Android Karenina (51 page)

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

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

Anna’s box.

“No!” he cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you hurt?”

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

This alien was the first of many.

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Robots, Anna, they are robots!”

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

“In fairness, Kartasov was also a robot.”

She scowled and continued her feverish preparations for departure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

T
HEY WILL COME
for us in three ways”

It was this strange phrase that was on everyone’s lips in the days and weeks after the terrible violence at the Vox Fourteen. “They will come for us in three ways,” a strange scrap of liturgy from the discredited quasi-religion of xenotheologism, once in vogue in certain corners of Moscow and Petersburg, long since discarded along with its primary adherents, women like the farcical Madame Stahl.

“They will come for us in three ways.”

There was no doubting that they had come in
one
way, not as benevolent light-beings but as the awful, screeching humanoid lizard-things that had wreaked such havoc and spilled the blood of so many Russians at the Vox Fourteen. If, indeed, there was any wisdom in that strange, old, tattered bit of liturgy, then what were the other two ways? And were they to be feared as much as the first? Questions abounded, fears doubled and redoubled, anxious rumors tore wildly like II/Coachman/6-less carriages through the streets of Petersburg and Moscow. One thing that all could agree on was how fortunate it was, on the night of the terrible attack, that so many of the new, powerful, perfectly humanoid Class IV
robots had been present to fight off the foe.

Having previously labored to hide the shocking fact of this new creation from society, the Higher Branches of the Ministry of Robotics and State Administration now shifted gears, as it were, proudly proclaiming the arrival of the new generation of servomechanism, proclaiming the Class IV robots Mother Russia’s newest and greatest protectors, whether against lizard-like creatures from the starry beyond, or the scientist-terrorist schemers of UnConSciya. To this much-heralded revelation was coupled, almost incidentally, the confirmation of another rumor: No, came this further announcement from the councils of the Ministry, the old beloved-companion robots would
not
be coming back. The circuitry adjustment, it seemed, had been a failure; the old machines, due to an inherent and previously undetected flaw in design, could not be properly brought up to date.

And thus, at a stroke, the ancient class of beloved-companion robots entered its obsolescence.

In Moscow, the onion-shaped bulb of the Tower still revolved, framed now by two plumes of black and purple smoke—emanating, or so went the most persistent and disquieting rumor of all, from the sub-sub-basements, where the junkered Class III robots were being melted for scrap.

T
HESE FOREBODING PLUMES
of smoke could not be seen from the groznium mine and surrounding estate at Pokrovskoe, but the changes they represented were as much felt there as anywhere. Konstantin Levin and his new wife, Kitty, now felt united not only by the bonds of matrimony but by a common purpose: having left Socrates and
Tatiana behind, disguised as battered old Class IIs, and slaving in a grimy cigarette factory, they vowed never to submit their beloved-companions for “adjustment”—now understood to be a most permanent adjustment indeed—no matter what should happen.

They were united, too, in their fear of the Honored Guests; Kitty had watched as Levin with determination set his army of Pitbots and Extractors to the building of strong fencing and the digging of trenches around the grounds of the estate, in hopes of repelling the alien hordes.

But for Kitty and Levin, all this tension and fear and looming dread only reaffirmed and even heightened their love.

They were playing host to a small party up from Moscow, and Levin and Kitty were particularly happy and conscious of their love that evening. The presence of Dolly, and of Kitty’s mother, the old princess—both of whom who had grudgingly submitted their own Class Ills to be adjusted, and now knew they had lost them for good—only made their shared bond that much stronger. They loved each other and their happiness in their love seemed to imply a disagreeable slur on those who would have liked to feel the same and could not—and they felt a prick of conscience.

Kitty longed to tell her mother their secret, of how Socrates and Tatiana were yet extant and well. But she was urged by Levin to hold her tongue, for he feared that this forbidden knowledge would inevitably travel from the princess to Dolly, and from Dolly to Stepan Arkadyich—who Levin felt had far too casual a manner to be trusted with the confidence.