Android Karenina (57 page)

In late October, Antipodal returned from a routine scouting trip with remarkable news. Reporting to Count Vronsky in strictest privacy, he described his encounter in the forest with a short man wearing a long, dirty beard, in bast sandals and a tattered laboratory coat. This man had appeared seemingly from nowhere, flatly refusing to provide his name or any other identifying information. He would only say he demanded a tête-à-tête with Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky to discuss what he called an “alliance,” though with whom or for what purpose, the man had not said. Antipodal finally reported the time and place set for a meeting: a week following, at a Huntshed in Kashinsky, three versts distant.

It was the very dullest autumn weather, which is so dreary in the
country, and so, preparing himself for a struggle, Vronsky, with a hard and cold expression, informed Anna of his departure as he had never spoken to her before. But, to his surprise, Anna accepted the information with great composure, and merely asked when he would be back. He looked intently at her, at a loss to explain this composure. She smiled at his look. He knew that way she had of withdrawing into herself, and knew that it only happened when she had determined upon something without letting him know her plans. He was afraid of this; but he was so anxious to avoid a scene that he kept up appearances, and half sincerely believed in what he longed to believe in—her reasonableness.

“I hope you won’t be dull?”

“I hope not,” said Anna. “Android Karenina and I are knitting banners for our little army. No, I shan’t be dull.”

She’s trying to take that tone, and so much the better,
he thought,
or else it would be the same thing over and over again.

And so he made a last circuit of the barrier-defenses, then set off for the tête-à-tête without appealing to her for a candid explanation. It was the first time since the beginning of their intimacy that he had parted from her without a full explanation. From one point of view this troubled him, but on the other side he felt that it was better so.
At first there will be, as this time, something undefined kept back, and then she will get used to it. In any case I can give up anything for her, but not my masculine independence,
he thought.

K
ONSTANTIN DMITRICH LEVIN
stood just within the creaking, rusted door of the abandoned Huntshed, which, though long unused, still housed the Surceased bodies of three massive
Huntbears, their crudely fashioned paws frozen in positions of attack. He looked again down the long path leading to the Huntshed, and decided that this was a fool’s errand, just as Kitty had warned. Only when he began to exit the shed and walk back to his carriage did he hear a distant rumble coming through the forest; he watched as the trees shook, and from them emerge a roughly hewn Exterior battle-suit, accompanied by a regimental Class III robot in the shape of a great gray wolf. Both machines stopped, and with a high creak the torso door of the Exterior opened to reveal the dapper form of Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky.

“Konstantin Dmitrich! Delighted!” Vronsky called out as he emerged. “I believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you . . . at Princess Shcherbatskaya’s,” he said, giving Levin his hand.

“Yes, I quite remember our meeting,” said Levin, and blushing crimson, he turned away immediately and looked instead at the frozen Huntbears. The days when both had courted Kitty Shcherbatsky were a lifetime ago, but the pain and embarrassment sprang back to Levin undimmed. His mind leapt to the business at hand. “For what reason have you requested a meeting?”

“I requested it? No, sir,” countered Vronsky, tugging suspiciously on his mustache. “You mean it was not you?”

Suddenly Lupo snarled, whipped his head around, and bared his teeth. A moment later, Vronsky and Levin saw what had excited the keen-eared wolf: a short, squat man with a long beard, tangled and filthy, draped in an equally squalid laboratory coat.

“Mea culpa, mea culpa”
said this strange personage, speaking with exceptional rapidity. “My name is Federov, and I am afraid the blame for the ambiguity attendant on our little tête-à-tête is entirely mine. But hardly could I have sent a communiqué grandly requesting your presence at a meeting with a representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists.”

“UnConSciya!” shouted Vronsky, and in an instant his hot-whip was deployed, crackling across the space between himself and Federov. But the man merely touched a small device on his belt, and the whip
seemed not even to touch him.

“Now, now,” the little man in the lab coat said, as if chastising a child. “I am hardly in a position to ask you to disarm, but our meeting will go more smoothly if you refrain from such posturing. I myself am wearing an array of defensive clothing and underclothing, created of technologies several generations ahead of any you might have access to. ‘Always be prepared,’ that’s the motto of our little society.”

Levin looked carefully at Federov. “What is it that you want?”

“Each of you, in your own way, is now as much an enemy of the Ministry as we are. You have come to understand what we have long understood: that our benevolent protectors are at heart neither benevolent, nor protective. Soon all Russia will know it, too, and they will need their leaders.”

The squat, strange little man turned to Konstantin Dmitrich and looked him directly in the eye. “Levin, we beg you to travel with your household to Moscow, and wait there until such time as you can be of use.”

Vronsky sneered, and spoke derisively, “You ask us to enter into conspiracy with the greatest criminals in Russian history.”

“Yes,” Levin echoed, his mind racing. “How can we?”

“By knowing this: we have never committed a single one of the violent acts attributed to us by the Ministry. Yes, we left the government laboratories en masse because we did not like certain orders we had been given, the path our rulers demanded technological innovation travel down. But we have never committed a single act of violence.”

The funny little man leaned forward, his eyes welling with tears: “Not a
single one.
The emotion bombs, the malfunctions—the Ministry itself has done it all. Remember, if you want to control someone, first protect them. And if you will protect someone, you need something to protect them from.”

Vronsky snorted with derision, and shook his head, but Levin trembled like a man hearing the word of God. He was moved beyond
words to see that tears were openly rolling down Federov’s dirty, bearded face. “I apologize for becoming so emotional,” said Federov. “But we have spent a generation outside of possibility, and now I stare at you two proud Russian gentlemen, and I cannot help it—I feel—
hope.
”

BOOM!

The forest exploded with fire.

“No,” cried Federov. “An emotion bomb! I should have known.”

BOOM!
A second hope-bomb rattled the treeline, and with a terrible crack a massive oak tree splintered and fell before them, its leaves alive with fire. All three men ducked down to the earth, covering their ears against the concussive roar of the detonations. “It is me,” screamed Federov. “My hope! My—”

BOOM!
A third blast, the loudest yet, knocked Vronsky’s massive Exterior to the ground and tore the roof from the Huntshed. Levin caught a glimpse of the tops of the Surceased Huntbears, their fight grimaces glinting in the fire-lit darkness, before a burning branch cracked free and landed across his back.

“Ahh!” he screamed in terrible pain, and Vronsky rolled atop him, causing him exquisite agony but extinguishing the blaze. Levin wailed helplessly, while Vronsky screamed to Federov. “It is a trap! You have trapped us here! What have you done? You’ve killed him!”

“I did not cause this attack!” shouted Federov, staggering to his feet. “But I can still the hope that provokes it!” Levin, moaning, clutching at himself with his badly scalded hands, sat up and stared—as Federov pulled out a dagger and drove it into his own heart.

Levin gasped; the man from UnConSciya screamed and doubled forward, pushing the knife in to the hilt. No further bombs were heard, only the eerie crackling of the burning forest.

“Remember these words, men,” Federov said between clenched teeth, sinking to his knees. “Rearguard . . . Action.”

“Rearguard . . . ,” intoned Levin, as if hypnotized.

“Action,” Vronsky mumbled.

V
RONSKY HAD AGREED
to pursue the tête-à-tête at the Huntshed partly because he was attracted, as all cocksure men are, by a chance for further adventures—-just as the tippler, once he has tasted wine, will again and again reactivate the II/Barrel/4. But also Vronsky was bored in the country and wanted to show Anna his right to independence. He had not in the least expected that the tête-à-tête would so interest him, so keenly excite him, and that he would be so good at this kind of thing.

After burying the body of the UnConSciya man in a circular hollow a hundred or so paces from the Huntshed, Levin and he stopped to discuss the remarkable events, and to enjoy smoking cigars. They spoke in a calm and happy way—though, while they seemed to be perfect allies and friends, their past rivalry forgotten, Levin did not mention that his Class III still lived, buried in a Urgensky smoke factory; and Vronsky did not bring up his cherished hope, that if only he could get Anna to “see it right,” they would give up their share in rebellion entirely.

They were thus smoking and talking, when Lupo was beamed a communiqué and promptly lit it up on his monitor.

It was from Anna, and before Vronsky watched it, he already knew its contents. Expecting the tête-à-tête to be over in five days, he had promised to be back on Friday. Today was Saturday, and he knew that the communiqué contained reproaches for not being back at the fixed time.

The missive was not unexpected, but the form of it was unexpected, and particularly disagreeable to him. Anna’s face flashed red
in the projection, as she bitterly pronounced, “Annie is very ill, and Placebo”—a Vozdvizhenskoe decom who had once been beloved-companion to a great Moscow doctor—“says it may be inflammation. I am losing my head all alone. I expected you the day before yesterday, and yesterday, and now I am sending to find out where you are and what you are doing. I wanted to come myself, but thought better of it, knowing you would dislike it. Send some answer, that I may know what to do.”

Vronsky played the communiqué again, to ensure he had it right, and again watched the pleading face of Anna Karenina.
Send some answer, that I may know what to do.
The child ill, yet she had thought of coming herself. Their daughter ill, and this hostile tone. The adrenalin-flushed excitement of the meeting in the woods and this gloomy, burdensome love to which he had to return struck Vronsky by their contrast. But he had to go, and immediately he bid Levin farewell and set off home.

B
EFORE VRONSKY’S DEPARTURE
for the tête-à-tête, Anna had reflected that the scenes constantly repeated between them each time he left their fortifications might only make him cold to her instead of attaching him to her, and resolved to do all she could to control herself so as to bear the parting with composure. But the cold, severe glance with which he had looked at her when he came to tell her he was departing for the meeting had wounded her, and before he had started, her peace of mind was already destroyed.

In solitude afterward, thinking over that glance which had expressed his right to freedom, she came, as she always did, to the same point—the sense of her own humiliation. “He has the right to go away when and where he chooses,” she complained to Android Karenina. “Not simply
to go away, but to leave me. He has every right, and I have none. But knowing that, he ought not to do it.” Together they had fled Petersburg, together they had built Vozdvizhenskoe on the old abandoned patch of farmland. But now while he was out playing the role of dashing rebel leader, she waited for him alone in the autumn cold.

“What has he done, though? . . . He looked at me with a cold, severe expression. Of course that is something indefinable, impalpable, but it has never been so before, and that glance means a great deal,” she concluded, as Android Karenina softly stroked her flowing hair. “That glance shows the beginning of indifference.”

And though she felt sure that a coldness was beginning, there was nothing she could do, she could not in any way alter her relations to him. Just as before, only by love and by charm could she keep him. And so, just as before, only by occupation in the day, by Galena Box at night, could she stifle the fearful thought of what would be if he ceased to love her. There was still one means, she finally admitted to herself, not to keep him—for she wanted nothing more than his love—but to be nearer to him, to be in such a position that he would not leave her.

That meant a divorce from Karenin; worse, it meant dispatching an emissary to the Higher Branches, revealing their location; it meant giving up their arms, begging forgiveness of the Ministry. And, of course, it would mean giving up their Class III robots, though this possibility Anna was not ready even to consider.

Absorbed in such thoughts, she passed five days without him, the five days that he was to be at the mysterious tête-à-tête in the woods. When the sixth day ended without his return, she felt that now she was utterly incapable of stifling the thought of him and of what he was doing there, just when her little girl was taken ill. Anna began to look after her, but even that did not distract her mind, especially as the illness was not serious. However hard she tried, she could not love this little child, and to feign love was beyond her powers. Toward the evening of that day, still alone, Anna was in such a panic about him that she decided to start for
the town, but on second thought recorded the contradictory communiqué that Vronsky received, and without watching it through, beamed it off to Lupo. The next morning she received his reply and regretted her communiqué. She dreaded a repetition of the severe look he had flung at her at parting, especially when he knew that the baby was not dangerously ill.