Android Karenina (56 page)

“You guess that I have something I want to say to you,” he said, looking at her with laughing eyes. “I am not wrong in believing you to be a friend of Anna’s.” He took off his hat, and taking out his handkerchief, wiped his head, which was growing bald. Dolly made no answer, and merely stared at him with dismay. When she was left alone with him, she suddenly felt afraid; his laughing eyes and stern expression scared her. The wolf-robot, Lupo, trotted beside them, and she saw with
distaste that he was working at a hunk of the alien’s hide with his back teeth. The most diverse suppositions as to what Vronsky was about to speak of to her flashed into her brain.
He is going to beg me to come to stay in this rebel cantonment with them with the children, and I shall have to refuse; or isn’t it Vassenka Veslovsky and his relations with Anna? Or perhaps about Kitty, that he feels he was to blame?
All her conjectures were unpleasant, but she did not guess what he really wanted to talk about to her.

“You have so much influence with Anna, she is so fond of you,” he said. “Do help me.”

Darya Alexandrovna looked with timid inquiry into his energetic face, which under the lime trees was continually being lighted up in patches by the sunshine, and then passing into complete shadow again. She waited for him to say more, but he walked in silence beside her, scratching with his cane in the gravel.

“You have come to see us, you, the only woman of Anna’s former friends—I know that you have done this not because you regard our position as the right one but because, understanding all the difficulty of the position, you still love her and want to be a help to her. Have I understood you rightly?” he asked, looking round at her.

“Oh, yes,” answered Dolly, retracting her I/Sunshade/6, “but . . .”

“No,” he broke in, and unconsciously, oblivious of the awkward position into which he was putting his companion, he stopped abruptly, so that she had to stop short too. “No one feels more deeply and intensely than I do all the difficulty of Anna’s position; and that you may well understand, if you do me the honor of supposing I have any heart. I am to blame for that position, and that is why I feel it.”

“Yes, but here, so far—and it may be so always—you are happy and at peace. Not literally at peace, far from it given the severity of the threats that face you, but at peace in your hearts, which is after all the more valuable. I see in Anna that she is happy, perfectly happy, she has had time to tell me so much already,” said Darya Alexandrovna, smiling;
and involuntarily, as she said this, at the same moment a doubt entered her mind whether Anna really was happy.

But Vronsky, it appeared, had no doubts on that score. “Yes, yes,” he said, “I know that she has revived after all her sufferings; she is happy. She is happy in the present. But I? . . . I am afraid of what is before us. . . . I beg your pardon, you would like to walk on?”

“No, I don’t mind.”

“Well, then, let us sit here.”

Darya Alexandrovna sat down on a garden seat in a corner of the avenue. He stood up facing her.

“I see that she is happy,” he repeated, and the doubt whether she was happy sank more deeply into Darya Alexandrovna’s mind. “But can it last?”

A junker named Vespidae, employing a very limited propeller-driven hovering capacity as he patrolled the perimeter of the camp, swung low overheard and flashed an all-clear light on its undercarriage to Vronsky, who gave a desultory wave in return and continued.

“Whether Anna and I have acted rightly or wrongly is another question, but the die is cast,” he said, “and we are bound together for life. We are united by all the ties of love that we hold most sacred. We have a child. We have these machine-men and -women who have sought what they perceive as safety in our shadow. But the conditions of our position are such that thousands of complications arise that she does not see and does not want to see. And that one can well understand. But I can’t help seeing them.” Vronsky absently ran his fingers along Lupo’s spine, and the dog thrummed with pleasure. Dolly wondered what Vronsky was getting at.

“My child,” he said suddenly. “Can we raise her here, in such a situation? And what of the future? My daughter will be hunted for all her life, bearing the mark of the rebel, whether she would choose to or not, for she will never be given the choice. We have made it for her, by our actions. Can I will her such an existence!” he said, with a vigorous gesture of refusal, and he looked with gloomy inquiry toward Darya Alexandrovna.

She made no answer, but simply gazed at him. He went on: “One day a son may be born, my son, and he too will have the results of this choice, he too will have the consequences thrust upon him. He will be an outcast, an escapee from society, and worse—if this redoubt of ours should be found and our defenses destroyed, my child would in the course of events be killed, or worse, raised by
him:
as a Karenin! You can understand the bitterness and horror of this position! I have tried to speak of this to Anna. It irritates her. She is happy now, she has taken what she sees as her principled position on the Robot Question. She enjoys the thrill of this wilderness existence we now lead. She cannot look far enough down the road to contemplate the kind of future we are engendering. She does not understand, and to her I cannot speak plainly of all this. . . .”

He paused, evidently much moved.

“Yes, indeed, I see that. But what can Anna do?” queried Darya Alexandrovna.

“Yes, that brings me to the object of my conversation,” he said, calming himself with an effort. “It is my great hope that I might give up this life and marry Anna properly, within the bounds of society.”

“I am surprised to hear you say so,” replied Dolly. She looked about her, her gesture taking in the whole of Vozdvizhenskoe. “I would have said you were so happy here, at the head of your robot regiment. . . .”

“But they could be brought into service! With me at their head! Can you imagine . . .”

“Into service?”

“Of the state, of the Ministry,” Vronsky turned his gaze back toward the farmhouse, as if ensuring Anna did not overhear. “I am prepared to play what part it is thought I would play best in the New Russia being created by our leaders.” Dolly raised a hand to her mouth, but said nothing.

“I have built this world in the woods because I have stood for the honor of Anna Karenina. But in truth I have no problem, no practical problem that is to say, with the direction of the Higher Branches,
with the changes they seek to implement. My differences with Alexei Alexandrovich are
personal,
not
political
.”

“But after your departure . . . your disappearance . . . how can the Higher Branches allow your return? How could Karenin?”

“If Anna asked he would allow it: I’m sure of it. Her husband agreed to a divorce—at that time your husband had arranged it completely. And now, I know, he would not refuse it. He would grant her a divorce, and forgiveness for both of us. It is only a matter of sending him a communiqué. He said plainly at that time that if she expressed the desire, he would not refuse. Of course,” he said gloomily, “it is one of those pharisaical cruelties of which only such heartless men are capable. He knows what agony any recollection of him must give her, and knowing her, he must have a communiqué,” he said, with an expression as though he were threatening someone for its being hard for him. “And so it is, princess, that I am shamelessly clutching at you as an anchor of salvation. Help me to persuade her to write to him and ask for a divorce and for
amnesty.”

This last word he spoke with emphasis, though quietly. But Lupo, who had padded up to them midway through their conversation and had been sitting contentedly as usual at his master’s feet, heard—with his extraordinary, lupine aural circuitry, he heard, and with his survival instincts he understood. For Vronsky and Anna to be given amnesty, they would surely have to comply with the “adjustment protocol.”

The wolf-machine let loose a long, low growl, which Vronsky did not, or affected not, to hear.

“Use your influence with her, make her record a communiqué. I don’t like—I’m almost unable to speak about this to her.”

“Very well, I will talk to her,” said Darya Alexandrovna, and for some reason she suddenly at that point recalled Anna’s strange new habit of half-closing her eyes. And she remembered that Anna dropped her eyelids just when the deeper questions of life were touched upon.
Just as though she were half-shutting her eyes to her own life, so as not to see everything,
thought Dolly. “Yes, indeed, for my own sake and for hers I will talk to her,” Dolly said in reply to his look of gratitude. They got up and walked to the farmhouse.

They passed Lupo, prowling in and out of the old henhouse, sniffing at Tortoiseshell’s stubby groznium tail. It was as if he were already more at home in this company than at the side of his master. Vronsky did not call out to him.

W
HEN ANNA FOUND DOLLY
at home before her, she looked intently in her eyes, as though questioning her about the talk she had had with Vronsky, but she made no inquiry in words.

“I believe it’s dinnertime,” she said. “We’ve not seen each other at all yet. I am reckoning on the evening. Now I want to go and dress. I expect you do too; we have all been splattered with mud, and with the spilt, stinking yellow gore of our attacker.” Dolly went to her room and she felt amused. To change her dress was impossible, for she had already put on her best dress. She brushed it off as best she could, wringing out some of the more gore-soaked patches of fabric; then, in order to signify in some way her preparation for dinner, she changed her cuffs and tie, and put some lace on her head.

“This is all I can do,” she said with a smile to Anna, who came in to escort her to the ramshackle little tent where the sarcastic
mécanicien
served as camp cook as well.

“Yes, we are too formal here,” Anna said, as it were apologizing for the unceremoniousness of the dining. “Alexei is delighted at your visit, as he rarely is at anything. He has completely lost his heart to you,” she added. “You’re not tired?”

There was no time for talking about anything before dinner. The dinner, the wine, the decoration of the table were all of a compelling simplicity; flasks open on the long wooden table; candlelight serving for
lumières,
in the old way.

After dinner they sat on the terrace, then they proceeded to play a quaint, old manual game called lawn tennis that Anna and Vronsky had come to enjoy in the absence of Flickerfly and other grozniumage amusements. The players, divided into two parties—humans against robots—stood on opposite sides of a tightly drawn net with gilt poles on the carefully leveled and rolled croquet ground. Darya Alexandrovna made an attempt to play, but it was a long time before she could understand the game, and by the time she did understand it, she was so tired that she sat down and simply looked on at the players. Her partner, Witch Hazel, gave up playing too and sat beside her; and after asking permission, began braiding her hair, an intimate kind of Class III action that brought tears to Dolly’s eyes.

The others kept the game up for a long time. Vronsky and Anna played very well and seriously: they kept a sharp lookout on the balls served to them, and without haste or getting in each other’s way, they ran adroitly up to them, waited for the rebound, and neatly and accurately returned them over the net. Veslovsky played worse than the others. He was too eager, but he kept the players lively with his high spirits. His laughter and outcries never paused. With the ladies’ permission, he took off his coat, and his solid, comely figure in his white shirtsleeves, with his red, perspiring face and his impulsive movements, made a picture that imprinted itself vividly on the memory.

During the game Darya Alexandrovna was not enjoying herself. She did not like the light tone of raillery that was kept up all the time between Vassenka Veslovsky and Anna; she felt strangely disquieted by the attention he paid to her. But to avoid breaking up the party and to get through the time somehow, after a rest she joined the game again, and pretended to be enjoying it. All that day it seemed to her as though
she were acting in a theater with actors cleverer than she, and that her bad acting was spoiling the whole performance. She had come with the intention of staying two days, if all went well. But in the evening, during the game, she made up her mind that she would ask that Witch Hazel guide her home the next day. The maternal cares and worries, which she had so hated on the way, now, after a day spent without them, struck her in quite another light, and tempted her back to them.

*    *    *

When Darya Alexandrovna lay in bed that night, as soon as she closed her eyes, she saw Vassenka Veslovsky flying about the match ground. Something about that man, with his frivolous manner and appearance, caused her such disquiet—even distress.

V
RONSKY AND ANNA
spent the whole summer and part of the winter in the country, living as lord and lady of their robot freedomland at Vozdvizhenskoe, and still taking no steps to obtain a divorce. It was an understood thing between them that they could not go away anywhere, but both felt, the longer they lived alone, especially in the autumn, just them and their small robot army, that they could not stand this existence, and that they would have to alter it. Their life was apparently such that nothing better could be desired. They had the fullest abundance of everything; they had a child, and both had occupations. The building of the fortifications, the slow improvement of the camp from a woodsy tent city into a strong, well-fortified encampment, interested Anna greatly. She did not merely assist, but planned and
suggested a great deal herself.

But her chief thought was still of herself: how far she was dear to Vronsky, how far she could make up to him for all he had given up. Vronsky appreciated this desire not only to please but to serve him, which had become the sole aim of her existence, but at the same time he wearied of the loving snares in which she tried to hold him fast. As time went on, and he saw himself more and more often held fast in these snares, he had an evergrowing desire, not so much to escape from them, as to test whether they hindered his freedom. Had it not been for this growing desire to be free, not to have scenes every time he wanted to ride out to check the farthest flung component of their early-warning system, or take one of the junker regiments on a day-long training exercise, Vronsky would have been perfectly satisfied with his life. The role he had taken up, the role of a captain to a regiment of machine-men, was very much to his taste (even though, as he had expressed in confidence to Dolly, he would prefer to play that role within society, not outside it). Now, after spending six months in that character, he derived even greater satisfaction from it. And his management of his estate, which occupied and absorbed him more and more, was most successful: no more Honored Guests attacked the camp, and if agents of the Ministry discovered their whereabouts, never did they make an attempt against their walls.