Free The Infinite Moment by John Wyndham

Council decides the ratios," she went on to explain. "The doctors at the clinic examine the babies and allocate them suitably to the different classes. After that, of course, it is just a matter of seeing to their specialised feeding, glandular control, and proper training."
    "But," I objected wildly. "What's it for? Where's the sense in it? What's the good of being alive, like that?"
    "Well, what is the sense in being alive? You tell me," she suggested.
    "But we're meant to love and be loved, to have babies we love by people we love."
    "There's your conditioning again; glorifying and romanticising primitive animalism. Surely you consider that we are superior to the animals?"
    "Of course I do, but"
    "Love, you say, but what can you know of the love there can be between mother and daughter when there are no men to introduce jealousy? Do you know of any purer sentiment than the love of a girl for her little sisters?"
    "But you don't understand," I protested again. "How should you understand a love that colours the whole world? How it centres in your heart and reaches out from there to pervade your whole being, how it can affect everything you are, everything you touch, everything you hear... It can hurt dreadfully, I know, oh I know, but it can run like sunlight in your veins... It can make you a garden out of a slum; brocade out of rags; music out of a speaking voice. It can show you a whole universe in someone else's eyes. Oh, you don't understand... you don't know... you can't... Oh, Donald, darling, how can I show her what she's never even guessed at... There was an uncertain pause, but presently she said: "Naturally, in your form of society it was necessary for you to be given such a conditioned reaction, but you can scarcely expect us to surrender our freedom, to connive at our own resubjection, by calling our oppressors into existence again."
    "Oh, you won't understand. It was only the more stupid men and women who were continually at war with one another. Lots of us were complementary. We were pairs who formed units."
    She smiled. "My dear, either you are surprisingly illinformed on your own period, or else the stupidity you speak of was astonishingly dominant. Neither as myself, nor as a historian, can I consider that we should be justified in resurrecting such a state of affairs. A primitive stage of our development has now given way to a civilised era. Woman, who is the vessel of life, had the misfortune to find man necessary for a time, but now she does no longer. Are you suggesting that such a useless and dangerous encumbrance ought to be preserved, out of sheer sentimentality? I will admit that we have lost some minor conveniencesyou will have noticed, I expect, that we are less inventive mechanically, and tend to copy the patterns we have inherited; but that troubles us very little; our interests lie not in the inorganic, but in the organic and the sentient. Perhaps men could show us how to travel twice as fast, or how to fly to the moon, or how to kill more people more quickly; but it does not seem to us that such kinds of knowledge would be good payment for reenslaving ourselves. No, our kind of world suits us betterall of us except a few Reactionists. You have seen our Servitors. They are a little timid in manner, perhaps, 52 but are they oppressed, or sad? Don't they chatter among themselves as brightly and perkily as sparrows? And the Workersthose you called the Amazonsdon't they look strong, healthy, and cheerful?"
    "But you're robbing them allrobbing them of their birthright."
    "You mustn't give me cant, my dear. Did not your social system conspire to rob a woman of her "birthright" unless she married? You not only let her know it, but you socially rubbed it in: here, our Servitors and Workers do not know it, and they are not worried by a sense of inadequacy. Motherhood is the function of the Mothers, and understood as such."
    I shook my head. "Nevertheless, they are being robbed. A woman has a right to