Android Karenina

CHAPTER 1

THE WORKINGS OF A CLASS III ROBOT are as surpassingly complex as they are surpassingly small. As is well known, each of these miraculous humanoid automatons contains within itself a self-perpetuating system of systems, a universe of infinitesimal mechanisms, and the movement of these intricately interconnected contraptions is powered by the “sun” that sits at the core of every Class III. That sun is the groznium engine, the approximate size and proportion of a human heart, which burns for the life of the machine with furious intensity. It is that remarkable heat-giving heart, unseen from without but all-powerful within, that gives life to the machine, generating the energy to turn the gears to animate the thousands of interlocking parts creating the easy, fluid functioning of a companion robot.

So, too, goes the working of our universe. God’s will in the world is like that unseen groznium fire-its heat and power forever surrounding us, suffusing every new event and idea. Whether we know it or not, we are but servomechanisms in the service of fate, and our movements, our very thoughts, are powered only by the magnificent heat shed by the Almighty.

And so, just as a Class III performs its variety of ever-changing duties with seeming intelligence and independence, we humans may attempt in our arrogance to steer the events of the world, but never can we indeed control those events-they will continue along their own way, along God’s way, no matter the fervency of our desires or the force of our expectations. We are but gears, turned only by the unseen hand of the Lord.

The Higher Branches of the Ministry, led by Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, now unquestionably their dominant figure, moved forward with the momentous Project: the collection of all Class III robots to undergo “adjustments,” the precise nature of which were still a great mystery to the public in general, who would be affected. Softening the blow was the civil and decorous manner of the young officers assigned to enact the adjustment provision; reportedly recruited from the highest ranks of the Caretakers, these young men soon became known as Toy Soldiers, what with their neatly pressed blue uniforms and slim black boots. In pairs or groups of three they appeared on doorsteps all over the country, inquiring respectfully whether any Class III robots were among the household. With handheld Class I devices they diligently recorded the names and generational information of each beloved-companion, and carefully provided a receipt before the machine was loaded in the back of a coach.

Anyone who thought to question the Toy Soldiers as to the precise nature of the planned circuitry “adjustments” was told firmly but with gentleness that such concerns were the responsibility of the Ministry, and wouldn’t we all do well to put our trust in our leaders? In general, this response was considered satisfactory, and the people accepted their receipts and bade calm farewell to their Class Ills.

Even Stepan Arkadyich Oblonsky, whose beloved-companion Small Stiva flashed his usually cheerful eyebank tremulously as he was led away, waved merrily and called out, “Never fear, little Samovar. I shall see you again soon.” Stepan Arkadyich tried mightily, by dint of a peculiar internal ability he cherished, to block out unpleasant thoughts and associations, to forget what he had seen in Karenin’s basement office in the Moscow Tower. There could be no connection, he assured himself, between Karenin’s strange experiments and what was happening now. “Wouldn’t we all do well to put our trust in our leaders?” he chastened his tearful wife, Darya Alexandrovna, as her kind and matronly Dolichka was led away.

“Wouldn’t we?”

CHAPTER 2

THE GEARS OF LIFE turned and turned again, ever forward, and in time the anxious confusion surrounding the departure of Small Stiva and Dolichka was replaced in the household of Oblonsky by joyful anticipation, as preparations began for the wedding of Dolly’s sister, Kitty Shcherbatskaya, to Stepan’s oldest friend, Konstantin Dmitrich Levin.

When they arrived at the church, a crowd of people, principally women, was thronging round the church lighted up for the wedding. Those who had not succeeded in getting into the main entrance were crowding about the windows, pushing, wrangling, and peeping through the gratings.

More than twenty carriages had already been drawn up in ranks along the street by the Class II police robots, their bronze weather-protected outercoating primed against the rusting frost. More carriages were continually driving up, and ladies wearing flowers and carrying their trains, and men taking off their helmets or black hats kept walking into the church. The church windows, programmed for the occasion by a highly sought-after display gadgeteer, glowed brightly with the life of the Savior, one luminously delineated scene shifting seamlessly into the next. This ornate display, along with the gilt on the red background of the holy picture-stand, the silver of the lusters, and the stones of the floor, and the rugs, and the banners above in the choir, the steps of the altar, the cassocks and surplices-all were flooded with light.

The only thing missing was the loving couple. Every time there was heard the creak of the opened door, the conversation in the crowd died away, and everybody looked round expecting to see the bride and bridegroom come in. But the door had opened more than ten times, and each time it was either a belated guest or guests, who joined the circle of the invited on the right, or a spectator, who had eluded the II/Policeman/56s, and went to join the crowd of outsiders on the left. The Galena Box sent its waves of oscillation through the room, but was proving insufficient to dampen the mood of confused anxiety; both the guests and the outside public had by now passed through all the phases of anticipation. The long delay began to be positively discomforting, and relations and guests tried to look as if they were not thinking of the bridegroom but were engrossed in conversation.

At last one of the ladies, glancing at her I/Hourprotector/8, said, “It really is strange, though!” and all the guests became uneasy and began loudly expressing their wonder and dissatisfaction.

Kitty meanwhile had long ago been quite ready, and in her white dress and long veil and wreath of orange blossoms she was standing in the drawing room of the Shcherbatskys’ house. Beside her was her pink-flushed Class III, Tatiana, one of the last beloved-companions left in Moscow. Kitty had been allowed to forestall her Class III’s collection for “adjustment” until after the wedding, thanks to the intercession of her father, Prince Shcherbatsky with a childhood friend who sat on the Higher Branches. (“A girl cannot be wed without the soothful presence of her Class III,” the prince had pleaded; meanwhile, all across Russia, less well-connected brides were somehow making do.) Tatiana was looking out of the window, and had been for more than half an hour piping a soft and calming lullaby from her Third Bay, to keep her mistress from becoming too anxious that her bridegroom was not yet at the church.

Levin meanwhile, in his trousers, but without his coat and waistcoat, was walking to and fro in his room at the hotel, with Socrates pacing directly behind him, his beard clanking. (He, too, had been granted a reprieve, exhausting the favors due to the old prince). Man and machine took turns poking their heads out of the door and looking up and down the corridor. But in the corridor there was no sign of the Class II who had been dispatched to bring Levin his shirtfront, which had been forgotten. The shirtfront had been left at home by Levin’s best man, Stepan Arkadyich, who placed the blame on Small Stiva-or rather, the absence of Small Stiva. Oblonsky had assumed that his beloved-companion, ever mindful of such details, would bring the necessary accoutrements, and it slipped his mind entirely that his dear friend was by now at a Robot Processing Facility in Vladivostok, in deep Surcease with his mechanical guts splayed out on a workbench.

While Socrates frantically paced, Levin addressed Stepan Arkadyich, who was smoking serenely.

“Was ever a man in such a fearful fool’s position?” he said.

“Yes, it is stupid, and I feel awful,” Stepan Arkadyich assented, smiling soothingly. “I’m a simple block of wood without my Little Samovar. But don’t worry, it’ll be brought directly.”

“No, what is to be done!” said Levin, with smothered fury. “What if it’s been lost?”

“It’s not been lost,” reassured Stepan Arkadyich.

“It may have been lost. Yes, probably it’s lost,” intoned Socrates.

“That is not helpful,” said Stepan Arkadyich with a glare suggesting a wish that Socrates, too, were in a Vladivostok R.P.F. Addressing himself to Levin, he said: “Just wait a bit! It will come round.”

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.”

CHAPTER 3

“THEY’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.

After supper, the same night, the young people left for the country.

CHAPTER 4

VRONSKY AND ANNA had been traveling for three months together on the surface of the moon. They had visited the Mare Tranquillitatis and the famous canals of St. Catherine, and had just arrived at a hotel, part of the small farside colony where they meant to stay some time.

A Moonie, one of the weird, wiry Class IIs with bulbous glowing head units employed in nearly all man-serving positions on the moon’s surface, stood with his hands in the full curve of his silver outercoating, giving some frigid reply to a gentleman in a coarse engineer’s jumpsuit who had stopped him. Catching the sound of footsteps coming from the other side of the entry toward the staircase, the Moonie swiveled his big, bright ball of a head and, seeing the Russian count, who had taken their best rooms, with a bow informed him that a communiqué had been received: the business about the module he and his companion planned to rent had all been arranged.

“Ah! I’m glad to hear it,” said Vronsky. “Is madame at home or not?”

“Madame… went out for walk… but returned now,” answered the Class II in the distinctive stop-start manner of the Moonie.

Vronsky took off his soft, wide-brimmed hat and passed his handkerchief over his heated brow and hair, which had grown half over his ears, and was brushed back covering the bald patch on his head. And glancing casually at the gentleman, who still stood there gazing intently at him, he almost moved on.

“This gentleman… a Russian… inquiring after you.”

With mingled feelings of annoyance at never being able to get away from acquaintances anywhere, and longing to find some sort of diversion from the monotony of his life, Vronsky looked over at the gentleman, who had retreated and stood still again. Lupo, instinctually distrustful of strangers, leaned back on his haunches and bared his teeth at the stranger; but Vronsky, recognizing the man, whistled a sharp “stand down” to his Class III and smiled broadly.

“Golenishtchev!”

“Vronsky!”

Surprising though it was, it really was Golenishtchev, a comrade of Vronsky’s from the Corps of Pages. Golenishtchev and Vronsky had gone completely different ways on leaving the corps, and had only met once since, and had not gotten along. But now they beamed and exclaimed with delight on recognizing one another. Vronsky would never have expected to be so pleased to see Golenishtchev, but probably he was not himself aware how bored he was, so many space-versts from home, with only Anna for human company. With a face of frank delight he held out his hand to his old comrade, and the same expression of delight replaced the look of uneasiness on Golenishtchev’s face.

“How glad I am to meet you!” said Vronsky, showing his strong white teeth in a friendly smile.

“I heard the name Vronsky, but I didn’t know which one. I’m very, very glad!”

“Let’s go in. Come, tell me what you’re doing.”

“Digging, friend! Digging and digging and digging.”

Now Vronsky understood the reason for the dust-caked jumpsuit; Golenishtchev, a trained excavation and extraction engineer, had received a license from the Ministry’s Extra-Orbital Branch to plumb huge tracts of the lunar surface in search of the Miracle Metal-on the theory that, if it had mysteriously appeared in the Russian soil, and if the Russians in their ingeniousness had utilized groznium-derived technologies to land men on the moon, surely the Miracle Metal would one day be found there as well; although, Golenishtchev reported with a sad shrug, so far he had found only moon-rocks and dust.

“Ah!” said Vronsky, with sympathy, before deciding to broach the difficult subject, which he knew would come up sooner or later with any acquaintance. “Do you know Madame Karenina? We are traveling together. I am going to see her now,” he said, carefully scrutinizing Golenishtchev’s face.

“Ah! I did not know,” Golenishtchev answered carelessly, though he did know, and excused himself to ask a question of the obsequious Moonie.

“Yes, he’s a decent fellow, and will look at the thing properly,” Vronsky said happily to Lupo. “I can introduce him to Anna, he looks at it properly.”

During these weeks that Vronsky had spent on the moon, he had always on meeting new people asked himself how the new person would look at his relations with Anna, and for the most part, in men, he had met with the “proper” way of looking at it. But if either he or those who looked at it “properly” had been asked exactly how they did look at it, both he and they would have been greatly puzzled to answer.

In reality, those who in Vronsky’s opinion had the “proper” view had no sort of view at all, but behaved in general as well-bred persons do behave in regard to all the complex and insoluble problems with which life is encompassed on all sides; they behaved with propriety, avoiding allusions and unpleasant questions. They assumed an air of fully comprehending the import and force of the situation, of accepting and even approving of it, but of considering it superfluous and uncalled for to put all this into words.

Vronsky at once divined that Golenishtchev was of this class, and therefore was doubly pleased to see him. And in fact, Golenishtchev’s manner toward Madame Karenina and her android, when he was taken to call on them, was all that Vronsky could have desired. Obviously without the slightest effort he steered clear of all subjects that might lead to embarrassment. He had never met Anna before, and was struck by her beauty and the sleek lines of her beloved-companion, and still more by the frankness with which the woman accepted her position. She blushed when Vronsky brought in the rough-hewn Golenishtchev, his everlit helmet dangling from its chinstrap, his I/Shovelhoe/40(b) clanking at his side, and he was extremely charmed by this childish blush overspreading her candid and handsome face. But what he liked particularly was the way in which at once, as though on purpose that there might be no misunderstanding with an outsider, she called Vronsky simply Alexei, and said they were moving into a house they had just taken, what was here called a module. Golenishtchev liked this direct and simple attitude toward her own position. Looking at Anna’s manner of simple-hearted, spirited gaiety, Golenishtchev fancied that he understood her perfectly. He fancied that he understood what she was utterly unable to understand: how it was that, having made her husband wretched, having abandoned him and her son and lost her good name, she yet felt full of spirits, gaiety, and happiness.

“I tell you what: it’s a lovely day, let’s go and have another look at the module,” said Vronsky, addressing Anna.

“I shall be very glad to; I’ll go and find my helmet. And how is the gravity today?” she said, stopping short in the doorway and looking inquiringly at Vronsky. Again a vivid flush overspread her face.

Vronsky saw from the way her eyes would not meet his, resting instead on Android Karenina’s reassuring and familiar faceplate, that she did not know on what terms he cared to be with Golenishtchev, and so was afraid of not behaving as he would wish.

He looked a long, tender look at her. “The gravity is extremely fine,” he said. “All that could be wished for.”

And it seemed to her that she understood everything, most of all that he was pleased with her; and smiling to him, she walked with her rapid step out the door, Android Karenina whizzing along with equal confidence behind her. Vronsky and his old acquaintance glanced at one another, and a look of hesitation came into both faces, as though Golenishtchev, unmistakably admiring her, would have liked to say something about her, and could not find the right thing to say, while Vronsky desired and dreaded his doing so.

ANNA EMERGED IN PERAMBULATING TOGS, HER PALE AND LOVELY HAND HOLDING THE HANDLE OF HER DAINTY LADIES’-SIZE OXYGEN TANK

Anna excused herself to put on her perambulating togs. It was a rather cumbersome and complicated outfit, but every piece was entirely necessary: the oxygen tanks; the heavy, treaded boots; the asbestos-lined undersuit; and of course the sturdy, airtight helmet of reinforced glass. When Anna emerged, her stylish feathered hat bent to fit inside the dome of the helmet, her pale and lovely hand holding the handle of her dainty ladies’-size oxygen tank, it was with a feeling of relief that Vronsky broke away from the plaintive eyes of Golenishtchev, and with a fresh rush of love looked at his charming companion, full of life and happiness.

They walked to the module they had reserved, and looked over it, Golenishtchev pompously taking the role of chief inspector, carefully examining the sealing systems and hatches, having vastly more experience than they with lunar living.

“I am very glad of one thing,” said Anna to Golenishtchev when they were on their way back. “Alexei will have a capital atelier. You must certainly take that module,” she said to Vronsky in Russian, using the affectionately familiar form as though she saw that Golenishtchev would become intimate with them in their isolation, and that there was no need of reserve before him.

“Do you paint?” said Golenishtchev, turning round quickly to Vronsky.

“Yes, I used to study long ago, and now I have begun to do a little,” said Vronsky, reddening.

“He has great talent,” said Anna with a delighted smile, and Lupo yipped his proud agreement. “I’m no judge, of course. But good judges have said the same.”

CHAPTER 5

ANNA, IN THAT PERIOD of her emancipation and rapid return to health, after her dangerous confinement and delivery, had felt herself unpardonably happy and full of the joy of life. The memory of all that had happened after her illness: her reconciliation with her husband, its breakdown, the news of Vronsky’s wound, his visit, the preparations for divorce, the departure from her husband’s house, the parting from her son, traveling to the moon inside an ovoid canister shot from a giant cannon-all that seemed to her like a delirious dream, from which she had woken up alone with Vronsky on the lunar surface. The thought of the harm caused to her husband aroused in her a feeling like repulsion, and akin to what a drowning man might feel who has shaken off another man clinging to him. That man did drown. It was an evil action, of course, but it was the sole means of escape, and better not to brood over these fearful facts.

One consolatory reflection upon her conduct had occurred to her at the first moment of the final rupture, and when now she recalled all the past, she remembered that one reflection. “I have inevitably made that man wretched, but I don’t want to profit by his misery,” she mused, while Android Karenina’s slim fingers braided her hair into charming plaits. “I too am suffering, and shall suffer; I am losing what I prized above everything-I am losing my good name and my son. I have done wrong, and so I don’t want happiness, I don’t want a divorce, and shall suffer from my shame and the separation from my child.”

Android Karenina nodded kindly, her eyebank glittering from deep red to sympathetic lilac. But she knew as well as her mistress that, although Anna had expected to suffer, she was not suffering. Shame there was not. She and Vronsky had never placed themselves in a false position, and everywhere they had met people who pretended that they perfectly understood their position, far better indeed than they did themselves. It was not by accident that they had traveled to the moon, a permissive enclave where judgment, along with gravity, held only a fraction of its usual force. Separation from the son she loved-even that did not cause her anguish in these early days. The baby girl-his child-was so sweet, and had so won Anna’s heart, since she was all that was left to her, that Anna rarely thought of her son.

The desire for life, waxing stronger with recovered health, was so intense, and the conditions of life were so new and pleasant, that Anna felt unpardonably happy. The more she got to know Vronsky, the more she loved him. She loved him for himself, and for his love for her. Her complete ownership of him was a continual joy to her. His presence was always sweet to her. All the traits of his character, which she learned to know better and better, were unutterably dear to her. His appearance, changed by his civilian dress, was as fascinating to her as though she were some young girl in love. In everything he said, thought, and did, she saw something particularly noble and elevated; she cherished a childish vision of Vronsky and Lupo as of a paladin and his steed. Her adoration of him alarmed her indeed; she sought and could not find in him anything not fine. She dared not show him her sense of her own insignificance beside him. It seemed to her that, knowing this, he might sooner cease to love her; and she dreaded nothing now so much as losing his love, though she had no grounds for fearing it. But she could not help being grateful to him for his attitude toward her, and showing that she appreciated it. He, who had in her opinion such a marked aptitude for a regimental career, in which he would have been certain to play a leading part-he had sacrificed his ambition for her sake, and never betrayed the slightest regret. He was more lovingly respectful to her than ever, and the constant care that she should not feel the awkwardness of her position never deserted him for a single instant. He, so manly a man, never opposed her, had indeed, with her, no will of his own, and was anxious, it seemed, for nothing but to anticipate her wishes. And she could not but appreciate this, even though the very intensity of his solicitude for her, the atmosphere of care with which he surrounded her, sometimes weighed upon her.

Vronsky, meanwhile, in spite of the complete realization of what he had so long desired, was not perfectly happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the mistake men make in picturing to themselves happiness as the realization of their desires. For a time after joining his life to hers, after unwinding the hot-whip from his thigh and donning civilian dress, he had felt all the delight of freedom in general of which he had known nothing before, and of freedom in his love-and he was content, but not for long. He was soon aware that there was springing up in his heart a desire for desires-ennui. He longed for the camaraderie of the battlefield, missed the sparks and the heat and fog of combat, missed the clang of the Exterior door swinging shut behind him, missed the weight of a smoker in his hand. Without conscious intention he began to clutch at every passing caprice, taking it for a desire and an object. Sixteen hours of the day must be occupied in some way, since they were living in complete freedom, outside the conditions of social life that filled up time in Petersburg. As for the amusements of bachelor existence, which had provided Vronsky with entertainment on previous extra-atmospheric sojourns, they could not be thought of, since his sole attempt of that sort had led to a sudden attack of depression in Anna, quite out of proportion with the cause-a late game of lunar croquet with bachelor friends.

Relations with the society of the place-foreign and Russian-were equally out of the question owing to the irregularity of their position. The inspection of the various panoramas, of Earth’s blue-green magnificence or the starry sprawl of distant galaxies, had not for Vronsky, a Russian and a sensible man, the immense significance Englishmen are able to attach to that pursuit.

And just as the hungry stomach eagerly accepts every object it can get, hoping to find nourishment in it, Vronsky quite unconsciously clutched first at politics, then at new books, and then at pictures. He began to understand the semi-mystical art of painting with groznium-based pigments, how the artist could push the little pools of color around the canvas with subtle flicks of the brush, how the individual droplets would attract each other, creating luminous patterns as singular as fingerprints or snowflakes. Vronsky concentrated on these studies; with this technique he began to paint Anna’s portrait in her boots and helmet, and the portrait seemed to him, and to everyone who saw it, extremely successful.

CHAPTER 6

THE OLD, NEGLECTED MODULE they had leased, with its lofty, hard-textile ceilings and off-white, dimly lit passageways, with its slow-sequencing, Earth-scenery monitor frames, its manual door locks and gloomy reception rooms-this base did much, by its very appearance after they had moved into it, to confirm in Vronsky the agreeable illusion that he was not so much a Russian country gentleman, a retired army officer, as an enlightened, bohemian “moon man” and patron of the arts, who had renounced his past, his connections, and his planet for the sake of the woman he loved.

“Here we live, and know nothing of what’s going on,” Vronsky said to Golenishtchev as he came to see him one morning. “Have you seen Mihailov’s picture?” he said, pointing to Lupo’s monitor, where was displayed a communiqué from a Russian friend that he had received that morning, and pointing to an article on a Russian artist living in the very same colony and just finishing a picture which had long been talked about. “Couldn’t we ask him to paint a portrait of Anna Arkadyevna?” said Vronsky.

“Why mine?” Anna interjected. “After yours I don’t want another portrait. Better have one of Annie” (so she called her baby girl). She glanced with a smile through the glass porthole into the nursery, where the child was giggling delightedly at the clownish tumbling of a I/HurdlyGurdly/2.

“I have met Mihailov, you know,” Golenishtchev said. “But he’s a queer fish. He did not migrate to the moon entirely of his own volition, if my meaning is quite clear.” It was not, of course, and in answer to Vronsky’s curious expression Golenishtchev leaned forward, in exactly that conspiratorial fashion with which people in possession of secrets signal that they wish to be pressured into revealing them.

“I understand that many years ago he professed rather an extreme view on the Robot Question. Took the line that the extent of evolution of any given machine should be up to its owner, and its owner alone.”

“Yes, well,” Anna began, gesturing proudly to her own beloved-companion, preparing to defend that position, or at least argue its merits.

“But this Mihailov took the idea to a rather bizarre conclusion, publishing his opinion that robots were, in many ways, the equals of human beings-and that junkering a Class III was therefore tantamount to murdering a human being.” Vronsky raised his eyebrows, and Golenishtchev went on. “It is even said that he put these rather extreme opinions into practice, and…,” Golenishtchev made a pretense of blushing before continuing, “and fell in love with his wife’s Class III, and would have married it. The point is, one way or another he found it necessary to decamp for the charming lunar colony where now we find him.”

Golenishtchev settled happily back into his chair, evidently quite pleased with his own skills as raconteur, while Anna sat silent, absently stroking Android Karenina’s hand. Were Mihailov’s views so wrong? Was not her beloved-companion twice the woman-twice the person-twice the… whatever one might call it-than most of the people Anna had known?

“I tell you what,” said Anna finally. “Let’s go and see him!”

CHAPTER 7

THE ARTIST MIHAILOV was, as always, at work when the greeting signal of Count Vronsky and Golenishtchev sounded in his studio. He walked rapidly to the door, and in spite of his annoyance at the interruption, he was struck by the soft light that Android Karenina was shedding on Anna’s figure as she stood in the shade of the entrance listening to Golenishtchev, who was eagerly telling her something, while she evidently wanted to look round at the artist and his work.

They spoke but Mihailov only noticed every fifth word; he was examining in his mind’s eye that subtle nimbus of luminescence the robot imparted to her mistress. So he readily agreed to paint a portrait of Anna, and on the day he fixed, he came and began the work.

In another man’s house, and especially in Vronsky’s module, Mihailov was quite a different man from what he was in his studio. He behaved with hostile courtesy, as though he were afraid of coming closer to people he did not respect. He called Vronsky “Your Excellency,” and notwithstanding Anna’s and Vronsky’s invitations, he would never stay for dinner, nor come except for the sittings. Anna was even more friendly to him than to other people, and was very grateful for her portrait. Vronsky was more than cordial with him, and was obviously interested to know the artist’s opinion of his picture. Mihailov met Vronsky’s talk about his painting with stubborn silence, and he was as stubbornly silent when he was shown Vronsky’s picture. He was unmistakably bored by Golenishtchev’s transparent attempts to goad him into conversation on the Robot Question, and he did not attempt to oppose him.

From the fifth sitting the portrait impressed everyone, especially Vronsky, not only by its resemblance, but by its characteristic beauty. It was strange how Mihailov could have discovered just her characteristic beauty. “One needs to know and love her as I have loved her to discover the very sweetest expression of her soul,” Vronsky murmured to Lupo, who rumbled softly in his lap; though in truth it was only from this portrait that he had himself learned this sweetest expression of her soul. But the expression was so true that he, and others too, fancied they had long known it.

To Anna, what was remarkable was Mihailov’s decision to include Android Karenina in the painting, a decision not in keeping with traditions of portraiture, but one which seemed to her entirely fitting and appropriate.

On the sixth day of the sitting Golenishtchev entered with his usual bluster. As he pulled off his thick, dust-caked moon boots, he reported on a communiqué he had just received from a friend in Petersburg, who spoke of a rather bizarre new dictate emerging from the Ministry: all Class III robots, it seemed, were being gathered up by the government for some sort of mandatory circuitry adjustment.

Golenishtchev passed easily on to other subjects, nattering next about a funny little Moonie he had lost in the pit earlier today, and the various difficulties attending to Extractor maintenance in low gravity. But Mihailov and Anna Karenina-that is, the painter and the painted-seemed deeply struck by the pitman’s information. Mihailov laid down his brush and looked off through the big bay window of the module.

As for Anna, she instantly knew who was behind this enigmatic new Ministry program. “Might it be,” she murmured to Android Karenina, rising from her model’s stool, stretching, and walking arm and arm with her beloved-companion through the atelier, “that in my absence, whatever strange force lives inside my husband has gathered strength? Has my departure, my immersion in the freedom that the moon has given me, doomed my fellow Russians, and their beloved-companions, to suffer in my stead?”

And her heart was rent by feelings of guilt and frustration.

Vronsky did not share these concerns; he was instead agonized by his dawning understanding of his own failure to master the technique of groznium-pigment painting, and his realization that he never would. “I have been struggling on for ever so long without doing anything,” he said of his own portrait of her, “and he just looked and painted it. That’s where technique comes in.”

“That will come,” was the consoling reassurance given him by Golenishtchev, in whose view Vronsky had both talent and what was most important, culture, giving him a wider outlook on art. Golenishtchev’s faith in Vronsky’s talent was propped up by his need of Vronsky’s sympathy and approval for his own hope of finding groznium on the moon, and he felt that the praise and support must be mutual. “Isn’t that correct, M. Mihailov?”

But Mihailov remained silent. He walked, slowly, still clutching his brush, away from that big bay window and toward the airlock. “Tell me, sir,” he said to Golenishtchev, propping himself up against the reinforced steel of the door. “This Project; they intend to ‘gather up’ all Class Ills for what purpose?”

“It is not said-only that we must put our trust in the Ministry.”

“Ah,” he said. “I suppose we must do that. That I suppose we must do.”

A long stillness then filled the atelier: Golenishtchev looked toward Vronsky and Anna with raised eyebrows and a wry expression, impressing upon them his enjoyment of the idiosyncratic behavior of the great artiste. Vronsky continued his contemplation of the master’s portrait of Anna, while Anna herself stood with her hand in the gentle end-effector of Android Karenina, gazing down thoughtfully toward that big blue-green Class I toy, the Earth.

The airlock had already swung closed behind Mihailov, decisively clanking shut before anyone realized that he had exited-and had not taken with him his oxygen tank, nor even his helmet.

They watched with eyes wide with amazement, as the old painter tromped in his moon boots across the dusty lunar landscape and, showing no sign of the desperate constriction of his lungs that was surely taking place, blew a single, sad kiss in the direction of Earth; and then lay down heavily on the lunar dust, and ran out of breath.

After the strange death of Mihailov, Anna and Vronsky’s rented module suddenly seemed so obtrusively old and dirty: the periodic small malfunctioning of their Class I door locks, the streaks in the glass, the dried-out putty on the seals became so disagreeably obvious, as did the everlasting sameness of Golenishtchev, forever talking of the great day when he would strike his long-dreamed-of lunar ore. They had to make some change, and they resolved to return to Russia. In Petersburg Vronsky intended to arrange a partition of land with his brother, while Anna intended, somehow, to see her son.

Vronsky and Anna soon were climbing inside the ballistic canister and hurtling back toward the planet from whence they had come.

CHAPTER 8

LEVIN HAD BEEN MARRIED three months. He was happy, but not at all in the way he had expected to be. At every step he found his former dreams disappointed, and new, unexpected surprises of happiness. He was happy; but on entering upon family life he saw at every step that it was utterly different from what he had imagined. At every step he experienced what a man would experience who, after admiring the smooth, happy course of a meteor around a planetoid, should be given an opportunity to climb aboard that meteor. He saw that it was not all sitting still, floating smoothly; that one had to think too, not for an instant forgetting where one was floating; and that there was atmospheric pressure around one, and that one must endeavor somehow to steer one’s meteor; and that his unaccustomed hands would be sore; and that it was only to look at it that was easy; but that doing it, though very delightful, was very difficult, and very likely fatal.

As a bachelor, when he had watched other people’s married life, seen the petty cares, the squabbles, the jealousy, he had only smiled contemptuously in his heart. In his future married life there could be, he was convinced, nothing of that sort; even the external forms, indeed, he fancied, must be utterly unlike the life of others in everything. And all of a sudden, instead of his life with his wife being made on an individual pattern, it was, on the contrary, entirely made up of the pettiest details, which he had so despised before, but which now, by no will of his own, had gained an extraordinary importance that could not be denied. Although Levin believed himself to have the most exact conceptions of domestic life, unconsciously, like all men, he pictured domestic life as the happiest enjoyment of love, with nothing to hinder and no petty cares to distract. He ought, as he conceived the position, to do his work, and to find repose from it in the happiness of love. She ought to be beloved, and nothing more. But, like all men, he forgot that she too would want work. And he was surprised that she, his poetic, exquisite Kitty, could not merely busy herself about the Class Is and the furniture, about mattresses for visitors, about a tray, about the II/Cook/6 and the dinner, and so on.

Now her trivial cares and anxieties jarred upon him several times. But he saw that this was essential for her. And, loving her as he did, though he jeered at these domestic pursuits, he could not help admiring them. He jeered at the way in which she arranged the furniture they had brought from Moscow; rearranged their room; placed the Galena Box carefully on a certain shelf, then the next day reconsidered and moved it to another shelf; saw after a Surcease nook for the new II/Maid/467, a wedding gift from Levin’s parents; ordered dinner of the old II/Cook/6; came into collision with his ancient mécanicienne, Agafea Mihalovna, taking from her the charge of the Is and IIs.

He did not know the great sense of change Kitty was experiencing; she, who at home had sometimes wanted some favorite dish, or sweets, without the possibility of getting either, now could order what she liked, riding on a tandem I/Bicycle/44 with her darling Tatiana to the store to buy pounds of sweets, spend as much money as she liked, and order any puddings she pleased.

This care for domestic details in Kitty, so opposed to Levin’s ideal of exalted happiness, was at first one of the disappointments; and this sweet care of her household, the aim of which he did not understand, but could not help loving, was one of the new happy surprises.

Another disappointment and happy surprise came in their quarrels. Levin could never have conceived that between him and his wife any relations could arise other than tender, respectful, and loving ones, and all at once in the very early days they quarreled, so that she said he did not care for her, that he cared for no one but himself, burst into tears, and wrung her arms.

This first quarrel arose from Levin’s having gone with Socrates to a nearby farmhouse, having heard from a fellow landowner that another of the mysterious, gigantic, wormlike koschei had been spotted in that corner of the countryside. Going to investigate, Levin did not find the beast-machine itself, but paused for some time to contemplate what he found instead: a thick pool of expectorated ochre-yellow goo, along with the skeleton of a man with all the flesh neatly stripped off the bone.

He and Socrates passed a happy hour recreating the struggle, carefully measuring each scuff mark in the soil with a precision triangulator from the Class Ill’s beard. Ultimately they determined that this mechanical monster had to have been larger by a third than the one they had fended off, with the help of Grisha’s I/Flashpop/4, the previous season.

Socrates ran his usual analysis, but to Levin the only conclusion possible was that these UnConSciya koschei (were they UnConSciya?) were growing-but why? And how?

Flush with the usual pleasure he took in scientific investigation and discovery, Levin started off toward home; but as they drove, one happiness shifted to another, and soon his thoughts turned to Kitty, to her love, to his own happiness. The nearer he drew to home, the warmer was his tenderness for her. He ran into the room with the same feeling, with an even stronger feeling than he had had when he reached the Shcherbatskys’ house to make his offer. And suddenly he was met by a lowering expression he had never seen in her. He would have kissed her; she pushed him away.

“What is it?”

“You’ve been enjoying yourself,” she began, and he saw Tatiana standing behind her, glowing an accusatory cadmium yellow, her slender arms crossed. Kitty tried to be calm and spiteful, but as soon as she opened her mouth, a stream of reproach, of senseless jealousy, of all that had been torturing her during that half hour which she had spent sitting motionless at the window, burst from her. He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began. He felt this from the agonizing sensation of division that he experienced at that instant. He was offended for the first instant. “Enjoying myself!” he exclaimed. “I have literally been crouched in goo-thickened mud, examining mutilated human remains!”

“It’s true, Madame,” Socrates added, presenting as evidence a handful of the thick, yellow gunk, which dropped grossly through his endeffectors. Kitty and Tatiana drew back in disgusted unison from this repulsive offering.

Levin felt that he could not be offended by his dear Kitty, that she was himself. He felt as a man feels when, having suddenly received a violent blow from behind, he turns round, angry and eager to avenge himself, to look for his antagonist, and finds that it is he himself who has accidentally struck himself, that there is no one to be angry with, and that he must put up with and try to soothe the pain.

Before he could conceive of how to do so, the scene of marital discord was interrupted by the mechanized tritone of the I/Doorchime/3. A moment later the II/Footman/C(c)43 led in a handsomely uniformed pair of visitors, each with a rosy-fresh complexion, a neat, blond haircut and trim mustache, and slim black boots: Toy Soldiers.

“Good afternoon,” said the first of the men, speaking with every drop of the great respect and politeness due the master of Pokrovskoe and his new bride. The other man stood with arms crossed and his hat at a slightly insouciant angle on his blond head, saying nothing, a smile frozen on his face. His careful gaze was locked on Socrates and Tatiana.

“We are representatives of the Ministry of Robotics and State Administration,” continued the first man, speaking in a polished but rushed manner, as if from a prepared text. “We have come today to collect your Class III companion robots, in compliance with the nationwide order for compulsory circuitry adjustment. You were each granted an extension in respect of your nuptials. And may we add our congratulations, on behalf of the Ministry, on that blessed event.”

The other soldier uncrossed his arms and spoke curtly, gesturing roughly at the two companion robots. “These are the machines to be taken?”

Tatiana took a sidelong, slippered step toward Kitty, and the two locked arms and stood upright, like dancers preparing to launch into a partnered minuet.

“But no!” Kitty announced suddenly, with a wide-eyed, innocent expression. “They cannot go!”

Levin drew breath to speak, intending to upbraid his wife for indulging in such childish defiance of authority. Gazing upon her, however, arm in arm with her beloved-companion, he was softened by the distress evident on her face. What is more, he felt in his heart-especially when his intelligent eyes saw the concern evident in the flickering eyebank and nervous twitching of his own loyal Class III-that Kitty was absolutely correct in her defiance.

For how could they?

“Gentlemen, I beg that you pardon my wife the rashness of her young age and tenderhearted spirit. Naturally we shall comply and submit these machines for the necessary adjustments. But I wonder if you, in your official capacity, might first perform a service for a local landowner.”

Speaking rapidly, directing his words primarily to the first Toy Soldier, the one who seemed to him to have the friendliest nature, Levin explained what he and Socrates had observed at the old farmhouse: the skeleton stripped of flesh; the signs of struggle; the puddle of viscous ochre goo. He told them, too, of his own encounter with the gigantic, wormlike koschei outside Ergushovo. “Could you not, as long as your official business has brought you to this province, ride out to these spots I have mentioned and investigate? The threat of such unusual and deadly monsters is a cause of deep distress, as you can imagine, to myself and my household.”

But the Toy Soldier to whom Levin directed his appeal scratched his head and squinted, seemingly entirely uninterested in the bizarre creatures Levin spoke of. “That is indeed a most alarming tale,” he said softly, “but it does not, alas, have to do with us and our business.” Levin glanced from the corner of his eye at Socrates, and saw that he had brought one end-effector up to gently touch Tatiana where her torso unit met her lower portion-a touchingly human gesture. “Sir, we have precise instructions from the Ministry.”

Levin was inwardly cursing the seeming singlemindedness of the soldiers when the other one, who had been standing mute with arms crossed, seeming not to pay attention, held up an open palm. “This wormlike machine,” he said, “did it emit a sound-like a sort of ticking, a tikka tikka tikka sound?”

Levin nodded his assent, at which the Toy Soldier sighed and spoke in a whisper to his companion. As they turned on their slim black boots and walked back toward the door, the first of the soldiers glanced amiably over his shoulder at Levin, and said in a casual tone, “We shall return shortly, and complete our previously announced business here. We have no desire to perform our commission by force.”

“No,” said the second soldier, as he pulled the big front door of the manor house behind them. “Not yet.”

Kitty burst into tears, running to her Class III and hiding her face in Tatiana’s thin metal bosom. “I could not bear for her to be taken!” she said through her tears.

“Nor I, my dear,” was Levin’s reply, as he looked gravely out the front window, watching the Toy Soldiers ride off. “Nor I.”

“And what will they do with them? I mean, really do?”

“I don’t know, Kitty.”

“Madame?” interjected Tatiana anxiously, as Levin and Kitty embraced.

“Sir?” echoed Socrates.

“Yes, yes, beloved-companions,” Levin said. “You are quite right. Now we must leave Pokrovskoe. And fast.”

CHAPTER 9

IMMEDIATELY THERE COMMENCED in the Levin household that frenzy of activity, among robots and humans alike, attendant upon a rapid and secret flight to safety. What to take? How much luggage? How best to travel undetected? And where to go?

“I shall take the Class Ills with me to the small provincial town of Urgensky, where my brother Nikolai is residing,” Levin said. “In his last communiqué he said his own Class III, Karnak, has not been taken in for adjustment. We may hope that Urgensky is too out of the way, with too few Class III companion robots in residence there, to be considered worth the effort of the state to collect them.”

Kitty’s face changed at once.

“When?” she said.

“Immediately! A visit to my ailing brother is a perfectly reasonable excuse for travel, and I shall carry the Surceased robots with my luggage.”

“And I will go with you, can I?” Kitty said.

“Kitty! What are you thinking of?” he said reproachfully.

“How do you mean?” she said, offended that he should seem to take her suggestion unwillingly and with vexation. “Why shouldn’t I go? I shan’t be in your way. I-”

“The journey is to be long, and likely dangerous,” said Levin, all the fire of their earlier quarrel returning. “Why should you-”

“Why? For the same reason as you.”

“Ah!” said Levin, and bitterly muttered to Socrates, though loud enough for Kitty to hear. “At a moment of such gravity, she only thinks of her being dull by herself, alone here in the pit-house without me or Tatiana.”

“Now now,” counseled Socrates, looking guiltily at Kitty. “Do not be cross with her.”

“No!” said Levin sternly. “It’s out of the question.”

Tatiana brought Kitty a cup of tea from the I/Samovar/1(8); Kitty did not even notice her. The tone in which her husband had said the last words wounded her, especially because he evidently did not believe what she had said.

“I tell you, that if you go, I shall come with you; I shall certainly come,” she said hastily and wrathfully.

“It is out of the question!”

“Why out of the question? Why do you say it’s out of the question?”

“Because I’ll be going God knows where, by all sorts of roads and to all sorts of hotels. And my brother lives in entirely unsuitable circumstances! That would be reason enough to bar your coming, before one even considers the danger of our being discovered by agents of the Ministry and prosecuted as Januses for disobeying the compulsory adjustment order. You would be a hindrance to me,” said Levin, trying to be cool.

“What dangers you can face, I can!” replied Kitty hotly.

“Yes, yes. But think, too, of where we are going, and whom we will meet. For one thing then, this woman’s there whom you can’t meet.”

“I don’t know and don’t care to know who’s there and what. My husband is undertaking a risk, to protect his beloved-companion as well as mine, and I will go with my husband too…”

“Kitty! Don’t get angry. But just think a little: this is a matter of such importance that I can’t bear to think that you should bring in a feeling of weakness, of dislike to being left alone. Come, you’ll be dull alone, so go and stay at Moscow a little.”

“There, you always ascribe base, vile motives to me,” she said with tears of wounded pride and fury. “I didn’t mean, it wasn’t weakness, it wasn’t… I feel that it’s my duty to be with my husband when he’s in trouble, but you try on purpose to hurt me, you try on purpose not to understand…”

“No, this is awful! To be such a slave!” cried Levin, getting up, and unable to restrain his anger any longer. But at the same second he felt that he was beating himself.

“Then why did you marry? You could have been free. Why did you, if you regret it?”

He began to speak, trying to find words not to dissuade but simply to soothe her. But she did not heed him, and would not agree to anything. He bent down to her and took her hand, which resisted him. He kissed her hand, kissed her hair, kissed her hand again-still she was silent. But when he took her face in both his hands and said “Kitty!” she suddenly recovered herself, and began to cry, and they were reconciled.

It was decided that they should go together, as soon as possible. The robots were put in Surcease, and locked together in a trunk.

CHAPTER 10

THE HOTEL IN URGENSKY, the provincial town where Nikolai Levin was living, was one of those provincial hotels which are constructed on the newest model of modern improvements, with the best intentions of cleanliness, comfort, and even elegance, but owing to the public that patronizes them, are with astounding rapidity transformed into filthy taverns with a pretension of modern improvement that only makes them worse than the old-fashioned, honestly filthy hotels.

There remained only one filthy room, which would barely fit the two of them, and their robots, once revivified. Levin was feeling angry with his wife because what he had expected had come to pass: at the moment of arrival, when his heart throbbed with emotion and anxiety to find his brother and make whatever arrangements were necessary to find a place where the Class Ills could stay here undetected, he had to be seeing after her.

“Go, do go!” she said, looking at him with timid and guilty eyes.

He went out of the door without a word, and at once stumbled over his brother’s consort, Marya Nikolaevna, who had heard of his arrival and had not dared to go in to see him. She was just the same as when he saw her in Moscow; the same woolen gown, and bare arms and neck, and the same good-naturedly stupid, pockmarked face, only a little plumper.

Speaking rapidly and with obvious apprehension, Marya Nikolaevna expressed her relief at seeing him: Nikolai’s illness, she explained, had dramatically worsened, and indeed she feared he was now at death’s door.

“What? Well, and how is he at present?”

“Very bad. He can’t get up. His body writhes with pain, and there is in the texture of his flesh a strange and unseemly rippling. I fear the worst. Come,” Marya Nikolaevna continued. “He has kept expecting you.”

The door of his room opened and Kitty peeped out. Tatiana’s head peeped out just under hers. Levin crimsoned both from shame and anger with his wife, who had put herself and him in such a difficult position; but Marya Nikolaevna crimsoned still more. She positively shrank and flushed to the point of tears, and clutching the ends of her apron in both hands, twisted them in her red fingers without knowing what to say or what to do.

For the first instant Levin saw an expression of eager curiosity in the eyes with which Kitty looked at this awful woman, so incomprehensible to her; but it lasted only a single instant.

“Well! Have you explained to her our plan, regarding the Class III robots?” she turned to her husband and then to her.

“But one can’t go on talking in the corridor like this!” Levin said, looking angrily at a gentleman who walked jauntily at that instant across the corridor, as though going about his affairs. Could this be one of them? A Toy Soldier? Some other agent of the state, disguised in everyday clothes?

“Well then, come in,” said Kitty, turning to Marya Nikolaevna, who had recovered herself, but noticing her husband’s face of dismay, she added, “or go on; go, and then come for me,” and she and Tatiana went back into the room.

Levin went to his brother’s room. There he was aghast to see the instructions etched above the door, but he obeyed them nonetheless, donning the elaborate sickroom costume of mask, gown, and gloves.

“My poor brother,” he murmured to Socrates, who was donning his own mask; of course a companion robot required no protection from human infection, but the costume would at least delay his immediate detection as a machine-man, should a doctor or other stranger happen into the room.

Levin, from Marya’s descriptions, had expected to find the physical signs of the approach of death more marked-greater weakness, greater emaciation, but still almost the same condition of things. He had expected himself to feel the same distress at the loss of the brother he loved and the same horror in face of death as he had felt then, only in a greater degree.

In this little, dirty room with the caution posted by the door, with the painted panels of its walls filthy with spittle, and conversation audible through the thin partition from the next room, in a stifling atmosphere saturated with impurities, on a bedstead moved away from the wall, there lay, covered with a quilt, a body. One arm of this body was above the quilt, and the wrist, huge as a rake handle, was attached, inconceivably it seemed, to the thin, long bone of the arm, smooth from the beginning to the middle. The head lay sideways on the pillow. Levin could see the scanty locks wet with sweat on the temples and the tense, transparent-looking forehead.

Propped against the opposite wall was Karnak, Nikolai’s staggering rust-bucket of a Class III, if anything more decrepit and dilapidated than the last time Levin had seen him. “One can see why the Ministry has no interest in adjusting such machines,” whispered Levin to Socrates, who had instinctively recoiled from the sad, shrunken metal figure.

As they approached the bed, any doubt that this wracked figure was Levin’s dear brother became impossible. In spite of the terrible change in the face, Levin had only to glance at those eager eyes raised at his approach, only to catch the faint movement of the mouth under the sticky mustache, to realize the terrible truth that this death-like body was his living brother.

When Konstantin took him by the hand, the thick, white protective gloves feeling scarcely protection enough, Nikolai smiled. There was at that moment the scrape of a boot heel in the hallway outside, and Levin looked up sharply: was it them? Had they been found already? Socrates pulled his mask higher over his face, his eyebank flashing unsteadily.

“You did not expect to find me like this,” Nikolai articulated with effort.

“Yes… no,” said Levin. The sound of the footsteps faded down the hallway.

A great swell of flesh bubbled up from Nikolai’s midsection, as if his body was a balloon and air had been temporarily forced into one part of it. Levin looked away, as Nikolai winced and groaned.

“How was it you didn’t let me know before that you were suffering so?”

Nikolai could not answer; again the flesh of his torso bubbled grotesquely, and again he gritted his teeth and scowled with evident agony.

Levin had to talk so as not to be silent, and he did not know what to say, especially as his brother made no reply. His odd condition was not, it appeared, contained to his midsection; as Levin watched, one of Nikolai’s eyes bulged grotesquely, and then the other. He tried to speak and his swollen tongue lolled like bread dough onto his cheek. Containing his horror and revulsion, Levin said to his brother that his wife had come with him. When his tongue detumesced and he could speak again, Nikolai expressed pleasure, but said he was afraid of frightening her by his condition. A silence followed-Levin would not say so, but he had precisely the same fear.

“Let me explain the reason we have come,” Levin then said. “It has to do with…” He lowered his voice to a whisper, drawing nearer his brother’s wrecked flesh, and said, “the robots.”

Karnak’s leg fell off, and he fell to the ground with a scrape and clank. Socrates, politely, lifted the other machine back up and placed him in his previous position against the wall.

Suddenly Nikolai stirred, and began to say something, entirely ignoring Levin’s whispered comment about the Class Ills and speaking instead of his health. He found fault with the doctor, regretting he had not a celebrated Moscow doctor with a II/Prognosis/4 or higher. Levin saw that he still hoped.

Seizing the first moment of silence, Levin got up, anxious to escape, if only for an instant, from his agonizing emotion, and said that he would go and fetch his wife.

“Very well, and I’ll tell Karnak to tidy up here. It’s dirty and stinking here, I expect. Karnak! Clear up the room,” the sick man said with effort. Karnak swiveled his head unit uncertainly, his aural sensors detecting some distant sensory input.

“Well, how is he?” Kitty asked with a frightened face when Levin went to fetch her.

“Oh, it’s awful, it’s awful! What did you come for?” said Levin.

Kitty was silent for a few seconds, looking timidly and ruefully at her husband; then she went up and took him by the elbow with both hands.

“Kostya! Take me to him; it will be easier for us to bear it together. You only take me, take me to him, please, and go away,” she said. “You must understand that for me to see you, and not to see him, is far more painful. There I might be a help to you and to him. Please, let me!” she besought her husband, as though the happiness of her life depended on it.

Levin was obliged to agree, and regaining his composure, and completely forgetting about Marya Nikolaevna by now, he went again to his brother with Kitty.

Stepping lightly, and continually glancing at her husband, showing him a valorous and sympathetic face, Kitty donned the mask and gloves and gown, went into the sickroom, and, turning without haste, noiselessly closed the door. With inaudible steps she went quickly to the sick man’s bedside, and going up so that he had not to turn his head, she immediately clasped in her fresh, young, thickly gloved hand, the skeleton of his huge hand, pressed it, and began speaking with that soft eagerness, sympathetic and not jarring, which is peculiar to women.

“We have met, though we were not acquainted, on the Venus orbiter,” she said. “You never thought I was to be your sister?”

“Would you have recognized me?” he said, with a radiant smile at her entrance.

“Yes, I would. I am sorry to have found you unwell, and I hope I can be of some use to you.”

“And I to you, and to your machines.” Nikolai smiled, and from this quiet statement Levin gathered that his brother had indeed heard his allusion to the robots, and was willing despite his grave health to help keep their beloved-companions safe.

It was decided that when the time came for Levin and Kitty to return to Pokrovskoe (meaning, though none spoke the words aloud, when Nikolai had passed into the Beyond), their Class Ills would stay here, their exterior trim radically downgraded, masquerading as Class IIs at work in a local cigarette factory-the owner of which, Nikolai felt sure, would accept a small payment to hide the robots among his workforce-and spending their Surceased nights in the dingy factory basement.

CHAPTER 11

AS THE HOURS and then days passed, Levin found he could not look calmly at his brother; he could not himself be natural and calm in his presence. When he went in to be with the sick man, his eyes and his attention were unconsciously dimmed, and he did not see or distinguish the details of his brother’s position. He smelled the awful odor, saw the dirt, disorder, and miserable condition, and heard the groans, and felt that nothing could be done to help. While Kitty directed her full attention and sympathy to the dying man, and Socrates anxiously circumnavigated the room, Levin’s mind wandered, like a landowner traveling the acres of his life. He surveyed all that was pleasurable, like his pit-mining operation and his beloved Kitty, and he surveyed all those tracts causing him concern: the mysterious, wormlike mechanical monsters rampaging the countryside; the circuitry adjustment protocol, which seemed to Levin an inexplicable and unjustified exercise of state power against the citizenry; and worst of all, the unspeakable illness eating his dear brother alive.

It never entered his head to analyze the details of the sick man’s situation, to consider how that body was lying under the quilt, how those emaciated legs and thighs and spine were lying huddled up, how those long waves of undulating flesh were appearing and disappearing, and whether they could not be made more comfortable, whether anything could not be done to make things, if not better, at least less bad. It made his blood run cold when he began to think of all these details. He was absolutely convinced that nothing could be done to prolong his brother’s life or to relieve his suffering. To be in the sickroom was agony to Levin; not to be there still worse. And he was continually, on various pretexts, going out of the room and coming in again, because he was unable to remain alone.

But Kitty thought, and felt, and acted quite differently. On seeing the roiling flesh of the sick man, she pitied him. And pity in her womanly heart did not arouse at all that feeling of horror and loathing that it aroused in her husband, but a desire to act, to find out all the details of his state, and to remedy them. And since she had not the slightest doubt that it was her duty to help him, she had no doubt either that it was possible, and immediately set to work. The very details, the mere thought of which reduced her husband to terror, immediately engaged her attention. She sent for the doctor, and set Tatiana and Socrates and Marya Nikolaevna to sweep and dust and scrub, as slow, crossed-wire Karnak was quite useless in this regard. She herself washed up something, washed out something else, laid something under the quilt. Something was by her directions brought into the sickroom, something else was carried out. She herself went several times to her room, regardless of the men she met in the corridor, got out and brought in sheets, pillowcases, towels, and shirts.

The sick man, though he seemed and was indifferent about it, was not angry, but only abashed, and on the whole, as it were, interested in what she was doing with him. Coming back from the doctor to whom Kitty had sent him, and putting back on his layers of prophylactic gear, Levin, on opening the door, came upon the sick man at the instant when, by Kitty’s directions, they were changing his linen. The long, white ridge of his spine, with the huge, prominent shoulder blades and jutting ribs and vertebrae, was bare, and covered in a rough constellation of black and greenish scabs; Marya Nikolaevna and the waiter were struggling with the sleeve of the nightshirt, and could not get the long, limp arm into it. Kitty, hurriedly closing the door after Levin, was not looking that way, but the sick man groaned, and she moved rapidly toward him.

“Make haste,” she said.

“Oh, don’t you come,” said the sick man angrily. “I’ll do it myself…”

“What say?” queried Marya Nikolaevna. But Kitty heard and saw he was ashamed and uncomfortable at being naked before her.

“I’m not looking, I’m not looking!” she said, putting the arm in. “Marya Nikolaevna, you come to this side, you do it,” she added.

Levin found a new doctor, not the one who had been attending Nikolai Levin, as the patient was dissatisfied with him. With Socrates and Tatiana secreted away in Levin and Kitty’s room, the new doctor came and sounded the patient; he consulted his II/Prognosis/M4, prescribed medicine, and with extreme minuteness explained first how to take the medicine and then what diet was to be kept to. He advised eggs, raw or hardly cooked, and seltzer water, with warm milk at a certain temperature.

“But what is wrong with him?” asked Levin, wringing his hands.

“It is unquestionably a unique case,” the doctor began, glancing warily at Nikolai’s stomach, where a grotesque convexity was even then fighting upward, like a frog squirming within a mud bank. “I must tell you, however, that as to the nature of his condition, I have not the slightest idea.”

When the doctor and his II/Prognosis/M4 had gone away, the sick man said something to his brother, of which Levin could distinguish only the last words: “Your Katya.” By the expression with which he gazed at her, Levin saw that he was praising her.

“I’m much better already,” he said. “Why, with you I would have gotten well long ago. How nice it is!” he took her hand and drew it toward his lips, but as though afraid she would dislike such contact, he changed his mind, let it go, and only stroked it. Kitty took his hand in both of hers and pressed it.

“Now turn me over on the left side and go to bed,” he said.

CHAPTER 12

THE NEXT DAY the sick man received the sacrament and extreme function from a priest, who stood, with his cross raised before him, a precautionary three feet away from the sickbed. During the ceremony Nikolai Levin prayed fervently. His great eyes, rotating in opposite directions from each other, tried but failed to fasten on the holy image that was set out on a card table covered with a colored napkin. For Levin it was agonizingly painful to behold the supplicating, hopeful eyes and the emaciated body, wasted and covered in its pattern of sores, making the sign of the cross on his tense, pockedmarked brow, and the prominent shoulders and hollow, gasping chest, which could not feel consistent with the life the sick man was praying for. During the sacrament Levin did what he, an unbeliever, had done a thousand times. He said, addressing God, “If Thou dost exist, make this man to recover” (of course this same thing has been repeated many times), “and Thou wilt save him and me.” When the priest had gone, Socrates came forth from hiding and Levin loaded his Third Bay with the same hopeful prayer, playing it over and over again.

After extreme unction the sick man became suddenly much better. He did not cough once in the course of an hour, and no fresh turgescence troubled his midsection. He smiled, kissed Kitty’s hand, thanking her with tears, and said he was comfortable, free from pain, and that he felt strong and had an appetite. He even raised himself when his soup was heated in a primitive I/Warmer/1, and asked for a cutlet as well. Hopelessly ill as he was, obvious as it was at the first glance that he could not recover, Levin and Kitty were for that hour both in the same state of excitement, happy, though fearful of being mistaken. Even Karnak emitted a harsh, happy garble, pinpricks of hopeful orange registering in the mud brown of his eyebank.

“Is he better?”

“Yes, much.”

“It’s wonderful.”

“There’s nothing wonderful in it.”

“Anyway, he’s better,” they said in a whisper, smiling to one another.

This self-deception was not of long duration. The sick man fell into a quiet sleep, but he was woken up half an hour later by a violent, wracking cough, accompanied by the abrupt return of the flesh-bulging phenomenon, extending this time from his stomach all along the length of his frame, from his neck down to his thighs. And all at once every hope vanished in those about him and in himself. The reality of his suffering crushed all hopes in Levin and Kitty and in the sick man himself, leaving no doubt, no memory even of past hopes.

At eight o’clock in the evening Levin and his wife were drinking tea in their room when Marya Nikolaevna ran in to them breathlessly. She was pale, and her lips were quivering. “He is dying!” she whispered. “I’m afraid he will die this minute.”

Both of them ran to him. He was lying in the bed, rocking back and forth, his stomach bulging and puckering, a new system of sores visible on his neck and arms, his long back bent, and his head hanging low.

“How do you feel?” Levin asked in a whisper.

“It is inside me,” Nikolai said enigmatically but with extreme distinctness, screwing the words out of himself.

Levin took Nikolai to mean that lurking inside him was the spirit of death, which was determined to consume him.

“Inside me,” Nikolai said again.

“Why do you think so?” said Levin, so as to say something.

“Inside-inside-it wants to come out,” he repeated, as though he had a liking for the phrase. “It must come out. It’s the end.”

Marya Nikolaevna went up to him.

“You had better lie down; you’d be easier,” she said.

“I shall lie down soon enough,” he pronounced slowly, a great, thick pocket of flesh bubbling up from his torso. “When I’m dead.”

Levin laid his brother on his back, sat down beside him, and gazed at his face, holding his breath. The dying man lay with closed eyes, but the muscles twitched grotesquely from time to time on his forehead, living creatures dancing within the skin. Levin involuntarily thought with him of what it was that was happening to him now, but in spite of all his mental efforts to go along with him he saw by the expression of that calm, stern face that for the dying man all was growing clearer and clearer that was still as dark as ever for Levin.

“Yes, yes, so,” the dying man articulated slowly at intervals, speaking with difficulty through a tongue that swelled and receded, swelled and receded.

“My God,” said Levin sotto voce to Socrates. “What manner of death is this?”

Three more days of agony followed; the sick man was still in the same condition. The sense of longing for his death was all felt by everyone now at the pitiable sight of the patient, writhing and moaning; all thought of capture, of the danger to the Class Ills, was forgotten in the face of such evident distress. Nikolai arched his back and gritted his teeth; he clutched at his pulsing stomach. Only at rare moments, when the Galena Box’s salutary hum gave him an instant’s relief from the pain, he would sometimes, half asleep, utter what was ever more intense in his heart than in all the others: “Oh, if it were only the end!” or, more ominously, “It is inside… it is inside… inside…” Occasionally, tired old Karnak plopped down on the floor and imitated his master’s agonized posture, his rusted end-effectors clutching across his dinged and dented midsection.

Such was the consuming horror of Nikolai’s suffering that when, on the tenth day from their arrival at the town, Kitty felt mildly unwell, Levin could not contain an anxious expression, which his wife immediately understood. “But you do not fear,” she began, choking back sobs, “that I have contracted Nikolai’s illness?”

“Of course not, dear. It cannot be so.” He gathered her to him for an embrace; only when he had brought her to bed and laid her down for a replenishing midday rest, did he carefully study her neck and forehead, for any signs of the terrible rippling that marked his brother’s flesh. But no; Kitty was untainted.

After dinner Kitty again donned her protective accoutrements and went as usual with her work to the sick man. He looked at her sternly when she came in, and smiled contemptuously when she said she had been unwell. That day he was alive with sores, his whole body covered with them, all of them throbbing and red like so many angry craters.

“How do you feel?” she asked him.

“Worse,” he articulated with difficulty. “In pain!”

“In pain, where?”

“Everywhere.” He gestured to his body, covered in ulcerated divots and loose flaps of skin.

“It will be over today, you will see,” said Marya Nikolaevna. Though it was said in a whisper, the sick man, whose hearing Levin had noticed was very keen, must have heard. Levin said hush to her, and looked round at the sick man. Nikolai had heard; but these words produced no effect on him. His eyes, ringed though they were with tiny sores on his cheeks and eyelids, had still the same intense, reproachful look.

“Why do you think so?” Levin asked her, when she had followed him into the corridor.

“He has begun picking at himself,” said Marya Nikolaevna.

“How do you mean?”

“Like this,” she said, scratching wildly at her arms and legs, as if clawing at something beneath the skin.

Marya Nikolaevna’s prediction came true. Toward night the sick man was not able to lift his hands, and could only gaze before him with the same intensely concentrated expression in his eyes. Even when his brother or Kitty bent over him, so that he could see them, he looked just the same. Kitty sent for the priest to say the prayer for the dying.

While the priest was administering the blessing, the dying man suddenly buckled violently, his hands thrashing, his body contorting up and back, shaking like a bridge wracked by high water. The priest attempted to continue the prayer as the dying man thrashed madly on the bed, every sore on his body pulsing vividly; indeed, as he stretched and his eyes rolled madly in his head, the little sores started to spurt cobalt bile like hideous little dragon mouths spitting gouts of fire. The priest scrabbled for his Holy Book and desperately continued chanting, reaching forward with a tremulous hand to try and place the cross to Nikolai’s cold forehead, but the dying man was bucking forward and back, slapping at his stomach, which bulged forward to an obscene degree. He moaned terribly, and Karnak emitted an awful, high-pitched shriek of distress.

“It is inside,” cried Nikolai. “Inside…”

At that moment the door was kicked open, and two young and handsome men with regimental-grade smokers burst into the sickroom.

“We are representatives of the Ministry of Robotics and State Administration. We have come today to… dear Heavenly Father!”

For while the man was speaking, Nikolai sat bolt upright, and his skin tore clean from his body like the wrapping ripped from a Class I plaything, his flesh flying free and scattering about the floor of the room like paper and ash. All present, including the two Toy Soldiers, stood frozen as Nikolai Dmitrich issued his last gurgling scream before his head lolled backward at a terrible angle. The remains of his body were shook free like a useless husk: shook free by a hunched, slavering inhuman being, more than six feet in height, its flexing, green-gray exoskeleton rippling with knobby stubs. The monstrosity, now standing astride the sickbed, had some dozens of eyes, clustered around a jagged, reptilian snout ending in a crooked, dirty-yellow beak. A thick, scaly tail swept about the room, while four stubby arms, each ending in a grasping three-fingered talon, lashed out in various directions.

Levin cried out and threw himself in front of Kitty; the priest wept and murmured prayers into his beard. Tatiana leaped in a rapid jeté from where she had been hiding, along with Socrates, behind the curtain in the rear of the room-and landed on one of the Toy Soldiers.

“Ah! Help!” shouted the Toy Soldier, as the Class III, her normal pink hue tinged with furious orange, clawed at his eyes with her long, manicured groznium fingernails. “Help!”

His colleague was unable to respond: for, as the others watched, transfixed, the unearthly creature let out a high, shrieking war cry, bounded off the bed, flexed its gigantic claws in midair, and landed on the other Toy Soldier, who had only just gathered the presence of mind to raise the smoker and draw aim. Before he could fire, the beast snapped its beak shut on the man’s head like the jaws of a trap.

The monster reared back with the soldier’s body dangling limply from its mouth, smashed its fat tree trunk of a tail against the wall, and stomped off through the broken door.

Tatiana meanwhile remained crouched over the other Toy Soldier, battering away robotically with clenched fists, dozens of blows a second, until at last the man stopped moving. The lissome Class III then sat coiled over his body for a long moment, the urgent flash of her eyebank slowly returning to its normal, even pulse.

NIKOLAI DMITRICH ISSUED HIS LAST GURGLING SCREAM BEFORE HIS HEAD LOLLED BACKWARD AT A TERRIBLE ANGLE

Through all of this, Levin stared with forlorn confusion at the sickbed where formerly his brother had lain-now but a tangle of sodden sheets, dotted with pieces of scalp, flesh in ill-colored hunks, small, gray piles of shed skin. Socrates gingerly helped Tatiana to her feet, and then bent to examine the battered body of the Toy Soldier, plucking a visionary-hundredfold from the metallic instrument tangle of his beard.

Kitty regarded her Class III with confusion, love, and fear. “I… I cannot express my thanks, that you took such a risk in defending our safety, as well as your own. But, but Tati…,” she trailed off, and Levin was forced to complete the thought for her: “Tatiana, you have violated the Iron Laws. No robot may strike a human being! How could your programming have allowed such an action?”

“I am uncertain,” said Tatiana slowly, anxiously smoothing out her tutu with one trembling end-effector.

“I shall explain,” answered Socrates, looking up from the Toy Soldier’s unmoving form. “This is not the corpse of a human being. This is groznium. These men were robots.”

As he and Kitty bid a tearful farewell to their brave beloved-companions, and began along the road home to Pokrovskoe, Dmitrich Levin was left to contend with twin mysteries: the grisly death of his brother, apparently as the result of having somehow become a sort of human hatching ground for an abominable alien creature; and the revelation that the Ministry’s new elite cadre, the very persons charged with collecting the nation’s Class Ills for adjustment, were not persons at all but perfectly humanoid robots. These mysteries revived in Levin that sense of horror in the face of the insoluble enigma that had come upon him that autumn evening when his brother had slept beside him. This feeling was now even stronger than before; even less than before did he feel capable of apprehending the meaning of life and death, and its inevitability rose up before him more terrible than ever.

But now, thanks to his wife’s presence, that feeling did not reduce him to despair. In spite of death and fear, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him toward love and toward life.

When they arrived home, the provincial doctor confirmed his earlier suppositions in regard to Kitty’s health: her indisposition was a symptom indicating that she was with child.

CHAPTER 13

FROM THE MOMENT when Alexei Alexandrovich understood that all that was expected of him was to leave his wife in peace, without burdening her with his presence, and that his wife herself desired this, he felt the madness that simmered like a kind of fever in the back of his brain begin to burn hotter and hotter-exactly what the Face had hoped for. Let Alexei be weak… let him grant forgiveness… let the woman and her mustachioed brigand live and go free… In time, the Face knew, their continuing existence would be a sharp nettle to torture Alexei’s already anguished mind past the point of no return.

Alexei did not know himself what he wanted now. It was only when Anna had left his house, and the II/Porter/7e62 asked whether he desired the full table setting, though he would be dining alone, that for the first time he clearly comprehended his position, and was appalled by it. Most difficult of all in this position was the fact that he could not in any way connect and reconcile his past with what was now. It was not the past when he had lived happily with his wife that troubled him. The transition from that past to a knowledge of his wife’s unfaithfulness he had lived through miserably already; that state was painful, but he could understand it. If his wife had then, on declaring to him her unfaithfulness, left him, he would have been wounded, unhappy, but he would not have been in the hopeless position-incomprehensible to himself-in which he felt himself now. He could not now reconcile his immediate past, his tenderness, his love for his sick wife, and for the other man’s child with what was now the case; for in return for all this he now found himself alone.

PUT TO SHAME. A LAUGHINGSTOCK. NEEDED BY NO ONE. DESPISED BY ALL.

“Yes,” responded Karenin, pacing the empty rooms of his home.

NOT I THOUGH.

I SHALL NEVER ABANDON YOU.

His confidence buttressed by the supportive exhortations of the Face, Alexei was able to preserve an appearance of composure, and even of indifference. Answering inquiries about the disposition of Anna Arkadyevna’s rooms and belongings, he exercised immense self-control to appear like a man in whose eyes what had occurred was neither unforeseen nor out of the ordinary course of events, and he attained his aim: no one could have detected in him signs of despair.

On the second day after her departure, Alexei Alexandrovich was paid a visit by a shop clerk, to whom he had previously sent word that his wife’s outstanding bills should be sent to her directly.

“Excuse me, your Excellency, for venturing to trouble you. But she is on the moon, where collections efforts are exceedingly difficult.”

Alexei began in his cold and formal way to explain that whatever planet or planetoid his wife cared to live upon was not his concern. But he trailed off, midway through his sentence, his head cocked slightly to the side, listening to an unheard admonition.

HOW DARE HE?

Yes, thought Alexei Karenin. Yes.

“You come to me today in search of money, the money owed to you by Anna Arkadyevna. You come and speak as if you do not know of our situation.”

“Of course, that is, I do know,” the shopkeeper stammered. “I do know of the situation to which you refer.”

“Yes,” Alexei began, and the human portion of his face twisted into a sneer, while his voice changed, emerging unnaturally with the timbre of nails rattling in an empty can: “BUT DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”

“I… I-yes, your Excellency,” the man stammered helplessly, stepping backward slowly as he spoke. “And normally of course before troubling you I would send my Class III. Funny little robot called Wholesale. But, sir, of course he’s been sent for adjustment.”

Alexei Alexandrovich threw his head back and pondered, as it seemed to the clerk, and all at once, turning round, he sat down calmly at the table.

“I am sorry for bothering you. Perhaps it is best that I go. Sir? Sir?”

Letting his head sink into his hands, Karenin sat for a long while in that position, several times attempted to speak and stopped short. Then, at last, he looked up, stared directly at the man, and his ocular device clicked slowly forward.

When it was done-when the shopkeeper’s windpipe had been shattered like the neck of a wine bottle, when his eyes popped out of his head like overripe fruit, when what had been the man’s body lay in a ragged mass on the floor, one hand still clutching Anna’s overdue bill-Alexei Alexandrovich allowed a small smile to creep into the corner of his mouth.

“You may consider it paid, sir,” he said to the corpse as he stepped over it and returned to his bedchamber.

But, alone again, Alexei Alexandrovich recognized that he had not the strength to keep up the line of firmness and composure any longer. He gave orders for the carriage that was awaiting him to be taken back, and for no one to be admitted, and he did not go down to dinner.

He felt that he could not turn aside from himself the hatred of men, because that hatred did not come from his being bad (in that case he could have tried to be better), but from his being shamefully and repulsively unhappy. He knew that for this, for the very fact that his heart was torn with grief, they would be merciless to him. He felt that men would crush him as dogs strangle a torn dog yelping with pain-if he did not crush them first. He knew that his sole means of security against people was to hide his wounds from them, and instinctively he tried to do this for two days, but now he felt incapable of keeping up the unequal struggle.

SHE MADE YOU THE FOOL, ALEXEI.

Tomorrow he would appear before his colleagues in the Ministry; accompanied by a regiment of Toy Soldiers, loyal to him and him alone, he would appear before them to deliver a decisive announcement.

SHE ABANDONED YOU, AND THE WORLD HOWLED WITH LAUGHTER.

He would announce to them his new thinking on the topic of the grand Project, of which he was the supervisor; for his plans on that topic had somewhat… evolved.

NOW SHE MUST SUFFER.

AND THE WORLD ALONG WITH HER.

He threw back his head and emitted a long, horrid noise, beginning as a laugh that was a cold parody of laughter, and trailing off into a hideous, sobbing moan of despair. His despair was even intensified by the consciousness that he was utterly alone in his sorrow. In all Petersburg there was not a human being to whom he could express what he was feeling, who would feel for him, not as a high official, not as a member of society, but simply as a suffering man; indeed he had not such a one in the whole world.

THE WORLD MUST SUFFER ALONG WITH HER.

The so-called beloved-companions, now that they had all been gathered up, would not have their circuits adjusted and then be returned to their owners.

They would never be returned at all.

ONLY ONE FRIEND, ALEXEI .

ONLY ME.

CHAPTER 14

WHEN THEY HAD ALIT upon terra firma, after the journey back from the moon, Vronsky and Anna stayed at one of Petersburg ’s finest hotels: he in a lower story, she in a suite of rooms with her child, a II/Governess/D145 to attend to the baby, and Android Karenina.

On the day of his arrival Vronsky went to his brother’s. There he found his mother, who had come from Moscow on business. His mother and sister-in-law greeted him as usual: they asked him about his stay on the moon, and talked of their common acquaintances, but did not let drop a single word in allusion to his connection with Anna. His brother came the next morning to see Vronsky, and of his own accord asked him about her, and Alexei Vronsky told him directly that he looked upon his connection with Madame Karenina as a marriage; that he hoped to arrange a divorce, and then to marry her, and until then he considered her as much a wife as any other wife, and he begged him to tell their mother and his wife so.

“If the world disapproves, I don’t care,” said Vronsky, “but if my relations want to be on family terms with me, they will have to be on the same terms with my wife.”

The elder brother, who had always a respect for his younger brother’s judgment, could not well tell whether he was right or not till the world had decided the question; for his part he had nothing against it, and with Alexei he went up to see Anna.

Before his brother, as before everyone, Vronsky addressed Anna with a certain formality, treating her as he might a very intimate friend, but it was understood that his brother knew their real relations.

In spite of all his social experience, Vronsky was, in consequence of the new position in which he was placed, laboring under a strange misapprehension. One would have thought he must have understood that society was closed for him and Anna; but now some vague ideas had sprung up in his brain that this was only the case in old-fashioned days, and that now with the rapidity of modern progress (he had unconsciously become by now a partisan of every sort of progress) the views of society had changed, and that the question of whether they would be received in society was not a foregone conclusion. Of course, he thought, intimate friends can and must look at it in the proper light.

One of the first ladies of Petersburg society whom Vronsky saw was his cousin Betsy.

“At last!” she said, greeting him joyfully. “And Anna? How glad I am! I can fancy after your delightful travels you must find our poor Petersburg horrid. I can fancy your honeymoon in the Mare Tranquillitatis! And your charming Lupo has yet to be gathered up! How marvelous for you!”

And thus did Betsy jump from subject to subject, clearly ill at ease with her old friends. She rambled about the rumors of alien monsters at large in the countryside-“Our Honored Guests, at last arrived!”-and spoke of how she eagerly awaited the return of the Class Ills. “Not that I miss Darling Girl one bit, of course. I’m doing just fine without her.” Vronsky nodded, noting with stifled amusement that Betsy’s hair sat in a sloppy bun atop her head, and her dress front was abominably wrinkled.

“How about the divorce,” Betsy prattled on. “Is that all over?”

“No, not yet-but what is the meaning of-”

Vronsky noticed that Betsy’s enthusiasm waned when she learned that no divorce had as yet taken place.

“People will throw stones at me, I know,” she said, “but I shall come and see Anna; yes, I shall certainly come. You won’t be in Petersburg long, I suppose?”

And she did certainly come to see Anna and Android Karenina the same day, but her tone was not at all the same as in former days. She unmistakably prided herself on her courage, and wished Anna to appreciate the fidelity of her friendship. She only stayed ten minutes, talking of society gossip and speculating about the Honored Guests: Were they from Venus? This new planet, Neptune, that had only just been discovered? Regardless, the Ministry was offering every assurance that the threat could be easily countered, and who would be such a fool as to doubt it?

On leaving she said:

“You’ve never told me when the divorce is to be? Supposing I’m ready to fling my cap over the mill, to show my friendship-other starchy people will give you the cold shoulder until you’re married. And that’s so simple nowadays. Although your husband, or so I understand, is exceptionally busy these days, overseeing the adjustment of the beloved-companions.

“If only your husband were someone else entirely. I do hear that of late he has become somewhat…”

She trailed off, raising one hand to her unkempt mess of hair.

“Somewhat strange!”

From Betsy’s tone Vronsky might have grasped what he had to expect from the world; but he made another effort in his own family. The day after his arrival Vronsky went to Varya, his brother’s wife, and finding her alone, expressed his wishes directly: that she would not throw stones, and would go simply and directly to see Anna, and would receive her in her own house.

“You know, Alexei,” she said after hearing him, “how fond I am of you, and how ready I am to do anything for you; but I have not spoken because I knew I could be of no use to you and to Anna Arkadyevna,” she said, articulating the name Anna Arkadyevna with particular care. “Don’t suppose, please, that I judge her. Never; perhaps in her place I should have done the same. I don’t and can’t enter into that,” she said, glancing timidly at his gloomy face. “But one must call things by their names. You want me to go and see her, to ask her here, and to rehabilitate her in society; but do understand that I cannot do so. I have daughters growing up, and I must live in the world for my husband’s sake.”

Vronsky left gloomily, knowing well that further efforts were useless, and that he had to live in Petersburg as though in a strange town, avoiding every sort of relation with his own old circle in order not to be exposed to the annoyances and humiliations, which were so intolerable to him. Even among strangers, he was always aware of the cold and envious stares of those wondering how he was allowed to walk about with his Class III robot. And to this implied question, he had no answer. Why had not these famous Toy Soldiers, who were led of course by none other than Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin himself, come to take away his beloved Lupo?

Indeed, one of the most unpleasant features of his position in Petersburg was that Alexei Alexandrovich and his name seemed to meet him everywhere. He could not begin to talk of anything without the conversation turning on Alexei Alexandrovich; he could not go anywhere without risk of meeting him. So at least it seemed to Vronsky, just as it seems to a man with a sore finger that he is continually, as though on purpose, grazing his sore finger on everything.

Their stay in Petersburg was all the more painful to Vronsky because he perceived all the time a sort of new mood that he could not understand in Anna. At one time she would seem in love with him, and then she would become cold, irritable, and impenetrable, spending hours sitting quietly alone with Android Karenina. She was worrying over something, and keeping something back from him, and did not seem to notice the humiliations that poisoned his existence, and for her, with her delicate intuition, must have been still more unbearable.

The old adage, which Vronsky remembered from his youth, seemed to hold true: You may travel to the moon, but do not be surprised if the world changes while you are gone.

CHAPTER 15

ONE OF ANNA’S OBJECTS in coming back to Russia had been to see her son; she understood from letters she had received that Sergey had been told she was dead, and that terrible deception weighed heavily on her heart. From the day she left the moon the thought of it had never ceased to agitate her. And as she got nearer to Petersburg, the delight and importance of this meeting grew ever greater in her imagination. When Vronsky spied her sitting in quiet counsel with Android Karenina, it was this dream she was speaking of, talking endlessly of Sergey and cuing Memories of the boy day and night. Anna did not even put to herself the question of how to arrange it. It seemed to her natural and simple to see her son when she should be in the same town with him. But on her arrival in Petersburg she was suddenly made distinctly aware of her present position in society-not only her relations with Vronsky, but her possession of one of the few remaining Class Ills on the city streets-and she grasped the fact that to arrange this meeting was no easy matter. To go straight to the house, where she might meet Alexei Alexandrovich, that she felt she had no right to do.

But to get a glimpse of her son out walking, finding out where and when he went out, was not enough for her; she had so looked forward to this meeting, she had so much she must say to him, she so longed to embrace him, to kiss him.

She decided that the next day, Seryozha’s birthday, she would go straight to her husband’s house and at any cost see her son and overturn the hideous deception with which they were encompassing the unhappy child.

As her plan formed itself in her mind, she went to a toy shop, bought toys; and then crept into Vronsky’s private chambres d’armory, while he slept soundly, and carefully removed what she felt were the items necessary for the excursion. She thought over a plan of action. She would go early in the morning at eight o’clock, when Alexei Alexandrovich would be certain not to be up. She carefully explained her intentions to Android Karenina, who instantly and completely understood her desires.

The next day, at eight o’clock in the morning, a woman climbed from a hired sledge outside the home of Alexei Karenin and rang at the front entrance.

“Some lady,” grunted the Karenins’ stoic, old mécanicien, Kapitonitch, who, not yet dressed, in his dumpy, grey undercoat, peeped out of the window to see a lady in a veil standing close up to the door. Kapitonitch opened the door and was astonished to see the figure of his old mistress, Anna Karenina, covered in her familiar traveling cloak and veil.

Kapitonitch stood perfectly still, a statue of a man with his hand upon the doorknob-for how could he open it? He remembered Anna’s kindness, and he wished for nothing greater than to allow her entrance to what had been her home; but it was Kapitonitch who had buried the poor store clerk in a rutted ditch behind the house.

“Whom do you want?” he asked, affecting a voice as hard as tempered steel.

From behind her veil, Anna, apparently not hearing his words, made no answer.

At the same moment, in the gardens behind the house, the real Anna Karenina-for of course it was Android Karenina standing still and wordless at the front door behind Anna’s veil-the real Anna overleaped the high electrified fence and landed with a bone-rattling thud beside the fountain. Uneasily holding one of Vronsky’s prized regimental smokers before her, she advanced in her stocking feet toward the rear door of the great house that once, a lifetime ago, had been her own. Step after careful step she advanced, not daring to glance up at the bedroom windows, and instead noticing, a few feet from the back door, a kind of rickety outbuilding she did not recognize.

The large metal door of this shed hung slightly open, glinting in the daylight, and Anna’s curiosity overcame her.

At the front door, noticing the embarrassment of the unknown lady, Kapitonitch went out to her, opened the second door for her, and asked her what she wanted.

Again the woman said nothing.

“His honor’s not up yet,” said Kapitonitch, looking at her attentively. Then, hearing a loud, sharp shriek from the rear of the house-the distressed call of a captured bird? the strangled cry of a woman?-he wheeled sharply about.

Anna hid herself behind the shed, out of which she had rapidly retreated, in horror of what lay inside. Dear God, she thought, jamming her thick fox-fur muff into her mouth to muffle the ragged sound of her breathing.

Dear merciful God.

Inside the shed she had seen a long, wooden worktable, lined with human faces. Some were displayed in velvet cases, some scattered haphazardly in a gruesome clutter; faces high-cheeked and fleshy and beadyeyed; whole faces and faces in various states of ghoulish disassembly: here a mouth, there the broad expanse of a forehead, there a pair of eyeballs rolling in a wooden box; half a cheek, the skin peeled back to reveal the tangle of red-black muscle beneath.

Still reeling from the stomach-turning awfulness of such a sight, Anna gave the lock of the house’s rear door a single silenced blast-charge, slipped quietly inside, and stood with her eyes wide, breathing deeply. She had not anticipated that the absolutely unchanged hall of the house where she had lived for nine years would so greatly affect her. Memories sweet and painful rose one after another in her heart, and for a moment she forgot what she was here for.

Android Karenina, at the doorstep, her duty discharged, bowed to Kapitonitch and turned to depart; but the old mécanacien, still believing this to be his old mistress, felt a pang of grief that this kind woman, however to blame, should leave without seeing her son. “Stop,” he cried. “Wait a moment.”

There was something in the immediate way she obeyed his order…

“Spin in a circle,” Kapitonitch ordered, squinting with suspicion as the woman did so immediately. “Put your hands in the air. Wiggle your fingers.” At each command, the woman demonstrated automatic-that is, robotic-obedience.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “Android Karenina?”

“Turn around. Slowly” said the real Anna, from where she now stood, directly behind Kapitonitch, the smoker still drawn and leveled shakily at his head. But as he turned, Kapitonitch drew a weapon of his own: a small, metallic hand cannon, as long again as the length of his arm, and aimed directly at her head.

Of course the mécanicien of this household is armed, thought Anna. Of course.

“Oh, Madame Karenina,” said Kapitonitch sadly, and unlike Anna’s, his hand did not shake.

For a long moment they stared at each other, weapons drawn. On the stoop Android Karenina, her veil now drawn back, regarded the scene in terrified silence, her eyebank fluttering double-time as she calculated her odds of disarming Kapitonitch without harm to her mistress. Anna offered a silent prayer that, if she were fated to die here, Providence would allow her to see her dear son once more before it was all over.

But it was not Providence that saved her, it was human kindness; so often, one comes dressed in the clothing of the other. “I cannot shoot you, Madame Karenina. Please come in, your Excellency,” he said to her.

She tried to say something, but her voice refused to utter any sound; with a guilty and imploring glance at the old man she went with light, swift steps up the stairs. Bent over, and his galoshes catching on the steps, Kapitonitch ran after her, imploring in an urgent whisper that she not tarry.

Anna mounted the familiar staircase, not understanding what the old man was saying.

“This way, to the left, if you please. Excuse its not being tidy. Your husband’s in the old parlor now,” the mécanicien said, panting. “Excuse me, wait a little, your Excellency; I’ll just see,” he said, and overtaking her, he opened the high door and disappeared behind it. Anna stood still, waiting. “He’s only just awake,” Kapitonitch reported, coming out.

“Do be quick, madame,” he said again. “Please. He will not be happy to find you here. Most unhappy indeed.”

And at the very instant the mécanicien said this, Anna caught the sound of a childish yawn. From the sound of this yawn alone she knew her son and seemed to see him living before her eyes.

“Let me in; go away!” she said, and went in through the high doorway, Android Karenina heeling her closely. On the right of the door stood a bed, and sitting up in the bed was the boy. His little body bent forward with his nightshirt unbuttoned, he was stretching and still yawning. The instant his lips came together they curved into a blissfully sleepy smile, and with that smile he slowly and deliciously rolled back again.

“Seryozha!” she whispered, going noiselessly up to him. Android Karenina glowed warmly, suffusing the scene with delicate pinks of joy.

When Anna was parted from her Sergey, and all this latter time when she had been feeling a fresh rush of love for him, she had pictured him as he was at four years old, when she had loved him most of all. Now he was not even the same as when she had left him; he was still further from the four-year-old tot, more grown and thinner. How thin his face was, how short his hair was! What long hands! How he had changed since she left him! But it was he, with his head, his lips, his soft neck and broad little shoulders.

“Seryozha!” she repeated just in the child’s ear.

He raised himself again on his elbow, turned his tangled head from side to side as though looking for something, and opened his eyes. Slowly and inquiringly he looked for several seconds at his mother standing motionless before him, and just behind her the comforting familiar figure of her beloved-companion.

All at once he smiled a blissful smile, and shutting his eyes, rolled not backward but toward her into her arms.

“Seryozha! My darling boy!” she said, breathing hard and putting her arms round his plump little body.

“Mother!” he said, wriggling about in her arms so as to touch her hands with different parts of him. “I know,” he said, opening his eyes; “it’s my birthday today. I knew you’d come. I’ll get up right now.”

And saying that he fell back asleep.

Anna looked at him hungrily; she saw how he had grown and changed in her absence. She knew, and did not know, the bare legs, so long now, that were thrust out below the quilt, those short-cropped curls on his neck, which she had so often kissed. She touched all this and could say nothing; tears choked her.

“What are you crying for, mother?” Seryozha said, waking completely up. “Mother, what are you crying for?” he cried in a tearful voice.

“I won’t cry… I’m crying for joy. It’s so long since I’ve seen you. I won’t, I won’t,” she said, gulping down her tears and turning away. “Come, it’s time for you to dress now,” she added after a pause, and, never letting go his hands, she sat down by his bedside on the chair, where his clothes were ready for him.

“How do you dress without me? How…” she tried to begin talking simply and cheerfully, but she could not, and again she turned away.

“I don’t have a cold bath, Papa didn’t order it. Why, you’re sitting on my clothes!”

And Seryozha went off into a peal of laughter. She looked at him and smiled.

“Mother, darling, sweet one!” he shouted, flinging himself on her again and hugging her. It was as though only now, on seeing her smile, he fully grasped what had happened.

“I don’t want that on,” he said, taking off her hat. And as it were, seeing her afresh without her hat, he fell to kissing her again. “Why do you carry a smoker? Mother!”

“But what did you think about me?You didn’t think I was dead?”

“They said you were killed! By a koschei that came upon you in the marketplace, while you shopped for apples.”

“Not so!”

“They said it attached itself at the base of your spine, and then burrowed all the way up to your brain.”

“No, indeed, my darling!”

“They said when you were found, your face was so mutilated, it was almost impossible to recognize it.”

Anna’s eyelashes fluttered furiously, as she attempted to conceal her dismay at the wishful thinking that had clearly gone into that particular detail of the story Karenin had concocted for Seryozha.

“I never believed it,” the boy said.

“You didn’t believe it, my sweet?”

“I knew, I knew!” he repeated his favorite phrase, and snatching the hand that was stroking his hair, he pressed the open palm to his mouth and kissed it. He afforded a sweet glance, too, to Android Karenina, who issued a small hum of pleasure and tried in vain to straighten his mess of childish curls with her slender phalangeals.

“You must go,” said Kapitonitch from the door, a note of desperation in his voice. “He must not discover you here. I should not have permitted it. Please, madame.” But neither mother nor son would permit their reunion to be interrupted.

The old mécanicien shook his head, and with a sigh he closed the door. “I’ll wait another ten minutes,” he said to himself, clearing his throat and wiping away tears. “I have made a mistake. A terrible mistake.”

Anna could not say good-bye to her boy, but the expression on her face said it, and he understood. “Darling, darling Kootik!” she used the name by which she had called him when he was little, “you won’t forget me? You…,” but she could not say more.

“Of course not, mother,” he responded simply. And then, seeming to think of something suddenly, he said, “She has not been collected for circuitry adjustment?”

“Not yet, dear son, not yet.”

“Oh. Then are you among the deserving?”

“What?

“Father says only the deserving ones will have their Class Ills returned to them after their circuits have been properly adjusted. Only the deserving are to own robots from now on.”

Anna’s eyes widened in bafflement. “And who has your father spoken of, as being amongst the ‘deserving?’”

Seryozha thought for a moment, and then let out a gale of childish laughter. “Why, he himself, I suppose! None other than he!”

How often afterward she thought of words she might have said. But now she did not know how to say it, and could say nothing. She only trembled, and clutched dearly at Android Karenina like a drowning woman clutches at a lifeboat. Seryozha only understood that his mother was unhappy and loved him. He knew that his father would wake soon, and that his father and mother could not meet, or the consequences would be disastrous. Android Karenina pulled on her mistress’s arm, as it was past time for them to depart, but silently Seroyzha pressed close to her and whispered, “Don’t go yet. He won’t come just yet.”

The mother held him away from her to see what he was thinking, what to say to him, and in his frightened face she read not only that he was speaking of his father, but, as it were, asking her what he ought to think about his father.

“Seryozha, my darling,” she said, “you must temper his hatred with your goodness. You are the only human thing he has left.”

“I fear him!” he cried in despair through his tears, and, clutching her by the shoulders, he began squeezing her with all his force to him, his arms trembling with the strain.

“My sweet, my little one!” said Anna, and she cried as weakly and childishly as he.

“No… please… sir… no…” came a cry from just beyond the door. Anna had only time to reflect how the voice of a man as strong as Kapitonitch could be reduced, in a moment of terror and desperation, to one like that of a frightened child-when the door flew open with a sharp clatter, and the body of the mécanicien came flying into the room. The corpse slammed into the wall above Sergey’s head and slid down the wall, leaving a slick of blood below the colorful tapestry hanging above the boy’s bed.

Sergey wailed like a bobcat and buried his head in his mother’s arms. Android Karenina threw a protective arm around her mistress, and the three of them huddled together, cowering from the tall and dramatic figure of Alexei Karenin, who stood trembling, filling the doorway with his imposing frame.

A long moment passed, before he let out a scream of primal rage. His eyes-one human, one rotating with a dead buzz in his silver half-face-glared from the doorway at the huddled band, and the dread oculus slowly extended toward them, its minute click foretelling some dire and inalterable fate.

Anna, though in her mind she prayed frantically for the safety of her son, was outwardly as silent as Android Karenina.

Only Sergey spoke, opening his young, pink lips and forming a single word: “Father…”

And even as Alexei Alexandrovich’s cruel mechanical eye quivered in its metal socket; even as he stood with stiffened spine and clenched fists in the doorway; even as every inch of his body seemed to strain with hatred and the desire to destroy; even so, his natural eye softened, and his mouth went slack and moist. From somewhere within him, a single, small word welled up and fought its way to freedom.

“Go.”

Anna hurriedly rose, but in the rapid glance she flung at him, taking in his whole figure in all its details, feelings of repulsion and hatred for him and jealousy over her son took possession of her. How could she go? How could she leave her dear Sergey with this monster?

But Android Karenina, calculating options at lightning speed, knew that there could be no other choice: if they did not go quickly, all would die. The loyal machine-woman lifted her mistress bodily over her shoulder, as a mother carries a sleeping child to bed, and together they fled the house. Anna had not time to undo, and so carried back with her, the parcel of toys she had chosen the day before in a toy shop with such love and sorrow.

CHAPTER 16

AS INTENSELY AS ANNA had longed to see her son, and as long as she had been thinking of it and preparing herself for it, she had not in the least expected what had occurred. The man now living in that house-the man with trembling jaw and destructive oculus, who kept a collection of half-built human faces in a shed-this man was not the same man who once had been her husband. On getting back to her lonely rooms in the hotel, she could not for a long while understand why she was there. “Yes, it’s all over, and I am again alone,” she said to herself, and without taking off her hat she sat down in a low chair by the hearth. Fixing her eyes on a I/Hourprotector/47 standing on a table between the windows, she tried to think.

She thought of the sympathy that Kapitonitch had shown in letting her into the home, and what it had cost him; she thought of Sergey’s words: “Only the deserving…” She had lost her son now, forever; and how much longer before Android Karenina, too, was torn from her-never to return?

The II/Governess/143 brought the baby to Anna. The plump, well-fed little baby, on seeing her mother, as she always did, held out her fat little hands, and with a smile on her toothless mouth, began, like a fish with a float, bobbing her fingers up and down the starched folds of her embroidered skirt, making them rustle. It was impossible not to smile, not to kiss the baby, impossible not to hold out a finger for her to clutch, crowing and prancing all over; impossible not to offer her a lip, which she sucked into her little mouth by way of a kiss. And all this Anna did, and took her in her arms and made her dance, and kissed her fresh little cheek and bare little elbows; but at the sight of this child it was plainer than ever to her that the feeling she had for her could not be called love in comparison with what she felt for Seryozha. And she was forever-not physically only, but spiritually-divided from him, and it was impossible to set this right.

She gave the baby back to the nurse, let her go, and cued happy Memories of Sergey on Android Karenina’s monitor. In the last and best Memory, Sergey was playing in a white smock, sitting astride a chair, trying to solve a I/Puzzle/92 depicting a Huntbear, working with frowning eyes and smiling lips. It was his best, most characteristic expression.

That was the last Memory in the series, and after it, by chance, came one of Vronsky on the moon performing a lighthearted gravity-reduced dance with his longish hair tucked inside his glass helmet. “Oh, here he is!” she said, regarding the Memory of Vronsky, and she suddenly recalled that he was the cause of her present misery. She had not once thought of him all morning. But now, coming all at once upon that manly, noble face, so familiar and so dear to her, she felt a sudden rush of love for him.

“But where is he? How is it he leaves me alone in my misery?” she asked of Android Karenina, forgetting she had herself kept from him everything concerning her son. She sent to ask him to come to her immediately; with a throbbing heart she awaited him, rehearsing to herself the words in which she would tell him all, and the expressions of love with which he would console her. The II/Footman/74 returned with the answer that he had a visitor with him, but that he would come immediately, and that he asked whether she would let him bring with him Prince Yashvin, who had just arrived in Petersburg. He’s not coming alone, and since dinner yesterday he has not seen me, she thought. He’s not coming so that I could tell him everything, but coming with Yashvin. And all at once a strange idea came to her:

“Android Karenina,” she asked, “what if he has ceased to love me?” The Class Ill’s eyebank bubbled a warm, empathetic lavendar, and she held out her arms to comfort her mistress. But it was no use; in going over the events of the last few days, Anna saw in everything a confirmation of this terrible idea: the fact that he had not dined at home yesterday, and the fact that he had insisted on their taking separate sets of rooms in Petersburg, and that even now he was not coming to her alone, as though he were trying to avoid meeting her face to face.

“But he ought to tell me so. I must know that it is so. If I knew it, then I would know what I should do!” she said to the robot, who in response reset her monitor to the previous sequence, hoping with the Memories of Sergey to reverse her mistress’s melancholy humor. But Anna was caught in this frightening way of thinking, utterly unable to picture to herself the position she would be in if she were convinced of his not caring for her. She thought he had ceased to love her, she felt close to despair, and consequently she felt exceptionally alert. She left Android Karenina and went to her room alone, and as she dressed, she took more care over her appearance than she had done all those days, as though he might, if he had grown cold to her, fall in love with her again because she had dressed and arranged her hair in the way most becoming to her.

She heard the bell ring before she was ready. When she went into the drawing room it was not he, but Yashvin, who met her eyes. Vronsky was watching the Memory of Sergey, and he made no haste to look round at her.

“We have met already,” she said, putting her little hand into the huge hand of Yashvin, whose bashfulness was so queerly out of keeping with his immense frame and coarse face. “We met last year at The Cull. Shut that off,” she said, indicating sharply to Android Karenina to dim the Memory, and glancing significantly at Vronsky’s flashing eyes. “Were the matches good this year?”

Having talked a little while, and noticing that Vronsky glanced at the clock, Yashvin asked her whether she would be staying much longer in Petersburg, and unbending his huge figure reached after his cap.

“Not long, I think,” she said hesitatingly, glancing at Vronsky.

“So then we shan’t meet again?”

“Come and dine with me,” said Anna resolutely, angry, it seemed, with herself for her embarrassment, but flushing as she always did when she defined her position before a fresh person. “The dinner here is not good, but at least you will see him. There is no one of his old friends in the regiment Alexei cares for as he does for you.”

“Delighted,” said Yashvin with a smile, from which Vronsky could see that he liked Anna very much.

Yashvin said good-bye and went away; Vronsky stayed behind.

“Are you going too?” she said to him.

“I’m late already,” he answered. “Run along! I’ll catch you up in a moment,” he called toYashvin.

She took him by the hand, and without taking her eyes off him, gazed at him while she ransacked her mind for the words to say that would keep him.

“Wait a minute, there’s something I want to say to you,” and taking his broad hand she pressed it on her neck. “Oh, was it right my asking him to dinner?”

“You did quite right,” he said with a serene smile that showed his even teeth, and he kissed her hand.

“Alexei, Petersburg is strange now-it is lonely and strange without the Class Ills,” she said, pressing his hand in both of hers. “Soon ours will be taken from us as well. We will be safer in the provinces, Alexei, safer and happier.”

“I cannot agree with you, dear, given what Yashvin was telling me only just before you came in. These aliens, these so-called Honored Guests, rampage everywhere outside the cities; they say that now, when a person falls ill, his family packs up and flees as rapidly as possible, because soon a large, beaked reptile with dozens of eyeballs will burst forth from inside him and join the hordes. Yashvin says it is quickly becoming very like a full-scale invasion, and speaks as though the provinces will soon be entirely overrun.”

“Alexei, I am miserable, and scared. Where can we go? And when?”

“Soon, soon. You wouldn’t believe how disagreeable our way of living here is to me too,” he said-but then he drew away his hand, and turned his face away.

He is happy that there are these aliens in the woods, she thought bitterly. Happy for a reason to keep us here.

“Well, go, go!” she said in a tone of offense, and she walked quickly away from him.

CHAPTER 17

AT DINNER, YASHVIN SPOKE of the sensational new opera then in residence at Petersburg’s grand Vox Fourteen; Anna, much to Vronsky’s alarm, determined that they should get a box for the evening. After dinner, Yashvin went to smoke, and Vronsky went down with him to his own rooms. After sitting there for some time he ran upstairs. Anna was already dressed in a low-necked gown of light silk and velvet that she had had made on the moon, and had set Android Karenina to a charming pearl-white glow that was particularly becoming.

“Are you really going to the theater?” he said, trying not to look at her.

“Why do you ask with such alarm?” she said, wounded again at his not looking at her. “Why shouldn’t I go?” She appeared not to understand the motive of his words.

“Oh, of course, there’s no reason whatever,” he said, frowning.

“That’s just what I say,” she said, willfully refusing to see the irony of his tone, and quietly turning back her long, perfumed glove.

“Anna, for God’s sake! What is the matter with you?” he said, exasperated.

“I don’t understand what you are asking.”

“You know that it’s out of the question to go.”

“Why so?”

He shrugged his shoulders with an air of perplexity and despair.

“But do you mean to say you don’t know…?” he began.

“But I don’t care to know!” she almost shrieked. “I don’t care to. Do I regret what I have done? No, no, no! If it were all to do again from the beginning, it would be the same. For us, for you and for me, there is only one thing that matters, whether we love each other. Other people we need not consider. Why can’t I go? I love you, and I don’t care for anything,” she said, glancing at him with a peculiar gleam in her eyes that he could not understand. “If you have not changed to me, why don’t you look at me?”

He looked at her. He saw all the beauty of her face, set against Android Karenina’s gentle pearl-white glow. But now her beauty and elegance were just what irritated him.

“My feeling cannot change, you know, but I beg you, I entreat you,” he said again in French, with a note of tender supplication in his voice, but with coldness in his eyes.

She did not hear his words, but she saw the coldness of his eyes, and answered with irritation:

“And I beg you to explain why I should not go.”

“Because… because…” He hesitated, and then grasped for an explanation which was not the true cause of his reluctance, but which nevertheless had the virtue of being quite true: “Because of Android Karenina! Flaunting yourself in public in the company of your Class III will only give your husband and his minions a perfect opportunity to subject her to his ridiculous circuitry adjustment program after all.”

“This is a risk I am willing to take,” she said, filled with spite toward him, toward Alexei Karenin, and toward their whole pitiful situation. Only her Class III did she love and hold blameless, and now she turned tenderly to Android Karenina. “A risk that we are willing to take. Aren’t we, my beloved-companion?”

In answer, Android Karenina flashed her eyebank tenderly at her mistress, and motored off behind her to the Vox Fourteen.

CHAPTER 18

VRONSKY FOR THE FIRST TIME experienced a feeling of anger against Anna, almost a hatred for her willfully refusing to understand her own position. This feeling was aggravated by his being unable to tell her plainly the cause of his anger. If he had told her directly what he was thinking, he would have said:

“In that dress, with that android-cast glow, to show yourself at the theater is not merely equivalent to acknowledging your position as a fallen woman, it is flinging down a challenge to society-that is to say, cutting yourself off from it forever.”

What Alexei Kirillovich could not yet understand was that such concerns simply did not matter any longer. After that night at the Vox Fourteen, a night that would be long remembered and long mourned by the people of Russia, he would understood much better.

Left alone in the wake of her departure, he finally got up from his chair and began pacing up and down the room.

“And what’s today?”

Lupo gave a gruff yelp, tilted his head, and scraped the hard wooden floor four times with his right front claw. “Yes, of course, the fourth night. Yegor and his wife are there, and my mother, most likely. Of course all Petersburg’s there. By now she’s gone in, taken off her cloak and come into the light.” Vronsky threw himself back into the chair and patted his lap for Lupo to leap into it. “What about me? What about us? Are we frightened? From every point of view-stupid, stupid!… And why is she putting me in such a position?” he said with a gesture of despair.

“Come, friend,” Vronsky snarled, and his fierce beloved-companion obeyed. “We’re going to the theater.”

When they arrived at the palatial Vox Fourteen it was half past eight and the performance was in full swing. The II/Boxkeeper/19, recognizing Vronsky as he peeled off his fur coat, called him “your Excellency.” In the brightly lighted corridor there was no one but the II/Boxkeeper/19 and two II/Attendant/77s listening at the doors. Through the closed doors came the sounds of the discreet staccato accompaniment of the orchestra, and a single female voice rendering distinctly a musical phrase. The door opened to let the Boxkeeper slide through, and the phrase drawing to the end reached Vronsky’s hearing clearly. But the doors were closed again at once, and Vronsky did not hear the end of the phrase and the cadence of the accompaniment, though he knew from the thunder of applause that it was over.

When he entered the Vox Fourteen, brilliantly lighted with I/Lumiére/7s and gas jets, the noise was still going on. On the stage the singer, bowing and smiling, with bare shoulders flashing with diamonds, was, with the help of the tenor who had given her his arm, gathering up the bouquets that were flying awkwardly over the footlights. Then she went up to a gentleman with glossy pomaded hair parted down the center, who was stretching across the footlights holding out something to her, and all the public in the stalls as well as in the boxes was in excitement, craning forward, shouting and clapping. The conductor from his podium assisted in passing the offering, and straightened his white tie. Vronsky walked into the middle of the stalls, and, standing still, began looking about him. His attention turned upon the familiar, habitual surroundings, the stage, the noise, all the familiar, uninteresting, particolored herd of spectators in the packed theater. There were no Class Ills. No beloved-companions lounging at their master’s elbows, shedding flattering light, fetching spectacles and lighting cigarettes. All these people-the uniforms and black coats, the dirty crowd in the upper gallery, and in the boxes and front rows, the real people, the people of society-but not a robot moving among them.

Or so it appeared to Count Vronsky.

He had not yet seen Anna. He purposely avoided looking in her direction. But he knew by the direction of people’s eyes where she was. He looked round discreetly, but he was not seeking her; expecting the worst, his eyes sought out Alexei Alexandrovich. To his relief he was not in the theater that evening.

“How little of the military man there is left in you!” his friend Serpuhovskoy was saying to him. “A diplomat, an artist, something of that sort, one would say.”

“Yes, it was like going back home when I put on a black coat,” answered Vronsky, smiling and with a few clicks activating his opera glass.

“Well, I’ll own I envy you there. When I come back from abroad and put on this,” he touched his epaulets, “I regret my freedom.”

Serpuhovskoy had long given up all hope of Vronsky’s career, but he liked him as before, and was now particularly cordial to him.

“What a pity you were not in time for the first act!”

Vronsky, listening with one ear, moved his opera glass from the stalls and scanned the boxes. Near a lady in a turban and a bald old man, who seemed to wave angrily in the moving opera glass, Vronsky suddenly caught sight of Anna’s head, proud, strikingly beautiful, with Android Karenina’s pearl glow casting intricate shadows through the lace of her collar. She was in the fifth box, twenty paces from him. She was sitting in front, and, slightly turning, was saying something to Yashvin. The setting of her head on her handsome, broad shoulders, the restrained excitement and brilliance of her eyes and her whole face reminded him of her just as he had seen her at the float in Moscow. But he felt utterly different toward her beauty now. In his feeling for her now there was no element of mystery, and so her beauty, though it attracted him even more intensely than before, gave him now a sense of injury. She was not looking in his direction, but Vronsky felt that she had seen him already.

When Vronsky turned the opera glass again in that direction, he noticed that Anna’s friend Princess Varvara was particularly red, and kept laughing unnaturally and looking round at the next box. Anna, de-telescoping her I/Fan/6 and tapping it on the red velvet, was gazing away and did not see, and obviously did not wish to see, what was taking place in the next box. Yashvin’s face wore the expression which was common when he was losing at cards. Scowling, he sucked the left end of his mustache further and further into his mouth, and cast sidelong glances at the next box.

In that box on the left were the Kartasovs Vronsky knew them, and knew that Anna was acquainted with them. Madame Kartasova, a thin little woman, was standing up in her box, and, her back turned upon Anna, she was putting on a mantle that her husband was holding for her. Her face was pale and angry, and she was talking excitedly. Kartasov, a fat, bald man, was continually looking round at Anna, while he attempted to soothe his wife. When the wife had gone out, the husband lingered a long while, and tried to catch Anna’s eye, obviously anxious to bow to her. But Anna, with unmistakable intention, avoided noticing him, and talked to Yashvin, whose cropped head was bent down to her.

Vronsky could not understand exactly what had passed between the Kartasovs and Anna, but he saw that something humiliating for Anna had happened. He knew this both from what he had seen, and most of all from the face of Anna, who, he could see, was taxing every nerve to carry through the part she had taken up. And in maintaining this attitude of external composure she was completely successful. Anyone who did not know her and her circle, who had not heard all the utterances of the women expressive of commiseration, indignation, and amazement, that she should show herself in society, and show herself so conspicuously with her lace and her beauty, and with the audacity to parade her Class III in such circumstances-anyone would have admired the serenity and loveliness of this woman, without suspecting that she was undergoing the sensations of a man in the stocks.

Knowing that something had happened, but not knowing precisely what, Vronsky felt a thrill of agonizing anxiety, and hoping to find out something, he went toward the box where she sat. Working his way through the aisles toward her, he jostled as he came out against the colonel of his regiment, talking to two strangers.

The colonel greeted him with genial familiarity, and hastened to introduce him to the others. The colonel’s companions were young, with neat hairstyles under regimental caps, high cheekbones, and cold, green-gray eyes.

“Excuse me, gentlemen, but I must pass. Good evening, sir,” he said curtly, ignoring the two strangers and addressing only his old friend, the colonel. The men did not step aside, however, but to the contrary formed a tight, jostling ring around him, chattering familiarly.

“Ah, Vronsky! When are you coming to the regiment? We can’t let you off without a supper. You’re one of the old set,” said one of the men. But even as he smiled politely, still glancing up toward Anna’s box and trying to shoulder past, Vronsky saw that all three, even his old friend the colonel, wore not the bronze uniform of his regiment, but the crisp blue of the Toy Soldiers. Vronsky turned away from them, silently appealing to the colonel to let him by… and noticed with a start, as he looked directly into the colonel’s round, handsome eyes, that this was not his old friend at all.

The face was almost the same face-the same set of the jaw, the same roll of flesh below the chin, the same bristly black mustache-but a cunning simulacrum of his friend’s appearance, not the real thing.

Vronsky recoiled. “I can’t stop, awfully sorry, another time,” he said, and tried again to break free, to get to the carpeted stairs that led to Anna’s box.

“No, no,” replied the colonel-who-was-not-the-colonel genially. “We insist.” One of the other soldiers grinned, as if preparing to invite Vronsky for a drink or a game of Flickerfly. “Say, the adjustment protocol is moving toward completion. How strange it is that your Class III remains uncollected.”

“Oh yes!” said the third soldier. “Why, we could rectify that situation right away!”

Lupo hissed and showed his teeth. Vronsky murmured a demurral while his left hand, hidden by his cloak, moved discreetly toward his belt. Although not, apparently, as discreetly as he had hoped.

“Oh, that won’t do, your Excellency,” said the “colonel” with a smile. “That won’t do at all.”

The colonel’s face blurred, wavered, and was replaced in a terrible instant by a silver-black mass of churning gears. Vronsky yelped in startlement as the same hideous transformation unfolded on the other men: the skin of their faces retracted, revealing not flesh but gears-gears rolling in gears, tiny pistons pumping up and down, winding tracks-all in the approximate shape of a human face, but made from the stuff of robots.

“Good God,” Vronsky had time to say, before a tongue of flame shot forth from the mouth-space on the colonel’s face, or rather where the face had been a moment ago. Vronsky ducked in the last moment and caught the blast with the top of his head. He cried out in pain, smelling his own singed flesh and burnt hair, and drew his smoker to open fire; Lupo launched himself forward on his strong hind legs and landed on the chest of one of the counterfeit soldiers, groznium teeth sinking into groznium Adam’s apple. The robot cried out and went down in what appeared to be some genuine form of pain, while Lupo wrestled and thrashed at his neck.

Abstractedly, Vronsky heard the panicked screams of the other theatergoers; he ducked and rolled away from a second fire-blast, crouching behind a red-upholstered seat and returning fire. The non-colonel winced as he absorbed a fusillade that would have killed a real human several times over.

Vronsky cursed, and then heard, from the other side of the box, a strangely commonplace refrain coming from the third soldier. “Here boy,” the soldier said, crouching down and patting at his lap. “Here, Lupo.”

Vronsky, rolling away from a third belch of fire from his antagonist, nearly laughed at the implausibility of such a plan-until he saw that Lupo had indeed released his toothsome clasp on the one robot’s neck and was trotting, spellbound, toward the other. “What in the…”

A fresh gout of fire spilled over the seat, and Vronsky narrowly avoided it, got off a quick smoker blast at the face-hole of the pretended colonel, and was then distracted again-this time by the sound of weapons firing above.

Anna’s box.

“No!” he cried.

He looked up, to where two more of the Toy Soldiers in their handsome blue uniforms stood, with smokers drawn and aimed at Anna’s heart. And fat, foolish Kartasov, who mere minutes ago had presented no more significant a threat than societal disapprobation, had revealed his own churning, silver-black death-robot face-from whose mouth-space was billowing a swirling, malevolent column of blue-black smoke.

This cloud snaked forward, Vronsky saw with some relief, not toward Anna but toward Android Karenina; his relief lasted only until Anna boldly jumped forward, interposing herself between the strange cloud and her beloved-companion.

I should not have let her come to the opera. How could I have let her come?

Cursing, Vronsky leapt from behind the barricade of the seat row and leveled his most deadly blast yet at the robot colonel, crossing the trajectories of his two smokers in a deadly effluxion that he knew would drain the weapons, creating a fire pattern so powerful he could technically face court martial for employing it indoors; the least of my worries, he thought drily, watching with satisfaction as the robot’s torso melted into a sodden mass.

He was dashing for the door of the box when he heard a pitiful yip from behind him-Damn it, he thought. Lupo. It appeared that the blue uniformed man-machine, just by staring in the dog’s eyes and calling him, had drawn Lupo nearly all the way to his lap-where, Vronsky noticed with horror, the Toy Soldier held a long, nasty-looking groznium scimitar, of exactly a sort he had seen used to junker animal-form Class Ills in the most direct and irrevocable way. He jerked on the triggers of his smokers, knowing it was no use: his maneuver had exhausted the weapons and they were dead metal in his hands. “Stay!” he shouted to Lupo. “Stay, boy!” But Lupo, caught by the mysterious power glowing out of the soldier’s eyes-that-were-not-eyes, continued the forward trot toward his own doom.

Vronsky, in one swift and terrible movement, snapped his hot-whip to life and flicked it at his own Class Ill’s aural sensors. In an instant, the wolf was blinded, the cruel spell was broken, and Vronsky scooped him up under his arm-except that now they faced the Toy Soldier, unarmed. Their faceless opponent drew back the gleaming groznium scimitar and was about to swing…

Suddenly Anna Karenina and her companion robot, their hands joined in one powerful fist, smashed down on him from the balcony above. The robot collapsed, and Vronsky, still clutching poor, blinded Lupo beneath his arm, ran to the woman and machine-woman.

“Are you hurt?”

“Not so badly as they,” Anna replied smartly, clutching at her leg as she smoothed her skirts and struggled to her feet. Vronsky glanced up at the theater box, and saw the two Toy Soldiers slumped over the sides of the railing, broken like dolls, and the Kartasov robot with its head unit entirely torn off.

“How-” he began, but Anna interrupted: “Alexei, we must go.” She was gesturing at the prone Toy Soldier, whose machine-face, stilled at the moment of injury, had begun to whir and glow back to life.

The mechanical soldier leaped to his feet, hissed angrily, raised his gleaming sword-and was set upon again: this time by a massive beast, resembling a madman’s hallucination of a jungle lizard, standing upright, with a cluster of yellow-grey eyeballs and the long, razored snout of a bird of prey. The inhuman monster’s beak gored the groznium belly of the Toy Soldier, while his ragged claws laced into the arms and legs of the machine-man. As soon as the robot stopped moving, the beast bounded away, leaping over the heads of Anna, Vronsky, and their Class Ills, and down the aisles.

“It’s… my Lord, it’s…” Vronsky stammered.

“It is our chance, Alexei,” cried Anna. “For God’s sake, run!”

This alien was the first of many.

Twitching, snarling, slavering, their massive reptilian heads bubbling with eyeballs; their craggy, ridged snouts ending in knife-like beaks; their clutching, slashing claws; their long, scaly tails dragging against the lush carpets-the aliens poured in a great, fearsome horde into the Petersburg Vox Fourteen, dozens and dozens of them, yowling in a loud, high-pitched shriek as they sped up and down the aisles.

But the Vox Fourteen was well defended, more so than anyone had realized: the Toy Soldiers, robots in the form of men, were, it seemed, everywhere. As Vronsky and Anna rushed headlong for the exits, all over the Vox Fourteen people jumped to their feet and revealed themselves to be robots. Husbands, wives, soldiers, singers-hundreds of pretend people, all secreted by the Ministry of Security among the thousands of theatergoers; as, it was later realized, they must have been secreted everywhere. As their shocked companions watched, their faces wavered, blurred, disappeared, and were replaced by the deadly weapon-faces of the Toy Soldiers, and they joined combat with the Honored Guests.

But as has been the way of combat since the times of the Greeks and Romans, it was those with the least stake in the conflict who suffered the most grievously: as the robotic Toy Soldiers defended the Petersburg Vox Fourteen from the onslaught of the alien invaders, it was the human beings who died. The robots shot at the aliens and the humans were caught in the crossfire; the aliens slashed and tore at the robots and the humans were slashed and torn. Not one in ten made it out alive; not one in ten escaped the scalding glow of the smoker or the ragged claw of the lizard-beast, or the trampling boot heels of their fellow theatergoers, desperate for escape.

By morning the stage of the Vox Fourteen was littered with blood and bodies, the aisles with shredded hunks of alien flesh, the orchestra pit with groznium shrapnel and tangles of wire. But Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky had long since made their escape.

By the time the first fingers of dawn crept along the windowsills and into her rented rooms, Anna was packing hurriedly. They were fugitives now, and both knew it. Some new life would have to be forged, a new place found; the alien threat aside, she and Vronsky had obviously earned the status of outlaws, fugitives from the strange new society that was being built-under the leadership, Anna thought darkly, of her own husband.

When Vronsky went up to her, she was in the same dress as she had worn at the theater, madly throwing her things into a valise; as each new article of clothing was tossed in, Android Karenina rapidly took it up again, folded it neatly with fast-flying phalangeals, and placed it back in careful order.

TWITCHING, SNARLING, THEIR MASSIVE REPTILIAN HEADS BUBBLING WITH EYEBALLS, THE ALIENS POURED INTO THE OPERA HOUSE

“Anna,” said Vronsky, passionately, “I nearly lost you.”

“You, you are to blame for everything!” she cried, with tears of despair and hatred in her voice.

“I begged, I implored you not to go, I knew it would be unpleasant…”

“Unpleasant!” she cried. “Hideous! Those men-”

“Robots, Anna, they are robots!”

“You think I don’t know that! As long as I live I shall never forget it. But I will tell you Alexei, those vicious robot soldiers and bloodthirsty creatures were scarcely worse than the sneering expression of Madame Kartasov and her husband.”

“In fairness, Kartasov was also a robot.”

She scowled and continued her feverish preparations for departure.

“Forget it, you must forget all that,” said Vronsky, pacing back and forth, Lupo at his heels. “There are more important things to occupy us now.”

“I hate your calm. You ought not to have brought me to this. If you had loved me…”

“Anna! How does the question of my love come in?”

“Oh, if you loved me, as I love, if you were tortured as I am…!” she said, looking at him with an expression of terror.

He was sorry for her, and angry notwithstanding. He assured her of his love because he saw that this was the only means of soothing her, and he did not reproach her in words, but in his heart he reproached her. He spoke softly to her again of a place he knew, where they could be together and be safe, at least for now, along with their Class Ills.

And the asseverations of his love, which seemed to him so vulgar that he was ashamed to utter them, she drank in eagerly, and gradually became calmer. The next hour, completely reconciled, they and their battered beloved-companions left for the country.