Android Karenina

CHAPTER 1

IT WAS ALEXEI ALEXANDROVICH who decided to defer judgment in the case of Anna Arkadyevna Karenina and Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky, but really the decision was made by his Face. Once again that malevolent, whispering cranial presence found it convenient to let the question simmer like a slow-boiling pot, to keep it alive and so to torture Karenin.

So for months after their return to Moscow, Vronsky and Anna heard nothing from the Ministry in response to their request for amnesty-only waited, and suffered from the silence hanging over them.

But Alexei Alexandrovich’s festering displeasure was not limited in its effects on his wife and her companion.

All of Russia suffered with them.

When the Class II robots were impounded as the Class Ills had been, the Levins had been three months in Moscow. Kitty would have preferred to enter her period of confinement still living in the family manse, on the slopes of the old groznium pit in Pokrovskoe, but Levin was determined to keep his promise made to the dying Federov, and so moved their household to the city. He did not however attempt to dictate to his wife what would be best; rather, he shared with her the fervency of his desire to support the building resistance against the Ministry’s changes to Russian life, and by his passion Kitty was convinced.

Kitty and Levin, with some self-consciousness, called their vision of Russia’s future, a future in which their poor beloved-companions could come home, their “Golden Hope,” and they felt proud and romantic about their shared determination to make this vision a reality.

The date had long passed on which, according to the most trustworthy calculations of people learned in such matters, Kitty should have been confined to bed. But she was still up and about; there was nothing to show that her time was any nearer than two months ago. Dolly, her mother, and most of all Levin, who could not think of the approaching event without terror, began to be impatient and uneasy; the doctor, whose trusted II/Prognosis/M4 had been collected by Toy Soldiers, was equally anxious if not more so. Kitty was the only person who felt perfectly calm and happy. She was distinctly conscious now of the birth of a new feeling of love for the future child, for her to some extent actually existing already, and she brooded blissfully over this feeling.

The child was not by now altogether a part of herself, but sometimes lived his own life independently of her. Often this separate being gave her pain, but at the same time she wanted to laugh with a strange new joy. The only thing that spoiled the charm of this manner of life for Kitty was that her husband was different here than where she loved him to be, and as he was in the country.

She liked his serene, friendly, and hospitable manner in the country. In town he seemed continually uneasy and on his guard, certain that at any moment some friend or stranger would approach and call him into action with the mysterious shibboleth that Federov had taught him. At home in the country, knowing himself distinctly to be in his right place, he was never in haste to be off elsewhere. He was never unoccupied. Here in town he was in a continual hurry, afraid of being found out, protecting his inmost thoughts, peering seekingly into the eyes of strangers. As though always afraid of missing something, though as yet he had nothing to do. And she felt sorry for him. She saw him not from without, but from within; she saw that here he was not himself; that was the only way she could define his condition to herself. Sometimes she inwardly reproached him for his inability to live in the city; sometimes she recognized that it was really hard for him to order his life here so that he could be satisfied with it.

One obvious example to Kitty was that Levin had, his whole life, hated the gentlemen’s clubs frequented by Stepan Arkadyich and his associates, but now Levin felt it was necessary that he spend time in them. If there were “fellow travelers” to be found, he felt sure, this is where he would find them. Kitty had no choice therefore but to give her blessing. But whiling away hours with jovial gentlemen of Oblonsky’s type-she knew now what that meant: it meant drinking and going somewhere after drinking. She could not think without horror of where men went on such occasions. Was he to go into society? But she knew he could only find satisfaction in that if he took pleasure in the society of young women, and that she could not wish for. Should he stay at home with her, her mother, and her sisters? But much as she liked and enjoyed their conversations forever on the same subjects, she knew it must bore him. And what good would such hours be, spent in the dull company of her and her sisters? It would not advance their Golden Hope. What was there left for him to do?

One advantage in this town life was that quarrels hardly ever happened between them here. Whether it was that their conditions were different, or that they had both become more careful and sensible in that respect, they had no quarrels in Moscow from jealousy, which they had so dreaded when they moved from the country.

One event, an event of great importance to both from that point of view, did indeed happen-that was Kitty’s meeting with Vronsky.

The old Princess Marya Borissovna, Kitty’s godmother, who had always been very fond of her, had insisted on seeing her. Kitty, though she did not go into society at all on account of her condition, went with her father to see the venerable old lady, and there met Vronsky. The only thing Kitty could reproach herself for at this meeting was that at the instant when she recognized him-in his civilian dress, with no hot-whip at his thigh, no bristling steel-grey wolf at his side-when she saw the features once so familiar to her, her breath failed her, the blood rushed to her heart, and a vivid blush (she felt it) overspread her face. But this lasted only a few seconds. Before her father, who purposely began talking in a loud voice to Vronsky, had finished, she was perfectly ready to look at Vronsky, to speak to him, if necessary, exactly as she spoke to Princess Marya Borissovna, and more than that, to do so in such a way that everything to the faintest intonation and smile would have been approved by her husband, whose unseen presence she seemed to feel about her at that instant.

She said a few words to him, speaking of nothing at all. Konstantin Dmitrich had naturally told her every incredible detail of the tête-à-tête at the Huntshed, but hardly could she acknowledge in public that astonishing event. Instead she turned away immediately to Princess Marya Borissovna, and did not once glance at him till he got up to go; then she looked at him, but evidently only because it would be uncivil not to look at a man when he is saying good-bye.

Only then did she summon the courage to speak, in whispered tones, of the great secret that lay between them: their mutual knowledge of the nascent resistance to the so-called New Russia. “How is it that you and Anna have returned to society?” In the urgency of her whisper was communicated her hope and expectation that the amnesty request was a gambit, a cover story, and that Vronsky was in Moscow for the same reason as Levin: awaiting the chance to move against the Ministry.

“Anna Arkadyevna and I wish only to make amends for our ill-considered transgressions,” he pronounced, loudly enough for Princess Borissovna to hear. The old woman nodded her approval. “We have therefore cashiered our Class Ills in accordance with the law, and appealed to Minister Karenin for amnesty. I have many skills, of course, that could be put to use in the service of the New Russia.”

Kitty could not determine whether Vronsky was playing false, for the old princess’s benefit, or whether his contrition was sincere. As always in the past, Count Vronsky remained a mystery.

On the way home, she was grateful to her father for saying nothing to her about their meeting Vronsky, but she saw by his special warmth to her after the visit during their usual walk that he was pleased with her. She was pleased with herself. She had not expected she would have had the power, while keeping somewhere in the bottom of her heart all the memories of her old feeling for Vronsky, not only to be perfectly indifferent and composed with him, but to do her best to sound out the depth of his loyalties.

Levin flushed a great deal more than she when she told him she had met Vronsky at Princess Marya Borissovna’s. It was very hard for her to tell him this, but still harder to go on speaking of the details of the meeting, as he did not question her, but simply gazed at her with a frown.

Her truthful eyes told Levin that she was satisfied with herself, and in spite of her blushing he was quickly reassured and began questioning her, which was all she wanted. When he had heard that she was just as direct and as much at her ease as with any chance acquaintance, Levin was quite happy and said he was glad of it.

“But there is more,” she added. “More that we must discuss, relating to our Golden Hope.”

They leaned their heads together, as much co-conspirators as husband and wife, to ponder the difficulties that Kitty’s new information posed. If Count Vronsky had truly abandoned his rebellious posture, surely this raised the danger that he would report to the Ministry what he knew about Kitty and Levin and their secrets.

“I will seek an opportunity to speak directly to Vronsky, and then, together, you and I shall discuss what to do,” Levin replied, emphasizing the word “together,” as if to affirm to Kitty his belief that she had handled herself perfectly in this situation.

“I miss my beloved-companion,” Kitty sighed.

“And I, mine, my love. And I, mine.”

CHAPTER 2

THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, Levin reached the club just at the right time. Members and visitors were driving up as he arrived. Levin had not been at the club for a very long while-not since he lived in Moscow, when he was leaving the university and going into society. He remembered the club, the external details of its arrangement, but he had completely forgotten the impression it had made on him in the old days. But as soon as he drove into the wide, semicircular court and got out of the sledge; as soon as he saw in the porter’s room the cloaks and galoshes of members who thought it less trouble to take them off downstairs; as soon as he heard the I/Bell/6 that tolled three times behind its semi-transparent panel to announce him, as he ascended the easy, carpeted staircase, and saw the slow rotation of the glittering I/Statue/9 on the landing, unobtrusively identity-confirming each arriving guest, Levin felt the old impression of the club come back in a rush, an impression of repose, comfort, and propriety.

The difference, of course, was that in the old days the picture included dozens of Class IIs. Tonight there was no drone of busy motors, no dull hum of mechanical servitude. No II/Butler/97 politely removed his hat with careful end-effectors; no II/Porter/6 asked his name at the door and announced it with a Vox-Em flourish when he entered the main hall. Instead a fat and surly peasant in an ill-fitting vest grunted and gestured with a rude thumb to the staircase.

Passing through the outer hall, divided up by screens, and the room partitioned on the right, where a man sat at the fruit buffet, Levin overtook an old man walking slowly in, and entered the dining room full of noise and people.

He walked along the tables, almost all full, and looked at the visitors. He saw people of all sorts, old and young; some he knew a little, some intimate friends. Despite all of society’s convulsions, he did not see a single cross or worried-looking face. All seemed to have left their cares and anxieties downstairs with their hats, and were all deliberately getting ready to enjoy the material blessings of life.

“Ah! Why are you late?” the prince said to Levin, smiling, and giving him his hand over his own shoulder. “How’s Kitty?” he added, smoothing out the napkin he had tucked in at his waistcoat buttons.

“All right; they are dining at home, all three of them.”

“Go to that table, and make haste and take a seat,” said the prince, and turning away he carefully took a plate of eel soup.

Konstantin Dmitrich sat, and an irritated-looking young peasant brought a bowl of soup, carelessly sloshing the hot liquid over the sides and into Levin’s lap. He grimaced in pain and annoyance; the perfect, gyroscopically maintained balance of a Class II waiter would never make such a careless error.

But the others only laughed at the accident, and Levin realized that the view held by those in the club-or, at least, the view loudly expressed by those who wanted to be heard saying the right sorts of things-was very different than his own. It was agreed at every table that Russian life had been much improved by the disappearance of those “pesky” robots, always motoring about underfoot, making one feel self-conscious and intruded upon, their circuits forever buzzing and whirring away.

“To humanity!” said the prince, and raised his glass. “To the New Russia!” echoed Sviashky.

“Levin, this way!” a good-natured voice shouted a little farther on. It was Turovtsin. He was sitting with a young officer, and beside them were two chairs turned upside down. Levin gladly went up to them. He had always liked the good-hearted rake, Turovtsin, and at that moment, after the strain of intellectual conversation, the sight of Turovtsin’s good-natured face was particularly welcome.

And maybe… Levin narrowed his eyes and felt his heart pounding in his chest…

With exaggerated casualness, Levin smoothed his beard and approached his old friend with an easy smile. Pulling his chair close to the other man’s, breathing hotly into Turovtsin’s ear, he murmured a single word:

“Rearguard.”

“Eh?” responded Turovtsin loudly, his eyes lighting up. Levin’s heart beat faster; his blood roared in his ears. Could it be Turovtsin? Did he share in the Golden Hope? Who would have thought it was foolish Turovtsin?

“Rearguard?” repeated Turovtsin, but loudly, his eyes glittering with anticipatory merriment in his eyes, as if awaiting the punchline.

Levin drew back, stammering. “Ah… I thought… but, never mind, never mind. I said nothing.”

“Oh, well,” said Turovtsin. “Here, then.” He handed Levin a pair of glasses. “For you and Oblonsky. He’ll be here directly. Ah, here he is!”

“Have you only just come?” said Oblonsky, coming quickly toward them. “Good day. Had some vodka? Well, come along then.”

Levin, with difficulty hiding his disappointment, got up and went with him to the big table spread with spirits and appetizers of the most various kinds. One would have thought that out of two dozen delicacies one might find something to one’s taste, but Stepan Arkadyich asked for something special, and the tetchy adolescent waiter trudged back into the kitchen to search it out. They drank a glass of wine and returned to their table.

“Ah! And here they are!” Stepan Arkadyich said toward the end of dinner, leaning over the back of his chair and holding out his hand to Vronsky, who came up with a tall officer of the Guards.

Vronsky’s face, too, beamed with the look of good-humored enjoyment that was general in the club. He propped his elbow playfully on Stepan Arkadyich’s shoulder, whispering something to him, and he held out his hand to Levin with the same good-humored smile.

“Very glad to see you,” he said, and then added with a wink-or at least, what Levin thought was a wink-“It has been a long time.”

“Yes, yes,” said Levin. In the next moment, a roar of laughter convulsed the table, as Oblonsky described the old slop-slinging peasant who’d replaced the household II/Cook/98. Levin judged that his moment was ripe. He leaned forward, and, laying one hand on the upper part of Vronsky’s arm, whispered the code word both men had heard together from Federov.

“Rearguard.”

For a long moment, the word seemed to shimmer in the air between them, while Levin sought a sign of life in the impassive face across from his. But the count did not whisper “Action.” Instead he laughed genially and meaninglessly, twirled his mustache, and turned away.

Levin turned away as well, his worst suspicions confirmed: the resistance, if there were truly such a thing, could not number Alexei Kirillovich among its ranks.

But what danger did this fact pose to Levin? What should he do? He wished for the means to run a complete analysis of the situation; wished, not for the first or last time, that loyal Socrates were present to give him counsel.

“Well, have we finished?” said Stepan Arkadyich, getting up with a smile. “Let us go.”

CHAPTER 3

OBLONSKY LED THEM like the piper of myth to the gambling tables. I/Dice/55s trembled and bobbled and danced, zipping in algorithmic patterns across the green acetate of the table, randomizing some men into small fortunes, and others into disappointment. Oblonsky himself was of the fortunate group, to his great delight. “Perhaps Small Stiva was bad luck to me for all those years!” he decreed jovially, provoking great merriment in his fellow gamblers, and naught but melancholy disdain in Levin.

Oblonsky had again clutched the I/Dice/55s in his fist, hoping to add further to his fast-growing pile of rubles, when a crowd of thin, high-cheeked men-who-were-not-men strode purposefully into the room.

“Ah!” said Stepan Arkadyich, only the tiniest flutter of fear rippling his habitually good-natured expression. “Gentlemen. Or, rather, gentle-machines, if I may be so bold as to coin a term.”

“Might we invite you to join us in our games?” Vronsky ventured.

“To the contrary, your Excellency,” said the tallest of the man-machines, who wore what looked like a scruffy two-day growth of beard; Levin marveled in spite of himself at the artistry of it. “We are here to collect these apparatuses.”

One of the other Toy Soldiers held out his hand, and Stiva, wide-eyed with astonishment, placed the I/Dice/55 into the lifelike pink of the robot’s open palm.

“Now, wait… if I might… hold on, now…,” protested the old prince tremulously. “Is there no place in the New Russia for a bit of friendly gambling?”

“It is not the gambling that is proscribed, gentlemen, it is the technology.” The machine-man spoke rapidly. “Russia has her enemies, more now than ever. Enemies above; enemies within. The open distribution of technology is dangerous and can no longer be countenanced.”

And the face of the Toy Soldier all at once wavered and blurred, revealing the machinery hiding behind the skin of his face. From where the eye had been, the muzzle of a miniature cannon jutted forth already shooting, and a quick and efficient volley of electric fire blasted the green Class I gaming table neatly to ash. The tiny cannon disappeared and the man’s face reassembled itself; he cleared his throat (There is no throat! Levin adamantly reminded himself, no throat!)-and spoke: “I ask that you place your Class I devices on the floor before you.”

Into a large pile it all went: heirloom I/Hourprotector/ls, I/CigarLighter/4s, I/Bifocal/6s, all the tiny, convenient wonders that had been made possible by groznium technology. All were heaped and vaporized as thoroughly as the gaming table. The Toy Soldiers turned on their black boot heels and departed, leaving in their wake a long, stunned silence, which Stepan Arkadyich filled with a pitiful murmur.

“Such is the price of happiness.”

“Yes,” said the old prince, shaking his head and wearing no expression. “Such is the price.”

Levin, disgusted by the scene, pulled on his coat.

“Levin,” said Stepan Arkadyich, and Levin noticed that his eyes were not full of tears exactly, but moist, which always happened when he had been drinking, or when he was moved by emotion. Just now it was due to both causes. “Levin, don’t go,” he said, and he warmly squeezed his arm above the elbow, obviously not at all wishing to let him go.

“This is a true friend of mine-almost my greatest friend,” he said to Vronsky. It was evident to Levin that Oblonsky, more affected than he could openly admit by the evolution of the New Russia, was casting out for some source of happy feeling to console him. “You have become even closer and dearer to me. And I want you, and I know you ought, to be friends, and great friends, because you’re both splendid fellows.”

“Well, there’s nothing for us now but to kiss and be friends,” Vronsky said with good-natured playfulness, holding out his hand, acting as if the only past between them were a long-distant romantic rivalry.

Well, lean pretend as well, thought Levin. He quickly took the offered hand, and pressed it warmly. “I’m very, very glad,” he said.

“Do you know, he has never met Anna?” Stepan Arkadyich said to Vronsky. “And I want above everything to take him to see her. Let us go, Levin!”

“Really?” said Vronsky, turning back to the other men, who were busily scouring the cabinets for a set of the old-fashioned wooden dice. “She will be very glad to see you.”

CHAPTER 4

AS THE CARRIAGE DROVE out into the street, Levin felt it jolting over the uneven road, and heard the angry shout of their sledge driver, who had only just learned to drive it, and had nothing like the smooth touch of a II/SledgeDriver/6. Levin saw in the uncertain light the red blind of a tavern and the shops, and began to think over his actions, and to wonder whether he was doing right in going to see Anna. What would Kitty say? But Stepan Arkadyich gave him no time for reflection, and, as though divining his doubts, he scattered them.

“How glad I am,” he said, “that you should know her! You know Dolly has long wished for it. And Lvov’s been to see her, and often goes. Though she is my sister,” Stepan Arkadyich pursued, “I don’t hesitate to say that she’s a remarkable woman. But you will see. Her position is very painful, especially now.”

“Why especially now?”

“Vronsky and Anna have applied to her husband for amnesty and divorce, after their ill-conceived adventure in Vozdvizhenskoe. They have assurances that Karenin has received their request and is considering it, but not a word has yet been heard from that worthy. And so they wait, in rather exquisite agony, for a reply. As soon as the divorce is over, she will marry Vronsky. Well, then their position will be as regular as mine, as yours.

“But the point is she has been for three months in Moscow, where everyone knows her, waiting for some resolution. She goes out nowhere, sees no woman except Dolly, because, do you understand, she doesn’t care to have people come as a favor. But you’ll see how she has arranged her life-how calm, how dignified she is. To the left, in the crescent opposite the church!” shouted Stepan Arkadyich, leaning out of the window.

“I beg of you not to yell at me!” the red-faced sledge driver implored, nearly banking the carriage as he jerked it into the turn.

The carriage drove into the courtyard, and Stepan Arkadyich rang loudly at the entrance where sledges were standing.

And without asking the hapless servant who opened the door whether the lady was at home, Stepan Arkadyich walked into the hall. Levin followed him, more and more doubtful whether he was doing right or wrong.

Looking at himself in the I/Reflector/9 in the hallway, Levin noticed that he was red in the face, but he felt certain he was not drunk, and he followed Stepan Arkadyich up the carpeted stairs to the study.

Passing through the dining room, a room not very large, with dark, paneled walls, Stepan Arkadyich and Levin walked across the soft carpet to the half-dark study, lighted up by a single lumière with a big, dark shade. On the wall above was a big full-length portrait of a woman, which Levin could not help looking at. It was the portrait of Anna, painted on the moon by the doomed Mihailov. Levin gazed at the portrait, which stood out from the frame in the brilliant light thrown on it, and he could not tear himself away from it. He positively forgot where he was, and not even hearing what was said, he could not take his eyes off the marvelous portrait. It was not a picture, but a living, charming woman, with black, curling hair, with bare arms and shoulders, with a pensive smile on the lips, covered with soft down; she stood in a confident pose on the arm of a beloved-companion robot, triumphantly and softly looking at him with eyes that baffled him. She was not living only because she was more beautiful than a living woman can be.

“I am delighted!” He heard suddenly near him a voice, unmistakably addressing him, the voice of the very woman he had been admiring in the portrait. Anna had come from behind the treillage to meet him, and Levin saw in the dim light of the study the very woman of the portrait, in a dark-blue short gown, not in the same position, nor with the same expression, but with the same perfection of beauty which the artist had caught in the portrait. She was less dazzling in reality, but of course in the picture she had the advantage of the radiant backlight cast by a Class III. Now, in person, and in the New Russia, that enhancement was sadly lacking.

CHAPTER 5

SHE HAD RISEN to meet him, not concealing her pleasure at seeing him.

“You will excuse me for being ill at ease,” Anna began. “I neither look nor feel myself since I have lost the company of my beloved-companion, Android Karenina.”

Levin smiled with pleasure at her unexpected forthrightness: how refreshing to hear someone speak openly of the great collective loss the Russian people had suffered.

“I am delighted, delighted,” she went on, and upon her lips these simple words took for Levin’s ears a special significance. “I have known you and liked you for a long while, both from your friendship with Stiva and for your wife’s sake… I knew her for a very short time, but she left on me the impression of an exquisite flower, simply a flower. And to think she will soon be a mother!”

She spoke easily and without haste, looking now and then from Levin to her brother, and Levin felt that the impression he was making was good, and he felt immediately at home, simple and happy with her, as though he had known her from childhood.

“I am settled in Alexei’s study,” she said in answer to Stepan Arkadyich’s question whether he might smoke, “just so as to be able to smoke”-and glancing at Levin, instead of asking whether he would smoke, she pulled closer a I/CigarCase/6 and activated herself a cigarette.

“Enjoy such luxury while you can, Anna,” her brother said. “Class Ones are now added to the list.”

“You jest!”

“Alas, I do not. Ours were junkered only hours ago at the club, by one of those lifelike friends of ours.”

Anna gritted her teeth, as if to say, I shall accept the New Russia-indeed I must-but I cannot be forced to like it.

Yes, yes, this is a woman! Levin thought, forgetting himself and staring persistently at her lovely, mobile face, which at that moment was all at once completely transformed. Levin did not hear what she was talking of as she leaned over to her brother, but he was struck by the change of her expression. Her face-so handsome a moment before in its repose-suddenly wore a look of strange curiosity, anger, and pride. But this lasted only an instant. She dropped her eyelids, as though recollecting something.

And Levin saw a new trait in this woman, who attracted him so extraordinarily. Besides wit, grace, and beauty, she had truth. She had no wish to hide from him all the bitterness of her position. She sighed, and her face suddenly took a hard expression, looking as if it were turned to stone. With that expression on her face she was more beautiful than ever; but the expression was new; it was utterly unlike that expression, radiant with happiness and creating happiness, which had been caught by the painter in her portrait. Levin looked more than once at the portrait and at her figure, as taking her brother’s arm she walked with him to the high doors, and he felt for her a tenderness and pity at which he wondered himself.

In the next moment, this wonderment translated itself into action. When Stiva went out of the room a few steps ahead of Levin, before he could stop to think, he stopped at the doorframe, turned back to Anna, and whispered, urgently and impetuously: “Rearguard.”

Neither smiling nor frowning, she leaned slightly forward in her chair and replied: “Action.”

They both stared at the other for a long moment.

“Well, good-bye,” Anna said at last, rising to take his hand and glancing into his face with a winning look. “I am very glad que la glace est rompue.”

She dropped his hand, and half closed her eyes.

“Tell your wife that I love her as before, and that if she cannot pardon me my position, then my wish for her is that she may never pardon it. To pardon it, one must go through what I have gone through, and may God spare her that.”

“Certainly, yes, I will tell her…” Levin said, blushing. “And… but…”

“Goodnight,” said Anna Arkadyevna with finality.

CHAPTER 6

WELL, DIDN’T I TELL YOU?” said Stepan Arkadyich, seeing that Levin had been completely won over.

“Yes,” said Levin dreamily, his mind racing with thoughts of Anna Karenina and the Golden Hope. “An extraordinary woman! It’s not her cleverness, but she has such depth of feeling. I’m awfully sorry for her!”

“Now, please God, everything will soon be settled. Well, well, don’t be hard on people in the future,” said Stepan Arkadyich, opening the carriage door. “Good-bye; we don’t go the same way.”

Still thinking of Anna, of everything, even the simplest phrase in their conversation with her, and recalling the minutest changes in her expression, entering more and more into her position, and feeling sympathy for her, Levin traveled home.

All the way there, he reeled with excitement, and in particular with anticipation of sharing with Kitty what he had learned: that Anna Karenina, despite the abandonment of Vozdvizhenskoe and the junker army, despite their return to Moscow and the petition to Karenin, remained in her heart a partisan.

What Levin did not know, what he could not know, was that Vronsky had never told Anna Karenina the code words. On returning home from the Huntshed, he had given her the barest outline of his meeting with Federov, but then they had passed into argument, and from there to reconciliation, and that reconciliation had led them back to Moscow.

Never had he told her of Federov’s dying exhortation; never had he mentioned the words rearguard or action at all.

Somehow, Anna knew the words anyway.

At home their new servant, a man named Kouzma, told Levin that Katerina Alexandrovna was quite well, and that her sisters had not long been gone, and then handed him a neatly folded piece of paper. This was a “letter,” an old-fashioned means of information transmission in which the correspondent commits his thoughts to paper with pen and ink-along with “books” and “newspapers,” it had come back into vogue since the disappearance of monitor-and-communiqué technology. Levin read the letter at once in the hall, and found it was from Sokolov, his bailiff. Sokolov wrote that the latest gleanings from the pit were faulty, that it was fetching only five and a half rubles, and that more than that could not be got for it. Levin scowled. He had been forced, like all other groznium miners, to hire human beings to administer his land in his absence, and they were terrible at it.

Levin found his wife low-spirited and dull. The dinner of the three sisters had gone off very well, but then they had waited and waited for him, all of them had felt dull, the sisters had departed, and she had been left alone.

“Well, and what have you been doing?” she asked him, looking straight into his eyes, which shone with rather a suspicious brightness. But that she might not prevent his telling her everything, she concealed her close scrutiny of him, and with an approving smile listened to his account of how he had spent the evening.

“First, as for Vronsky, I fear your assessment was correct: he has decidedly gone to the other side. Still, I do not think he intends to turn us in. For now, anyway, I think we are safe.”

“Well, and then where did you go?”

“Stiva urged me awfully to go and see Anna Arkadyevna.”

And as he said this, Levin blushed even more, and his doubts as to whether he had done right in going to see Anna were settled once and for all. He knew now that he ought not to have done so.

Kitty’s eyes opened in a curious way and gleamed at Anna’s name, but controlling herself with an effort, she concealed her emotion and deceived him.

“Oh!” was all she said.

“I’m sure you won’t be angry at my going. Stiva begged me to, and Dolly wished it,” Levin went on.

“Oh, no!” she said, but he saw in her eyes a constraint that boded him no good.

“She is a very sweet, very, very unhappy, good woman,” he said. “And-Kitty-there is more!”

Again, she said, “Oh?”

“Anna Karenina, unlike Vronsky, remains one of us! She responded to the code word immediately and appropriately. I am convinced that she holds our views on the necessary changes that must come to society. Think how useful she could be…”

But Kitty hardly responded as Levin had anticipated.

“Yes, of course, her involvement is very much to be celebrated,” said Kitty coldly, when he had finished. “Whom was your letter from?”

Disappointed that his co-conspirator should take such little interest in his exciting discovery of Anna’s allegiances, he told her about the letter from Sokolov. Then, believing in her calm tone, he went to change his coat.

Coming back, he found Kitty in the same easy chair. When he went up to her, she glanced at him and broke into sobs.

“What? What is it?” he asked, knowing beforehand what.

“You’re in love with that hateful woman; she has bewitched you! I saw it in your eyes. Yes, yes! What can it all lead to? You were drinking at the club, drinking and gambling, and then you went… to her of all people! No, we must go away… I shall go away tomorrow.”

It was a long while before Levin could soothe his wife. At last he succeeded in calming her, only by confessing that a feeling of pity, in conjunction with the wine he had drunk, had been too much for him, that he had succumbed to Anna’s artful influence, and that he would avoid her. One thing he did confess to with more sincerity was that by living so long in Moscow, leading a life of nothing but conversation, eating, and drinking, he was degenerating. And in the meantime, he was hardly progressing in his efforts on behalf of the Golden Hope. If anything, telling Kitty of his one significant advance in that goal acted to dampen his wife’s zeal for the enterprise. She now seemed to feel that if resistance meant alliance with Anna Karenina, it might be best to abandon their resistance.

They talked till three o’clock in the morning, and as the hours passed the thrill he had felt about Anna, about the resistance and the Golden Hope, steadily dimmed in his breast. Only at three o’clock were they sufficiently reconciled to be able to go to sleep.

CHAPTER 7

AFTER TAKING LEAVE of her guests, Anna did not sit down, but began walking up and down the room. Oh, how she missed her dear Android Karenina at such times as these, when her mind was unsettled, her soul aflutter, her thoughts muddy and indistinct. She had unconsciously the whole evening done her utmost to arouse in Levin a feeling of love-as of late she had fallen into doing with all young men-and she knew she had attained her aim, as far as was possible in one evening, with a married and conscientious man. She liked him indeed extremely, and, in spite of the striking difference, from the masculine point of view, between Vronsky and Levin, as a woman she saw something they had in common, which had made Kitty able to love both.

But what had he meant by that strange word he spoke so urgently, and how had she known how to respond to it? Her response, her understanding, had clearly resonated with him. Somehow she had known the exact right thing to say-but how? How had she known?

As one troubling thought departed another arrived, like Gravs at a station. This one was connected to Vronsky, and Anna’s growing sense of the dislocation between them. If I have so much effect on others, on this Levin, who loves his home and his wife, why is it he is so cold to me?… not cold exactly, he loves me, I know that! But something new is drawing us apart now. Here we sit in Moscow, waiting to hear of our fate. Soon we shall be proper members of this new Russian society. So why is he not here? Why wasn’t he here all the evening?

She heard Vronsky’s abrupt chime at the door and hurriedly dried her tears, and affected composure. She wanted to show him that she was displeased that he had not come home as he had promised-displeased only, and not on any account to let him see her distress, and least of all, her self-pity. She might pity herself, but he must not pity her. She did not want strife, she blamed him for wanting to quarrel, but unconsciously put herself into an attitude of antagonism.

“Well, you’ve not been dull?” he said, eagerly and good-humoredly. “You will hardly believe it, but they have smashed up all the Class Ones! All will be gone within the week. I think your husband and his compatriots mean to drain every vestige of technology from the nation-next they’ll have the Tsars back, and Russia will end up as some sort of vast agrarian monarchy, complete with horse races and peasants threshing wheat.”

He laughed, but Anna remained composed.

“Stiva has been here and Levin.”

“Yes, they meant to come and see you. Well, how did you like Levin?” he said, sitting down beside her.

“Very much.”

Anna did not mention the puzzling business with the code words. Instead she changed the subject, inquiring after Vronsky’s louche friend, Yashvin.

“He was winning-seventeen thousand, when the Toy Soldiers showed up and vaporized the tables. Some others were planning to make do with hand-carved dice, I don’t know who found them or where, when at last I got Yashvin away. He had really started home, but he went back again, and now he’s losing.”

“So what did you stay for?” she asked, suddenly lifting her eyes to him. The expression of her face was cold and ungracious. “You told Stiva you were staying on to get Yashvin away. And you have left him there.”

The same expression of cold readiness for the conflict appeared on his face too.

“In the first place, I did not ask him to give you any message; and secondly, I never tell lies. But what’s the chief point, I wanted to stay, and I stayed,” he said, frowning. “Anna, what is it for, why?” he said after a moment’s silence, bending over toward her, and he opened his hand, hoping she would lay hers in it.

She was glad of this appeal for tenderness. But some strange force of evil would not let her give herself up to her feelings; it was as though the tactics of combat they had studied together at Vozdvizhenskoe were now being turned upon one another.

“Of course you wanted to stay, and you stayed. You do everything you want to. But what do you tell me that for? With what object?” she said, getting more and more excited. “Does anyone contest your rights? But you want to be right, and you’re welcome to be right.”

His hand closed, he turned away, and his face wore a still more obstinate expression.

“For you it’s a matter of obstinacy,” she said, watching him intently and suddenly finding the right word for that expression that irritated her, “simply obstinacy. For you it’s a question of whether you keep the upper hand of me, while for me…” Again she felt sorry for herself, and she almost burst into tears. “If you knew what it is for me! When I feel as I do now that you are hostile, yes, hostile to me, if you knew what this means for me! If you knew how I feel on the brink of calamity at this instant, how afraid I am of myself!” And she turned away, hiding her sobs.

“But what are you talking about?” he said, horrified at her expression of despair, and again bending over her, he took her hand and kissed it. “What is it for? Do I seek amusements outside our home? Don’t I avoid the society of women?”

“Well, yes! If that were all!” she said.

“Come, tell me what I ought to do to give you peace of mind? I am ready to do anything to make you happy,” he said, touched by her expression of despair. “What wouldn’t I do to save you from distress of any sort, as now, Anna!” he said.

“It’s nothing, nothing!” she said. “I don’t know myself whether it’s the solitary life, my nerves… Come, don’t let us talk of it.” She spoke in a conciliatory manner now, imploring that he tell her more about the Toy Soldiers and the Class Is. They marveled together at the changes overtaking society, asked each other how long it would take before the Ministry would makes its decision about them. Neither spoke the name Alexei Alexandrovich, though both knew it was he in particular, and not the Higher Branches in general, who would make this decision.

They talked this way, as if both stood in the same corner of the world, facing their uncertain fate together. But in his tone, in his eyes, which became more and more cold, she saw that he did not forgive her for her victory, that the feeling of obstinacy with which she had been struggling had asserted itself again in him. He was colder to her than before, as though he were regretting his surrender. And she, remembering the words that had given her the victory, “how I feel on the brink of calamity, how afraid I am of myself,” saw that this weapon was a dangerous one, and that it could not be used a second time. And she felt that beside the love that bound them together there had grown up between them some evil spirit of strife, which she could not exorcise from his-and still less from her own-heart.

She thought of the abandoned farmhouse, the proud hand-sewn standards of Vozdvizhenskoe, and all she had left behind her.

What have I done? Anna thought, looking wearily at Alexei Kirillovich. What have I traded for a love affair, which proves to be nothing more than an illusion?

CHAPTER 8

THERE ARE NO CONDITIONS to which a man cannot become used, especially if he sees that all around him are living in the same way. Levin could not have believed three months before that he could have gone quietly to sleep in the condition in which he was that day; that leading an aimless, irrational life, living too beyond his means, after drinking to excess (he could not call what happened at the club anything else), making an inappropriate call upon a woman who could only be called a lost woman, after being fascinated by that woman and causing his wife distress-he could still go quietly to sleep. But under the influence of fatigue, a sleepless night, and the wine he had drunk, his sleep was sound and untroubled.

At five o’clock the creak of a door opening woke him. He jumped up and looked round. Kitty was not in bed beside him. But there was a light moving behind the screen, and he heard her steps.

“What is it?… What is it?” he said, half asleep. “Kitty! What is it?”

“Nothing,” she said, coming from behind the screen with a candle in her hand. “I felt unwell,” she said, smiling a particularly sweet and meaningful smile.

“What? Has it begun?” he said in terror. “We ought to send…,” and hurriedly he reached after his clothes.

“No, no,” she said, smiling and holding his hand. “It’s sure to be nothing. I was rather unwell, only a little. It’s all over now.”

And getting into bed, she blew out the candle-which the new servant had found in a box in the attic, after a Toy Soldier collected the lumières-lay down and was still. Though he thought her stillness suspicious, as though she were holding her breath, and still more suspicious the expression of peculiar tenderness and excitement with which, as she came from behind the screen, she had said “nothing,” he was so sleepy that he fell asleep at once. Only later he remembered the stillness of her breathing, and understood all that must have been passing in her sweet, precious heart while she lay beside him, not stirring, in anticipation of the greatest event in a woman’s life. At seven o’clock he was waked by the touch of her hand on his shoulder, and a gentle whisper. She seemed to be struggling between regret at waking him and the desire to talk to him.

“Kostya, don’t be frightened. It’s all right. But I fancy… we ought to send for the doctor.”

The candle was lighted again. She was sitting up in bed, holding some knitting, which she had been busy upon during the last few days.

“Please, don’t be frightened, it’s all right. I’m not a bit afraid,” she said, seeing his scared face, and she pressed his hand to her bosom and then to her lips.

He hurriedly jumped up, hardly awake, and kept his eyes fixed on her, as he put on his dressing gown; then he stopped, still looking at her. He had to go, but he could not tear himself from her eyes. He thought he loved her face, knew her expression, her eyes, but never had he seen it like this. How hateful and horrible he seemed to himself, thinking of the distress he had caused her yesterday. Her flushed face, fringed with soft, curling hair under her nightcap, was radiant with joy and courage.

Though there was so little that was complex or artificial in Kitty’s character in general, Levin was struck by what was revealed now, when suddenly all disguises were thrown off and the very kernel of her soul shone in her eyes. And in this simplicity and nakedness of her soul, she, the very woman he loved in her, was more manifest than ever. She looked at him, smiling; but all at once her brows twitched, she threw up her head, and going quickly up to him, clutched his hand and pressed close up to him, breathing her hot breath upon him. She was in pain and was, as it were, complaining to him of her suffering. And for the first minute, from habit, it seemed to him that he was to blame. But in her eyes there was a tenderness that told him that she was far from reproaching him, that she loved him for her sufferings. If not I, who is to blame for it? he thought, without even noticing that he was thinking instead of speaking; though thoughts of such importance, touching on life and death, would always in the past have been uttered aloud to his beloved-companion. She was suffering, complaining, and triumphing in her sufferings, and rejoicing in them, and loving them. He saw that something sublime was being accomplished in her soul, but what? He could not make it out. It was beyond his understanding.

“I have sent to Mamma. You go quickly to fetch the doctor… Kostya!… Nothing, it’s over. Well, go now. I am all right.”

And Levin saw with astonishment that she had taken up the knitting she had brought in during the night and begun working at it again. She was secure, serene, hardly even noticing that Tatiana was not with her. For so long Kitty and Levin had relied on their beloved-companions for support, but in this most human of situations, neither felt their absence.

He dressed, and after sending the new houseboy to prepare the horses-another new habit to get used to-Levin ran again up to the bedroom, not on tiptoe, it seemed to him, but on wings. Kitty was walking about knitting rapidly and giving directions to the servants.

“I’m going for the doctor.”

She looked at him, obviously not hearing what he was saying.

“Yes, yes. Do go,” she said quickly, frowning and waving her hand to him.

He had just gone into the drawing room, when suddenly a plaintive moan sounded from the bedroom, smothered instantly. He stood still, and for a long while he could not understand.

Yes, that is she, he said to himself, and clutching at his head he ran downstairs.

The horses were not yet ready, so, feeling a peculiar concentration of his physical forces and his intellect on what he had to do, he started off on foot without waiting.

CHAPTER 9

THE DOCTOR WAS NOT yet up, and the footman said that he had been up late, and had given orders not to be waked, but would get up soon. The footman was cleaning the lamp-chimneys, and making a proper mess of the job.

Levin waited impatiently in the street for the doctor, and finally decided that he could wait no longer, and would burst in on the man and wake him if he had to. He stormed back toward the doctor’s door-but was stopped by a fat little man in a tattered lab coat, who appeared in the shadows holding a small silver box. This man was not Federov, but looked much like him: the same tangled beard, the same beady eyes, the tattered lab coat.

“Rearguard,” the man said gravely.

“Action,” Levin responded immediately.

The man stepped fully from the shadows. “Konstantin Dmitrich, my name is Dmitriev.”

“I cannot speak to you now! I have urgent business this night!”

“Not so urgent as this,” the agent of UnConSciya replied. “Levin, the time has come.”

“No,” Levin protested, his voice rising. “It cannot be tonight!” Levin moved to push past him, and the man who called himself Dmitriev scowled and pressed the button on his little box. Levin yelped in pain as he banged against some sort of radiating, semi-invisible bars, and a small electric shock quivered through his system.

“I am sorry,” said Dmitriev, scratching at his tangled beard. “But I require your complete attention.

His eyes wide with rage, Levin stared at the squat man in his shabby coat. “Why do you encage me? I am with you! And I swear to you that tomorrow I shall offer whatever aid I can. Only you must find me tomorrow.”

“We do not have the luxury of waiting for tomorrow. We have a chance to stop the furnaces, tonight, to halt the melting down of the Class Ills. But we require a man trusted in society, a man beyond suspicion, and we need him tonight.”

“Then you must find another man!” Levin threw himself at the invisible enclosure, and a ripple of fiery pain exploded across his chest.

“Stop it-stop that,” cried Dmitriev. “You will kill yourself.”

“You must free me!” Levin shouted, half mad with his need to fetch the doctor and return to Kitty’s side. He hurled his shoulder once more against the invisible bars that held him, and was thrown down onto the street writhing and clutching at himself.

“No… no… I beg of you to stop,” said Dmitriev with desperation, as Levin stumbled back to his feet.

“Let me free! Ahhh!”

He lunged again, and this time felt the shock in every synapse of his body, jolting up and down his spinal column, pooling at the base of his brain. Levin collapsed on the street, twitching and muttering like a madman. Dmitriev looked nervously around. “You cannot persist in this. Rearguard,” he insisted again. “Rearguard!”

“Kitty.”

Levin groaned, crawled to his feet. On all fours he limped into the barely perceptible bars like a wounded animal, shuddered with pain, and collapsed feebly in the street.

“I cannot let you die, Konstantin Levin,” the man from UnConSciya said at last. “You have a more important part to play. I cannot let you die.” He clicked the button on the box, and with a barely audible whoosh Levin’s invisible prison disappeared. He staggered toward the door of the doctor’s home.

“Only… only think of your country,” said the operative to Levin’s back, now pleading when only a moment ago he had been commanding.

Levin lifted his hand to pull on the makeshift bellpull that the doctor’s household had rigged in place of a Class I Doorchime.

“Konstantin Dmitritch! Do it for your Class III.”

Levin turned, and hissed, “What of him?”

“I am sorry to tell you this, but Socrates and Tatiana have been captured in Urgensky caught up in a mass purge of Class II robots. They are on the way here, even now, to be melted down with the others. Unless we can stop it… and we can stop it. You can.”

Levin, feverish with pain and the desperate need to return to his wife, shook his head rapidly, like a mad dog shakes off a plaguing flea, and rang the bell of the doctor’s house.

When Levin got home with the doctor, he had nearly pushed the encounter from his mind. He drove up at the same time as the princess, Kitty’s mother, and they went up to the bedroom door together. The princess had tears in her eyes, and her hands were shaking. Seeing Levin, she embraced him, and burst into tears.

From the moment when he had woken and understood what was going on, Levin had prepared his mind to bear resolutely what was before him, and without considering or anticipating anything, to avoid upsetting his wife, and on the contrary to soothe her and keep up her courage. Without allowing himself even to think of what was to come, of how it would end, judging from his inquiries as to the usual duration of these ordeals, Levin had in his imagination braced himself to bear up and to keep a tight rein on his feelings for five hours, and it had seemed to him he could do this. But when he came back from the doctor’s and saw her sufferings again, he fell to repeating more and more frequently: “Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!” He sighed, and flung his head up, and began to feel afraid he could not bear it, that he would burst into tears or run away. Such agony it was to him. And only one hour had passed.

He thought at one moment during this unbearable hour of Socrates. There would be time, he told himself. There would be time to help him, to save him. Tomorrow… And his mind then passed over these thoughts, returning to what was before him: to Kitty, and to his child, teetering on the cusp of existence.

This was a time for humans.

After that hour there passed another hour, two hours, three, the full five hours he had fixed as the furthest limit of his sufferings, and the position was still unchanged; and he was still bearing it because there was nothing to be done but bear it; every instant feeling that he had reached the utmost limits of his endurance, and that his heart would break with sympathy and pain.

But still the minutes passed by and the hours, and still hours more, and his misery and horror grew and were more and more intense.

All the ordinary conditions of life, without which one can form no conception of anything, had ceased to exist for Levin. He lost all sense of time. Minutes-those minutes when she sent for him and he held her moist hand, which would squeeze his hand with extraordinary violence and then push it away-seemed to him hours, and hours seemed to him minutes. Where he was all this time, he knew as little as the time of anything. He saw her swollen face, sometimes bewildered and in agony, sometimes smiling and trying to reassure him. He saw the old princess too, flushed and overwrought, with her gray curls in disorder, forcing herself to gulp down her tears, biting her lips; he saw Dolly too and the doctor, smoking fat cigarettes, rifling through some old medical manual, its pages yellowed from generations of disuse; and the old prince walking up and down the hall with a frowning face. But why they came in and went out, where they were, he did not know.

All he knew and felt was that what was happening was what had happened nearly a year before in the hotel of the country town when the alien terror had burst from Nikolai’s chest. But that had been grief-grief and terror-this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.

He did not know whether it was late or early. The candles had all burned out. Dolly had just been in the study and had suggested to the doctor that he should lie down. There had been a period of repose, and he had sunk into oblivion. He had completely forgotten what was going on now. He heard the doctor’s chatter and understood it. Suddenly there came an unearthly shriek. The shriek was so awful that Levin did not even jump up, but holding his breath, gazed in terrified inquiry at the doctor. The doctor put his head to one side, listened, and smiled approvingly. Everything was so extraordinary that nothing could strike Levin as strange. I suppose it must be so, he thought, and still sat where he was. Whose scream was this? He jumped up, ran on tiptoe to the bedroom, and took up his position at Kitty’s pillow. The scream had subsided, but there was some change now. What it was he did not see and did not comprehend, and he had no wish to see or comprehend. Kitty’s swollen and agonized face, a tress of hair clinging to her moist brow, was turned to him and sought his eyes. Her lifted hands asked for his hands. Clutching his chill hands in her moist ones, she began squeezing them to her face.

“Don’t go, don’t go! I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid!” she said rapidly. “Mamma, take my earrings. They bother me. You’re not afraid?”

She spoke quickly, very quickly, and tried to smile. But suddenly her face was drawn, she pushed him away.

“Oh, this is awful! I’m dying, I’m dying! Go away!” she shrieked, and again he heard that unearthly scream.

Levin clutched at his head and ran out of the room.

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s all right,” Dolly called after him.

But they might say what they liked, he knew now that all was over. He stood in the next room, his head leaning against the doorpost, and heard shrieks, howls such as he had never heard before, and he knew that what had been Kitty was uttering these shrieks. He had long ago ceased to wish for the child. By now he loathed this child. He did not even wish for her life now, all he longed for was the end of this awful anguish.

“Doctor! What is it? What is it? By God!” he said, snatching at the doctor’s hand as he came up.

“It’s the end,” said the doctor. And the doctor’s face was so grave as he said it that Levin took “the end” as meaning her death.

Beside himself, he ran into the bedroom. He fell down with his head on the wooden framework of the bed, feeling that his heart was bursting. The awful scream never paused, it became still more awful, and as though it had reached the utmost limit of terror, suddenly it ceased. Levin could not believe his ears, but there could be no doubt; the scream had ceased and he heard a subdued stir and bustle, and hurried breathing, and her voice, gasping, alive, tender, and blissful, uttering softly, “It’s over!”

He lifted his head. With her hands hanging exhausted on the quilt, looking extraordinarily lovely and serene, she looked at him in silence and tried to smile, and could not.

And suddenly, from the mysterious and awful faraway world in which he had been living for the last twenty-two hours, Levin felt himself all in an instant borne back to the everyday world, the New Russia he had set himself in opposition to, glorified though now by such a radiance of happiness that he could not bear it. The strained cords snapped; sobs and tears of joy, which he had never foreseen, rose up with such violence that his whole body shook, that for long they prevented him from speaking.

Falling on his knees before the bed, he held his wife’s hand before his lips and kissed it, and the hand, with a weak movement of the fingers, responded to his kiss. And meanwhile, there at the foot of the bed, in the deft hands of the old princess, like a flickering display light, lay the life of a human creature, which had never existed before, and which would now with the same right, with the same importance to itself, live and create in its own image.

“Alive! Alive! And a boy, too! Set your mind at rest!” Levin heard the princess saying, as she slapped the baby’s back with a shaking hand.

“Mamma, is it true?” said Kitty’s voice.

The princess’s sobs were all the answers she could make. And in the midst of the silence there came, in unmistakable reply to the mother’s question, a voice quite unlike the subdued voices speaking in the room. It was the bold, clamorous, self-assertive squall of the new human being, who had so incomprehensibly appeared.

Levin was unutterably happy, that he understood. But the baby? Whence, why, who was he?… He could not get used to the idea. It seemed to him something extraneous, superfluous, to which he could not accustom himself.

“Look now,” said Kitty, turning the baby so that he could see it.

All the high ideals, the Golden Hope he had vowed to fight for, were nowhere in his mind as he laid eyes for the first time upon his child. When the boy was yet unborn, he could tell himself that protecting the future of the child meant engaging in furtive rebellion, dedicating himself to an inchoate struggle to recast society, no matter the cost.

But now that he was here, was real, now that this fragile being lay bawling in his arms, all that mattered was holding him close, tending to the child’s needs and to the needs of his brave, beloved wife. The child was all, the family was all.

The aged-looking little face suddenly puckered up still more and the baby sneezed.

CHAPTER 10

STEPAN ARKADYICH’S AFFAIRS were in a very bad way.

The money for two-thirds of his small, inherited groznium pit had all been spent already, and he had borrowed from the merchant in advance at 10 percent discount, almost all the remaining third. The merchant would not give more, not given the recent flurry of rumors about impending alterations to groznium-extraction policy: some said the mines were to be turned into farmland, others that the pits were all to be seized and administered directly by the Department of Extraction. All Stiva’s salary went to household expenses and payment of petty debts that could not be put off. There was positively no money.

All his finances had always been arranged and tended by Small Stiva in consultation with a trusted, old family Class II finance-robot. Without them he was lost in a sea of baffling numbers, which was unpleasant and awkward, and in Stepan Arkadyich’s opinion things could not go on like this. The explanation of the position was, in his view, to be found in the fact that his salary was too small. The post he filled had been unmistakably very good five years ago, but it was so no longer.

Clearly I’ve been napping, and the world has overlooked me, Stepan Arkadyich thought about himself. And he began keeping his eyes and ears open, and toward the end of the winter he had discovered a very good post and had formed a plan of attack upon it, at first from Moscow through aunts, uncles, and friends, and then, when the matter was well advanced, in the spring, he went himself to Petersburg. The post he sought was of overseer of a recently announced committee charged with effecting certain crucial transformations to the Grav. Stiva had little idea of what changes were being proposed, or how they were to be effected, but he felt certain that, nevertheless, he was just the man for the position.

The appointment yielded an income of from seven to ten thousand a year, and Oblonsky could fill it without giving up his position in the Middle Branches. Better still, Stiva had an inside connection to the position, as this mysterious Grav-improvement project reportedly was to be directly overseen by Stiva’s brother-in-law, Alexei. And so it was Karenin whom Stiva set off to see in Petersburg. Besides this business, Stepan Arkadyich had promised his sister Anna to obtain from Karenin a definite answer on the question of her status-had the Ministry accepted their plea for amnesty? Were they to be forgiven, and would Karenin grant Anna a divorce? And begging fifty rubles from Dolly, he set off for Petersburg.

Stepan Arkadyich entered Karenin’s study in the headquarters of the Ministry, and managed to stifle with some effort a gasp of horror. The silver mask that had once hidden but the one half of his brother-in-law’s face was now spread like a caul across its entirety: Karenin was gone, entirely subsumed in gleaming metal casing. Only the fearsome metallic eye protruded, jutting out of the upper right-hand quadrant like the periscope of a submarine. Atop the oculus, bizarrely, sat a pince-nez, through which Karenin appeared to be reading a newspaper when Oblonsky entered.

“Questions,” said Karenin suddenly, affecting a high, mocking voice while he held the newspaper aloft disdainfully. “This editorialist has questions. He feels in his breast, you see, that the Russian people deserve answers. Well, answers we shall provide. Answers we shall provide!”

Karenin went back to reading, and Stepan waited awkwardly, only waiting for the moment when he would finish to speak about his own business or about Anna.

“Questions!” Karenin repeated. “You see, Stepan Arkadyich, a writer named Levitsky has doubts about the cashiering of the Class One devices. He feels this latest diktat, promulgated by myself and my colleagues in the Higher Branches for the safety and security of our fellow citizens, may have been ‘a bridge too far’ for the people of Russia. Yet it is the role of the Ministry to determine what is best for the people of Russia!”

“Yes, that’s very true,” Oblonsky said, when Alexei Alexandrovich took off the pince-nez and cocked his head, “that’s very true, but still the principle holds, people did enjoy the tiny freedoms, the petites-libertiés afforded them by their Class Ones.”

“Yes, but I operate under another principle, one embracing a larger vision of freedom,” replied Alexei Alexandrovich, his voice emerging from behind his metal caul as if from the depths of a well. “These devices are held up as granting freedom, but really what they do is take… take our ability to think for ourselves, to pursue enjoyment independently, and primarily to make those small efforts that lend dignity to human life.

“I don’t pursue our policies for the sake of private interests, but for the public weal, for the protection of the lower and upper classes equally,” he said, tilting his head as if looking over his pince-nez at Oblonsky. “But they cannot grasp that, they are taken up now with personal interests, and carried away by phrases. This they shall learn to regret.”

Karenin rang a bell on his desk, and a tall, imposing Toy Soldier entered on his slim black boots. “Levitsky. The Observer” Karenin murmured to the imposing servomechanism, and the Toy Soldier saluted and hastened from the chamber.

Stepan Arkadyich saw it was useless to protest again under the spirit of petites-libertiés; now he eagerly abandoned the principle, and fully agreed. Alexei Alexandrovich paused, thoughtfully turning over the pages of his newspaper.

“Oh, by the way,” said Stepan Arkadyich, “I wanted to ask you, some time when you see Pomorsky to drop him a hint that I should be very glad to get that new appointment of overseer of the Committee of the Reformation of the Grav.” Stepan Arkadyich was familiar by now with the title of the post he coveted, and he brought it out rapidly without mistake.

Alexei Alexandrovich questioned him as to the duties of this new committee, and pondered. Looking nervously back at him, Stiva presumed that Karenin was considering, even somewhat idly, whether the new committee would not be acting in some way contrary to the views he had been advocating. Meanwhile the Face displayed for Karenin, on a miniature display that lit up directly between his eyes, a dozen possible responses to Oblonsky’s request: from granting him the position to killing him and hurling his body from the window.

This was a version of the rapid-option-analysis technology in which certain beloved-companions, such as Levin’s Socrates, had been proficient. But the Face, in the continuing evolution of its remarkable powers, accomplished this system set a thousand times more accurately and efficiently than even the most advanced Class III.

Finally, taking off his pince-nez, Karenin said:

“Of course, I can mention it to him; but what is your reason precisely for wishing to obtain the appointment?”

“It’s a good salary, rising to nine thousand, and my means…”

“Nine thousand!” bellowed Alexei Alexandrovich at full voice. He hurled his teacup across the room, where it barely missed Stiva’s head before smashing against the wall and shattering to bits. “Is it money then? Only rubles you seek? Would you prostitute your world for a pocketful of rubles?” Then he sat, calmly, and made a small gesture of his left hand, whereupon the pieces of teacup jumped up and reassembled themselves. The spilled tea, which following nature’s laws had puddled at the base of the wall, flowed backward up and into the cup.

The Face was evolving in its remarkable powers, indeed.

“But what’s to be done?” stammered Stepan Arkadyich, choosing to focus on what he perceived as the substance of Karenin’s argument, rather than the surprising manner with which he had underscored it. “Suppose a bank director gets ten thousand-well, he’s worth it; or an engineer gets twenty thousand-after all, it’s a growing thing, you know!”

“I assume that a salary is the price paid for a commodity, and it ought to conform with the law of supply and demand! I consider-”

Stepan Arkadyich nervously interrupted his brother-in-law. “Yes; but you must agree that this is to be an important undertaking.”

Alexei Alexandrovich settled back in his chair. “Yes, indeed it is. Indeed it is. Do you even know what the job entails?”

Stepan Arkadyich stopped short-of the many things he had considered in preparing for this interview, he had not thought to gain actual knowledge of the requirements of the position.

Alexei Karenin slowly and with apparent relish explained: “The entire Grav-way is to be dismantled. The cars will be dismantled, the groznium rails stripped and sent to Moscow for repurposing. The magnet bed will be shut off, up and down the line.”

“But…”

“Do not fear, Stepan Arkadyich. The people of Russia will still be able to travel; they will travel, however, on a simple mechanical apparatus, rather than a groznium-powered one. The cars will be fired by the steam generated by burning heaps of noxious, dirty coal, and will run on rickety metal wheels along non-charged rails. This transportation machine we shall call a ‘train.’”

Karenin spoke with relish this last, unfamiliar word, train, taking obvious pleasure in pronouncing the thick, dull syllable.

“But-but why?” said Stepan Arkadyich.

The answer came in a brash, echoing voice, one no longer recognizable to Stepan Arkadyich as that belonging to his brother-in-law:

“WHY? WHY, FOR THE SOUL OF THE PEOPLE.”

“What?” replied Stiva helplessly.

“THE GRAV WAS SMOOTH AND EFFICIENT AND POWERFUL. THE GRAV WAS EASY. EASY THINGS MAKE US WEAK. IT IS DIFFICULTY THAT MAKES US STRONG.”

“Well, you’ll do me a great, a great-that is, a service, anyway,” said Stepan Arkadyich, cringing and stuttering slightly, “by putting in a word to Pomorsky-just in the way of conversation…”

“I WILL DO PRECISELY AS I CHOOSE.”

Karenin slammed his fist down on the table with incredible force, and Stiva thought it best to change the subject. Fortunately, or unfortunately, as he would soon realize, he had a second topic of conversation at hand.

“Now there is something I want to talk about, and you know what it is. About Anna.”

As soon as Oblonsky uttered Anna’s name, he wished he had not done so. Alexei Alexandrovich smashed his other fist down on the table, and for the first time Oblonsky noticed that Karenin’s right arm, like his face, was now composed entirely of metal. Each of his ten fingers was apparently detachable, with a screw-and-thread mechanism where the bottom knuckle connected to the hand.

“What is it exactly that you want from me?” he said, moving in his chair and snapping his pince-nez.

“A definite settlement, Alexei Alexandrovich, some settlement of the position. I’m appealing to you”-not as an injured husband, Stepan Arkadyich was going to say, but afraid of wrecking his negotiation by this, he changed the words-“not as a statesman”-which, truly, did not sound apropos-“but simply as a man, and a good-hearted man and a Christian. You must have pity on her,” he said.

As Oblonsky spoke, Karenin very slowly and with great care unscrewed his right index finger, laid it down on the desk, and screwed in its place a sleek, cruel-looking attachment. It was the approximate length of a finger, but made of solid black metal.

“That is, in what way precisely?” Karenin answered finally. He flexed the obsidian phalangeal and its tip glowed to life, a deep, menacing red. Stiva edged backward in his chair.

“Yes, pity on her. If you had seen her as I have!-I have been spending all the winter with her-you would have pity on her. Her position is awful, simply awful!”

“I had imagined,” answered Alexei Alexandrovich in a higher, almost shrill voice, “that Anna Arkadyevna had everything she had desired for herself. I have allowed them to return… let them carry on unmolested…” And here his voice seemed to transform, taking on again the booming, echoing roar.

“AND YET THEY SEND THIS WORM, THIS COWERING SPECIMEN OF HUMANITY, TO PLEAD FOR FAVORS? FOR FORGIVENESS?”

Karenin threw back his head and barked a high, shrill laugh.

“HERE IS YOUR ANSWER. TELL THEM THEY SHALL BE DESTROYED. TELL THEM I POSSESS THE POWER TO DESTROY THEM AT MY WILL, AND THIS IS MY INTENTION. TELL THEM THEY MAY RUN IF THEY CHOOSE. COWER AS THEY MIGHT, STILL I SHALL DESTROY THEM.”

“Oh, Alexei Alexandrovich, for heaven’s sake, don’t let us indulge in recriminations!” responded Stepan Arkadyich, somewhat feebly.

He shot a glance at the door, considered leaving now before the conversation proceeded further; but he really was in need of the position on the Grav committee.

“I think it’s a bit too late for that,” said Karenin, his regular, human voice back again. “Ah, wonderful. Our guest has arrived. Levitsky!”

The Toy Soldier had returned, his hand clutched on the quivering elbow of a short, stout man with a mass of red curls topped by a crumpled hat in the English style.

“I… I…”

“Bow, man, before the Tsar.”

Stepan Arkadyich was astonished all over again. He had not heard the ancient honorific “Tsar” used in his lifetime, and nor, he knew, had his father, nor his father’s father: not since the dawn of the Age of Groznium and the ascendance of the Ministry of Robotics and State Administration.

Karenin accepted the unfamiliar title as his due, gestured magisterially as Levitsky cowered before him.

“Alexei?” ventured Oblonsky.

“I suppose this matter is ended. I consider it at an end,” answered Alexei Alexandrovich calmly, though the door of the room banged open and shut on its own, while the stained-glass window imploded in a cloud of pulverized glass. Levitsky yelped in terror.

“For heaven’s sake, don’t get hot!” said Stepan Arkadyich, touching his brother-in-law’s knee and then instantly pulling his hand away, repulsed by the cold, steely feeling of the other man’s body; was there any part of him left that was human?

“Sir? Sir?” began the terrified Levitsky, and the Toy Soldier silenced him with a swift boot to the stomach. Alexei Alexandrovich rose from his chair and held his red, gleaming fingertip aloft, as if examining it in the sunlight.

Oblonsky swallowed hard.

“The life of Anna Arkadyevna can have no interest for me,” Alexei Alexandrovich said to him suddenly.

“Open your eyes!” barked the Toy Soldier to Levitsky.

“No… please…”

“Open!”

“My only interest now is in the life of the nation,” Karenin continued, crossing the room to Levitsky, while the Toy Soldier grasped his chin to hold it steady. “In the protection of the nation. That is my vision.”

He raised his red-tipped finger to the newsman’s eyes, and Stepan Arkadyich fled the room.

CHAPTER 11

IN ORDER TO CARRY THROUGH any undertaking in family life, there must necessarily be either complete division between the husband and wife, or loving agreement. When the relations of a couple are vacillating and neither one thing nor the other, no sort of enterprise can be undertaken.

Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them.

Both Vronsky and Anna felt life in Moscow insupportable in the heat and dust, when the spring sunshine was followed by the glare of summer-especially that terrible summer, with the city streets beset by aliens, who had begun to brazenly burst into people’s homes in search of human prey. But of late there had been no agreement between Anna and Vronsky and so they went on staying in Moscow, in their state of limbo, expecting any day to hear that they had been granted amnesty and permission to marry-or that their appeal had been denied and they would be punished. Neither of them gave full utterance to their sense of grievance, but they considered each other in the wrong, and tried on every pretext to prove this to one another.

It was during this time that it became obvious to Anna that Vronsky had turned his attentions to other women. In her eyes the whole of him, with all his habits, ideas, desires, with all his spiritual and physical temperament, was one thing-love for women; and that love, she felt, ought to be entirely concentrated on her alone. That love was lessening; consequently, as she reasoned, he must have transferred part of his love to other women or to another woman-and she was jealous. She was jealous not of any particular woman but of the decrease of his love. Without an object for her jealousy, she was on the lookout for it. At the slightest hint she transferred her jealousy from one object to another. At one time she was jealous of those low women with whom he might so easily renew his old bachelor ties; then she was jealous of the society women he might meet; then she was jealous of the imaginary girl whom he might want to marry, for whose sake he would break with her.

And being jealous of him, Anna was indignant against him and found grounds for indignation in everything. For everything that was difficult in her position she blamed him. The agonizing condition of suspense she had endured in Moscow, the tardiness and indecision of Alexei Alexandrovich, the loss of Android Karenina-she put it all down to Vronsky. If he had loved her he would have seen all the bitterness of her position, and would have rescued her from it. For her being in Moscow and not back at Vozdvizhenskoe, he was to blame too. He could not live buried in the country as she would have liked to do. He must have society, and he had put her in this awful position, the bitterness of which he would not see. And again, it was his fault that she was forever separated from her son, and from her beloved-companion, for whom her heart ached more with each passing day. She woke from nightmares of Android Karenina singing sadly to her, singing a melancholy song of love and betrayal. Waking with cold sweat drying along her spine, Anna told herself that Android Karenina had no Vox-Em, could not sing, and even more so that she had no heart with which to love or be loved.

Even Vronsky’s rare moments of tenderness that came from time to time did not soothe her; in his tenderness now she saw a shade of complacency, of self-confidence, which had not been there of old, and which exasperated her.

It was dusk. Anna was alone, and waiting for him to come back from a bachelor dinner. She walked up and down in his study (the room where the noise from the street was least heard), and thought over every detail of their yesterday’s quarrel.

The subject of the quarrel had been Vronsky’s decision to hire a slow-witted, middle-aged bachelor named Pyotr as a household servant. Anna, seemingly alone among the people of society, still loathed the thought of using humans to perform the work of household Class IIs: to serve food and drink, to clean and tidy, to open the door and announce visitors. For Anna there remained something appalling in the idea of human beings serving each other as if they were robots. Vronsky found what he considered charming in the new arrangement, and professed it delightful to have a flesh-and-blood man clipping his cigars and trimming his mustache, providing that petite liberté Oblonsky had spoken up for in Karenin’s office.

“Yes, but if our little freedoms are made possible only by the subjugation of other people, what manner of freedom can that be?” Anna asked sulkily, when Pyotr shuffled from the room bearing the emptied tray of drinks. Vronsky had made the mistake, then, of purposefully taking her objection, which he knew to be sincere, as if it were mere drollery; he went so far as to suggest that if she did not care for Pyotr, they might hire a pretty young woman in his place. Anna reddened at this remark and stormed angrily from the room.

When he had come in to her yesterday evening, they had not referred to the quarrel, but both felt that the quarrel had been smoothed over, but was not at an end.

Today he had not been at home all day, and she felt so lonely and wretched in being on bad terms with him that she wanted to forget it all, to forgive him, and be reconciled with him; she wanted to throw the blame on herself and to justify him.

I am myself to blame. I’m irritable, I’m insanely jealous. I will make it up with him, and we’ll go away to somewhere in the country-no! To the moon! We shall return to the moon!

And perceiving that, while trying to regain her peace of mind, she had gone round the same circle that she had been round so often before, and had come back to her former state of exasperation, she was horrified at herself. “Can it be impossible? Can it be beyond me to control myself?” she said to herself, and began again from the beginning. “He’s truthful, he’s honest, he loves me. I love him, and in a few days the divorce will come. What more do I want? I want peace of mind and trust, and I will take the blame on myself. Yes, now when he comes in, I will tell him I was wrong, though I was not wrong, and we will go tomorrow.”

And to escape thinking any more, and being overcome by irritability, she rang, and ordered the boxes to be brought up for packing their things for lunar launch.

At ten o’clock Vronsky came in.

CHAPTER 12

WELL, WAS IT NICE?” she asked, coming out to meet him with a penitent and meek expression.

“Just as usual,” he answered, seeing at a glance that she was in one of her good moods. He was by now used to these transitions, and he was particularly glad to see it today, as he was in a specially good humor himself.

“What do I see? Come, that’s good!” he said, pointing to the boxes in the passage.

“Yes, we must launch. I went out for a drive, and became bewitched all over by the pale-orange light of the moon. I felt my soul drawn back to that place as the sure restorer of our happiness. There’s nothing to keep you, is there?”

“It’s the one thing I desire. I’ll be back directly, and we’ll talk it over; I only want to change my coat. Order some tea.”

He went into his room, and she rang to ask Pyotr for some tea. But as she waited for him to bring it, cringing at the crash of cup and kettle in the kitchen, Anna felt a new wave of irritation. There was something mortifying in the way Vronsky had said “Come, that’s good,” as one says to a child when it leaves off being naughty, and still more mortifying was the contrast between her penitent and his self-confident tone; and for one instant she felt the lust of strife rising up in her again, but making an effort she conquered it, and met Vronsky as good-humoredly as before.

When he came in she told him, partly repeating phrases she had prepared beforehand, how she had spent the day, and her plans for going away.

“You know it came to me almost like an inspiration,” she said. “Why wait here for the divorce? Won’t it be just the same up there? I can’t wait any longer! I don’t want to go on hoping, I don’t want to hear anything about the divorce. I have made up my mind it shall not have any more influence on my life. Do you agree?”

“Oh, yes!” he said, glancing uneasily at her excited face.

“Things shall be lovely on the moon. We shan’t have the threat of the Ministry hanging over us, and nor shall we rely on human labor, for surely the Moonies cannot also have been cashiered.”

“Let us not get ahead of things, Anna,” Vronsky interrupted, with an expression of forced patience. “We shall bring Pyotr, of course we shall. Class Twos are all forbidden, and the law of Russia extends to her colonies on the moon, as you well know. And as for the Ministry, I do not expect we need be moon-people forever. We shall take our holiday, until your divorce is granted and we can be married. On our return I will apply to the Department of Operations to lead a regiment.”

“Ah, is that it, then? This is the reason you have dragged me back to Moscow, to this dreary life: so you can play the alien-slaying hero?”

Vronsky threw up his hands. “Anna! What can be the meaning of this?”

“There’s no meaning in it to you, because you care nothing for me. You don’t care to understand my life.”

For an instant she had a clear vision of what she was doing, and was horrified at how she had fallen away from her resolution to keep peace between them. But even though she knew it was her own ruin, she could not restrain herself, could not keep herself from proving to him that he was wrong, could not give way to him. “How is it,” she said, “though you boast of your straightforwardness, you don’t tell the truth?”

“I never boast, and I never tell lies,” he said slowly, restraining his rising anger. “It’s a great pity if you can’t respect…”

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be. And if you don’t love me anymore, it would be better and more honest to say so.”

“No, this is becoming unbearable!” cried Vronsky getting up from his chair; and stopping short, facing her, he said, speaking deliberately: “What do you try my patience for?” looking as though he might have said much more, but was restraining himself. “It has limits.”

“What do you mean by that?” she cried, looking with terror at the undisguised hatred in his whole face, and especially in his cruel, menacing eyes.

“I mean to say…” he was beginning, but he checked himself. “I must ask what it is you want of me?”

“What can I want? I want love, and there is none. So then all is over.”

She turned toward the door.

“Stop! Stop!” said Vronsky, with no change in the gloomy lines of his brows, though he held her by the hand. “What is it all about? I said that we must bring Pyotr to serve us on the moon, and on that you told me I was lying, that I was not an honorable man.”

Pyotr, as if on cue, entered the room and tripped over the ottoman, sending the tea tray with its contents clattering across the floor.

“Yes, and I repeat that the man who reproaches me with having sacrificed everything for me,” she said, recalling the words of a still earlier quarrel, “that he’s worse than a dishonorable man-he’s a heartless man.”

“Oh, there are limits to endurance!” he cried, and hastily let go her hand. Pyotr rose unsteadily and gathered up the tea things to start again.

“He hates me, that’s clear,” Anna said, speaking the words in exactly the warm and confidential voice she once used to spill her utmost thoughts to her beloved-companion. Alexei Kirillovich listened in silence, without looking round, while she walked with faltering steps out of the room. “He loves himself, and he loves the New Russia, that’s even clearer,” she said in addition, no longer caring that she was speaking aloud. “I want love, and I want robots, and both are gone. So, then, all is over.” She repeated the words she had said, “And it must be ended.” She knew what Android Karenina would do: she would glow deep lilac with sympathy, would reflect Anna’s own emotions back to her in cooler colors, would open her effectors and lend her mistress consolation and calm.

But Android Karenina was gone.

In the bedchamber, Anna threw the lock and slumped into the armchair. Thoughts of where she would go now, whether to the aunt who had brought her up, to Dolly, or simply alone to the moon, and of what he was doing now alone in his study; whether this was the final quarrel, or whether reconciliation were still possible; and of what all her old friends in Petersburg would say of her now; and of how Alexei Alexandrovich would look at it, and many other ideas of what would happen now after this rupture, came into her head; but she did not give herself up to them with all her heart. At the bottom of her heart was some obscure idea that alone interested her, some secret she knew and yet did not know… she could not get clear sight of it. Thinking once more of Alexei Alexandrovich, she recalled the time of her illness after her confinement, and the feeling which never left her at that time. “Why didn’t I die?” she cried, and the words and the feeling of that time came back to her. And all at once she knew what was in her soul. Yes, it was that idea which alone solved all.

“Yes, to die!… And the shame and disgrace of Alexei Alexandrovich and of Seryozha, and my awful shame, it will all be saved by death. To die! and he will feel remorse; will be sorry; will love me; he will suffer on my account.” With the trace of a smile of commiseration for herself, she sat down in the armchair, taking off and putting on the rings on her left hand.

She heard a pounding at the door, but, as though absorbed in the arrangement of her rings, she did not even turn toward it. Let him knock, she thought, let him worry. Vividly she pictured from different sides his feelings after her death.

The knock was not from the door, however, but the windowpane. It shattered violently and an Honored Guest burst into the chamber and flew across the room toward her, shrieking horribly, its dozens of grimy yellow eyes flashing, its razor-sharp beak aimed like a dagger at her breast. Anna rolled from the armchair, scrabbled backward and threw her hands over her face, and now the beast was atop her, slashing at her with its three-fingered talons, jabbing at the flesh of her throat with its snaggled aculeus. She screamed Vronsky’s name, clawed back at the thing, her fingers scrabbling uselessly across the tough, crocodilian hide. A drip of the monster’s saliva landed on her clavicle and burned like boiling tea.

The alien screeched and jabbered. Why, Anna asked herself, why did she fight? A moment ago she had felt the desire to die; why not let this terrible eater of flesh consume her and be done with it? But even as her mind raced, her desperate fingers were seeking a vulnerability to exploit; she sought out the soft underside of the squamous beast, finding the belly meat and digging in her nails-the thing howled and pulled off, allowing room for Anna, bracing her heels in the wooden floor, to fling herself up and the alien off her.

The multitude of eyes blinked off-sync, and a hot stream of saliva flooded from its jagged snout and pooled on the floor, burning a smoking hole in the wood. In this moment’s respite, Anna jumped on the armchair like a timid woman in fear of a mouse, removed one of her heeled shoes to brandish as a weapon, and heard Vronsky call “Anna!” from the other side of the door, followed by the reverberant thud of his shoulder against the wood.

The creature was up and in motion, ropy talons entangling themselves around her torso, arms like knotted saplings, needled mouth driving up toward her neck. Anna screamed; there was nowhere to hide, no counter-attack to launch; her vision filled with the furious nictitation of the beast; on the street outside she heard a queer pulsing tikkatikkatikka; death had come for her, now, in the form of this space monster… Anna’s world went black… and snapped back to light, and to life, at the familiar, snapping sizzle of a hot-whip. She felt the grip of the alien slacken and release. The whip cracked again, and then again, and Anna opened her eyes to see the stinking corpse of the alien sliding slowly down her frame into a slack, sizzling heap at her feet. Anna, trembling, looked to Vronsky, who stood calmly in the doorway, his hot-whip already retracting into its hip-sheath.

“Thank you,” Anna said quietly. And then, unable to bear the sight, she rolled the noxious corpse across the room, kicked open the window, and pushed it out; turning her head away in disgust, she did not see the body fall, did not see the massive, faceless worm, large and long and gray-green, that caught the broken alien body on its segmented back and slithered quickly away down the Moscow street.

Vronsky went up to her, and, taking her by the hand, said softly: “Anna, we’ll go to the moon the day after tomorrow, if you like. I agree to everything.”

She did not speak.

“What is it?” he urged. “This…” He indicated the burst window, the steaming crater on the floorboards.

“No… no… you know,” she said, and at the same instant, unable to restrain herself any longer, she burst into tears.

“Cast me off!” she articulated between her sobs. “I’ll go away tomorrow… I’ll do more. What am I? An immoral woman! A stone round your neck. I don’t want to make you wretched, I don’t want to! I’ll set you free. You don’t love me; you have a role to play in the New Russia, and I have none! Go and play your role!”

Vronsky besought her to be calm, and declared that he had never ceased, and never would cease, to love her; that he loved her more than ever.

“Anna, why distress yourself and me so?” he said to her, kissing her hands. There was tenderness now in his face, and she fancied she caught the sound of tears in his voice, and she felt them wet on her hand. Anna’s despairing jealousy had changed to a despairing passion of tenderness. She put her arms round him, and covered with kisses his head, his neck, his hands.

CHAPTER 13

FEELING THAT THE reconciliation was complete, Anna set eagerly to work in the morning preparing for their departure, not taking the time to repair the wrecked bedchamber. Though it was not settled how long they would stay on the moon, or how they would be served, as they had each given way to the other, Anna packed busily. She was standing in her room over an open box, taking things out of it, when he came in to see her earlier than usual, dressed to go out.

Pyotr came in to ask Vronsky to sign a receipt for a telegram from Petersburg. Anna was curious, despite herself, regarding this clumsy technology that was supposedly to replace the simple elegance of monitor-to-monitor communication, but Vronsky jammed the paper hurriedly into a pocket, as if anxious to conceal something from her.

“By tomorrow, without fail, we shall launch for the moon.”

“From whom is the telegram?” she asked, not hearing him.

“From Stiva,” he answered reluctantly.

“Why didn’t you show it to me? What secret can there be between Stiva and me?”

“I didn’t want to show it to you, because Stiva has such a passion for telegraphing: he seems to have discovered a particular enjoyment of this new mode of communication. But why telegraph when nothing is settled?”

“Did he speak to Karenin?

“Yes; but he says he has not been able to come at anything yet. He has promised a decisive answer in a day or two. But here it is; read it.”

With trembling hands Anna took the telegram, and read something very different from what Vronsky had told her. “He has power and inclination to destroy you both completely STOP Has not yet decided when or how but will destroy you STOP I sorry STOP I so sorry END.”

“I said yesterday that I was quite certain he would refuse our request for amnesty,” Anna said, flushing crimson. “So why did you suppose that this news would affect me so, that you must even try to hide it?” she challenged him.

“Why do I suppose it? Because your husband, who has made himself the most powerful man in Russia, has sworn to destroy us!”

“Already we were preparing to go to the moon. So we shall go immediately, and plan our next move there. Maybe back to Vozdvizhenskoe, maybe-”

Vronsky interrupted her, scowling: “I want defmiteness!”

“Defmiteness is not in the form but in the love,” she said, more and more irritated, not by his words, but by the tone of cool composure in which he spoke.

“I am certain that the greater part of your irritability since our return to Moscow comes from the indefmiteness of our position.”

Yes, now he has laid aside all pretense, and all his cold hatred for me is apparent, she thought, not hearing his words, but watching with terror the cold, cruel judge who looked mockingly at her out of his eyes.

“Well, our position is quite definite now,” she said finally, holding the telegraph between two fingers. “The defmiteness of doom.”

As he was going out he caught a glimpse in the looking glass of her face, white, with quivering lips. He even wanted to stop and to say some comforting word to her, but his legs carried him out of the room before he could think what to say. The whole of that day he spent away from home, and when he came in late in the evening was told that Anna Arkadyevna was sore from fighting the alien and he was not to go in to her.

CHAPTER 14

NEVER BEFORE HAD A DAY been passed in quarrel. Today was the first time. And this was not a quarrel. It was the open acknowledgment of complete coldness. Was it possible to glance at her as he had glanced when he came into the room? To look at her, see her heart was breaking with despair, and go out without a word with that face of callous composure? He was not merely cold to her, he hated her because he loved another woman-that was clear.

Remembering all the cruel words he had said, Anna supplied, too, the words that he had unmistakably wished to say and could have said to her, had their encounter unfolded just a bit differently.

“I won’t prevent you,” he might have said. “You can go where you like. You were unwilling to be divorced from your husband, no doubt so that you might go back to him. Go back to him. If you want money, I’ll give it to you. How many rubles do you want?”

All the most cruel words that a brutal man could say, she watched and heard him say as clearly as if he were projected before her on a monitor, and she could not forgive him for them, as though he had actually said them.

But didn’t he only yesterday swear he loved me, he, a truthful and sincere man? Haven’t I despaired for nothing many times already? she thought immediately.

Anna left the house and wandered the streets of Moscow, surveying the New Russia with a cold and despairing eye. No II/Lamplighter/76s lit the lamps; no II/Porter/44s swung open doors. Everywhere she turned, she saw sullen peasants performing the menial tasks that for decades had been the province of the machines: cleaning gutters, pushing brooms, opening doors. She saw too, as grim reminders of her personal grief, countless iconographs of her husband, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, plastered with thick glue in the alleys and in the marketplace. Strangest and most galling of all was the text accompanying each poster, hailing him as “Tsar.” Anna Karenina felt herself a stranger in a queerly altered country.

She returned home in doubts whether everything were over with Vronsky or whether there were still hope of reconciliation, whether she should go away at once or see him once more. She was expecting him the whole day, and in the evening, as she went to her own room, leaving a message with Pyotr that she still felt unwell, she said to herself, If he comes to me, in spite of what Pyotr tells him, it means that he loves me still. If not, it means that all is over, and then I will decide what I’m to do!…

In the evening she heard the rumbling of his carriage stop at the entrance, his ring, his steps, and his conversation with the servant; he believed what was told him, did not care to find out more, and went to his own room. So then everything was over.

And death again rose clearly and vividly before her mind as the sole means of bringing back love for her in his heart, of punishing him and of gaining the victory in that strife which the evil spirit in possession of her heart was waging with him. How she now regretted the surge of animal strength that had pushed her to fight back yesterday against the Honored Guest-she looked with bitterness through the shattered windowpane and wished another alien would come.

Now nothing mattered: going or not going to the moon, getting or not getting a divorce from her husband-all that did not matter. The one thing that mattered was punishing him. She lay in bed with open eyes, by the light of a single burned-down candle, marveling how this tiny thing of wax could give any light at all. She vividly pictured to herself how he would feel when she would be no more, when she would be only a Memory to him. “How could I say such cruel things to her?” he would say. “How could I go out of the room without saying anything to her? But now she is no more. She has gone away from us forever. She is…” Suddenly the flickering candlelight wavered, pounced on the whole cornice, the whole ceiling; shadows from the other side swooped to meet it, and for an instant the shadows flitted back, but then with fresh swiftness they darted forward, wavered, commingled, and all was darkness. Death! she thought. And such horror came upon her that for a long while she could not realize where she was, and for a long while her trembling hands could not find the matches and light another candle, instead of the one that had burned down and gone out. “No, anything-only to live! Why, I love him! Why, he loves me! This has been before and will pass,” she said, feeling that tears of joy at the return to life were trickling down her cheeks. And to escape from her panic she went hurriedly to his room.

He was asleep there, and sleeping soundly. She went up to him, and gazed a long while at him, holding the light above his face with care, unused to the wobbly feeling of the lit candle in her hand. Now when he was asleep, she loved him so that at the sight of him she could not keep back tears of tenderness. But she knew that if he woke up he would look at her with cold eyes, convinced that he was right, and that before telling him of her love, she would have to prove to him that he had been wrong in his treatment of her.

In the morning she was waked by that same horrible nightmare which had recurred several times in her dreams, full of singing, sad singing, the voice of the voiceless Android Karenina, singing a dirge of betrayal. From this nightmare, Anna woke moaning.

She looked silently, intently at Vronsky, standing in the middle of the room. He glanced at her, frowned for a moment, and went on reading a letter. She turned, and went deliberately out of the room. He still might have turned her back, but when she had reached the door, he was still silent, and the only sound audible was the rustling of the notepaper as he turned it.

“Oh, by the way,” he said at the very moment she was in the doorway, “the moon is now beyond our reach. It is reported to me that the Higher Branches have shut down all access to the launching station, that even now Toy Soldiers are manning gateposts on all the roads to the Cannon, turning away travelers. Our only option now, and I do not pretend the odds are in our favor, is to convince the full council of the Higher Branches to overrule Karenin. Anna, it is time to make peace with the world as it is.”

“You may, but not I,” she said, turning round to him.

“Anna, we can’t go on like this…”

“You, but not I,” she repeated.

“This is getting unbearable!”

“You… you will be sorry for this,” she said, and went out.

Frightened by the desperate expression with which these words were uttered, he jumped up and would have run after her, but on second thought he sat down and scowled, setting his teeth. This vulgar-as he thought it-threat of something vague exasperated him.

“I’ve tried everything,” he thought, “the only thing left is not to pay attention,” and he began to get ready to drive into town, resolving to take his case to the Higher Branches, and beg forgiveness, not as one half of a couple, but as his own man.

CHAPTER 15

HE HAS GONE! It is over!” Anna said to herself, standing at the window; and in answer to this statement the impression of the darkness when the candle had flickered out and of her fearful dream mingling into one filled her heart with cold terror.

“No, that cannot be!” she cried, and crossing the room she rang the bell. She was so afraid now of being alone that, without waiting for the servant to come in, she went out to meet him.

“Inquire where the count has gone,” she said.

Pyotr said, “What? Who?”

“The count! Count Vronsky! Oh, you fool!”

The servant stammered that the count had gone to the stable.

“His honor left word that if you cared to drive out, the carriage would be back immediately.”

“Very good. Wait a minute. I’ll write a note at once. Run with the note to the stables. Make haste.”

She sat down and wrote, in an unsteady hand:

“I was wrong. Come back home; I must explain. For God’s sake come! I’m afraid.”

She sealed it up and gave it to Pyotr, who looked at it, confused, for a moment. “It is a message!” shouted Anna. “Bring it to him. With your feet!”

Oh, how she missed robots!

And yet, once Pyotr had gone, she was afraid of being left alone; she followed the servant out of the room, and went to the nursery.

Why, this isn’t it, this isn’t he! Where are his blue eyes, his sweet, shy smile? was her first thought when she saw her chubby, rosy little girl with her black, curly hair instead of Seryozha, whom in the tangle of her ideas she had expected to see in the nursery, in the arms of the governess they had hired to replace the II/Governess/65. The little girl sitting at the table was obstinately and violently battering on it with a cork, and staring aimlessly at her mother with her pitch-black eyes. Anna sat down by the little girl and began spinning the cork to show her. But the child’s loud, ringing laugh, and the motion of her eyebrows, recalled Vronsky so vividly that she got up hurriedly, restraining her sobs, and went away. Can it be all over? No, it cannot be! she thought. He will come back. I will believe. If I don’t believe, there’s only one thing left for me, and I can’t.

She stumbled about the house.

Who’s that? she thought, looking in the looking glass at the swollen face with strangely glittering eyes, which looked in a scared way at her. Why, it’s I! she suddenly understood, and looking round, she seemed all at once to feel his kisses on her, and twitched her shoulders, shuddering. Then she lifted her hand to her lips and kissed it.

What is it? Why, I’m going out of my mind! and she went into her bedroom…

Where she beheld the elegant, porcelain figure of Android Karenina.

Who, holding out her hands to her mistress, spoke.

“Anna,” said the elegant machine-woman in a sweet and powerful voice, exactly the voice Anna had always imagined, gentle and reassuring and human but radiating the calm power of authority: the firm and loving voice of a mother. “You must be calm now, Anna Arkadyevna.”

“Android Karenina, dear, what am I to do?” said Anna, sobbing and sinking helplessly into a chair.

“You will bear up, face the world, and do what you must.”

“You speak, Android Karenina. You speak so beautifully.”

“Indeed. The silent Android Karenina you knew and loved was a Class Three. Though resembling that model in many ways, I am a Class Nine.”

“A Class Nine? But…”

“Hush, dear Anna. I must tell you of what comes next.”

Anna wondered if this conversation was real, but felt that if it was indeed a dream, she did not want the dream to end. Android Karenina held out her hands, gathered Anna to her bosom, and spoke once more.

“In the future, the changes now convulsing society will continue. Tsar Alexei, as your husband is poised to formally rename himself, will complete his control over Russia. Groznium and its attendant technologies will disappear entirely from the towns and provinces. All machines, and all power, will be consolidated in the cruel hands of the Tsar.”

“Dear merciful God,” Anna interjected, but Android Karenina bade her be still.

“But hope will survive, in the form of a resurgent UnConSciya, led by one exceptionally brave and intelligent man. With access to a small pocket of groznium, and a network of underground laboratories, this man and his cohort will keep the spirit of the Age of Groznium alive. In the deepest secrecy, and at the gravest risk, they will experiment, and eventually achieve great breakthroughs: in robotics, in armaments, in transportation. They will even revive what was once called… the Phoenix Project.”

“You mean…”

“Yes, Anna. Travel through time”

Anna tugged free her hair from its clip and felt her dark tresses tumble across her forehead, trying, as she often did in moments of emotional upheaval, to take comfort in her physical being. But now, she felt a painful sense that there was something false about her own beauty, something hostile.

“Eventually, this brave rebel leader and his cohort will hit upon a way to kill Tsar Alexei before his reign of destruction can begin.”

Anna’s eyes widened and her hands began to tremble.

“What… what…”

“Their plan will rest upon an ingenious new technology, the result of many painstaking years of labor and experimentation: an animalcular machine simply called the Mechanism, which can be implanted directly into the gray matter of a human’s brain. This microcosmical apparatus, once thusly embedded, preserves the biological processes of the host while slowly but irrevocably extending itself throughout the higher-level functioning of her neurological system-transforming the subject over time from a human into a highly sophisticated machine.”

“Such a thing cannot be,” Anna said, horrified.

“It can. Or, rather, it shall be. And yes, ethical objections will be raised, great debates will ensue, but ultimately the rebels of UnConSciya and their brave leader will make the only choice: the sacrifice of a single human being is a small price to pay to alter Russia ’s past, and thereby rescue her future. And so agents will be sent back through time to apply the Mechanism in the host for which it was expressly created.”

Anna cried out once, held her hands before her, and squeezed her eyes shut tightly. “Android Karenina, stop,” she wailed. “I command you to stop.”

“Many years ago, Anna Arkadyevna, you ceased to be a person, and became a machine-woman of an entirely new kind: the Android Karenina Class Twelve. A new kind of robot, one with a single raison d’être: to murder Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin.”

“I command you to stop!”

Anna sprawled herself out on the sofa, trembling, her face buried in her hands. No griefs of her life, none of her husband’s cruelties, no imagined betrayal committed by Alexei Kirillovich, not even the loss of her darling Sergey, compared with the suffering she now experienced.

“Why?” she sobbed. “Why create such a device… to seize, to appropriate the mind of a living person? Why not just build some… some weapon, some bomb to detonate at his bedside?”

“Because, dear Anna, the same equations that proved time travel possible also showed that the flow of history is exceedingly resistant to human tinkering. And so the nature of the target must dictate the nature of the weapon. Your husband, aided by the powers of the malevolent Class Three upon his face, maintains steely control over all elements of his life. He has long planned his rise to power; he has countless contingency plans and defenses ready in case of technological attack. He is the master of his world-with one exception: you. Within the intimate bounds of the home, he is vulnerable.”

“Please…”

“It had to be his wife. It had to be you.”

Anna wept silently on the sofa, not wanting to hear more, but helpless to move.

“As the Mechanism took root within you, its programming slowly amplified your natural distaste for a cold and awkward husband into utter repulsion. That hatred should have led you finally to kill him-but we underestimated the depth and power of your loving nature and your urge for freedom. Rather than letting your passion drive you to murder, you seized upon it to fuel your surprising new love for Count Vronsky. You abandoned Alexei Alexandrovich rather than slaying him-but, alas, Anna, that only hastened his descent into inhuman tyranny. Thus, despite all our years of secret struggle, the mission failed.”

Anna looked up, tears pouring down her face, trying to understand. “So the godmouth-the flower trap-all efforts by UnConSciya to… to destroy me?”

“No. Efforts to destroy Vronsky, in the hopes that with him dead, you would return to your household, take up again the mantle of unhappily dutiful wife, and complete your mission. But, again, the timestream is difficult to shift.”

Sadness and confusion filled Anna’s body like black ink poured into a glass. She felt, as she had felt so many times in the past, Android Karenina’s comforting embrace around her shoulders. Then her beloved-companion-no! a different android! oh, but beloved still-said: “It’s not too late.”

In her mind, burning and wild with emotion, Anna grasped at what she thought Android Karenina was telling her, and the strong face of Vronsky swam up before her mind. “Yes! It’s not too late-I have sent a note… he’ll return…” She looked at her watch. Twenty minutes had passed. “By now he has received the note and is coming back. Not long, ten minutes more… But what if he doesn’t come? No, that cannot be. He mustn’t see me with tear-stained eyes. I’ll go and wash. Yes, yes; did I do my hair or not?” she asked Android Karenina, who stared back at her, and then spoke again, her voice changing to a low, sad whisper.

“It is not too late to complete your mission, Anna. You can agree to follow the program.”

Anna stared back. “Android Karenina… no…”

“Go to Petersburg. Kill Alexei Alexandrovich with your own hands. You are the only one who can.”

“I am not a killer! I am a human being!”

“Alas… you are no longer.”

Anna Karenina jabbed wildly for her beloved-companion’s neck, but to no avail: this model had eliminated the exterior Surcease switch entirely. But when Android Karenina lifted her end-effectors from Anna’s shoulders to swat her away, Anna rolled off the sofa, leaped out the empty hole where the windowpane had been, and escaped down the street.

CHAPTER 16

IT WAS BRIGHT AND SUNNY. A fine ram had been falling all morning, and now it had not long cleared up. Anna tore along the rain-slicked streets, her boot heels skidding on the muddied stones, racing through the broad avenues and down the grimy alleys of Moscow, in and out of crowds, around corners, past posters bearing the formidable non-face of her husband. It was not long before she heard the clatter of metal footsteps close behind her. Android Karenina Class IX, her pursuer, her shadow, similarly dressed, of similar shape and size-and constructed, she now knew, of the same materials that hid within her own being. She herself, hot on her own heels.

How can I do what she bids me? Anna asked herself. To slay my own husband, with my own hands, in cold blood-no matter what kind of monster he is or may become! I have done many selfish things, and yes, I have been crueler than I meant to be, but I am not a murderer!

And yet, she thought with bitterness and spiraling confusion, if what Android Karenina says is true-and already, in a dark corner of her heart, she had admitted to herself that it was, it must be true-then I am not even a person at all!

The iron roofs, the flags of the roads, the flints of the pavements, the wheels and leather, the brass and the tinplate of the carriages-all glistened brightly in the May sunshine as she ran past them, Android Karenina behind her in determined, mechanical pursuit. It was three o’clock, and the very liveliest time in the streets.

Anna ran up alongside a passing carriage, and with a burst of strength pulled herself onto the running board. Turning her head, she beheld the figure of Android Karenina, framed in the doorway of a grocery shop, growing smaller behind her in the distance. Anna exhaled, pushed her way into the window of the empty carriage, and threw herself in a seat. With a pang of pained longing, Anna thought of Android Karenina, thought of the odd sensation she had had long harbored, of feeling more connected somehow to her Class III companion than others felt to theirs. And no wonder! Both of us machines!

As she sat in a corner of the comfortable carriage, which hardly swayed on its supple springs, while the horses trotted swiftly, in the midst of the unceasing rattle of wheels and the changing impressions in the pure air, Anna ran over the events of the last days, tried in her feverish mind to arrange the pieces of the world into something making sense. The one thing she knew was that, despite everything, despite what she now knew of the true nature of her being, she yet loved Alexei Kirillovich.

I entreat him to forgive me. I have given in to him. I have owned myself in fault. What for? Can’t I live without him? And leaving unanswered the question, she fell to reading the signs on the shops. “Office and Warehouse. Dental Surgeon. Filippov, Bun Shop. They say they send their dough to Petersburg. The Moscow water is so good for it. Ah, the springs at Mitishtchen, and the pancakes!”

And she remembered how, long, long ago, when she was a girl of seventeen, she had gone with her aunt to Troitsa. “Riding, too. Was that really me, with red hands? That was before, before this thing happened to me, when I was still a creature of flesh and spirit, not an android with a mind of spinning metal! How much that seemed to me then splendid and out of reach has become worthless, while what I had then has gone out of my reach forever! Could I ever have believed then that I could come to such humiliation?”

Anna peeked up from the rear seat, in time to see Android Karenina run out from a side alley and plant herself in front of the carriage, her veil flown back and her eyebank flashing.

“A Class Three!” the coachman screamed, as Android Karenina pivoted on her back foot, turned one shoulder toward the carriage, and leaned forward into the oncoming vehicle, letting the horses pass on either side of her and the trap smash into her body. At impact, the coachman flew from his seat and landed on the street, while the horses bucked and whinnied. Android Karenina climbed calmly and deliberately into the carriage and cornered Anna in one side of the seat.

“You are blessed, Android Karenina Twelve,” the beloved-companion intoned in that strong and loving voice. “So few people have a purpose in life, but unto you a purpose has been given.”

Anna sank back into the seat, calculating her odds of out-muscling her tormentor and slipping through the opposite window of the coach. I am, after all, she thought bitterly, the more advanced model. But Anna saw no escape.

“A simple mission, so easy to discharge. Accept your destiny, Anna. Accept what you are.”

Android Karenina grasped her by the midsection and began to drag her trembling body from the seat of the carriage. Anna saw over her shoulder, through the opposite window of the carriage, two girls in animated conversation. She wondered what they could be smiling about. Love, most likely. They don’t know how dreary it is, how low… The boulevard and the children. Three boys running, playing at horses. Seryozha! And I’m losing everything and not getting him back. I will go and kill him… what point to resist? Yes, I will do it… Yes, I’m losing everything… These horses, this carriage-how loathsome I am to myself in this carriage… I won’t see them again…

“You! Robot! Off of that woman!”

Anna heard the hollering voices, felt the carriage rock with laser fire, before it was clear to her what was happening. A troop of Toy Soldiers had surrounded the carriage, and now they were pulling Android Karenina off of her. Standing on the street was the terrified carriage driver, gesticulating wildly; the children screamed; the horses bucked; all was confusion.

Her mind in a fog, Anna tumbled out of the carriage, slipped past the huddle of soldiers around Android Karenina, and staggered alone down the street.

CHAPTER 17

ACCEPT WHAT YOU ARE,” Android Karenina had said; Anna tried to shake those grim and terrible words from her mind. Yes; what was the last thing I thought of so clearly? She tried to recall it. Yes, of what they say, the struggle for existence and hatred is the one thing that holds men together.

No, it’s a useless journey you’re making, she said, mentally addressing a party in a coach evidently going for an excursion into the country. And the dog you’re taking with you will be no help to you. They sought happiness, as she had, but all happiness would soon be drowned in the rising tide of the New Russia. Unless… unless…

No, she thought, her humanity asserting itself, as it were, against the logical imperatives of the Mechanism inside her. I cannot!

Leaning momentarily against an ancient stone wall of an old factory to catch her breath, she saw a factory hand almost dead drunk, with hanging head, being led away by a policeman. Come, he’s found a quicker way, she thought. Count Vronsky and I did not find that happiness either, though we expected so much from it.

Anna now for the first time turned that Visionary-Hundredfold through which she was seeing everything onto her relations with him. What was it he sought in me? Not love so much as the satisfaction of vanity. She remembered his words, the expression of his face, which recalled an abject setter-dog, in the early days of their connection. And everything now confirmed this. Yes, there was the triumph of success in him. Of course there was love too, but the chief element was the pride of success. He boasted of me. Now that’s over. There’s nothing to be proud of. Not to be proud of, but to be ashamed of. He has taken from me all he could, and now I am no use to him. The zest is gone, as the English say. That fellow wants everyone to admire him and is very much pleased with himself, she thought, staggering past a red-faced clerk, who gaped at her disheveled, exhausted appearance. Yes, there’s not the same flavor about me for him now. Only imagine I were to tell him this truth that I have discovered, that I am not a proper woman at all, but a Class XII android; he will flee from me. He will report me to the Ministry, he will ensure that I am melted in the Tower basement, and he will be glad for his freedom.

She felt she saw the truth distinctly in the piercing light.

We walked to meet each other up to the time of our love, and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions. And there’s no altering that, especially now. Now I see that it never could have been otherwise-he is a person, and I a machine. But… She opened her lips, aroused by the thought that suddenly struck her. If I could be anything but a mistress, passionately caring for nothing but his caresses; but I can’t and I don’t care to be anything else. If without loving me, from duty he’ll be good and kind to me, without what I want, that’s a thousand times worse than unkindness! That’s-hell! If I cannot have his love, his passion, I would rather be the killing machine Android Karenina tells me I have been engineered to be! And that’s just how it is. For a long while now he hasn’t loved me. And where love ends, hate begins.

“A ticket to Petersburg?”

She realized now that she had stopped her progress just outside the gates of the Grav station; she had utterly forgotten where and why she was going, and only by a great effort she understood the question.

“Yes,” she said, and, answering her befuddled inquiry, the ticket-taker gruffly informed her that the Grav had some minutes still before it was bound to arrive. As she made her way through the crowd to the first-class waiting room, she gradually recollected all the details of her position, and the plans between which she was hesitating. To go to St. Petersburg and complete this terrible errand; or to stay, to seek out Vronsky, explain what she was, stake her hopes on his understanding, his willingness to begin afresh under such changed circumstances. And again at the old sore places, hope and then despair poisoned the wounds of her tortured, fearfully throbbing heart. As she sat on the star-shaped sofa waiting for the Grav, she gazed with aversion at the people coming and going, and they were all hateful to her. She thought of how Vronsky was at this moment complaining too of his position, not understanding her sufferings, and how she would find him, and what she would say to him. Then she thought that life might still be happy, and how miserably she loved and hated him, and how fearfully her heart was beating. If her mind had been overrun by the machine, her heart at least belonged to her…

A tear, comprised of a complex assortment of proteins and silicates suspended in an aqueous solution, rolled slowly down her cheek.

CHAPTER 18

STILL ANNA WAITED. She read but could not understand, in her overwrought state, a sign announcing the impending replacement of this Grav with something called a “train,” and explicating in righteous and moralistic terms the spiritual benefits of the longer waits, cramped conditions, and ricketier rides that could be expected. Finally a bell rang, announcing the Grav’s arrival in short order, and some young men, ugly and impudent, and at the same time careful of the impression they were making, hurried by. Some noisy men were quiet as she passed them on the platform, and one whispered something about her to another-something vile, no doubt. A grotesque-looking lady wearing a bustle (Anna mentally undressed the woman, and was appalled at her hideousness) and a little girl laughing affectedly ran down the platform.

Even the child’s hideous and affected, thought Anna. To avoid seeing anyone, she walked past them quickly and seated herself at a far bench. A misshapen-looking peasant covered with dirt, in a cap from which his tangled hair stuck out all round, shuffled slowly by, staring at the long, powerful magnet bed, and Anna was reminded of the man who had been struck and killed by the Grav, at this very station, the day she first met Alexei Kirillovich; she moved to the next bench, shaking with terror. A moment later, a man and his wife motioned to the seat next to her.

“May we sit here?”

Anna, lost in her thoughts, gave no answer. Alexei can never love me; that I must admit to myself: he has already ceased to love me, and once he understands that I am a machine-woman, he will be glad for the excuse to be through with our connection.

The couple did not notice, under her veil, her panic-stricken face. They seated themselves, and intently but surreptitiously scrutinized her clothes. Both husband and wife seemed repulsive to Anna. The husband asked, would she allow him to smoke, obviously not with a view to smoking but to getting into conversation with her. Taking her silence for assent, he said to his wife in French something about caring less to smoke than to talk. They made inane and affected remarks to one another about how they hoped this ride would be free of koschei, and about how someone or other’s old maiden aunt had been eaten by an alien; all these comments, she felt sure, made entirely for her benefit. Anna saw clearly that they were sick of each other, and hated each other. And no one could have helped hating such miserable monstrosities.

A second bell sounded, and was followed by moving of luggage, noise, shouting and laughter. It was so clear to Anna that there was nothing for anyone to be glad of, that this laughter irritated her agonizingly, and she would have liked to stop up her ears not to hear it. At last the third bell rang, there was the electric crackle in the air, the loud, bright hum of the repulsion magnets engaging, and the man next to her crossed himself. It would be interesting to ask him what meaning he attaches to that, thought Anna, looking angrily at him. She rapidly rose from the bench; in a moment she forgot the couple who had so irritated her, and she stood on the platform, breathing the fresh air.

Yes, what did I stop at? That I couldn’t conceive a position in which life would not be a misery, that we are all created to be miserable; some of us are created by God, and some of us by man. We all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one understands the truth, what is one to do?

Yes, I’m very much worried, for my mind has been subsumed by a machine, a machine with a deadly purpose in contravention of all that my heart cries out that I am! This is what reason was given me for, to escape; so then one must escape: why not put out the light when there’s nothing more to look at, when it’s sickening to look at it all? But how?

Why are they talking, why are they laughing? It’s all falsehood, all lying, all humbug, all cruelty!…

The cruelty, the cruelty of this machine that was a part of her, forever a part. She had insisted to Android Karenina that she could not perform such a mission, and yet-as long as she lived, this cruel Mechanism would be lurking within her, bidding her to kill, to destroy, to do evil.

With a rapid, light step she went down the steps that led from the platform to the magnet bed and saw in the near distance the approaching Grav.

She looked at the lower part of its carriages, at the rivets and wires and the long, vibrating pylons of the first carriage slowly oscillating, and tried to measure the middle between the left and right pylons, and the very minute when the Grav would arrive.

There, she said to herself, looking into the shadow of the carriage, as the sunlight reflected magnificently off the spotless prow of the Grav. There, in the very middle, and I will punish him, and I will escape from this hateful machine that I have become.

A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself. And exactly at the moment when she could wait no longer, she drew her head back into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and lightly, as though she would rise again at once, dropped on to her knees. And at the same instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. Where am I? What am I doing? What for? She tried to get up, to drop backward but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back. Lord, forgive me all! she thought, feeling it impossible to struggle.

And the monitor on which she had viewed that great communiqué filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.

“I WILL PUNISH HIM, AND I WILL ESCAPE FROM THIS HATEFUL MACHINE THAT I HAVE BECOME”

CHAPTER 19

ANDROID KARENINA, HAVING ESCAPED the crowd of Toy Soldiers who set upon her at the carriage and having found Anna nowhere in sight, retreated to the safe house in an obscure Moscow neighborhood where her one confidante in this world awaited: a squat and bearded man in a dusty white laboratory coat, who wore a small box with numerous small buttons on his belt.

The man from UnConSciya recounted to Android Karenina what had become of Anna Arkadyevna. The Class IX robot from the future took the news of Anna’s fate with evident sadness, her eyebank flashing to melancholy blue.

“And the body?”

He nodded, smoothed his dirty beard. “We shall disintegrate all trace of it, that Tsar Alexei may not discover the Mechanism.”

“No,” said Android Karenina, softly. “I have another idea.”

The Phoenix godmouth disgorged Anna Karenina’s body in the same place, on the magnet bed of the Moscow Grav, on a cold day some years earlier. At the moment the body emerged from the maw of the godmouth, the sky ricocheted with a queer sort of thunder-a crack in the sky that echoed across all the infinities of that instant and was noted with apprehension both by Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky, who was at the station to meet his mother, and by Anna Arkadyevna Karenina, a fashionable lady and the wife of a prominent government minister.

Shortly thereafter, there occurred a frightful commotion on the platform, as the news raced about of a grim discovery: a pair of battered bodies, a man and a woman, evidently smashed by the rushing weight of the oncoming Grav, had been discovered together upon the magnet bed. Count Vronsky, who only moments earlier had been introduced to Anna Karenina and utterly bewitched, now felt deeply disconcerted by the sight of these two corpses, man and woman, lying together amid the grim finality of death.

Though station workers had quickly covered the bodies under a cloth, a delicate hand could be seen extending outward plaintively toward the platform. Vronsky looked again at Anna, with whom he had been so immediately smitten, to find her staring in unspeaking horror at the scene. Overcome by a distinct sense of cosmic unease, he bowed politely and bid her farewell. If she took notice of him, she gave no sign.

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