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and regulations were beyond human comprehension. There's the eugenic angle, too."

"That's what I mean. I'm beginning to think the eugenic side is more important than the revenue."

"There isn't any revenue, Aubry. It's all on paper, a computation by an electronic brain. Productivity and service is the real monetary system of the tax, and that's where the eugenic element comes in."

Aubretia abandoned the discussion for a while and scanned a picture magazine, but the three-dimensional color photographs were uninteresting. Even the nude stills of the erotic dancer known as Luella III, who was reputed to have the longest legs and the widest thighs in the Western hemisphere, failed to attract a second glance. Valinia had considerably more essential erotic fire in the touch of her little finger.

Presently her mind disassociated itself from the pages of the magazine and returned to the darker problem of mortics. She considered the basic principle: that all individuals from birth have a certain monetary value to the State, based on the service they render and the productivity they can achieve in terms of work. At the moment of birth a woman might have an immense potential value, for her future achievements were unknown; at the instant of death, however, her value was nil, for her service to the State had come to a stop. Between those two extremes lay a lifetime of labor and applied effort, mental or physical, that formed the basic economic unit of a functioning society.

Translating the abstract into the concrete was a complex matter, and the Department of Mortic Revenue had solved the problem to some extent by devising arbitrary standards. There was, for instance, the fundamental unit assessment. Every individual, and every child at birth, had a price on her head, an assessment in terms of dollars based on the average expected productivity of any single citizen. Nobody knew the