Something Going Around

Something Going Around Read Free

Book: Something Going Around Read Free
Author: Harry Turtledove
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than dogs. Come to think of it, my friends with AIDS who came down with toxoplasmosis had cats, too. I took care of one of them for a while when the guy it owned was in the hospital.
    â€œRats and mice carry Toxoplasma , the same way we do,” Indira said. “It doesn’t make them sick, either. But if normal mice or rats smell cat urine, they show fear. They run. They hide. They know that smell means danger. Rats and mice with Toxoplasma aren’t afraid of cat piss. Which rats and mice do you think the cats eat more often? Where does the Toxoplasma need to go?”
    I thought about that for a little while. I imagined the poor, damned mice and rats as marionettes, with invisible strings connecting their arms and legs and twitching noses to an even more invisible puppeteer. Mandelbaum’s isn’t one of those bars where the AC tries to turn it into Baffin Island in January. I shivered anyhow.
    â€œDoes Toxoplasma do anything like that to people with working immune systems?” I asked. All of a sudden, I didn’t want Alaric—yes, my lazy, fuzzy beast is named for a Gothic king, not that he cares—getting the drop on me.
    Indira sent me another one of those … measuring looks. “You do find the interesting questions, don’t you?”
    â€œWell, I have a cat.” I told her about the predator infesting my condo. Alaric is the deadliest hunter his size. He is if you happen to be a kitty treat, anyhow.
    â€œI see,” she said. “The answer is yes. Toxoplasma doesn’t turn people into cat food. It does influence their behavior, though. It makes men more suspicious and less willing to accept social rules. Women, by contrast, become friendlier. The effects aren’t enormous, not in people. But they’re measurable. Parasites have evolved the ability to influence their hosts over millions of years and millions and millions of generations.”
    â€œHow about that?” I said. Especially after a few beers, it seemed very profound. Here were these things inside bigger creatures, things without any brains in the ordinary sense of the word. But they got the bigger creatures to do what they wanted—no, what they needed—one way or another, with or without brains. “I can see why all this intrigues you so much.”
    â€œThe deeper you dig, the more you see you’ve only started to scratch the surface,” Indira said. “When I was born, we didn’t know any of this. I’m sure researchers will be learning surprising new things about parasites and hosts two hundred years from now.”
    I was a long way from sure philologists would be learning surprising new things about Gothic two hundred years from now. I had some major doubts, as a matter of fact. To learn more about the language, we’d have to come up with new texts. Maybe the Great Gothic Novel—mm, more likely the Great Gothic Saint’s Life or the Great Gothic Chronicle—would turn up in some monastery in Italy or Spain or even the Crimea. Maybe, sure, but I wasn’t holding my breath. Neither were the few dozen others scattered across the world who could get through Ulfilas’s Bible with gun and camera and lexicon and patience.
    Something else crossed my beady little mind, probably because I’d soaked up all those beers. “Suppose there’s a parasite that can live in people but needs some other host to mate in,” I said.
    â€œAll right. Suppose there is.” Indira sounded as if she was humoring me. No doubt she was. She’d made a career of this. I was making conversation in a bar. She’d put away a fair bit of scotch, too. “What then?”
    â€œWhat I wondered was, how would the parasites get out?” I said. “People would be inconvenient to them, wouldn’t they? Uh, wouldn’t we? We live too long, and the parasites in us would just be sitting there twiddling their thumbs waiting for us to die. If

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