Android Karenina (20 page)

In dreams, when she had no control over her thoughts, her position presented itself to her in all its hideous nakedness. One dream haunted her almost every night. She dreamed that both were her husbands at once, that both were lavishing caresses on her. Alexei Alexandrovich was weeping, kissing her hands, and saying, “How happy we are now!” And Alexei Vronsky was there too, and he
too
was her husband. And Lupo was also there, prowling in circles, sniffing the tangled bedsheets; and Alexei’s metal Face was there, glinting in the light of the
lumiéres;
and then Anna, glancing down, saw that while she embraced Vronsky, her own human head had been fused somehow onto Android Karenina’s gleaming robot body.

This dream weighed on her like a nightmare, and she awoke from it in terror.

I
N THE EARLY DAYS
after his return from Moscow, whenever Levin shuddered and grew red, remembering the disgrace of his rejection, he said to himself:
This was just how I used to shudder and blush, thinking myself utterly lost, when I was plucked in physics and did not get my remove; and how I thought myself utterly ruined after I built that first surface mine and it collapsed. And yet, now that years have passed, I recall it and wonder that it could distress me so much. It will be the same thing too with this trouble. Time will go by and I shall not mind about this either.

But three months had passed and he had not left off minding about it; and it was as painful for him to think of it as it had been those first days. He could not be at peace because after dreaming so long of family life, and feeling himself so ripe for it, he was still not married, and was further than ever from marriage.

Meanwhile spring came on, beautiful and kindly, without the delays and treacheries of spring—one of those rare springs in which plants, beasts, and man rejoice alike. This lovely spring roused Levin still more, and strengthened him in his resolution of renouncing all his past and building up his lonely life firmly and independently.

One day, as he rode up to the house in this happy frame of mind, Levin heard the bell ring at the side of the principal entrance of the house.

’Yes, that’s someone from the station,” he said to Socrates. “Just the time to be here from the Moscow Grav. . . . Who could it be? What if it’s brother Nikolai? He did say: ‘Maybe I’ll go to the waters, or maybe I’ll come down to you.’”

He felt dismayed and vexed for the first minute, that his brother Nikolai’s presence should come to disturb his happy mood of spring. But he felt ashamed of the feeling, and at once he opened, as it were, the arms of his soul, and with a softened feeling of joy and expectation, now he hoped with all his heart that it was his brother. He pricked up his horse, and riding out from behind the acacias he saw a hired three-horse sledge from the Grav station, and a gentleman in a fur coat.

“Ah,” cried Levin joyfully, flinging up both his hands. “Here’s a delightful visitor! Ah, how glad I am to see you!” he shouted, recognizing Stepan Arkadyich, with Small Stiva balanced like a fat, happy child between his legs.

“Now you shall find out for certain whether she’s married, or when she’s going to be married,”
Socrates muttered to him with a cautious tone, anxious to protect his master’s feelings. But on that delicious spring day Levin felt that the thought of Kitty did not hurt him at all.

“Well, you didn’t expect me, eh?” said Stepan Arkadyich, getting out of the sledge, splashed with mud on the bridge of his nose, on his cheek, and on his eyebrows, but radiant with health and good spirits. “I’ve come to see you in the first place,” he said, embracing and kissing him, while Socrates plucked an air-blasting end-effector to clean the mud from Small Stiva’s frontal display. “To participate in the Hunt-and-be-Hunted second, and to sell that little patch of soil at Ergushovo third.”

Stepan Arkadyich told him many interesting pieces of news, but not one word in reference to Kitty and the Shcherbatskys; he merely gave him greetings from his wife. Levin was grateful to him for his delicacy and was very glad of his visitor. As always happened with him during his solitude, a mass of ideas and feelings had been accumulating within him, which he could not communicate to those about him. And now he poured out upon Stepan Arkadyich his poetic joy in the spring, and his failures and plans for the seasonal extraction. Stepan Arkadyich, always charming, understanding everything at the slightest reference, was particularly charming on this visit, and Levin noticed in him a special
tenderness, as it were, and a new tone of respect that flattered him.

They determined that they would Hunt-and-be-Hunted the very next day, and Levin ordered the Huntbears to be warmed and baited overnight.

T
HE PLACE FIXED ON
for the Hunt-and-be-Hunted was not far above a stream in a little aspen copse. On reaching the copse, Levin led Oblonsky to a corner of a mossy, swampy glade, already quite free from snow. He went back himself to a double birch tree on the other side, and leaning his gun on the fork of a dead lower branch, he took off his full overcoat, fastened his belt again, and worked his arms to see if they were free.

The sun was setting behind a thick forest, and in the glow of sunset the birch trees, dotted about in the aspen copse, stood out clearly with their hanging twigs, and their buds swollen almost to bursting. Levin sighed with contentment, for the Hunt-and-be-Hunted was to him the ideal way to spend a day: shooting at grackles and geese with one’s old-fashioned cartridge rifle, while simultaneously trying to escape the claws of the heat-seeking, man-chasing mechanical monsters called Huntbears.

How, Levin had long wondered, had hunting ever held the slightest enchantment before the introduction of the Huntbears?

From the thickest parts of the copse, where the snow still remained, came the faint sound of narrow, winding threads of water running away. Tiny birds twittered, and now and then fluttered from tree to tree. They heard the rustle of last year’s leaves, stirred by the thawing of the earth and the growth of the grass. Small Stiva optimized his aural and optical sensors, rotating his head unit nervously around and around; he loathed the Hunt-and-be-Hunted, and envied Socrates, who had been left at the
estate doing bookkeeping.

“Imagine! One can hear and see the grass growing!” Levin said, noticing a wet, slate-colored aspen leaf moving beside a blade of young grass. Oblonsky laughed gaily at this observation, and then Small Stiva beeped shrilly six times, the birds fled in one urgent fluttering cloud, and the Huntbear thundered into the copse. The huge mechanized bear, over eight feet high, crashed toward them with great, lumbering steps, opening its gaping mouth to display two rows of oversize teeth. Levin, even as he leveled his rifle at the thing, admired the simple but effective craftsmanship; the Bear looked not so much like a real bear as like a child’s rendering of a bear, with massively exaggerated paws and fangs.

Oblonsky, rattled, fired first but wildly, and most of his cartridge rounds ended up in the surrounding trees, or tinged harmlessly off the Huntbear’s thick groznium legs. While the Huntbear advanced another crashing step toward them, Small Stiva skittered off into the cover of the undergrowth.

Levin, calmly taking aim at the thrashing beast, noticed for the first time that the Huntbear was accompanied by a cub—a nice naturalistic touch. He would try to remember to thank his groundskeeper for providing an especially delightful day’s Hunt-and-be-Hunted.

Levin shot once and missed. The Huntbear swatted Oblonsky with the back of its paw, hard enough to knock him down but not to kill; Oblonsky cried out in genuine terror—like most first-time Hunt-and-be-Hunters, he forgot in the heat of the action that Huntbears were programmed with the Iron Laws and so could never do real harm to humans.

Levin shot again and scored a clean hit in the belly of the beast—the ursine robot monster reared back in simulated pain. At that moment, a hawk flew high over a forest far away with a slow sweep of its wings, and another flew with exactly the same motion in the same direction and vanished. The Huntbear paused in its rampage, its sensors distracted by the graceful black swoop of the hawk, and Levin took his opportunity:
he fired his rifle exactly four times, with deadly precision—bang, bang, bang, bang—alternating, one shot to bring down a hawk, one shot in the right eye of the Bear, one for the other hawk, one for the other eye.

Birds twittered more and more loudly and busily in the neighboring thicket. An owl hooted not far off. The Bear, its brain circuits shattered by Levin’s shots, clattered to the ground like a fallen tree. Oblonsky hesitantly rose to his feet, laughing with easy good humor at his momentary panic, just as Small Stiva emerged from the bush clutching both dead hawks with the pincer of a single end-effector.

*   *   *

The Hunt-and-be-Hunted was capital. Stepan Arkadyich shot two more birds and Levin two, of which one was not found. It began to get dark. Venus, bright and silvery, shone with her soft light low in the west behind the birch trees, and Levin gazed happily at the planet with a loving look, wondering why the sight, which he had seen so many times before, should inspire in him such a sense of pleasure and calm.

The snipe had ceased flying; but Levin resolved to stay a little longer, till Venus, which he saw below a branch of birch, should be above it. Then Venus had risen above the branch, yet still he waited.

“Isn’t it time to go home?” said Stepan Arkadyich.

It was quite still now in the copse, and not a bird was stirring.

“Let’s stay a little while,” answered Levin.

“As you like.”

They were standing now about fifteen paces from one another.

“Stiva!” said Levin unexpectedly. “How is it you don’t tell me whether your sister-in-law’s married yet, or when she’s going to be?”

Levin felt so resolute and serene that no answer, he fancied, could affect him. But he had never dreamed of what Stepan Arkadyich replied.

“She’s never thought of being married, and isn’t thinking of it; but she’s very ill, and the doctors have sent her into orbit around Venus.”

Venus. Levin stared up again at the distant body, and felt its tug upon his heart.

“They’re positively afraid she may not live.”

“What!” cried Levin. “Very ill? What is wrong with her? How has she . . .?”

Before he could inquire further into her condition, at that very instant both suddenly heard a shrill whistle which, as it were, smote on their ears; it was Small Stiva, bleating out the alarm again. Both suddenly seized their guns and two flashes gleamed as they pumped a combined seventeen rounds into the tiny groznium body of the Huntbear cub.

They stood together over the smoldering heap of the fallen Huntbear, flushed with pleasure at the unexpected victory, each humorously blaming the other for having forgotten about the cub.

“Splendid! Together!” cried Levin.
Oh, yes, what was it that was unpleasant?
he wondered.
Yes, Kitty’s ill. . . . Well, it can’t be helped; I’m very sorry,
he thought.

*   *   *

They tromped back to Levin’s estate, and did not see that, as soon as they turned their backs, a head like that of a worm, only closer in size to a dog’s head, emerged from the rough forest ground as if from a tunnel; and they did not see this worm head open a grotesque, gaping mouth and suck up the shattered groznium skeleton of the Huntbear cub, before disappearing again beneath the earth’s surface.

A
LTHOUGH ALL VRONSKY’S INNER LIFE
was absorbed in his passion, his external life unalterably and inevitably followed along the old accustomed lines of his social and regimental ties and interests. The interests of his regiment, the Circling Hawks of the Borderland, took an important place in Vronsky’s life, both because he was fond of the regiment, and because his regiment was fond of him. They were not only fond of Vronsky in his regiment, they respected him too, and were proud of him; proud that this man, with his immense wealth, his brilliant education and abilities, and the path open before him to every kind of success, distinction, and ambition, had disregarded all that, and of all the interests of life had the interests of his Border regiment and his comrades nearest to his heart. Vronsky was aware of his comrades’ view of him, and in addition to his liking for the life, he felt bound to keep up that reputation.

It need not be said that he did not speak of his love to any of his comrades, nor did he betray his secret even in the wildest drinking bouts (though indeed he was never so drunk as to lose all control of himself) . And he shut up any of his thoughtless comrades who attempted to allude to his connection. But in spite of that, his love was known to all the town; everyone guessed with more or less confidence at his relations with Madame Karenina. The majority of the younger men envied him for just what was the most irksome factor in his love—the exalted position of Karenin, and the consequent publicity of their connection in society. Only a few of the younger members, men who harbored half-secret jealousies of Vronsky’s rank and ambition, whispered that such an
assignation—to the wife of a man in the secretive world of the Higher Branches—might carry dangers beyond that attending to a commonplace adulterous intrigue.

Besides the service and society, Vronsky had another great interest—the annual gladiatorial contest, known as the Cull, by which advancement in the regiment was determined. He was passionately fond of these contests, had done particularly well in the last, and looked forward with savage glee to the next, which was now rapidly approaching.

The contest took place in a great arena, witnessed by vast crowds of spectators. Every member of the regiment donned their own customized, death-dealing, armor-plated suit known as an Exterior, and entered into mass free-for-all combat, man against man against man, until the weaker ones were destroyed. Those that emerged victorious—as Vronsky, so far, always had—earned not only glory but advancement in rank.