It all depended on your point of view. Either you were within the walls or you weren’t and never the twain shall meet. Not even deliveries were handled by the same people on both sides of any gate. Orders were places in a box every day, which was slid through the wall. The next day, the deliveries were left outside the proper gate, signaled with the ringing of the bell, not picked up by those inside fro a full hour, enough time for those outside to “get them gone.”
Within the walls skirts and without, trousers.
“Never the twain shall meet” was a bit extreme. Some of them met. Rather frequently. Nightly, actually. Children had to come from somewhere, after all.
Chosen by lot, accompanied by a great deal of ceremony and pomp, drugged back to bestiality, left with only one another, just the pair, in a dark place deep in the earth. Somehow, they all figured it out. Eventually. And of course, the infants all had to stay inside the wall. For a time. Once the weaning was over, though, long before they’d remember anything, they’d be separated.
The anonymity caused occasional problems. Nothing that couldn’t be solved by a coolly administered dose of poison, though. And the pair responsible for the more abominable infants never needed to know how closely they were related. No one of consequence was every hurt by it.
All in all, it was a fairly equitable system. It had worked for over a thousand years and in all that time, only about a hundred had vanished from either group.
Funny how they always disappeared in pairs.
Title: A Fairly Equitable System
Word Count: 291
Encylopedia: Clute, John and Nicholls, Peter; The Encylopedia of Science Fiction; New York; St. Martin's Press; New York; 1993, update 1995
Entry: Cabell, James Branch
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