Free Something Going Around by Harry Turtledove Page B

people.
    â€œYou … work on how parasites operate in the ordinary world?” I tried to translate what Indira Patel had said into ordinary English.
    She smiled and nodded, so I must have done it right. “That is what I do, yes.” She smiled some more. I’d scored a point or two, all right.
    â€œSounds … complex,” I said.
    She nodded again. “You have no idea. No one has any idea. The more we learn, the more complex it seems, too.”
    â€œSo tell me,” I told her. “Can I buy you another drink while you’re doing it?”
    â€œThank you,” she said. The mating dance, Mandelbaum’s style. Not so blatant or quick as it would have been at the meat-market places, but it was. Well, we weren’t so blatant or quick ourselves, either. Things did happen there, though.
    Victor built her a fresh scotch over ice. I got myself a new brew. Indira and I sat there and we talked. Not just parasites and beastly irregular Gothic verbs (the first-person plural past subjunctive of the verb to have is habeidedema in Gothic; in English, it’s had ). I found out she’d been married once before; she found out I’d been married twice before. She had a son and a daughter. I had two sons. Her boy and my older one were both in college out of state. We bitched about how too expensive that was, and how we’d have to declare bankruptcy when our younger offspring started chasing sheepskins.
    As a matter of fact, I wasn’t so broke as all that. I strongly suspected Indira wasn’t, either. She talked like someone who took money seriously. If you take it seriously, odds are you don’t run out of it. That isn’t a sure bet, but it’s a good one.
    I have to think she picked up the same vibe off me. We smiled the kind of smiles at each other that meant Yeah, you’re complaining, but you don’t have it so bad . Truth to tell, I didn’t. If she did, I would have been surprised.
    We did talk shop. What else are a couple of academics going to do? I went on about how the Gothic alphabet took characters from Greek, Latin, and the old Germanic runes. I told how Bishop Ulfilas translated the New Testament very literally from the Greek. I may have gone on too long; Indira listened well.
    I tried my best to do the same. My first ex would laugh her head off if she heard me say that. She’d have her reasons, too. I hope I’ve grown up some since then. I don’t know what I saw in her. Mm, yes I do—I was getting laid regularly for the first time ever. Which was fun while it lasted, but not, it turned out, a rock to build a lifetime on.
    My second ex? Different story. Not a happier ending, but different. Cyndi and I wrangled about money and about her brother. Malcolm is into crank. I don’t need to say any more than that.
    But Indira was talking about parasites that don’t walk on two legs. A lot of parasites, it turns out, infest different critters at different stages of their life cycle. “Like malaria,” I said.
    She beamed at me the way I’d beamed at her when she compared Gothic to Sanskrit. You always feel good when the person you’re talking with knows something about what you know a lot about.
    â€œMalaria is a very important one,” she agreed. “Various strains infect birds and mammals, but they mate in a mosquito’s gut. And, to some degree, they influence the behavior of their hosts. This is what interests me most—how parasites influence hosts to act in the parasites’ benefit and not their own.”
    â€œHow does malaria do that?” I’d had some beer by then, but I know a cue when I hear one.
    Turns out that a mosquito with baby malaria parasites (Indira told me the name for them, but I’ve forgotten it) in its gut bites less than one that’s clean. When they’re in its gut, they can’t spread, so the mosquito doesn’t risk getting squashed. When