Page 87 - BraveNewWorld

IDPH 87

proud. “I’m afraid you won’t find it very exciting,” she said. “But it’s the only
thing I have.” She sighed. “If only you could see the lovely reading machines
we used to have in London!” He began reading. The Chemical and Bacteriolo-
gical Conditioning of the Embryo. Practical Instructions for Beta Embryo-Store
Workers. It took him a quarter of an hour to read the title alone. He threw the
book on the floor. “Beastly, beastly book!” he said, and began to cry.

The boys still sang their horrible song about Linda. Sometimes, too, they
laughed at him for being so ragged. When he tore his clothes, Linda did not
know how to mend them. In the Other Place, she told him, people threw away
clothes with holes in them and got new ones. “Rags, rags!” the boys used to
shout at him. “But I can read,” he said to himself, “and they can’t. They don’t
even know what reading is.” It was fairly easy, if he thought hard enough about
the reading, to pretend that he didn’t mind when they made fun of him. He as-
ked Linda to give him the book again.
The more the boys pointed and sang, the harder he read. Soon he could read
all the words quite well. Even the longest. But what did they mean? He asked
Linda; but even when she could answer it didn’t seem to make it very clear,
And generally she couldn’t answer at all.
“What are chemicals?” he would ask.
“Oh, stuff like magnesium salts, and alcohol for keeping the Deltas and Epsi-
lons small and backward, and calcium carbonate for bones, and all that sort of
thing.”

“But how do you make chemicals, Linda? Where do they come from?”
“Well, I don’t know. You get them out of bottles. And when the bottles are
empty, you send up to the Chemical Store for more. It’s the Chemical Store
people who make them, I suppose. Or else they send to the factory for them. I
don’t know. I never did any chemistry. My job was always with the embryos.
It was the same with everything else he asked about. Linda never seemed to
know. The old men of the pueblo had much more definite answers.
“The seed of men and all creatures, the seed of the sun and the seed of earth
and the seed of the sky-Awonawilona made them all out of the Fog of Increase.
Now the world has four wombs; and he laid the seeds in the lowest of the four
wombs. And gradually the seeds began to grow .”

One day (John calculated later that it must have been soon after his twelfth
birthday) he came home and found a book that he had never seen before Iying
on the floor in the bedroom. It was a thick book and looked very old. The
binding had been eaten by mice; some of its pages were loose and crumpled.
He picked it up, looked at the title-page: the book was called The Complete
Works of William Shakespeare.

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