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.
âRats and mice carry Toxoplasma , the same way we do,â Indira said. âIt doesnât 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 arenât afraid of cat piss. Which rats and mice do you think the cats eat more often? Where does the Toxoplasma need to go?â
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. Mandelbaumâs isnât one of those bars where the AC tries to turn it into Baffin Island in January. I shivered anyhow.
âDoes Toxoplasma do anything like that to people with working immune systems?â I asked. All of a sudden, I didnât want Alaricâyes, my lazy, fuzzy beast is named for a Gothic king, not that he caresâgetting the drop on me.
Indira sent me another one of those ⦠measuring looks. âYou do find the interesting questions, donât you?â
âWell, I have a cat.â 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.
âI see,â she said. âThe answer is yes. Toxoplasma doesnât 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 arenât enormous, not in people. But theyâre measurable. Parasites have evolved the ability to influence their hosts over millions of years and millions and millions of generations.â
âHow about that?â 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 wantedâno, what they neededâone way or another, with or without brains. âI can see why all this intrigues you so much.â
âThe deeper you dig, the more you see youâve only started to scratch the surface,â Indira said. âWhen I was born, we didnât know any of this. Iâm sure researchers will be learning surprising new things about parasites and hosts two hundred years from now.â
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, weâd have to come up with new texts. Maybe the Great Gothic Novelâmm, more likely the Great Gothic Saintâs Life or the Great Gothic Chronicleâwould turn up in some monastery in Italy or Spain or even the Crimea. Maybe, sure, but I wasnât holding my breath. Neither were the few dozen others scattered across the world who could get through Ulfilasâs Bible with gun and camera and lexicon and patience.
Something else crossed my beady little mind, probably because Iâd soaked up all those beers. âSuppose thereâs a parasite that can live in people but needs some other host to mate in,â I said.
âAll right. Suppose there is.â Indira sounded as if she was humoring me. No doubt she was. Sheâd made a career of this. I was making conversation in a bar. Sheâd put away a fair bit of scotch, too. âWhat then?â
âWhat I wondered was, how would the parasites get out?â I said. âPeople would be inconvenient to them, wouldnât they? Uh, wouldnât we? We live too long, and the parasites in us would just be sitting there twiddling their thumbs waiting for us to die. If