Android Karenina (68 page)

Vronsky made no further effort to pursue an acquaintance with Madame Karenina; did not ask her for the mazurka at Kitty Shcherbatsky’s float; and remained in Moscow for the remainder of the season.

I
N THE SLANTING EVENING SHADOWS
cast by the baggage piled up on the platform, Vronsky in his long regimental overcoat and gleaming silver hat, with his hands in his pockets, strode up and down, like a proud lion displaying himself for an admiring crowd, turning sharply after twenty paces. His beloved-companion robot, Lupo, strutted along behind him as always, the silver paneling of his lupine frame glimmering beautifully in the late-day sun, as together man and machine awaited departure on their newest assignment.

Vronsky’s old friend and fellow soldier Yashvin fancied, as he approached him, that Vronsky saw him but was pretending not to see. This did not affect Yashvin in the slightest: interested only in his own advancement, and distinctly aware of the high regimental perch Vronsky now inhabited, Yashvin was above all personal dignity. At that moment Yashvin looked upon Vronsky as a man at the pinnacle of a remarkable career, and would think himself foolish to miss any opportunity to thrust himself before the great man. He went up to him.

Vronsky stood still, looked intently at him, recognized him, and going a few steps forward to meet him, shook hands with him very warmly.

“Well, now, Alexei Kirillovich,” said Yashvin. “As strange as it feels to see any Russian soldier setting off on such a mission, I can imagine none other but you undertaking it. Did you ever imagine we would see such a day arrive?”

“I have had a feeling for some years that things were going this way,” said Vronsky, turning his head for a moment to admire the figure of a fashionable woman with a charming, fuchsia Class III. “Since the
rise of Stremov, you know, with his decidedly liberal bent on the Robot Question. After the death of the . . . oh, dear, you know the fellow I mean. With the unusual face.”

Yashvin hurried to fill in the gap, eager to impress Vronsky with his understanding. “Karenin.”

“Yes, that’s right. Karenin.”

Vronsky’s jaw twitched impatiently from the incessant, gnawing toothache that prevented him from even speaking with a natural expression. The Karenin affair had been rather a shocking incident, now that he recalled it: a minister of the Higher Branches, murdered by his wife in his own bed. “He was a hardliner on mechanical development, that Karenin. Stremov always gave every impression of seeing things in a different light. Though it will certainly feel strange, as you say, to sit on the opposite side of a bargaining table with UnConSciya.”

“Yes, well . . . ,” Yashvin began. Vronsky looked off into the distance as they heard the pleasant thrum of the arriving Grav. Right on time, reliable and efficient as always.

“I am sorry to intrude upon your solitude. I merely meant to offer you my services,” saidYashvin finally, scanning Vronsky’s face. “To deliver one’s brother-men from endless war is an aim worth death and life. God grant you success outwardly—and inwardly peace,” he added, and he held out his hand. Vronsky warmly pressed his outstretched hand, and began to respond, when suddenly he could hardly speak for a throbbing ache in his strong teeth, which were like rows of ivory in his mouth. And all at once a different pain, not an ache, but an inner trouble that set his whole being in confusion, made him for an instant forget his toothache. To make peace with UnConScyia was unquestionably a great boon for Russia and the Russian people, but what did it mean for
him?
The only purpose his life had known, the only star around which the planet of his being had ever revolved, was the making of war, the heavy grinding power of the Exterior suit in motion, the searing flash of the whip. Vronsky’s eyes took in the arriving Grav, elegantly whooshing forward
on its magnet bed. He thought suddenly of a half-remembered girl, of Princess Kitty Shcherbatskaya: one of a dozen or more such girls whose head he had turned, at one time or another, with easy talk of love.
She is married now
, Vronsky thought,
to that funny man, that miner. . . .

For one cold moment, Vronsky saw himself reflected in the mighty silver prow of the Grav in the most uncharitable and unforgiving light: a body approaching middle age, a soldier lacking a war, a man lacking a wife.

He rubbed at his aching chin, and Lupo let out a little querying yelp.

“Yes, yes, old friend. Of course. I still have you.”

Just at that moment, the sun dipped below the horizon line, and Vronsky and his Class III climbed aboard the Grav.

A
LMOST TWO MONTHS
had passed since Anna’s suicide at the Grav. The hot summer was half over, and Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky was on his way to deep space.

The horrifying death of Anna Arkadyevna Karenina had generated the inevitable deluge of scandalous conversation; but, as is so often the case, even this most salacious bit of gossip grew stale, and soon gave way to the next item of interest. Which, in this case, was a most shocking item indeed: The home planet of the Honored Guests had been located. A speck on the star maps of the astronomers, a smear of red dust flickering in the shadow of the moon, this planetoid was quickly dubbed the Nest by a public hungry for news of the invaders; it became de rigeur at society gatherings for someone to trot out a telescope, so all present could glance with fearful wonderment at the home of the enemy.

“We would be remiss, however, only to look and not to act.” This was the challenge posed to the people of Russia by that man now openly acknowledged to be their one and only leader, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, known lovingly as Tsar Alexei: The King With No Face. His head enrobed in shimmering metal, carrying himself with the pomp and solemnity befitting the recently bereaved, the great man stood before the people at Petersburg Square and announced the momentous decision: Our forces, the brave regiments of Russia, would travel aboard specially
designed shuttles to the Nest, wherefrom the lizard-like aliens and their worm-machine steeds had emerged, and launch a counter-attack.

“Know, my people, that this decision was not an easy one, for our courage will inevitably cost us many lives. But still it is necessary that we go—for the ‘Honored Guests’ have made it clear that they shall not stop until we are defeated, and that cannot be allowed.

“Now
we
shall be the guests,” Karenin concluded, waving his metal fist. “And they the most unwilling hosts.”

YES,
hissed the Face, even as Alexei stepped off the podium and the crowd roared its approval.
LET THE REGIMENTS COME. LET THE MIGHTY REGIMENTS COME.

*    *    *

And so, as the blackness of space rushed by outside, Vronsky in his long overcoat and slouch hat, with his hands in his pockets, strode up and down the unnaturally lit hallway of the shuttle, like a wild beast in a cage, turning sharply after twenty paces. His old comrade Yashvin fancied, as he approached him, that Vronsky saw him but was pretending not to see. This did not affect Yashvin in the slightest. At that moment Yashvin looked upon Vronsky as a man taking an important part in a great cause, and he thought it his duty to encourage him and express his approval. He went up to him.

Vronsky stood still, looked intently at him, recognized him, and going a few steps forward to meet him, shook hands with him very warmly.

“Possibly you didn’t wish to see me,” Yashvin said, “but couldn’t I be of use to you?”

“There’s no one I should less dislike seeing than you,” said Vronsky. “Excuse me; and there’s nothing in life for me to like.”

“I quite understand, and I merely meant to offer you my companionship,” said Yashvin, scanning Vronsky’s face, which was full of unmistakable suffering. “I am honored to count myself among your friends. Your volunteering to lead the first attack wave proves your great
usefulness to the state.”

“My use as a man,” said Vronsky, “is that life’s worth nothing to me. And that I’ve enough bodily energy to cut my way into their ranks, and to trample on them or fall—I know that. I’m glad there’s something to give my life for, for it’s not simply useless but loathsome to me. Anyone’s welcome to it.” And his jaw twitched impatiently from the incessant gnawing toothache that prevented him from even speaking with a natural expression.

“You will become another man, I predict,” said Yashvin, feeling touched. “To deliver one’s planet from bondage is an aim worth death and life. God grant you success outwardly—and inwardly peace,” he added, and he held out his hand. Vronsky warmly pressed his outstretched hand.

“Yes, as a weapon I may be of some use. But as a man, I’m a wreck,” he jerked out.

He could hardly speak for the throbbing ache in his strong teeth, which were like rows of ivory in his mouth. And all at once a different pain, not an ache, but an inner trouble, that set his whole being in anguish, made him for an instant forget his toothache. Glancing out the window of the shuttle, he saw the Earth receding, growing smaller and smaller behind them. He suddenly recalled
her
—imagined what she might have looked like, had he been permitted to see her before, he was told, the body had been whisked away; imagined her on a table in the Grav station, shamelessly sprawled out among strangers, the bloodstained body so lately full of life; the head unhurt, dropping back with its weight of hair, and the curling tresses about the temples, and the exquisite face, with red, half-opened mouth, the strange, fixed expression, piteous on the lips and awful in the still-open eyes, which seemed to utter that fearful phrase—that he would be sorry for it—that she had said when they were quarreling.

And he tried to think of her as she was when he met her the first time, mysterious, exquisite, loving, seeking and giving happiness, and not cruelly revengeful as he remembered her in that last moment. He tried to recall his best moments with her, but those moments were poisoned
forever. He could only think of her as triumphant, successful in her menace of a wholly useless remorse never to be effaced. He lost all consciousness of his toothache, and his face worked with sobs.

K
ITTY, AS ALWAYS,
knew that her child was crying even before she reached the nursery. And he was indeed crying. She heard him and hastened. But the faster she went, the louder he screamed. It was a fine, healthy scream, hungry and impatient.

“Has he been screaming long, nurse, very long?” said Kitty hurriedly, seating herself on a chair, and preparing to give the baby the breast. “But give me him quickly. Oh, nurse, how tiresome you are! There, tie the cap afterwards, do!”

The baby’s greedy scream was passing into sobs.

“But you can’t manage so, ma’am,” said Agafea Mihalovna, who had remained in the household though her services as
mécanicienne
were no longer required.” He must be put straight. A-oo! a-oo!” she chanted over him, paying no attention to the mother.

The nurse brought the baby to his mother. Agafea Mihalovna followed him with a face dissolving with tenderness. “He knows me, he knows me. In God’s faith, Katerina Alexandrovna, ma’am, he knew me!” Agafea Mihalovna cried above the baby’s screams.

But Kitty did not hear her words. Her impatience kept growing, like the baby’s. Their impatience hindered things for a while. The baby could not get hold of the breast right, and was furious. At last, after despairing, breathless screaming, and vain sucking, things went right, and mother and child felt simultaneously soothed, and both subsided into calm.

“But poor darling, he’s all in perspiration!” said Kitty in a whisper,
touching the baby.

“What makes you think he knows you?” she added, with a sidelong glance at the baby’s eyes, which peered roguishly, as she fancied, from under his cap, at his rhythmically puffing cheeks, and the little, red-palmed hand he was waving.

“Impossible! If he knew anyone, he would have known me,” said Kitty, in response to Agafea Mihalovna’s statement, and she smiled. She smiled because, though she said he could not know her, in her heart she was sure that he knew not merely Agafea Mihalovna, but that he knew and understood everything, and knew and understood a great deal too that no one else knew, and that she, his mother, had learned and come to understand only through him. To Agafea Mihalovna, to the nurse, to his grandfather, to his father even, the child was a living being, requiring only material care, but for his mother he had long been a mortal being, with whom there had been a whole series of spiritual relations already.

“When he wakes up, please God, you shall see for yourself. Then when I do like this, he simply beams on me, the darling! Simply beams like a sunny day!” said Agafea Mihalovna.

“Well, well; then we shall see,” whispered Kitty. “But now go away, he’s going to sleep.”

She stroked the baby’s cheek with tenderness. Little Tati: so sweet and so lovely. So like the gentle machine for which he was named.

K
ONSTANTIN DMITRICH LEVIN
gently opened the door of the nursery. Seeing however that both mother and child were fast asleep, and how the nurse and Agafea Mihalovna implored him with gentle eyes to be quiet, he closed the door once more. Levin’s pleasure
in the child was most complete when he saw Tati in such surroundings: at peace, surrounded by his mother, his nurse, and Agafea Mihalovna, in the bosom of warm, human company.

Recently, though, these happy reflections increasingly reminded him of the terrible question that had bedeviled him, in one fashion or another, since the night his child was born. He had turned his back at that moment on Dmitriev and the UnConSciya faction; in that moment the fateful decision had been easily made, had not, indeed, even felt as if it was a decision. But he could not say now whether that decision had been a right one, nor what it was that life demanded of him now. From that moment, though he did not distinctly face it, and still went on living as before, Levin had never lost this sense of terror at his lack of knowledge.