Once a troop ship came down, holed by a torpedo. It was full of drowned corpses, freshly dead, and they had descended so quickly to the bottom that they hadn’t been so much as nibbled by Ooze’s competitors in the layers above.
Strange new currents rushed by for a little while, and for a long time after these had subsided, the groans and clicks of cooling metal intruded harshly into the near-silence of the abyss, while stirred-up mud that had lain inert for centuries gave the water a powerful tang for many miles around. There were new and unfamiliar tastes too, tastes of metal and ash and oil, that persisted even when the mud had settled and the clicks and groans had fallen silent.
Ooze’s senses registered these things, but none of them triggered any of her store of innate or conditioned responses. So she remained in her characteristic resting state, lying completely motionless except for the steady opening and closing of her gills, in the middle of her current patch of mud. But as time passed, new and interesting flavours began to waft in her direction. She became alert, her muscles tensing as she warmed them up in readiness for activity, her head turning slightly from side to side to sample the delicious traces in the water around her. Soon she began to move, wriggling vigorously to pull the source of these flavours towards herself, and push into oblivion behind her the barren patch of mud which, up to now, she’d been guarding as jealously as a dragon on its pile of gold. The more she wriggled, the more excited she became. For beneath the tang of metal she was tasting flesh, flesh in an abundance she’d never previously known.
All around her, for a distance of several miles, many thousands of Ooze’s own kind were also springing into alertness, abandoning current territories, and pulling that mysterious cornucopia of flesh towards themselves. Each one alone in its own universe, thousands of small tube-like creatures wriggled along converging radial paths across the mud, until their mouths came up against the hard surface of the sunken ship.
The taste was quite exquisite now, and of an intensity that none of them had experienced before. No physical obstacle was going to prevent Ooze, or any one of her kin, from trying to reach its source. Ooze slithered back and forth over the barnacled metal – or, as it seemed to her, she turned the entire ship this way and that – until she came to the breach in the hull that had split it almost in two. And there, with the slimy writhing bodies of countless others pushing in around her, she slid inside.
Thousands had died in that ship. They too were essentially tubes, creatures with a spinal cord, a mouth at one end and an anus at the other, and were in fact descendants of creatures very much like Ooze herself. But over the course of time their ancestors had acquired hands and feet and lungs, and much larger swellings at the front end of their spinal cords. But of course Ooze, who didn’t even know she had a mother or a father, and had no notion of a universe beyond her own sensations, could not know that she was burrowing in the bodies of her own distant cousins. (In fairness to her, it’s doubtful that if they’d lived and Ooze had been caught and laid before them, they’d have recognised their kinship with her any better than she did.)
Ooze had never encountered this much food. None of them had. There was more meat here than they could eat in a lifetime and yet there was still an urgency about consuming it, for now that they were tearing into it, the taste of the rotting flesh was spreading wider and wider over the abyssal mud, and many more of Ooze’s kind, from ten miles away and more, were stirring into alertness, moving their heads from side to side as they located the source of the alluring new taste, warming up their muscles, and joining the great migration towards the wreck.
So much food. So much more than Ooze could eat, and yet soon it would all be gone.
Inside the ship, Ooze’s relatives were already all over every corpse. They were inside too. They pushed and shoved as they gnawed away in there, yanking at chunks of meat that clung to the bone, shoving each other aside to reach the choicest and most aromatic morsels. In the pitch darkness, the dead soldiers and sailors jerked this way and that as if they were still alive. Their cheeks moved as if they too were chewing. Their bellies gave sudden jerks as if they were pregnant women with babies almost ready to be born.
Ooze couldn’t think. She didn’t make plans or devise strategies. But simple plans and strategies were pre-wired into her tiny brain, the legacy of successful choices made by her ancestors. (They were truly remarkable ancestors, by the way. Every one of them, without even a single exception, had been one of the tiny percentage of individuals in each generation who’d lived long enough to reproduce. If you met her she might not seem so, but Ooze was one of the crème de la crème.) And so, though Ooze herself was incapable of working out a solution to the problem of there being too much meat to consume before others came and took it from her, it was an old problem, and Ooze’s body had a solution ready-made.
She began to feel a new desire. Where normally the touch and tingle of others round her would have made her irritable and anxious and prone to fight, now she longed to feel them closer still. She couldn’t get enough of their slipperiness, the smoothness of their skin, the way their wriggling sent tremors, over and over, from one end of her little body to the other. She craved their touch, she ached for the electric tingle of their nerves. Soft, smooth, writhing flesh was already rubbing against her, making her quiver with ecstasy, but still she wanted more. And so she pressed against the others, coiled herself around them, slid her skin over theirs, until suddenly the pleasure became too much to bear and a jet of tiny eggs came bursting from her.
The same stimuli had been at work on all the others round her. They might be separate universes, islands of sensation in a void, but they were subject to the same basic laws, for each of them had ancestors every bit as distinguished as Ooze’s own, each was a member of the same tiny elite of the living. And so, as she spurted out eggs, they spurted too, until the water inside the wreck was thick and soupy with tiny gritty eggs and chlorine-tasting nebulae of creamy milt.
There was no plan on Ooze’s part, or on the part of any of the others, there was no strategy, but nevertheless an impeccable strategy was unfolding. Very soon millions of tiny fry were jiggling about in the clouded water, seeking out the dead flesh that they could already taste and recognise, though they as individuals had never encountered it before. They fastened themselves onto the ragged remnants of the soldiers and sailors, their tiny bodies forming great quivering sheets that pulsated in unison as they sucked and rasped at muscle and connecting tissue, skin and fat, guts and eyes and brains. Where bones had been broken by the explosion that had destroyed the ship, even the marrow was consumed, as the fry pressed through the jagged fractures and swarmed into the rich interior flesh, pulsing, quivering, jiggling, as they sucked and chewed and grew.
Ooze and her fellows might not be able to do justice to all that meat, but they could make copies of themselves who could.
And then quite suddenly the meat was gone. The ship was left with a crew of skeletons whose uniforms enclosed body-shaped masses of empty water, and whose bones tasted of nothing more appetising than chalk. The only taste in the water now was metal, and ash, and the drifting faeces of Ooze and all the others, the last remnants of the meat, which would spread out across the abyssal plain, settle onto the mud, and be processed in turn by the microscopic lifeforms out there that specialised in such things. From being a place of plenty the ship had all at once become exceptionally barren, a place that would yield no food at all, without even the usual meagre possibility of scraps descending from the surface. Ooze knew this, though the knowledge wasn’t encoded in her limited store of learned information, but in the wants and impulses that had been built into her brain over all those millions of generations of successful ancestors.
She didn’t want to be here any more: that was the form her knowledge took. She didn’t know why – she didn’t even know of the possibility of asking why – but she knew she didn’t want these tastes around her, and that she disliked the troubling vibrations that resulted from b
eing enclosed. What was more, these tingling, wriggling presences all around her no longer provoked desire. She had no recollection of their ever having done so, nor any understanding that many thousands of them were her own sons and daughters. All she knew was that the proximity of all this touch and tingling once again provoked the feelings that it normally would: worry, irritation, fury, dread. And those feelings were a kind of knowledge too, not the temporary surface knowledge that is acquired in a single life, but a deep and ancient knowledge that was as much part of her make-up as her mouth or her senses or her spinal cord. Ooze could not reason, but the laws of her body, based on the experience of countless generations, were reasonable. One could say that Ooze’s body knew, even if she did not, that too many rivals in too small a space would very soon mean starvation.
She pushed the cold metal and the bone away from herself, pushed and turned, until taste and water flow and sound showed her which way she needed to face in order to find mud and open water which she could pull towards herself. And so, in due course, little wriggling Ooze emerged once again from the stripped and scoured wreck. All around her, thousands of tingling others were doing the same, wriggling over and under one another in their hurry to escape. Hunger would very soon build up. Even out there, in the open water around the wreck, there was nothing like enough nourishment descending from above to feed so many mouths. In this now hopelessly overcrowded part of the abyss, every tiny scrap of food that came down from the nothingness above would find a thousand hungry squirming rivals rushing to be the first to reach it.
And that meant that, out of every thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine would soon be dead, their bodies fought over and torn apart by the still living, most of whom would die and be eaten in their turn. Nothing was wasted down there on the mud, nothing that could be eaten was left to lie.
But with her belly still full for the moment, Ooze pushed the useless metal and bone behind her with a firm rhythmic movement of her narrow body, and pulled the open mud steadily towards herself. Half a mile, a mile, she kept on moving, a tiny wriggling shape on a vast featureless expanse. It was chance, most probably, that sent her far enough away from the wreck to find a defendable territory that would be big enough to keep her going. It was probably just luck that she got away before being completely hemmed in by rivals who wouldn’t let her cross their mud. But chance or not, she got out in time.
And now she waits there again at the bottom of the abyss for the scraps and fragments that appear from above. She is always hungry, always anxious, always on the edge of murderous rage, but yet she is still alive. If she were like us, she’d look back fondly on the times of plenty, that happy interlude when there was more meat than she could eat, those precious moments when her body was so full of pleasure that her own substance burst out from inside her into the surrounding water. But old Ooze isn’t one for memories. Just as the point in space which she occupies is the centre of the universe, so each moment is the only moment she knows.
Yet she has learnt one thing from the time of the ship, learnt it in something like our own sense of that word, I mean: learnt it with her own brain in her own lifetime. She’s learnt that the taste of metal and oil and ash means meat. It means meat in abundance, still unchewed. And it means pleasure, ecstatic pleasure, pleasure of every kind.
Ooze doesn’t think about that taste again, because thinking isn’t a thing she does. She doesn’t play it over in her mind. She doesn’t revisit it. But if she ever encounters it again, she won’t wait this time for the taste of flesh to follow. No, if a lump of burnt metal descends again to her part of the abyss, clever Ooze will head towards it at once. She will drag it closer to herself, haul it out of nothingness, draw it into the tingling core of the universe, so that the universe may be transfigured once again by joy and exultation and rapturous pleasure.
To say Ooze hopes this will happen again would be to impose our kind of understanding on hers. And yet this new readiness, this new reflex, newly conditioned into her modest brain, is a kind of analogue or prototype of hope. She doesn’t know it, she doesn’t know it at all, but what Ooze hopes for in this prototypical and unconscious sense is that her strange-limbed cousins in the world above will sink more of their ships, or crash their planes, or have their great cities flooded by tidal waves of sufficient power to fling cars and buses and trains far out into the sea, so that little Ooze can gorge herself, down at the bottom of the world, and be happy once more before she dies.
Newmarket
This was their third date and Judy had suggested a walk not far from where she lived, followed by lunch in a local pub. It wasn’t the ideal day for it, Gerry privately thought, and he wasn’t so keen either on her choice of walk. Under a low grey sky, the country around them was flat not only in the sense of having no hills but also, so it seemed to him, in the sense of being 2D, as if not only colour but the third dimension had somehow been leached out of it. And, in this austere, minimalist landscape, Judy had chosen the most minimalist of landscape features to walk along. It was apparently once a defensive barrier, thrown up in the Dark Ages to protect the East Angles from enemies to the west, but that didn’t alter the fact that it was a dead straight bank of earth beside a dead straight ditch.
‘Think of the labour it must have entailed,’ said Gerry, trying to work up an interest. ‘No diggers, no bulldozers, no trucks. Just human beings with picks and spades and baskets.’
It was a very conventional observation to make in such a spot, no more exciting really than the landscape itself, and it had probably been made in this exact same place many thousands of times before. But Gerry’s theory about conversations was that they were like jazz. You might start out with a simple chord sequence or a banal melody, but you built things up collaboratively from there. This had seemed to work quite satisfactorily on the last two dates, and, although Judy was a somewhat less confident soloist than he was – he was a science fiction writer, after all, and riffing on ideas was in a way his job – she had seemed to enjoy the game of starting with a simple theme and ending up in new and unexpected places.
Today, however, she remained silent.
‘And all for what?’ added Gerry. ‘Nobody now remembers which side of this line their ancestors came from, or what the fight was about that necessitated all this work.’
‘Well, I expect it was useful at the time,’ Judy said.
It was a reasonable comment he thought. In fact, it was rather an interesting one if you stopped to think about it. Barriers were useful. Indeed, they were absolutely fundamental, because…
But there was something about her tone that made him feel reproached. ‘Let’s not go off on yet another of your rambles, Gerry,’ it seemed to say. So he didn’t pursue the subject any more, though he wondered a little resentfully what exactly was interesting about this bloody ditch, if one wasn’t allowed to think about its history or its purpose.
Their talk moved on to more everyday matters – work, their respective kids, her family in Bristol, his ex, places they’d been and people they knew – but he felt that reproach still, lurking there behind everything else she said. She’d seemed to enjoy his company on their last two meetings, but this time, there was no doubt about it, Gerry was getting on her nerves. In fact, having developed a feel for the life cycle of these encounters, he thought it quite likely that this would be the final date. It was as if he was a new shoe, which Judy had found quite comfortable when she first put it on, but now was starting to pinch and chafe. Most probably she’d ask the assistant to take it back and fetch her another pair. He felt sad about that.
After a couple of miles, the dyke was bisected by a busy dual carriageway, which they crossed via a footbridge. Engines snarling, tyres hissing, cars and trucks hurtled beneath them at 70, 80, 90 miles an hour, half of them rushing eastwards, the other half heading west with equal urgency. This struck Gerry as mildly amusing.
‘All this self-important haste, in two opposite directions!’
When Judy smiled f
aintly but didn’t answer, he felt a moment of mild panic. ‘I’m sorry if I’m boring you,’ he almost burst out, ‘but I’m just trying to have a conversation.’
That would have been silly of course. It wasn’t as if they’d been walking in silence all this time. They’d been having a perfectly reasonable chat about their kids and holidays and so forth, and Judy really wasn’t obliged to respond to every one of his observations about their surroundings, particularly the rather dull ones which were all he’d managed so far. What really was his point, for instance, about the dual carriageway? That roads should only go one way? That no one should go anywhere at all? That everyone should travel round together in a herd? (It was typical of Gerry that he enumerated these alternatives in his mind, and briefly weighed each one.)
On the far side of the bridge, there was a stile in a hedge, and beyond that, suddenly and, to Gerry, completely unexpectedly, there was a large and very famous race course, with hundreds of acres of mown grass, and miles and miles of white railing.
A bit of the dyke had been levelled out to let the race track through, and they had to cross over there to climb back onto the earthwork. Once they were up on top again, they could see a starting gate, only about fifty yards ahead of them to their left. It was a long metal structure with rubber tyres which had been towed into place by a tractor and, to Gerry’s surprise, racehorses were trotting up to it right now, with jockeys in multicoloured liveries casually chatting to one another as they brought the animals round into the stalls. Gerry knew nothing whatever about horseracing, but it seemed to him oddly informal and off-hand that a race should begin in this way, over here by the dyke, with no one to watch the horses set off other than him and Judy who just happened to be passing. And the jockeys didn’t seem at all like the intense gladiatorial competitors he’d seen in sports page photos. They reminded him more of those delivery drivers whose job was to deliver cars to showrooms. They simply brought horses over here, it seemed, batch by batch, rode them back again as quickly as they could, and then fetched another lot.
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