Android Karenina (32 page)

She walked across the drawing room and went resolutely to him. When she went into his study he was in official uniform, obviously ready to go out, sitting at a little table on which he rested his elbows, looking dejectedly before him. She saw him before he saw her, and she saw that he was thinking of her.

On seeing her, he would have risen, but changed his mind, then his metal faceplate rapidly radiated through a sequence of colors, from cruel
red to a harsh, gleaming gold—an affect Anna had never seen before, and she thought to herself:
It is growing. All the time it is growing.

Karenin got up quickly and went to meet her, looking not at her eyes, but above them at her forehead and hair. He went up to her, took her by the hand, and asked her to sit down.

“I am very glad you have come,” he said, sitting down beside her, and obviously wishing to say something, he stuttered. Several times he tried to begin to speak, but stopped.

SPEAK, MAN. SPEAK! SO STEELY IN THE HALLS OF POWER, SO WEAK IN HIS OWN PRIVATE CHAMBERS. . . .

The silence lasted for some time. “Is Seryozha quite well?” he said, and not waiting for an answer, he added: “I shan’t be dining at home today, and I have got to go out directly.”

“I had thought of going to Moscow,” she said.

“No, you did quite, quite right to come,” he said, and was silent again.

Seeing that he was powerless to begin the conversation, she began herself.

“Alexei Alexandrovich,” she said, looking at him and not dropping her eyes under his persistent gaze at her hair, “I’m a guilty woman, I’m a bad woman, but I am the same as I was, as I told you then, and I have come to tell you that I can change nothing.”

“I have asked you no question about that,” he said, all at once, resolutely and with hatred looking her straight in the face, and the Face again pulsed and radiated wild colors, venom traveling along its veins. “That was as I had supposed.” Under the influence of anger he apparently regained complete possession of all his ability to speak. “But as I told you then, and have written to you,” he said in a thin, shrill voice, “I repeat now, that I am not bound to know this. I ignore it. Not all wives are so kind as you, to be in such a hurry to communicate such agreeable news to their husbands.” He laid special emphasis on the word “agreeable,” and Anna thought she noticed that his voice changed as he said it, darkening
dramatically in pitch and tone:
AGREEABLE.

“I shall ignore it so long as the world knows nothing of it, so long as my name is not disgraced. And so I simply inform you that our relations must be just as they have always been, and that only in the event of your compromising me I shall be obliged to take steps to secure my honor.”

“But our relations cannot be the same as always,” Anna began in a timid voice, looking at him with dismay.

When she saw once more those composed gestures, heard that shrill, childish, and sarcastic voice, her aversion for him extinguished her pity for him, and she felt only afraid, but at all costs she wanted to make clear her position.

“I cannot be your wife while I . . . ,” she began.

He laughed a cold and malignant laugh, and she felt a jab of sharp pain inside her mind, as if a knitting needle had been thrust between the lobes of her brain. She gave out a choked sob of pain, and Android Karenina, obeying her programmed impulses, reached out to place a comforting arm across her mistress’s shoulders.

Karenin then spoke: “The manner of life you have chosen is reflected, I suppose, in your ideas. I have too much respect or contempt, or both . . . I respect your past and despise your present . . . that I was far from the interpretation you put on my words.”

Anna sighed and bowed her head.

“Though indeed I fail to comprehend how—with the independence you show,” he went on, getting hot, “announcing your infidelity to your husband and seeing nothing reprehensible in it, apparently—you can see anything reprehensible in performing a wife’s duties in relation to your husband.”

“Alexei Alexandrovich! What is it you want of me?”

TO REPENT OF HER UNFAITHFULNESS
.

TO GROVEL AT YOUR FEET
.

TO SUBMIT TO YOUR WILL, OR PAY THE ULTIMATE CONSEQUENCE FOR HER REFUSAL
!

Alexei Alexandrovich screamed out loud, and the little drawing-room table flew up into the air and spiraled over their heads to smash against the opposite wall. Anna whirled round in fright as a vase of flowers on the other side of the room suddenly exploded, as if shot; the door, which she had left ajar, slammed violently closed and the mechanism of the lock noisily engaged.

Anna turned back and gaped at Alexei Alexandrovich, who took a deep, labored breath as if trying to overmaster himself. Finally the room was still, and while Anna trembled, her husband calmly and coldly expressed his wishes. “I want you not to meet that man here, and to conduct yourself so that no one in the world, not even a
robot
, can find fault with you. Not to see him: that’s not much, I think. And in return you will enjoy all the privileges of a faithful wife without fulfilling her duties. That’s all I have to say to you. Tonight I am not dining at home.” He folded his arms across his chest and turned away.

“Alexei?”

He looked back.

“Is it possible . . . for me to . . .” She looked with evident uncertainty to the heavy oaken door.

LEAVE IT
.

LET HER STAY UNTIL SHE ROTS
.

But Alexei Alexandrovich only shook his head slightly, and the lock disengaged, and the door swung open. Immediately, she got up, and signaled to Android Karenina that they would leave. Bowing in silence, Alexei Alexandrovich let them pass before him, visibly composed but inwardly as miserable and confused as she.

Only the Face was pleased, for in every such encounter it gained exponentially in power and control.

Over the man—over the woman—over them
all.

O
NE AFTERNOON, TOWARD THE END
of the spring extraction season, Levin and Socrates were in the living room, engaged in an intense discussion about the giant koschei that plagued the countryside around Provokovskoe. More and more peasants had reported hearing the dreaded
tikkatikkatikka
echoing through the woods at night; some spoke of friends who had gone out hunting and not returned; Levin spoke to one man who told personally of his battle with one of the robotic monsters, of how he narrowly escaped its tremendous gathering maw. Socrates had determined through rigorous analysis of recovered metallic shreds that the things were indeed of the same mechanical infrastructure as the small wormlike koschei that had plagued the countryside last season—but how they had grown so large, and so prevalent, especially after the Ministry had determined them exterminated, remained an open question.

While Socrates mulled this question yet one more time, charting out the various possibilities with branching mathematical precision in the chambers of his mind, Levin had a seemingly unrelated recollection that nevertheless chilled him to the bones: of Countess Nordston, Kitty’s foolish friend, speaking of her belief in the Honored Guests—extraterrestrial beings who, supposedly, would one day come to redeem the human race.

“In three ways,” she had said.
“They will come for us in three ways.”

Turning over this gnomic phrase in his mind, wondering what connection it could have to the question of the wormlike koschei, Levin did not at first hear the sound of a long, wrenching cough coming from
the front hall. But he heard it indistinctly through the sound of his own footsteps, and hoped he was mistaken. Then he caught sight of a long, bony, familiar figure, followed by a squat, rattling metal shadow, and now it seemed there was no possibility of mistake; and yet he still went on hoping that this tall man taking off his fur cloak and coughing was not his brother, Nikolai, accompanied by his woeful Class III, Karnak.

Levin loved his brother, but being with him was always a torture. Levin was confused and anxious about the koschei, and had not seen his beloved Kitty since the day he spotted her, waking gently in her carriage, and he was in a troubled and uncertain humor; meeting with his ailing brother in such a state seemed particularly difficult. Instead of a lively, healthy visitor, some outsider who would, he hoped, cheer him up in his uncertain humor, he had to see his brother, who knew him through and through, who would call forth all the thoughts nearest his heart, would force him to show himself fully. And that he was not disposed to do.

Angry with himself for so base a feeling, Levin ran into the hall; as soon as he saw his brother close, this feeling of selfish disappointment vanished instantly and was replaced by pity. Terrible as his brother Nikolai had been before in his emaciation and sickliness, now he looked still more emaciated, still more wasted. He was a skeleton covered with skin.

He stood in the hall, jerking his long, thin neck and pulling the scarf off it, and smiled a strange and pitiful smile. When he saw that smile, submissive and humble, Levin felt something clutching at his throat.

“You see, I’ve come to you,” said Nikolai in a thick voice, never for one second taking his eyes off his brother’s face. As Levin regarded him, the skin of Nikolai’s face, pulled so tightly across his skull, rippled grotesquely, like small waves moving across the surface of a fetid pond.

“I’ve been meaning to come a long while, but I’ve been unwell all the time,” he said, rubbing his beard with his big, thin hands. “Now I’m ever so much better.”

“Yes, yes!” answered Levin. He approached him to offer a kiss, but instantly drew back, horrified at the idea of his lips coming into contact
with the pale, beleaguered flesh of his suffering brother. But even as he drew away, covering his mouth with his hand, he saw that Nikolai’s big eyes were full of a strange light.

A few weeks before, Konstantin Dmitrich had written to his brother that through the sale of a small part of their property that had remained undivided, there was a sum of about two thousand rubles to come to him as his share.

Nikolai said now that he had come to take this money and, what was more important, to stay a while in the old nest, to get in touch with the earth, so as to renew his strength like the heroes of old for the work that lay before him. In spite of his exaggerated stoop and the emaciation that was so striking from his height, his movements were as rapid and abrupt as ever. Levin led him into his study.

His brother had dressed with particular care—a thing he never used to do—and he combed his scanty, lank hair, not noticing that as he did he tugged free several stray clumps.

“Well, I’ll spend a month or two with you, and then I’m off to Moscow,” Nikolai said. He was in the most affectionate and good-humored mood, just as Levin often remembered him in childhood. And yet there was something in his brother’s voice and manner, something that suggested to Levin some deep concern he needed to share, but did not know how to express.

Even as he spoke, Levin saw that the flesh-rippling was not confined to Nikolai’s forehead; his stomach, his chest, even his eyes undulated nearly imperceptibly. Nikolai grimaced, evidently trying to hide his discomfort from his brother.

“Besides, I want to turn over a new leaf completely now. I’ve done silly things, of course, like everyone else, but money’s the last consideration; I don’t regret it. So long as there’s health, and my health, thank God, is quite restored.”

As the brothers moved toward the bedrooms, Karnak wobbled along at their heels, his woefully maltuned navigation circuits occasionally
driving him into the walls.

As the house was damp, and only one bedroom had been kept heated, Levin put his brother to sleep in his own bedroom behind a screen. Socrates’ Third Bay emitted a gentle perfume throughout the night, to minimize the combined stench of rust and dissolution emitting from Nikolai and Karnak.

His brother got into bed, and whether he slept or did not sleep, he tossed about, coughed, and when he could not get his throat clear, mumbled something. Sometimes when his breathing was painful, he said, “Oh, my God!” Sometimes when he was choking, he muttered angrily, “Ah, the devil!” Levin could not sleep for a long while, hearing him. His thoughts were most various, but the end of all his thoughts was the same: death. Death, the inevitable end of all, for the first time presented itself to him with irresistible force. And death, which was here in this beloved brother, groaning half asleep and from habit calling without distinction on God and the devil, was not so remote as it had hitherto seemed to him. It was in himself, too, he felt that. If not today, tomorrow; if not tomorrow, in thirty years—wasn’t it all the same! And what was this inevitable death; he did not know, had never thought about it, and what was more, had not the power, had not the courage to think about it.

“I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I had forgotten—death.”

He sat on his bed in the darkness, crouched up, hugging his knees, and, holding his breath from the strain of thought, he pondered. But the more intensely he thought, the clearer it became to him that it was indubitably so, that in reality, looking upon life, he had forgotten one little fact: that death will come, and all ends; that nothing was even worth beginning, and that there was no helping it anyway. Yes, it was awful, but it was so.

“But I am alive still. Now what’s to be done? What’s to be done?” he said to Socrates in despair. He lighted a candle, got up cautiously, stood before the monitor of his beloved-companion, and set it to show himself
to himself. Yes, there were gray hairs about his temples. He opened his mouth. His back teeth were beginning to decay. He bared his muscular arms. Yes, there was strength in them. But Nikolai, who lay there breathing with terrible difficulty had had a strong, healthy body too. “And now that bent, hollow chest . . . with that awful rippling below his skin . . . and I, not knowing what will become of me, or wherefore . . .”