Intermere

by William Alexander Taylor

The women were splendid types of physical beauty as well as mental endowment; the men were trained athletes, and the devotees of physical as well as mental culture, and I watched with keen zest their prowess in the athletic games everywhere indulged in. I did not see a physical, mental or moral derelict in the land. All were robust and perfectly formed.

There were no classes. Laborers and officials met on an equal footing. There were no telltale differences in dress to indicate sets, circles, position or titles among the men. The same was true of the women. Mental superiority or maturity was discernible to me and recognized on every hand, not to be envied or decried, but to serve as the guide to other feet.

And all this was easily reconcilable to me. All were coequal laborers. All were coequal sharers of the common benefits of their governmental system, and they all had a common incentive—to ennoble and dignify the race by ennobling and dignifying themselves individually, but contributing alike to the common stock of blessings.

Never before did I fully realize the meaning of the Divine Master when He said: "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." Before me and around me was the literal fulfillment of the injunction in the form of the model government for mankind, founded upon the highest attribute of Divinity.

But there was neither cant nor affected solemnity in the never-ending performance of this duty. It had become absolutely and essentially a part of their nature, and was at once the cornerstone and the Temple of their Religion; but their ideas of Religion were widely different from ours. They never expounded, but lived it.

Delightful people accompanied us if we traveled in Aerocars; delightful people met us with Medocars when we came to terra firma, and accompanied us through the bewildering lanes and mazes of beauty by land; and delightful people met us with fairy-like Merocars when we sought to thread the enchanting islands of the strange pulsating, moving sea.

Thus day by day I was carried from province to province, from city to city, from valley to valley and from mountain to mountain; relays of entertainers met us at every stopping-point to take the places of those who had accompanied us thither. Nothing could have seemed more unreal; nothing could have been more exquisitely enjoyable.

Now we wound through gardens smiling with beauty and redolent with balm and fragrance; anon we were in orchards plucking the ripened fruit; then in the harvest fields of the husbandman, and next in shops, factory or store; I wondering at all I saw, and my conductors kindly wondering at me, no doubt, but of that they gave no significance or sign.

Almost literally speaking there is no night in Intermere. With the twilight myriads of lights flash out everywhere along the streets, highways, lanes, and from residences, temples and monuments, more luminous than our electric lamps, diffusing a mellow and pleasing light everywhere. But one sees no wires, as with us, to feed the lamps of many sizes and shades of light, each one of which, so far as we can see and realize, is independent of all others and everything.