Android Karenina (21 page)

That year’s intra-regimental Exterior battle had been arranged for the officers and was rapidly approaching. In spite of his love affair, he was looking forward to the match with intense, though reserved, excitement.

These two passions did not interfere with one another. On the contrary, he needed occupation and distraction quite apart from his love, so as to recruit and rest himself from the violent emotions that agitated him.

A
KIND OF METAL SHED
known as “the silo” had been put up close to the battle arena, and there Vronsky’s Exterior was to have been taken the previous day. He had not yet seen her there. During the last few days he had not ridden her out for practice himself, and so now
he positively did not know in what condition his Exterior had arrived yesterday and was in today.

Vronsky was justifiably proud of his Exterior, Frou-Frou, which he had built and modified to his tastes, in consultation with a brilliant English engineer whom he retained as
mécanicien
at great cost. Frou-Frou’s every movement was controlled by Vronsky, encased inside her, his body attached to her delicate sensory system by dozens of wires.

“Well, how’s Frou-Frou?” Vronsky asked the engineer in English.

“All right, sir,” the Englishman’s voice responded somewhere in the inside of his throat. “Come along, then,” said the Englishman, frowning and speaking with his mouth shut, and with swinging elbows he went on in front with his disjointed gait.

They went into the little yard in front of the shed. A target boy, trembling a bit in the head-to-toe padded suit he wore, followed them. As they walked through the silo Vronsky knew five other Exteriors stood in their separate stalls, and he knew that Matryoshka, the Exterior belonging to his chief rival, Mahutin, had been brought there, and must be standing among them.

Even more than his own Exterior, Vronsky longed to see Matryoshka, whom he had never seen. But he knew that by the etiquette of the Cull it was not merely impossible for him to see another of the exoskeletons, but improper even to ask questions about it. Just as he was passing along the passage, the boy opened the door into the second stable on the left, and Vronsky caught a glimpse of exactly that fighting machine he was most curious about: Matryoshka was a curiously innocent-looking Exterior, with an immense and rounded bottom, a smaller but equally rounded upper portion, and the crude, clownishly painted face of a bearded old peasant man. He lingered, surprised that Mahutin’s Exterior should be so pleasant, even silly looking; then, with the feeling of a man turning away from another man’s open letter, he turned round and went into Frou-Frou’s stall.

Frou-Frou was an Exterior of medium size, constructed to roughly
humanoid shape from a dozen enormous, curved, and overlapping metal plates. He had paid dearly to acquire the masses of groznium alloy required to plate her entire body, and such was the cleverness of her jointures that no enemy ordnance Vronsky had yet encountered could pierce her. As to offensive capability, Frou-Frou was equipped with a trio of rotating heavy-fires set in cones at chest level, plus a grill across the “face” of the machine, from which, when Vronsky wished it, could launch cannonball-sized bursts of globular electricity, directed at the opponent of his choosing.

About all Frou-Frou’s figure, and especially her head, there was a certain expression of energy, of overwhelming offensive capability, and yet of softness. Some Exteriors seem only like deadly furniture, large weapons with a hole to climb inside; but Frou-Frou was one of those Exteriors—less than a Class III but more than a simple Class II—which seem not to speak only because they were built without a mouth hole. To Vronsky, at any rate, it seemed that she understood all he felt at that moment as he looked at her.

As soon as Vronsky was attached to the dozen pulse-point electrodes allowing him to communicate with Frou-Frou’s control relays, she shifted the massive armor plates at the joints, rotated her eyes in their cavernous ocular cavities, and pointed her three heavy-fires in three different directions.

“There, you see how fidgety she is,” said the Englishman.

“There, darling! There!” said Vronsky, speaking soothingly to the suit. “Quiet, darling, quiet!” he said, patting her again over her rear section, which glinted in the dim light of the shed. “Let’s give her a go.”

In another moment the engineer had opened her metal torso, and Vronsky had climbed inside, attaching the dozen wires to the corresponding input points along Frou-Frou’s contact board. Vronsky felt that his heart was throbbing, and that he, too, like the suit, longed to move, to open fire; it was a feeling both dreadful and delicious. As the machine warmed up, and Vronsky felt the familiar delectable tingle of his limbs
seeming to merge with the synthetic reflexes of the suit, the target boy made a run for it, but was corralled by Lupo, who growled warningly to hold him at bay until Vronsky was ready to test-fire.

“Please, your Excellency,” said the target boy. “Perhaps—”

The Englishman rolled his eyes and walloped him on the back of the head. “It’s only a half-power round.”

Vronsky, as comfortable in Frou-Frou’s familiar confines as a child in the womb, directed his Exterior to shoot, and shoot she did, loosing a jolt of pure electric force from behind the face grill directly at the target boy. Though it was indeed only a half-power jolt, when Vronsky climbed out of the suit and he and the Englishmen stepped from the shed into the sunlight, they left the target boy behind them, his body shivering as he slowly recovered on the rock-hard floor of the silo.

“Well, I rely on you, then,” Vronsky said to the Englishman. “Half past six on the ground.”

“All right,” said the Englishman. “Ah, where are you going, my lord?” he asked suddenly, using the title which he had scarcely ever used before.

Vronsky in amazement raised his head, and stared, as he knew how to stare, not into the Englishman’s eyes, but at his forehead, astounded at the impertinence of his question. But realizing that in asking this the Englishman had been looking at him not as an employer, but as a combatant, he answered:

“I’ve got to pay a visit; I shall be home within an hour.” He blushed, a thing which rarely happened to him.

The Englishman looked gravely at him; and, as though he, too, knew where Vronsky was going, he added: “The important thing’s to keep quiet before a contest. Don’t get out of temper or upset about anything. And watch the roads. The rumor is circulating that UnConSciya has mined the roads around the arena with emotion bombs.” Vronsky scowled. Emotion bombs were a nasty business: detonators triggered by mood-based physiological surges in passersby, such as their perspiration
chemistry.

“All right,” answered Vronsky, and departed, still wearing the set of miniaturized sense-plates attached to his body, with which he would later resume his connection with Frou-Frou—and through which, via vibratory telegraphy, the engineer could monitor his physiological condition until then.

Before he had driven many paces away, the dark clouds that had been threatening rain all day broke, and there was a heavy downpour.

T
HE RAIN DID NOT
last long, and by the time Vronsky arrived at the Karenins’ the sun had peeped out again, the roofs of the summer villas and the old lime trees in the gardens on both sides of the principal streets sparkled with wet brilliance, and from the twigs came a pleasant drip and from the roofs rushing streams of water. He thought no more of the shower spoiling the match ground, but was rejoicing now that—thanks to the rain—he would be sure to find her at home and alone, as he knew that Alexei Alexandrovich had not moved from Petersburg.

Hoping to find her alone, Vronsky alighted, as he always did, to avoid attracting attention, before crossing the bridge, and walked to the house. He did not go up the steps to the street door, but went into the court.

“Has your master come?” he asked a
mécanicien,
who was irritatedly tinkering with a maltuned II/Topiary/42-9.

“No, sir. The mistress is at home. But will you please go to the front door; there are II/Footmen/74s there,” the
mécanicien
answered. “They’ll open the door.”

“No, I’ll go in from the garden.”

And feeling satisfied that she was alone, and wanting to take her by surprise, since he had not promised to be there today, and she would certainly not expect him to come before the match, he walked, with one hand on the handle of his hot-whip, and stepping cautiously over the sandy path bordered with flowers to the terrace that looked out upon the garden. Vronsky forgot now all that he had thought on the way of the hardships and difficulties of their position. He thought of nothing but that he would see her directly, not in imagination, but living, all of her, as she was in reality.

Anna Karenina was sitting on the terrace waiting for the return of her son, who had gone out for his walk and been caught in the rain. She had sent a II/Porter/7e62 and a II/Maid/467 out to scan for him. Dressed in a white gown, deeply embroidered, she was sitting in a corner of the terrace watering some flowers with a Class I water-spritzer, which sensed the precise amount of mist to properly water each individual leaf and stem, and therefore did not hear him. In his Cull undersuit, with the dozen electrodes still attached to various vital points along his body, Vronsky was aware that he must look strange and vulnerable. Bowing her curly black head, she pressed her forehead against a cool watering pot that stood on the parapet, and both her lovely hands, with the rings he knew so well, clasped the pot. The beauty of her whole figure, her head, her neck, her hands, struck Vronsky every time as something new and unexpected. He stood still, gazing at her in ecstasy. His heart palpitated rapidly; at the same moment, away in the battleground silo, the English engineer, monitoring Vronsky’s telemetry readings on a Class I physiolographer, grimaced at the way his pulse was escalating.

But, just as he was about to make a step to come nearer to her, Anna was aware of his presence, pushed away the watering pot, and turned her flushed face toward him.

“What’s the matter? You are ill?” he said to her in French, going up to her. He would have run to her, but remembering that there
might be spectators, he looked round toward the balcony door, and reddened a little, as he always reddened, feeling that he had to be afraid and be on his guard.

“No, I’m quite well,” she said, getting up and pressing his outstretched hand tightly. “I did not expect . . . thee. What in God’s name are you wearing?”

“Mercy! What cold hands!” he said, and quickly he explained the undersuit and the need for his vital signs to be monitored in the hours preceding the Cull.

“You startled me,” she said. “I’m alone, and expecting Seryozha. He’s out for a walk; they’ll come in from this side.”

But, in spite of her efforts to be calm, her lips were quivering.

“Forgive me for coming, but I couldn’t pass the day without seeing you,” he went on, speaking in French, as he always did to avoid using the stiff Russian plural form, so impossibly frigid between them, and the dangerously intimate singular.

“Forgive you? I’m so glad!”

“But you’re ill or worried,” he went on, not letting go her hands and bending over her. “What were you thinking of?”

“Always the same thing,” she said, with a smile, and back in the stable the engineer muttered a curse in English, watching the various needles of his box shoot up into the red.

Anna had spoken the truth. If ever at any moment she had been asked what she was thinking of, she could have answered truly: of the same thing, of her happiness and her unhappiness. She was thinking, just when he came upon her, of this: Why was it that to others it was all easy, while to her it was such torture? Today this thought gained special poignancy from certain other considerations. She asked him about the impending death matches. He answered her questions, and, seeing that she was agitated, trying to calm her, he began telling her in the simplest tone the details of his preparations for the races.

Tell him or not tell him?
she thought, looking into his quiet, affectionate
eyes.
He is so happy, so absorbed in his upcoming Cull that he won’t understand as he ought, he won’t understand all the gravity of this fact to us.

“But you haven’t told me what you were thinking of when I came in,” he said, interrupting his narrative. “Please tell me!”

She did not answer, and, bowing her head a little, she looked inquiringly at him from under her brows, her eyes shining under their long lashes. Her hand shook as it played with a leaf she had picked. He saw it, and his face expressed that utter subjection, that slavish devotion, which had done so much to win her; the needles on the Englishman’s Class I registered the calming effect of adoration on his bloodstream.

“I see something has happened. Do you suppose I can be at peace, knowing you have a trouble I am not sharing? Tell me, for God’s sake,” he repeated imploringly.

Abruptly Anna rose and walked to Android Karenina, whom Vronsky had not even noticed, sitting perfectly still on the opposite side of the fountain.

“Yes,” Anna sighed to her Class III. “I shan’t be able to forgive him if he does not realize all the gravity of it. Better not tell; why put him to the test?”

“For God’s sake!” he repeated, circling the fountain and taking her hand.

“Shall I tell you?”

“Yes, yes, yes . . .”

But Anna could not bring herself to speak, and it was Android Karenina who revealed to him the truth, without saying a word: holding her two end-effectors interlaced in front of her midsection, she slowly brought them outward and upward, miming the appearance of a growing stomach, heavy with child.

As Android Karenina enacted this dumb show, the leaf in Anna’s hand shook more violently, but she did not take her eyes off Vronsky, watching how he would take it. He turned white, would have said something, but stopped; he dropped her hand, and his head sank on his
breast. His reaction might have been still more dramatic, had not the Englishman, noting the sudden spiking wildness on his monitor, keyed the right combination of buttons to moderate his heartbeat.