mary in him as well. It will be interesting to see who he takes after." Paul replaced the picture and selected another.
The next one he chose was of Hannah and Leah on the day they graduated from secondary school. It would have been easy to call the twins, `Mary's children from her first marriage,' because that's what they were, except Mary's first husband did not figure in their creation. Mary's first husband, Zeke, had been sterile. Mary seduced a delivery driver, a Hispanic man named Diego who used to deliver the bottled drinking water to her home. He was the father of her children. He died before the twins were born, so he didn't figure as anything more than a sperm donor.
When the girls were thirteen or fourteen, old enough to understand' in Mary's estimation, Mary and Bem explained their origins to them. Mary didn't want any surprises later on and insisted the girls be told the complete truth of how they came into the world. Bem had been worried how they would react to the news. At the time, he still felt like an outsider to what he thought of as Mary's family.'
The twins did the best thing they could have done. They hugged their mother and kissed Bem and told them both that Mary was their mother and Bem was their father and as far as they were concerned, that was the beginning and the end of it. Bem wept for joy and thereafter the girls called him `Daddy' to his immense gratification.
I focused my attention onto the photo of Hannah and Leah that Paul was scrutinizing, to remind myself of the event it depicted. The photo was very recent, barely a week old, and was a close-up of three faces. Two of them were my nieces, who'd grown to be very attractive twenty-year-olds, and they were each kissing one of the hollow cheeks of their shared boyfriend, Altus Profundus. Altus, a lean, sallow faced youth, with startling green eyes and blond hair down to his ass, had a sly look on his face that said he knew he was living every straight man's fantasy.
Hannah and Leah had their mother's height, both five-feet-nine-inches, and also had Mary's fine features, but they had what I assumed was their biological father's genes for coloring and body type. The girls had dusky olive skin and tightly curled black hair that they wore shoulder length, like the poodle dog hairdos some women wore in the nineteen-eighties. They were also more voluptuous than my sister, with amply feminine hourglass bodies that they loved to show off by wearing as little as possible.
I was always deeply surprised when the girls would trapse around the house, usually headed to and from the pool, wearing the Solum version of string bikinis. These were made more shocking because the girls had deliberately selected a fabric color that was the same tone as their tanned skin, so from even a small distance, the girls appeared completely nude. Boyfriend Altus was also an exhibitionist and showed off his sinewy leanness, clad in a slingshot-style thong that seemed to accentuate his genitals more than it concealed them.
The `bathing suit,' if you could call it that, had no waistband and wrapped only above his right hip and not the left. His selection of garment was more shocking as it didn't equate to altered grooming habits. Altus shamelessly showed off his thick crop of wavy blond pubic hair. I thought this was odd because he obviously shaved the rest of his body but seemed to deliberately cultivate this private hair.
As often as it happened, I never quite got over seeing the man so close to nude. One side effect of seeing him that way, it made me wonder if taste in men could be hereditary. Altus' coloring and body type were close enough to Bem's to be startling.
"Amazing to have them out of school so young." Paul commented on the photo. He either wasn't disturbed by my nieces sharing a man or he'd decided to keep his thoughts to himself. "I wrote you about that, didn't I?" I asked. I was certain I had, but I wasn't certain that Paul would remember the details.
Education on Solum doesn't follow the same pattern as education on Earth. On Solum, children receive primary education until they are fifteen, with general education being the main focus. When they are sixteen, they enter their secondary schooling where they receive career training in their chosen field. This career training is conducted in parallel to magic training.
Through watching the twins grow up, I'd learned that magic power manifests in the young during puberty. Primary school classifies young people as their powers blossom and teaches them basic control, but the specific use of magic power is a subject saved for secondary schooling.
Hannah and Leah turned out to be powerful Second-Class empaths with the individual powers of telepathy and compulsion. They can't read minds for specific thoughts, though they get impressions of mood and intent, but they can speak mind to mind with each other and can initiate mental conversation with most people. They could also compel people to do certain things as long as the subject didn't have strong feelings against the act. They couldn't compel someone to jump off a bridge, but they could compel someone to leave a room.
Their chosen career path was law enforcement, and they'd just graduated from the Solum equivalent of the police academy. The two girls and their boyfriend had jobs waiting for them on the Epistylium police force, but the three had decided to take the summer off before going to work. They didn't seem to have plans for their vacation beyond living at the estate and soaking up as much sun as possible while they could. The three of them barely spoke aloud, though their tendency to burst into unexplained laughter told me that they carried on a near constant mental conversation among the three of them.
I'd had Altus checked out as thoroughly as I'd done with Comet and found him acceptable for my nieces. He seemed a basically decent guy who had a little trouble respecting his elders. His lack of respect didn't worry me too much. He was still young, and I didn't figure he'd be a permanent fixture for either of the girls. They seemed to be having fun, and without the risks of disease or pregnancy, I had no reason to object to whatever they might get up to.
I also knew that between the combat training they'd received at the academy and the tutoring their `Daddy' Bem had given them, each girl was more than capable of defending herself against any unwanted attention that might be directed their way. I'd once watched the two of them spar with the retired, but still very capable, Cy Dux. They'd subdued him with fearsome speed. I pitied anyone who would underestimate either of them individually, but when both of them were together, they were unstoppable.
Mary seemed to struggle a bit with the overtly sexual lives her daughters were living, but she'd managed to keep her thoughts to herself for the most part. More than once, I'd seen her open her mouth to object to a more obvious grope or other overt sexual attention between the girls and their boyfriend. Each time Bem was there with a kiss or grope of his own to silence Mary before she spoke.
I was certain that all Mary would manage to do by making a stink, would be to drive a wedge between herself and her daughters. As there was no real risk, there was no real reason to complain. I assumed the novelty of the overt sexuality of the relationship would eventually run its course and the girls would settle down. Until then, I reasoned that the less said, the better.
Bem seemed to agree with me though we hadn't spoken about it. He and I hadn't spoken about much in a while. When we got back to Solum from Earth in 2025, he and Mary became instant soulmates and the Bem that I'd come to know and love didn't come back to me. It's not that we weren't friends anymore, we were, but we were friends from a greater distance. When I reflected on the subject, which I found myself doing more and more often recently, I felt that the distance between he and I was even greater now that we lived in the same place than when he was on the other side of the world on tour with Divided Light.
I missed Bem as my friend, and I missed him as my lover. In the years since Bem had committed himself to a monogamous relationship with Mary, Shawn and I had invited a few other special guests to our bed, but none of them were even close to as much fun as Bem had been. Maybe I expected too much from the others, or maybe I was looking for something that couldn't be found.
"Church." Paul put a hand on mine.
His touch reminded me where I was and what I was doing. I looked down and realized my right hand was closed around the bracelet on my left wrist and was squeezing it hard enough that all my knuckles were white. I peeled the hand away and used it to rub the back of my neck. "Sorry, Father...I mean Paul. I guess my mind wandered. What were we talking about?"
Paul blinked at me for a second, like he wasn't sure what to say or do, but his hesitance didn't last. "I said Mary's girls seemed to enjoy their young man, and I asked if that style of relationship was common here."
Paul held the picture out to me, and I took it. I looked at my nieces and the current object of their affection and thought about Paul's question. I told him the truth as I knew it. "It's more common in the very young. Occasionally a three-way relationship will become a three-way marriage, but it's rare. Solum doesn't have a problem with bigamy, but I think those types of relationships are more difficult to maintain."
"I could see how they would be." Paul conceded.
"They have lots of time." I added. "Shawn's parents didn't even meet until they were in their eighties, and they didn't marry until Shawn's mother was in her late-nineties. They had their first child a year or two later and Shawn's mother was one-hundred-and-three when she had Shawn."
Paul rubbed his chin with his big right hand and shook his head like he didn't believe me. I assumed he was struggling with the idea that people could live as long as they did on Solum. I put the photo of my nieces back and found one of Shawn and his mother. The picture was several years old and was from a party we'd had to christen the estate when construction was complete.
In the picture, Shawn and Lenis were standing next to each other, close together and arm in arm. Both of them were wearing their long, raven-black-hair down, Shawn's to his shoulders and Lenis' to her waist. The way it framed their faces made them look very much alike. Shawn was wearing a typical Solum long-cut suit in taffy pink with an orange shirt and white tie while his mother wore a floor-length dress in the same orange as Shawn's shirt.
Lenis' dress was form-fitting and clung to her athletic figure in a way that highlighted her femininity and showed her off. The dress had a daring powder-blue streak up the side that looked like Lenis had run through a sprinkler spraying blue paint. Her free-hand held a champaign flute in the air like she was agreeing to a toast. She winked at the camera through a genuine smile.
I stuck the framed photo into Paul's left hand and introduced him to it. "That's her, Lenis Summas, Shawn's mother. She's one-hundred-and-forty-three, but this picture is seven years old or so, so that makes her one-hundred-and-thirty-six there. Her birthday was the fifth of this month."
"Cinco de Mayo." Paul breathed. He held the photo up to me like I hadn't seen it. "This woman...this woman right here...is how old?" He pointed at it and insisted I answer him.
"She was born in eighteen-ninety-four. Wild, isn't it?"
Paul brought the photo back to his face and stared at it. "This is a very handsome woman. There is no question she is a very handsome woman. Shawn looks very much like her."
His words gave me pause. If Paul had been anyone else, if he hadn't been a priest, I would have teased him about being smitten with Shawn's mother. As he was who he was, I left the comment unuttered and waited for him to finish with the picture. He set the frame back in its place on the shelf and asked me several questions about some of the keepsakes on the other shelves.
I took my time explaining various ceremonial keys to various cities all over Solum, most of them awarded to Shawn and me after we participated in a disaster recovery effort. I also showed off trophies I'd won during my brief career as a professional debater. Early in Shawn and my relationship, Shawn had taken me to watch a debate at a public park. I'd challenged one of the debating experts during the question and answer period of the event and managed to attract the attention of the debate organizer.
The organizer, a dumpy man named Hice, asked me if I'd be interested in debating. I said I would and while I was recovering from the first mission, and couldn't get around very well, I debated extensively to keep myself busy. Sometimes I prepared for a debate with weeks of research and sometimes I just showed up cold and attacked the merits of my opponent's position.
Either way I approached the event, I seemed to have a knack for arguing and became a respected debater on the Epistylium circuit. I could have gone on to debate greater and greater headliners, but once my physical recovery was complete, Shawn and I started to travel, and I never got back to debating. I'd thought about going back to it, more than once, as a way to kill time, but I never followed through.
The other item that I showed off with a measure of personal pride was my two degrees from college. When Shawn and I returned from Earth in 2025, and after my family was settled in, Shawn opened his first practice in the capitol, and I went to college. I studied Solum history and science and technology and was eventually awarded the equivalent of bachelor's degrees in both fields.
I could have pursued a teaching career in either field, but during a vacation Shawn and I took when I graduated, we'd decided to purchase the Demon's Citadel Mountain and the Nameless Plains and build the estate and all that. I took charge of that effort and never did anything with my degrees. Not that they had gone to waste or anything. The degrees had done what I wanted them to do, they taught me about Solum. With the knowledge I'd gained in school, I felt very at home in my new world, and that had been the original point.
I also showed Paul several framed letters from people who Shawn had helped in his practice. The letters were from all kinds of people from both ends of the social spectrum. Some of the letters came from dignitaries and celebrities and some came from regular people, even poor people. Shawn cherished the ones from the poor people the most. He loved to help and often donated his very-sought-after services to those who had no hope of being able to pay what his time was worth.
"You are both very accomplished men." Paul observed after examining several of the framed letters addressed to Shawn. "It makes me proud to be the friend of such accomplished men. Why, I look at these shelves and it makes me doubt my own accomplishments, if it were possible to measure such things."
I was about to praise Paul for his own myriad lifetime successes when Paul's eyes apparently fell on something troubling. "Who is that?" He pointed to the photo of a bearded fat man with his arm around Andy.
"That's Joe."
"It isn't." Paul gasped, refusing to believe. "What happened to him?"
I physically turned Paul away from the shelf and guided him toward the apartment door. "I'll tell you on the way."