Salmonella Men on Planet Porno (Vintage Contemporaries) (28 page)

“That was certainly inattentive of you,” agreed Mogamigawa.

In no time at all, the nursery spider had wound its silk around the newborn in the shape of a pear, leaving only a single hole at the top – probably for air. Then it grabbed a few threads that protruded from around the neck of the pod, slung them over its shoulder in true swagman fashion, and started to climb the nearest tree.

“If the aim is not to eat it, it must be to rear it,” I said as we started off again. “It cocoons the newborn in silk to return it to the ‘womb’, as it were. The newborn grows inside the cocoon until it can stand by itself. So there you are – now we know why they’re called nursery spiders.”

“But where is the merit in so doing?” asked Mogamigawa. “Rearing hybrid young brings no prima facie benefit to the host.”

“That’s true,” I replied with a tilt of my head. There could surely be no life form on any planet that would engage in such pointless
activity outside the major goal of preserving its own species. “Once we’re out of the jungle, let’s cut a relic pod from a tree and open it up. We may discover something.”

When we at last emerged from the jungle, night had fallen once more. We switched on the girdle lamps that hung from our waists, and continued westwards through a belt of woodland margin over gently rolling terrain.

We came to a shallow river that flowed some five miles down from the mountains in the north, and decided to set up camp on its rocky shore. With our many exertions so far, we had started to feel slightly inebriated. There was more oxygen in the air than on earth, making our fatigue all the more extreme.

“You go on to Newdopia by yourself now. The border is right over there,” Mogamigawa commanded Yohachi. “You know what you’re supposed to do, don’t you. We’ve told you often enough.”

Yohachi guffawed. “I’m a man, aren’t I? You needn’t tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

Mogamigawa scowled. “Not that, you fool!”

I pointed at Yohachi’s nether regions. Having been relieved of his trousers by the flatback hippos, he was wearing nothing but his spare pair of pants. “Take your clothes off,” I said. “You’ll have less trouble getting in if you’re completely naked. You can carry your baggage on your back.”

“All right. I’ll do that.” Yohachi merrily hummed a tune as he undressed himself.

“What’s got into him?” Mogamigawa said as an aside.

Completely naked but for a canvas bag containing a telecall and other requisites tied around his head, Yohachi splashed into the river with gaily dancing steps, waded over to the other side and disappeared into a grove of trees.

“What a cheerful chap,” Mogamigawa said with a wry smile before easing himself onto the ground.

I went to find a sandy area and lay down there. Well might the Newdopians live their lives permanently naked – the climate was pleasant and there were no pestering insects, leaving one to sleep in peace without even needing a blanket.

“He’s cheerful all right. He can have sex as often as he wants in there,” I said with a huge yawn. And no sooner had I spoken than the dark demons of sleep descended on me.

I awoke after only two hours, unable to bear the dazzling light shining down from the two suns. That was the problem with this planet. Most people, on first arriving here, had their biorhythms disturbed and suffered badly from sleeplessness.

I boiled some rice in a mess tin, opened a can of Sakata Land Horned Beef and ate my dinner. As I was brewing some coffee with water from the river, Mogamigawa, who’d disappeared from his sleeping place, returned with three relic pods hanging from his arms.

“Let’s open them right away. I really must know. Do you have any scissors?”

“I do.” Taking a pair of dissection scissors from my collecting case, I snipped one of the relic pods open in a straight line from the hole at the top to the base.

Inside the cocoon was a hybrid creature, curled in fetal position with eyes still closed, surrounded by a liquid that resembled amniotic fluid. It was probably formed when the inner surface of the silk cocoon had dissolved. The creature had the body of a nursery spider and the head of a tapir-pig.

“A cross between a nursery spider and a tapir-pig,” I said. “So the parent must have turned its own hybrid newborn into a relic pod.”

“Hmm.” Mogamigawa snorted in a way that suggested disagreement, then signalled to me to open the other two cocoons.

The other two relic pods contained not hybrids but juvenile nursery spiders with eyes already open and hair on their bodies. They grew excited and let out unearthly cries when they felt the outside air. I exchanged astonished looks with Mogamigawa.

“The wife waker!”

“So that’s where the noise comes from!”

“Look here, Sona,” said Mogamigawa, using each hand to prevent a juvenile nursery spider from escaping as he scrutinized their bellies. “For what possible reason would a nursery spider cocoon
its own young in silk and turn them into relic pods? When they’re not even hybrids?”

“Because that’s how they rear their young? They can’t distinguish between their own young and, say, hybrids produced by other creatures. If they see a baby, their first instinct is to wrap it in…” I stopped in mid-sentence and stared wide-eyed at Mogamigawa. “In other words…”

He nodded. “I think these juveniles may have no reproductive capacity. Could you examine them for me? Use my electron microscope if you like.”

“All right.”

I didn’t need the electron microscope, for it was clear to see that the juveniles had no sex organs. What’s more, the sex organs of the other relic pod – the cross between a nursery spider and a tapir-pig – were severely reduced and looked more like vestigial organs.

“First generation hybrids with no reproductive capacity all mutate into nursery spiders,” I said with a sigh. “How did you know?”

“I simply imagined that the spiders might raise the young of other species because they cannot reproduce by themselves,” Mogamigawa said rather proudly. “Also, I felt that the niche of the spiders in the jungle was abnormally high. Each time I looked up, I would invariably see a nursery spider in the trees above me. I thought that it must therefore be the dominant species. And when we saw that the relic pods were in fact produced by nursery spiders, I became convinced of it when I considered the sheer quantity of relic pods hanging from the branches of the trees.”

“To think that such a thing could be possible!” Gazing at one of the open relic pods, I dipped the tip of my finger into the thick, slimy solution inside it.

“The fluid must provide a stimulus that triggers spontaneous metamorphosis, you see. It causes evolutionary regression to the nursery spider, which seems, to all appearances, the lowest life form on this planet. It often happens among lower-order organisms – an anomalous metamorphosis that causes a once evolved species to regress back again under external stimuli. If you had it your way,
the reverse evolution theory should apply to this planet, shouldn’t it. Ergo, the nursery spider must be preventing any further regression or divergence of species. Or in other words, anomalous metamorphosis on this planet has become what Goethe called ‘normal metamorphosis’.”

“This seems increasingly like an artificial ecosystem, doesn’t it,” I mused.

“I’ve started to see the Newdopians in a slightly different light myself. They seem after all to have a highly advanced spiritual culture, as well as a grasp of science and technology,” Mogamigawa agreed. “Of course, it’s virtually impossible to create a totally artificial ecosystem, but they must have started the reverse evolution of higher-order species and had the technology for suppressing species divergence. Or even if they didn’t, they must at least have known that any higher-order species that devolved from themselves would inevitably be able to coexist peacefully, as befits their own planet. And in fact that’s exactly what happened. Furthermore, even lower-order species and plants evolved until they could be incorporated into the ecosystem of these higher-order vertebrates. Or perhaps those species alone were not eliminated but underwent adaptive radiation.”

“Rather than having technology as such, perhaps they merely applied a reverse logic to the theory of evolution,” I added. “That is, on planets where the theory of evolution applies, there always exists a predator-prey relationship. Even man, the ‘terminal animal’, inevitably needs an aggressive instinct, which makes him destroy his environment, start wars and so forth. In that case, conversely, if we could create a planet to which the regression theory applies and where only relationships based on libido exist, it should be possible to maintain a peaceful environment. Instead of a Thanatosian ‘eat or be eaten’ ecology, we should be able to create an Erosian ecology, in which all living things love each other. Being pacifists, the original colonists must surely have been convinced of that. Considering the dubious nature of Freud’s dualist theory in his later years, even I have started to think that this erotic ecology may more closely warrant the title of orthodoxy in our cosmos.”

“Well, I don’t know where they came from. But I’ve no doubt they must have learnt a lot from the egregious errors of their home planet,” said Mogamigawa, waxing oddly lyrical. “Perhaps that planet surprisingly resembled the earth.”

I felt the same. We looked at each other and laughed with one voice.

“Isn’t it about time we contacted Yohachi?” I said as I finished my coffee and took out the telecall. “He may have done it so much that he’s forgotten what he’s there for.”

“That sounds likely,” said Mogamigawa.

“Yo!” Yohachi’s voice as he answered the telecall was bounding with cheerful energy. In the background, I could hear the spirited sound of five-beat music.

“So you got in all right? It sounds very lively there. Are you in a dance hall?”

“I’m at an open-air arena. They’re doing ballet on the stage. I’ve never seen anything so fantastic in all my life!”

“Idle bugger!” Mogamigawa snatched the telecall from my hand and bellowed into it. “Have you asked them how to contracept pregnancy by widow’s incubus and abort the fetus, man?”

“Yeah. I’ve asked.”

“Well, come straight back here then!”

“Can’t I watch this a bit longer? You see it’s… well… it’s just fantastic!”

“No you may not!” bawled Mogamigawa. “Or do you mean to keep two eminent scientists such as ourselves waiting idly by in a place like this? That would be the biggest mistake in the history of science, I can tell you. Though I can’t expect you to take responsibility for that.”

“I can’t quite hear what you’re saying, but anyway, yeah, OK, I’ll be on my way soon,” said Yohachi, and with that he terminated the telecall from his end.

Night fell once more. When it was starting to grow light again, Yohachi at last returned. After his carnal excesses, I was fully expecting him to look completely spent – but on the contrary, he appeared utterly exhilarated. He strolled up from the river with a
relaxed gait, water dripping from his naked body. Even the look in his eyes had changed.

“Seems you were well-received!” I said with a grin.

Yohachi shook his head with an expression of sincerity, though still with a look of elation on his face. “I wasn’t particularly well-received, but I wasn’t driven away either. We always go on about ‘entering’ their country, but there was no border of any sort, and it was at night. So I just walked in amongst them, and was soon surrounded by a lot of naked men and women who were trying to ask me something. The moment I tried to speak, they seemed to know immediately what I wanted to say, which saved me a lot of trouble, I can tell you. They even started to take words out of my head and put them together until they could speak earth language themselves. They seemed to know straight away what I was there for, and soon they were all laughing their heads off.”

“And did they tell you what we asked?”

Yohachi nodded at Mogamigawa. “I don’t know if you’d call it ‘telling’, but one of the men just said this: ‘Ah. Well, all you have to do is have sex with the women here, then go back and have sex with the one who’s pregnant’.”

Mogamigawa turned to me with a look of bewilderment. “What on earth can he mean?”

“And what happened then?” I asked, leaning towards Yohachi with mounting curiosity. “Did you have sex with the women?”

“Oh yeah,” Yohachi replied with the same earnest expression on his face. “The men quickly lost interest and buggered off. But the women hung around for a bit. They were all so beautiful. And naked. I just couldn’t wait to get stuck in. I already had a hard-on and was chomping at the bit. Then one of the women led me to a nearby park and let me do it with her on the grass. After that I did it with, oh, God knows how many. Twelve or thirteen? But I still didn’t forget why I was there in the first place, all right? ‘I mustn’t forget what they tell me,’ I thought, ‘I must remember it correctly.’ So I repeated the same questions to four or five women. One of them said this. The women in this country are often raped by those penisparrows in their sleep. I mean, the birds stick their
heads into the women’s… you know. That’s the penisparrow’s kind of, er…”

“Habit?”

“Habit, yeah. This woman said the penisparrow carries a sort of infection caused by, er, something-ella, and so more than half of the women in Newdopia have been, you know, they’ve been…”

“Infected?”

“Yes, infected by that, er, whatever it was. So then it also infects the men. And the, er, something-ella eats the, er, something of the widow’s incubus, the… er…”

“Spores?”

“Yeah, it eats the spores of the widow’s incubus, and that stops them from getting pregnant. And even if they do get pregnant, they just have to have sex with a man who’s got the infection, and then they can get rid of it easily.”

“I want to know more about this infection,” Mogamigawa said to Yohachi. “Let me examine you.”

Yohachi grasped his overworked member, which now hung down limply. “Yeah, sure. Go ahead.”

“No, no. That’s not enough. I’m asking you to masturbate, strum your banjo, grease your pole, whatever. I need a
specimen
, man.”

“I don’t really feel like doing it now,” Yohachi grumbled, but still managed to squeeze out a quantity of semen onto Mogamigawa’s glass slide. Mogamigawa immediately started to observe it under his electron microscope.