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Beaton M.C. Hamish Macbeth 01 Hamish Macbethi ĹmierÄ plotkary
Miller Henry Zwrotnik Raka 01 Zwrotnik Raka
McNish Cliff Tajemnica zaklÄcia 01 Tajemnica zaklÄcia
Kurtz, Katherine Adept 01 The Adept
Malin Wolf Drachenkrieger 01 Drachenliebe
Jo Clayton Drinker 01 Drinker Of Souls
Jay D. Blakeny The Sword, the Ring, and the Chalice 01 The Sword
Antologia BarbarzyĹcy [Rebis] 01 BarbarzyĹcy_ Tom 1 (1991)
Diana Hunter [Submission 01] Secret Submission [EC] (pdf)
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Parasitic mind control? I said. My flesh crawled a little.
In mammals at least. There are some pretty great ones for insects and mollusks too, but if you want to play
with hosts that have spinal cords, T. gondii is the best game in town.
Aubrey s eyes were bright, and he leaned forward over the steering wheel as he spoke. Enthusiasm made
him seem younger than he was. I kind of wished he was getting jazzed about something with a lower ick factor,
but as he went on, the urge to wash my hands lessened a little and I found myself getting interested.
It usually lives in a cat s intestinal tract, he said. We call the cat the final host. It s where the organism
really wants to be.
So what does it do to the cat s mind? I asked.
Nothing. Zip. Nada. But there s a middle part. In order to get from one cat to another, it passes through
mice. So the first step is to go from the inside of a cat to the inside of a mouse.
And you do that by& ? I asked just a heartbeat before I figured it out. I made a face. We re about to talk
about mice eating cat poop, aren t we?
Well, yeah, he said. I weighed whether to change the subject back to mystical assassins and my recent
slaughter thereof, and reluctantly decided to stay with the poop-eating mice. We paused at a red light. Two
homeless men passed beside the car, faces flushed with the heat.
The thing that s interesting is what happens once it s inside the mouse, Aubrey continued. Normally,
mice avoid anyplace that smells like a cat s living there. Just good sense. But infect a mouse with T. gondii, and it
isn t afraid anymore. In fact, it starts liking the smell. The infected mouse starts hanging out where cats are more
likely to be. Good for the cat, because it s more likely to get a meal. Good for the parasite. It can get into a fresh
host. Lousy for the mouse.
Okay, that s the creepiest thing ever, I said. I think I get it, though. That s like riders. The things that are
inside Coin? And the ones we killed last night?
The light turned green. Traffic started moving.
Some riders can be like that, yeah, Aubrey said. I don t think the Invisible College ones are quite that
flavor. But there are also a lot of riders that will just hang out in the back of someone s mind and& change them.
You know?
The way your amoeba thing changes mice, I said.
Actually, the way it changes people. T. gondii infects humans too. People with the cysts in their brain
suffer mild disinhibitions. Men become more prone to violence.
And women?
Aubrey glanced over at me and then back at the road.
Sex, he said. It makes women more affectionate and prone to& ah&
Get prone? I suggested. A green sedan cut in front of us. Aubrey swore, hitting the brakes and his horn at
the same time. I took the opportunity to switch subjects.
So Eric read your paper and tracked you down?
Yeah, Aubrey said. He seemed relieved not to be talking about sex. I wasn t sure whether I was or not.
He was working on an idea about riders. See, there are some things about riders that look a lot like biological
agents. And then there are things that really just don t. What we were doing was sort of reverse-engineering riders.
Figuring out what kinds of constraints are on them from the way they act.
Hey, that was Stout, I said, pointing back at the street sign we d just passed.
It s a one-way. They all are downtown. We ll go down Champa and turn around.
Okay, I said. Sorry. You were saying? Reverse engineering something?
Yeah, like cicadas. Did you know cicadas have prime-numbered cycles?
I did hear about that, yeah, I said. Something about staying away from things that eat them, right?
That s the theory. If the cicadas are trying to avoid a predator with a five-year cycle, they develop a
thirteen-year period and only coincide with the predator every sixty-five years.
Okay, I said. I was getting a little lost, but I didn t want Aubrey to think I was stupid. So what s the five-
year predator?
There isn t one, he said. At least not now. But that the prime numbers show up suggests that there was
one, even if it s already gone extinct. So when primes show up in riders, maybe it s because there s something out
there that they re avoiding. The Invisible College is actually a good example of that. They have this ceremony
every seven years. Why seven?
Because it s a prime, and they re avoiding something? I said.
Maybe, yeah. Or then again, maybe because there are seven wandering stars, Aubrey said. Or because
God made the world in seven days. Or there are supposed to be seven categories of the soul. It s hard to know
what kinds of rules actually apply. Eric wasn t about to let any good hypothesis go untested, though. Here, this is
Seventeenth Street. I m going to grab that space and we can walk from here.
Sounds good, I said, noticing for no good reason that seventeen was a prime. I got out of the minivan,
stepping into the beating sun. I felt a little light-headed, but whether it was the conversation or the altitude or just
the spiritual jet lag that my utterly transformed life brought on, I couldn t say. Aubrey came up at my side, his
fingertips brushing my arm. I let him lead me across the street.
Eric thought if we could figure out how riders changed people, we could make a better guess at what they
wanted. What their agenda was.
Midian said they re an infection, I said.
Midian has some simplistic ideas about infection, Aubrey said.
The bank was down a very short block. As if we d agreed on it, Aubrey and I dropped the subjects of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
