She pressed the contact button. The square face of the Mistress of Information peered at her from the small screen.
“Don’t move,” said the Mistress. “And don’t worry. You will be all right. We shall come for you in about two minutes.”
They came in one minute and forty seconds.
Birm was a beautiful city, in many ways more beautiful than Lon. It was more spacious, and the air seemed cleaner and fresher. From her apartment Aubretia could look down a wide tree-lined avenue that receded to a hazed horizon four or five miles away. Vehicles more than twenty storeys below crawled along the highway like tiny multicoloured beetles. The buildings were slender ethereal columns of chrome, white concrete and glass, and at night they were outlined in rain bow neon.
She had been doing the new job for several weeks now, and on the whole she preferred the change. The work, which had to do with the collating and filing of governmental statistical records, was less exacting than press liaison, even if more monotonous. Sometimes she wondered why she had applied for the transfer, but it was always difficult to isolate a precise reason. At all events she had asked, and the government had obliged.
She had a friend called Valinia who worked in the same department as herself. Valinia was a lithe olive-skinned girl, not more than twenty-three, with a firm shapely body and a comprehensive fund of erotic knowledge that bewildered and fascinated Aubretia. By coincidence Valinia lived in the apartment immediately below Aubretia’s and before long they spent most of their leisure time together. It wasn’t a question of love — the emotional contact didn’t go that deeply — but rather a matter of physical and emotional captivation. There were times when Aubretia suspected that her new friend’s attitude was a little too calculating and predetermined, but the suspicion never survived the erotic impact of Valinia’s alluring presence.
Life was very smooth and easy, not only for Aubretia her self but for womankind as a whole. Many of the more comprehensible statistics and computations that passed through her hands confirmed the general conditions of well-being and prosperity in which human affairs thrived. In a sense every thing was tied to the industrial production program through out the world. Vast factories turned out the requirements of civilization without staff, without workers, powered by atomic energy, controlled by automation, and remotely supervised by wired television units. The arteries of supply and provision were healthy and abundantly used. The labour program was, therefore, mainly concerned with the supervision of machines and the balancing of productivity against needs. For more than a thousand years the balance had been maintained with a fine accuracy.
There had, of course, been little progress in the sense of absolute research; indeed, certain fields of technological investigation had even retrogressed. Astronautics, for example, was a dead subject. Rockets were no longer made apart from a few small projectiles used for meteorological purposes. Air craft design had not altered within living memory, perhaps not even in millennia. The high-powered stratojets that could circle the earth in twenty-four hours without refuelling were adequate for all purposes. In the field of atomic engineering, research had halted once the production of nuclear power had been established on an economic basis. It was the female viewpoint, essentially practical and in no way visionary, using technology for what it could give with no interest in abstract research for its own sake, that prevailed.
The same practical attitude had resolved the major problems of power politics. Although womankind was still split by geographical divisions into independent continental groups, there was close liaison at every level of life and work. The separate governing bodies were co-ordinated by a central committee which was franchised to act in an advisory capacity on all questions of governing policy and local ad ministration. It was recognized that government was part of the regulating machinery of society, an enormous ductless gland controlling the basic functioning of the organism as a whole, but it was the organism which was important, not the gland.
Nor had women bothered to theorize about their science or society. Some called it a scientific democracy, others a technocracy, and still others a controlled anarchy. The names meant nothing: The mechanism functioned just as efficiently whatever the label applied to it.
This state of relative Utopia had materialized slowly during the past five thousand years. There was a feeling, which
Aubretia shared, that it had come about as a result of the disappearance of man from the earth. Although little was known of man and the kind of world in which he held sway, the Department of the Written Word had pointed out on many occasions that the wars and political disputes of past ages were undoubtedly characteristic of the male sex. One had only to consider the lower animals (in which male-female differentiation still existed) to appreciate the fundamental difference between the psycho-physical behaviour pattern of the two sexes. There never could have been a Utopia while man survived and controlled human affairs, for his innate aggressiveness and insatiable curiosity forced him restlessly to pursue the ever-widening boundary of knowledge without giving a thought to the application of his newly found powers in the service of humanity. In abolishing man, nature had opened the way to the permanent establishment of peace and plenty. Several women scientists had pointed out that man had been necessary to nature’s purpose; he had tackled, with considerable energy and ingenuity, the problem of adapting his environment to himself, and had succeeded in wresting from the blind forces of the cosmos all the power he needed to secure the supremacy and ultimate survival of the human race as an entity. And at that point man became redundant. Worse he became an obstacle to the wise and peaceful exploitation of natural power for the benefit of his species. So man ceased to exist, and woman became mistress of her planet, and nature provided parthenogenesis to replace the outmoded reproduction mechanism that had vanished with the male sex.
It was a clear, logical and satisfactory picture. Everything seemed to be on the credit side, with one or two minor debits that were doubtless necessary if unpleasant. The first and by far the most disquieting, so far as Aubretia was concerned, was the mode of taxation employed throughout the world, for, of course, the benefits of social prosperity and stability had to be paid for by those who enjoyed it. The Department of Mortic Revenue was a term that always chilled her mind and heart whenever she heard it mentioned, or even thought about it. The word mortic was a polite euphemism; what they meant was death. It was the word which pinpointed the entire mechanism of the tax system and, incidentally, gave a clue to the means by which population level was controlled and kept within the limits proscribed by the parameters of industrial productivity.
She discussed the subject with Valinia one evening after having read during the day a statistical report which stated that the number of mortic revenue deaths below the age of forty-five had increased by nearly seven percent during the past year. Mortic revenue deaths was another way of saying compulsory euthanasia. It was, in a sense, the exact opposite of parthenogentic births, and the two were strictly balanced. Birth and death rates always increased or decreased in exact proportion.
“At one time,” said Aubretia, “the question of mortic law never entered my head at all. But now that I’m growing older I find myself thinking about it more and more, and it seems to me that the taxation side is only a small part of it.” Valinia regarded her with bright brown eyes. “Why should you worry, Aubry? The mortic tax assessors must be quite happy with your record.”