Spring Tide

¹⁴ Ooze

Go out into the middle of the ocean, turn vertically downwards, continue in that direction for two miles until you reach a place where there’s no light and the bare muddy sediment stretches away in every direction like a desert. That’s where you’ll find Ooze. Not that Ooze herself knows where she is, or that there could be anywhere else. Not that she knows she’s Ooze.

Ooze has no eyes or limbs, only a narrow body with a mouth at one end of it, an anus at the other and a spinal cord along its length. She is essentially a tube. Her brain is no more than a smallish swelling at one end of that spinal cord. She can’t think as we can. She can’t reflect or reason. But that doesn’t mean she can’t feel. She knows pain, she knows fear, she knows pleasure, and she experiences them all with no less intensity than we do. Or perhaps even with more, for Ooze has nothing to mediate her feelings. She can’t say to herself ‘This is just a feeling’ or ‘I feel this way now but it will soon pass.’ Feelings are all she has.

Ooze may have no eyes but she has senses. She tastes the water around her. She knows which way her body is oriented in relation to the sea bed, though she doesn’t know the thing below her is the sea bed, and doesn’t even conceive of herself as inhabiting a world separate from herself. She’s sensitive to even tiny fluctuations in the pressure of the water against her body, including the vibrations that we call sound. She can feel the touch of objects against her skin, and particularly against the nerve-rich ring that surrounds her jawless mouth. And she has another sense too, an electric sense – let’s call it tingle – which alerts her to the presence of other living creatures, including other individuals of her own kind.

She does not conceive of them as individuals, though, or as her own kind. To her they are tingly presences that make her furiously angry, either by intruding on her own patch of mud, or by being in her way when she chooses to move.

Ooze doesn’t conceive of herself as an individual either. To herself she is the entire universe, and, though I have spoken of her as ‘moving’, she doesn’t really experience herself to be moving as we’d understand it. For how can a universe move? Where could it move to? Ooze just knows that by wriggling her body in a certain way, she can pull new water and mud into existence in front of her and push old water and mud into nothingness behind her.

Ooze is always hungry, and she is always anxious. The two are closely related. She is the universe, and therefore immortal, so her fears are not centred on the possibility of ceasing to exist, but the function they serve is precisely that of keeping her alive. She fears all the time that she will find nothing to eat, however much mud and water she calls into being. And even when she finds food, her constant worry is that those tingly things that fight will appear out of nothing, as they sometimes do, and take it away from her.

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.

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 being 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.