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"Let's forget about mortic revenue," Valinia whispered intimately. "It can't affect either of us ever."

"That's what I've been worrying about, Valy. For a long time there's been something at the back of my mind, something buried and forgotten, and I can't help feeling it has to do with mortics."

Valinia smiled. "You're crazy, Aubry."

"Yes, I must be."

"About me."

"Mm."

Valinia seized her partner possessively. Aubretia sighed gently and squeezed Valinia's arm.

Aubretia followed her out of the room.

The weeks passed by smoothly, in a routine pattern, hazy and pleasurable. The world was kind and beautiful in its own unchanging way. The world was Valinia and beyond her was the rest of womankind, shadows against a mellow golden backdrop that was contemporary society. Life was a relationship between two people, and the relationship was warm and fruitful and reassuring. Even the morbid problem of mortic revenue clicked suddenly into a more comforting perspective, for she realized that control of death was just as logical as control of birth; indeed, the two were an intimately related function of the balanced state. And there was satisfaction in the thought that by a long term process of selection and elimination the human race itself would inevitably be improved, both physically and spiritually.

Then, one evening, the unexpected happened. Valinia had gone to Lon for three days on some vague government assignment, and Aubretia was alone in her apartment, missing the solace of her friend's company, but making the best of