«I suppose Epsilons don’t really mind being Epsilons,» she said aloud.
«Of course they don’t. How can they? They don’t know what it’s like being anything else. We’d mind, of course. But then we’ve been differently conditioned. Besides, we start with a different heredity.»
«I’m glad I’m not an Epsilon,» said Lenina, with conviction.
«And if you were an Epsilon,» said Henry, «your conditioning would have made you no less thankful that you weren’t a Beta or an Alpha.» He put his forward propeller into gear and headed the machine towards London. Behind them, in the west, the crimson and orange were almost faded; a dark bank of cloud had crept into the zenith. As they flew over the crematorium, the plane shot upwards on the column of hot air rising from the chimneys, only to fall as suddenly when it passed into the descending chill beyond.
«What a marvellous switchback!» Lenina laughed delightedly. But Henry’s tone was almost, for a moment, melancholy. «Do you know what that switchback was?» he said. «It was some human being finally and definitely disappearing. Going up in a squirt of hot gas. It would be curious to know who it was-a man or a woman, an Alpha or an Epsilon…» He sighed. Then, in a resolutely cheerful voice, «Anyhow,» he concluded, «there’s one thing we can be certain of; whoever he may have been, he was happy when he was alive. Everybody’s happy now.»
«Yes, everybody’s happy now,» echoed Lenina. They had heard the words repeated a hundred and fifty times every night for twelve years. Landing on the roof of Henry’s forty-story apartment house in Westminster, they went straight down to the dining-hall. There, in a loud and cheerful company, they ate an excellent meal. Soma was served with the coffee. Lenina took two half-gramme tablets and Henry three. At twenty past nine they walked across the street to the newly opened Westminster Abbey Cabaret. It was a night almost without clouds, moonless and starry; but of this on the whole depressing fact Lenina and Henry were fortunately unaware. The electric sky-signs effectively shut off the outer darkness. «CALVIN STOPES AND HIS SIXTEEN SEXOPHONISTS.» From the façade of the new Abbey the giant letters invitingly glared. «LONDON’S FINEST SCENT
AND COLOUR ORGAN. ALL THE LATEST SYNTHETIC MUSIC.» They entered. The air seemed hot and somehow breathless with the scent of ambergris and sandalwood. On the domed ceiling of the hall, the colour organ had momentarily painted a tropical sunset. The Sixteen Sexophonists were playing an old favourite: «There ain’t no Bottle in all the world like that dear little Bottle of mine.» Four hundred couples were five-stepping round the polished floor. Lenina and Henry were soon the four hundred and first. The saxophones wailed like melodious cats under the moon, moaned in the alto and tenor registers as though the little death were upon them.
Rich with a wealth of harmonics, their tremulous chorus mounted towards a climax, louder and ever louder-until at last, with a wave of his hand, the conductor let loose the final shattering note of ether-music and blew the sixteen merely human blowers clean out of existence. Thunder in A flat major. And then, in all but silence, in all but darkness, there followed a gradual deturgescence, a diminuendo sliding gradually, through quarter tones, down, down to a faintly whispered dominant chord that lingered on (while the five-four rhythms still pulsed below) charging the darkened seconds with an intense expectancy. And at last expectancy was fulfilled. There was a sudden explosive sunrise, and simultaneously, the Sixteen burst into song:
«Bottle of mine, it’s you I’ve always wanted!
Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted?
Skies are blue inside of you,
The weather’s always fine;
For
There ain’t no Bottle in all the world
Like that dear little Bottle of mine.»
Five-stepping with the other four hundred round and round Westminster Abbey, Lenina and Henry were yet dancing in another world-the warm, the richly coloured, the infinitely friendly world of soma-holiday. How kind, how good-looking, how delightfully amusing every one was! «Bottle of mine, it’s you I’ve always wanted…» But Lenina and Henry had what they wanted… They were inside, here and now-safely inside with the fine weather, the perennially blue sky. And when, exhausted, the Sixteen had laid by their saxophones and the Synthetic Music apparatus was producing the very latest in slow Malthusian Blues, they might have been twin embryos gently rocking together on the waves of a bottled ocean of blood-surrogate.
«Good-night, dear friends. Good-night, dear friends.» The loud speakers veiled their commands in a genial and musical politeness. «Good-night, dear friends…» Obediently, with all the others, Lenina and Henry left the building. The depressing stars had travelled quite some way across the heavens. But though the separating screen of the sky-signs had now to a great extent dissolved, the two young people still retained their happy ignorance of the night.
Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds. Bottled, they crossed the street; bottled, they took the lift up to Henry’s room on the twenty-eighth floor. And yet, bottled as she was, and in spite of that second gramme of soma, Lenina did not forget to take all the contraceptive precautions prescribed by the regulations. Years of intensive hypnopaedia and, from twelve to seventeen, Malthusian drill three times a week had made the taking of these precautions almost as automatic and inevitable as blinking.
«Oh, and that reminds me,» she said, as she came back from the bathroom, «Fanny Crowne wants to know where you found that lovely green morocco-surrogate cartridge belt you gave me.»
ALTERNATE Thursdays were Bernard’s Solidarity Service days. After an early dinner at the Aphroditzeum (to which Helrnholtz had recently been elected under Rule Two) he took leave of his friend and, hailing a taxi on the roof told the man to fly to the Fordson Community Singery. The machine rose a couple of hundred metres, then headed eastwards, and as it turned, there before Bernard’s eyes, gigantically beautiful, was the Singery. Flood-lighted, its three hundred and twenty metres of white Carrara-surrogate gleamed with a snowy incandescence over Ludgate Hill; at each of the four corners of its helicopter platform an immense T shone crimson against the night, and from the mouths of twenty-four vast golden trumpets rumbled a solemn synthetic music.
«Damn, I’m late,» Bernard said to himself as he first caught sight of Big Henry, the Singery clock. And sure enough, as he was paying off his cab, Big Henry sounded the hour. «Ford,» sang out an immense bass voice from all the golden trumpets.
«Ford, Ford, Ford…» Nine times. Bernard ran for the lift. The great auditorium for Ford’s Day celebrations and other massed Community Sings was at the bottom of the building. Above it, a hundred to each floor, were the seven thousand rooms used by Solidarity Groups for their fortnight services. Bernard dropped down to floor thirty-three, hurried along the corridor, stood hesitating for a moment outside Room 3210, then, having wound himself up, opened the door and walked in.
Thank Ford! he was not the last. Three chairs of the twelve arranged round the circular table were still unoccupied. He slipped into the nearest of them as inconspicuously as he could and prepared to frown at the yet later comers whenever they should arrive.
Turning towards him, «What were you playing this afternoon?» the girl on his left enquired. «Obstacle, or Electro-magnetic?»
Bernard looked at her (Ford! it was Morgana Rothschild) and blushingly had to admit that he had been playing neither. Morgana stared at him with astonishment. There was an awkward silence.
Then pointedly she turned away and addressed herself to the more sporting man on her left.
«A good beginning for a Solidarity Service,» thought Bernard miserably, and foresaw for himself yet another failure to achieve atonement. If only he had given himself time to look around instead of scuttling for the nearest chair! He could have sat between Fifi Bradlaugh and Joanna Diesel. Instead of which he had gone and blindly planted himself next to Morgana. Morgana! Ford! Those black eyebrows of hers-that eyebrow, rather-for they met above the nose. Ford! And on his right was Clara Deterding. True, Clara’s eyebrows didn’t meet. But she was really too pneumatic. Whereas Fifi and Joanna were absolutely right. Plump, blonde, not too large… And it was that great lout, Tom Kawaguchi, who now took the seat between them. The last arrival was Sarojini Engels.
«You’re late,» said the President of the Group severely. «Don’t let it happen again.» Sarojini apologized and slid into her place between Jim Bokanovsky and Herbert Bakunin. The group was now complete, the solidarity circle perfect and without flaw. Man, woman, man, in a ring of endless alternation round the table. Twelve of them ready to be made one, waiting to come together, to be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities in a larger being.
The President stood up, made the sign of the T and, switching on the synthetic music, let loose the soft indefatigable beating of drums and a choir of instruments-near-wind and super-string-that plangently repeated and repeated the brief and unescapably haunting melody of the first Solidarity Hymn. Again, again-and it was not the ear that heard
