Sometimes the Canal spontaneously produces what the old women of the old
quarter call a looney-baby.
   In the organic slop flowing slowly down the channel that is Canal-
VBZ18, someone's sperm happens into someone's egg. The resultant embryo
attaches to any suitable tissue it can find, and learns to seine food out
of the surrounding matter.
   The fetus will gestate for up to 2 years in the slow moving canals of
waste, meandering this way and that in the yellow-red goo, with its cargo
of organs and entrails, failed experiments, free radicals, poo,
chemicals, radioactive waste, and secret criminal compounds too
disgusting and frightening to name. One vast, giant beaker of unregulated
science.
   Eventually he swims to the edge, and crawls up onto land. It's a
terrible shock, the open air, but he's driven by some force he doesn't
understand (or perhaps the exhortations of shore dwellers or other looney
babies). At first he'll return frequently to the canals to feed, and then
gradually he'll learn to ferret out his meat from the wet cracks and
filthy crevices of the city.
   (This is all conjecture, by the way — it's entirely possible that the
old ladies hurl unwanted babies into the canal, out of which they manage
to crawl, barely alive and irrevocably altered.)