Android Karenina (14 page)

Masha promised to write to Konstantin in case of need, and he departed. As he and Socrates descended the creaky stairs, Levin considered his suspicion that there was something wrong with his brother far beyond the effects of drink, and wondered what exactly it could be.

I
N THE MORNING
Konstantin Levin left Moscow, and toward evening he reached home. On his journey on the Grav he talked to his neighbors about politics and the new gravways, and, just as in Moscow, he was overcome by a sense of confusion of ideas, dissatisfaction with himself, shame of something or other. But when he got out at his own station, when he saw the cyclopian II/Coachman/47-T, its sturdy torso perfectly perpendicular at the controls; when, in the dim light reflected by the station fires, he saw his own sledge, his own four-treaded Puller at
its head, trimmed with rings and tassels; when the Coachman mechanically relayed the village news, he began to see what had happened to him in quite a different light. He felt himself, and did not want to be anyone else. All he wanted now was to be better than before.

Then, riding on the coach from the Grav station, came the heat: the radiating warmth of the pit, his pit, which he began to feel on his skin several versts before his massive groznium mine came into view. At last, there it was, a vast and craggy crater blasted out of the countryside. The pit was half a verst long and twice again as wide, its rough rock walls sloping down into a rutted rock-lined bottom, which was dotted with a thousand small smelting fires, which rung twenty-four hours a day with the clang of pickaxes and shovels.

Konstantin Levin climbed from the sledge, waved robustly to a gang of Pitbots with their battered but firm charcoal bodies and wide treads, donned his goggles, and stood at the outer radius of the pit. As he stared down into the vast crater, watching his dozens of diligent Pitbots at work, diligent and industrious as honeybees, scurrying to and fro, churning up the Earth with their axes, he felt that little by little the confusion was clearing up, and the shame and self-dissatisfaction were passing away.

He took a last breath of the sulfurous air and walked with Socrates to the house from the side of the pit. As they walked, Levin expressed to his Class III his new resolutions.

“In the first place, from this day I will give up hoping for any extraordinary happiness,” he said. “Such as marriage might have given me.”

“One, no happiness for you,”
Socrates parroted faithfully, his master’s use of the set phrase “in the first place” having activated his recording/retaining function-set.

“Consequently I will not so disdain what I really have.”

“Subset of one: no happiness equals no disdain.”

“Secondly, I will never again let myself give way to low passion, the memory of which tortured me so while I was making up my mind to
make an offer.”

“Two: absence of low passion.”

Then Levin remembered his brother Nikolai, and made one further resolution. “I will never allow myself to forget him, Socrates.”

“Three: Nikolai preservation dedication.”

“I will follow him up, and not lose sight of him. I will be ready to help if his illness should continue to worsen.”

The snow of the little quadrangle before the house was lit up by a light in the bedroom window of his old
mécanicienne
, Agafea Mihalovna. She was not yet asleep.

“You’re soon back again, sir,” said Agafea Mihalovna as Levin and Socrates entered.

“I got tired of it, Agafea Mihalovna. With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better,” he answered, and, together with his beloved-companion, went into his study.

C
OME, IT’S ALL OVER
, and thank God!” was the first thought that came to Anna Arkadyevna, when at the Moscow Grav Station she bid good-bye to her brother, who stood blocking the entrance to the carriage till the third bell was heard. She sat down on her lounge beside Android Karenina, and looked about her in the twilight of the sleeping carriage.

On the morning after the float, Anna Arkadyevna had sent her husband a telegram that she was leaving Moscow the same day.

“No, I must go, I must go.” She had explained to her sister-in-law the change in her plans in a tone that suggested that she had to remember so many things that there was no enumerating them: “No, it had
really better be today!”

Stepan Arkadyich came to see his sister off at seven o’clock. Kitty had not come, sending a note that she had a headache.

“Thank God!” Anna murmured to her beloved-companion as they settled in the carriage. “Tomorrow I shall see Seryozha and Alexei Alexandrovich, and my life will go on in the old way, all nice and as usual.”

Still in the same anxious frame of mind, as she had been all that day, Anna took pleasure in arranging herself for the journey with great care. With her long, deft fingers Android Karenina opened a discreet mid-body compartment, took out a cushion, and laid it on Anna’s knees. Anna smiled and stroked Android Karenina’s gentle hands in thanks: she had long felt, and felt all the more so at such moments, that she and her darling android enjoyed a bond that was, somehow, stronger than that between other humans and their beloved-companions—even though Android Karenina never breathed a word, indeed lacked even the capacity to elocute, Anna knew in her own heart that there was no one else on Earth, human or robot, who understood or loved her so well.

They were seated across from a kindly elderly lady, but, intending to enjoy a novel, rather than to engage her fellow passengers in conversation, Anna leaned back in her seat and engaged a chitator, putting Android Karenina into partial Surcease. At first her attention was too distracted to follow the story. She could not help listening to the magical, propulsive noises of the Grav as it shot forward on the magnet bed; then the snow beating on the left window and sticking to the pane, and the sight of the muffled II/Gravman/160 rolling by, covered with snow on one side, and the conversations about the terrible snowstorm raging outside distracted her attention.

At last, Anna began to understand the story. Anna Arkadyevna listened and understood, but it was distasteful to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she heard that the heroine of the story had fallen ill with malaria, she longed to move with noiseless steps about a sick room; if the chitator had a pirate
ship laying siege to a houseboat, she longed to be the one active in its defense. But there was no chance of doing anything, and she forced herself to relax and let the chitator wash over her.

The heroine of the story was already almost reaching her English happiness, a handsome husband and a lakeside estate, and Anna was feeling a desire to go with them to the estate, when she suddenly felt that
he
ought to feel ashamed, and that she was ashamed of the same thing. But what had he to be ashamed of?
What have I to be ashamed of?
she asked herself in injured surprise. She switched off the chitator, sank against the back of the chair, and glanced at Android Karenina to help her understand, but her faceplate in Surcease was perfectly smooth and unreflective, revealing nothing.

There
was
nothing! She went over all her Moscow recollections. All were good, pleasant. She remembered the ball, remembered Vronsky and the crackle of his hot-whip and his face of slavish adoration, remembered all her conduct with him: there was nothing shameful. And for all that, at the same point in her memories, the feeling of shame was intensified, as though some inner voice, just at the point when she thought of Vronsky, were saying to her, “Warm, very warm, hot.”

“Well, what is it?” she demanded of Android Karenina, though she knew the Class III could hardly respond while in Surcease. “What does it mean? Am I afraid to look it straight in the face? Why, what is it? Can it be that between me and this officer boy there exists, or can exist, any other relations than such as are common with every acquaintance?”

But, as is the way with many people who have difficult questions, but not the will to hear them answered, she asked her questions of a Surceased robot, who of course offered no response.

Anna laughed contemptuously at her own foolishness, and reactivated the chitator; but now she was definitely unable to follow what she heard.

Unthinkingly, she lifted Android Karenina’s smooth hand and laid its cool surface onto her cheek, and almost laughed aloud at the feeling
of delight that all at once without cause came over her. She felt as though her nerves were strings being strained tighter and tighter on some sort of screwing peg. She felt her eyes opening wider and wider, her fingers and toes twitching nervously, something within oppressing her breathing, while all shapes and sounds seemed in the uncertain half-light to strike her with unaccustomed vividness.

In this strange and disjointed sense of hyperawareness, it took her eyes a long moment to fully register what she then saw across from her: a koschei, bronzish, pencil-thin and centipedal, crawling on dozens of tiny, hideous feet across the wrinkled neck of the dozing elderly lady seated across from her.

The skittering steps of the miniature bug-robot were hardly heavy enough to wake the sleeping woman, and Anna thanked God at least for that small mercy. Surely the very sight of the skittering koschei—for that must be what this was, one of the hideous little insect-like death-machines used by UnConSciya to terrify the Russian populace—would cause the old woman to panic, and panic would seal her doom. Anna, murmuring a prayer for courage, scrunched forward in her seat, raising one hand, her fore- and middle fingers primed for plucking . . . slowly, carefully, she raised her hand, never taking her eyes off the automaton crawling in and out of the wrinkled folds of the ancient woman’s neck flesh.

She was about to grasp the glowing, creeping thing, not yet considering what she would do with it once it was in her grasp, when three things happened in rapid succession.

A flat, jellyfish-like blob of undulating silver flew over Anna’s head from behind her and landed with a thick, disgusting splat across the old woman’s face, causing her to wake and begin thrashing in her seat; Anna herself also began screaming, loud enough to wake the devil; and the koschei she had been grasping for escaped her clutches, leapt off the old woman and onto Anna’s forearm, and escaped up the sleeve of her dress.

The sensation of the koschei twitching rapidly forward inside her
dress was viscerally horrifying, the countless tiny feet dancing about on her flesh—but worse by far was her knowledge of what was surely the koschei’s intention, programmed like an animal instinct: to find her breastbone, to pierce her flesh, to plunge its heat-sucking electrode antennae into the chambers of her heart. Anna clawed at her chest with one hand, and with the other she desperately flicked Android Karenina’s red switch, praying with every breath that she would not be long in emerging from Surcease.

There was nothing to be done for the elderly woman, even if she could: the jellyfish koschei was still clenched over the old woman’s face and was oozing out in all directions, covering the woman’s body like a wriggling sheath, sucking the heat from her body.

While Anna slapped at her flesh, trying to squash the centipede koschei inside her dress, she became aware that all over the Grav car, other koschei were attacking other passengers. A slavering robotic beast in the shape of a gigantic cockroach, with coal-black wings and teeth like needles, buzzed down the aisle and landed on the eyes of a dignified Petersburg gentleman. Anna saw the roach thing sink its pulsing antennae into a dozen places in the unfortunate man’s face, before her attention was seized by a most welcome distraction: Android Karenina, animated and in action, her smart, thin fingers inside Anna’s bodice, catching up the wriggling koschei, crushing it neatly between thumb and forefinger.

Android Karenina then scooped up her mistress around the waist and hustled them both to the end of the carriage, where they escaped down the running board and toward the platform, for the Grav had made an emergency stop at a rural station. As they stepped from the carriage, the driving snow and the wind rushed to meet them. Android Karenina greeted the cold burst of air silently, but to Anna, the wind seemed as though lying in wait for her; with gleeful whistle it tried to snatch her up and bear her off, but she clung to the cold doorpost, and holding her skirt got down onto the platform and under the shelter of
the carriages. The wind had been powerful on the steps, but on the platform, under the lee of the carriages, there was a lull. With a giddy, life-embracing thrill of having survived, she drew deep breaths of the frozen, snowy air, and standing near the carriage looked about the platform and the lighted station.

The carriages, posts, people, everything that was to be seen was covered with snow on one side, and was getting more and more thickly covered. For a moment there would come a lull in the storm, but then it would swoop down again.

Meanwhile, inside the carriage from whence they had escaped, a troop of 77s charged in, heads spinning rapidly, spitting pincer-tipped cords from their midsections to catch up koschei, sending rapid-fire bursts of bolts around the carriage, pinning the little beasts against chair backs and doorposts. Anna saw several more of the dog-sized cockroach koschei, along with at least one blackly gleaming spider-bot and a small cadre of flying wasp koschei, which buzzed and swooped through the carriage like demonically possessed birds, stinging passengers in their necks and ears.

Android Karenina gently turned her mistress’s eyes from such horrors, and for a long time they stood quietly in the freezing dark of the station. But then it sounded like the tenor of the battle was changing, and Anna risked another glance through the window; what she saw heartened her, for it seemed that koschei were being dispatched rapidly now, one after the other, their hideous clacketing metal feet stilled, their fangs loosened from the necks and arms of the passengers.