Salmonella men on Planet Porno: stories - By Yasutaka Tsutsui Page 0,84

it’s impossible to tell with radiology alone what exactly it is. She’s in her fourth month.”

“She’s been pregnant four months without knowing it? What sort of woman is she?!” I said, almost shouting. “Or perhaps she was deliberately hiding it?”

Ignoring my outburst, Dr Mogamigawa, an utterly humourless, solemn, stubborn old man who refused to recognize anything other than natural science, grimaced as he produced a weed that resembled a type of fern and placed it on the table. “This obscene plant was mixed up among the samples collected by Dr Shimazaki. I found it in her collecting case.”

I jumped up. “What? Widow’s incubus?! What’s that doing in these parts? It’s only supposed to grow west of Newdopia!”

“Correction. West of Lake Turpitude,” Mogamigawa said, glaring at me. “Dr Shimazaki went to the lake to collect plants, but failed to notice that she’d collected the widow’s incubus along with the other samples. The microspores of the widow’s incubus must have penetrated her body. As you know, the androspores of this obscene plant stimulate the ovarian cells of higher vertebrates, and independently cause the growth of new individuals in utero.”

“But Dr Shimazaki is not a widow,” said the Team Leader.

Mogamigawa simply turned away in disdain, as if to say, What has that to do with anything. Dr Fukada took over instead.

“It was tentatively called widow’s incubus by a member of the First Expedition,” he explained. “Actually, it doesn’t matter if the host is a widow or not. It will attempt parthenogenesis with any woman, as long as she isn’t a virgin. Parthenogenesis literally means virgin generation, but in this case perhaps we should call it non-virgin generation. Ahaha. We don’t yet know why it fails to stimulate the ovarian cells of virgins, but it may have something to do with the quantity of estrogenic hormones secreted. And of course it should be no surprise that Dr Shimazaki is not a virgin,” he said with a smile. “After all, she is thirty-two. It would be harsh to cast aspersions on her just because she isn’t a virgin.”

“Hold on, I’m not casting anything on her,” said the Team Leader, stirring in his seat. “Well, there are only four of us – but let’s start the meeting anyway. Dr Shimazaki herself has declined to attend, on the grounds of embarrassment. Well, that’s only natural, considering how shy and demure she is. The geo-mineralogists are out surveying that obscene cloystone at the Hokomaka Pass on Mount Arasate.”

“As the matter demands immediate action, we should act right away. Ah! I appear to have said much the same thing twice. How embarrassing,” said Fukada, who, having written some thirty tedious novels as a hobby, posed as a man of letters. “Ahem. Proceeding to the main issue, pregnancy caused by widow’s incubus reaches full term in ten earth days. So, to amend the statement made by Dr Sona just now, Dr Shimazaki was pregnant for only four days without knowing it. In the two previous cases involving earth women, a member of the First Expedition miscarried on the seventh day, and a female doctor attached to the Base Construction Team rather recklessly aborted her own pregnancy by curettage on the third day. But in Dr Shimazaki’s case, curettage is already out of the question, and we have no way of knowing whether she can miscarry or not. There is every chance that she will in fact give birth. However, Dr Shimazaki herself says that she does not want to.”

“Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she. Having a child fathered by a weed called widow’s incubus would bring disgrace to her long family line of notable scientists.”

“May we keep this discussion on a scientific level?,” said Mogamigawa, glaring at me again. “It is inconceivable that the androspores of widow’s incubus, having entered the body through the respiratory organs, would then proceed directly from there to the uterus. Rather, they merely give some kind of acid stimulus to the woman’s unfertilized ovum, and thereby induce the growth of a new individual. As such, the widow’s incubus has not directly fertilized Dr Shimazaki per se, and therefore cannot be said to have ‘fathered’ anything. All will be revealed when she gives birth, but I feel sure that the new individual will only have chromosomes from the mother’s side. It’s normal for human individuals born by parthenogenesis to lack a reproductive capacity, as Professor Yoishonovitch Sano states in his History of Transparent Embryogeny in Humans.”

“Well yes, that would be the normal way of thinking,”