It was obvious to see that he was merely putting on a show. Even I was cringing at the thought of the abominable creatures that lay in wait for us ahead.
“Yes. Let’s make haste!” I called in falsely high spirits, quite at odds with the quaking in my heart. But no sooner had I started off than I screamed loudly and fell flat on my back. A gigantic nursery spider had slid down from the trees in front of my eyes, brought its weird lemur-like face close to mine, then gripped my face tenderly with its folded, hairy front legs and seemed about to kiss me.
“Chase it away, for Christ’s sake!” I shrieked, virtually foaming at the mouth as I lay prostrate on the ground.
“It’s gone,” said Yohachi. “You scared it off when you screamed.”
“Was that really a spider?” asked Mogamigawa behind me when we’d started off in trepidation once more. “It had four legs, did it not. More like a cross between a lemur and a spider monkey, I’d say.”
“It is almost certainly not a spider. After all, one characteristic of this planet is that there are hardly any insects at all, except for those screeching cicadas,” I answered as I waded through the undergrowth. “I can’t say anything for sure until we catch one, but I think they’re either mammals or something close to that. Its hands were warm.”
“So what’s behind the name, then?”
“Nursery spider? It was named by a chap called Hatsumi, a member of the First Expedition. He loved making puns, and it was he who named most of the species on this planet. But he came across so many bizarre life forms that, when quizzed about the names back on earth, he often couldn’t remember why he’d named them.”
“How thoroughly irresponsible.”
“Indeed. But there must be some meaning behind the name.”
We heard a flapping, rustling noise of something violently beating the leaves of the trees above us. A flying creature skimmed over our heads, its large warm body smacking against my instinctively raised hand.
“Graarrghh!” the thing squawked, then fell to the ground and scuttled off into the undergrowth.
“A penisparrow!” Yohachi shouted in amazement. “A whopping great penisparrow! The size of a cat! The king of all penisparrows!”
“No. That wasn’t a penisparrow,” I said, still somewhat stunned. “It had fur, and its call was different too. It either glides by stretching the skin on its sides like a flying squirrel, or else it has membrane wings like a chiropteran, I’d say.”
“I don’t believe it,” Mogamigawa muttered grumpily. “We keep seeing creatures that do nothing but support your famous regression theory!”
I was little inclined to go over the whole regression theory again. On the other hand, if we had something to debate, perhaps we could distract our minds from our mounting terror. So I started again. “The regression theory is difficult to establish because it assumes that humans suddenly appeared out of nothing. But let’s say the Newdopians are intelligent humanoid beings that came here from some other planet. By that I don’t mean some major species migration, but something like, well, you remember back in the Second Green Revolution on earth, when all those obnoxious hippies were herded onto spaceships and banished beyond our galaxy. The Newdopians could be their descendants.”
“Based on what, pray?”
“Based on the fact that they haven’t spread all over this planet but are limited to one location. Perhaps they knew about their ancestors, and for that very reason predicted that, sooner or later, intelligent life forms similar to themselves would visit them from another planet. That’s why they created a proper country as they have done here. They did refuse us entry, after all. And we may not be the first beings to have visited Newdopia from another planet.”
“And you’re saying that all the mammals on this planet could have regressed from them?”
“That’s right. I mean, look at those!” I indicated a group of three gaping hooters sitting in line on a nearby tree, flaring their exposed nostrils as they looked down at us. “Give them noses, and they’d look just like Newdopians, don’t you think?”
“Well, I’ve only seen the natives on photographs. But hold on – what about the flora then? Are you saying they existed on this planet from the beginning?”
“Yes, at least the algae. And there were probably also fauna, up to about the stage of multi-cell protozoa. It’s conceivable that the original ancestors of the Newdopians carried food provisions in the form of chlorella or such like. They must also have brought parasites with them. That would explain the discontinuity between higher-and lower-order fauna, and the fact that there are many gymnosperms but only two or three species of angiosperm among the flora. In other words, the fauna have not yet regressed as far as reptiles or fish, while the flora have yet to evolve as far as angiosperms.”
“I’m sorry, but it doesn’t explain anything of the sort,” said Mogamigawa. “Otherwise how can you accommodate the screeching cicada, an insect? Also, considering your adaptive radiation of gymnosperms, it’s abnormal for there to be so few species of higher order vertebrates. If they’re all mating so heterogeneously, I would have expected new species equipped with genetic plasticity to be crawling all over the place. And there’s also the puzzle of how the fecundity of the Newdopians and higher vertebrates is kept in check, inter alia.”
“Actually, the screeching cicada is merely an extremely primitive form of insect, despite the name. On earth it would be about the equivalent of the protoblattaria or primitive cockroaches that appeared in the Carboniferous period. Whether it evolved from a crustacean, or from one of the earliest arthropods like the trilobite, it must have subdivided into various forms when it came up on dry land. As such, we should see other types of insects here. I don’t know why that’s not so, but I’d say the most plausible explanation is that all the other primitive insects died out, for some reason, leaving only the screeching cicadas to adapt and survive. It may sound ridiculous, but their cry so resembles the shrieking voices of young women that it sounds highly erotic, and this may have helped them adapt to the overriding ambience of eroticism on this planet. Their cry so intensely stimulates sexual urges, you see.”
“It’s unscientific, I admit, but I’ve also started to feel the same way. I mean, this planet may be a world in which only indecent life forms are allowed to exist,” Mogamigawa said with a sigh, seeming to lack energy after his violation by mistress bine.
“Sssh!”
I signalled to Mogamigawa and Yohachi to keep their heads down, and hid myself in a thicket of evergreen fern. Beyond the thicket lay an open clearing that appeared to be the dead centre of the jungle. There, a number of animals were writhing around in highly furtive activity.
“Are they mating?” whispered Mogamigawa, who’d crawled along the ground to join me.
“Clearly.”
“The female resembles a small bear…”
“And the male looks like a mountain goat. The other two seem to be a cross between a tapir and a pig.”
“What are they doing?”
“Waiting their turn, probably,” I answered, sickened by the sheer outlandishness of it. “I’ve never seen any of these before. They must live permanently in the jungle. I can’t remember hearing names that would answer to any of them, either.”
“I doubt such an obscene sight could be found on any other planet,” muttered Mogamigawa with a look of nausea. He hurriedly started to crawl back. “Let’s be off. I don’t wish to see any more of this.”
Noticing the sound of rustling leaves as Mogamigawa brushed against the evergreen ferns, the two creatures that resembled tapir-pigs reared up on their hind legs and turned towards us.
“Oh no! They’ve spotted us!” exclaimed Yohachi.
The two tapir-pigs both sported massive erections. No sooner had they discovered us than their bloodshot eyes started to glisten, as if they assumed us to be new objects for their sexual gratification. They began to waddle towards us on hind legs, hips jerking and lower bellies thrust forwards, rev
ealing their swollen members. Their appearance reminded me of a certain type of middle-aged man who’s so starved of physical affection that he turns into a sex-crazed monster. Nothing could be more repugnant to the eyes.
I set aside my fear and prepared to run. But the blood drained from my face when I saw another seven or eight animals suddenly emerge from the undergrowth around the dead centre. The tapir-pigs weren’t the only ones that had been waiting their turn to mate – these others had also been lying in the thickets quietly biding their time. They were all creatures that I’d never seen before in the two months since I’d been on this planet. One looked like a horse, another resembled a dog, another an elephant, another a sloth and another looked like nothing on earth. The weirdest of them all resembled a massive gaping hooter, but was even closer in appearance to a human. They all stood on hind legs, displaying erect penises and panting heavily as they yielded themselves to their burning carnal desires and started to approach us. No words could describe the dread that filled us at that moment.
“Naargh!”
“Hyaargh!”
“Here they come!”
We started to run for all we were worth. It was as if we were being pursued by the demons of vengeance for spying on the Walpurgis night feast. We felt like dead men already, and had lost all sense of our bearings. All we could do was to keep running, gasping and wheezing for breath as we imagined what might happen to us if we stopped or fell, those demonic beasts ravishing us from behind, their blood-red members thrust deep inside of us. Just when it seemed that our hearts would leap out of our mouths, it was Mogamigawa who at last flopped down onto the ground in exhaustion, then Yohachi on top of him, and finally myself on top of the two of them.
“Nooooooooooooo!” Mogamigawa, evidently mistaking us for the beasts, leapt up waving his arms about madly like a man in the throes of death, and tried to run off again. He was about to collide with an itchy scratchy tree that stood in his path, but howled with fright when he saw its trunk. “Wha! Gnngggnngg! Frphhhghh! Drrgrrrnnn!” No words of significance would emerge from his mouth.
A tapir-pig had become entangled in mistress bine on the trunk of the itchy scratchy tree, and had died as it remained fastened there. Its exposed face had started to decompose and its eyeballs had fallen out. We shuddered at the ghastly sight of its agonized features, and slumped to the ground petrified with terror.
“That’s odd,” I said with a tilt of my head when I’d recovered my senses and found my tongue again. I pointed at the carcass of the dead tapir-pig. “Mistress bine only has gripping force initially, but eventually it relaxes its hold. So a creature as large as that should be able to disengage itself easily. And anyway, this individual is a male. Surely, the animal would have lost its usefulness once it had released its protein, and the mistress bine would have returned to its usual dangling state…”
“Perhaps he gave himself up voluntarily?” suggested Yohachi. “Perhaps he got such an unbearable itch from the itchy scratchy tree, and because he didn’t have a partner, went to rub himself on the plant. Then he couldn’t stop doing it, and as more and more of the plants came to give him one, he eventually used up all his energy and died. That’s what I reckon.”
“Hmm. You may have something there,” I said, looking him up and down. “But what made you think that?”
“I dunno,” he laughed. “That itchy scratchy tree has been making me itch like hell for a while now. I wouldn’t mind getting tangled up in that plant myself!”
“You’ve already ejaculated seven or eight times and still you say that?!” said Mogamigawa with a frown. “How utterly disgusting!”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if all the animals in this jungle, including the ones that were mating just now, have their sexual desire aroused by the itchy scratchy tree,” I said with a nod to Mogamigawa as I got up. “It’s just one big orgy around here. Let’s get out, quick!”
In the blind panic of our flight, we’d strayed off our linear course through the jungle. I set off once more at the head of the group with compass in hand.
As we continued to push on westwards, we stumbled across a truly heart-rending scene. A female gaping hooter had collapsed at the foot of a sagging fern palm and, with thighs spread wide, was in the process of giving birth. The baby’s blood-drenched head and shoulders were already protruding outside the mother’s body. I stopped walking and lowered my head to watch.
Mogamigawa edged close to me and whispered in my ear. “Aren’t we right in the middle of an animal trail here? Why give birth in such a wide-open space, when it doesn’t even live here?”
“Because it has no natural enemies, of course,” I replied. “But look at the baby’s head! It doesn’t look anything like a gaping hooter – it’s a much larger creature. More like a hybrid between a gaping hooter and that bear-like thing we saw earlier.”
“The mother’s certainly having a hard time of it.”
“Yes. The baby’s too big and she will probably die. Look how badly she’s bleeding.”
“In that case, the baby will also die. There’ll be no mother to feed it, and no surrogate mother either, as it’s a hybrid.”
“Yes, naturally.” I stretched my back, then went over to examine the newborn before turning back to Dr Mogamigawa. “Hybrids like this must be born and die all the time in this jungle. Poor wretches! Right, let’s be on our way. It’ll be dark soon.”
“Wait a minute!” yelled Mogamigawa, placing his palm on my chest to hold me back. “Take a look at that!”
A nursery spider, hanging on a thread that emerged from its backside, came sliding down from the trees directly above the prostrate body of the dying mother. We watched its behaviour closely, wondering what it was planning to do.
Though a mammal, the nursery spider seemed to have a number of silk-spinning glands in its backside, from which it produced a silk-like thread. This thread must have been formed by mucus secreted from those glands, instantly congealing on contact with air, and was found on closer observation to consist of several strands. If there were only one, it would have broken with the weight of the nursery spider alone. The spider descended onto the mother’s body with all four legs; then, after appearing to sniff around it, crawled across to the newborn hybrid by its side.
Suddenly, the spider popped the blood-soaked newborn into its mouth and stood up on its hind legs. Then it appeared to be using its front legs to scoop forwards the thread, which was continuously secreted from the silk-spinning glands on its backside, winding it very nimbly around the body of the newborn in its mouth.
“It’s preparing to eat it later,” murmured Mogamigawa with an air of excitement.
“But the nursery spider is not supposed to be a carnivore,” I whispered back. “I think we’re about to discover the meaning behind the name. Let’s watch a little longer.”
The suns started to dip, and a ray of orange light fell diagonally onto the floor of the jungle, vividly illuminating the figure of the nursery spider as it continued its surreal activity.
At length, my jaw dropped when I realized what was being created in the arms of the nursery spider. “A relic pod! So that’s what they are! Newborn hybrids cocooned in the silk of the nursery spider and hung from the branches of trees – for whatever purpose. If only I’d studied the relic pod earlier, I could have discovered so much! But instead, I classified it as unclassifiable and wasted my time examining the ecology of animals closer to hand!”
“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.
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