Android Karenina (11 page)

“Is he capable of remorse?” Dolly interrupted, gazing intently into her sister-in-law’s face.

“Yes. I know him. I could not look at him without feeling sorry for him. We both know him. He’s good-hearted, but he’s proud, and now he’s so humiliated. What touched me most . . .” (and here Anna guessed what would touch Dolly most) “he’s tortured by two things: that he’s ashamed for the children’s sake, and that, loving you—yes, yes, loving you beyond everything on earth,” she hurriedly interrupted Dolly, who would have answered—“he has hurt you, pierced you to the heart. ‘No, no, she cannot forgive me,’ he keeps saying.”

Dolly looked dreamily away beyond her sister-in-law as she listened to her words, and then responded angrily.

“She’s young, you see, she’s pretty, she’s technically proficient. Do you know, Anna, my youth and my beauty are gone, taken by whom? By him and his children.”

Again her eyes glowed with hatred.

“And after that he will tell me . . . . What! Can I believe him? Never! No, everything is over, everything that once made my comfort, the reward of my work, and my sufferings . . . . What’s so awful is that all at once my heart’s turned, and instead of love and tenderness, I have nothing but hatred for him; yes, hatred. I could kill him.”

Dolly grew calmer, and for two minutes both were silent.

“What’s to be done? Think for me, Anna, help me. I have thought over everything, and I see nothing.”

Anna could think of nothing, but her heart responded instantly to each word, to each change of expression of her sister-in-law.

“One thing I would say,” began Anna. “I am his sister, I know his character, that faculty of forgetting everything, everything.” She waved her hand before her forehead, as if a person’s circuits could be unspooled in the same way as those of a Class III. “That faculty for being completely carried away, but for completely repenting too. He cannot believe it, he cannot comprehend now how he can have acted as he did.”

“No, he understands, he understood!” Dolly broke in. “But I . . . you are forgetting me . . . does it make it easier for me?”

Anna cut her short, kissing her hand once more.

“I know more of the world than you do,” she said. “I know how men like Stiva look at it. They project a sort of electric barrier that can’t be crossed between them and their families. I don’t understand it, but it is so.”

“Yes, but he has kissed her . . .”

“Dolly, hush, darling. I saw Stiva when he was in love with you. I remember the time when he came to me and cried, talking of you, and all the wild oscillations of his heart for you, and I know that the longer he has lived with you the loftier you have been in his eyes. You know
we have sometimes laughed at him for putting in at every word:’Dolly’s a marvelous woman.’ You have always been a divinity for him, and you are that still, and this has not been an infidelity of the heart. . . .”

“But if it is repeated?”

“It cannot be, as I understand it. . . .”

“Yes, but could you forgive it?”

“I don’t know, I can’t judge. . . . Yes, I can,” said Anna, thinking a moment; and grasping the position in her thought and weighing it in her inner balance, she added: “Yes, I can, I can, I can. Yes, I could forgive it. I could not be the same, no; but I could forgive it, and forgive it as though it had never been, never been at all . . .”

“Oh, of course,” Dolly interposed quickly, as though saying what she had more than once thought, “else it would not be forgiveness. If one forgives, it must be completely, completely. Come, let us go; I’ll take you to your room,” she said, getting up to flick Dolichka back to life, while Anna did the same with Android Karenina. As the Class IIIs reanimated, their respective mistresses embraced.

“My dear, how glad I am you came,” Dolly said, and then offered a polite bow to Android Karenina, who tilted her head with kindness in place of a smile. “That
both
of you came. It has made things better, ever so much better.”

T
HE WHOLE OF THAT DAY ANNA
and Android Karemna spent at the Oblonskys’, and received no one, though some of Anna’s acquaintances had already heard of their arrival, and came to call. Anna spent the whole morning with Dolly and the children. She merely sent a brief note to her brother to tell him that he must not fail to dine
at home. “Come, God is merciful,” she wrote.

Oblonsky did dine at home: the conversation was general, and his wife, speaking to him, addressed him as “Stiva,” as she had not done before. In the relations of the husband and wife the same estrangement still remained, but there was no talk now of separation, and Stepan Arkadyich saw the possibility of explanation and reconciliation. Small Stiva, while attending as usual to his master, once dared to flash the red eye-shapes of his frontal display flirtatiously at Dolichka, who turned away but did not swat him.

Immediately after dinner Kitty came in. She knew Anna Arkadyevna, but only very slightly, and she came now to her sister’s with some trepidation at the prospect of meeting this fashionable Petersburg lady, whom everyone spoke so highly of. But she made a favorable impression on Anna Arkadyevna—she saw that at once. Anna was unmistakably admiring her loveliness and her youth, and before Kitty knew where she was she found herself not merely under Anna’s sway, but in love with her, as young girls do fall in love with older and married women. Anna was not like a fashionable lady, nor like the mother of a boy of eight years old. In the elasticity of her movements, the freshness and the unflagging eagerness which persisted in her face and broke out in her smile and her glance, she would rather have passed for a girl of twenty, had it not been for a serious and at times mournful look in her eyes, which struck and attracted Kitty. Her Class III, Android Karenina, too, seemed even in her perfect silence to be marked by a soulful depth of emotions—inaccessible, complex, and poetic—unlike any companion robot Kitty had ever seen.

After dinner, when Dolly went away to her own room, Anna rose quickly and went up to her brother, who was just lighting a cigar, having flicked open Small Stiva’s torso to use his groznium core for a light.

“Stiva,” she said to him, winking gaily, crossing him and glancing toward the door, “go, and God help you.”

He chucked the cigar into Small Stiva’s core, where it was consumed,
winked back at his sister, and departed through the doorway.

“And when is your next float?” Anna asked Kitty.

“Next week, and a splendid float it shall be! Finally I am considered a woman, old enough to receive my very own Class III at last.”

“My congratulations,” murmured Anna Karenina, trying to remember the days of her own life, so many years ago, before her android had been brought to her—it seemed she could hardly recall a time when she hadn’t had the comforting presence of her beloved-companion at her heel.

“Yes,” Kitty added brightly. “I feel it will be one of those floats where one always enjoys oneself.”

“For me there are no floats now where one enjoys oneself,” said Anna, and Kitty detected in her eyes that mysterious world which was not open to her. “For me there are some less dull and tiresome.”

“How can
you
be dull at a float?”

“Why should
I
not be dull at a float?” inquired Anna.

“Because you always look nicer than anyone.”

Anna had the faculty of blushing. She blushed a little, and said: “In the first place it’s never so; and secondly, if it were, what difference would it make to me?”

“Are you coming to this float?” Kitty asked. “I shall be so glad if you go. I should so like to see you dancing.”

“Anyway, if I do go, I shall comfort myself with the thought that it’s a pleasure to you.”

“I imagine your android at the ball glowing with a lilac hue,” Kitty said, daring a quick glance at Android Karenina, who had her faceplate turned toward the window, gazing it seemed at the Eye in the Tower, in its slow, eternal revolution.

“And why lilac precisely?” asked Anna, smiling. Class IIIs were often programmed, at public events, to glow from “bow to stern” in fanciful colors, to lend an extraje
ne sais quoi
to their mistresses’ appearance. “I know why you press me to come to the float. You expect perhaps to
leave this float with your companion robot and a
human
companion as well! And you want everyone to be there to take part in it.”

“How do you know? Yes.”

“Oh! What a happy time you are at,” pursued Anna. “I remember, that feeling as if gravity has been oh-so-slightly suspended, not just at the float, but everywhere you go! That mist which covers everything in that blissful time when childhood is just ending, and out of that vast circle, happy and gay, there is a path growing narrower and narrower, and it is delightful and alarming to enter the ballroom, bright and splendid as it is. . . . Who has not been through it?”

Kitty smiled without speaking.
But how did she go through it? How I should like to know all her love story!
thought Kitty, recalling the foreboding, unromantic appearance of Alexei Alexandrovich, her husband.

“I know something. Stiva told me, and I congratulate you. I liked him so much,” Anna continued. “I met Vronsky at the Grav station.”

“Oh, was he there?” asked Kitty, blushing. “What was it Stiva told you?”

“Stiva gossiped about it all. I traveled yesterday with Vronsky’s mother,” she went on, “and his mother talked without a pause of him; he’s her favorite. I know mothers are partial, but . . .”

“What did his mother tell you?”

“Oh, a great deal! And I know that he’s her favorite; still one can see how chivalrous he is. . . . Well, for instance, she told me that he has served in the Border Wars, and is now with a regiment hunting UnConSciya operatives. He has destroyed many koschei, saving many lives. He’s a hero, in fact,” said Anna.

But she did not tell Kitty about her encounter with Vronsky at the Grav station, nor how Vronsky had gallantly interposed himself before her line of sight, to protect her from seeing the person dead upon the magnet bed. She was about to, when she glanced at Android Karenina, who bent her head forward by several degrees toward her lap, and for some reason made Anna feel it was disagreeable to her to think of it. She
felt that there was something that had to do with her in it, and something that ought not to have been.

S
TIVA AND DOLLY
soon emerged, their Class IIIs scuttling noisily behind them like happy children, and both Kitty and Anna could tell that a reconciliation had taken place. The whole evening Dolly was, as always, a little mocking in her tone to her husband, while Stepan Arkadyich was happy and cheerful, but not so as to seem as though, having been forgiven, he had forgotten his offense.

At half past nine o’clock a particularly joyful and pleasant family conversation over the tea table at the Oblonskys’ was broken up by an apparently simple incident. But this simple incident for some reason struck everyone as strange. Anna had gone upstairs with her light, resolute step to retrieve a favorite polishing cloth from her valise, so that she might give Android Karenina’s monitor a sheen before displaying Memories of her Sergey. The stairs up to her room came out on the landing of the great warm main staircase.

Just as she was leaving the drawing room, the I/Doorchime/6’s tinkling greeting was heard in the hall.

“Who can that be?” said Dolly.

“It’s early for me to be fetched, and for anyone else it’s late,” observed Kitty.

“Sure to be someone from the Ministry for me,” put in Stepan Arkadyich. When Anna was passing the top of the staircase, a Class II was buzzing up to announce the visitor, while the visitor himself was standing under a lamp. Anna glancing down at once recognized Vronsky, for the crackle of the hot-whip and the twin bulges of the smokers were
unmistakable. A strange feeling of pleasure and at the same time dread of something stirred in her heart; as she looked at Count Vronsky, she remembered with a kind of violence in her head the tremendous
BOOM
that had rent the sky at the Grav station, when last they had met.

Vronsky was standing still, not taking off his gleaming silver outer-coat, pulling something out of his pocket. At the instant when she was just facing the stairs, he raised his eyes, caught sight of her, and in the expression of his face there passed a shade of embarrassment and dismay. With a slight inclination of her head she passed, hearing behind her Stepan Arkadyich’s loud voice calling him to come up, and the quiet, soft, and composed voice of Vronsky refusing.

By the time Anna rejoined the group, he was already gone, and Stepan Arkadyich was telling them that he had called to inquire about the dinner they were giving the next day for a celebrated engineer who had just arrived. “And nothing would induce him to come up. What a queer fellow he is!” added Stepan Arkadyich.

Kitty blushed. She thought that she was the only person who knew why he had come, and why he would not come up.
He has been at home,
she thought,
and didn’t find me, and thought I should be here, but he did not come up because he thought it late, and Anna’s here.

All then turned their attention to Android Karenina’s monitor, where Anna’s Memories of handsome young Sergey were sequentially displayed.

T
HE FLOAT WAS ONLY JUST
beginning as Kitty and her mother walked up the great staircase, flooded with light, and lined with flowers and II/Footmen/74s in red linings. Bracing themselves against the banister, they bent at the leg and waited with keen
anticipation at the top step until the special chime was sounded, signaling the first blasts of jet-powered air from the hidden matrix of pipes in the floor and walls. At the same moment, the notes of the waltz began, and mother and daughter leaped from the top step and caught the air, dancing in airborne three-quarters time about the room.

A beardless youth, one of those society youths whom the old Prince Shcherbatsky called “young bucks,” in an exceedingly open waistcoat, straightening his white tie as he went, waved to them as he bounced awkwardly past on a puff of air, then did a clumsy midair course reversal to ask Kitty for a quadrille. As the first quadrille had already been given to Vronsky, she had to promise this youth the second. He bowed and sailed past on the next surge of air, stroking his mustache, admiring rosy Kitty.