Android Karenina (41 page)

And so while the bridegroom was expected at the church, he was pacing about his room like a caged Huntbear, peeping out into the corridor, and with horror and despair recalling what absurd things he had
said to Kitty and what she might be thinking now.

At last the II/Runner/470 zipped into the room with the shirt held aloft from a pincer, like a dog with a bagged quail. Three minutes later Levin ran full speed into the corridor not looking at his I/Hourprotector/8 for fear of aggravating his sufferings.

“It’s eleven thirty. . . ,” moaned Socrates, motoring quickly behind him. “
eleven thirty-one! We are very late, very late indeed
!”

“Not helpful,” sighed Stepan Arkadyich as he tossed his cigarette into an ashtray, where it sputtered, hissed, and disappeared. “Not helpful at all.”

“T
HEY’VE COME!
” “Here he is!” “Which one? The tall yellow robot?” “No, fool! The robot’s master!” “Rather young, eh?” were the comments in the crowd, when Levin at last walked with Socrates into the church.

Stepan Arkadyich told his wife the cause of the delay, and the guests were whispering it with smiles to one another. Levin saw nothing and no one; he did not take his eyes off his bride as she walked up the aisle toward him.

Everyone said she had lost her looks dreadfully of late, and was not nearly so pretty on her wedding day as usual; but Levin did not think so. He looked at her hair done up high, with the long white veil and white flowers and the high, stand-up, scalloped collar, her strikingly slender figure, and it seemed to him that she looked better than ever—not because her beauty was accented by these flowers, this veil, this gown from Paris, and by the gentle pink backlight shed by Tatiana—but because, in spite of the elaborate sumptuousness of her attire, the expression of her sweet face, of her eyes, of
her lips was still her own characteristic expression of guileless truthfulness.

“I was beginning to think you meant to run away,” she said, and smiled at him.

“It’s so stupid, what happened to me, I’m ashamed to speak of it!” he said, reddening.

Dolly came up, tried to say something, but could not speak, cried, and then laughed unnaturally. She was more affected than she had anticipated by the absence of Dolichka. How perfectly ridiculous, she thought, to have no nimble metal fingers to hand her tissues, no strong metal shoulder to lean on, at her own sister’s wedding!

Kitty looked at her, and at all the guests, with the same absent eyes as Levin.

Meanwhile the officiating clergy had gotten into their vestments, and the priest and deacon came out to the lectern, which stood in the forepart of the church. The priest turned to Levin saying something, but it was a long while before Levin could make out what was expected of him. For a long time they tried to set him right and made him begin again—because he kept taking Kitty by the wrong arm or with the wrong arm—till he understood at last that what he had to do was, without changing his position, to take her right hand in his right hand. When at last he had taken the bride’s hand in the correct way, the priest walked a few paces in front of them and stopped at the lectern. The crowd of friends and relations moved after them, with a buzz of talk and a rustle of skirts. Someone stooped down and pulled out the bride’s train. The church became so still that one could hear the faint buzz of the I/Lumiére/7s in their sconces.

All eyes were fixed upon the altar, and no one noticed that outside the church, the II/Policeman/56s were motoring in arbitrary circles, periodically colliding harmlessly, a sure sign of having been severely, and purposefully, maltuned.

The little old priest in his ecclesiastical cap, with his long, silverygray locks of hair parted behind his ears, was fumbling with something at the lectern. “Drat it, Saint Peter, where’d’ya keep the things?” he muttered in frustration; but while the church’s sacramental robot had been permitted to remain in its place at the altar, its analytical core had been removed for the Ministry’s adjustment. At last the priest put out his little old hands from under the heavy silver vestment with the gold cross on the back of it.

“A GIRL CANNOT BE WED WITHOUT THE SOOTHFUL PRESENCE OF HER CLASS III,” THE PRINCE HAD PLEADED

The priest initiated two I/Lumiére/7s, wreathed with flowers, and faced the bridal pair. He looked with weary and melancholy eyes at the bride and bridegroom, sighed, and putting his right hand out from his vestment, blessed the bridegroom with it, and also with a shade of solicitous tenderness laid the crossed fingers on the bowed head of Kitty. Then he gave them the lumiéres, and taking the censer, moved slowly away from them.

“Can it be true?” thought Levin, and he looked round at his bride. Looking down at her he saw her face in profile, and from the scarcely perceptible quiver of her lips and eyelashes he knew she was aware of his eyes upon her.

She did not look round, but the high, scalloped collar, which reached her little pink ear, trembled faintly. He saw that a sigh was held back in her throat, and the little hand in the long glove shook as it held the thin illuminated Class I.

All the fuss of the shirt, of being late, all the talk of friends and relations, their annoyance, his ludicrous position—all suddenly passed away and he was filled with joy and dread.

It was that precise cocktail of strong feeling that triggered the first of the emotion bombs.

It exploded with pinpoint precision beneath the seat of a single parishioner, an elderly second cousin of Kitty’s seated in the third pew from the back. The blast unleashed all the destructive force of a traditional explosion, but all concentrated on this one unfortunate soul, furiously vibrating every molecule in his body and turning his insides to a gelatinous paste. So precise was this terrible blast of force, however, that even the parishioners to the left and right of the man did not realize
what had transpired, that the wedding was suddenly under attack by agents of UnConSciya. The wedding guest simply slumped forward in his seat, and might have been sleeping: an impolite but hardly shocking action by an elderly man at a church service.

“Blessed be the name of the Lord,” the solemn syllables rang out slowly one after another, as the priest intoned the liturgy, setting the air quivering with waves of sound. The brains of the murdered second cousin, essentially turned to liquid, leaked slowly from his ears.

“Blessed is the name of our God, from the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,” the little old priest said in a submissive, piping voice, still fingering something at the lectern. And the full chorus of the unseen choir rose up, filling the whole church, from the windows to the vaulted roof, drowning out a lone woman’s panicked shrieking from the back of the church.

“This man is dead! My God, what has—what’s happened?!”

A second emotion bomb ignited, this time beneath a young peasant woman with her head wrapped in colorful scarves—like the elderly relative, she collapsed in her place, her insides instantly emulsified.

The triumphant and praiseful sound of the choir grew ever stronger, and joy and mystery swelled in the bosoms of Levin and his bride, amplifying the danger for all present. The officiants prayed, as they always do, for peace from on high and for salvation; for the long life of the Higher Branches they prayed; and for the servants of God, Konstantin and Ekaterina, now pledging their troth. The closer the liturgy drew to the fateful moment, when Kitty and Levin would together enter the mysterious country of matrimonial connection, the more palpable was the bubbling admixture of dread and joy in their respective hearts; and with every upswell of that queer emotional tide, more of the quiet, precise bombs went off, each one more brutally effective than the last. Kitty and Levin stared into each other’s eyes, lost in tender feeling and contemplation of their intertwined fates, as the grim toll of their love grew every second.

“Vouchsafe to them love made perfect, peace and help, O Lord, we beseech Thee,” came the voice of the head deacon. Levin heard the words, and they impressed him.

“How did they guess that it is help, just help that one wants?” he whispered to Socrates, who stood faithfully at his elbow.

“Help!” cried Princess Shcherbatskaya. “My Lord, help!” Her sister, Kitty’s aunt, had suddenly jerked in her seat, twisted her body unnaturally, and tumbled forward into the princess’s lap. Levin and Kitty wheeled around from the altar, at last to behold the bedlam unfolding around them: a horror becoming worse every moment, as dread-joy bombs went off like celebratory I/Flashpop/4s at a child’s birthday party. Kitty screamed, her hands clutching at the side of her face in horror, as another explosion—no longer silent, indeed, louder than a sky full of thunder—shattered the electronically programmed window, sending shards of Savior-emblazoned glass raining down.

The first decisive action to stem the tide of violence came from the two beloved-companion robots. In a single smooth gambol, Tatiana tackled her mistress to the ground and arched backward into a bridge to protect her from the hail of glass. Socrates, plucking a well-worn physiometer from the tangle of tools in his beard, waded into the crowd to begin triage, and Levin could only rush to keep up.

“Why does it continue?” Kitty shouted to Levin, as he and his faithful machine-man surveyed the damage and tended to the wailing wounded. “If this is an emotion bombing”—for such was the only logical conclusion—“and if the bombs are fed by our joy at entering the blessed state of marriage, then why have they not stopped, now that our happiness is entirely subsumed?” Tatiana, meanwhile, with fluttering phalangeals deflected a fresh rain of glass and splintered wood.

Levin smiled despite himself.
What a woman! How clever she is, to make such an astute analysis amid such dreadful circumstances.
“Oh, God,” he said in sudden horror. “It’s
me.
I am happy! Heavenly Father, forgive me, but I am
happy!
I look at her, and even in such straits I cannot help it: I
love her, and I feel joy!”

As if in grim confirmation of Levin’s realization, at the moment he uttered the word “joy” a blast rattled the back of the hall.

He looked about him in horror, marveling at the power of his love, trying and failing to squelch its power in his breast; and then Kitty lunged at him, her gown of lush white and lace billowing out behind her, clawing feverishly at his eyes and pulling viciously at his beard. Levin, shocked, covered his head against the onslaught, and, in that wild, pained instant, he was so surprised at her assault that his love for Kitty transformed into its opposite.

“Stop it,” he shouted at his beloved. “For God’s sake, stop! Are you insane?”

He grasped her wrists to cease the onslaught; she collapsed, spent, against his chest, weeping. Socrates looked up, beeping questioningly in the sudden hush that followed.

For as Konstantin Dmitrich’s joy waned, so had the attack. The emotion bombs were silenced and the devastated church grew silent and terribly still, but for the moaning and weeping of the wounded.

“She is a very capable woman,”
said Socrates, admiringly.

“To be sure, old friend,” Levin agreed, stroking her hair. “As capable and intelligent as she is—”

Boom!
A rafter cracked above the apse, and a displaced I/Lumiére/7 hurtled down from above.

“Master, let us remove you from this place.”

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later, outside the rubble of the church, the surviving officiant concluded the ceremony in a melancholy spirit. Kitty and Levin stood with laced hands, bruised and tearful, but unwilling—in the ancient Russian spirit—to let the terrorists of UnConSciya ruin their sacred day of union.

And so the old priest turned to the bridal pair and began: “Eternal God, who joinest together in love those who were separate,” he said in a sad, piping voice, as voices wailed in the background, “who hast ordained the union of holy wedlock that cannot be set asunder, Thou who didst bless Isaac and Rebecca and their descendants, according to Thy Holy Covenant; bless Thy servants, Konstantin and Ekaterina, leading them in the path of all good works. For gracious and merciful art Thou, our Lord, and glory be to Thee, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, now and ever shall be.”

Even as the ancient words were intoned, within the church the ragged and helpless victims awaited the inevitable arrival of a Caretaker with his troupe of 77s, who always arrived in the aftermath of such horrors. They wept for their injuries, for the continued plague of UnConSciya upon society; and they wept bitterly that their Class Ills had not been there to protect them, and were not there now to lend them support and comfort.

*   *   *

The violent disorder of his wedding day could not help but have its effect on Konstantin Dmitrich’s romantic ideas about marriage, and the life he was now to lead. Levin felt more and more that all his ideas of marriage, all his dreams of how he would order his life, were mere childishness, and that it was something he had not understood hitherto, and now understood less than ever, though it was being performed upon him. The lump in his throat rose higher and higher; tears that would not be checked came into his eyes.