Vision of Tomorrow: The Complete Fiction by Various

Author:Various [Various]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 2022-12-15T21:00:00+00:00

We hacked powered knives into the thick green confusion until sweat poured down our bodies. I had not armed the reprisal party with energy weapons; we didn’t dare risk them falling into mutie hands. The others pressed at my heels, eyes wide and roving.

In this thorny twining Jungle of mutated plants we were forced to make our own trail and keep close together. Our hug-suits would be ripped to shreds if we had to retreat into the spines and brambles of the hydras. Knives whined, shearing the pliant, springy vegetation. Only muties, with their tough leathery hides, could possibly live in this kind of overgrowth.

‘Why did we ever let it grow this far?’ Konrad wiped sweat from his face with a sap-sticky hand. ‘We should have poisoned it, ripped it out years ago. Instead—’

‘Instead,’ I finished curtly, ‘they’ve been pushing us back.’ Even now, my crawling skin told me they were watching, awaiting their advantage. Waiting as they had for half a century. ‘Why? my mind drummed, echoing Konrad’s question. Why did we let it happen?

The pat answer came back: we had been smug, superior, lazy in the confidence of our science and our second-hand sense of mission.

Nonsense!

I stopped short. The man behind stumbled against my heel, cursed, lapsed into embarrassed silence. I turned off my knife.

No! There was something more, something that hurt my head when I reached for words to frame awareness.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘We don’t know what we’re doing. We have some general idea of reprisal. That’s not enough.’

There was a rumble of angry muttering. I flung out my hand.

‘Look around you,’ I roared. ‘This goddam jungle of hydras, those eyes watching us even if we can’t see them. Things have gone too far for petty measures like reprisals.’

Clammy heat made me dizzy. Exotic scents and the heady oxygen these acres of green plants threw into the air filled me with a curious sense of unreality. Yet I knew that what I was saying was more real, more significant than anything I had ever said in my life.

‘We have only two choices,’ I ground out through numb lips. ‘Destroy the muties completely, kill or sterilize them—or accept them completely!’

Blood rushed, clashed with the shocked babble of the other men. Their faces were white, confused, angry.

‘These hydras,’ I cried, ‘this overgrowth we call the Jungle. It’s nothing more than a wild overflow of unattended hydroponic farms.’ . . . I was loosing grip on myself, chattering things everybody knew. But there was, my fogged brain told me, a point that had to be made.

I grabbed Konrad by the shoulders, yelled into his face.

‘You know why we can’t rip out the hydras!’

‘No!’ Fright broke his fury for a moment. He jerked his head from side to side. ‘I—’

‘Think! Because it’s the sole food source now available to the muties. And why can’t we kill the muties?’

Nausea ripped at both of us. I heard, distantly, a man retching.

‘All sapient beings are brothers,’ Konrad choked. ‘We can’t—’

‘Then why can’t we feed the deviants, accept them, free their section?’

Words gushed.

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