Wetworld

by Mark Michalowski

  How come no one had mentioned that they could talk before? She couldn’t recall their talking when they’d taken her the first time. Up ahead, a domed black shape showed against the darkness of the forest. Although Martha didn’t remember seeing one of the otters’ nests from the outside, she knew full well what it was. Her pulse began to quicken and her mouth began to dry as her little furry entourage guided her down a channel-like path into their home.

  She had to drop to all fours, feeling the soft mud squelching between her fingers and the wetness soaking through the dressing gown and hospital gown to her knees. And then she was inside. Memories of the last time she’d been in a nest came rushing back and she fought back the rising panic. But as her eyes became acclimatised to the darkness, she realised that this nest was a little different to the other one: the pit at the centre, instead of being filled with water, contained only soil. Otters ran backwards and forwards across it.

  ‘So what now?’ Martha said, hunching herself up against the far wall and hooking her arms around her knees. ‘Tea would be nice.’

  For a moment, she realised that she was sounding like the Doctor. And, in a silly way, it made her feel stronger. If the Doctor could get through the worst of times with a joke and a grin, then why couldn’t she? Maybe it was one of those unwritten rules of space and time travel: face it all with a quip or risk going completely barking mad.

  The otters that had brought her here lined up around the curve of their nest, linking paws in an incredibly cute way, as if they were about to take a bow at the climax of Tarka – The Opera.

  ‘I spose that “take me to your leader” won’t help, will it?’ Martha suggested – hoping that their leader wouldn’t turn out to be one of the slime creatures.

  ‘Leader bad,’ said one of them. ‘Hurt.’

  ‘Your leader’s hurt?’

  ‘Bad leader. Leader hurt. Hurt bad.’

  Martha shook her head.

  ‘Just rearranging the words isn’t going to help,’ she said. ‘Is your leader hurt?’

  ‘No leader,’ repeated the otter. ‘Leader bad. Leader hurt us.’

  ‘Ah!’ Martha reckoned it was making a certain kind of sense. ‘Right – let me see if I’m getting this right. You don’t have a leader, yeah?’

  ‘No leader,’ agreed the otter seriously – or as seriously as a squeaking otter could be.

  ‘But a leader has hurt you? Something you think of as a leader?’

  ‘Leader hurt us. Bad. Don’t want leader. Leader wants us. Leader wants you.’

  ‘And by leader,’ Martha ventured, ‘you mean those slime-things, don’t you? They hurt you, didn’t they?’

  Martha tried not to think too hard about what the otters’ ‘leader’ had done to her, how it had made her feel – angry, hungry, violent. It had worn off with her as it had worn off with the otters – well, these otters at least. But why these otters…? A sudden thought came to her.

  ‘Before,’ she said slowly, trying to keep her speech simple. ‘Where were you?’ She gestured around at them.

  ‘Before?’

  ‘Before you found me. Before you brought me here. After the leader hurt you. Where were you?’

  ‘Square nests,’ one of the otters said.

  Square nests? What the Dickens were ‘square nests’?

  But no explanation was forthcoming from the otters.

  ‘So why have you brought me here?’

  ‘Why?’ echoed an otter. Martha sighed. Clever the otters might be, but they weren’t what she’d call intelligent. Or should it be the other way around?

  ‘Me,’ Martha gestured. ‘Here.’ She paused. ‘Why?’

  ‘Help us,’ said the otter. ‘Help you.’

  A bout of squeaking and squeeing ensued and then three of the otters rushed off through a hole in the side of the nest. They returned a few moments later, rolling something the size of a football in front of them. As they pushed it up against Martha’s feet, she realised that it was made of a sort of wickerwork, like the roof of the nest. Encouraged by the otters, she picked it up, but it was too dark to see what was inside it – and then, suddenly, the whole thing moved in her hands and she dropped it.

  More cautiously this time, she pulled it back towards her and peered through the mesh of reeds. Inside, only just visible, something glistened wetly, shifting about.

  ‘Why would these slime creatures want us?’ Ty asked the Doctor. ‘And what did Col mean about them wanting our intelligence?’

  The Doctor tapped his finger against his lip, his eyes narrow.

  ‘It makes a certain kind of sense,’ he said eventually. ‘What Col said about intelligence, and what I experienced last night.’ He pulled out his spectacles, fiddled with them for a few moments, and then put them back. ‘What d’you know about SETI?’ he asked.

  ‘Another word for a sofa?’ Candy suggested.

  The Doctor put his spectacles on and peered acidly at her over the top of them.

  ‘Something to do with whales?’ Ty ventured. ‘Cetaceans?’

  He peered again and shook his head.

  ‘What are they teaching people in schools these days?’ He whipped his glasses off again. ‘Come on – we’ve got work to do,’ he said suddenly. He spun around and his fingers dabbed at the video table: the overhead lights came on as the screens went dark. The Doctor raced around Ty to the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she said, jumping to her feet.

  ‘Where are we going, you mean,’ replied the Doctor, halfway out of the room.

  Ty shook her head and followed, Candy bringing up the rear.

  ‘OK,’ Ty called, trying to catch up. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘We,’ he called back over his shoulder, ‘are going to the same place that they’ve taken the others.’

  ‘Their nests?’

  The doors ahead slammed open as the Doctor strode out into the orange daylight.

  ‘Nope,’ he shouted. ‘The river.’

  Ty managed to catch up with him, and Candy jogged to fall into step with him on the other side.

  ‘How d’you know they’ve gone there?’

  He tapped the side of his head.

  ‘That’s one of the things the proteins told me.’

  ‘One of them?’ Ty asked. ‘So they are encoding information?’

  He pulled a disparaging face.

  ‘As information encoding goes, it’s all a bit shoddy – a bit make-do-and-mend. The Urzhers on Mustack would have been able to encode a whole symphony, the complete works of Tschubas and a recipe for chocolate cake into the proteins I injected into myself. But our slimy little friends aren’t quite up to the Urzhers’ standards.’ He waved his fingers in the air dismissively. ‘Rather amateur, actually – but I suppose it did its job.’

  ‘Which was…?’ asked Ty, clearly starting to get annoyed with his vagueness.

  The Doctor rounded the corner and headed into the main square. Ty and Candy ran to keep up.

  ‘They wanted us all fired up, angry, acting on instinct,’ he explained. ‘It helps to override our intelligence, our free will. My guess is that they’re still experimenting, still trying to work out the right proteins, the right RNA strings to pull our strings. Oooh!’ He glanced at Candy. ‘Remind me to use that one again. Where was I? Oh yes,’ he plunged on. ‘I think they were just testing us – us non-otters, that is. They’ve had months to practise on them and by now have probably got the hang of pulling their strings perfectly. The stuff they injected into Martha – and that I injected into myself – was fairly simple: a few trigger chemicals, a sprinkling of dumb, a bit of angry and just a soupçon of greedy. Oh, and some pictures.’

  ‘Pictures? Of what?’

  The Doctor had reached the very centre of the square and he stopped dead, spinning around on his heels.

  ‘Swamps, water, otters – just the usual holiday snaps. And a very nice postcard of your old city.’

  ‘The settlement? Why?’

  ‘I think they
’re curious,’ he whispered. ‘Very curious.’

  ‘The slime creatures? About the settlement?’

  ‘About us and about what’s in the settlement. Remember what Col said about them wanting our intelligence? Well intelligence is only useful if directed towards a goal. If it’s used for problem-solving. So we need to think along the lines of what problems the slimeys might have. If we can keep one step ahead of them, if we can out-think them, then maybe we’ve a chance of stopping them. What is in the grey building, by the way – the one nearest the bank, the one they were poking around in as I left.’

  Ty frowned.

  ‘You mean… the technical services unit?’

  ‘Doesn’t sound very exciting, does it,’ he murmured, ‘The “technical services unit”. What’s a “technical services unit” when it’s at home, then?’

  ‘It’s where all the plans for the Sunday City were kept, where all the power and communications were controlled from. Sort of a nerve centre.’

  ‘Ahh…’ the Doctor said mysteriously. ‘Now that’s more like it: a nerve centre. In fact, I think it deserves capitals. A Nerve Centre! And an exclamation mark.’

  ‘Why would the otters want the technic—’

  Ty stopped and rolled her eyes as the Doctor raised a finger and an eyebrow.

  ‘Why would the otters want the Nerve Centre?’ she said wearily.

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘And what,’ said Ty, planting her hands on her hips, ‘are we going to fight them with?’

  ‘One of the greatest all-purpose tools that evolution’s yet come up with,’ the Doctor grinned. He paused, clearly hoping someone would come up with the answer. There was silence.

  ‘I imagine,’ he said eventually, ‘that the irony of the fact that I’m talking about the human brain will be lost on you both.’

  Ty and Candy looked at each other.

  ‘Honestly,’ he sighed, ‘my wit’s wasted on you people, it really is.’

  Martha felt the woven ball move slightly in her hands as the thing inside it shifted again. The dim moonlight filtering in through the roof of the otters’ nest caught it. It was about the size of a fist but blobby and shapeless. Martha made the instant connection between it and the slime-things.

  ‘It’s a baby isn’t it?’ she said in a whisper. ‘A baby slime creature!’

  The otters squeed and chattered, and little groups of them joined hands as if for mutual support.

  ‘Broken,’ said one – the one with the grey smudge on its ear. ‘Broken leader.’

  Martha didn’t understand. Was it ill? Is that how they’d managed to catch it?

  ‘Look,’ she said firmly. ‘Thanks for the show ‘n’ tell. But I’m not sure what you want me to do with it.’

  ‘Make broken,’ said the otter. ‘Make broken.’ Others joined in and, within seconds, they were chanting in unison.

  Martha sighed, setting the ball down by her knee. She was starting – a bit unfairly – to feel irritated by this half-speech that the otters were giving her.

  ‘You want me to make this more broken?’ she asked, gesturing to the shaking ball.

  ‘Leader,’ said the one with the smudged ear. ‘Make broken.’

  Only then did it suddenly hit her: the otters wanted her to do what they couldn’t. They wanted her to make the ‘leader’ – the parent of the thing in the basket – broken.

  They wanted her to kill it!

  Marj Haddon felt as though she were drowning in slow motion.

  Every breath was laboured and painful, like she was breathing treacle. And everything around her was blurred and smeared, as though through a rain-drenched window.

  And there was something in her head with her.

  She tried to focus – tried to remember how she’d gotten there. Wherever there was. All around her, sticking up out of the mud, were buildings – dirty, grubby buildings that looked familiar and yet strange. She struggled to concentrate on them, to understand what they were. But the whispering voices at the back of her head kept distracting her and her awareness kept slipping away. Images of water, sensations of hunger and impatience kept nipping at the edges of her consciousness, like irritating little dogs, eager for her attention. She felt slightly – though not pleasantly – drunk, drifting through this strange world on autopilot.

  Again, she tried to work out how she’d gotten from where she’d been before (where was that?) to here. A sudden flickering montage of images crashed into her head: things, biting at her legs, scratching her. Screams. People crying. And then the dark of the night and the sounds of stumbling through the forest. And then she was down at the edge of the water, and the water was moving, swirling…

  And then…

  Nothing.

  She was here. Around her, like sleepwalkers, other people drifted like ghosts. Some of them carried things in their hands. Others just shuffled, like clockwork toys that someone had wound up and let go. What were ‘clockwork toys’? The thought came and went like a fish in a river, just a shiny sliver of memory, uncatchable, unholdable.

  Something in her head told her which way to go.

  She moved.

  Candy found herself hanging back a little as the three of them reached the rise beyond which lay the start of the old settlement. She could smell the wet and the damp from the flooded river plain ahead, and memories of the evening before, when she’d found Col, came trickling back.

  I should have told them, she thought. I should have said something…

  The little voice had been niggling away inside her ever since she’d returned and told Ty what had happened. She’d been surprised, to be honest, that Ty hadn’t pressed the point more firmly: what had Col been doing at the One Small Step? Why had he gone out there on his own, without telling anyone?

  But Ty’s shock at what had happened to him seemed to have swamped all that, and Candy was glad.

  The poor man’s dead, thought Candy. Let him rest in peace. What use would it be to tell them?

  ‘You OK?’

  It was the Doctor. He was looking at her strangely, as if he could read her mind. She forced a smile and nodded.

  ‘Just tired,’ she said. He nodded as if he understood.

  ‘Maybe you should go back,’ he suggested. ‘Have a bit of a kip.’

  Candy shook her head.

  ‘I’m fine, honestly. What’s the plan?’

  The Doctor grinned down at her.

  ‘Step one: we find out where they all are. Step two: I use the sonic screwdriver to stun the otters. And step three: we move in and get your people out as quickly as possible.’

  ‘What about the slime creatures?’ asked Ty. ‘I suspect that they’re not going to be much of a problem. So far, they’ve kept to the water – or pretty close to it. I suspect they’re mainly aquatic, and they’ve used the otters as their hands and eyes and ears – at least until now. So I don’t think we have to worry too much about them. Not yet, at any rate. But any sign of them and we leg it – got that?’

  Candy and Ty nodded. They dropped to all fours as they reached the crest of the rise. The Doctor glanced back and grinned.

  ‘Let’s take a look, shall we?’

  On his hands and knees, the Doctor crept to the brow of the hill. Ty glanced nervously at Candy and gave her a tight smile.

  ‘They’re there,’ the Doctor hissed.

  Candy scuttled alongside him.

  Down on the mud flats she could see about half a dozen of the settlers. They were drifting in and out of the technical services unit, carrying bits and pieces, plans, wires. They looked like zombies, robots. And amongst them, stationary, like little brown statues, were the otters.

  ‘Why aren’t the otters moving?’ whispered Candy.

  ‘Probably been given orders just to watch your people. They’re the ones that the slimeys are concentrating on.’

  ‘So this control…’ It was Ty. ‘How does it work? The slimeys put instructions in their heads and then…’

  ‘Then the
humans carry them out. They have to be relatively simple: the slimeys’ encoding isn’t sophisticated enough, yet, to give them very complex tasks. Stuff like “Go there – get this – take it there” I should imagine. And there will be a homing instruction too. The proteins don’t last long, so the slimeys need to make sure that the humans go back to them for more instructions before the chemicals break down. If you hadn’t tied me down last night, I’d probably have made a break for the water, trying to get back to them. Martha had a similar reaction.’

  ‘Where are the rest of them?’

  ‘They must be busy elsewhere. That’s a bit of a bummer, isn’t it? Still, can’t be helped. If we can rescue these, it’s a start.’

  He reached down and fished in his pocket for the sonic screwdriver.

  ‘Everybody ready?’

  Slowly he stood up, raised the sonic screwdriver and held it out in front of him – and pressed the button.

  The tip glowed a fierce blue-white and it began to hum.

  And then, with a noise like a rapidly deflating balloon, the light went out.

  ‘What just happened?’ asked Candy.

  The Doctor shook it and tried again. This time there was nothing – no light, no sound.

  He turned sharply to Ty.

  ‘What have you been doing with this?’

  ‘What?’

  He peered at it closely, shook it – even held it to his ear.

  ‘It’s full of mud!’ he wailed. ‘It’s dead.’

  ‘It won’t be the only thing,’ said Ty in a low voice. ‘Look…’

  Everyone looked over the rise: down below, the otters had seen them and were flowing out from amongst the settlers.

  Towards them.

  The Doctor sighed. ‘Here we go again…’

  ‘Run!’ shouted the Doctor. ‘Both of you – get back to the city!’

  ‘No way,’ said Candy.

  ‘Candy,’ said Ty. ‘Go on. I’ve got two tranq guns in my pocket. Get back to the city and tell everyone what we’ve seen. Just in case… you know.’

  ‘I’m not going,’ Candy said stubbornly. ‘You two are no match for the otters.’

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised,’ said the Doctor, his voice steely and determined.