Android Karenina (15 page)

Anna realized after a moment that the changing tide of the fight appeared to be the doing of one man—not a 77 at all, but a regimental soldier in a crisp silver uniform, who moved briskly but unpanicked up and down the length of the carriage, slashing and shooting and calling out orders with a loud, authoritative voice. And even before Anna heard the rumbling growl of a mechanical wolf, before she could see the sizzle and crackle of a hot-whip in action, before she could see his face, she
knew that it was
he.

The battle won, the koschei thrown together into a portable sizzle unit and destroyed, Vronsky emerged from the carriage, put his hand to the peak of his cap, bowed to her, and asked if she had been hurt? Could he be of any service to her? She gazed rather a long while at him without answering, and, in spite of the shadow in which he was standing, she saw, or fancied she saw, both the expression of his face and his eyes. It was again that expression of reverential ecstasy which had so worked upon her the day before. More than once she had told herself during the past few days, and again only a few moments before, that Vronsky was for her only one of the hundreds of young men, forever exactly the same, that are met everywhere, that she would never allow herself to bestow a thought upon him. But now at the first instant of meeting him, she was seized by a feeling of joyful pride. She had no need to ask why he was here. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.

“It is lucky you were on this train, it seems, Count Vronsky,” she said. “But what are you coming for?” she then added, barely masking the irrepressible delight and eagerness that shone in her eyes.

“What am I coming for?” he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. “You know that I have come to be where you are,” he said. “I can’t help it.”

At that moment the wind, surmounting all obstacles, sent the snow flying from the carriage roofs, and clanked some sheet of iron it had torn off, while the mechanisms of the Grav’s engine eased back to life. All the awfulness of the storm, all the terror of the koschei, seemed to her almost splendid now. He had said what her soul longed to hear, though she feared it with her reason. She made no answer, and in her face he saw conflict.

“Forgive me, if you dislike what I said,” he said humbly.

He had spoken courteously, deferentially, yet so firmly, so stubbornly, that for a long while she could make no answer. Android
Karenina, for all this long silence, looked off with studied disinterest into the distance, while Lupo, less instinctively decorous, sniffed with curiosity at the hem of her skirts.

“It’s wrong, what you say, and I beg you, if you’re a good man, to forget what you’ve said, as I shall forget it,” she said at last.

“Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget. . . .”

“Enough, enough!” she cried, trying assiduously to give a stern expression to her face, into which he was gazing greedily. And clutching at the cold doorpost, she clambered up the steps and got rapidly into the corridor of the carriage. Settled again in the carriage, fumigated and revivified already by the Grav’s assiduous crew of IIs, she cued in Android Karenina’s monitor a Memory of what had just occurred. As she watched, she realized instinctively that the momentary conversation had brought them fearfully closer; and she was panic-stricken and blissful at it. The overstrained condition which had tormented her before did not only come back, but was intensified, and reached such a pitch that she was afraid every minute that something would snap within her from the excessive tension. She did not sleep all night. But in that nervous tension, and in the visions that filled her imagination, there was nothing disagreeable or gloomy: on the contrary, there was something blissful, glowing, and exhilarating. Even the painful recollection of the multitudinous cold steel feet of the koschei, tickling their way up toward her breastbone, could not dampen this powerful rush of feeling.

Toward morning Anna sank into a doze, sitting in her place, and when she woke it was daylight and the Grav was gliding into the Petersburg station. At once thoughts of home, of husband and of son, and the details of that day and the following came upon her.

*   *   *

At Petersburg, as soon as the Grav stopped and she got out, the
first person that attracted Anna’s attention was her husband. “Oh, mercy! That face!” she murmured to Android Karenina. Covering the right side of Alexei Alexandrovich’s face as always, nearly entirely hiding it, was a mask of steely silver, descending from brow to chin, with only enough metal cut away to allow his nose and mouth their full functioning. While Alexei’s left eyebrow could and did twitch sardonically, and while his left cheek could and did rise in wry humor, the corresponding parts on the opposite side were hidden behind an unreadable sheen of metallic cold, laced with dark veins of pure groznium—not tempered or alloyed by the Ministry’s metallurgists, but the raw, scarlet-black ore itself. Where his right eye once had sat was a large aperture, a cyborgicist’s reinvention of a human eye socket, from which emerged a telescoping oculus. It was with this rotating orbital that Alexei Alexandrovich was now scanning the crowd, looking for his wife.

Catching sight of her, he came to meet her, his lips sliding into their habitual, sarcastic smile, and his left human eye looking straight at her, while its mechanized companion eye mechanically scanned the station. An unpleasant sensation gripped at her heart when she met his obstinate and weary glance, as though she had expected to see him different. She was especially struck by the feeling of dissatisfaction with herself that she experienced on meeting him. That feeling was an intimate, familiar feeling, like a consciousness of hypocrisy, which she experienced in her relations with her husband. But hitherto she had not taken note of the feeling; now she was clearly and painfully aware of it.

“Yes, as you see, your tender spouse, as devoted as the first year after marriage, burned with impatience to see you,” he said in his deliberate, high-pitched voice, and in that tone which he almost always took with her, a tone of jeering at anyone who should say in earnest what he said. He took his wife’s valise from Android Karenina, offering her Class III no greeting, and naturally receiving none in return.

“Is Seryozha quite well?” Anna asked.

“This is all the reward,” said he, “for my ardor? He’s quite well. . . .”

A
FTER THE MAYHEM
with the koschei, Vronsky had not even tried to sleep all that night. Rather, as Lupo lay curled in Surcease at his feet, he sat in his Grav carriage, looking straight before him or examining the people who got in and out. If he had indeed on previous occasions struck and impressed people who did not know him by his air of unhesitating composure, he seemed now more haughty and self-possessed than ever. He looked at people as if they were things. A nervous young man, a clerk in a law court, sitting opposite him, hated him for that look. The young man asked him for a light, and entered into conversation with him, and even pushed against him, to make him feel that he was not a thing, but a person. But Vronsky gazed at him exactly as he would a Class I device, and the young man made a wry face, feeling that he was losing his self-possession under the oppression of this refusal to recognize him as a person.

Vronsky saw nothing and no one. Occasionally, he passed his eye over the revivified carriage to ensure no more of the vicious skittering koschei were aboard, even while he was certain in his heart that none remained: not when he, Alexei Kirillovich, with all his battlefield acuity and self-assurance, had junkered the lot.

He felt himself a king, not because he believed that he had made an impression on Anna—he did not yet believe that—but because the impression she had made on him gave him happiness and pride. His hot-whip crackled pleasantly along his thigh, an old fellow soldier whose very presence reminded him of past successes.

What would come of it all he did not know, he did not even think.
He felt that all his forces, hitherto dissipated, wasted, were centered on one thing, and bent with fearful energy on one blissful goal. And he was happy at it. He knew only that he had told her the truth, that he had come where she was, that all the happiness of his life, the only meaning in life for him, now lay in seeing and hearing her. When he had climbed out on the platform and seen her, in the adrenalin-charged moments after the koschei were destroyed, involuntarily his first word had told her just what he thought. And he was glad he had told her it, that she knew it now and was thinking of it. He did not sleep all night. When he was back in the carriage, he kept unceasingly going over every position in which he had seen her, every word she had uttered, and before his fancy, making his heart faint with emotion, floated pictures of a possible future.

When he got out of the train at Petersburg, he felt after his sleepless night as keen and fresh as after a cold bath. He paused near his compartment, waiting for her to get out. “Once more,” he said quietly to Lupo, who growled happily, “once more I shall see her walk, her face, her striking beloved-companion; she will say something, turn her head, glance, smile, maybe.” But before he caught sight of her, he saw her husband, whom the Stationmaster was deferentially escorting through the crowd. “Ah, yes! The husband.” Only now for the first time did Vronsky realize clearly the fact that there was a person attached to her, a husband. He knew that she had a husband, but had hardly believed in his existence, and only now fully believed in him, with his head and shoulders, his cold, mechanical faceplate, his legs clad in black trousers; especially when he saw this husband calmly take her arm with a sense of property.

Seeing Alexei Alexandrovich with his severely self-confident figure, in his round hat, with his rather prominent spine, he believed in him, and was aware of a disagreeable sensation, such as a man might feel tortured by thirst, who, on reaching a spring, should find a dog, a sheep, or a pig who has drunk of it and muddied the water. Alexei Alexandrovich’s outsize automated eye, now slowly scanning Anna from within its prominent metal socket, particularly annoyed Vronsky. He could recognize in
no one but himself an indubitable right to love her. But she was still the same, and the sight of her affected him the same way, physically reviving him, stirring him, and filling his soul with rapture.

He saw the first meeting between the husband and wife, and noted with a lover’s insight the signs of slight reserve with which she spoke to her husband. Lupo, at his feet, bristled and arched his back. “Yes, Lupo, I notice it too,” Vronsky said in a low voice to the beast. “She does not love him and cannot love him.”

He strode toward the pair, and at the moment before approaching them, he noticed too with joy that Anna Arkadyevna was conscious of his being near, and looked round, and seeing him, turned again to her husband.

“The koschei certainly provided us with a restless evening,” Vronsky greeted her. “Are you feeling well this morning?” he asked, bowing to her and her husband together, and leaving it up to Alexei Alexandrovich to accept the bow on his own account, and to recognize it or not, as he might see fit.

“Thank you, yes,” she answered.

Lupo’s narrow canine eyes looked into the single robotic oculus of Alexei Alexandrovich, and the theriomorphic Class III let out a loud, gear-grinding bark. Vronsky silenced him with one raised finger.

Anna’s face looked weary, and there was not that play of eagerness in it peeping out in her smile and her eyes; but for a single instant, as she glanced at Vronsky, there was a flash of something in her eyes, and although the flash died away at once, he was happy for that moment. She glanced at her husband to find out whether he knew Vronsky. Alexei Alexandrovich looked over Vronsky’s silver uniform with displeasure, vaguely recalling who this was. Vronsky’s composure and self-confidence here struck, like a scythe against a stone, upon the cold imperturbability of Alexei Alexandrovich.

“Count Vronsky,” said Anna.

“Ah! We are acquainted, I believe,” said Alexei Alexandrovich
indifferently, giving his hand. To Anna he said, “You set off with the mother and you return with the son,” articulating each syllable, as though each were a separate favor he was bestowing.

Lupo barked a second time, sharp and clear, raising his back and baring his teeth at Alexei Alexandrovich, who regarded the beast with weary irritation before addressing his wife in a jesting tone: “Well, were a great many tears shed in Moscow at parting?”

By addressing his wife like this he gave Vronsky to understand that he wished to be left alone, and, turning slightly toward him, he touched his hat; but Vronsky turned to Anna Arkadyevna.

“I hope I may have the honor of calling on you,” he said.

Lupo, his circuits for some reason keenly activated, now emitted from his Vox-Em a piercing, willful
aroof.
Before Vronsky could chastise the dog-robot, Alexei Alexandrovich cocked his head and stared straight at the Class III with his dark metallic eye for a long moment. Lupo yelped feebly, shuddered, and fell to the ground like a broken Class I plaything. Alexei Alexandrovich then glanced with his biological eye at Vronsky, who was staring with open-mouthed shock at his beloved-companion.

“On Mondays we’re at home,” Alexei Alexandrovich said blandly. Vronsky crouched on the spotless floor of the Grav station cradling Lupo’s great, bristly head in his lap. Lupo stirred feebly, issuing hollow little whimpers and moans.

“How fortunate,” Alexei Alexandrovich said to his wife in the same jesting tone, dismissing Vronsky altogether, “that I should just have half an hour to meet you, so that I can prove my devotion.”

“You lay too much stress on your devotion for me to value it much,” she responded in the same jesting tone, involuntarily glancing backward at the stricken Vronsky. “But what has it to do with me?” she murmured to Android Karenina. She began asking her husband how Seryozha had got on without her.

“Oh, capitally! The II/Governess says he has been very good.
And . . . I must disappoint you . . . but he has not missed you as your husband has. Well, I must go to my committee. I shall not be alone at dinner again,” Alexei Alexandrovich went on, no longer in a sarcastic tone. “You wouldn’t believe how I’ve missed . . . “And with a long pressure of her hand and a meaningful smile, he put her in her carriage.