Android Karenina

CHAPTER 1

ALMOST TWO MONTHS had passed since Anna’s suicide at the Grav. The hot summer was half over, and Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky was on his way to deep space.

The horrifying death of Anna Arkadyevna Karenina had generated the inevitable deluge of scandalous conversation; but, as is so often the case, even this most salacious bit of gossip grew stale, and soon gave way to the next item of interest. Which, in this case, was a most shocking item indeed: The home planet of the Honored Guests had been located. A speck on the star maps of the astronomers, a smear of red dust flickering in the shadow of the moon, this planetoid was quickly dubbed the Nest by a public hungry for news of the invaders; it became de rigeur at society gatherings for someone to trot out a telescope, so all present could glance with fearful wonderment at the home of the enemy.

“We would be remiss, however, only to look and not to act.” This was the challenge posed to the people of Russia by that man now openly acknowledged to be their one and only leader, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, known lovingly as Tsar Alexei: The King With No Face. His head enrobed in shimmering metal, carrying himself with the pomp and solemnity befitting the recently bereaved, the great man stood before the people at Petersburg Square and announced the momentous decision: Our forces, the brave regiments of Russia, would travel aboard specially designed shuttles to the Nest, wherefrom the lizard-like aliens and their worm-machine steeds had emerged, and launch a counter-attack.

“Know, my people, that this decision was not an easy one, for our courage will inevitably cost us many lives. But still it is necessary that we go-for the ‘Honored Guests’ have made it clear that they shall not stop until we are defeated, and that cannot be allowed.

“Now we shall be the guests,” Karenin concluded, waving his metal fist. “And they the most unwilling hosts.”

YES, hissed the Face, even as Alexei stepped off the podium and the crowd roared its approval. LET THE REGIMENTS COME. LET THE MIGHTY REGIMENTS COME.

And so, as the blackness of space rushed by outside, Vronsky in his long overcoat and slouch hat, with his hands in his pockets, strode up and down the unnaturally lit hallway of the shuttle, like a wild beast in a cage, turning sharply after twenty paces. His old comrade Yashvin fancied, as he approached him, that Vronsky saw him but was pretending not to see. This did not affect Yashvin in the slightest. At that moment Yashvin looked upon Vronsky as a man taking an important part in a great cause, and he thought it his duty to encourage him and express his approval. He went up to him.

Vronsky stood still, looked intently at him, recognized him, and going a few steps forward to meet him, shook hands with him very warmly.

“Possibly you didn’t wish to see me,” Yashvin said, “but couldn’t I be of use to you?”

“There’s no one I should less dislike seeing than you,” said Vronsky. “Excuse me; and there’s nothing in life for me to like.”

“I quite understand, and I merely meant to offer you my companionship,” said Yashvin, scanning Vronsky’s face, which was full of unmistakable suffering. “I am honored to count myself among your friends. Your volunteering to lead the first attack wave proves your great usefulness to the state.”

“My use as a man,” said Vronsky, “is that life’s worth nothing to me. And that I’ve enough bodily energy to cut my way into their ranks, and to trample on them or fall-I know that. I’m glad there’s something to give my life for, for it’s not simply useless but loathsome to me. Anyone’s welcome to it.” And his jaw twitched impatiently from the incessant gnawing toothache that prevented him from even speaking with a natural expression.

“You will become another man, I predict,” said Yashvin, feeling touched. “To deliver one’s planet from bondage is an aim worth death and life. God grant you success outwardly-and inwardly peace,” he added, and he held out his hand. Vronsky warmly pressed his outstretched hand.

“Yes, as a weapon I may be of some use. But as a man, I’m a wreck,” he jerked out.

He could hardly speak for the throbbing ache in his strong teeth, which were like rows of ivory in his mouth. And all at once a different pain, not an ache, but an inner trouble, that set his whole being in anguish, made him for an instant forget his toothache. Glancing out the window of the shuttle, he saw the Earth receding, growing smaller and smaller behind them. He suddenly recalled her-imagined what she might have looked like, had he been permitted to see her before, he was told, the body had been whisked away; imagined her on a table in the Grav station, shamelessly sprawled out among strangers, the bloodstained body so lately full of life; the head unhurt, dropping back with its weight of hair, and the curling tresses about the temples, and the exquisite face, with red, half-opened mouth, the strange, fixed expression, piteous on the lips and awful in the still-open eyes, which seemed to utter that fearful phrase-that he would be sorry for it-that she had said when they were quarreling.

And he tried to think of her as she was when he met her the first time, mysterious, exquisite, loving, seeking and giving happiness, and not cruelly revengeful as he remembered her in that last moment. He tried to recall his best moments with her, but those moments were poisoned forever. He could only think of her as triumphant, successful in her menace of a wholly useless remorse never to be effaced. He lost all consciousness of his toothache, and his face worked with sobs.

CHAPTER 2

KITTY, AS ALWAYS, knew that her child was crying even before she reached the nursery. And he was indeed crying. She heard him and hastened. But the faster she went, the louder he screamed. It was a fine, healthy scream, hungry and impatient.

“Has he been screaming long, nurse, very long?” said Kitty hurriedly, seating herself on a chair, and preparing to give the baby the breast. “But give me him quickly. Oh, nurse, how tiresome you are! There, tie the cap afterwards, do!”

The baby’s greedy scream was passing into sobs.

“But you can’t manage so, ma’am,” said Agafea Mihalovna, who had remained in the household though her services as mécanicienne were no longer required.” He must be put straight. A-oo! a-oo!” she chanted over him, paying no attention to the mother.

The nurse brought the baby to his mother. Agafea Mihalovna followed him with a face dissolving with tenderness. “He knows me, he knows me. In God’s faith, Katerina Alexandrovna, ma’am, he knew me!” Agafea Mihalovna cried above the baby’s screams.

But Kitty did not hear her words. Her impatience kept growing, like the baby’s. Their impatience hindered things for a while. The baby could not get hold of the breast right, and was furious. At last, after despairing, breathless screaming, and vain sucking, things went right, and mother and child felt simultaneously soothed, and both subsided into calm.

“But poor darling, he’s all in perspiration!” said Kitty in a whisper, touching the baby.

“What makes you think he knows you?” she added, with a sidelong glance at the baby’s eyes, which peered roguishly, as she fancied, from under his cap, at his rhythmically puffing cheeks, and the little, red-palmed hand he was waving.

“Impossible! If he knew anyone, he would have known me,” said Kitty, in response to Agafea Mihalovna’s statement, and she smiled. She smiled because, though she said he could not know her, in her heart she was sure that he knew not merely Agafea Mihalovna, but that he knew and understood everything, and knew and understood a great deal too that no one else knew, and that she, his mother, had learned and come to understand only through him. To Agafea Mihalovna, to the nurse, to his grandfather, to his father even, the child was a living being, requiring only material care, but for his mother he had long been a mortal being, with whom there had been a whole series of spiritual relations already.

“When he wakes up, please God, you shall see for yourself. Then when I do like this, he simply beams on me, the darling! Simply beams like a sunny day!” said Agafea Mihalovna.

“Well, well; then we shall see,” whispered Kitty. “But now go away, he’s going to sleep.”

She stroked the baby’s cheek with tenderness. Little Tati: so sweet and so lovely. So like the gentle machine for which he was named.

CHAPTER 3

KONSTANTIN DMITRICH LEVIN gently opened the door of the nursery. Seeing however that both mother and child were fast asleep, and how the nurse and Agafea Mihalovna implored him with gentle eyes to be quiet, he closed the door once more. Levin’s pleasure in the child was most complete when he saw Tati in such surroundings: at peace, surrounded by his mother, his nurse, and Agafea Mihalovna, in the bosom of warm, human company.

Recently, though, these happy reflections increasingly reminded him of the terrible question that had bedeviled him, in one fashion or another, since the night his child was born. He had turned his back at that moment on Dmitriev and the UnConSciya faction; in that moment the fateful decision had been easily made, had not, indeed, even felt as if it was a decision. But he could not say now whether that decision had been a right one, nor what it was that life demanded of him now. From that moment, though he did not distinctly face it, and still went on living as before, Levin had never lost this sense of terror at his lack of knowledge.

At first, fatherhood, with the new joys and duties bound up with it, had completely crowded out these thoughts. But of late, the question that clamored for solution had more and more often, more and more insistently, haunted Levin’s mind.

The question was summed up for him thus: “If I do not accept the authority of the Ministry of Robotics and State Administration, and the ways that Russia has been and is being reformed, then how can I justify failing to act?” He told himself that scenes such as the one he had just witnessed-of his child, surrounded not by machines but by humanity, and the fundamental rightness of that scene-proved that, after all, he agreed with the changes society had undergone. And more: as he gazed out at the vast groznium pit, now being methodically plowed under and transformed into wheat fields, he found himself looking forward to being master of a great agricultural estate, as his ancestors had been in the time of the Tsars. Yet in the whole arsenal of his convictions, so far from finding any satisfactory answers, he was utterly unable to find anything at all like an answer.

He was in the position of a man seeking food in toy shops and tool shops. Instinctively, unconsciously, with every book, with every conversation, with every man he met, he was on the lookout for light on these questions and their solution. What puzzled and distracted him above everything was that the majority of men of his age and circle had, like him, exchanged their old beliefs for the same new convictions, and yet saw nothing to lament in this, and were perfectly satisfied and serene. So that, apart from the principal question, Levin was tortured by other questions too. Were these people sincere? he asked himself, or were they playing a part? Or was it that they understood the answers that the Ministry gave to these problems in some different, clearer sense than he did? And he assiduously studied both these men’s opinions and the books which treated of these explanations. Russia had allowed itself to become weak, they said, too reliant on the easy solutions and shortcuts that technology provides. Hadn’t Levin reached much the same conclusions, working alongside his Pitbots and Glowing Scrubblers in the depths of the mine? Hadn’t he regretted the loss of discipline and mental clarity in the Age of Groznium?

But he had given his heart to a moment in time, to a Golden Hope, and now could not admit that at that moment he knew the truth, and that now he was wrong; for as soon as he began thinking calmly about it, it all fell to pieces. He could not admit that he was mistaken then, for his set of beliefs then was precious to him, and to admit that it was a proof of weakness would have been to desecrate those moments. He was miserably divided against himself, and strained all his spiritual forces to the utmost to escape from this condition.

These doubts fretted and harassed him, growing weaker or stronger from time to time, but never leaving him. He read and thought, and the more he read and the more he thought, the further he felt from the aim he was pursuing.

All that spring he was not himself, and went through fearful moments of horror. Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life’s impossible; and that I can’t know, and so I can’t live, Levin said to himself.

He must escape from this torture. And the means of escape everyman had in his own hands. He had but to cut short this dependence on evil. And there was one means-death.

And Levin, a happy father and husband, in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord that he might not be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun for fear of shooting himself.

But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living.

CHAPTER 4

SEVERAL DAYS LATER, Agafea Mihalovna found on the doorstep a brown-paper-wrapped package bearing no writing upon it, nor identifying marks of any kind. Agafea Mihalovna dutifully brought the package to Konstantin Dmitrich.

Curious and confused, Levin carefully cut away the layers of brown paper and lifted out the dismembered torso unit of an old Class III robot. He gasped. The torso unit was severely dented, battered as if by hard wear, but the yellow casing was unmistakable, as was the small circular stamp bearing the logo of the Urgensky Cigarette Factory.

“Kitty!” he cried. “Kitty!”

Making sure they were entirely alone, Konstantin Dmitrich and his wife locked the door of their bedchamber and tremblingly engaged the monitor of the Class III-aware that even the small series of hand motions necessary to do so were now illegal.

The figure in the communiqué was Socrates himself. At the sight of him, tugging at his beard of tools and apparatuses, looking one way and then another, his familiar faceplate flickering with evident anxiety, Kitty burst into tears. Levin clutched at her hand, feeling his own chin working with emotion.

Socrates!

“Master, my time I fear is short. Short indeed yes short. However I would be remiss if I did not relay to you the result of my analysis.”

“Old friend,” Levin cried out, reaching toward the monitor with trembling fingers, as if to pluck out the tiny, glowing figure and hug it to his heart. “Loyal friend!”

“Examining all the relevant data: All that you discovered of the worm machines, and of the so-called Honored Guests, and…”

Here the Class III stopped in his narration and looked wildly about the dingy room where he stood, in fear of what it was impossible to say.

“I must hurry, Master. Must hurry hurry.

“When it was so often claimed that the aliens ‘will come for us in three ways,’ this was not after all meaningless. They have come in three ways.

“They have done sol”

When they finished watching the monitor, and Socrates’s explanation was complete, Levin took Kitty’s hand in his own, and together they sat for a long time, not saying a word: only contemplating what came next.

They had come as screeching warrior-beasts, born in horror from the fragile bodies of the ill.

They had come as ticking soil-dwelling worm-things, gathering strength from the groznium soil before bursting forth from the ground beneath us.

And they had come a third way…

WE CANNOT BE STOPPED, said the Face to Alexei Alexandrovich, which is to say, said to itself, for now the Face was Karenin, and Karenin was the Face.

WE CANNOT BE STOPPED OR DEFEATED. NOT NOW. THIS PLANET BELONGS TO US.

Tsar Alexei had ordered the regiments to fight the aliens in the Nest, and had therefore consigned them to their doom, and left Russia undefended against the onslaught to come. He had done this because that was what the Face wanted, and the man called the Tsar was now entirely the puppet of the Face.

The alien soldiers known as Honored Guests had killed and been killed, but the alien leaders had won their war against humanity years ago. They had won from the moment that Alexei Alexandrovich, with the Face already a part of him, had ascended to power in the Ministry.

The aliens had won from the day of Karenin’s ascendance, and nothing could stop that now, because that day had long passed.

Karenin-that-was-not-Karenin cackled from inside his gleaming silver caul with a terrible laugher; while, somewhere in the deep recesses of what once had been a human heart, there floated and glittered the memory of a woman, a woman he had loved.

CHAPTER 5

LEVIN STRODE ALONG the highroad, absorbed not so much in his thoughts-he could not yet disentangle them-as in his spiritual condition, unlike anything he had experienced before. The words uttered by Socrates in the communiqué had acted on his soul like an electric shock, suddenly transforming and combining into a single whole the whole swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts that incessantly occupied his mind.

The Golden Hope was not a fight for the sake of robots, or for the importance of technology, but for human freedom. Karenin was the enemy, not because he would take groznium technology from the people, but because he was an alien creature bent on the subjugation of all humanity.

Levin was aware of something new in his soul, and tested this new thing, not yet knowing what it was.

He wished to express this new rush of understanding to his old coconspirator, his darling Kitty.

She understands, he thought; she knows what I’m thinking about. Shall I tell her or not? Yes, I’ll tell her. But at the moment he was about to speak, she began speaking… and he found that she had nearly the same thoughts, almost in the same words.

On that day, in that moment, they began to make their plans. Somehow they would seek out whatever remnants of UnConSciya had survived the summer purges, and begin to regain their trust and rebuild the resistance. Levin would secretly seal off one corner of his mine, ensuring that there was enough of the Miracle Metal left for him to begin experiments. Quietly, invisibly, they would keep humanity’s flame burning until the Golden Hope could finally fly free. Someday, they would find a way to overturn the evil that Karenin had brought to their world, no matter the lengths to which they must go.

Night fell. As they spoke, Levin gazed up into the high, cloudless sky, where somewhere the alien invaders hovered.

“Do I not know that that is infinite space, and that it is not a round arch? But, however I screw up my eyes and strain my sight, I cannot see it not round and not bounded, and in spite of my knowing about infinite space, I am incontestably right when I see a solid, black dome, and more right than when I strain my eyes to see beyond it. That is how we must think of the future, of the rest of our lives. We cannot see it, but we know it is there to take-and we know it belongs to us, if we have the strength and the courage to seize hold of it.”

Kitty kissed him gently, and went off to bed.

Levin pictured the future in his imagination. Can this be purpose? he thought, afraid to believe in the feelings carrying him away. “Socrates, I thank thee!” he said, gulping down his sobs, and with both hands brushing away the tears that filled his eyes.

“This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy and enlightened all of a sudden, as I had dreamed, just like the feeling for my child. There was no surprise in this either. Faith-or not faith-I don’t know what it is-but this feeling has come just as imperceptibly through suffering, and has taken firm root in my soul.

“I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why hope lives in my breast, and I shall still go on hoping; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no longer meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”

QUIETLY, INVISIBLY, THEY WOULD KEEP HUMANITY’S FLAME BURNING UNTIL THE GOLDEN HOPE COULD FINALLY FLY FREE