Android Karenina (16 page)

Vronsky remained on the silver floor of the Petersburg Grav station, watching with relief as signs of full functioning returned one by one to his Class III. He shook his head, contemplating the beauty of Anna Karenina, the austere elegance of Android Karenina—and wondering, of her strange, metal-faced husband:
What in God’s name is he?

T
HE FIRST PERSON
to meet Anna at home was her son. He dashed down the stairs to her, in spite of his II/Governess/D147’s call, and with desperate joy shrieked: “Mother! Mother!” Running up to her, he hung on her neck.

“I
told
you it was mother!” he shouted to the II/Governess/D147, who issued scolding clucks at this rudeness. “I knew!”

But the son, like the husband, aroused in Anna a feeling akin to disappointment. She had imagined him better than he was in reality. She had to let herself drop down to the reality to enjoy him as he really was. But even as he was, he was charming, with his fair curls, his blue eyes, and his plump, graceful little legs in tightly pulled-up stockings. Anna experienced almost physical pleasure in the sensation of his nearness and his caresses, and moral soothing when she met his simple, confiding, and loving glance and heard his naive questions.

Anna took out the Class Is that Dolly’s children had sent him, and told her son what sort of little girl his cousin was in Moscow, how she
could read, and even taught the other children.

“Why, am I not so nice as she?” asked Seryozha.

“To me you’re nicer than anyone in the world.”

“I know that,” said Seryozha, smiling.

Various friends visited with Anna, glad to have her back, while Alexei Alexandrovich spent the day at the Ministry, busy with some momentous project that he himself had initiated and was directing. Anna, finally left alone, spent the time till dinner in helping with her son’s dinner (he dined apart from his parents) and in putting her things in order, and in reading and answering the notes and letters that had accumulated on her table.

The feeling of causeless shame, which she had felt on the journey, and her excitement, too, had completely vanished. In the habitual conditions of her life she felt again resolute and irreproachable; in her physical body she felt only the occasional phantasmal tingling just above her breastbone, where the koschei had danced with its dozens of disgusting feet across her chest.

She shuddered at the memory, and then recalled with wonder her curiously joyful state of mind after the nightmare of the attack.
What was it? Nothing. Vronsky said something silly, which was easy to put a stop to, and I answered as I ought to have done. To speak of it to my husband would be unnecessary and out of the question. To speak of it would be to attach importance to what has no importance.
She remembered how she had told her husband of what was almost a declaration made to her at Petersburg by a young man, one of her husband’s subordinates in the Ministry, and how Alexei Alexandrovich had answered that every woman living in the world was exposed to such incidents, but that he had the fullest confidence in her tact, and could never lower her and himself by jealousy. Neither ever mentioned the incident again, and the man had, anyway, later been revealed as a Janus, and given appropriate punishment in Petersburg Square.

“So then there’s no reason to speak of it? And indeed, thank God, there’s nothing to speak of,” she said to Android Karenina, who nodded her quiet agreement.

“IT’S TIME, IT’S TIME,” HE SAID, WITH A MEANINGFUL SMILE; HIS TELESCOPING OCULUS ZOOMED INAS HE ENTERED THEIR BEDROOM

Alexei Alexandrovich came back from his meeting at four o’clock, but as often happened, he had not time to come in to her. Later they dined together, and after dinner Anna sat down at the hearth to write a letter to Dolly, and waited for her husband. Precisely at twelve o’clock, when Anna was still sitting at her writing table, she heard the sound of measured steps in slippers, and Alexei Alexandrovich, freshly washed and combed, his faceplate glinting in the hearth light, came in to her.

“He’s a good man, truthful, good-hearted, and remarkable in his own line,” Anna whispered to Android Karenina, as her husband approached. “And really, the visible half of his face is handsome in its way.”

“It’s time, it’s time,” he said, with a meaningful smile; his right eye zoomed slowly toward her, its lens opening visibly, before he went into their bedroom.

“And what right had he to look at him like that?” Anna said to her android, recalling Vronsky’s glance at Alexei Alexandrovich. Undressing, she went into the bedroom, and sent Android Karenina, as was appropriate, into Surcease; but her face had none of the eagerness that, during her stay in Moscow, had fairly flashed from her eyes and her smile; on the contrary, now the fire seemed quenched in her, hidden somewhere far away.

A
T THE END OF THE WINTER
, in the Shcherbatskys’ house, a consultation was being held, which was to pronounce on the state of Kitty’s health and the measures to be taken to restore her failing strength. It was hoped by her family that she was suffering from nothing worse than a broken heart. But she had been severely ill, and as spring came on she grew worse. A celebrated physician was called in, and, with his valise crammed full of the latest physiolographical instruments, accompanied by an industrious hospital-green Class II with an impressive effector array, he examined the patient.

For more than an hour the doctor ran his Class I physiometers along every inch of Kitty Shcherbatskaya’s naked flesh, carefully working the thread-thin vital-estimators into her windpipe and the chambers of her ears, listening with his echolocater pressed against the sides of her skull. Throughout this invasive and degrading process, Princess Shcherbatskaya, the patient’s mother, hovered anxiously at the edges of the room, as did Tatiana, the lithe, balletic Class III who had, as yet, been little used and hardly noticed by her ailing mistress.

“Well, doctor, decide our fate,” said the princess. “Tell me everything.”

“Yes, yes, tell! What hope is there? Is there hope?”
said La Scherbatskaya, the princess’s Class III, wringing her hands beside her mistress.

“Princess. Allow me to examine the results of the various physiolographs and then I will have the honor of laying my opinion before you.”

“So we had better leave you?”

“As you please.”

When the doctor was left alone, he flicked on his II/Prognosis/M4, and fed into it all the data he had collected. After thirty long seconds, during which the wise little machine ran its efficient tabulation of the various symptoms that had been discovered, the Class II reported that there was possibly a commencement of tuberculosis trouble . . . that there were indications: malnutrition, nervous excitability, and so on.

The celebrated physician looked impatiently at the Class II. “Yes, but in the presence of tuberculosis indications, what is to be done to maintain nutrition?”

The Class II mulled over this follow-up, a faint steam indicative of second-tier information-processing escaping from its Third Bay, while the doctor glanced at his gold-plated watch and waited, thinking about the opera. Meanwhile in the drawing room the family whispered anxiously, surrounding Kitty where she lay prostrate on the sofa, blushing and anticipating her fate. Her Class III, Tatiana, performed nervous
jetés
from one corner of the room to the other.

At last the physician received the final results from the Class II and entered the drawing room. When the doctor came in, Kitty flushed crimson and her eyes filled with tears. All her illness and treatment struck her as a thing so stupid, ludicrous even! Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders and vitasonic recalibrations? But she could not grieve her mother, especially as her mother considered herself to blame.

“May I trouble you to sit down, princess?” the celebrated doctor said to her.

He sat down with a smile, facing her, felt her pulse, and again began asking her tiresome questions. Suddenly sensing an opportunity to be of use to her mistress, Tatiana pirouetted over and took first position directly between the doctor and Kitty.

“Excuse me, doctor,”
she said, her sweet, still-developing soprano Vox-Em tone showing surprising strength.
“But there is really no object in this. For this is the third time you’ve asked her the same things!”
Kitty looked up with wide-eyed gratitude at this intercession, experiencing for the first time that mysterious feeling of true, deep kinship between a human and her beloved-companion; and then, arm in arm, Kitty Shcherbatskaya and her pink-hued android left the room.

The celebrated doctor did not take offense.

“What a charming Class III,” he said to the princess. “However, I had finished . . .”

And the doctor began scientifically explaining to the princess, repeating word for word the phrases he had heard only a few minutes earlier from the II/Prognosis/M4. At the question whether they should “go abroad,” the doctor plunged into deep meditation, as though resolving a weighty problem. He glanced furtively at the Class II, saw it indicate
yes
with a barely perceptible 2.5-degree head unit rotation, and thusly pronounced his decision: they
were
to “go abroad,” but to put no faith in foreign quacks, and to apply to him in any need.

It seemed as though some piece of good fortune had come to pass after the doctor had gone. The mother was much more cheerful when she went back to her daughter, and Kitty pretended to be more cheerful. She even spent a half hour walking the grounds of the estate with Tatiana, which made the rose-accented Class III immeasurably joyful.

“Really, I’m quite well, Mamma. But if you want to go abroad, let’s go!” she said, and trying to appear interested in the proposed tour, she began talking of the preparations for the journey.

So it was that several weeks later the Shcherbatskys marked the coming of Lent by giving up their terrestrial moorings. They traveled
first by Puller carriage and then by Grav to Russia’s grand departure port, the town of Pushkin, where stood the pride of the century: the Ballistic Cross-Orbital Cannon.

Thus were the Scherbatskys blasted into space.

T
HE HIGHEST PETERSBURG SOCIETY
is essentially one: in it everyone knows everyone else, everyone visits everyone else. But this great set has its subdivisions. Anna Arkadyevna Karenina had friends and close ties in various circles of this highest society. One circle was her husband’s government official set, consisting of his colleagues and subordinates in the Higher Branches of the Ministry of Robotics and State Administration. Anna found it difficult now to recall the feeling of almost awe-stricken reverence that she had at first entertained for these persons, who were together responsible for the management and advancement of groznium-derived technologies, and therefore for the welfare of all Mother Russia. Now she knew all of them as people know one another in a country town; she knew their habits and weaknesses, and where the shoe pinched each one of them. She knew their relations with one another and with the head authorities, knew who was for whom, and how each one maintained his position, and where they agreed and disagreed.

The second circle with which Anna had ties was preeminently the fashionable world—the world of floating balls, of dinners, of sumptuous dresses. Her connection with this circle was kept up through Princess Betsy Tverskaya, her cousin’s wife, who had an income of a hundred and twenty thousand rubles, and who had taken a great fancy to Anna since she came of age and received her Class III, showed her much attention, and drew her into her set, which followed all the latest trends.

Anna had at first avoided as far as she could Princess Tverskaya’s world, because it necessitated an expenditure beyond her means, and besides in her heart she preferred the first circle. But since her visit to Moscow she had done quite the contrary. She avoided her serious-minded friends in that circle around the Ministry, and went out into the fashionable world. There she saw Vronsky, and experienced an agitating joy at those meetings. She met Vronsky especially often at Betsy’s, for Betsy was a Vronsky by birth and his cousin. Vronsky was everywhere where he had any chance of meeting Anna and speaking to her, when he could, of his love. She gave him no encouragement, but every time she met him there surged up in her heart that same feeling of quickened life that had come upon her that day in the Grav, when he saw her for the first time. She was conscious herself that her delight sparkled in her eyes and curved her lips into a smile, and she could not quench the expression of this delight.

At first Anna sincerely believed, and earnestly expressed to Android Karenina, that she was displeased with him for daring to pursue her. But soon after her return from Moscow, on arriving at a soiree where she had expected to meet him, and not finding him there, she realized distinctly from the rush of disappointment that she had been deceiving herself, and that this pursuit was not merely not distasteful to her, but that it made the whole interest of her life.