Something Going Around (2 page)

“Makes me never want to go outside again,” I said.

“It is more dangerous in India than here,” she said, “but malaria used to reach as far north as North Dakota. Global warming and easy travel may bring those days back.”

Indira sent me a measuring stare. Some people who've gone through a couple of divorces, or even one, get too cynical for normal, less scarred, human beings to stand. But she had a scar or three of her own. I must have passed the test. She went on talking and drinking with me—no
Oh, I have to run. Gotta steam-clean the tropical fish
.

I mentioned the cognates that Gothic and English share. The Gothic word for “he, she, or it said” is
qath
. Looks ugly, doesn't it? Looks even uglier if you use the thorn character to represent
th
, the way most printed texts do (in the real Gothic alphabet, the letter for
th
looks like a Greek psi). But open the King James Bible anywhere. How often will you see
quoth
in there? Gothic may be a crazy great-uncle, but it's part of our family, all right.

And Indira talked about sticklebacks. You can find them in ponds and creeks around here. They don't get much longer than your finger. In spring, which is their mating season, the males go from silvery to orangey-red. It's what they do instead of trolling in bars.

They have parasites. Everything has parasites, from what Indira said. Even parasites have parasites. I started to quote that bit from Swift about smaller fleas preying on bigger ones. She laughed out loud and finished it for me—a good thing, 'cause I would have messed it up. Her lilting accent turned the doggerel to music.

But anyway, sticklebacks. Like I said, they're little. They eat things like mosquito larvae and the eggs of other fish. Anything that's bigger than they are eats them. Sticklebacks in their right mind will dive deep to get away from the wading birds that think of them as sardines minus the olive oil.

Sticklebacks in their right mind, yeah. But sticklebacks get flatworms. When they have them, they grow more buoyant, so they can't dive so well. And they turn fearless. They don't run—well, swim—away from herons. Sometimes they even change color, as if they're breeding. They do everything but carry an EAT ME! sign.

Do those flatworms need the wading birds for the next phase of their life cycle? Does Sam Adams make pretty decent beer? Kind of tough on the sticklebacks, but no flatworms show up on Dr. Phil's show to talk about how guilty they feel.

“These worms fill the sticklebacks' intestinal tract,” Indira said. “They take most of the nourishment from what the fish eat. No wonder the sticklebacks grow desperate. Other parasites are more subtle.
Toxoplasma
is one.” My face must have twisted, because she stopped. “You know about
Toxoplasma
?”

“Afraid I do,” I said. “Back in the Eighties, three or four friends of mine died of AIDS. Two of them got brain abscesses from toxoplasmosis. It was like they were going nuts. No, not like—they were.”

She nodded. “People with normal immune systems can carry
Toxoplasma
their whole lives and never know they have it. Millions of people do, especially people with cats. Malaria breeds in a mosquito's gut.
Toxoplasma
lives in a lot of animals, but it needs a cat's gut to breed. And it makes sure it gets there.”

“How do you mean?” I asked. I've had cats; I've got one now. I like them better 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.

“Rats 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.

“Does
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?”

“Well, 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.

“I 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.”

“How 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.”

“The 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.

“All 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?”

“What 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 they had thumbs, I mean.”

“You are not including an insect vector, like the mosquito for malaria.” Even with the scotch she'd taken aboard, Indira was very precise. To go into a line of research like hers, she'd have to be.

And I said, “No, I didn't have anything like that in mind. Too easy.”

“Too easy.” Indira made a little clucking noise. “I said before that you found interesting questions, didn't I? That one … I don't know the answer to that one yet. I wonder if I ever will. We
are
harder to influence than rats and mice, thank heaven. Whether we're impossible, I also don't know.” She glanced down at her glass, and seemed amazed to see only a few melting rocks in there. “I do know I'd like another drink.”

I wasn't sorry to have another one myself. We talked some more. We gave each other cell numbers and e-mail addresses that didn't belong to the university system. Yes, the modern mating dance. After a while, Indira checked her iPhone and said something about how late it was getting.

When she stood up, I did too, though I wasn't planning on leaving quite yet. She wore sparkly shoes. Before long, I found out she did that all the time, even when she exercised. She never met footwear with sequins or sparkles or rhinestones that she didn't like. It was part of her style, the way gaudy bow ties are with some men.

“I enjoyed talking with you,” I said.

“And I did, with you,” she answered.

“I'll call you,” I said. If she decided she didn't feel like going out with a random professor of Germanic philology she'd met in a bar, she'd let me know. Even if she didn't want to, I doubted she'd be mean about it. The way things are, you can't hope for more than that. Too often, you don't even get so much.

Call her I did. She didn't pretend she had no idea who I was. We went to dinner a few times, and to plays, and to a folk club I like. We went to each other's places and met each other's children. All the kids got that their parents had lives of their own. They weren't always thrilled about it, but they got it.

We talked more about languages, and about parasites, and about other things, too.

Yes, we arranged some privacy. That
was
private, though, so I won't go on about it. I know—my attitude is old-fashioned these days. Everyone puts everything online as soon as it happens, or sometimes even before. But if someone who specializes in Gothic isn't entitled to be old-fashioned, who the devil is?

After I finished the last blue book of finals week and e-mailed grades to the registrar's office, I headed over to Mandelbaum's to celebrate my liberation. I heard the sirens while I was walking, but I didn't pay much attention to them. You do hear sirens every so often in the city. People rob other people, or whack them over the head with fireplace pokers, or shoot them. Cars run lights and smash each other. Sirens are part of life.

They're part of death, too. This time, the accident had happened only a few doors up from Mandelbaum's. It reminded me too much of the other one I'd seen. Another humongous set of wheels with a stove-in front end. Another body on the street with something covering up the worst of things. Another goddamn enormous splash of blood with nasty little critters licking or drinking or nibbling at the edges.

This time, the driver was a man. He sounded just as appalled, just as stunned, as the blond gal had the last time. “Oh, my God!” he told the cop with the notebook. “She just sailed out in front of me like she didn't have a care in the whole wide world. I couldn't stop—no fuckin' way. Oh, my God!”

She. Yes, those were a woman's legs sticking out from under the tarp. The feet were bare. She'd got knocked clean out of her shoes. You don't like to look at death up close and personal. You don't like to, but sometimes you can't help it. I noticed her skin was brown.

One of her shoes lay on the hood of a car a startlingly long way down the street. It glittered under the streetlamp—it was sequined to a fare-thee-well.

Now I was the one who choked out, “Oh, my God!” I started to turn to the cop, but what could I have told him? Nothing he'd believe. Nothing I even knew, not really.

I went into Mandelbaum's instead. Excuse me—I
ran
into Mandelbaum's instead. Yes, Victor was behind the bar. “Hey, Stan,” he said, and then, “Stan? Are you all right?”

“No.” I bolted into the men's room at the back. In there, I knelt down in front of the toilet and gave back everything I'd eaten for the past week and a half. I haven't heaved like that since I don't know when. Somehow, I was very neat. It all went into the bowl. When the spasm finally passed, I stood up and flushed it away. I washed my face at the sink. Half a dozen different kinds of tears were streaming down my cheeks. I dried myself with paper towels.

Then I rinsed my mouth again and again, for all the good it did. The taste doesn't go away so fast. You only wish it would. And after that, with soap and the hottest water I could stand, I washed my hands and washed them and washed them some more. Lady Macbeth would have been proud of me.

Of course, blood wasn't what I was trying to get rid of. And I had no idea whether breaks in the skin there were what might let it in to begin with. But all you can do is try.

Wish me luck, Indira.

END

Copyright (C) 2014 by Harry Turtledove

Art copyright (C) 2014 by Greg Ruth