Salmonella Men on Planet Porno (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Yasutaka Tsutsui

  Yohachi and I started cutting wood. There were various species of pine and cedar, which the members of the expedition had half-jokingly named supine, overcedar, and so on. But those would have taken too long to fell, so we concentrated on cutting tree ferns, which we bound together with rope to form a rectangular raft about twelve foot square. By the time we’d transferred the baggage onto the raft, camouflaged the hovercar under fronds of fern and launched the raft onto the lake, the suns had already started to set.

  “Only thirty minutes to nightfall!” said Mogamigawa in dismay as he eyed his wristwatch, having done nothing himself but constantly hustle and bellow at us. “Can we cross to the other side in thirty minutes?”

  “Yes, if we all use our poles together,” I replied with an ironic grin.

  He pulled a sullen face. “Are you expecting me to use my pole?”

  “Yeah, just like you do with your wife every night,” Yohachi whispered in my ear.

  We had brought three collapsible plastic poles with which to propel the raft. We extended them to a length of about fifteen feet, took one each and climbed aboard. As we pushed our poles into the edges and bottom of the lake, pockets of air came bubbling up to the water’s surface around the raft, accompanied by a reddish-brown mud. We pulled away from the lake’s edge.

  Every now and again, blood-red algae would come up entangled on our poles.

  “That’s bleedweed,” I said. “Makes my skin crawl every time I see it.”

  “If there’s so much bleedweed here, there must also be a good number of matchbox jellyfish,” Mogamigawa said as he cackhandedly manoeuvred his pole. “They’ll be surfacing any moment now.”

  Before I could say “Well postulated,” a swarm of rectangular jellyfish that resembled large translucent matchboxes came floating up to the surface and eagerly huddled around our raft belly-side up, mouths agape and tentacles swaying.

  “Swimming upside down as usual. What an obscene creature.”

  “Also known as the jacuzzi or missionary jellyfish.”

  “I did some research on these once,” said Mogamigawa. “They have ectodermal reproductive glands and appear to eat bleedweed, as well as various species of vegetable plankton.”

  “Do they sting?” asked Yohachi.

  “Well, considering how very obscene they are, they’re obviously going to sting, aren’t they,” said Mogamigawa, staring at Yohachi maliciously. “Why not try grabbing one?”

  “They only sting before reproducing,” I explained to Yohachi, then turned back to Mogamigawa. “And when they do, it doesn’t really hurt but is a rather pleasant feeling. Why do you think that is?”

  “That’s precisely my point,” he replied sourly. “Their pre-reproductive nematocysts contain poison, like that of earth jellyfish. I’m analysing this poison now, but it seems somehow to display anaphylaxis. That is, the first sting only has a mild effect on the ejaculatory centre, but with increased frequency the resistivity is lowered, finally leading to ejaculation. It’s the opposite of immunity.”

  “Have you tried it out?” I said with a snort of laughter. “Oh. Sorry.”

  Mogamigawa gave me a murderous look.

  “Let’s catch a few of them, then!” said Yohachi.

  A gentle splish-splashing noise could be heard. I looked back towards the shore, which was already about fifty yards behind us.

  One by one, a colony of gurgling alligators, which appeared to have been basking on mudflats some distance from our launch point, were starting to slip into the lake.

  “Do you think they’re coming after us?” Mogamigawa said anxiously.

  “But of course,” I answered as I vigorously thrust my pole down to the bottom of the lake. “And in some numbers. Let’s make haste!”

  The alligators, somewhat smaller than the earth variety, started to approach our raft in groups. Although some seemed to have concealed themselves underwater, dozens of them swam just under the water’s surface, showing only the tips of their snouts, their eyes and the tops of their bony backs, which resembled dorsal fins. They closed in on us at speed, making no sound in the water except the lazy gurgling noise of breath flapping out of their nostrils.

  “If they all come here, the raft will capsize!” Mogamigawa shrieked while frantically working his pole. “What do they want from us?!”

  “Our chastity,” I replied. “They have a habit of mating with other species.”

  “If they drag us underwater we’ll drown!” Mogamigawa wailed. “Isn’t there anything we can do? How did you get over this last time?”

  “By getting to the other side quickly. The opposite shore is the territory of eleventh-hour crocodiles…”

  Just at that moment, the alligators approaching underwater must have risen to the surface, for the raft suddenly listed to one side. We all lurched with it.

  Mogamigawa crouched down on the surface of the raft to prevent himself from falling. “These must all be females, then?” he asked.

  “Some are male, some female,” I answered, also squatting on the raft. I had hurriedly withdrawn my pole, which they’d tried to wrench from my grasp with their gaping mouths, and was now holding on to it for dear life. “They can’t tell the gender of other species, so they just try to mate with them anyway.”

  “But it’s usually only the male that displays courtship!”

  “Yes, but on this planet both males and females display courtship. We know that attractants such as sex pheromones have hardly any effect between individuals of the same species, which means that they don’t mate much among themselves. They compensate for this with a strange innate releasing mechanism, whereby they chase other species as if hunting prey.”

  “Won’t the species then become extinct?”

  “No. Excessive inbreeding is more likely to cause extinction. Especially on this planet, where the animals have hardly any natural enemies.”

  “Why don’t we try it out?” said Yohachi, using his pole to bash an alligator as it tried to crawl onto the raft. “It might feel good.”

  “Idiot. If it’s a male, your anus will be ripped apart,” I said, then gasped in relief when I saw the opposite shore only thirty feet away. “Thank God! Eleventh-hour crocodiles!”

  Slightly larger than the gurgling alligators, groups of eleventh-hour crocodiles were crawling into the lake from swamps near the shore.

  Pushed up from below by the alligators’ snouts, our raft continued to tilt wildly. We clung onto our baggage to avoid being shaken off, and waited for the eleventh-hour crocodiles to arrive.

  “But it’s out of the frying pan into the fire, isn’t it?” said Mogamigawa, shaking with fear.

  “We’ll escape while they’re fighting,” I replied.

  The eleventh-hour crocodile at the head of the group snapped at one of the gurgling alligators. The pair corkscrewed their bodies and leapt six feet into the air as they grappled with each other. A massive spray of water flew up, and at last, the mother of all battles started around our raft.

  “Now!” I yelled.

  We desperately worked our poles to escape from the carnage.

  “That’s quite a battle,” said Mogamigawa, turning back to watch the action goggle-eyed. “Many of them will surely die.”

  “No. What you’re seeing is a ‘ritual contest’, as they say in ethology. It’s the same as when males of earth species fight over the females. The difference on this planet is that they’re not fighting over females but over the spectators, creatures of other species that simply watch the action from the side. They’re waiting to yield their chastity to the victors.” I was punting along for all I was worth, but let out a cry when I saw the far bank approaching. “Oh no! What a fool I’ve been! There’s a pod of flatback hippos near here!”

  Mogamigawa raised his voice in alarm. “Those unearthly creatures?! Good God, it’ll be no joke if we’re ravished by them! Which way should we go?”

  “Let’s skirt the shore southwards. Hey, Yohachi – look out!”

&nbs
p; Before I could finish, a number of flatback hippos surfaced around the raft, showing only their flat rectangular backs.

  “Take that!” I shouted.

  “Take that!” yelled Yohachi.

  “And take your bestial desires with you!” added Mogamigawa.

  We thrust our poles into the backs of the flatback hippos in a mad frenzy. Their soft backs were covered with fine crêpe-like wrinkles resembling the mesh of a reed mat. With each manly thrust, the ends of our poles would penetrate the skin and slide into the thick fat on their backs. But it didn’t appear to hurt the hippos at all, for they continued to close in on our raft undeterred, oblivious of their gaping wounds. A very small quantity of white fat oozed out of the round holes made in their backs by the poles. As I continued to thrust, I wondered if perhaps they actually enjoyed having this done to them…

  The hippos’ backs now had so many holes in them that they began to resemble honeycombs, a truly sickening sight. I decided to stop thrusting the pole and started smashing them over the head with it instead. But merely being hit on the head wasn’t going to make these hippos desist. They continued to look up at us ruefully, their eyes bloodshot with carnal lust, some diving down below the raft while others waited for a chance to crawl up onto it.

  “Aaargh!” Yohachi had plunged his pole into a hippo’s back with such force that he was unable to pull it out again. As he clung to the end of the pole, he was lifted off the raft and hoisted about three feet into the air vertically above the hippo’s back. “HELPPPP!!!” he cried, eyeballs bulging.

  Our raft, surrounded on three sides by flatback hippos, was gradually buffeted along the shore away from Yohachi. The hippo that had Yohachi on its back also continued to chase, but lagged somewhat behind the others under Yohachi’s weight. The gap between us gradually widened as a result, though we remained at the same distance from the shore.

  “Is it all right to leave him like that?” Mogamigawa asked.

  “The main thing is for us to reach the shore,” I replied. “Then we can throw him a rope.”

  At that moment, one of the hippos must have stood on all fours in the shallows directly beneath us, for the raft started to tilt at an acute angle.

  “As I thought – we should have made the raft of pine or cedar,” I shouted, frantically gathering up the baggage to stop it falling into the water. “We’ll be up a creek if we fall off now. The water round here is full of fondleweed!”

  “But we’re men, and we’re wearing trousers, are we not? We will surely not be fondled so vigorously,” said Mogamigawa. “This is no good at all. We’ll capsize at this rate. You take the machinery and equipment, and I’ll take the food. If the raft capsizes, we’ll wade ashore with the bags on our backs. We’ll just have to force our way through the fondleweed. Audere est facere, my friend!”

  “Right.”

  The raft moved closer to the shore. Dusk was starting to close in.

  With the flatback hippos still standing beneath us, the raft had tilted to an angle of about forty degrees. We slid down its surface with the baggage on our backs, landing thigh-deep in water.

  “Run! Run or be fondled!” Mogamigawa hollered as he started to race bow-legged through the water. I followed behind. The flatback hippos were still grouped on the other side of the raft, and as they could only waddle through the shallows with their slow thumping feet, there was no danger of them catching us.

  We reached the shore safely without being molested by fondleweed, then turned back in relief to look at the lake. The flatback hippos had given up chasing us. Instead, they were now homing in on Yohachi from all sides. Some started to clamber up onto the hippo that had Yohachi’s pole stuck in its back.

  “Quick, fetch the rope!”

  I went to get the rope out of the baggage, but it was too late. Yohachi’s trousers, along with his pants, were instantly snapped off by the gargantuan mouths of the flatback hippos.

  “That’s it – I’m off!” Yohachi shrieked. He boldly leapt off the pole and bounded towards us, completely naked from the waist down, using the heads and backs of the hippos as stepping stones, then plunged straight into the lake and began to run towards us waist-high in water.

  I braced myself. “Hey – he’s running through the fondleweed…”

  “Come on, he’s a man! Even if it fondles him, it won’t be that bad.”

  No sooner Mogamigawa had spoken than Yohachi started to slow down. His eyes assumed a haunted look, and he gasped oppressively as he walked the next two or three steps. Then a half-smile came over his face as he issued a loud cry, bent his head backwards, and in that pose fell flat on his face in the water.

  “It’s got him!” Mogamigawa shouted aghast. “The fool! He should have kept his trousers on!”

  As I watched, I shook at the horrible thought of what the swarming fondleweed might be doing to Yohachi under the water. The surface started to bubble feverishly, then Yohachi’s face appeared, followed by his upper body. He started towards us with an expression of complete exhaustion, staggered up onto the shore with white trails of semen hanging from his still erect member, and collapsed at the water’s edge panting furiously.

  “I wonder why the flatback hippos remain unharmed by this fondleweed,” Mogamigawa mused as I nursed Yohachi. “They eat fondleweed, so they must always be physically surrounded by it.”

  “No, even the flatback hippos are fondled. Or to be more exact, they only know where their food is when it starts to fondle them. Of course, they must have the occasional orgasm while they eat.”

  “Really? Now I begin to understand,” Mogamigawa said with a nod. “Once, Dr Shimazaki asked me to test the water quality near a spot where fondleweed grows. There I discovered large quantities of helical bacteria breeding on protein, potassium and calcium. The fondleweed evidently absorbs these substances once they’ve been degraded into inorganic matter and excreted by those bacteria.”

  “So the process goes something like this. First, fondleweed fondles the flatback hippos, and the males ejaculate. Bacteria reproduce by eating the protein and other substances in their semen. The fondleweed then absorbs the degraded excretions of the bacteria and transforms them into vegetable protein, which the hippos eat. In other words, it’s a tripartite regenerative cycle – right?”

  “Well, yes, although of course there are other species of bacteria that live on the excretions of the flatback hippos.”

  Undeterred by Mogamigawa’s challenging expression, I continued to argue in the growing belief that we were about to make a discovery – a clue to understanding the laws that governed ecosystems on this planet. “On the other hand, since fondleweed forces the flatback hippos to ejaculate, this must create environmental resistance to increases in population size, weakening the fecundity of the species as a whole. This in turn provides negative feedback that prevents the fondleweed from being completely consumed by the hippos. In other words, what we have here is a regulating biotope for these three species. After all, with no pronounced seasonal variation in climate on this planet, organisms would go through population explosions followed immediately by extinction if left unchecked, wouldn’t they.”

  “You seem overhasty in your desire to make judgements, but you shouldn’t jump to conclusions, my friend. Even if that happened to be true in this case, don’t forget that this is merely a single cybernetic system within the wide, open space of an entire planet. We don’t know how it links with others.”

  As Mogamigawa continued to speak with his customary glare, Yohachi tottered shakily to his feet.

  “I think I’m all right now,” he said.

  “So you should be. Pull yourself together, man. What’s two or three ejaculations?!” said Mogamigawa.

  Yohachi gave him a withering look. “Anyone else would have passed out, or even died. I came seven or eight times!”

  The suns had already set. But for us, it was time to be on the move, as we had to cross the marsh right away. It would have been sheer lunacy, after all, to go
through that dark and eerily foreboding jungle at night.

  We let Yohachi carry most of the baggage, while we ourselves took only the experimental observation equipment that we thought might come in handy on the way. With that, we entered the marsh. I took the lead with Mogamigawa following behind.

  “Anyway,” I said as I walked on ahead, “the relationship between those alligators, the matchbox jellyfish and the bleedweed could also be seen as part of a multi-species regenerative system similar to that of the flatback hippos and the fondleweed, could it not. Unlike the earth varieties, the alligators are not carnivores but eat bleedweed and other algae. And besides, they’re mammals, aren’t they? What completely ridiculous names the expedition members gave these creatures. The false-eared rabbit isn’t even a rabbit, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Well, there are still cases of such risible names being fabricated by amateurs. More than that, though, aren’t nearly all the higher vertebrates on this planet mammals? What happened to all the lower-order reptiles, amphibians, et cetera? Did they all die out like the giant reptiles on earth during the Mesozoic, do you think?”

  I was stuck for words. If I’d said what I’d been thinking for a while now, it was certain that Mogamigawa would once again look at me as if I’d lost my mind.

  I changed the subject in the nick of time. “However, the very fact that most species of higher-order animals are mammals and, although very different in appearance, are so similar as to be related to each other, means that mating between species is possible, even if they can’t actually reproduce. Although of course, if a small animal like the false-eared rabbit were to mate with one of those flatback hippos, it would probably die of organ rupture.”

  “I wonder if the hippos actually go looking for other animals to have it off with,” Yohachi said loudly as he walked along at the rear, a mountain of baggage piled high on his back. “After all, they’re always being done over by that fondleweed, aren’t they. And by the way, it’s really fantastic being done over by that fondleweed.”