ings clean when there isn’t hot water laid on? And look at these clothes. This beastly wool isn’t like acetate. It lasts and lasts. And you’re supposed to mend it if it gets torn. But I’m a Beta; I worked in the Fertilizing Room; nobody ever taught me to do anything like that. It wasn’t my business. Besides, it never used to be right to mend clothes. Throw them away when they’ve got holes in them and buy new. ‘The more stitches, the less riches.’ Isn’t that right? Mending’s anti-social. But it’s all different here. It’s like living with lunatics. Everything they do is mad.” She looked round; saw John and Bernard had left them and were walking up and down in the dust and garbage outside the house; but, none the less confidentially lowering her voice, and leaning, while Lenina stiffened and shrank, so close that the blown reek of embryo-poison stirred the hair on her cheek. “For instance,” she hoarsely whispered, “take the way they have one another here. Mad, I tell you, absolutely mad. Everybody belongs to every one else—don’t they? don’t they?” she insisted, tugging at Lenina’s sleeve. Lenina nodded her averted head, let out the breath she had been holding and managed to draw another one, relatively untainted. “Well, here,” the other went on, “nobody’s supposed to belong to more than one person. And if you have people in the ordinary way, the others think you’re wicked and anti-social. They hate and despise you. Once a lot of women came and made a scene because their men came to see me. Well, why not? And then they rushed at me … No, it was too awful. I can’t tell you about it.” Linda covered her face with her hands and shuddered. “They’re so hateful, the women here. Mad, mad and cruel. And of course they don’t know anything about Malthusian Drill, or bottles, or decanting, or anything of that sort. So they’re having children all the time—like dogs. It’s too revolting. And to think that I … Oh, Ford, Ford, Ford! And yet John was a great comfort to me. I don’t know what I should have done without him. Even though he did get so upset whenever a man … Quite as a tiny boy, even. Once (but that was when he was bigger) he tried to kill poor Waihusiwa—or was it Popé?—just because I used to have them sometimes. Because I never could make him understand that that was what civilized people ought to do. Being mad’s infectious, I believe. Anyhow, John seems to have caught it from the Indians. Because, of course, he was with them a lot. Even though they always were so beastly to him and wouldn’t let him do all the things the other boys did. Which was a good thing in a way, because it made it easier for me to condition him a little. Though you’ve no idea how difficult that is. There’s so much one doesn’t know; it wasn’t my business to know. I mean, when a child asks you how a helicopter works or who made the world—well, what are you to answer if you’re a Beta and have always worked in the Fertilizing Room? What are you to answer?”
8
Outside, in the dust and among the garbage (there were four dogs now), Bernard and John were walking slowly up and down.
“So hard for me to realize,” Bernard was saying, “to reconstruct. As though we were living on different planets, in different centuries. A mother, and all this dirt, and gods, and old age, and disease …” He shook his head. “It’s almost inconceivable. I shall never understand, unless you explain.”
“Explain what?”
“This.” He indicated the pueblo. “That.” And it was the little house outside the village. “Everything. All your life.”
“But what is there to say?”
“From the beginning. As far back as you can remember.”
“As far back as I can remember.” John frowned. There was a long silence.
It was very hot. They had eaten a lot of tortillas and sweet corn. Linda said, “Come and lie down, Baby.” They lay down together in the big bed. “Sing,” and Linda sang. Sang “Strep-tocock-Gee to Banbury-T” and “Bye Baby Banting, soon you’ll need decanting.” Her voice got fainter and fainter …
There was a loud noise, and he woke with a start. A man was saying something to Linda, and Linda was laughing. She had pul