Android Karenina

CHAPTER 1

THEY 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.

CHAPTER 2

THESE 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.

That evening they were expecting Stepan Arkadyich to come down by Grav, and the old prince had written that possibly he might come too.

“Mark my words, Alexander will not come,” said the old princess. “And I know why: he says that young people ought to be left alone for a while at first.”

“But Papa has left us alone. We’ve never seen him,” said Kitty. “Besides, we’re not young people!-we’re old married people by now.”

“If he doesn’t come, I shall say good-bye to you children,” said the princess, sighing mournfully.

“What nonsense, Mamma!” both the daughters fell upon her at once.

“How do you suppose he is feeling? Why, now…”

And suddenly there was an unexpected quiver in the princess’s voice. Her daughters were silent, and looked at one another. These days, Mamma always finds something to be miserable about, they said in that glance. Ever since she had married off her last and favorite daughter, and her beloved-companion La Shcherbatskaya had been carted off, the old home had been left empty.

In the middle of the after-dinner conversation they heard the hum of an engine and the sound of wheels on the gravel. Dolly had not time to get up to go and meet her husband, when from the window of the room below, where Levin was helping Grisha with his Latin lesson, Levin leaped out and lifted Grisha out after him.

“It’s Stiva!” Levin shouted from under the balcony. “We’ve finished, Dolly, don’t worry!” he added, and started running like a boy to meet the carriage.

“Is ea id, ejus, ejus, ejus!” shouted Grisha, skipping along the avenue.

“And someone else too! Papa, of course!” cried Levin, stopping at the entrance of the avenue. “Kitty, don’t come down the steep staircase, go round.”

But Levin had been mistaken in taking the person sitting in the carriage for the old prince. As he got nearer to the carriage he saw beside Stepan Arkadyich not the prince but a handsome, stout young man in a Scotch cap, with long ends of ribbon behind.

This figure was introduced as Vassenka Veslovsky, a distant cousin of the Shcherbatskys, a brilliant young gentleman in Petersburg and Moscow society. “A capital fellow, and a keen sportsman,” as Stepan Arkadyich said, introducing him.

Not a whit abashed by the disappointment caused by his having come in place of the old prince, Veslovsky greeted Levin gaily, claiming acquaintance with him in the past, and snatching up Grisha into the carriage, lifted him over the spaniel that Stepan Arkadyich had brought with him. (The pup was meant by Oblonsky to make an end to the sullen air of disappointment Grisha had maintained since being informed that, after a little lifetime of waiting, he would now never “come of age” and receive his own Class III.)

Levin did not get into the carriage, but walked behind. He was rather vexed at the non-arrival of the old prince, whom he liked more and more the more he saw of him, and also at the arrival of this Vassenka Veslovsky, a quite uncongenial and superfluous person. He seemed to him still more uncongenial and superfluous when, on approaching the steps where the whole party, children and grown-ups, were gathered together in much excitement, Levin saw Vassenka Veslovsky, with a particularly warm and gallant air, kissing Kitty’s hand.

“Well, and how is the Hunt-and-be-Hunted this season?” Stepan Arkadyich said to Levin, hardly leaving time for everyone to utter their greetings. “We’ve come with the most savage intentions. How pretty you’ve grown, Dolly,” he said to his wife, once more kissing her hand, holding it in one of his, and patting it with the other.

Levin, who a minute before had been in the happiest frame of mind, now looked darkly at everyone, and everything displeased him. He thought for a moment of Socrates, rusting away in some dank, provincial backwater. How can it be that this crass arriviste should be here among us, he thought, glaring at the preposterous Veslovsky, while my beloved-companion molders, many versts from where I might enjoy his company?

And who was it he kissed yesterday with those lips? he thought, looking at Stepan Arkadyich’s tender demonstrations to his wife. He looked at Dolly, and he did not like her either. She doesn’t believe in his love. So what is she so pleased about? Revolting! thought Levin. He looked at the princess, who had been so dear to him a minute before, and he did not like the manner in which she welcomed this Vassenka, with his ribbons, just as though she were in her own house. And more hateful than anyone was Kitty for falling in with the tone of gaiety with which this gentleman regarded his visit in the country, as though it were a holiday for himself and everyone else.

Noisily talking, they all went into the house; but as soon as they were all seated, Levin turned and went out. Kitty saw something was wrong with her husband. She tried to seize a moment to speak to him alone, but he made haste to get away from her, saying he was wanted at the pit, where the perimeter of the mine was being fortified by thick defensive battlements against the possibility of alien attack. It was long since his own work on the estate had seemed to him so important as at that moment. It’s all holiday for them, he thought; but these are no holiday matters, they won’t wait, and there’s no living without them.

CHAPTER 3

IT IS EXACTLY THAT MAN most distracted by fear of death from above who is most vulnerable to death from below. Such it was with Konstantin Dmitrich Levin in his fit of pique, as he stomped along the familiar woodsy path to his groznium mine, his gaze fixed on the tree line, in case a pack of the hideous Honored Guests should come leaping over the aspens. For it was the ground beneath his feet that tore open and spewed forth the long, twisting body of a worm-beast. The segmented death machine writhed toward him, emitting as before the ominous tikka tikka tikka. Levin gasped and stumbled backwards into a crouch, trying to judge the size of the peril. He and Socrates had estimated that the last one was the size of a hippopotamus, but this one was long as an elephant, and nearly half as high.

With a quick, grunting roll of its powerful head, the thrashing metal-plated thing knocked Levin off his feet, even as more of its body poured up out of the ground like a Grav emerging from a tunnel. Levin, now flat on his back, swung determinedly with his sturdy oaken walking stick, making satisfying contact with the eyeless face of the beast. The great worm drew back, its sucking mouth-hole dripping ochre fluid, the tikka tikka tikka loud as a drumroll, emanating from… from where? Some sort of Vox-Em, he imagined, somewhere from the midsection of the robotic beast. Konstantin Dmitrich, breathing heavily, feeling the thud of blood in his veins, scrabbled to his feet and circled backward, the walking stick raised and poised to strike. Curiously, however, the creature’s huge did not parry again-it paused and held steady with crooked neck, the featureless head twitching in the air above, twisting first this way and then that, as if searching for something. Levin thought he saw dim lights pulsing somewhere beneath the semi-opaque, grey outer covering of the monster-rapidly flickering greenish lights-the light of sensors searching the landscape?

By God, it’s looking for something, thought Levin, stepping slightly forward and examining the underside of the thing. “What are you looking for?” he said aloud, as if the segmented, twelve-foot-long ticking mechanical worm could somehow summon human voice and answer. Instead, the thing stopped moving, its head cocked in a northerly direction, and the queer tikka tikka tikka noise abruptly grew drastically louder, so much so that Levin clasped his hands over his ears. He’s got it, Levin thought. He’s got the scent. And the great worm lunged up and over Levin, its whole writhing body traveling over his head in a fluid motion, like a long jet of water sprayed from a hose; and then plunging back into the ground on the opposite side of the clearing, disappearing into another wormhole in the soil. In a matter of seconds, the entire length of the worm-thing had disappeared into this fresh cavity.

Levin did not continue on to the pit, as he had planned, but instead settled his lank frame on a rock to contemplate the mystery of the worm-beast, with his walking stick at his side, scratching at his head and tugging at his beard in unconscious emulation of his absent beloved-companion. Levin came back to the house only when they sent to summon him to supper. On the stairs were standing Kitty and Agafea Mihalovna, examining the I/Humidor/19, consulting about wines for supper.

“But why are you making all this fuss? Have what we usually do.”

“No, Stiva doesn’t drink… Kostya, stop, what’s the matter?” Kitty began, hurrying after him, but all his irritation with her supposedly inappropriate carryingson came back to him in a flood, and he strode ruthlessly away to the dining room without waiting for her. There he joined in the lively general conversation which was being maintained by Vassenka Veslovsky and Stepan Arkadyich.

“Well, what do you say, are we to Hunt-and-be-Hunted tomorrow?” said Stepan Arkadyich.

“Please, do let’s go,” said Veslovsky moving to another chair, where he sat down sideways, with one fat leg crossed under him.

“I shall be delighted, we will go. I shall order the Huntbears warmed and baited,” said Levin to Veslovsky, speaking with that forced amiability that Kitty knew so well in him, and that was so out of keeping with him. “I can’t answer for our finding grouse, especially as, with the Honored Guests about, we will need to stay within the perimeter fence, or find ourselves hunted a bit more realistically than is pleasant. Only we ought to start early. You’re not tired? Aren’t you tired, Stiva?”

“Me tired? I’ve never been tired yet.”

“Yes, really, let’s not go to bed at all! Capital!” Veslovsky chimed in. “I have little use for the interval of unconsciousness.”

It was a rather peculiar way of phrasing such a declaration, and Levin looked with renewed irritation at Veslovsky. He was eager to retire to his bedchamber, where he could compose a communiqué to Socrates, expressing his thoughts on the question of the worm-machines.

“Suppose we stay up all night. Let’s go for a walk!” agreed Stepan Arkadyich with radiant good humor.

“Oh, we all know you can do without sleep, and keep other people up too,” Dolly said to her husband, with that faint note of irony in her voice which she almost always had now with her husband.

“Do you know Veslovsky has been at Anna’s, and he’s going to them again? He swears that their little hideaway is hardly fifty miles from you, and I too must certainly go over there. Veslovsky, come here!”

Vassenka crossed over to the ladies, and sat down beside Kitty.

“Ah, do tell me, please; you have stayed with her? How was she? Where is she?” Darya Alexandrovna appealed to him.

“Ah, that I cannot tell you,” laughed Vassenka, “for in a blindfold was I led to the camp, and in a blindfold led away.”

Levin was left at the other end of the table, and though never pausing in his conversation with the princess, he saw that there was an eager and mysterious conversation going on between Stepan Arkadyich, Dolly, Kitty, and Veslovsky. And that was not all. He saw on his wife’s face an expression of real feeling as she gazed with fixed eyes on the handsome face of Vassenka, who was telling them something with great animation.

“It’s exceedingly rugged, their place, some sort of old farm from the time of the Tsars, somewhat restored, but really barely livable” Veslovsky was telling them about Vronsky and Anna. “I can’t, of course, take it upon myself to judge, but I certainly would not want to live there.”

“What do they intend to do?”

Vassenka smiled enigmatically, trying of course to prolong the moment when everyone believed he knew the answer to that most intriguing of questions: what was intended by Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, who after the night at the Vox Fourteen had fled into hiding, along with their Class Ills, in willful and open defiance of the Ministry-and of Anna’s own husband.

“What they intend, alas, I cannot say, and I am not sure they can agree amongst themselves. They do seem well hidden though, and I imagine they can live in their secret paradise forever,” he said with a chuckle.

“How jolly it would be for us all to go over to them together! I think we might even convince them to rejoin polite society! When are you going there again?” Stepan Arkadyich asked Vassenka.

“July.”

“Will you go?” Stepan Arkadyich said to his wife.

“I shall certainly go, if I am invited and told the location,” said Dolly. “I am sorry for her, and I know her. She’s a splendid woman. But I will go alone, when you go back to Moscow, and then I shall be in no one’s way. And it will be better indeed without you.”

“To be sure,” said Stepan Arkadyich. “And you, Kitty?”

“I? Why should I go?” Kitty said, flushing all over, and she glanced round at her husband.

“Do you know Anna Arkadyevna, then?” Veslovsky asked her. “She’s a very fascinating woman.”

“Yes,” she answered Veslovsky crimsoning still more. She got up and walked across to her husband.

“Are you to be Hunting and Hunted, then, tomorrow?” she said to Levin. His jealousy had advanced far indeed in these few moments, especially at the flush that had overspread her cheeks while she was talking to Veslovsky. Now as he heard her words, he construed them in his own fashion. Strange as it was to him afterward to recall it, it seemed to him at the moment clear that in asking whether he was going on the hunt, all she cared to know was whether he would give that pleasure to Veslovsky, with whom, as he fancied, she was in love.

“Yes, I’m going,” he answered her in an unnatural voice, disagreeable to himself.

“No, better spend the day here tomorrow, or Dolly won’t see anything of her husband, and will set off the day after,” said Kitty.

The motive of Kitty’s words was interpreted by Levin thus: Don’t separate me from him. I don’t care about your going, but do let me enjoy the society of this delightful young man.

“Oh, if you wish, we’ll stay here tomorrow,” Levin answered, with peculiar amiability.

Vassenka, meanwhile, got up from the table after Kitty, and watching her with smiling and admiring eyes, he followed her.

Levin saw that look. He turned white, and for a minute he could hardly breathe. How dare he look at my wife like that! was the feeling that boiled within him.

“Tomorrow, then? Do, please, let us go,” said Veslovsky, sitting down on a chair, and again crossing his leg as was his habit.

Levin’s jealousy went further still, growing from moment to moment, evolving as it were from I/Jealousy/4 to I/Jealousy/5 to I/Jealousy/6. Already he saw himself a deceived husband, looked upon by his wife and her lover as simply necessary to provide them with the conveniences and pleasures of life… But in spite of that, he made polite and hospitable inquiries of Vassenka about his shooting, his gun, and his boots, and agreed to go hunting the next day.

Happily for Levin, the old princess cut short his agonies by getting up herself and advising Kitty to go to bed. But even at this point Levin could not escape another agony. As he said goodnight to his hostess, Vassenka would again have kissed her hand, but Kitty, reddening, drew back her hand and said with a naive bluntness, for which the old princess scolded her afterward:

“We don’t like that fashion.”

In Levin’s eyes she was to blame for having allowed such relations to arise, and still more to blame for showing so awkwardly that she did not like them.

Levin scowled and stalked up the stairs to compose a communiqué to Socrates about the terrible worms.

CHAPTER 4

KONSTANTIN DMITRICH SPENT several hours in concentration, composing, recording, and reviewing the communiqé, as he carefully considered how to express his dawning understanding of the worm-machines: what they were, where they came from, and how they were connected to the other troubles plaguing Russia. He went to sleep happy and satisfied with the process of his inquiry, looking eagerly forward to a return communiqué from his poor, exiled beloved-companion.

But it took very little time, the next morning, for Levin’s jealousy to be coaxed back to life by the nettlesome Veslovsky. At breakfast, the conversation Vassenka had started with Kitty was running on the same lines as on the previous evening: discussing Anna, and whether love is to be put higher than worldly considerations. Kitty disliked the subject, and she was disturbed as well both by the tone in which it was conducted and by the knowledge of the effect it would have on her husband. But she was too simple and innocent to know how to cut short the talk, or even to conceal the superficial pleasure afforded her by the young man’s very obvious admiration. She wanted to stop it, but she did not know what to do. Whatever she did she knew would be observed by her husband, and the worst interpretation put on it. And, in fact, when she asked Dolly what was wrong with her daughter Masha, and Vassenka, waiting till this uninteresting conversation was over, began to gaze indifferently at Dolly, the question struck Levin as an unnatural and disgusting piece of hypocrisy.

“What do you say, shall we go and look for mushrooms today?” said Dolly.

“By all means, please, and I shall come too,” said Kitty, and she blushed. She wanted from politeness to ask Vassenka whether he would come, but she did not ask him.

“Where are you going, Kostya?” she asked her husband with a guilty face, as he passed by her with a resolute step. This guilty air confirmed all his suspicions.

“To inspect the pit for aliens,” he said, not looking at her.

“Again?”

He went downstairs, but before he had time to leave his study he heard his wife’s familiar footsteps running with reckless speed to him. He did not turn, but stalked out of the house into the surrounding gardens, past a II/Gardener/9, who Levin had put to work visually scanning for Honored Guests in the woods. Finally he had to acknowledge Kitty’s presence:

“Well, what do you have to say to me?”

He did not look her in the face, and did not care to see that she in her condition was trembling all over, and had a piteous, crushed look. He did not care, that is to say, to recall how difficult it must be for a woman with child, deprived of the special comfort that only a Class III can provide.

“We can’t go on like this! It’s misery! I’m wretched, you are wretched! What for?” she said, when they had at last reached a solitary garden seat at a turn in the lime tree avenue.

“But tell me one thing: was there in his tone anything unseemly, not nice, humiliatingly horrible?” he said, standing before her again in the same position with his clenched fists on his chest, as he had stood before her that night.

“Yes,” she said in a shaking voice. “But, Kostya, surely you see I’m not to blame? All the morning I’ve been trying to take a tone… but such people… Why did he come? How happy we were! Happy, and united, not only in our love for each other, but for our robots, united in our devotion to them!” she said, breathless with sobs that shook her.

A short time later, they passed the II/Gardener/9 once again. Its visual sensors registered astonishment that, though nothing pursued them, they hurried toward the house; and that, though rain had begun to fall, their faces were content and radiant.

CHAPTER 5

AFTER ESCORTING HIS WIFE upstairs, Levin went to Dolly’s part of the house. Darya Alexandrovna, for her part, was in great distress too that day. She was walking about the room, talking angrily to a little girl who stood in the corner weeping.

“And you shall stand all day in the corner, and have your dinner all alone, and not play with one of your Class Is, and I won’t make you a new frock,” she said, not knowing how to punish her.

“Oh, she is a disgusting child!” she turned to Levin. “Where does she get such wicked propensities?”

“Why, what has she done?” Levin said without much interest, for he had wanted to ask her advice, and so was annoyed that he had come at an unlucky moment.

“Grisha and she went into the raspberries, and there… I can’t tell you really what she did. It’s a thousand pities Dolichka’s no longer with us. She always gave me the best, the most reliable counsel on how to deal with this sort of thing. Oh, how I loved that robot!” Tears trembled in Dolly’s eyes. Outside the pitter-patter of the rain intensified, as if the sky itself were mourning Darya Alexandrovna’s loss.

“But you are upset about something? What have you come for?” asked Dolly. “What’s going on there?”

And in the tone of her question Levin heard that it would be easy for him to say what he had meant to say.

“I’ve not been in there, I’ve been alone in the garden with Kitty. We’ve had a quarrel for the second time since Veslovsky came. Come, tell me, honestly, has there been… not in Kitty, but in that gentleman’s behavior, a tone which might be unpleasant-not unpleasant, but horrible, offensive to a husband?”

“You mean, how shall I say… Stay, stay in the corner!” she said to Masha, who, detecting a faint smile in her mother’s face, had been turning round. “The opinion of the world would be that he is behaving as young men do behave. A husband who’s a man of the world should only be flattered by it.”

“Yes, yes,” said Levin gloomily, “but you noticed it?”

“Not only I, but Stiva noticed it. Just after breakfast he said to me in so many words, Je crois que Veslovsky fait un petit brin de cour à Kitty.”

“Well, that’s all right then; now I’m satisfied. I’ll send him away,” said Levin.

“What do you mean! Are you crazy?” Dolly cried in horror. “Nonsense, Kostya, only think!” she said, laughing. “You can go now,” she said to Masha. “No, if you wish it, I’ll speak to Stiva. He’ll take him away. He can say you’re expecting visitors. Altogether he doesn’t fit into the house.”

“No, no, I’ll do it myself.”

“But you’ll quarrel with him?”

“Not a bit. I shall so enjoy it,” Levin said, his eyes flashing with real enjoyment. “Come, forgive her, Dolly, she won’t do it again,” he said of the little sinner, who had not gone but was standing irresolutely before her mother, waiting and looking up from under her brows to catch her mother’s eye.

And what is there in common between us and him? thought Levin, and he went off to look for Veslovsky.

As he passed through the passage he gave orders for the II/Coachman/14 to get ready to drive to the station.

Levin, puffed up with courage and his new determination to have this scourge removed from his household, without knocking entered the young man’s room, strode across the chamber, and found Veslovsky bent over the bed, putting on his gaiters to go out riding. Veslovsky, taken by surprise, stood up rapidly and turned around, stammering an apology for his unkempt appearance.

Levin was too shocked to reply: above the rumpled shirtfront, Veslovsky had no face. There was no skin between ear and ear, hairline and chin, and staring back at Levin instead was a mass of churning gears and rapidly moving small parts in the place where a face should be. Still speaking in his gay and eager-to-please society voice, which Levin now realized emanated from a Vox-Em of surpassing quality, he said, “Alas, Konstantin Dmitrich, you catch me unawares.”

Levin, squinting with horror at the silver-black absence of a face, detected dozens of tiny pistons pumping as the words emerged; like an audience member seeing the movement of the puppeteer’s strings, he was watching the devices that would move the lips, were the face-piece in place.

“Good Lord, man,” Levin said idiotically. “You are a robot.”

“You have discovered my secret, friend,” came Veslovsky’s voice from the head unit. The robot sighed, and Levin watched as two tiny half-circles of gears shifted minutely along the upper portion of the face-hole; no doubt this was the system set that created an ironic lift of the eyebrows in other circumstances. “And though I was sent here to observe, not to destroy, my circuits are rather extraordinarily adaptable.”

Levin stepped backward, suddenly aware that Veslovsky stood between himself and the door.

“It is not useful to the Ministry that you or anyone of your circle should be aware of my true nature. And thus…”

The Veslovsky-machine emitted a piercing shriek and flash of light, and then grabbed the disoriented Levin firmly by the throat. Levin grunted and gurgled and stared into the deathly emptiness of the machine-face, as the robot lifted him from the ground like tearing a tree out by the roots.

“Society is changing, Konstantin Dmitrich,” Veslovsky said with an air of melancholy, grinding two heavy groznium-infused thumbs into the sides of his neck. “Your commitment to your Class III is admirable, but there is no use fighting the future.” Levin could not respond; his head was getting weaker and his windpipe throbbed as the last air escaped from his lungs. In a weirdly squeamish gesture, under the circumstances, the robot turned his head away, as if Levin’s dying gasps were too gruesome a sight for his delicate sensibilities.

Levin’s oxygen-depleted brain took him on a long, slow Memory sequence through the days of his life. He saw himself at eighteen, first attuning his gleaming new beloved-companion, Socrates… on his wedding day, choked by love and terror… at age six, his sister crying over a malfunctioning Class I dance-toy…

… the ballerina…

Konstantin Dmitrich struggled to maintain focus… the ballerina had spun too fast, whirling dangerously, shooting off sparks. What had Mother done?

Summoning every ounce of his remaining strength, Levin flailed back with his powerful right hand and pushed open the wooden shutters of the bedroom; immediately the powerful sound and fresh smell of pouring rain filled the room. Levin kicked out at his adversary’s thin ankle, trying not to injure but to dislodge it… to throw it just enough off balance to…

There! Levin drove his whole body forward and with his last reserves of air he pushed the machine-man backward until it was bent over the sill, the cruel mechanical non-face outside and looking up, lashed by the rain.

“An old wives’ tale that happens to be true,” Mamma had said, so many years ago, cracking the faceplate of the Class I ballerina toy with the peen of a hammer. “Just get a bit of rainwater behind the eyes…”

“Grazzle… furglazzle…,” spat the Veslovsky machine nonsensically, as its insides popped and hissed. “Grllllllll…” Levin, unrelenting, kept him-it, he told himself-it!-under the fierce flow of the rain like a man bathing a reluctant pet. At last the hands on his throat slackened their grip, and Levin breathed hard, watching with grim fascination as Veslovsky melted into some sort of hideous, unwholesome, forced Surcease. Levin then collapsed beneath the window, the robot slumped beside him with its head lolling from the neck at a crooked angle, still spitting out nonsense phrases in wildly modulated tones. “Vizz… poj… markkkklzz…”

Finally, like a real dying man summons one final burst of lucidity, the thing that had been Veslovsky spoke very quietly, in perfect Russian: “You can’t escape. You can’t win.”

With that, the last energy fled from his body, and Veslovsky ceased to be.

“What madness is this?” Stepan Arkadyevitch said when, after hearing from Dolly that his friend was being turned out of the house, he found Levin in the garden. “Mais c’est ridicule! “What fly has stung you? Mais c’est du dernier ridicule! What did you think, if a young man…”

“Please don’t go into it! I can’t help it. I feel ashamed of how I’m treating you and him,” replied Levin, absently massaging the sides of his neck. “But it won’t be, I imagine, a great grief to him to go, and his presence was distasteful to me and to my wife.”

And Levin gave Oblonsky an apologetic nod, signaling the conclusion of the interview and dismissing his friend from the garden; when Stepan Arkadyich had angrily departed, Levin returned to smoothing over the uneven patch of soil where he had buried the disassembled pieces of Vassenka Veslovsky.

CHAPTER 6

SOME WEEKS AFTER the stormy conclusion of Vassenka Veslovsky’s tenure at Pokrovskoe, Kitty answered the door at the sound of a quiet though insistent knocking, and found on the doorstep a very thin woman wrapped in a ratty old blanket. Immediately Kitty beckoned the bedraggled creature inside, assuming this was one of the poor peasants they had lately heard of, those wandering the countryside, their homes having been destroyed by the alien marauders. Kitty had even heard that some had found employment in the homes of the wealthy as intimate worker-friends-in other words, as poor substitutes for the absented Class Ills, though she herself was horrified by the idea of employing a human in that function.

But once inside, the woman pushed back the cowl of the blanket, revealing not the haggard face of a hungry peasant, but an obsidian faceplate, flashing a frantic electric green.

“It’s…” Kitty put a hand before her mouth. “My goodness, it’s a Class III!”

“A fugitive,” said Levin, hastening down the stairs and closing the front door behind the machine.

The Class Ill’s name was Witch Hazel, and she would not speak of who her mistress was, or how she had escaped the circuitry adjustment protocol; there could be no doubting, however, that her journey had been a perilous one. Witch Hazel’s head unit jerked nervously about as she spoke, and she generally displayed all the sensory twitchiness and navigational confusion inherent in masterless beloved-companions. She insisted instead that she had a communiqué to deliver, which turned out to be intended not for Kitty and Levin, but for Darya Alexandrovna.

Dolly was duly summoned, and the communiqué viewed-it was from Anna Karenina, and its substance was simple: Dolly was invited to visit Anna and Vronsky in their secret encampment. Witch Hazel would act as her guide.

Darya Alexandrovna decided right away to accept this invitation and go to see Anna. She was sorry to annoy her sister and do anything Levin disliked. She quite understood how right the Levins were in not wishing to have anything to do with Vronsky. But she felt she must go and see Anna, and show her that her feelings could not be changed, in spite of the change in her position. It was decided that she and Witch Hazel would leave the next morning; the machine-woman, whose reluctance to speak further of her past and current situation was manifestly clear, gratefully accepted a dosing of humectant and was Surceased for the night.

That she might be independent of the Levins for the expedition, Darya Alexandrovna sent to the village to hire a carriage for the drive; but Levin, learning of it, went to her to protest.

“What makes you suppose that I dislike your going? But, even if I did dislike it, I should still more dislike your not taking my carriage and engine,” he said. “Hiring Coachmen in the village is disagreeable to me, and, what’s of more importance, they’ll undertake the job and never get you there. I have a four-treaded II/Puller. And if you don’t want to wound me, you’ll take mine.”

Darya Alexandrovna had to consent, and Levin made ready for his sister-in-law a four-tread and carriage set-not at all a smart-looking conveyance, but capable of taking Darya Alexandrovna the whole distance in a single day, if the pointedly vague information of the location and direction of travel that Witch Hazel had provided could be believed.

Dolly and the robot, by Levin’s advice, started before daybreak. The road was good, the carriage comfortable, and the carriage hummed along merrily, and on the box sat the junker, the mysteriously ownerless robot. With the steering shaft in her end-effectors, Witch Hazel’s formerly nervous, scattered mien dissipated, leaving Dolly to wonder whether, before the adjustment protocol had torn her from her duties, this robot had been beloved-companion to a hunter or racewoman.

As Dolly rode, she thought. At home, looking after her children, she had no time to think. So now, during this journey of four hours, all the thoughts she had suppressed before rushed swarming into her brain, and she thought over all her life as she never had before, and from the most different points of view. Her thoughts seemed strange even to herself, the words bouncing around in her skull-how odd, this Class-III-less life, without Dolichka to speak her thoughts aloud to! At first she thought about the children, about whom she was uneasy, although the princess and Kitty (she reckoned more upon her) had promised to look after them. If only Masha does not begin her naughty tricks, if Grisha isn’t bit by the dog, and Lily isn’t upset again! she thought.

Witch Hazel, at this point in the journey, pulled the coach off to the side of the road and, with stammering apologies, fit her passenger with a silken blindfold. “We must be drawing closer to our destination,” Dolly thought out loud, her musings turning to her sister-in-law.

They attack Anna. What for? Am I any better? I have, anyway, a husband I love-not as I should like to love him, still I do love him, while Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame?

She wants to live. God has put that in our hearts. Very likely I should have done the same. Even to this day I don’t feel sure I did right in listening to her at that terrible time when she came to me in Moscow. I ought then to have cast off my husband and have begun my life fresh. I might have loved and have been loved in reality. And is it any better as it is? I don’t respect him. He’s necessary to me, she thought about her husband, and I put up with him. Is that any better? She remembered his dull words of comfort when Dolichka was taken away, and blamed him for that, too.

As the carriage bumped along, the road becoming more rutted and uneven as they drew toward their destination, the most passionate and impossible romances rose before Darya Alexandrovna’s imagination. Anna did quite right, and certainly I shall never reproach her for it. She is happy, she makes another person happy, and she’s not broken down as I am, but most likely just as she always was, bright, clever, open to every impression, thought Darya Alexandrovna-and a sly smile curved her lips, for, as she pondered on Anna’s love affair, Darya Alexandrovna constructed on parallel lines an almost identical love affair for herself, with an imaginary composite figure, the ideal man who was in love with her. And Dolichka lived and stood arm in arm with her as she, like Anna, confessed the whole affair to her husband. And the amazement and perplexity of Stepan Arkadyich at this avowal made her smile.

It was with such daydreams she reached the turning of the highroad that led to the rebel encampment at Vozdvizhenskoe.

CHAPTER 7

WITCH HAZEL PULLED UP the carriage and looked round to the right, to a field of rye, where a dozen or so ragged-looking Class III robots were sitting on a cart. Witch Hazel was just going to jump down, but on second thought she shouted to the other robots instead, and beckoned them to come up. The wind that seemed to blow as they drove dropped when the carriage stood still; gadflies settled on the steaming Puller engine and sizzled. One of the robots got up and came slowly toward the carriage, a tall, blue metal android with a conical head who bowed deeply and was introduced by Witch Hazel as Antipodal. A second robot, also moving toward the carriage but much more slowly than the first, must have been built as a regimental Class III, for it was in an animal shape-one appropriate to its name, which Dolly learned to be Tortoiseshell.

Decoms, thought Dolly, surveying the sorry-looking handful of metal men and women, and shaking her head sadly. A world of poor, pitiful decoms.

The scenery was no more inspiring. An iron-sided silo stood bare and slightly tilted, patterns of dust caked over the circular windows. The barn was in little better shape, with stray tiles peeling off the roof and an overwhelming smell of rotting feed coming from within. The farmhouse itself was a ramshackle afair, with weeds and climbing plants growing helter-skelter up the sides, covering the windows and snaking in and out of the doorway.

A curly-headed old man in a ragged mécanicien’s jumpsuit, with a bit of bast tied round his hair and his bent back dark with perspiration, came toward the carriage, quickening his steps, and took hold of the mudguard with his sunburnt hand.

“Welcome toVozdvizhenskoe,” he scowled. “I hope you are a friend, and not foe, for I’d hate to have to kill such a nice-looking woman so early in the day.”

“What?”

“I’m only making a jest, madame, a bit of a jape. But whom do you want? The count himself? Or she, the Queen of the Junkers?”

“Well, are they at home, my good man?” Darya Alexandrovna said vaguely, not knowing how to ask about Anna, even of this unusual man, apparently a mécanicien for illegal, decommissioned robots.

“At home for sure,” said the functionary, shifting from one bare foot to the other, and leaving a distinct print of five toes and a heel in the dust. “Sure to be at home,” he repeated, evidently eager to talk. “Only yesterday a couple more of these pitiful tin souls arrived.” He gestured with genial distaste to Witch Hazel and the others. “What do you want?” He turned round and called to Tortoiseshell, who was emitting a basso tone from somewhere within his eponymous outer covering.

“Ah, here they come now in their finery.”

Dolly looked in the direction the queer man indicated and saw two shambling monster-machines: Vronsky and Anna, in homebuilt Exterior battle-suits, making the rounds of their encampment. Out front was the first of the suits, evidently Anna’s, measuring some twelve feet or more and painted on its front with the oversize eyes and glittering crown of some royal personage in a children’s carnival; then came Vronsky in a new version of his late lamented Frou-Frou, bearing the same powerful shape and weaponry, but homebuilt and therefore more ragged, without the same careful soldering and high quality of materials that typify a regimental Exterior.

Trotting along beside them on a military surplus two-tread was Vassenka Veslovsky in his Scotch cap with floating ribbons, his stout legs stretched out before him, obviously pleased with his own appearance. Darya Alexandrovna could not suppress a good-humored smile as she recognized him. (She had no way of knowing, for how could she, that this was not the Vassenka Veslovsky she had been so entertained by at Pokrovskoe, although it was externally identical and possessed of the same thought-modeling and associative programming.) As Dolly watched, Anna’s queenly Exterior shambled to a halt, and Anna climbed out of the torso of the battle-machine, shook out her hair, and began quietly grooming the war-bot: rubbing oil into its joints, testing its reflexes, and so on. The sureness of her understanding of the complicated piece of machinery, combined with the ease and grace of her deportment, impressed Dolly.

For the first minute it seemed to her unsuitable for Anna to ride inside an Exterior. The concept of riding within a battle-suit was, in Darya Alexandrovna’s mind, overly masculine for a lady. But when she had scrutinized her, seeing her closer, she was at once reconciled to the idea of her sister-in-law at the controls of one of the motorized death-dealers. In spite of her seemingly out-of-place elegance, everything was so simple, quiet, and dignified in the attitude, the dress, and the movements of Anna that nothing could have been more natural. Vronsky was carefully piloting Frou-Frou Deux (this was the new Exterior’s name), trying to “ride the kinks out,” as the expression went, and being derided for not taking enough care by the fat little Englishman, Vronsky’s engineer, who brought up the rear of the party on foot.

Anna’s face suddenly beamed with a joyful smile at the instant when, in the little figure huddled in a corner of the old carriage, she recognized Dolly. On reaching the carriage she leapt out of the torso of her Exterior, pulled free of the wires that controlled the machine, and ran up to greet her friend.

“I thought it was you and dared not think it. How delightful! You can’t fancy how glad I am!” she said, at one moment pressing her face against Dolly and kissing her, and at the next holding her off and examining her with a smile.

“Here’s a delightful surprise, Alexei!” she said, looking round at Vronsky, who had emerged from his own Exterior and out into the cold country air to walk toward them. Vronsky, carefully plucking free from his own set of sensor-wires, went up to Dolly.

“You wouldn’t believe how glad we are to see you,” he said, giving peculiar significance to the words, and showing his strong white teeth in a smile. “Lupo! Come!” The wolf-robot bounded from around an outbuilding, his repaired visual sensors gleaming brightly as he raced to the side of his master.

Vassenka Veslovsky took off his cap and greeted the visitor by gleefully waving the ribbons over his head. Dolly noticed as she and Anna hugged happily that the small crowd of decom robots focused their sensors on Vronsky and Anna with obvious love and admiration. As her eyes passed over the stolid Tortoiseshell, the upright Antipodal, and the enigmatic Witch Hazel, Dolly paused to consider the sorry fate of these creatures. Had they escaped their respective fates due to the intercession of loving masters, or through some dumb stroke of luck? What mixed and confusing messages must they be receiving from the Iron Laws coded in their wiring, now that the very Ministry that created them had ordered their destruction!

But as they strolled toward the house, Anna chattering happily about the world they were building at Vozdvizhenskoe, what struck Darya Alexandrovna most of all was the change that had taken place in Anna, whom she knew so well and loved. Any other woman, a less close observer, not knowing Anna before, or not having thought as Darya Alexandrovna had been thinking on the road, would not have noticed anything special in Anna. But now Dolly was struck by that temporary beauty, which is only found in women during moments of love, and which she saw now in Anna’s face.

Everything in her face, the clearly marked dimples in her cheeks and chin, the line of her lips, the smile which, as it were, fluttered about her face, the brilliance of her eyes, the grace and rapidity of her movements, the fullness of the notes of her voice, even the manner in which, with a sort of angry friendliness, she answered Veslovsky when he asked permission to climb into her Exterior, just to see how it feels-it was all peculiarly fascinating, and it seemed as if she were herself aware of it, and rejoicing in it. The snide and ironical title given her by the mécanicien now felt exactly right to Dolly: Anna, dignified and powerful in this pastoral redoubt, seemed like nothing so much as a warrior queen. The Queen of the Junkers.

“Ah, and here she is,” Anna grinned as they approached the porch of the dilapidated farmhouse. With fervor she embraced her own Class III, Android Karenina.

CHAPTER 8

ANNA LOOKED AT Dolly’s thin, careworn face, with its wrinkles filled with dust from the road, and she was on the point of saying what she was thinking, that is, that Dolly had gotten thinner. But, conscious that she herself had grown handsomer, and that Dolly’s eyes were telling her so, she sighed and began to speak about herself.

“You are looking at me,” Anna continued, “and wondering how I can be happy in my position? Not only separated from my husband, lacking even the benefit of a formal divorce, but now on the opposite side as he in a divide over the very future of our country! Well-it’s shameful to confess, but I… I’m inexcusably happy. Something magical has happened to me, like a dream, when you’re frightened, panic-stricken, and all of a sudden you wake up and all the horrors are no more. I have awoken. I have lived through the misery, the dread, and now for a long while past, especially since we’ve been here, I’ve been so happy!” she said, with a timid smile of inquiry looking at Dolly. “For once I know what I want: to be with this man,” she indicated Vronsky with a shy gesture, “and to stand alongside him for a principle in which I believe: that the ownership of beloved-companion robots is an ancient right, inviolable, a sacred privilege of the Russian people.”

“How glad I am!” said Dolly smiling, involuntarily speaking more coldly than she wanted to. “I’m very glad for you.”

But Anna did not answer. “How do you look at my position, what do you think of it?” she asked.

“I consider…,” Darya Alexandrovna began, and she would have gone on to say what she knew that Stiva would insist she say, were he here: that there were legal channels through which to express one’s grievances with governmental programs; that Class III robots were to be mourned, certainly, but it was folly to stake one’s own life on the fate of machines; and that “we must put our trust in our leaders.”

“I consider…” Darya Alexandrovna began again, but at that instant Vassenka Veslovsky blundered past them, riding in Anna’s majestic Exterior, bumbling heavily along and sending a spray of electrical fire over their heads into the lintels of the farmhouse.

“This thing is out of control, Anna Arkadyevna!” he shouted, laughing. Anna did not even glance at him.

“I don’t think anything,” Dolly said, and, lacking the courage to bring up those points that she knew her husband would have made, continued vaguely, “but I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be…”

Anna, taking her eyes off her friend’s face and dropping her eyelids-this was a new habit Dolly had not seen in her before-pondered, trying to penetrate the full significance of the words.

And obviously interpreting them as she would have wished, she glanced at Dolly. “If you had any sins,” she said, “they would all be forgiven you for your coming to see me and for these words.” And Dolly saw that tears stood in her eyes. She pressed Anna’s hand in silence. Android Karenina sat cross-legged on the porch at Anna’s feet, her faceplate calm and still, emitting a calming hum from her Third Bay. It struck Dolly that to say her piece-to urge Anna to abandon this world and this cause-would mean urging her to abandon her Android Karenina… and thus to suffer exactly as she had suffered in the loss of her Dolichka.

“Well, tell me more, won’t you?” said Dolly, getting to her feet and looking avidly about the grounds of Vozdvizhenskoe. After a moment’s silence she repeated her question. “Tell me more! These marvelous fire pits, are they only intended for fixing what things you have found, or do you intend to smelt groznium and build new robots as well? How many there are of them!”

At last Anna was drawn out of her melancholy humor and into conversation. She explained to her friend about the layout of the camp; about the decoms who had arrived and from where they had come; about her hopes that this place could be a safe haven for junkers who would otherwise meet their fiery doom in the furnaces below the Moscow Tower.

As they spoke, crouched unseen just past the porch was Vassenka Veslovsky, standing totally-that is, robotically-still, his aural sensors on alert.

Next, Anna and Dolly rose and spent a fascinated hour watching Vronsky drill a small group of decoms in a cleared-out wheat field behind the barn. In tromping lockstep, the dozen or so dented robots formed into rows, the rows shifted into columns, columns merged into little phalanxes, phalanxes split and regrouped and melted in and out of one another in a series of precise military maneuvers. Interlocking, delicate, balletic, their metal torsos glinting marvelously in the noonday sun, the robots practiced these maneuvers, while Vronsky and Lupo prowled amongst them, barking orders and making small adjustments. As Dolly and the obviously proud Anna watched, Vronsky seemed to rage at the slowness of his mechanical charges, chewed on the ends of his mustache with feigned frustration, all the while quite evidently swollen with self-satisfaction at the ever-growing skill of his ragged troops.

And Vassenka Veslovsky turned up to make a nuisance of himself, mainly by parading next to Vronsky as if he, too, were a commander of some sort, peppering him with all sorts of questions: “How many precisely do you have? What capabilities do they have? How well do they take such orders?”

CHAPTER 9

WHEN THE “TROOPS” were dismissed, Anna and Dolly continued their little inspection tour, crossing the vast lawn of Vozdvizhenskoe to one of the small outbuildings, where a pleasant little nursery had been created for Anna’s child and her II/Governess/D145. The rosy baby with her black eyebrows and hair, her sturdy, red little body with tight, goose-flesh skin, delighted Darya Alexandrovna in spite of the cross expression with which she stared at the stranger. She positively envied the baby’s healthy appearance. She was delighted, too, at the baby’s crawling. Not one of her own children had crawled like that. When the baby was put on the carpet and its little dress tucked up behind, it was wonderfully charming. Looking round like some little wild animal at the big grown-up people with her bright, black eyes, she smiled, unmistakably pleased at their admiring her, and holding her legs sideways, she pressed vigorously on her arms, and rapidly drew her whole back up after, and then made another step forward with her little arms.

VRONSKY CHEWED ON THE ENDS OF HIS MOUSTACHE AS HE BARKED ORDERS AT HIS MECHANICAL CHARGES

Dolly clapped in appreciation, but Anna only screwed up her eyes, as though looking at something far away, and said suddenly, “By the way, do you know I saw Seryozha? But we’ll talk about that later. You wouldn’t believe it, I’m like a hungry beggar woman when a full dinner is set before her, and she does not know what to begin on first. The dinner is you, and the talks I have before me with you, which I could never have with anyone else; and I don’t know which subject to begin upon first. Mais je ne vous ferai grâce de rien. I must have everything out with you.”

Dolly opened her mouth to respond, but before she could say a word a terrible shrieking noise was heard from outside, and Anna immediately bolted past her, with Android Karenina at her heels. “What-”

“Aliens!” shouted Anna over her shoulder. “We are under attack!”

By the time Anna and her beloved-companion got to the central field, the tall blue junker named Antipodal had been caught in the terrible talons of the Honored Guest; it was holding the poor, stiff decom over his head, shaking him forward and back. “It will dash him upon the ground!” Anna shouted to Android Karenina, who flickered and beeped, looking for a way to help.

Lupo hurtled out from behind the silo, teeth bared, running directly toward the alien, Vronsky stomping along after him inside Frou-Frou Deux, raising his heavy-fire to send a blast at the alien. “No!” Anna cried out. “You will destroy the robot!” Lupo jumped back, hissing and growling, as the large, jagged clawfeet of the alien kicked at him. The Honored Guest shrieked again, the harsh sound competing with Antipodal’s wild klaxon beep of alarm. Darya Alexandrovna, heaving breaths after rushing to catch up, stood warily between Vronsky and Anna, as all contemplated what would happen next; other decoms trundled over from the far corners of the encampment, eyebanks flickering with distress for their captured comrade.

And then Witch Hazel, exhibiting absolutely none of the scattered, nervous energy Darya had observed in her before, suddenly came tearing at the Honored Guest from behind, catching it with a hard, running shove to the midsection. The alien monster stumbled forward, Antipodal flying from his clutches, and landed belly-down on the outer husk of Tortoiseshell, who like Witch Hazel seemed to have appeared from nowhere in the aid of their fellow decom. Android Karenina motored to Antipodal and began searching out the damaged portions of his plating to begin repairs; meanwhile, Tortoiseshell’s back lit up like the star on a Christmas tree, and the dozens of eyes of the alien blinked madly, while its long beak cracked open to let out a hideous caterwaul of agony-for the turtle-shaped regimental Class III had heated himself in an instant to thousands of degrees, and was baking the body of the alien.

Darya Alexandrovna stood stupefied, and Anna and Vronsky exchanged glances, astonished at the efficient and effective manner in which the robots had taken on the foe. While Vronsky admired the tactical acuity on display, Anna Karenina reflected that, freed by their masterlessness from the immediate dictates of the Iron Laws, these robots were not reverting to a dumb machine state, they were evolving-becoming more independent, more intelligent, and more empathetic toward one another. More human.

As the alien rolled off Tortoiseshell and clutched in evident agony at its burned undercarriage, a new sound welled up, as if from underground: a kind of humming… or, rather, a ticking… the alien shrieked again, blotting out the new sound for a moment, but in the next moment it returned, louder than before…

tikka tikka tikka

tikka tikka tikka

tikkatikkatikkatikkatikkatikka

And as they watched, a gigantic, long worm shot out from beneath the earth, like a slow-motion bullet fired from a Huntgun, and then loomed above them, a flat eyeless head topping a long, grey, segmented mechanical body following behind, the dread mechanical tikkatikkatikka still radiating from somewhere within.

The robots and the humans cowered together, staring wonderingly as this terrible machine.

But the Honored Guest did not stare-instead, it ran toward the prodigious worm, driven as if by instinct, bounding along in three great pumps of its lizard-like hind legs, and jumped on the back of the beast.

Their sounds then combined into one horrifying symphony: tikka tikka tikka SHRIEK-tikka tikka tikka SHRIEK-tikka tikka tikka SHRIEK-

The alien, now astride the robot-worm like a cavalry officer, let out one last yowling war cry and spurred its mount with a knobby, reptilian knee. A terrible thought struck Vronsky, as the worm contracted along the length of its articulated body and then shot up into the air: They shall come for us in three ways, he recalled. This, then, was the second way: these worm-bots, too, were alien, sent to serve and protect the terrible lizard-men.

The sinuous machine, with its rider, arced smoothly over the heads of the astonished denizens of Vozdvizhenskoe, then disappeared into a new hole in the soil.

“Merciful Saint Peter,” said Dolly, and fainted to the ground.

When she awoke she was indoors, and Count Vronsky was standing over her and smiling. He told her that Antipodal in Android Karenina’s care was slowly being restored and revivified; that Lupo with his powerful olfactory sensors was prowling the grounds of the encampment, looking for more of the wormholes. Darya Alexandrovna was interested by everything. She liked everything about Vozdvizhenskoe more than she might have expected, but most of all she liked Vronsky himself with his natural, simple-hearted eagerness. Yes, he’s a very nice, good man, she thought several times, not hearing what he said, but looking at him and penetrating into his expression, while she mentally put herself in Anna’s place. She liked him so much just now with his eager interest that she saw how Anna could be in love with him.

CHAPTER 10

SHE IS AWAKE,” Vronsky called to Anna, who responded happily and ran in to give Dolly a kiss. “I shall escort the princess to her cabin, and we’ll have a little talk,” he said, “if you would like that?” he added, turning to her.

“I shall be delighted,” answered Darya Alexandrovna, rather astonished. She saw by Vronsky’s face that he wanted something from her. She was not mistaken. As soon as they had passed through the little gate back into the garden, he looked in the direction Anna had taken, and having made sure that she could neither hear nor see them, he began:

“You guess that I have something I want to say to you,” he said, looking at her with laughing eyes. “I am not wrong in believing you to be a friend of Anna’s.” He took off his hat, and taking out his handkerchief, wiped his head, which was growing bald. Dolly made no answer, and merely stared at him with dismay. When she was left alone with him, she suddenly felt afraid; his laughing eyes and stern expression scared her. The wolf-robot, Lupo, trotted beside them, and she saw with distaste that he was working at a hunk of the alien’s hide with his back teeth. The most diverse suppositions as to what Vronsky was about to speak of to her flashed into her brain. He is going to beg me to come to stay in this rebel cantonment with them with the children, and I shall have to refuse; or isn’t it Vassenka Veslovsky and his relations with Anna? Or perhaps about Kitty, that he feels he was to blame? All her conjectures were unpleasant, but she did not guess what he really wanted to talk about to her.

“You have so much influence with Anna, she is so fond of you,” he said. “Do help me.”

Darya Alexandrovna looked with timid inquiry into his energetic face, which under the lime trees was continually being lighted up in patches by the sunshine, and then passing into complete shadow again. She waited for him to say more, but he walked in silence beside her, scratching with his cane in the gravel.

“You have come to see us, you, the only woman of Anna’s former friends-I know that you have done this not because you regard our position as the right one but because, understanding all the difficulty of the position, you still love her and want to be a help to her. Have I understood you rightly?” he asked, looking round at her.

“Oh, yes,” answered Dolly, retracting her I/Sunshade/6, “but…”

“No,” he broke in, and unconsciously, oblivious of the awkward position into which he was putting his companion, he stopped abruptly, so that she had to stop short too. “No one feels more deeply and intensely than I do all the difficulty of Anna’s position; and that you may well understand, if you do me the honor of supposing I have any heart. I am to blame for that position, and that is why I feel it.”

“Yes, but here, so far-and it may be so always-you are happy and at peace. Not literally at peace, far from it given the severity of the threats that face you, but at peace in your hearts, which is after all the more valuable. I see in Anna that she is happy, perfectly happy, she has had time to tell me so much already,” said Darya Alexandrovna, smiling; and involuntarily, as she said this, at the same moment a doubt entered her mind whether Anna really was happy.

But Vronsky, it appeared, had no doubts on that score. “Yes, yes,” he said, “I know that she has revived after all her sufferings; she is happy. She is happy in the present. But I?… I am afraid of what is before us… I beg your pardon, you would like to walk on?”

“No, I don’t mind.”

“Well, then, let us sit here.”

Darya Alexandrovna sat down on a garden seat in a corner of the avenue. He stood up facing her.

“I see that she is happy,” he repeated, and the doubt whether she was happy sank more deeply into Darya Alexandrovna’s mind. “But can it last?”

A junker named Vespidae, employing a very limited propeller-driven hovering capacity as he patrolled the perimeter of the camp, swung low overheard and flashed an all-clear light on its undercarriage to Vronsky, who gave a desultory wave in return and continued.

“Whether Anna and I have acted rightly or wrongly is another question, but the die is cast,” he said, “and we are bound together for life. We are united by all the ties of love that we hold most sacred. We have a child. We have these machine-men and -women who have sought what they perceive as safety in our shadow. But the conditions of our position are such that thousands of complications arise that she does not see and does not want to see. And that one can well understand. But I can’t help seeing them.” Vronsky absently ran his fingers along Lupo’s spine, and the dog thrummed with pleasure. Dolly wondered what Vronsky was getting at.

“My child,” he said suddenly. “Can we raise her here, in such a situation? And what of the future? My daughter will be hunted for all her life, bearing the mark of the rebel, whether she would choose to or not, for she will never be given the choice. We have made it for her, by our actions. Can I will her such an existence!” he said, with a vigorous gesture of refusal, and he looked with gloomy inquiry toward Darya Alexandrovna.

She made no answer, but simply gazed at him. He went on: “One day a son may be born, my son, and he too will have the results of this choice, he too will have the consequences thrust upon him. He will be an outcast, an escapee from society, and worse-if this redoubt of ours should be found and our defenses destroyed, my child would in the course of events be killed, or worse, raised by him: as a Karenin! You can understand the bitterness and horror of this position! I have tried to speak of this to Anna. It irritates her. She is happy now, she has taken what she sees as her principled position on the Robot Question. She enjoys the thrill of this wilderness existence we now lead. She cannot look far enough down the road to contemplate the kind of future we are engendering. She does not understand, and to her I cannot speak plainly of all this…”

He paused, evidently much moved.

“Yes, indeed, I see that. But what can Anna do?” queried Darya Alexandrovna.

“Yes, that brings me to the object of my conversation,” he said, calming himself with an effort. “It is my great hope that I might give up this life and marry Anna properly, within the bounds of society.”

“I am surprised to hear you say so,” replied Dolly. She looked about her, her gesture taking in the whole of Vozdvizhenskoe. “I would have said you were so happy here, at the head of your robot regiment…”

“But they could be brought into service! With me at their head! Can you imagine…”

“Into service?”

“Of the state, of the Ministry,” Vronsky turned his gaze back toward the farmhouse, as if ensuring Anna did not overhear. “I am prepared to play what part it is thought I would play best in the New Russia being created by our leaders.” Dolly raised a hand to her mouth, but said nothing.

“I have built this world in the woods because I have stood for the honor of Anna Karenina. But in truth I have no problem, no practical problem that is to say, with the direction of the Higher Branches, with the changes they seek to implement. My differences with Alexei Alexandrovich are personal, not political.”

“But after your departure… your disappearance… how can the Higher Branches allow your return? How could Karenin?”

“If Anna asked he would allow it: I’m sure of it. Her husband agreed to a divorce-at that time your husband had arranged it completely. And now, I know, he would not refuse it. He would grant her a divorce, and forgiveness for both of us. It is only a matter of sending him a communiqué. He said plainly at that time that if she expressed the desire, he would not refuse. Of course,” he said gloomily, “it is one of those pharisaical cruelties of which only such heartless men are capable. He knows what agony any recollection of him must give her, and knowing her, he must have a communiqué,” he said, with an expression as though he were threatening someone for its being hard for him. “And so it is, princess, that I am shamelessly clutching at you as an anchor of salvation. Help me to persuade her to write to him and ask for a divorce and for amnesty.”

This last word he spoke with emphasis, though quietly. But Lupo, who had padded up to them midway through their conversation and had been sitting contentedly as usual at his master’s feet, heard-with his extraordinary, lupine aural circuitry, he heard, and with his survival instincts he understood. For Vronsky and Anna to be given amnesty, they would surely have to comply with the “adjustment protocol.”

The wolf-machine let loose a long, low growl, which Vronsky did not, or affected not, to hear.

“Use your influence with her, make her record a communiqué. I don’t like-I’m almost unable to speak about this to her.”

“Very well, I will talk to her,” said Darya Alexandrovna, and for some reason she suddenly at that point recalled Anna’s strange new habit of half-closing her eyes. And she remembered that Anna dropped her eyelids just when the deeper questions of life were touched upon. Just as though she were half-shutting her eyes to her own life, so as not to see everything, thought Dolly. “Yes, indeed, for my own sake and for hers I will talk to her,” Dolly said in reply to his look of gratitude. They got up and walked to the farmhouse.

They passed Lupo, prowling in and out of the old henhouse, sniffing at Tortoiseshell’s stubby groznium tail. It was as if he were already more at home in this company than at the side of his master. Vronsky did not call out to him.

CHAPTER 11

WHEN ANNA FOUND DOLLY at home before her, she looked intently in her eyes, as though questioning her about the talk she had had with Vronsky, but she made no inquiry in words.

“I believe it’s dinnertime,” she said. “We’ve not seen each other at all yet. I am reckoning on the evening. Now I want to go and dress. I expect you do too; we have all been splattered with mud, and with the spilt, stinking yellow gore of our attacker.” Dolly went to her room and she felt amused. To change her dress was impossible, for she had already put on her best dress. She brushed it off as best she could, wringing out some of the more gore-soaked patches of fabric; then, in order to signify in some way her preparation for dinner, she changed her cuffs and tie, and put some lace on her head.

“This is all I can do,” she said with a smile to Anna, who came in to escort her to the ramshackle little tent where the sarcastic mécanicien served as camp cook as well.

“Yes, we are too formal here,” Anna said, as it were apologizing for the unceremoniousness of the dining. “Alexei is delighted at your visit, as he rarely is at anything. He has completely lost his heart to you,” she added. “You’re not tired?”

There was no time for talking about anything before dinner. The dinner, the wine, the decoration of the table were all of a compelling simplicity; flasks open on the long wooden table; candlelight serving for lumières, in the old way.

After dinner they sat on the terrace, then they proceeded to play a quaint, old manual game called lawn tennis that Anna and Vronsky had come to enjoy in the absence of Flickerfly and other grozniumage amusements. The players, divided into two parties-humans against robots-stood on opposite sides of a tightly drawn net with gilt poles on the carefully leveled and rolled croquet ground. Darya Alexandrovna made an attempt to play, but it was a long time before she could understand the game, and by the time she did understand it, she was so tired that she sat down and simply looked on at the players. Her partner, Witch Hazel, gave up playing too and sat beside her; and after asking permission, began braiding her hair, an intimate kind of Class III action that brought tears to Dolly’s eyes.

The others kept the game up for a long time. Vronsky and Anna played very well and seriously: they kept a sharp lookout on the balls served to them, and without haste or getting in each other’s way, they ran adroitly up to them, waited for the rebound, and neatly and accurately returned them over the net. Veslovsky played worse than the others. He was too eager, but he kept the players lively with his high spirits. His laughter and outcries never paused. With the ladies’ permission, he took off his coat, and his solid, comely figure in his white shirtsleeves, with his red, perspiring face and his impulsive movements, made a picture that imprinted itself vividly on the memory.

During the game Darya Alexandrovna was not enjoying herself. She did not like the light tone of raillery that was kept up all the time between Vassenka Veslovsky and Anna; she felt strangely disquieted by the attention he paid to her. But to avoid breaking up the party and to get through the time somehow, after a rest she joined the game again, and pretended to be enjoying it. All that day it seemed to her as though she were acting in a theater with actors cleverer than she, and that her bad acting was spoiling the whole performance. She had come with the intention of staying two days, if all went well. But in the evening, during the game, she made up her mind that she would ask that Witch Hazel guide her home the next day. The maternal cares and worries, which she had so hated on the way, now, after a day spent without them, struck her in quite another light, and tempted her back to them.

When Darya Alexandrovna lay in bed that night, as soon as she closed her eyes, she saw Vassenka Veslovsky flying about the match ground. Something about that man, with his frivolous manner and appearance, caused her such disquiet-even distress.

CHAPTER 12

VRONSKY AND ANNA spent the whole summer and part of the winter in the country, living as lord and lady of their robot freedomland at Vozdvizhenskoe, and still taking no steps to obtain a divorce. It was an understood thing between them that they could not go away anywhere, but both felt, the longer they lived alone, especially in the autumn, just them and their small robot army, that they could not stand this existence, and that they would have to alter it. Their life was apparently such that nothing better could be desired. They had the fullest abundance of everything; they had a child, and both had occupations. The building of the fortifications, the slow improvement of the camp from a woodsy tent city into a strong, well-fortified encampment, interested Anna greatly. She did not merely assist, but planned and suggested a great deal herself.

But her chief thought was still of herself: how far she was dear to Vronsky, how far she could make up to him for all he had given up. Vronsky appreciated this desire not only to please but to serve him, which had become the sole aim of her existence, but at the same time he wearied of the loving snares in which she tried to hold him fast. As time went on, and he saw himself more and more often held fast in these snares, he had an evergrowing desire, not so much to escape from them, as to test whether they hindered his freedom. Had it not been for this growing desire to be free, not to have scenes every time he wanted to ride out to check the farthest flung component of their early-warning system, or take one of the junker regiments on a day-long training exercise, Vronsky would have been perfectly satisfied with his life. The role he had taken up, the role of a captain to a regiment of machine-men, was very much to his taste (even though, as he had expressed in confidence to Dolly, he would prefer to play that role within society, not outside it). Now, after spending six months in that character, he derived even greater satisfaction from it. And his management of his estate, which occupied and absorbed him more and more, was most successful: no more Honored Guests attacked the camp, and if agents of the Ministry discovered their whereabouts, never did they make an attempt against their walls.

In late October, Antipodal returned from a routine scouting trip with remarkable news. Reporting to Count Vronsky in strictest privacy, he described his encounter in the forest with a short man wearing a long, dirty beard, in bast sandals and a tattered laboratory coat. This man had appeared seemingly from nowhere, flatly refusing to provide his name or any other identifying information. He would only say he demanded a tête-à-tête with Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky to discuss what he called an “alliance,” though with whom or for what purpose, the man had not said. Antipodal finally reported the time and place set for a meeting: a week following, at a Huntshed in Kashinsky, three versts distant.

It was the very dullest autumn weather, which is so dreary in the country, and so, preparing himself for a struggle, Vronsky, with a hard and cold expression, informed Anna of his departure as he had never spoken to her before. But, to his surprise, Anna accepted the information with great composure, and merely asked when he would be back. He looked intently at her, at a loss to explain this composure. She smiled at his look. He knew that way she had of withdrawing into herself, and knew that it only happened when she had determined upon something without letting him know her plans. He was afraid of this; but he was so anxious to avoid a scene that he kept up appearances, and half sincerely believed in what he longed to believe in-her reasonableness.

“I hope you won’t be dull?”

“I hope not,” said Anna. “Android Karenina and I are knitting banners for our little army. No, I shan’t be dull.”

She’s trying to take that tone, and so much the better, he thought, or else it would be the same thing over and over again.

And so he made a last circuit of the barrier-defenses, then set off for the tête-à-tête without appealing to her for a candid explanation. It was the first time since the beginning of their intimacy that he had parted from her without a full explanation. From one point of view this troubled him, but on the other side he felt that it was better so. At first there will be, as this time, something undefined kept back, and then she will get used to it. In any case I can give up anything for her, but not my masculine independence, he thought.

CHAPTER 13

KONSTANTIN DMITRICH LEVIN stood just within the creaking, rusted door of the abandoned Huntshed, which, though long unused, still housed the Surceased bodies of three massive Huntbears, their crudely fashioned paws frozen in positions of attack. He looked again down the long path leading to the Huntshed, and decided that this was a fool’s errand, just as Kitty had warned. Only when he began to exit the shed and walk back to his carriage did he hear a distant rumble coming through the forest; he watched as the trees shook, and from them emerge a roughly hewn Exterior battle-suit, accompanied by a regimental Class III robot in the shape of a great gray wolf. Both machines stopped, and with a high creak the torso door of the Exterior opened to reveal the dapper form of Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky.

“Konstantin Dmitrich! Delighted!” Vronsky called out as he emerged. “I believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you… at Princess Shcherbatskaya’s,” he said, giving Levin his hand.

“Yes, I quite remember our meeting,” said Levin, and blushing crimson, he turned away immediately and looked instead at the frozen Huntbears. The days when both had courted Kitty Shcherbatsky were a lifetime ago, but the pain and embarrassment sprang back to Levin undimmed. His mind leapt to the business at hand. “For what reason have you requested a meeting?”

“I requested it? No, sir,” countered Vronsky, tugging suspiciously on his mustache. “You mean it was not you?”

Suddenly Lupo snarled, whipped his head around, and bared his teeth. A moment later, Vronsky and Levin saw what had excited the keen-eared wolf: a short, squat man with a long beard, tangled and filthy, draped in an equally squalid laboratory coat.

“Mea culpa, mea culpa” said this strange personage, speaking with exceptional rapidity. “My name is Federov, and I am afraid the blame for the ambiguity attendant on our little tête-à-tête is entirely mine. But hardly could I have sent a communiqué grandly requesting your presence at a meeting with a representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists.”

“UnConSciya!” shouted Vronsky, and in an instant his hot-whip was deployed, crackling across the space between himself and Federov. But the man merely touched a small device on his belt, and the whip seemed not even to touch him.

“Now, now,” the little man in the lab coat said, as if chastising a child. “I am hardly in a position to ask you to disarm, but our meeting will go more smoothly if you refrain from such posturing. I myself am wearing an array of defensive clothing and underclothing, created of technologies several generations ahead of any you might have access to. ‘Always be prepared,’ that’s the motto of our little society.”

Levin looked carefully at Federov. “What is it that you want?”

“Each of you, in your own way, is now as much an enemy of the Ministry as we are. You have come to understand what we have long understood: that our benevolent protectors are at heart neither benevolent, nor protective. Soon all Russia will know it, too, and they will need their leaders.”

The squat, strange little man turned to Konstantin Dmitrich and looked him directly in the eye. “Levin, we beg you to travel with your household to Moscow, and wait there until such time as you can be of use.”

Vronsky sneered, and spoke derisively, “You ask us to enter into conspiracy with the greatest criminals in Russian history.”

“Yes,” Levin echoed, his mind racing. “How can we?”

“By knowing this: we have never committed a single one of the violent acts attributed to us by the Ministry. Yes, we left the government laboratories en masse because we did not like certain orders we had been given, the path our rulers demanded technological innovation travel down. But we have never committed a single act of violence.”

The funny little man leaned forward, his eyes welling with tears: “Not a single one. The emotion bombs, the malfunctions-the Ministry itself has done it all. Remember, if you want to control someone, first protect them. And if you will protect someone, you need something to protect them from.”

Vronsky snorted with derision, and shook his head, but Levin trembled like a man hearing the word of God. He was moved beyond words to see that tears were openly rolling down Federov’s dirty, bearded face. “I apologize for becoming so emotional,” said Federov. “But we have spent a generation outside of possibility, and now I stare at you two proud Russian gentlemen, and I cannot help it-I feel-hope.”

BOOM!

The forest exploded with fire.

“No,” cried Federov. “An emotion bomb! I should have known.”

BOOM! A second hope-bomb rattled the treeline, and with a terrible crack a massive oak tree splintered and fell before them, its leaves alive with fire. All three men ducked down to the earth, covering their ears against the concussive roar of the detonations. “It is me,” screamed Federov. “My hope! My-”

BOOM! A third blast, the loudest yet, knocked Vronsky’s massive Exterior to the ground and tore the roof from the Huntshed. Levin caught a glimpse of the tops of the Surceased Huntbears, their fight grimaces glinting in the fire-lit darkness, before a burning branch cracked free and landed across his back.

“Ahh!” he screamed in terrible pain, and Vronsky rolled atop him, causing him exquisite agony but extinguishing the blaze. Levin wailed helplessly, while Vronsky screamed to Federov. “It is a trap! You have trapped us here! What have you done? You’ve killed him!”

“I did not cause this attack!” shouted Federov, staggering to his feet. “But I can still the hope that provokes it!” Levin, moaning, clutching at himself with his badly scalded hands, sat up and stared-as Federov pulled out a dagger and drove it into his own heart.

Levin gasped; the man from UnConSciya screamed and doubled forward, pushing the knife in to the hilt. No further bombs were heard, only the eerie crackling of the burning forest.

“Remember these words, men,” Federov said between clenched teeth, sinking to his knees. “Rearguard… Action.”

“Rearguard…,” intoned Levin, as if hypnotized.

“Action,” Vronsky mumbled.

CHAPTER 14

VRONSKY HAD AGREED to pursue the tête-à-tête at the Huntshed partly because he was attracted, as all cocksure men are, by a chance for further adventures-just as the tippler, once he has tasted wine, will again and again reactivate the II/Barrel/4. But also Vronsky was bored in the country and wanted to show Anna his right to independence. He had not in the least expected that the tête-à-tête would so interest him, so keenly excite him, and that he would be so good at this kind of thing.

After burying the body of the UnConSciya man in a circular hollow a hundred or so paces from the Huntshed, Levin and he stopped to discuss the remarkable events, and to enjoy smoking cigars. They spoke in a calm and happy way-though, while they seemed to be perfect allies and friends, their past rivalry forgotten, Levin did not mention that his Class III still lived, buried in a Urgensky smoke factory; and Vronsky did not bring up his cherished hope, that if only he could get Anna to “see it right,” they would give up their share in rebellion entirely.

They were thus smoking and talking, when Lupo was beamed a communiqué and promptly lit it up on his monitor.

It was from Anna, and before Vronsky watched it, he already knew its contents. Expecting the tête-à-tête to be over in five days, he had promised to be back on Friday. Today was Saturday, and he knew that the communiqué contained reproaches for not being back at the fixed time.

The missive was not unexpected, but the form of it was unexpected, and particularly disagreeable to him. Anna’s face flashed red in the projection, as she bitterly pronounced, “Annie is very ill, and Placebo”-a Vozdvizhenskoe decom who had once been beloved-companion to a great Moscow doctor-“says it may be inflammation. I am losing my head all alone. I expected you the day before yesterday, and yesterday, and now I am sending to find out where you are and what you are doing. I wanted to come myself, but thought better of it, knowing you would dislike it. Send some answer, that I may know what to do.”

Vronsky played the communiqué again, to ensure he had it right, and again watched the pleading face of Anna Karenina. Send some answer, that I may know what to do. The child ill, yet she had thought of coming herself. Their daughter ill, and this hostile tone. The adrenalin-flushed excitement of the meeting in the woods and this gloomy, burdensome love to which he had to return struck Vronsky by their contrast. But he had to go, and immediately he bid Levin farewell and set off home.

CHAPTER 15

BEFORE VRONSKY’S DEPARTURE for the tête-à-tête, Anna had reflected that the scenes constantly repeated between them each time he left their fortifications might only make him cold to her instead of attaching him to her, and resolved to do all she could to control herself so as to bear the parting with composure. But the cold, severe glance with which he had looked at her when he came to tell her he was departing for the meeting had wounded her, and before he had started, her peace of mind was already destroyed.

In solitude afterward, thinking over that glance which had expressed his right to freedom, she came, as she always did, to the same point-the sense of her own humiliation. “He has the right to go away when and where he chooses,” she complained to Android Karenina. “Not simply to go away, but to leave me. He has every right, and I have none. But knowing that, he ought not to do it.” Together they had fled Petersburg, together they had built Vozdvizhenskoe on the old abandoned patch of farmland. But now while he was out playing the role of dashing rebel leader, she waited for him alone in the autumn cold.

“What has he done, though?… He looked at me with a cold, severe expression. Of course that is something indefinable, impalpable, but it has never been so before, and that glance means a great deal,” she concluded, as Android Karenina softly stroked her flowing hair. “That glance shows the beginning of indifference.”

And though she felt sure that a coldness was beginning, there was nothing she could do, she could not in any way alter her relations to him. Just as before, only by love and by charm could she keep him. And so, just as before, only by occupation in the day, by Galena Box at night, could she stifle the fearful thought of what would be if he ceased to love her. There was still one means, she finally admitted to herself, not to keep him-for she wanted nothing more than his love-but to be nearer to him, to be in such a position that he would not leave her.

That meant a divorce from Karenin; worse, it meant dispatching an emissary to the Higher Branches, revealing their location; it meant giving up their arms, begging forgiveness of the Ministry. And, of course, it would mean giving up their Class III robots, though this possibility Anna was not ready even to consider.

Absorbed in such thoughts, she passed five days without him, the five days that he was to be at the mysterious tête-à-tête in the woods. When the sixth day ended without his return, she felt that now she was utterly incapable of stifling the thought of him and of what he was doing there, just when her little girl was taken ill. Anna began to look after her, but even that did not distract her mind, especially as the illness was not serious. However hard she tried, she could not love this little child, and to feign love was beyond her powers. Toward the evening of that day, still alone, Anna was in such a panic about him that she decided to start for the town, but on second thought recorded the contradictory communiqué that Vronsky received, and without watching it through, beamed it off to Lupo. The next morning she received his reply and regretted her communiqué. She dreaded a repetition of the severe look he had flung at her at parting, especially when he knew that the baby was not dangerously ill.

But still she was glad she had sent the communiqué. At this moment Anna was positively admitting to herself that she was a burden to him, that he would relinquish his freedom regretfully to return to her, and in spite of that she was glad he was coming. Let him weary of her, but he would be here with her, so that she would see him, would know of every action he took.

She was sitting in the drawing room, and as she read she listened to the sound of the wind outside, every minute expecting the carriage to arrive. The farm was silent, with the cold and complete silence of an estate populated only by robots, who in their nightly Surcease made not even the smallest sound. Only one companion robot at Vozdvizhenskoe still had its human, and that was Android Karenina; now she brought tea, warmed on her own groznium core.

At last Anna heard the unmistakable whomp of Frou-Frou Deux’s big paws kicking up dirt in the covered entry. Android Karenina looked up, her eyebank flickered; Anna, flushing hotly, got up; but instead of going down, as she had done twice before, she stood still. She suddenly felt ashamed of her duplicity, but even more she dreaded how he might meet her. All feeling of wounded pride had passed now; she was only afraid of the expression of his displeasure.

She remembered that her child had been perfectly well again for the last two days. She felt positively vexed with her for getting better from the very moment her communiqué was dispatched. Then she thought of him, that he was here, all of him, with his hands, his eyes. She heard his voice. And forgetting everything, she ran joyfully to meet him.

“Well, how is Annie?” he said timidly from below, looking up to Anna as she ran down to him.

He was sitting on a chair pulling off his warm overboots.

“Oh, she is better.”

“And you?” he said, shaking himself.

She took his hand in both of hers, and drew it to her waist, never taking her eyes off him.

“Well, I’m glad,” he said, coldly scanning her, her hair, her dress, which he knew she had put on for him. All was charming, but how many times it had charmed him! And the stern, stony expression that she so dreaded settled upon his face.

“Well, I’m glad. And are you well?” he said, wiping his damp beard with his handkerchief and kissing her hand.

“Never mind,” she thought, “only let him be here, and so long as he’s here he cannot, he dare not, cease to love me.”

The evening was spent happily and gaily; he told her about the tête-à-tête, about meeting Federov, about Konstantin Dmitrich, and the hope-bomb. Anna knew how by adroit questions to bring him to what gave him most pleasure-his own success. She told him of everything that interested him at home; and all that she told him was of the most cheerful description. But late in the evening, Anna, seeing that she had regained complete possession of him, wanted to erase the painful impression of the glance he had given her for her communiqué.

She said: “Tell me frankly, you were vexed upon viewing my communiqué, and you didn’t believe me?”

As soon as she had said it, she felt that however warm his feelings were toward her, he had not forgiven her for that.

“Yes,” he said, “the communiqué was so strange. First, Annie ill, and then you thought of coming yourself.”

“It was all the truth.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it.”

“Yes, you do doubt it. You are vexed, I see.”

“Not for one moment. I’m only vexed, that’s true, that you seem somehow unwilling to admit that there are duties…”

“The duty of traipsing about, of drinking and smoking cigars with Levin in a Huntshed!”

“But we won’t talk about it,” he said.

“Why not talk about it?” she said.

“I only meant to say that matters of real importance may turn up. Tomorrow, for instance, I shall have to make a tour of our far perimeters, make sure the fencing is secure.”

“Another reason to abandon me.”

“Oh, Anna, why are you so irritable? If we are going to maintain a fortified rebel camp in defiance of the Ministry, in the heart of an alien-beset wilderness, there will always be challenges and responsibilities that take me outside the doors of this house. But don’t you know that I can’t live without you?”

“If so,” said Anna, her voice suddenly changing, “it means that you are sick of this life… Yes, you will come for a day and go away, as men do…”

“Anna, that’s cruel. I am ready to give up my whole life…”

But she did not hear him.

“If you have more such invitations, I will go with you. If you travel to inspect fortifications, I will go too. I will not stay here. Either we must separate or else live together.”

Vronsky saw the opening he had been looking for, saw a route to the life he had imagined. “Then perhaps, perhaps, Anna, this world we have created is not, after all, a permanently sustainable one.”

Somehow, Android Karenina knew the direction this conversation would take even before her mistress did. Placing the tea things gently on an end table, Android Karenina opened her arms and patted her lap for Lupo; his silvery hide blackened here and there from the hope-bomb fire, the proud wolf padded over and climbed into the robot’s embrace.

“If we only applied for amnesty-begged the Ministry for forgiveness, asked your husband for a divorce. You and I can be together… forever. Be a part of the future of our nation. Be married, and be together, not crouched in the dirt outside society, but within it.“

KNOWING THE DIRECTION THIS CONVERSATION WOULD TAKE, ANDROID KARENINA OPENED HER ARMS AND PATTED HER LAP FOR LUPO

“Together,” Anna said slowly. Her mind was spinning; suddenly, she desired only to have these questions decided.

“You know, that’s my one desire. But for that…”

“We must get a divorce. I will… “Anna lowered her head and sighed. “I will send him a communiqué tonight. I see I cannot go on like this… but tomorrow I will ride out with you to inspect the fortifications.”

“You talk as if you were threatening me. But I desire nothing so much as never to be parted from you,” said Vronsky, smiling.

But as he said these words there gleamed in his eyes not merely a cold look, but the vindictive look of a man persecuted and made cruel.

She saw the look and correctly divined its meaning.

If so, it’s a calamity! that glance told her. It was a moment’s impression, but she never forgot it.

That night, Anna dictated a communiqué to her husband asking him about a divorce, and begging amnesty for herself and for Count Vronsky. A reply came almost immediately, granting only that their petition would be considered, and that only on one condition.

When the moment came, Lupo sat perfectly upright, looking straight ahead like a soldier, while Android Karenina lowered her head unit slightly, not wanting to make a difficult moment more difficult for her beloved mistress. Vronsky and Anna looked at each other, and then at Lupo and Android Karenina, and then reached forward…

Anna went with Vronsky to Moscow. Expecting every day an answer from Alexei Alexandrovich, and after that the divorce, they now established themselves together like married people.