Android Karenina (31 page)

“Anna,” he began, but then drew silent, staring at the curious tree as it grew more curious still: A thin film had emerged from within the bell of the flower, and it descended slowly, pouring down over the sides, as if a child with a Class I toy were inside the plant, blowing a bubble.

Anna scowled at his distraction, and he shook his head and focused his eyes upon her. “The one thing I longed for,” he continued, “the one thing I prayed for, was to cut short this position, so as to devote my life to your happiness.”

“Why do you tell me that?” she said. “Do you suppose I can doubt it? If I doubted—”

A sudden noise made Vronsky start. “Who’s that coming?” he asked,
pointing to two ladies walking toward them. “Perhaps they know us!” He abruptly took a step backward into the foliage.

“Oh, I don’t care!” Anna said, turning away from him. Her lips were quivering. And he fancied that her eyes looked with strange fury at him from under the veil. “Just see what he says to me. Watch the communiqué.” She cued Android Karenina to begin again.

Vronsky watched the display, and once again was unconsciously carried away by the sensations aroused in him by his own relation to the betrayed husband. Now he could not help picturing the challenge, which he would most likely find at home today or tomorrow, and the duel itself, in which, with the same cold and haughty expression that his face was assuming at this moment, he would await the injured husband’s shot, after having himself gallantly fired his smokers into the air. And at that instant there flashed across his mind the thought of what Serpuhovskoy had said to him, and what he had himself been thinking in the morning—that it was better not to bind himself—and he knew that this thought he could not tell her.

Neither Anna nor Vronsky, preoccupied by these thoughts and counter-thoughts running through their minds while the communiqué played, noticed what transpired directly above her head: the transparent film oozing from the odd flowering tree had silently ballooned outward to huge, though near-invisible, proportions. Now, like a soap bubble, it popped free of the tree and closed around Anna’s body, so thin and transparent as to be imperceptible even as it hardened into an impenetrable shell.

“You see the sort of man he is,” Anna said, with a shaking voice. “He . . .”

“I rejoice at this!” Vronsky said, speaking at the same time. Each was on their own side of the unseen sphere, and so neither could hear the other; and with Anna looking off into the distance, neither could even see that the other was speaking.

“Things can’t go on as they have,” Vronsky continued. “hope that
now you will leave him. I hope that you will let me arrange and plan our life.”

Unaware, Anna carried on her own conversation: “. . . my child! I should have to leave him!”

Android Karenina looked around curiously. Lupo sniffed the air, with a dawning awareness that something was dreadfully amiss.

And so it went. Not hearing, both lovers simply assumed they knew what the other was thinking. When Vronsky finally looked away from Android Karenina’s monitor and raised his eyes to Anna, she did not know what caused them to seem so implacable; she knew only that, whatever he might say to her, he would not say all he thought. And she was certain her last hope had failed her. This was not what she had been reckoning on. And while these sickening thoughts chased themselves around in her mind, the sides of the near-invisible sheath drew taut under her feet like the cinching of a drawstring sack, and she lurched off the ground and up into the air.

“My God!” Vronsky shouted, noticing her for the first time:” Anna! You are floating!”

As if the strange conveyance that was carrying Anna into the air somehow knew it had been discovered, it accelerated the upward motion with which it was lifting her off her feet. Lupo leaped up on his powerful, pneumatic-actuated legs toward the mysterious conveyance, but it was already too high to be reached.

“Stay the thing, Lupo!” shouted Vronsky, reverting at once to his regimental training. Lupo, settling back on his haunches, made his wide, fierce mouth into a perfect O and howled out a resonating battle-cry, sending a precisely modulated echo wave toward the base of Anna’s airborne prison—steadying it against the wind and holding it in place. Vronsky searched furiously for a way to deliver Anna to safety, even as, in the back of his mind, he wondered: first a godmouth, and now this bubble-like cage of a prison? UnConSciya was trying to capture or kill Anna Karenina. But why?

He squatted, plucked the crackle-dagger from his boot, and stared carefully towards his target. An inch too high, and the dagger would sail uselessly off into the gardens; an inch too low, and it would bounce harmlessly off the side of the bubble—or, worse, slice through the exterior and into Anna’s precious flesh. He squinted, took aim . . . and hesitated, as the wind shifted the bubble ever so slightly upon the air. Lupo redoubled his powerful air-disrupting war cry, but Vronsky knew he hadn’t much time left before the shell would be borne off by the winds.

Inside her queer floating prison, Anna looked down upon Vronsky, in his soldier’s crouch with weapons drawn, and, despite the furious tangle of fears and doubts that had gripped her, felt her heart wrung by love.
He is a man of action
, she thought,
a man who does not hesitate to grab hold of whatever life presents to him. That is how I am meant to live: with truth, with purpose, with vitality. I cannot give this up—cannot give him up, cannot stop loving him. But . . . am I really prepared to leave my husband? To lose my son? To abandon all I have begun, all I have known? To uproot my life entirely?

At that thought, all her problems coalesced. Of course! Anna gestured frantically to Vronsky, waving and pointing. Her wild but deliberate motions captured his attention, stopping him just before his cocked arm would have sent the deadly crackle-dagger arcing towards her. At last, they were communicating.

Vronsky, following her pantomimed suggestion, swung his crackle-dagger around to attack not the flowering bubble that held her fast, but at the base of the tree whence it had come. Lupo joined in the assault, extending excavation-quality end-effectors from his paws to dig furiously at the root of the mechanical plant. Within moments, they severed the trunk from the earth, and as it creaked and fell to the ground, the bubble that had been its progeny dissipated—sending Anna tumbling down to where Android Karenina waited to catch her beloved mistress in her arms.

“MY GOD!” VRONSKY SHOUTED, AT LAST NOTICING: “ANNA! YOU ARE FLOATING!”

*   *   *

After Anna had assured Vronsky for the third time that she had suffered nothing but minor bruising in the fall, they sat beside each other upon the stone wall beside the tree.

She turned his face to hers, looking him squarely in the eye. With the intensity brought on by peril, they focused and listened to one another.

“I cannot lose my son,” Anna began simply.

“But, for God’s sake, which is better?—leave your child, or keep up this degrading position?”

“To whom is it degrading?”

“To all, and most of all to you.”

As they spoke, Lupo padded carefully around the tree, sniffing at the earth, gathering up fragments of the translucent sheath for later analysis.

“You say degrading . . . don’t say that. That has no meaning for me.” Her voice shook. She did not want him now to say what was untrue. She had nothing left but his love, and she wanted to love him. “Don’t you understand that from the day I loved you everything has changed for me? For me there is one thing, and one thing only—your love. If that’s mine, I feel so exalted, so strong, that nothing can be humiliating to me. I am proud of my position, because . . . proud of being . . . proud . . .” She could not say what she was proud of. Tears of shame and despair choked her utterance. She stood still and sobbed.

He, too, felt, something swelling in his throat and twitching in his nose, and for the first time in his life Vronsky found himself on the point of weeping. The flower-trap; his love; their impossible situation; he could not have said exactly what it was that touched him so. He felt sorry for her, and he felt he could not help her, and with that he knew that he was to blame for her wretchedness, and that he had done something wrong.

“Is not a divorce possible?” he said feebly. She shook her head, not
answering. “Couldn’t you take your son, and still leave him?”

“Yes; but it all depends on him. Now I must go to him,” she said shortly. Her presentiment that all would again go on in the old way had not deceived her.

“On Tuesday I shall be in Petersburg, and everything can be settled.”

“Yes,” she said. “But don’t let us talk any more of it.”

Anna’s carriage, which she had sent away and ordered to come back to the little gate of the Vrede Garden, drove up. Anna said good-bye to Vronsky. Android Karenina gingerly lifted her up into their carriage, and they drove home.

O
N MONDAY THERE WAS
the usual sitting of the Higher Branches of the Ministry. Alexei Alexandrovich walked into the hall where the sitting was held, greeted the members and the president as usual, and sat down in his place, the papers laid ready before him. Among these papers lay the necessary evidence and a rough outline of the speech he intended to make. But he did not really need these documents. He remembered every point, and did not think it necessary to go over in his memory what he would say. He knew that when the time came, and when he saw his enemy facing him, and studiously endeavoring to assume an expression of indifference, his speech would flow of itself better than he could prepare it now. The Face murmured quiet encouragement into his cerebral cortex, assuring him that the import of his speech was of such magnitude that every word of it would have weight. Meanwhile, as he listened to the usual report, he had the most innocent
and inoffensive air. No one, looking at him gazing calmly through the monocle he wore, somewhat pompously, over his one human eye, and at the air of weariness with which his head drooped on one side, would have suspected that in a few minutes a torrent of words would flow from his lips that would arouse a fearful storm, set the members shouting and attacking one another, and force the president to call for order.

When the report was over, Alexei Alexandrovich announced in his subdued, delicate voice that he had several points to bring before the meeting in regard to the subsequent phases of the Project they had undertaken. All attention was turned upon him. Alexei Alexandrovich cleared his throat, and not looking at his opponent, but selecting, as he always did while he was delivering his speeches, the first person sitting opposite him, an inoffensive little old man who never had an opinion of any sort in the commission, began to expound his views.

“As those of you who have, like myself, been participants in the development of the Project are aware, the first phase of our noble endeavor has been a total and unqualified success.”

SO IT HAS BEEN
, hissed the Face.
SO I HAVE BEEN
.

“The second phase is now being made ready, under my direct supervision, in a subterranean work office in the Moscow Tower. The new prototype of robot, exactly as I planned, will have those three advancements we wished for: advancements in appearance, advancements in capacity, and advancements in the appropriate distribution of loyalty.”

This set of euphemistic and jargonistic phrases earned a smattering of applause from Karenin’s colleagues. But when he reached the point about the next phase of the Project, in which all Class III robots extant in Russian society would be gathered up and adjusted to meet the new standard, his opponent jumped up and began to protest. Stremov took the position that only those individuals who so desired it should have their Class Ills updated to the new version that Karenin was perfecting. Stremov, who had long been Karenin’s political enemy, was a man of fifty, partly gray, but still vigorous-looking, very ugly, but with
a characteristic and intelligent face. He spoke longly and loudly about “ancient prerogatives” and the “unique nature of the bond between man and beloved-companion,” and altogether a stormy sitting followed. But Alexei Alexandrovich triumphed, and his motion was carried, the oath of secrecy-unto-death was sworn; Alexei Alexandrovich’s success had been even greater than he had anticipated.

Next morning, Tuesday, Alexei Alexandrovich, on waking up, recollected with pleasure his triumph of the previous day, and he could not help smiling. Absorbed in this pleasure, Alexei Alexandrovich had completely forgotten that it was Tuesday, the day fixed by him for the return of Anna Arkadyevna, and he was surprised and received a shock of annoyance when a II/Footman/74 motored in to inform him of her arrival.

Anna had arrived in Petersburg early in the morning; the carriage had been sent to meet her in accordance with her communiqué, and so Alexei Alexandrovich might have known of her arrival. But when she arrived, he did not meet her. She sent word to her husband that she had come, went to her own room, and occupied herself in sorting out her things, expecting he would come to her. But an hour passed; he did not come. She went into the dining room on the pretext of giving some directions, and spoke loudly on purpose, expecting him to come out there; but he did not come, though she heard him go to the door of his study. She knew that he usually went out quickly to his office, and she wanted to see him before that, so that their attitude to one another might be defined.