Android Karenina (53 page)

“Oh, if you wish, we’ll stay here tomorrow,” Levin answered, with peculiar amiability.

Vassenka, meanwhile, got up from the table after Kitty, and watching
her with smiling and admiring eyes, he followed her.

Levin saw that look. He turned white, and for a minute he could hardly breathe.
How dare he look at my wife like that!
was the feeling that boiled within him.

“Tomorrow, then? Do, please, let us go,” said Veslovsky, sitting down on a chair, and again crossing his leg as was his habit.

Levin’s jealousy went further still, growing from moment to moment, evolving as it were from I/Jealousy/4 to I/Jealousy/5 to I/Jealousy/6. Already he saw himself a deceived husband, looked upon by his wife and her lover as simply necessary to provide them with the conveniences and pleasures of life. . . . But in spite of that, he made polite and hospitable inquiries of Vassenka about his shooting, his gun, and his boots, and agreed to go hunting the next day.

Happily for Levin, the old princess cut short his agonies by getting up herself and advising Kitty to go to bed. But even at this point Levin could not escape another agony. As he said goodnight to his hostess, Vassenka would again have kissed her hand, but Kitty, reddening, drew back her hand and said with a naive bluntness, for which the old princess scolded her afterward:

“We don’t like that fashion.”

In Levin’s eyes she was to blame for having allowed such relations to arise, and still more to blame for showing so awkwardly that she did not like them.

Levin scowled and stalked up the stairs to compose a communiqué to Socrates about the terrible worms.

K
ONSTANTIN DMITRICH SPENT
several hours in concentration, composing, recording, and reviewing the communiqé, as he carefully considered how to express his dawning understanding of the worm-machines: what they were, where they came from, and how they were connected to the other troubles plaguing Russia. He went to sleep happy and satisfied with the process of his inquiry, looking eagerly forward to a return communiqué from his poor, exiled beloved-companion.

But it took very little time, the next morning, for Levin’s jealousy to be coaxed back to life by the nettlesome Veslovsky. At breakfast, the conversation Vassenka had started with Kitty was running on the same lines as on the previous evening: discussing Anna, and whether love is to be put higher than worldly considerations. Kitty disliked the subject, and she was disturbed as well both by the tone in which it was conducted and by the knowledge of the effect it would have on her husband. But she was too simple and innocent to know how to cut short the talk, or even to conceal the superficial pleasure afforded her by the young man’s very obvious admiration. She wanted to stop it, but she did not know what to do. Whatever she did she knew would be observed by her husband, and the worst interpretation put on it. And, in fact, when she asked Dolly what was wrong with her daughter Masha, and Vassenka, waiting till this uninteresting conversation was over, began to gaze indifferently at Dolly, the question struck Levin as an unnatural and disgusting piece of hypocrisy.

“What do you say, shall we go and look for mushrooms today?”
said Dolly.

“By all means, please, and I shall come too,” said Kitty, and she blushed. She wanted from politeness to ask Vassenka whether he would come, but she did not ask him.

“Where are you going, Kostya?” she asked her husband with a guilty face, as he passed by her with a resolute step. This guilty air confirmed all his suspicions.

“To inspect the pit for aliens,” he said, not looking at her.

“Again?”

He went downstairs, but before he had time to leave his study he heard his wife’s familiar footsteps running with reckless speed to him. He did not turn, but stalked out of the house into the surrounding gardens, past a II/Gardener/9, who Levin had put to work visually scanning for Honored Guests in the woods. Finally he had to acknowledge Kitty’s presence:

“Well, what do you have to say to me?”

He did not look her in the face, and did not care to see that she in her condition was trembling all over, and had a piteous, crushed look. He did not care, that is to say, to recall how difficult it must be for a woman with child, deprived of the special comfort that only a Class III can provide.

“We can’t go on like this! It’s misery! I’m wretched, you are wretched! What for?” she said, when they had at last reached a solitary garden seat at a turn in the lime tree avenue.

“But tell me one thing: was there in his tone anything unseemly, not nice, humiliatingly horrible?” he said, standing before her again in the same position with his clenched fists on his chest, as he had stood before her that night.

“Yes,” she said in a shaking voice. “But, Kostya, surely you see I’m not to blame? All the morning I’ve been trying to take a tone . . . but such people . . . Why did he come? How happy we were! Happy, and united, not only in our love for each other, but for our robots, united in our
devotion to them!” she said, breathless with sobs that shook her.

A short time later, they passed the II/Gardener/9 once again. Its visual sensors registered astonishment that, though nothing pursued them, they hurried toward the house; and that, though rain had begun to fall, their faces were content and radiant.

A
FTER ESCORTING HIS WIFE
upstairs, Levin went to Dolly’s part of the house. Darya Alexandrovna, for her part, was in great distress too that day. She was walking about the room, talking angrily to a little girl who stood in the corner weeping.

“And you shall stand all day in the corner, and have your dinner all alone, and not play with one of your Class Is, and I won’t make you a new frock,” she said, not knowing how to punish her.

“Oh, she is a disgusting child!” she turned to Levin. “Where does she get such wicked propensities?”

“Why, what has she done?” Levin said without much interest, for he had wanted to ask her advice, and so was annoyed that he had come at an unlucky moment.

“Grisha and she went into the raspberries, and there . . . I can’t tell you really what she did. It’s a thousand pities Dolichka’s no longer with us. She always gave me the best, the most reliable counsel on how to deal with this sort of thing. Oh, how I loved that robot!” Tears trembled in Dolly’s eyes. Outside the pitter-patter of the rain intensified, as if the sky itself were mourning Darya Alexandrovna’s loss.

“But you are upset about something? What have you come for?” asked Dolly. “What’s going on there?”

And in the tone of her question Levin heard that it would be easy
for him to say what he had meant to say.

“I’ve not been in there, I’ve been alone in the garden with Kitty. We’ve had a quarrel for the second time since Veslovsky came. Come, tell me, honestly, has there been . . . not in Kitty, but in that gentleman’s behavior, a tone which might be unpleasant—not unpleasant, but horrible, offensive to a husband?”

“You mean, how shall I say . . . Stay, stay in the corner!” she said to Masha, who, detecting a faint smile in her mother’s face, had been turning round. “The opinion of the world would be that he is behaving as young men do behave. A husband who’s a man of the world should only be flattered by it.”

“Yes, yes,” said Levin gloomily, “but you noticed it?”

“Not only I, but Stiva noticed it. Just after breakfast he said to me in so many words, Je
crois que Veslovsky fait un petit brin de cour à Kitty.”

“Well, that’s all right then; now I’m satisfied. I’ll send him away,” said Levin.

“What do you mean! Are you crazy?” Dolly cried in horror. “Nonsense, Kostya, only think!” she said, laughing. “You can go now,” she said to Masha. “No, if you wish it, I’ll speak to Stiva. He’ll take him away. He can say you’re expecting visitors. Altogether he doesn’t fit into the house.”

“No, no, I’ll do it myself.”

“But you’ll quarrel with him?”

“Not a bit. I shall so enjoy it,” Levin said, his eyes flashing with real enjoyment. “Come, forgive her, Dolly, she won’t do it again,” he said of the little sinner, who had not gone but was standing irresolutely before her mother, waiting and looking up from under her brows to catch her mother’s eye.

And what is there in common between us and him?
thought Levin, and he went off to look for Veslovsky.

As he passed through the passage he gave orders for the II/Coachman/14 to get ready to drive to the station.

Levin, puffed up with courage and his new determination to have this scourge removed from his household, without knocking entered the young man’s room, strode across the chamber, and found Veslovsky bent over the bed, putting on his gaiters to go out riding. Veslovsky, taken by surprise, stood up rapidly and turned around, stammering an apology for his unkempt appearance.

Levin was too shocked to reply: above the rumpled shirtfront, Veslovsky had no face. There was no skin between ear and ear, hairline and chin, and staring back at Levin instead was a mass of churning gears and rapidly moving small parts in the place where a face should be. Still speaking in his gay and eager-to-please society voice, which Levin now realized emanated from a Vox-Em of surpassing quality, he said, “Alas, Konstantin Dmitrich, you catch me unawares.”

Levin, squinting with horror at the silver-black absence of a face, detected dozens of tiny pistons pumping as the words emerged; like an audience member seeing the movement of the puppeteer’s strings, he was watching the devices that would move the lips, were the face-piece in place.

“Good Lord, man,” Levin said idiotically. “You are a robot.”

“You have discovered my secret, friend,” came Veslovsky’s voice from the head unit. The robot sighed, and Levin watched as two tiny half-circles of gears shifted minutely along the upper portion of the face-hole; no doubt this was the system set that created an ironic lift of the eyebrows in other circumstances. “And though I was sent here to observe, not to destroy, my circuits are rather extraordinarily adaptable.”

Levin stepped backward, suddenly aware that Veslovsky stood between himself and the door.

“It is not useful to the Ministry that you or anyone of your circle should be aware of my true nature. And thus . . .”

The Veslovsky-machine emitted a piercing shriek and flash of light, and then grabbed the disoriented Levin firmly by the throat. Levin grunted and gurgled and stared into the deathly emptiness of the
machine-face, as the robot lifted him from the ground like tearing a tree out by the roots.

“Society is changing, Konstantin Dmitrich,” Veslovsky said with an air of melancholy, grinding two heavy groznium-infused thumbs into the sides of his neck. “Your commitment to your Class III is admirable, but there is no use fighting the future.” Levin could not respond; his head was getting weaker and his windpipe throbbed as the last air escaped from his lungs. In a weirdly squeamish gesture, under the circumstances, the robot turned his head away, as if Levin’s dying gasps were too gruesome a sight for his delicate sensibilities.

Levin’s oxygen-depleted brain took him on a long, slow Memory sequence through the days of his life. He saw himself at eighteen, first attuning his gleaming new beloved-companion, Socrates . . . on his wedding day, choked by love and terror . . . at age six, his sister crying over a malfunctioning Class I dance-toy . . .

. . . the ballerina . . .

Konstantin Dmitrich struggled to maintain focus . . .
the ballerina had spun too fast, whirling dangerously, shooting off sparks. What had Mother done?

Summoning every ounce of his remaining strength, Levin flailed back with his powerful right hand and pushed open the wooden shutters of the bedroom; immediately the powerful sound and fresh smell of pouring rain filled the room. Levin kicked out at his adversary’s thin ankle, trying not to injure but to dislodge it . . . to throw it just enough off balance to . . .

There!
Levin drove his whole body forward and with his last reserves of air he pushed the machine-man backward until it was bent over the sill, the cruel mechanical non-face outside and looking up, lashed by the rain.

“An old wives’ tale that happens to be true,” Mamma had said, so many years ago, cracking the faceplate of the Class I ballerina toy with the peen of a hammer. “Just get a bit of rainwater behind the eyes. . . .”

“Grazzle . . . furglazzle . . . ,” spat the Veslovsky machine nonsensically,
as its insides popped and hissed. “Grllllllll. . . .” Levin, unrelenting, kept him—
it,
he told himself-—
it!
—under the fierce flow of the rain like a man bathing a reluctant pet. At last the hands on his throat slackened their grip, and Levin breathed hard, watching with grim fascination as Veslovsky melted into some sort of hideous, unwholesome, forced Surcease. Levin then collapsed beneath the window, the robot slumped beside him with its head lolling from the neck at a crooked angle, still spitting out nonsense phrases in wildly modulated tones. “Vizz . . . poj . . . markkkklzz . . .”

Finally, like a real dying man summons one final burst of lucidity, the thing that had been Veslovsky spoke very quietly, in perfect Russian: “You can’t escape. You can’t win.”

With that, the last energy fled from his body, and Veslovsky ceased to be.

*    *    *

“What madness is this?” Stepan Arkadyevitch said when, after hearing from Dolly that his friend was being turned out of the house, he found Levin in the garden.
“Mais c’est ridicule!
“What fly has stung you?
Mais c’est du dernier ridicule!
What did you think, if a young man . . .”

“Please don’t go into it! I can’t help it. I feel ashamed of how I’m treating you and him,” replied Levin, absently massaging the sides of his neck. “But it won’t be, I imagine, a great grief to him to go, and his presence was distasteful to me and to my wife.”

And Levin gave Oblonsky an apologetic nod, signaling the conclusion of the interview and dismissing his friend from the garden; when Stepan Arkadyich had angrily departed, Levin returned to smoothing over the uneven patch of soil where he had buried the disassembled pieces of Vassenka Veslovsky.