Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

There really is very little to eat in Ooze’s world. Nothing grows down there. Every source of nutrition comes from above and, unlike mud and water, it can’t be summoned towards her by wriggling movements of her body. It simply appears. As a matter of fact, though Ooze doesn’t know this, her food consists of corpses, sometimes whole, but more often in tiny fragments. Dead fish, dead seabirds, dead crustaceans, dead seals: they reach her after descending slowly through those two vertical miles of water. Often they have descended part-way and then become bloated up with gas and risen back towards the surface, only to descend once more when their guts burst open, or are breached by carrion eaters. All of them have passed through many different realms in their journey from the upper waters to the bottom of the abyss, and all have been gnawed, chewed and plucked at by the many creatures who wait for dead flesh at each different level from the sunlit surface to the sunless depths, just as Ooze herself waits down there at the bottom of everything. Each layer has its own particular specialists in the processing of dead meat.

By the time they come to rest in Ooze’s realm, the animal corpses have usually been torn to pieces. In most cases they reach her as tiny specks and motes: single fibres, individual bones, solitary scales and teeth, which may have been churning around in the eddies and currents of the middle levels for days or weeks or months. They’re too small to truly satisfy, but better than nothing at all, and nothing at all is pretty common too. Hungry and anxious, Ooze has often waited for weeks on end without the smallest scrap to eat. (Though of course she doesn’t know of days or weeks, for the only rhythms she experiences are her beating heart and her pulsing gills.) All she can do is wait, tasting the water as it passes through her gills, feeling the flux and tremble of it against her skin.

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.