“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
“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.
“And anyway, what happened then?” I asked, drawing closer to Yohachi. “Tell me more.”
“It was around midday, I think. All of them, even the old people and children who hadn’t appeared much till then, and all the young men and women as well, they all went haring off together. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked the woman I was having sex with at the time. She said it was a ballet performance. So I followed them all to the open-air arena.” Yohachi’s eyes suddenly started to glisten. “I have never seen such a fantastic sight in all my life. There was no scenery, no lighting, just dozens of naked men and women dancing together on the stage. And they were actually having sex as they danced and jigged around. When they brought the lower parts of their bodies together, the man’s erect penis would actually go inside the woman. The join between the two of them would turn into a kind of support, so they could both hold hands while the woman, with her face upwards and leaning back, would twirl around and around. Ah. I could never find the words to explain how wonderful it was.” Yohachi slapped one knee one after the other in frustration. “Then the men would line up in a circle. The women would line up in another circle around them. The men would start by dancing with the woman facing them, then with the next one.”
“Aha. Like changing partners.”
“The man would lift the woman high into the air from behind. The woman would stretch out her arms and legs in mid-air and arch her body backwards. The man’s penis would go inside the woman again. Then he would
