The Romance of Atlantis Read Online Free PDF Page A

society, they refused to bear them. Salustra had attempted to persuade the ignorant and superstitious to practice birth control. But the religious groups headed by the priests protested loudly, and the ignorant and superstitious protested with them. What right had a mere temporal sovereign to order them to relinquish their divine right to spawn their feeble, mentally stunted, dependent, criminally inspired offspring?
    Salustra had thought of invoking her archenemies, the members of the priesthood, to augment the birthrate among the upper classes by threatening them with untold future torments if they practiced birth control. Ironically, only the ignorant and the undesirables would listen to such absurdities.
    Eventually, she hit upon a plan for penalizing aliens, paupers, dependent incompetents and inferiors for producing unrestrained numbers of children. She took them off welfare. Also, she prohibited unions of the diseased, the shiftless and the biologically inferior. She advocated intercourse between unmarried men of proven superiority and women of their choice, taking the children under the protection of the state. Illegitimacy was no disgrace. The priesthood, the pious and the righteous were outraged. But these Salustra squelched with a firm hand. “These children are the state’s,” she said. “Atlantis is their father and mother.”
    Her enemies snickered openly. Advocating exceptional children, why did not she, the flower of Atlantis, set a notable example? The cream of a patriotic young manhood would be only too happy to cooperate for the public good. Salustra did nothing to dignify these sly barbs.
    She rejoiced in her enemies, gauging the effectiveness of her laws by their opposition in certain quarters: the lords of industry, the indolent, the welfare recidivists and the criminal classes. Sometimes, obscene epigrams were scrawled on the walls of her Palace. Tales of her amorous hours were bandied about, encouraged by a malevolent priesthood. But the inarticulate majority trusted her cold intelligence.
    She had few friends, and these stoutly maintained an attitude of belief in her virginity, as if to distinguish her from ordinary women. This naïveté annoyed while it amused her. She understood too clearly that they were mistakenly realizing in her the sentimental ideals of their own youthful fantasies. Clever and wise men were almost childlike in sexual matters. Only the cynical were totally emancipated from convention. “Cynicism is the boast of youth, the affectation of the mature, and the bitter tea of the aged,” she would say.

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    She was rubbing her eyes drowsily as Mahius stood watching with a solemn expression.
    “Why so long a face, Mahius?” she said. “How could today add anything more disagreeable than yesterday?”
    Mahius’ pained expression gave him the look of a squeezed-out sponge. “Majesty, the geologists report a huge rumble in the earth far to the north.”
    She sat up in her bed and looked impishly at her First Minister. “Look the other way, old man, while I climb out of bed. I wear nothing but my skin these nights; it is so beastly hot without the central air-cooling system. Why cannot our Palace generators, which still feed our lamps, be stimulated enough to send cooling air into my chambers?”
    Mahius replied lamely, as he cast his eyes to the floor: “These generators have very little power, Majesty, sufficient only for partial illumination, and one can only speculate when this feeble trickle of energy gives out.”
    She now sat up on the edge of the bed, a shimmering vision in an abbreviated garment that began at the gentle swell of her breast and stopped at the hips.
    Mahius coughed uncertainly.
    “Now tell me of this earthquake, old man,” said Salustra in a teasing tone.
    Mahius’ gaze was as close to a reprimand as it had ever been with his ebullient Empress. “It is nothing to jest about, Majesty, not when one considers the terrible situation we already find