Salmonella men on Planet Porno: stories - By Yasutaka Tsutsui Page 0,99

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