“You spoke of the monarchy,” I interrupted. “Was the United States willing to surrender its long-cherished ideals of democracy? In fact, very few nations had any time for kingdoms and for kings even in my day. I must admit, however,” I added shamefacedly, “that we had very little real democracy.”

  A New World

  “When the world came under one government, England insisted that the highest officer in the Federation should bear the title of King. Since all the powers were making concessions to each other in order to end conflict forever, England had her way in this. She explained, and rightly too, that a King was a beautiful tradition that would add majesty and dignity to a world whose late sordid utilitarianism had starved the race for beauty. The title didn’t make much difference anyway, since the first King was an American, and it does keep alive the spirit of romance and the glamour of pageantry.

  “What we really have is a hierarchy, a perfect system in which each officer is supreme in his own jurisdiction and responsible only to his immediate head. Each officer is an expert in the duties of his office and only experts in a given sphere are eligible for offices embracing duties in that sphere. All officers are selected by popular suffrage, the vote being confined, of course, to candidates who under our rigid educational tests have qualified as experts for the offices to which they aspire. All elections are yearly, even that of King. Each officer has an assistant, a vice-officer, who serves under him. It is really the vice-officers who are elected each year, as each incumbent is succeeded by his assistant. This prevents confusion due to frequent changing of officials as each incoming officer has had a year’s thorough training under his predecessor. The King may assume autocratic power in any crisis, but normally he is simply head of the Supreme Council composed of ex-Kings, in which body he casts the deciding vote.

  “As I have already mentioned, we have very little government as you would conceive it, but its functions have enlarged tremendously to embrace spheres of jurisdiction outside of what your age would have considered expedient. Crime has practically vanished and with it the complex systems of jurisprudence, save as councils of arbitration and advice. Health is perfect, as no sane person would think of violating its laws; hence any supervision in that respect would be superfluous. There is no longer any need of armies and navies and even the International Police Force has survived only because it adds dignity and smoothness to our functions.

  “The government’s chief and holiest responsibility is the direction of education, which, however, has become greatly simplified. Knowledge is now conveyed to the mind during sleep by radiographic or phonographic lectures. The subject matter is indelibly imprinted on the subconscious mind, whose memory is eternal. During waking hours the objective mind is trained by great psychologists to recover at will any detail that has been impressed on the unconscious. Since all industry is controlled and all art is created by thought-power, our chief technical training is in thought-control and direction. Great stress is laid upon athletics, for a perfect mind can function adequately only through a perfect body.

  “Our college course, which is compulsory, also embraces a year’s voyage on one of our floating universities as a training for world citizenship. Our students, under the guidance of their instructors, visit all nations that the bonds of human understanding and world brotherhood may be strengthened. Since our lives are practically endless and since knowledge is also endless, it is arranged that after every five years of service to the State, each citizen again enters school for the purpose of adding to his education such branches of learning as he may have neglected and such new wisdom as may have been added to our racial store. International marriages are encouraged, since long before we attained immortality, we had weeded out undesirable racial strains by wholesale sterilization. The carefully preserved superior strains in the various races have united to form a super-race. Children are still born occasionally whenever a marriage is consummated wherein the contracting parties possess qualities of genius that we desire to see multiplied. However, the case must be exceptional, as we must avoid overpopulation.

  “We cherish spaciousness too well to permit even the suggestion of overcrowding. Birth is entirely different from the horror that it was in your day. The embryo is removed from the womb shortly after conception and brought to perfect maturity in an incubator. The old relations of the sexes except for purposes of procreation have practically ceased. The great energy back of the wasteful reproduction that led at last to death has been turned into the channels of rejuvenation. This does not imply that men and women do not love and live with their chosen mates in perfect comradeship. It does not even mean the absence of sex attraction, for, as I have told you, all our emotions have been preserved and intensified. It does mean that the divine ecstasy generated by our love for one another is transmuted to the higher planes of soul expression, whence it returns to us as children of inspiration, as the materialization of our dreams of beauty.

  “We have preserved the institution of monogamy and marriage but not in an arbitrary manner, as there always have been and always will be minds who do not adapt themselves to it. On the whole, however, you will find our world a world of homes and our marriages enduring. Why should they not be, since with the removal of all pressure, economic or spiritual, they are based on love alone? Reading each other’s inmost thoughts with our powers of thought-discernment, with no emotions to conceal, no impurity to hide, no selfish motives to attain—we know when the spark has flashed between us.”

  As she spoke of the spark, her voice trembled—faltered—then raising her glorious eyes, she looked straight into mine, searching—finding—and unafraid. Waves of ecstasy surged through and over me, and though many centuries flowed between us, I knew and loved and understood this woman, and her soul flowed into mine above the barriers of sensual limitation.

  A World Freedom

  Her voice regained its power and she continued:

  “Though I have digressed to explain our marriage system to you, the supervision of marriage and the selection of mates is not a function of government. It is left purely to individual choice. There was a time, far back, when in order to weed out inferior strains, sterilization was resorted to, but there are no longer any unfit. When highly superior couples meet and mate, the government may suggest that they bear a child or children. On the other hand, couples really desiring offspring may apply to the government for a permit to bear them. Such requests are usually granted, for the depletion of population during the Great Revolt, and the further depletion resulting from the weeding out of the unfit, leaves room for the addition of several millions more to our population. Good judgment is always exercised by our people and there is not among them that mad desire to reproduce themselves which was, after all, only a magnificent gesture of defiance to death.

  “An important function of our government is the supervision of popular entertainment, the judicious direction of the great leisure which we now have at our disposal, so that it may be employed constructively as well as joyously. This means so much more to us than you can realize. In your age men plunged madly into pleasure to drown the sense of frustration, the monotony of coarsening toil and the degrading conditions surrounding it. In your age pleasure was an escape from reality; with us it is the jewel in the crown of realization. Two hours we spend in the acquisition of knowledge, which does not include our training during sleep. Three hours we spend in bathing, exercises, and the care of our bodies. The balance of our time we pass as we see fit, either in the quiet contentment of our homes or in our wonderful diversions that include the drama, music, the art galleries, the astronomical observatories, and above all—dancing.

  “Our young people, too,” I mused aloud, “were also fond of dancing.”

  “Yes, and why not? Is not all life the mystic dance of atoms to the music of the spheres? What higher form of worship can there be than taking part in that eternal ritual?”

  “I don’t think that our younger generation interpreted the dance in quite that beautiful manner.” I smiled, thinking of the horrible rhythms of the jazz age.

  “No doubt their minds were partially corrupted by the impure thoughts of their elders,” responded Iris. “Yet the eternal urge was there, impelling them by means of rhythm to the harmonization of their spirits with the Undeviating Plan.”

  “Is that your religion?” I asked.

  “This is knowledge. We have no religion. The very word ‘religion’ means ‘to bind’ and we are free. Religion was a ladder by which men hoped to scale the walls of heaven. We have attained that goal in this, our earthly paradise. We have thrown away the ladder. Faith has blossomed into certainty.”

  “But you have no system of belief—no form of worship?”

  “We do not believe in God, the Universal Essence; we know that it is within and without us. It pulses through our veins in the passion and the ecstasy of life. Worship? Is not our whole life worship, is not every new attainment but a new prostration of the soul before the altar of the yet-to-be-attained!”

  “Surely, this is heaven I have found,” I told her, “instead of the same old Earth eight hundred years beyond my time.”

  “There was One who said, ‘The kingdom of heaven is within the heart.’ Truly it is like that. A sage once sought in distant countries to find an exotic blossom, to discover it had been blooming all the while beside his cottage door.”

  An ugly doubt assailed me like a serpent crawling through the fields of Eden.

  “Still, are you sure, can you be sure,” I questioned, “that this seeming perfection, this supreme contentment is not really the beginning of decadence? May it not be that humanity has reached the mountaintop and is going gracefully down the other side?”

  “The other side!” She laughed musically. “Why, we have barely set our feet upon the first slopes! We have just come through the Valley—the Valley of Illusion—and raised our eyes to glimpse the splendor of the mountaintop. We have scarcely conquered ourselves and our own planet—as yet. Beyond us lies—the Infinite—worlds innumerable, space illimitable—room for the soul to grow until it includes all life, all time and all being. Why, we have only recently established communication with Mars and Venus. The beginning of decadence! We have reached only the beginning of wisdom—in the realization of our littleness as compared to this Vastness.” She pointed to the firmament and all at once I knew that these people would never know decadence. A deep shame swept over me that, in my crude materialism, I had been so beast-minded as to believe that the lifting of the burden of toil would quench the spark of human ambition.

  CHAPTER 5

  The New City

  Therius broke the thread of my self-reproach. “We are coming into the harbor,” he reminded us. “The tale is ended, and so is our journey. The rest you can learn from observation.”

  I raised my eyes to the scene we were approaching. It was the port of Corpus Christi beyond a doubt. The coastline had changed but little in eight hundred years. But I was totally unprepared for the splendor of the royal city that rose before me like Venus from the waves. Ivory spires and fairy minarets flung themselves against the Italian blue of the heavens. Golden domes caught and scattered jewels of sunshine in crystal showers of light. Spacious avenues paved with varicolored glass and bordered by towering trees of tropic foliage led away from the water’s edge into seemingly infinite distances. Seductive music floated out through fretted casements, and above us graceful aircraft dipped and circled or hung motionless above the radiant Earth.

  Iris touched my arm. “This is Nirvania,” she told me rapturously, seeming to drink its fragrance into her soul. “Nirvania the beautiful!”

  Heriod laughed teasingly. “That’s what they call it now,” he explained. “Used to be Corpus Christi. Iris thinks it’s marvelous because she was born there, but it’s just what it always was, a charming little seaport town. Just wait till you see my city—New York.”

  Somehow I was glad to find that mankind was still human enough to have local pride. The pleasing touch of nature brought me to Earth again and we went about the business of landing.

  Quite a crowd had gathered to meet us. Therius informed me that this was due to the fact that he had sent a “thought-message” ahead telling all about myself. The throng crowded about us like the happy children that they were. Without any introduction they shook hands with me and embraced me as an old friend from whom they had been long parted. I could not help noticing that there was considerable restrained mirth because of my drab-colored, uncomfortable garments, but be it said to their credit, their mirth was restrained.

  Therius, Iris, and several erstwhile companions conducted me straight to the mayor’s residence, which was some little distance from the pier. They made no suggestion of entering any of the numerous vehicles of transportation that were at hand, and from the number of people that were sauntering along the streets, I decided that these people enjoyed walking.

  All around me were evidences of a higher culture than I had ever dreamed possible on Earth. It came to me that the keynote of their whole civilization could be expressed in three words: beauty—simplicity—spaciousness. There were no signs of the unsightly utilitarian structures of my day, no smoking factories, no ugly office buildings, no malodorous warehouses, no towering masses of iron and steel. Instead I saw a city of airy homes nestling in the midst of cool and verdant parks. Here and there at pleasing intervals were scattered the spires and domes of dignified public edifices that evidently served as schools, theatres, libraries, and museums of art. There was no heavy traffic on the streets. Leisurely moving bright-colored passenger vehicles skimmed along, keeping a foot or so above the pavement as though held to that position by some gravity-controlling device. There were numbers of people who actually flew through the air, equipped with artificial wings of gorgeous plumage that gave them the appearance of great birds. A surprising number were walking, considering the ease of transportation. Multitudes were singing and dancing in the grassy spaces or on smooth glassy platforms, to the sound of invisible music.

  The absence of the frantic speed, so nerve-wracking in my time, struck me as unusual. I remarked about it to my companion, mentioning the mad velocities of 1930.

  “What was their particular hurry?” said Iris so seriously that I knew she intended no sarcasm.

  Therius with his usual professorial habit of taking the answer out of one’s mouth, replied for me:

  “They were hurried,” he said, as though settling the question for all time, “because of the brevity of life in that day. One cannot blame them for wanting to crowd as much experience as possible into their brief span. Add to this the fact that they didn’t believe in their religions, as their actions repudiated any hope for a hereafter.”

  “Didn’t believe in their religions?” I asked curiously.

  “Can you imagine a sane person believing in the immortality of the soul, grieving over the dead and rushing along at 200 miles per hour?”

  Come to think about it, I couldn’t. “Do you believe in immortality?” I asked him.

  He smiled. “We don’t have to believe in it, we have it.”

  Further conversation was interrupted by our having reached our destination.

  The Mayor of Nirvania

  Wide marble steps that would have done credit to a Doric temple led up to the mayor’s palace. A great glass door swung noiselessly open as Therius pressed a button. We found ourselves in a colossal patio covered with movable skylights. It was paved with transparent glass beneath which flowed crystal waters in whose depths innumerable fragile fish of tropic waters disported themselves, trailing their filmy veils amid waving fernlike sea plants and through the apertures of miniature castles. The walls were simply magnificent mirrors broken by panelings displaying paintings whose genius was supreme, and occasional niches containing statuary unsurpassed by the artistry of Greece and Rome. A singing fountain tossed its white spray into a pool in the center of the court and here the fishes came to the surface.

  The only furnishings were low Oriental couches, a great profusion of velvet and silken cushions, a few low stools with Oriental carvings and quite a number of rare plants and palms. A delicious perfume hung in the air and a cool breeze was set in motion by invisible fans. Several magnificent Persian cats of an inconceivable size stretched themselves lazily in the warm glow that filtered through the skylights and a beautiful shepherd dog rose to greet us. I received quite a fright as a shaggy, majestic African lion rose from a cushion and sauntered curiously towards me, but Therius allayed my fears by patting him on the head and informing me that there were no more wild animals. A few uncaged canary birds and some humming birds flew freely about the patio unharmed and unnoticed by the giant cats. The whole scene was as beautiful as a vision of the Golden Age. Liberty and light and laughter had come at last to the Earth and our children’s children had come into their own.

  To my left a door swung noiselessly open and a young man joined us. He was tall, lithe, and splendidly proportioned, as were all this super-race. His features portrayed a subtle blending of the noblest qualities of the ancient Greek, the North American Indian, the Oriental, and the Anglo-Saxon. The aquiline nose was unquestionably Grecian, the high cheekbones were those of the Indian, the soft, mysterious eyes held all the charm of Hindustan, yet something flashed in their depths that betrayed the keen alertness of the modern American. In him as in all his contemporaries, the highest traits of all races were fused into a sort of sculptured harmony of face and form.