(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."

Mother gave me a look. "If you’ve finally begun to believe what I say, the universe is getting strange indeed." She sighed. "We were in the pagoda, Youn Suu. You were watching a pair of Neo-Tantrics doing their usual in a corner. You were pretending to meditate, but you were twelve years old, fascinated by all kinds of sex and not good at hiding your interest. People were watching you more than the Neo-Tants; you were so obvious, the way you kept taking oh-so-casual peeks at the couple in the corner, and I suppose a lot of folks found that cute."

"Or they just couldn’t take their eyes off my cheek."

"Maybe that too," Mother said. "You always drew attention. It was hard taking you out in public. I got so embarrassed…" She shook her head. "I guess that’s what happened at the temple. I was embarrassed by everybody looking at you, so I thought I’d go outside for a few minutes. Get some air. Pretend you weren’t with me. But when I got to the door…"

"You went to the door?"

"Yes. And outside, a bunch of statues were covered with stuff that hadn’t been there when we came in. Purple jelly, black sand, lava… every statue had something crawling on it."

"You saw the statues?"

"That’s what I’m saying. You were too busy staring at two not-very-attractive people having sex, but I saw what I saw."

"What about the Buddha statue? The one inside the pagoda, in the fountain."

"That was the strangest part," my mother said. "I came running back inside to get you — to drag you away someplace safe, in case the stuff on the statues was dangerous — and I glanced at the Buddha, just for half a second. In that instant, the statue was suddenly replaced with a woman in a wheelchair. She was moss from the waist down, Youn Suu: glowing red moss. And she was looking at you. You had your back to her, so you didn’t see. But she smiled at you. Her eyes were hidden behind her hair, but I could see her mouth, and she smiled. She lifted her hands toward you in the Wisdom mudra… then she disappeared, and the Buddha was back to normal. When I got you outside, the other statues were back to normal too. I hustled you away before anything else happened and never told you what I’d seen. Never went back to that temple either." She gave me a probing look. "Well? Was that what you wanted to hear?"