"Anything you like. Want me to play harmonica? Read you your favorite stories? Fuck you till you turn to butter? Kill you in your sleep?"
"Kill me in my sleep?"
"Well, yeah. If you can’t stand the thought of becoming moss, I could save you from a fate worse than death. I haven’t figured out how to kill you without the League of Peoples killing me first, but if we both put our heads together…"
"No," I said, "you don’t have to do that." I leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. The gold was warm with Tut’s body temperature… but it was just gold, and I wished it had been flesh instead. "It’s sweet of you to offer, but I’m fine, really. Shiny-finey. Best thing for both of us is to get plenty of sleep. We want to be sharp for the landing."
"Okay, Mom. But the offer’s still open. Not just killing you, but any of that other stuff too."
I smiled… and for a moment I imagined saying what the hell, why die a virgin? Why not have one night, even if it’s Tut? It would be painfully awkward — before, during, and after — and I couldn’t imagine drowsing languidly in his arms after he’d offered to kill me in my sleep — but if not Tut, who? And if not now, when?
Silence. Then a sigh. I couldn’t do it. It was too much like the fantasy scenarios that girls discuss when they’re thirteen: suppose you’ve got this fatal disease and the only guy you can sleep with is someone who’s okay, but you don’t love him at all…
I didn’t feel like a bubbly girl. "Good night, Tut," I said. "See you in the morning."
He watched me all the way to the door. As I walked away down the hall, I heard him start wheeling around the mess hall on his chair, slamming into things hard.
Back in my cabin, the ship-soul informed me that the call to my mother would go through in twenty minutes. I passed the time writing a preliminary report of what happened in Zoonau — preliminary because it was just a list of point-form notes. Without too much trouble, I could have fleshed it out into a complete linear narrative, but I liked the abbreviated format better: the last, hurried testament of a tragic heroine, doomed to die on Muta or be consumed by parasitic spores. I imagined future Explorers reading my words and thinking, "How brave she was! To keep to her duty, writing reports, while staring death in the face."
(Now I think, "How childish I was! To put on a show for unknown readers in the hope of winning their pity." I certainly was my mother’s daughter.)
I kept my eye on the clock as I wrote, hurrying so I’d be done in time. Exact to the second, the ship-soul announced that the call was going through… and almost immediately my mother answered.
"Raymond?" she said a bit breathlessly.
Her face on the vidscreen was made up Western style: lipstick, eyeliner, mascara. No thanaka. Though she was forty-five years old, YouthBoost treatments left her looking my age. I. In fact, she was almost my twin; the backstreet engineer had based me on Mother’s DNA, so we looked very much like sisters. I’d been designed to be beautiful, so my version of her features was a little better in almost every respect — better skin, better bone structure, more lustrous hair, more luminous eyes — but she didn’t have a leprous weeping cheek, which put her far ahead of me in the beauty contest. On the other hand, my face was washed and clean, not slathered with Caucasian makeup like a slut.
"It’s me, Mother," I said… unnecessarily, because she could surely see my face on her own vidscreen. A moment later, I knew she could see me: her eager expression fell when she realized I wasn’t the caller she hoped for.
"Who’s Raymond?" I asked. I knew it didn’t matter — his existence mattered, his actual identity didn’t — but I couldn’t help myself.
"He’s just a friend," my mother said, confirming all my suspicions. "Where are you, Youn Suu?"
Not Ma Youn Suu. Mothers weren’t required to address their daughters politely. Especially not when the daughter called with inconvenient timing. "I’m in space," I told her. "Light-years away. And I just have a single question."
"What?" Her voice went wary.
"When I was twelve, did we go to a temple together? The Ghost Fountain Pagoda. Is there really such a temple, and did anything strange happen there?"
She didn’t answer immediately. Whatever question she might have expected, this wasn’t it. (I wonder what she was afraid I’d ask. What secrets did my mother have that she feared I might uncover?) It took several seconds for her to switch mental tracks to what I’d actually said. "Of course there’s a Ghost Fountain Pagoda," she finally replied. "We went there once or twice, but I didn’t like it. Too many people. Too loud and crazy."
"Did anything unusual happen any of the times we went there?"
"How do I know what was unusual? I told you, we only went once or twice. Or three, four times, I don’t remember. Not often enough to know what was usual."
"But did anything remarkable happen while we were there?" I tried not to shout. Though I hadn’t talked to my mother in months, we’d fallen back into our old dysfunctional patterns: as soon as I asked a question, she instinctively tried not to answer it. But for once, I wanted to have a conversation with her that didn’t end up screaming.
"What do you consider remarkable?" my mother asked, still evading the question. "People having sex out in the open?"
"No." We’d seen that at a lot of temples. The Neo-Tantric sect had a constitutional right to copulate in public, and they exercised that right whenever, wherever. "If you don’t remember anything out of the ordinary, Mother, just say so."
"Why is this important?" she asked… yet again dodging the question. Despite my good intentions mere seconds before, I found myself losing my temper.
"It’s important because I’m being eaten!" I snapped. "I’m infected by a parasite that may be driving me mad, and I don’t know if I can trust my own memories. I thought, maybe, maybe, you’d help me decide if the spores were playing games with my mind. But of course I was wrong. You don’t want to help me with anything, Mother. You just want me to shut up before your precious Raymond calls."
She stared at me a moment… then let out an Oh-I’m-a-martyr sigh. "Really, Youn Suu. You look perfectly fine. Nothing’s eating you. Have you been taking drugs or something?"
"No. The parasite’s inside me. It’s an alien infestation that doesn’t show up on the surface until it’s too late."
"Then go see a doctor, you silly girl."
"Doctors can’t help. And neither, apparently, can you. Sorry to disturb you, Mother. I won’t do it again. I won’t last long enough, will I?"
I almost punched the DISCONNECT button: an ingrained reflex to cut off conversation after I’d delivered a good parting shot. But I stopped myself in time. Did I want to squander my chance for truth out of sheer petty pique?
On the vidscreen, my mother looked like she knew exactly what thoughts were going through my head. She wore a "Well, are you going to do it?" expression… based, I guess, on all the times I had hung up on her, or stormed out of the room, or just covered my ears and screamed, "Shut up, shut up, shut up!"
Taking a breath, I said, "Look. Let’s start over. Was there a day we went to that temple and something extraordinary happened?"
"Why do you want to know?" Again, answering my question with a question.
"Why don’t you want to tell me?" I said, giving her another question back. "You’re being so evasive, it sounds like something did happen, and you’re afraid to admit it."
I paused. Mother said nothing — looking somewhere off-screen. "Don’t be shy," I said. "It’s not like I’ll think you’ve gone crazy. If there’s one thing I’ve learned as an Explorer, it’s that the universe is full of strangeness. I’ll believe whatever you tell me."