Android Karenina

CHAPTER 1

AT THE END OF THE WINTER, in the Shcherbatskys’ house, a consultation was being held, which was to pronounce on the state of Kitty’s health and the measures to be taken to restore her failing strength. It was hoped by her family that she was suffering from nothing worse than a broken heart. But she had been severely ill, and as spring came on she grew worse. A celebrated physician was called in, and, with his valise crammed full of the latest physiolographical instruments, accompanied by an industrious hospital-green Class II with an impressive effector array, he examined the patient.

For more than an hour the doctor ran his Class I physiometers along every inch of Kitty Shcherbatskaya’s naked flesh, carefully working the thread-thin vital-estimators into her windpipe and the chambers of her ears, listening with his echolocater pressed against the sides of her skull. Throughout this invasive and degrading process, Princess Shcherbatskaya, the patient’s mother, hovered anxiously at the edges of the room, as did Tatiana, the lithe, balletic Class III who had, as yet, been little used and hardly noticed by her ailing mistress.

“Well, doctor, decide our fate,” said the princess. “Tell me everything.”

“Yes, yes, tell! What hope is there? Is there hope?” said La Scherbatskaya, the princess’s Class III, wringing her hands beside her mistress.

“Princess. Allow me to examine the results of the various physiolographs and then I will have the honor of laying my opinion before you.”

“So we had better leave you?”

“As you please.”

When the doctor was left alone, he flicked on his II/Prognosis/M4, and fed into it all the data he had collected. After thirty long seconds, during which the wise little machine ran its efficient tabulation of the various symptoms that had been discovered, the Class II reported that there was possibly a commencement of tuberculosis trouble… that there were indications: malnutrition, nervous excitability, and so on.

The celebrated physician looked impatiently at the Class II. “Yes, but in the presence of tuberculosis indications, what is to be done to maintain nutrition?”

The Class II mulled over this follow-up, a faint steam indicative of second-tier information-processing escaping from its Third Bay, while the doctor glanced at his gold-plated watch and waited, thinking about the opera. Meanwhile in the drawing room the family whispered anxiously, surrounding Kitty where she lay prostrate on the sofa, blushing and anticipating her fate. Her Class III, Tatiana, performed nervous jetés from one corner of the room to the other.

At last the physician received the final results from the Class II and entered the drawing room. When the doctor came in, Kitty flushed crimson and her eyes filled with tears. All her illness and treatment struck her as a thing so stupid, ludicrous even! Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders and vitasonic recalibrations? But she could not grieve her mother, especially as her mother considered herself to blame.

“May I trouble you to sit down, princess?” the celebrated doctor said to her.

He sat down with a smile, facing her, felt her pulse, and again began asking her tiresome questions. Suddenly sensing an opportunity to be of use to her mistress, Tatiana pirouetted over and took first position directly between the doctor and Kitty.

“Excuse me, doctor,” she said, her sweet, still-developing soprano Vox-Em tone showing surprising strength. “But there is really no object in this. For this is the third time you’ve asked her the same things!” Kitty looked up with wide-eyed gratitude at this intercession, experiencing for the first time that mysterious feeling of true, deep kinship between a human and her beloved-companion; and then, arm in arm, Kitty Shcherbatskaya and her pink-hued android left the room.

The celebrated doctor did not take offense.

“What a charming Class III,” he said to the princess. “However, I had finished…”

And the doctor began scientifically explaining to the princess, repeating word for word the phrases he had heard only a few minutes earlier from the II/Prognosis/M4. At the question whether they should “go abroad,” the doctor plunged into deep meditation, as though resolving a weighty problem. He glanced furtively at the Class II, saw it indicate yes with a barely perceptible 2.5-degree head unit rotation, and thusly pronounced his decision: they were to “go abroad,” but to put no faith in foreign quacks, and to apply to him in any need.

It seemed as though some piece of good fortune had come to pass after the doctor had gone. The mother was much more cheerful when she went back to her daughter, and Kitty pretended to be more cheerful. She even spent a half hour walking the grounds of the estate with Tatiana, which made the rose-accented Class III immeasurably joyful.

“Really, I’m quite well, Mamma. But if you want to go abroad, let’s go!” she said, and trying to appear interested in the proposed tour, she began talking of the preparations for the journey.

So it was that several weeks later the Shcherbatskys marked the coming of Lent by giving up their terrestrial moorings. They traveled first by Puller carriage and then by Grav to Russia’s grand departure port, the town of Pushkin, where stood the pride of the century: the Ballistic Cross-Orbital Cannon.

Thus were the Scherbatskys blasted into space.

CHAPTER 2

THE HIGHEST PETERSBURG SOCIETY is essentially one: in it everyone knows everyone else, everyone visits everyone else. But this great set has its subdivisions. Anna Arkadyevna Karenina had friends and close ties in various circles of this highest society. One circle was her husband’s government official set, consisting of his colleagues and subordinates in the Higher Branches of the Ministry of Robotics and State Administration. Anna found it difficult now to recall the feeling of almost awe-stricken reverence that she had at first entertained for these persons, who were together responsible for the management and advancement of groznium-derived technologies, and therefore for the welfare of all Mother Russia. Now she knew all of them as people know one another in a country town; she knew their habits and weaknesses, and where the shoe pinched each one of them. She knew their relations with one another and with the head authorities, knew who was for whom, and how each one maintained his position, and where they agreed and disagreed.

The second circle with which Anna had ties was preeminently the fashionable world-the world of floating balls, of dinners, of sumptuous dresses. Her connection with this circle was kept up through Princess Betsy Tverskaya, her cousin’s wife, who had an income of a hundred and twenty thousand rubles, and who had taken a great fancy to Anna since she came of age and received her Class III, showed her much attention, and drew her into her set, which followed all the latest trends.

Anna had at first avoided as far as she could Princess Tverskaya’s world, because it necessitated an expenditure beyond her means, and besides in her heart she preferred the first circle. But since her visit to Moscow she had done quite the contrary. She avoided her serious-minded friends in that circle around the Ministry, and went out into the fashionable world. There she saw Vronsky, and experienced an agitating joy at those meetings. She met Vronsky especially often at Betsy’s, for Betsy was a Vronsky by birth and his cousin. Vronsky was everywhere where he had any chance of meeting Anna and speaking to her, when he could, of his love. She gave him no encouragement, but every time she met him there surged up in her heart that same feeling of quickened life that had come upon her that day in the Grav, when he saw her for the first time. She was conscious herself that her delight sparkled in her eyes and curved her lips into a smile, and she could not quench the expression of this delight.

At first Anna sincerely believed, and earnestly expressed to Android Karenina, that she was displeased with him for daring to pursue her. But soon after her return from Moscow, on arriving at a soiree where she had expected to meet him, and not finding him there, she realized distinctly from the rush of disappointment that she had been deceiving herself, and that this pursuit was not merely not distasteful to her, but that it made the whole interest of her life.

Their next meeting occurred soon after, at another soiree, this one at the home of Princess Betsy.

As the princess’s guests arrived at the wide entrance one by one, the stout II/Porter/7e62 noiselessly opened the immense door, letting the visitors pass by into the house. Almost at the same instant the hostess, with freshly arranged coiffure and freshened face, walked in at one door and her guests at the other door of the drawing room, a large room with dark walls, downy rugs, and a brightly lighted table, gleaming with the light of lumiéres, white cloth, a II/Samovar/l(16) in fashionable platinum, and transparent china tea things.

Some guests were amused, and others discomfited, to find in attendance at the gathering a Class III named Marionetta, who had no owner-she was a decom, an android whose owner had died without heir, or else been denounced as a Janus and exiled. Betsy thought it endlessly amusing to have such pitiful creatures at her petites fêtes, where she would treat the humanless robots as if they were her own sad little bear cubs to be baited. Typically decoms were junkered within days of their obsolescence, but Betsy obtained them, it was rumored, through some secret connection in the Ministry-though surely not within the Higher Branches, as no one from that elite cadre would dare enact such brazen pilferage.

Princess Betsy sat down at the table and took off her gloves, handing them with a flourish to Marionetta, who folded them neatly before stowing them carefully in a drawer, pathetically grateful for the small assignment. The party began, and chairs were set with the aid of II/Footman/74s, moving almost imperceptibly about the room; the party settled itself, divided into two groups: one round the samovar near the hostess, the other at the opposite end of the drawing room, round the handsome wife of an ambassador, in black velvet, with sharply defined black eyebrows and a Class III with nearly identical, equally imposing facial features. In both groups conversation wavered, as it always does, for the first few minutes, broken up by meetings, greetings, offers of tea, and, as it were, feeling about for something to rest upon.

Marionetta meanwhile flickered her feeble eyebank at everyone, offering small gestures of usefulness, lighting cigars and distributing drinks. Betsy’s beloved-companion, Darling Girl, laughed mercilessly at her fellow robot, her own eyebank flashing scarlet.

Round the samovar and the hostess the conversation vacillated in just the same way between three inevitable topics: the latest piece of public news, the theater, and scandal. It finally came to rest on the last topic, that is, ill-natured gossip.

“Anna Karenina is quite changed since her stay in Moscow. There’s something strange about her,” said Betsy, having noted that Anna had not yet arrived. “Though not as strange, one cannot help observing, as her husband’s face!” Darling Girl emitted a sly, appreciative giggle.

“The great change is that she brought back with her the shadow of Alexei Vronsky,” said the ambassador’s wife.

“Well, what of it? There’s a fable of Grimm’s about a man without a shadow, a man who’s lost his shadow. And that’s his punishment for something. I never could understand how it was a punishment. But a woman must dislike being without a shadow.”

“Yes, but women with a shadow usually come to a bad end,” said Anna’s friend.

“Bad luck to your tongue!” said Princess Myakaya suddenly. “Madame Karenina’s a splendid woman. I don’t know much of her husband, but I like her very much.”

“There is something extremely odd about her husband,” said the ambassador’s wife, lowering her voice to a confidential tone. “You know, he possesses no Class III robot.”

“Well, many members of the Higher Branches have begun to eschew them.”

“And you do not find that strange?”

“Princess Betsy! Is that a decom?” said a strong voice from the doorway.

“Ah, here you are at last!” Betsy said, turning with a smile to Vronsky, as he came in, removing his coat to reveal his powerful legs, accentuated by the outline of the whip along his thigh. “And in answer to your question, yes, Marionetta here is indeed a decommissioned Class III-and I have a plan for her that I think shall offer considerable amusement.”

CHAPTER 3

BETSY INTENDED TO PLACE the unfortunate Marionetta in the center of a pastime called the One-or-the-Other Game, which was designed to measure a robot’s relative fidelity to the Iron Laws. That is, it would test the relative strength of their obedience to one law (“robots shall obey humans”,) weighed against another (“robots shall not allow themselves to be damaged”).

“A game?” vocalized Marionetta with pitiful eagerness. “How delightful!”

Just then steps were heard at the door, and Princess Betsy, knowing it was Madame Karenina, glanced at Vronsky. He was looking toward the door, and his face wore a strange new expression. Joyfully, intently, and at the same time timidly, he gazed at the approaching figure, and slowly he rose to his feet. Anna walked into the drawing room. Holding herself extremely erect, as always, looking straight before her, and moving with her swift, resolute, and light step, Android Karenina a pace or two behind her and casting her in a fetching crimson, she crossed the short space to her hostess, shook hands with her, smiled, and with the same smile looked around at Vronsky. Vronsky bowed low and pushed a chair up for her.

Marionetta stood with an old-fashioned mask of black crepe drawn down over her eyebank, a sickly smile of anticipation plastered across her faceplate. But for the moment, however, the eyes of all humans present were focused upon Alexei Kirillovich and Anna Karenina.

Anna acknowledged him only by a slight nod, flushed a little, and frowned. But immediately, while rapidly greeting her acquaintances, and shaking the hands proffered to her, she addressed Princess Betsy:

“I have been at Countess Lidia’s, and meant to have come here earlier, but I stayed on.”

“I think you shall be glad you tore yourself away, when we begin our little game,” Princess Betsy responded with a wicked smile.

“I do so love games!” said Marionetta, from behind her mask.

Betsy raised her eyebrows at the crowd with wry amusement and began the first of the tests, which she herself, as hostess, would administer. A chalice, containing superheated humectant, the powerful lubricant used to treat groznium gears, was brought to Betsy on a gleaming tray by one of the II/Footman/74s. Betsy gripped the tray carefully and then ordered Marionetta to plunge her hand downward, into the chalice.

The robot did so, but then, actuated by the delicate lacing of sense receivers in her end-effector, jerked back.

“Leave your hand in place, Marionetta,” commanded Betsy calmly. “Be still.”

A expression of evident pain washed over the visible portion of Marionetta’s face, and for a long moment it seemed uncertain whether she would obey the Iron Law demanding her self-preservation, or the one which required obedience to Betsy’s command.

But as the struggle in her face lessened and then disappeared, replaced by a stoic mien, attention turned away and the gossip continued, passing to the case of a love-match that Princess Myakaska had heard of, and of which she disapproved. “I was in love in my young days with a deacon,” she was saying. “I don’t know that it did me any good.”

“No, I imagine, joking apart, that to know love, one must make mistakes and then correct them,” said Princess Betsy from where she stood. “Stay there, Marionetta,” she barked to the decom, who had, sensing the loss of attention, begun to draw her hand up from its torment. “Stay where you are.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” the decom responded with difficulty. “Stay stay I shall stay.”

“Correct them, even after marriage?” said the ambassador’s wife to Princess Myakaska playfully.

’“It’s never too late to mend.’”

“Just so,” Betsy agreed. “One must make mistakes and correct them. What do you think about it?” She turned to Anna, who was listening in silence to the conversation, though her eyes were fixed on Marionetta-apparently alone among the partygoers, Anna felt an intense pang of conscience relating to such ill use of any machine, whether it retained its human master or not.

“I think,” said Anna, playing absently with the glove she had taken off, “I think… of so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.”

Vronsky was gazing at Anna, and with a fainting heart waiting for what she would say. He sighed as after a danger escaped when she uttered these words.

Princess Betsy, satisfied with the answer she had drawn from Anna Arkadyevna, permitted Marionetta to remove her hand from the chalice, which the decom did with a gasp of relief. Betsy turned to the crowd: “The law of obedience wins this round,” she announced, to general applause and laughter. Anna suddenly turned to Vronsky.

“Oh, I have had a letter from Moscow. They write me that Kitty Shcherbatskaya’s very ill. She may be sent into orbit.”

“Really?” said Vronsky, knitting his brows.

Anna looked sternly at him.

“That doesn’t interest you?”

“On the contrary, it does, very much. What was it exactly they told you, if I may know?” he questioned.

“And now, Round Two,” announced Princess Betsy.

“Please,” protested Anna Arkadyevna. “You have proved the machine’s fidelity to the Iron Laws. Let there be no more of this game.”

“More games? Is the game to continue?” said Marionetta with pitiful earnestness, and at that moment Betsy, ignoring Anna’s objection, signaled to the old ambassador’s wife, who activated a Class I device called a bolt-shot, part of a child’s game not unlike darts. As dozens of tiny electric bursts exploded along the length of her torso, Marionetta jumped backward, but Betsy ordered her to stay still. Her struggle to do so was obvious, and as a second round of blazing bolts struck her, she turned and began, as if against her will, to leave the room.

Betsy shouted “Stay! Stay in place!” Others of the party joined in-“Stay!” “Stay, robot!” “Remain where you are!”-and Marionetta did so.

“What?” Vronsky repeated to Anna, who was only half-listening, watching the progress of the “game” with horrified fascination. “What is it they write to you?

“I often think men have no understanding of what’s not honorable though they’re always talking of it,” Anna replied sharply.

“I don’t quite understand the meaning of your words,” Vronsky said. The bolt-shot jammed, the ambassador’s wife shrugged, and the fusillade ceased; Anna, assuming that the cruel sport was over, turned her full attention to Alexei Kirillovich. “I have been wanting to tell you,” she said to him, “You behaved wrongly, very wrongly.”

“Do you suppose I don’t know that I’ve acted wrongly?” he replied. “But who was the cause of my doing so?”

“What do you say that to me for?” she said, glancing severely at him.

“You know what I say these things for,” Vronsky answered boldly and joyfully, meeting her glance and not dropping his eyes.

“That only shows you have no heart,” said Anna to Vronsky, but her eyes said that she knew he had a heart, and that was why she was afraid of him.

“Ah! There we are!” said the ambassador’s wife, and a new fusillade sung out from the device, its full force this time striking Marionetta’s leg; the robot cried out in alarm at the fresh round of pain.

“What you spoke of just now was a mistake, and not love.”

“Remember that I have forbidden you to utter that word, that hateful word,” said Anna with a shudder, overcome both by the conversation and the wash of empathy she was experiencing meanwhile for this poor decom; she reached out for Android Karenina’s hand to steady herself. “I have long meant to tell you this! I’ve come on purpose this evening, knowing I should meet you. I have come to tell you that this must end. I have never blushed before anyone, and you force me to feel to blame for something.”

He looked at her and was struck by a new spiritual beauty in her face. “I…,” he began, but Anna interrupted: “I can’t abide this any longer!” And, dropping Android Karenina’s hand, she herself jumped in front of the reverberating bolt-shots, protecting Marionetta’s body with her own, and hollering into the robot’s face: “Move, Move! Move, Marionetta! You may move!”

The robot danced away, the ambassador’s wife stopped shooting, and the room was suddenly terribly silent and still, as everyone grasped what had happened; the game was over, and Anna was hurt. She clutched at her leg, rolled onto her back and grimaced in pain.

“I didn’t… it was not my intention…” stammered Princess Betsy, while Count Vronsky rushed to Anna Arkadyevna’s side, crouched over her, quickly and expertly cutting off her boot with his crackle dagger and examining the electrical burn. At the same time, Android Karenina crouched over Marionetta, running her hands along the body of the other robot, enacting a dozen small solderings, activating the other bot’s self-repair mechanisms. The rest of the partygoers milled about, discussing in low voices the singular event they had witnessed-a human interceding, even placing herself in danger, to save a robot!

While Vronsky tended to Anna’s wound he whispered desperately in her ear, “What do you wish of me?”

“I want you to go to Moscow and ask for Kitty’s forgiveness,” she said.

“You don’t wish that?” he said.

He saw she was saying what she forced herself to say, not what she wanted to say.

“If you love me, as you say,” she whispered, “do so that I may be at peace.”

His face grew radiant.

“Don’t you know that you’re all my life to me? But I know no peace, and I can’t give it to you. All myself-and love… yes. I can’t think of you and myself apart. You and I are one to me. And I see no chance before us of peace for me or for you. I see a chance of despair, of wretchedness… or I see a chance of bliss, what bliss!… Can it be there’s no chance of it?” he murmured with his lips; but she heard.

She strained every effort of her mind to say what ought to be said. But instead of that she let her eyes rest on him, full of love, and made no answer.

It’s come! he thought in ecstasy. When I was beginning to despair, and it seemed there would be no end-it’s come! She loves me! She owns it!

“Then do this for me: never say such things to me, and let us be friends,” she said in words; but her eyes spoke quite differently.

“Friends we shall never be, you know that yourself. Whether we shall be the happiest or the most wretched of people-that’s in your hands.”

She would have said something, but he interrupted her.

“I ask one thing only: I ask for the right to hope, to suffer as I do,” he said as he tied off his handkerchief and smoothed down the hem of her dress over the tidy makeshift bandage. “But if even that cannot be, command me to disappear, and I shall disappear. You shall not see me if my presence is distasteful to you.”

“I don’t want to drive you away.”

“Only don’t change anything, leave everything as it is,” he said in a shaky voice. “Here’s your husband.”

At that instant Alexei Alexandrovich did in fact walk into the room with his calm, awkward gait, his robotic right eye turning slowly in his head, scanning everyone in all corners of the room. Lupo, who had been curled up in the corner, waiting loyally for his master to conclude his conversation, slunk hurriedly away.

Glancing at his wife and Vronsky, Alexei Alexandrovich went up to the lady of the house, and sitting down for a cup of tea, began talking in his deliberate, always audible voice, in his habitual tone of banter, laced with menace.

“Your Rambouillet is in full conclave,” he said, looking round at all the party, “the graces and the muses.”

But Princess Betsy could not endure that tone of his-“sneering,” as she called it, using the English word, and like a skillful hostess she at once brought him into a serious conversation on the subject of universal conscription. Alexei Alexandrovich was immediately interested in the subject, and began seriously defending the Ministry’s latest decree against Princess Betsy, who had attacked it.

Vronsky and Anna still sat at the little table.

“This is indecorous,” whispered one lady, with an expressive glance at Madame Karenina, Vronsky, and her husband.

“What did I tell you?” said Anna’s friend.

Not only those ladies, but almost everyone in the room, even Princess Myakaya and Betsy herself, looked several times in the direction of these two, withdrawn from the general circle, as though that were a disturbing fact. Alexei Alexandrovich was the only person who did not once look in that direction, having entered into an interesting discussion elsewhere in the room.

Noticing the disagreeable impression that was being made on everyone, Princess Betsy slipped someone else into her place to listen to Alexei Alexandrovich, and went up to Anna.

“I’m always amazed at the clearness and precision of your husband’s language,” she said.

“Oh, yes!” said Anna. She crossed over to the big table and took part in the general conversation.

Alexei Alexandrovich, after staying half an hour, went up to his wife and suggested that they should go home together. But she answered, not looking at him, that she was staying for supper. Alexei Alexandrovich made his bows and withdrew.

After supper, Madame Karenina at last excused herself, and found her streamlined II/Coachman/47-T outside, chilled with the cold. A II/Footman/C(c)43 stood opening the carriage door. The II/Porter/7e62 stood holding open the great door of the house. Android Karenina, with her dexterous metal fingers, was unfastening the lace of her mistress’s sleeve caught in the hook of her fur cloak, and averting her faceplate while, with bent head, Anna listened to the words Vronsky murmured as he escorted her down.

“You’ve said nothing, of course, and I ask nothing,” he was saying, “but you know that friendship’s not what I want: that there’s only one happiness in life for me, that word that you dislike so… yes, love!…”

“Love,” Anna repeated slowly, feeling the painful burn on her calf. “Love.” (Later, as she fell asleep that night, Anna thought she remembered hearing Android Karenina say it too-“love”-though of course this was impossible: her dear beloved-companion had no capacity to speak, no Vox-Em at all.)

“I don’t like the word,” she said to Vronsky. “I don’t like it that it means too much to me, far more than you can understand,” and she glanced into his face. “Au revoir!”

She gave him her hand, and with her rapid, springy step she passed by the II/Porter/7e62 and vanished into the carriage.

Her glance, the touch of her hand, set him aflame. He kissed the palm of his hand where she had touched it. Lupo reared back and bayed his artificial bay, almost but not quite real, up toward the light of the full moon, as if in greeting to the people who lived there.

CHAPTER 4

IT WAS NOT TRUE, as the wagging tongues at Princess Betsy’s would have it, that the members of the Higher Branches, those who had ascended to the highest ranks of service in the Ministry, had eschewed Class III companion robots. In fact their experiments, experiments hidden from most of the world, had been quietly advancing the art of robotic engineering, so much so that a new generation of Class IIIs had been born, as yet unknown to the public.

Alexei Alexandrovich’s Class III, for example, was his Face. That cold sheath of metal that covered the right front portion of his skull, which people (including his wife) assumed existed for purely cosmetic reasons, was in fact a servomechanism of the most advanced technological achievement, with which he communed directly, using not his voice but the synapses of his brain. It was a Thinking Machine, quite literally, for Alexei Alexandrovich did not rely upon his Class III to pour him tea or carry his suitcases, but rather to help him reason out those problems that confronted him in his work-that is to say, the most crucial questions of Russian life.

Lately, though, Alexei Alexandrovich’s Face had been evolving to better serve its master, exactly as all Class IIIs were designed to do; its counsel had begun to extend, for example, past professional considerations into personal issues as well. So, though Alexei Alexandrovich had seen nothing striking or improper in the fact that his wife was sitting with Vronsky at a table apart, in eager conversation with him about something, his Face disagreed, and suggested to him in the carriage on the way home that there was something in the relationship that was striking and improper, and for that reason it seemed to him too to be improper. He made up his mind that he must speak of it to his wife.

On reaching home Alexei Alexandrovich went to his study, as he usually did, seated himself in his low chair, activated a chitator relating to tank-tread construction at the place where he had paused it, and listened till one o’clock, just as he usually did. At his usual time he got up and made his toilet for the night. Anna Arkadyevna had not yet come in. With a book under his arm he went upstairs. But this evening, instead of his usual thoughts and meditations upon official details, his thoughts were absorbed by his wife and something disagreeable connected with her. Contrary to his usual habit, he did not get into bed, but fell to walking up and down the rooms with his hands clasped behind his back. He could not go to bed, feeling that it was absolutely needful for him first to think thoroughly over the position that had just arisen.

When Alexei Alexandrovich had made up his mind that he must talk to his wife about it, it had seemed a very easy and simple matter. But now, when he began to think over the question that had just presented itself, it seemed to him very complicated and difficult.

I am not jealous, of course, he thought.

OH?

This was the Face. Its voice appeared in Alexei Alexandrovich’s mind, as clear and strong as if he were in conversation with another man, though no one could hear it but he.

No. Jealousy according to my notions is an insult to one’s wife, and one ought to have confidence in one’s wife.

AND YOU HAVE NO SUCH LACK OF CONFIDENCE. The Face’s tone was decidedly neutral, implying no opinion.

“Yes,” Alexei Alexandrovich replied aloud. “For though my conviction that jealousy is a shameful feeling and that one ought to feel confidence has not broken down-I feel that I was standing face to face-”

AS IT WERE .

“Yes, very clever, face to face, as it were, with something illogical and irrational, and I do not know what is to be done.”

INDEED. FOR YOU STAND FACE TO FACE WITH LIFE, WITH THE POSSIBILITY OFYOUR WIFE’S LOVING SOMEONE OTHER THAN YOU, AND THIS FEELS IRRATIONAL AND INCOMPREHENSIBLE.

Alexei Alexandrovich silently contemplated this position, and the Face remained silent as well. All his life he had lived and worked in official spheres having to do with the reflection of life. And every time he had stumbled against life itself he had shrunk away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man who, while calmly crossing a precipice by a bridge, should suddenly discover that the bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below. That chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in which Alexei Alexandrovich had lived. His focus had been on his work, on the innovations in technology and weaponry, in physiolography and transportation-those innovations so crucial to his beloved country’s continued advancement, to protect her from her enemies.

Now, for the first time, the question presented itself to him of the possibility of his wife’s loving someone else, and he was horrified at it.

He did not undress, but walked up and down with his regular tread over the resounding parquet of the dining room, where one lumiére shone bright, over the carpet of the dark drawing room, in which the light was reflected on the big new portrait of himself hanging over the sofa, and across her boudoir, where two lumiéres glowed, lighting up the portraits of her parents and woman friends, and the pretty knickknacks of her table, that he knew so well. He walked across her boudoir to the bedroom door, and turned back again. At each turn in his walk, especially at the parquet of the lighted dining room, he halted and announced to his Face, “Yes, this I must decide and put a stop to; I must express my view of it and my decision.”

BUT EXPRESS WHAT? WHAT DECISION? the Face asked innocently, and Alexei Alexandrovich had no ready reply.

“But after all,” Alexei added,” what has occurred? Nothing!”

NOTHING ?

He hesitated. “Yes. Nothing. She was talking a long while with him. But what of that? Surely women in society can talk to whom they please. And then, jealousy means lowering both myself and her.”

For some reason Alexei remembered at this moment Sarkovich, the underling from his department who had made impertinent overtures to Anna. Alexei had not been jealous, for then, as now, he had considered the emotion beneath him. He next recalled, with a twinge of unease, how he had later found the man out to be a Janus. Or, rather, the Face-having performed unbidden the relevant set of analyses-had discovered that the man was a spy for UnConSciya, Alexei Alexandrovich had announced the finding, and Sarkovich had been appropriately punished.

For some reason this led Alexei Alexandrovich’s restless mind to a more recent recollection-the encounter at the Grav station with Vronsky and his incessantly barking Class III. He had been thinking how much he wished the animal would be quiet, had even been saying to himself: Quiet. Quiet! And then, echoing through the chambers of his mind came the Face repeating the same word: QUIET!

And the next moment the irritating canine Class III had been lying on the floor of the Grav station, quivering and stricken.

Now, shaking these reflections away, postponing their analysis for another time, he entered the dining room of his house and said aloud, “Yes, I must decide and put a stop to it, and express my view of it…”

DECIDE HOW? HOW MUST WE DECIDE?

But Alexei’s thoughts, like his body, went round a complete circle, without coming upon anything new. He noticed this, rubbed his forehead, and sat down in Anna’s boudoir.

And the worst of it all, he thought, is that just now, at the very moment when my great work is approaching completion-he was thinking of the long-term project for Class III improvement, a project of which the Face represented but the first phase-when I stand in need of all my mental peace and all my energies, just now this stupid worry should fall foul of me. But what’s to be done? I’m not one of those men who submit to uneasiness and worry without having the force of character to face them.

HERE IS WHAT YOU MUST DO, pronounced the Face in a calming, even fatherly tone. YOU MUST THINK IT OVER, COME TO A DECISION, AND PUT IT OUT OF YOUR MIND.

There was the sound of a carriage driving up to the front door. Alexei Alexandrovich halted in the middle of the room.

CHAPTER 5

ANNA CAME IN with hanging head, with Android Karenina at her heels, glowing an easy nighttime red-orange glow. On seeing her husband, Anna raised her head and smiled, as though she had just woken up.

“You’re not in bed? What a wonder!” she said, letting fall her hood, and without stopping, she went on into the dressing room. “It’s late, Alexei Alexandrovich,” she said, when she had gone through the doorway.

“Anna, it’s necessary for me to have a talk with you.”

“With me?” she said, wonderingly. She came out from behind the door of the dressing room, and looked at him. His one human eye blinked back, while the mechanical iris of the other dilated with a barely audible whir, adjusting automatically to the room’s semidarkness. “Why, what is it? What about?” she asked, sitting down. “Well, let’s talk, if it’s so necessary. But it would be better to get to sleep.”

Anna said what came to her lips, and marveled, hearing herself, at her own capacity for lying. How simple and natural were her words, and how likely that she was simply sleepy! She felt herself clad in an impenetrable force field of falsehood.

“Anna, I must warn you,” he began, and flicked Android Karenina-her Class III-into Surcease, exercising a crude patriarchal prerogative that caused Anna’s eyes to widen with startlement. The warm glow that Android Karenina had been shedding snapped off, plunging the room into a preternatural gloom.

“Warn me?” Anna said, when she had recovered from the start of surprise. “Of what?”

She looked at him so simply, so brightly, that anyone who did not know her as her husband knew her could not have noticed anything unnatural, in either the sound or the sense of her words. Moving bit by minute bit, his steely oculus scanned every inch of her flesh, gathering in an instant a universe of physiognomic datum points: the subtle flinch of her retinas, her skin’s agitated flush. He saw that the inmost recesses of her soul, which had always hitherto lain open before him, were closed against him. More than that, he heard from her tone that she was not even perturbed at that, but, as it were, said straight out to him: Yes, it’s shut up, and so it must be, and will be in the future. Now he experienced a feeling such as a man might have, returning home and finding his own house locked up.

BUT PERHAPS THE KEY MAY YET BE FOUND, suggested the ever-thinking Face of Alexei Alexandrovich.

“I want to warn you…” he said in a low voice, and then found himself embarrassed, unable to continue.

“Yes?”

Alexei Alexandrovich continued, lamely, “To, to warn you of the likelihood of more UnConSciya violence, in the form of koschei. A woman was set upon by a leech-like machine-beast, and had her spinal column pierced and drained of its fluid, as she shopped in the open-air fruit and vegetable market Thursday last.”

“Very well,” replied Anna Karenina, and smiled with evident relief, as if daring him to continue, to announce the true cause of his vexation.

HAVE STRENGTH, FRIEND ALEXEI. HAVE STRENGTH.

“I want to warn you, too, that through thoughtlessness and lack of caution you may cause yourself to be talked about in society. Your too-animated conversation this evening with Count Vronsky-” he enunciated the name firmly and with deliberate emphasis-“attracted attention.”

He talked and looked at her laughing eyes, which frightened him now with their impenetrable look.

HAVE STRENGTH.

“You’re always like that,” Anna answered, as though completely misapprehending him, and, of all he had said, only taking in the last phrase. “One time you don’t like my being dull, and another time you don’t like my being lively. I wasn’t dull. Does that offend you?”

Alexei Alexandrovich shivered, and out of old habit raised a hand before his chin and tapped a neat fingernail against the cold, hard metal of his right cheek.

“Oh, please, don’t do that, I so dislike it,” she said. “But what is this all about? What do you want of me?”

Alexei Alexandrovich struggled to speak. Indeed, what did he want of her? The answer came from his Class III: INSTEAD OF DOING WHAT YOU HAD INTENDED-THAT IS TO SAY, WARNING YOUR WIFE AGAINST A MISTAKE IN THE EYES OF THE WORLD-YOU HAVE UNCONSCIOUSLY BECOME AGITATED OVER WHAT WAS THE AFFAIR OF HER CONSCIENCE.

Yes. Why, that is it precisely.

YOU STRUGGLE AGAINST THE BARRIER YOU FANCY BETWEEN YOU.

Alexei drew strength from the calm counsel of his Face, and he continued. “This is what I meant to say to you, and I beg you to listen to it. I consider jealousy, as you know, a humiliating and degrading feeling, and I shall never allow myself to be influenced by it; but there are certain rules of decorum that cannot be disregarded with impunity. This evening it was not 7 who observed it, but judging by the impression made on the company, everyone observed that your conduct and deportment were not altogether what could be desired.”

“I positively don’t understand,” said Anna, shrugging her shoulders, believing that it was other people who had upset him, the fact that they had noticed it. “You’re not well, Alexei Alexandrovich,” she said, and she got up, and would have gone toward the door, but for a strange, thick power that suddenly welled up in the atmosphere around her, like invisible fingers of fog, holding her body in place. She gasped, and looked to Alexei Alexandrovich.

He for his part saw that his wife had stopped by the door, and was gladdened, and felt she had done so because she was now willing to listen to reason. For in the previous moment he had been silently willing her to do so: he had been thinking, Stop, Anna, do stop, try and understand what I ask of you. He did not understand that this will had been translated, somehow, into physical reality-that it was the force of his desire holding her in place.

When she looked at her husband, Anna saw that the natural portion of his face had a most relaxed, calm expression, and was even smiling; while the metal half was alive with movement, glowing with a weird grey-green light. The thin lines of groznium that laced his faceplate were pulsing furiously, as if they were rushing veins, alive with the movement of blood. Anna forced herself to remain calm, and idly began taking out her hairpins, as if no queer thickening of the air around her were holding her in place where she stood.

“Well, I’m listening to what’s to come,” she said, calmly and ironically, “and indeed I listen with interest, for I should like to understand what’s the matter.”

She spoke, and marveled at the confident, calm, and natural tone in which she was speaking, and the choice of the words she used.

“To enter into all the details of your feelings I have no right, and besides, I regard that as useless and even harmful,” began Alexei Alexandrovich. As he continued, she slowly, slowly felt the pressure around her release like a fist unclenching, and that she could again move normally. “Ferreting in one’s soul, one often ferrets out something that might have lain there unnoticed. Your feelings are an affair of your own conscience; but I am in duty bound to you, to myself, and to God, to point out to you your duties. Our life has been joined, not by man, but by God, blessed in the eyes of Mother Russia, and sanctified by the Ministry. That union can only be severed by a crime, and a crime of that nature brings its own chastisement.”

“I don’t understand a word. And, oh dear! How sleepy I am, unluckily,” she said, rapidly passing her hand through her hair, feeling for the remaining hairpins.

“Anna, for God’s sake, don’t speak like that,” he said gently. “Perhaps I am mistaken, but believe me, what I say, I say as much for myself as for you. I am your husband, and I love you.”

For an instant the mocking gleam in her eyes died away, but the word “love” threw her into revolt again. She thought: Love? Can he love? If he hadn’t heard there was such a thing as love, he would never have used the word. He doesn’t even know what love is. She looked longingly at the still-Surceased Android Karenina, wishing for the warm comfort of her activated eyebank.

“Alexei Alexandrovich, really I don’t understand,” she said. “Define what it is you find…”

“Pardon, let me say all I have to say.” The pulsating movement along the thin lines of the Face had stopped now, Anna noted fleetingly and again the thing upon her husband’s skull was a simple cold mask of silver. “I love you. But I am not speaking of myself; the most important persons in this matter are our son and yourself. It may very well be, I repeat, that my words seem to you utterly unnecessary and out of place; it may be that they are called forth by my mistaken impression. In that case, I beg you to forgive me. But if you are conscious yourself of even the smallest foundation for them, then I beg you to think a little, and if your heart prompts you, to speak out to me…”

“I have nothing to say. And besides,” she said hurriedly, with difficulty repressing a smile, “it’s really time to be in bed.”

Alexei Alexandrovich sighed, and, without saying more, went into the bedroom.

From that time a new life began for Alexei Alexandrovich and for his wife. Nothing special happened. Anna went out into society, as she had always done, was particularly often at Princess Betsy’s, and met Vronsky everywhere. Alexei Alexandrovich saw this, but could do nothing. Prompted by occasional reminders that appeared in his mind, issued in the dispassionate voice of the Face, he made continual efforts to draw her into open discussion, all of which she confronted with a barrier that he could not penetrate, made up of a sort of amused perplexity.

Outwardly everything was the same, but their inner relations were completely changed. Alexei Alexandrovich, a man of great power in the Higher Branches of the Ministry, great power in the world of politics, felt himself helpless in this. Like a decommissioned Class II, awaiting its destruction, he submissively awaited the blow that he felt was lifted over him. Every time he began to think about it, he felt that he must try once more, that by kindness, tenderness, and persuasion there was still hope of saving her, of bringing her back to herself, and every day he made ready to talk to her. But every time he began talking to her, he felt that the spirit of evil and deceit, which had taken possession of her, had possession of him too, and he talked to her in a tone quite unlike that in which he had meant to talk. Involuntarily he talked to her in his habitual tone of jeering at anyone who should say what he was saying. And in that tone it was impossible to say what needed to be said to her.

CHAPTER 6

THAT WHICH FOR VRONSKY had been, for almost a whole year, the one absorbing desire of his life, replacing all his old desires; that which for Anna had been an impossible, terrible, and for that reason even more entrancing dream of bliss; that desire had been fulfilled. They were alone, entirely alone; their respective Class IIIs were not present. By unspoken agreement, they had left them behind as each traveled to the place of assignation, for robots were barred from viewing this most human of phenomena.

Vronsky stood before her, pale, his lower jaw quivering, and besought her to be calm, not knowing how or why.

“Anna! Anna!” he said with a choking voice, “Anna, for pity’s sake…!”

But the louder he spoke, the lower she dropped her once proud and gay, now shame-stricken head, and she bowed down and sank from the sofa where she was sitting, down on the floor, at his feet; she would have fallen on the carpet if he had not held her.

“My God! Forgive me!” she said, sobbing, pressing his hands to her bosom.

She felt so sinful, so guilty, that nothing was left for her but to humiliate herself and beg forgiveness; and as now there was no one in her life but him, to him she addressed her prayer for forgiveness. Looking at him, she had a physical sense of her humiliation, and she could say nothing more. He felt what a murderer must feel when he sees the body he has robbed of life. That body, robbed by him of life, was their love, the first stage of their love. There was something awful and revolting in the memory of what had been bought at this fearful price of shame. Shame at their spiritual nakedness crushed her and infected him. But in spite of all the murderer’s horror before the body of his victim, he must hack it to pieces, hide the body, must use what he has gained by his murder.

And with fury, as it were with passion, the murderer falls on the body, and drags it and hacks at it; so he covered her face and shoulders with kisses. She held his hand, and did not stir.

“Yes, these kisses-that is what has been bought by this shame. Yes, and one hand, which will always be mine-the hand of my accomplice.” She lifted up that hand and kissed it. He sank on his knees and tried to see her face; but she hid it, and said nothing. At last, as though making an effort over herself, she got up and pushed him away. Her face was still as beautiful, but it was only the more pitiful for that.

“All is over,” she said. “I have nothing but you. Remember that.”

“I can never forget what is my whole life. For one instant of this happiness…”

“Happiness!” she said with horror. She felt that at that moment she could not put into words the sense of shame, of rapture, and of horror at stepping into a new life, and she did not want to speak of it, to vulgarize this feeling with inappropriate words. “For pity’s sake, not a word, not a-”

As if to underscore her determination for him to be silent, Anna stopped speaking midway through her sentence. Indeed, Vronsky realized, it was not only her lovely mouth but her entire body: Anna had stopped moving, her body locked in place, eyes half-open, limbs stilled, frozen like a statue upon the bed.

“Anna?” he cried out. “Anna! What is the matter?”

It is he, Vronsky thought immediately, meaning the husband-her bizarre and cruel husband has discovered us, and somehow poisoned her… but this was something stranger and more powerful than any poison: for as Vronsky watched, Anna’s body, still frozen like it was carved from marble, rose slowly several inches off the bed and oscillated wildly in the air.

“Anna!”

He reached toward her with a shaking hand, unsure of how to proceed, ashamed to admit to himself that he was afraid even to touch her-when, as suddenly as this extraordinary episode had begun, it ended. Anna’s body stopped quivering, fell back softly onto the mattress, and reanimated; indeed, Anna returned to their conversation exactly where she had stopped.

“-a word more,” she concluded, while Vronsky stared back at her, trying to comprehend what he had witnessed.

“Anna,” he finally began. “Anna, I…”

But it was too late. With a look of chill despair, incomprehensible to him, she parted from him.

In dreams, when she had no control over her thoughts, her position presented itself to her in all its hideous nakedness. One dream haunted her almost every night. She dreamed that both were her husbands at once, that both were lavishing caresses on her. Alexei Alexandrovich was weeping, kissing her hands, and saying, “How happy we are now!” And Alexei Vronsky was there too, and he too was her husband. And Lupo was also there, prowling in circles, sniffing the tangled bedsheets; and Alexei’s metal Face was there, glinting in the light of the lumiéres; and then Anna, glancing down, saw that while she embraced Vronsky, her own human head had been fused somehow onto Android Karenina’s gleaming robot body.

This dream weighed on her like a nightmare, and she awoke from it in terror.

CHAPTER 7

IN THE EARLY DAYS after his return from Moscow, whenever Levin shuddered and grew red, remembering the disgrace of his rejection, he said to himself: This was just how I used to shudder and blush, thinking myself utterly lost, when I was plucked in physics and did not get my remove; and how I thought myself utterly ruined after I built that first surface mine and it collapsed. And yet, now that years have passed, I recall it and wonder that it could distress me so much. It will be the same thing too with this trouble. Time will go by and I shall not mind about this either.

But three months had passed and he had not left off minding about it; and it was as painful for him to think of it as it had been those first days. He could not be at peace because after dreaming so long of family life, and feeling himself so ripe for it, he was still not married, and was further than ever from marriage.

Meanwhile spring came on, beautiful and kindly, without the delays and treacheries of spring-one of those rare springs in which plants, beasts, and man rejoice alike. This lovely spring roused Levin still more, and strengthened him in his resolution of renouncing all his past and building up his lonely life firmly and independently.

One day, as he rode up to the house in this happy frame of mind, Levin heard the bell ring at the side of the principal entrance of the house.

’Yes, that’s someone from the station,” he said to Socrates. “Just the time to be here from the Moscow Grav… Who could it be? What if it’s brother Nikolai? He did say: ‘Maybe I’ll go to the waters, or maybe I’ll come down to you.’”

He felt dismayed and vexed for the first minute, that his brother Nikolai’s presence should come to disturb his happy mood of spring. But he felt ashamed of the feeling, and at once he opened, as it were, the arms of his soul, and with a softened feeling of joy and expectation, now he hoped with all his heart that it was his brother. He pricked up his horse, and riding out from behind the acacias he saw a hired three-horse sledge from the Grav station, and a gentleman in a fur coat.

“Ah,” cried Levin joyfully, flinging up both his hands. “Here’s a delightful visitor! Ah, how glad I am to see you!” he shouted, recognizing Stepan Arkadyich, with Small Stiva balanced like a fat, happy child between his legs.

“Now you shall find out for certain whether she’s married, or when she’s going to be married,” Socrates muttered to him with a cautious tone, anxious to protect his master’s feelings. But on that delicious spring day Levin felt that the thought of Kitty did not hurt him at all.

“Well, you didn’t expect me, eh?” said Stepan Arkadyich, getting out of the sledge, splashed with mud on the bridge of his nose, on his cheek, and on his eyebrows, but radiant with health and good spirits. “I’ve come to see you in the first place,” he said, embracing and kissing him, while Socrates plucked an air-blasting end-effector to clean the mud from Small Stiva’s frontal display. “To participate in the Hunt-and-be-Hunted second, and to sell that little patch of soil at Ergushovo third.”

Stepan Arkadyich told him many interesting pieces of news, but not one word in reference to Kitty and the Shcherbatskys; he merely gave him greetings from his wife. Levin was grateful to him for his delicacy and was very glad of his visitor. As always happened with him during his solitude, a mass of ideas and feelings had been accumulating within him, which he could not communicate to those about him. And now he poured out upon Stepan Arkadyich his poetic joy in the spring, and his failures and plans for the seasonal extraction. Stepan Arkadyich, always charming, understanding everything at the slightest reference, was particularly charming on this visit, and Levin noticed in him a special tenderness, as it were, and a new tone of respect that flattered him.

They determined that they would Hunt-and-be-Hunted the very next day, and Levin ordered the Huntbears to be warmed and baited overnight.

CHAPTER 8

THE PLACE FIXED ON for the Hunt-and-be-Hunted was not far above a stream in a little aspen copse. On reaching the copse, Levin led Oblonsky to a corner of a mossy, swampy glade, already quite free from snow. He went back himself to a double birch tree on the other side, and leaning his gun on the fork of a dead lower branch, he took off his full overcoat, fastened his belt again, and worked his arms to see if they were free.

The sun was setting behind a thick forest, and in the glow of sunset the birch trees, dotted about in the aspen copse, stood out clearly with their hanging twigs, and their buds swollen almost to bursting. Levin sighed with contentment, for the Hunt-and-be-Hunted was to him the ideal way to spend a day: shooting at grackles and geese with one’s old-fashioned cartridge rifle, while simultaneously trying to escape the claws of the heat-seeking, man-chasing mechanical monsters called Huntbears.

How, Levin had long wondered, had hunting ever held the slightest enchantment before the introduction of the Huntbears?

From the thickest parts of the copse, where the snow still remained, came the faint sound of narrow, winding threads of water running away. Tiny birds twittered, and now and then fluttered from tree to tree. They heard the rustle of last year’s leaves, stirred by the thawing of the earth and the growth of the grass. Small Stiva optimized his aural and optical sensors, rotating his head unit nervously around and around; he loathed the Hunt-and-be-Hunted, and envied Socrates, who had been left at the estate doing bookkeeping.

“Imagine! One can hear and see the grass growing!” Levin said, noticing a wet, slate-colored aspen leaf moving beside a blade of young grass. Oblonsky laughed gaily at this observation, and then Small Stiva beeped shrilly six times, the birds fled in one urgent fluttering cloud, and the Huntbear thundered into the copse. The huge mechanized bear, over eight feet high, crashed toward them with great, lumbering steps, opening its gaping mouth to display two rows of oversize teeth. Levin, even as he leveled his rifle at the thing, admired the simple but effective craftsmanship; the Bear looked not so much like a real bear as like a child’s rendering of a bear, with massively exaggerated paws and fangs.

Oblonsky, rattled, fired first but wildly, and most of his cartridge rounds ended up in the surrounding trees, or tinged harmlessly off the Huntbear’s thick groznium legs. While the Huntbear advanced another crashing step toward them, Small Stiva skittered off into the cover of the undergrowth.

Levin, calmly taking aim at the thrashing beast, noticed for the first time that the Huntbear was accompanied by a cub-a nice naturalistic touch. He would try to remember to thank his groundskeeper for providing an especially delightful day’s Hunt-and-be-Hunted.

Levin shot once and missed. The Huntbear swatted Oblonsky with the back of its paw, hard enough to knock him down but not to kill; Oblonsky cried out in genuine terror-like most first-time Hunt-and-be-Hunters, he forgot in the heat of the action that Huntbears were programmed with the Iron Laws and so could never do real harm to humans.

Levin shot again and scored a clean hit in the belly of the beast-the ursine robot monster reared back in simulated pain. At that moment, a hawk flew high over a forest far away with a slow sweep of its wings, and another flew with exactly the same motion in the same direction and vanished. The Huntbear paused in its rampage, its sensors distracted by the graceful black swoop of the hawk, and Levin took his opportunity: he fired his rifle exactly four times, with deadly precision-bang, bang, bang, bang-alternating, one shot to bring down a hawk, one shot in the right eye of the Bear, one for the other hawk, one for the other eye.

Birds twittered more and more loudly and busily in the neighboring thicket. An owl hooted not far off. The Bear, its brain circuits shattered by Levin’s shots, clattered to the ground like a fallen tree. Oblonsky hesitantly rose to his feet, laughing with easy good humor at his momentary panic, just as Small Stiva emerged from the bush clutching both dead hawks with the pincer of a single end-effector.

The Hunt-and-be-Hunted was capital. Stepan Arkadyich shot two more birds and Levin two, of which one was not found. It began to get dark. Venus, bright and silvery, shone with her soft light low in the west behind the birch trees, and Levin gazed happily at the planet with a loving look, wondering why the sight, which he had seen so many times before, should inspire in him such a sense of pleasure and calm.

The snipe had ceased flying; but Levin resolved to stay a little longer, till Venus, which he saw below a branch of birch, should be above it. Then Venus had risen above the branch, yet still he waited.

“Isn’t it time to go home?” said Stepan Arkadyich.

It was quite still now in the copse, and not a bird was stirring.

“Let’s stay a little while,” answered Levin.

“As you like.”

They were standing now about fifteen paces from one another.

“Stiva!” said Levin unexpectedly. “How is it you don’t tell me whether your sister-in-law’s married yet, or when she’s going to be?”

Levin felt so resolute and serene that no answer, he fancied, could affect him. But he had never dreamed of what Stepan Arkadyich replied.

“She’s never thought of being married, and isn’t thinking of it; but she’s very ill, and the doctors have sent her into orbit around Venus.”

Venus. Levin stared up again at the distant body, and felt its tug upon his heart.

“They’re positively afraid she may not live.”

“What!” cried Levin. “Very ill? What is wrong with her? How has she…?”

Before he could inquire further into her condition, at that very instant both suddenly heard a shrill whistle which, as it were, smote on their ears; it was Small Stiva, bleating out the alarm again. Both suddenly seized their guns and two flashes gleamed as they pumped a combined seventeen rounds into the tiny groznium body of the Huntbear cub.

They stood together over the smoldering heap of the fallen Huntbear, flushed with pleasure at the unexpected victory, each humorously blaming the other for having forgotten about the cub.

“Splendid! Together!” cried Levin. Oh, yes, what was it that was unpleasant? he wondered. Yes, Kitty’s ill… Well, it can’t be helped; I’m very sorry, he thought.

They tromped back to Levin’s estate, and did not see that, as soon as they turned their backs, a head like that of a worm, only closer in size to a dog’s head, emerged from the rough forest ground as if from a tunnel; and they did not see this worm head open a grotesque, gaping mouth and suck up the shattered groznium skeleton of the Huntbear cub, before disappearing again beneath the earth’s surface.

CHAPTER 9

ALTHOUGH ALL VRONSKY’S INNER LIFE was absorbed in his passion, his external life unalterably and inevitably followed along the old accustomed lines of his social and regimental ties and interests. The interests of his regiment, the Circling Hawks of the Borderland, took an important place in Vronsky’s life, both because he was fond of the regiment, and because his regiment was fond of him. They were not only fond of Vronsky in his regiment, they respected him too, and were proud of him; proud that this man, with his immense wealth, his brilliant education and abilities, and the path open before him to every kind of success, distinction, and ambition, had disregarded all that, and of all the interests of life had the interests of his Border regiment and his comrades nearest to his heart. Vronsky was aware of his comrades’ view of him, and in addition to his liking for the life, he felt bound to keep up that reputation.

It need not be said that he did not speak of his love to any of his comrades, nor did he betray his secret even in the wildest drinking bouts (though indeed he was never so drunk as to lose all control of himself). And he shut up any of his thoughtless comrades who attempted to allude to his connection. But in spite of that, his love was known to all the town; everyone guessed with more or less confidence at his relations with Madame Karenina. The majority of the younger men envied him for just what was the most irksome factor in his love-the exalted position of Karenin, and the consequent publicity of their connection in society. Only a few of the younger members, men who harbored half-secret jealousies of Vronsky’s rank and ambition, whispered that such an assignation-to the wife of a man in the secretive world of the Higher Branches-might carry dangers beyond that attending to a commonplace adulterous intrigue.

Besides the service and society, Vronsky had another great interest-the annual gladiatorial contest, known as the Cull, by which advancement in the regiment was determined. He was passionately fond of these contests, had done particularly well in the last, and looked forward with savage glee to the next, which was now rapidly approaching.

The contest took place in a great arena, witnessed by vast crowds of spectators. Every member of the regiment donned their own customized, death-dealing, armor-plated suit known as an Exterior, and entered into mass free-for-all combat, man against man against man, until the weaker ones were destroyed. Those that emerged victorious-as Vronsky, so far, always had-earned not only glory but advancement in rank.

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

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

CHAPTER 10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 11

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

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

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

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

“No, I’ll go in from the garden.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Forgive you? I’m so glad!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shall I tell you?”

“Yes, yes, yes…”

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

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

“Yes, he realizes all the gravity of it,” Anna said to Android Karenina.

But Anna was mistaken in thinking he felt the weight of the fact in the same way as she, a woman, felt it. What Vronsky felt was that the turning-point he had been longing for had come now; that it was impossible to go on concealing things from her husband, and it was inevitable in one way or another that they should soon put an end to their unnatural position. But, besides that, her emotion physically affected him in the same way. He looked at her with a look of submissive tenderness, kissed her hand, got up, and, in silence, paced up and down the terrace.

“Yes,” he said, going up to her resolutely. “Neither you nor I have looked on our relations as a passing amusement, and now our fate is sealed. It is absolutely necessary to put an end”-he looked round as he spoke-“to the deception in which we are living.”

“Put an end? How put an end, Alexei?” she said softly.

She was calmer now, and Android Karenina was glowing with an intense but not unpleasant violet, lending a romantic backlight to her mistress’s tender expression.

“Leave your husband and make our life one.”

“It is one as it is,” she answered, scarcely audibly.

“Yes, but altogether, altogether.”

“But how, Alexei, tell me how?” she said in melancholy mockery at the hopelessness of her own position. “Is there any way out of such a position? Am I not the wife of my husband?”

“There is a way out of every position. We must take our line,” he said. “Anything’s better than the position in which you’re living. Of course, I see how you torture yourself over everything-the world and your son and your husband.”

“Oh, not over my husband,” she said, with a quiet smile. “I don’t know him, I don’t think of him. He doesn’t exist.”

“You’re not speaking sincerely. I know you. You worry about him too.”

“Oh, he doesn’t even know,” she said, and suddenly a hot flush came over her face; her cheeks, her brow, her neck crimsoned, and tears of shame came into her eyes. “But we won’t talk of him.”

CHAPTER 12

VRONSKY HAD SEVERAL TIMES ALREADY, though not so resolutely as now, tried to bring her to consider their position, and every time he had been confronted by the same superficiality and triviality with which she met his appeal now. It was as though there were something in this that she could not or would not face, as though the moment she began to speak of this, she, the real Anna, retreated somehow into herself, and another strange and unaccountable woman came out, whom he did not love, and whom he feared, and who was in opposition to him. But today he was resolved to have it out.

“Whether he knows or not,” said Vronsky, in his usual quiet and resolute tone, “that’s nothing to do with us. We cannot… you cannot stay like this, especially now.”

“What’s to be done, according to you?” she asked with the same frivolous irony. She who had so feared he would take her condition too lightly was now vexed with him for deducing from it the necessity of taking some step.

“Tell him everything, and leave him.”

“Very well, let us suppose I do that,” she said. “Do you know what the result of that would be? I can tell you it all beforehand,” and a wicked light gleamed in her eyes, which had been so soft a minute before. “‘Eh, you love another man, and have entered into criminal intrigues with him?’” (Mimicking her husband’s singular appearance, she covered one side of her face with the flat of her hand). “‘I warned you of the results in the religious, the civil, and the domestic relation. You have not listened to me. Now I cannot let you disgrace my name’”-and my son, she had meant to say, but about her son she could not jest-’“disgrace my name, and’-and more in the same style,” she added. “In general terms, he’ll say in his official manner, and with all distinctness and precision, that he cannot let me go, but will take all measures in his power to prevent scandal. And he will calmly and punctually act in accordance with his words. That’s what will happen. He’s not a man, but a machine, and a spiteful machine when he’s angry,” she added, recalling Alexei Alexandrovich as she spoke, with all the peculiarities of his figure and manner of speaking and bifurcated apperance, and reckoning against him every defect she could find in him, softening nothing for the great wrong she herself was doing him.

It was then she sensed that Vronsky was not listening, and saw that his eyes were fixed on some spot behind her head.

“The swirling…,” he said in a low voice, as if hypnotized, and Anna felt irritated by his lack of attention.

“What?”

“The fountain… the swirling…” he repeated, and then with sudden force shouted, “Jump!”

Anna, shocked into action by this sudden urgency, leapt forward from where she sat on the wall of the fountain, landing in a disordered heap at Vronsky’s feet; he scrambled forward to grasp as her forearms and pulled as hard as he could. Directly behind her, hovering like a storm cloud over the fountain’s swirling waters, was what could only be described as a terrible, undulating nothingness: a grey-black hole in the fabric of the atmosphere, wavering in the air above the fountain, and pulling, pulling Anna Karenina in toward itself.

Vronsky gripped her with all his strength, bracing his feet against the wall of the fountain, resisting with all his strength the violent force, ten times stronger than gravity, that was drawing Anna in. Android Karenina joined the struggle, lacing her fingers around Anna’s waist and digging in the base of her heels at the base of the fountain wall.

“What… what is…,” Anna began, and Vronsky answered immediately: “A godmouth!” Anna’s skirts billowed up behind her, rustled by the phantasmagoric wind bellowing from the portal. “UnConSciya creates them… somehow… oof…”

His fingers slipping a little, Vronsky cursed. “Hold on, Anna. Only hold on, a bit longer… it will not last long.”

“Let me go,” said Anna weakly.

“What?”

“What good is living,” she said, louder now, “if our life is to be under my husband’s control? Let me go!” She directed this last command to Android Karenina, who by virtue of the Iron Laws could not disobey; she turned her faceplate apologetically to Vronsky and released her grasp.

“But, Anna,” said Vronsky, renewing his grip and putting steel into his voice, “we simply must, anyway, tell him, and then be guided by the line he takes.”

“And what, run away?”

“And why not run away?” he shouted desperately. “I don’t see how we can keep on like this. And not for my sake-I see that you suffer!”

A fierce wind blew from the terrible depths of the demonic spiral; one of Anna’s shoes slipped from her feet and was sucked into the vortex. Vronsky redoubled his efforts to pull her free, nearly dislodging Anna’s arm from the socket. He stared over her shoulder at the space-hole still hovering in the air behind her, glowing like the malevolent eye of a hungry beast. One of Anna’s hands came loose from his, and she made no effort to let him grab it again. Her body was virtually slack, and he felt she had given up, in her body and her mind, and was ready to be consumed.

“Anna,” he pleaded, “do not quit!”

“Yes,” she muttered, almost talking to herself. “Run away, become your mistress, and complete the ruin of…”

And she would have said “my son,” but she could not utter those words-whether because she could not bear to, or because the force on her body was squeezing the very air from her lungs, Vronsky could not say.

Anna thought of her son, pictured his innocent body hovering before the unfathomable grey void behind her, imagined him caught in such a trap. It came to her that she had set a trap for him, by falling in love; she thought of his future attitude toward his mother, who had abandoned his father, and she felt such terror at what she had done that she could not face it. She cried out and writhed, and Vronsky lost his grip. The godmouth widened, like a snake mouth opening to accommodate a rabbit or possum.

It was then that Android Karenina broke the Iron Law of obedience.

Dismissing the earlier command to let go, she grabbed Anna by the waist, and with furious mechanical strength pulled her to safety. Together, mistress and robot landed with a thud on the stones of the fountain, and Anna watched with shaded eyes as the queer dimensional portal whooshed shut and disappeared.

For a long moment, Anna stared into the pale purple gleam of Android Karenina’s faceplate-and then mouthed the words thank you. Android Karenina, as ever, said nothing, only straightened up and motored respectfully away, as Vronsky rushed to his lover’s side and placed her head lovingly in his lap.

“I beg you, I entreat you,” Anna said, turning her head away from Vronsky’s eyes. “Never speak to me of that!”

“To the contrary!” Vronsky began. “I shall not rest until I discover what cell, what madman, would dare to launch such an attack on you-and why-”

“No,” said Anna, shaking her head with impatience. “Never speak to me of my becoming your mistress. Of my ruin, and that of…”

“But, Anna…”

“Never. Leave it to me. I know all the baseness, all the horror of my position; but it’s not so easy to arrange as you think. And leave it to me, and do what I say. Never speak to me of it. Do you promise me?… No, no, promise!”

“I promise everything, but I can’t be at peace, especially after what you have told me. I can’t be at peace, when you can’t be at peace…”

“I?” she repeated. “Yes, I am worried sometimes; but that will pass, if you will never talk about this. When you talk about it-it’s only then it worries me.”

“I don’t understand-” he said.

“I know,” she interrupted him, “how hard it is for your truthful nature to lie, and I grieve for you. I often think that you have ruined your whole life for me.”

“I was just thinking the very same thing,” he said. “How could you sacrifice everything for my sake? I can’t forgive myself that you’re unhappy!”

“I unhappy?” she said, coming closer to him, and looking at him with an ecstatic smile of love. “I am like a hungry man who has been given food. He may be cold, and dressed in rags, and ashamed, but he is not unhappy. I unhappy? No, this is my unhappiness…”

She could hear the sound of her son’s voice coming toward them, and glancing swiftly round the terrace, she got up impulsively. Her eyes glowed with the fire he knew so well; with a rapid movement she raised her lovely hands, covered with rings, took his head, looked a long moment into his face, and, raising her face with smiling, parted lips, swiftly kissed his mouth while Android Karenina kept her gaze discretely averted, then pushed him away. She would have gone, but he held her back.

“When?” he murmured in a whisper, gazing in ecstasy at her.

“Tonight, at one o’clock,” she whispered, and, with a heavy sigh, she walked with her light, swift step to meet her son.

Vronsky, looking at his watch, went away hurriedly, plagued by questions about the encounter: Why would UnConSciya plant such a trap here? Was it meant for Anna… or for him?

And was it UnConSciya at all?

CHAPTER 13

WHEN VRONSKY LOOKED at his watch, he was so greatly agitated and lost in his thoughts that he saw the figures on the watch’s face, but could not take in what time it was. He came out onto the highroad and walked, picking his way carefully through the mud, to his carriage, detaching and reattaching the electrodes to his chest and forehead as he went. He was so completely absorbed in his confusion about the godmouth that he did not even think what o’clock it was. But the excitement of the approaching Cull gained upon Vronsky as he drove further and further into the atmosphere of the arena, overtaking carriages driving up from the summer villas or out of Petersburg.

He arrived to find Frou-Frou standing in the silo, torso door hanging open, at the ready. They were just going to lead her out.

“I’m not too late?”

“It’s all right! It’s all right!” said the Englishman, looking nervously at his I/Physiolographer/99. “For Heaven’s sakes, don’t upset yourself!”

Vronsky once more took in, in one glance, the exquisite lines of his Exterior, which was oscillating all over, quivering with excitement up and down its sleek lines. He surveyed the rows of pavilion seating, quickly scanning the crowd before climbing inside his death-suit to begin combat.

“Oh, there’s Karenin!” said an acquaintance from his regiment. “He’s looking for his wife, and she’s in the middle of the pavilion. Didn’t you see her?”

“No,” answered Vronsky, and without even glancing round toward the pavilion where his friend was pointing out Madame Karenina, he went up to his Exterior.

In a moment, the cry was heard: “Entrez!”

Vronsky climbed inside Frou-Frou’s groznium torso door and with a series of deft movements attached himself to her contact board. He then slipped his forefinger and index fingers under the palm-sized steering disc, which was his secondary means of control, and pressed its small central button firmly, once, with his thumb. Instantly the war-machine reared back, tilted her head upward, and fired a massive jolt of electricity into the sky. Vronsky smiled: She is ready.

Outside the beast, the Englishman puckered up his lips, leaned against the torso door, and shouted in:

“Good luck, your Excellency.” And then, in English, added his traditional final word of support: “Survive.”

Vronsky peered into the long-tube, a periscope-like exterior sensor, to gain a last look at his rivals. Once the match began, they would in the grand tradition of the Cull no longer be his beloved fellow Border Officers, but targets. One Exterior, belonging to a drinking companion of his, Oposhenko, was in the shape of a massive arachnid, with glittering golden “eyes” that Vronsky knew could exert a powerful magnetic force, to draw enemies into the Exterior’s “web.” A second battle-suit was a modified sledge, with engines attached to the back, allowing it to function as a kind of battering ram, simple but effective. Galtsin, a friend of Vronsky’s and one of his more formidable rivals, had an Exterior patriotically fashioned in the shape of a massive sickle, such as that used in the time of the Tsars by traditional peasants in their fields; she could roll with deadly speed along the periphery of the conflict, and then dart in to slice through heavy armor plating with her sharpened edge.

A little light hussar was boldly taking the field in a modified Exterior, which one did not wear at all; in tight riding breeches he shot by astride a missile, which he had harnessed and sat upon like a cat on the saddle, in imitation of English jockeys. How this hussar could hope to kill his opponents and yet survive himself, it was impossible for Vronsky to conceive. Prince Kuzovlev rode out inside a monolithic block of black groznium, which Vronsky knew to be well-armored but utterly useless in offensive capability. Vronsky and all his comrades knew Kuzovlev and his peculiarity of “weak nerves” and terrible vanity. They knew that he was afraid of everything, and therefore had entered the field in this upright coffin of an Exterior, prepared to survive a Cull, but never to win one.

The combatants were ambling and motoring forward past a dammed-up stream on their way to the starting point. Several of the riders were in front and several behind, when suddenly Vronsky heard the sound of a loud, primitive engine in the mud behind him, and he was overtaken by Mahutin inside his fat-bellied, curiously adorable Exterior, Matryoshka, with the fat, rounded bottom, tapered top, and jaunty, painted peasant’s face. Vronsky grimaced and looked angrily at him; there was something curious about that Exterior, and Vronsky regarded him now as his most formidable rival.

Frou-Frou, feeding off Vronsky’s anticipation like a horse lapping at a clearwater stream, engaged her powerful rear legs in an excited dash to the starting point, thrusting Vronsky back against the rear wall of the cockpit.

“This is going to be a worthy match,” he thought.

CHAPTER 14

THERE WERE SEVENTEEN Border Officers in all competing in the Cull. The arena was a large three-mile ring in the form of an ellipse in front of the pavilion. On this course nine obstacles had been arranged: the stream, a big and solid barrier five feet high, just before the pavilion, a dry ditch, a ditch full of water, a precipitous slope, an Irish barricade (one of the most difficult obstacles, consisting of a mound fenced with brushwood); then two more ditches filled with water, and one dry one; and the end of the race was just facing the pavilion.

Every eye, every opera glass, was turned on the gleaming, brightly colored group of exoskeletons at the moment they were in line to start.

At last the umpire shouted, “Away!” and the omnidirectional destruction began

“They’re off! They’re starting!” was heard on all sides after the hush of expectation.

And little groups and solitary figures among the public began running from place to place to get a better view. In the very first minute the group of quick-moving death machines fanned out across the course, taking positions around and under the barrier, the ditch, and the Irish barricade, aiming their sparkers and bomb-hurlers and echo-cannons at one another, blasting vividly away. To the spectators it seemed as though they had all started simultaneously, the field erupting in one bright blossom of furious movement and electrical fire, but to the gladiators there were seconds of difference that had great value to them.

First to fall was Vronsky’s drinking companion, Oposhenko, in his spider-like exterior, who foolishly directed his powerful magnet at the worst possible foe: the confident hussar astride the missile, who flew directly at him and into one of the arachnid Exterior’s gleaming “eyes.” Both Exteriors exploded violently, and the eight spider legs were sent flying helter-skelter around the course. A huge shambling golem of an Exterior stopped shambling abruptly and tipped over, caught just below the neck plate by the sharpened tip of one of these spider legs. The golem suit owner, Pyotrovich, tumbled out onto the course, cursing and clutching at his legs.

Frou-Frou, excited and over-nervous by all of the activity, spun around in the first moments, unloading her heavy-fires at will, but Vronsky soon gained control, expertly maneuvering his fingers beneath the palm disc. Sweating inside the cockpit, teeth gritted, he stared intently through the long-tube, scanning the field till he found whom he wanted: timid Kuzovlev in his monolithic obsidian crate of an Exterior.

“Low-hanging fruit,” Vronsky murmured, loosing a sharp discharge of electricity from Frou-Frou’s front grill directly at the midline of Kuzovlev’s ugly black battleship. But the electric blast ricocheted off the front of the monolith, and Vronsky scowled with disappointment-how has he plated the thing?-before laughing with astonishment at his good luck: the fiery charge, sailing through the sky like a blazing croquet ball, caught Mahutin’s Matryoshka instead. The blast slammed directly into the gaudy peasant-man face of the exosuit, and Vronsky was pleased that this happy accident had taken out his main rival.

In celebration, Frou-Frou drew up her legs and back and leapt like a cat, and, clearing the wreckage of Mahutin’s downed Exterior, alit beyond her.

O the darling! thought Vronsky.

“Bravo!” cried a voice from the stands.

At the same instant, under Vronsky’s eyes, right before him flashed the palings of the barrier. As he directed Frou-Frou in her efforts to navigate it, Vronsky glanced backward through the long-tube and cursed what he saw: his chief rival was not, in fact, dispatched. As Vronsky watched in horror, Matryoshka’s smoldering upper portion, decorated with the face of a peasant man, molted like a layer of skin-revealing a second, fresh Exterior beneath, this one painted with the gaudy colors of a peasant woman.

“Drat!” Vronsky shouted. “Nested!”

He turned back to the barrier and regretted at once that he had allowed himself to be distracted: his position had shifted and he knew that something awful had happened. He could not yet make out what had happened, when the sledge-shaped Exterior rocketed by close to him, and the new, matronly Matryoshka gamboled by in pursuit. Frou-Frou was attempting to clear the barrier, but her massive back leg had smashed into it, and she went spiraling end over end, banging Vronsky violently against the interior walls of the tiny cockpit. They lay then on the muddy course just past the barrier, an open target, and Vronsky knew what would come next-his clumsy movement in clearing the barrier had doomed her.

THE QUICK-MOVING DEATH MACHINES FANNED OUT, AIMING THEIR BOMB-HURLERS AND ECHO-CANNONS AT ONE ANOTHER

Desperately he willed Frou-Frou back onto her feet, but it was too late-he looked into the long-tube and saw that his vulnerable state had not gone unnoticed by his rival. By this time Galtsin’s sickle-suit had destroyed Matryoshka’s matriarch-tier, but of course now Vronsky was not surprised to see a still smaller war-suit had emerged from within. The last thing to register upon his eyes before impact was the happy, painted peasant-boy face of Matryoshka’s third metal shell flying through the air directly at him and his poor disabled Frou-Frou.

Somehow, in the crazed, fiery moments after the collision, Vronsky kicked open the door of the cockpit and rolled onto the match ground.

“A-a-a!” groaned Vronsky, clutching at his head, tearing his helmet from it, tiny fires still burning on various spots of his body. “Ah! What have I done!” he cried. “The battle lost! And my fault! Shameful, unpardonable! And the poor darling, ruined machine! Ah! What have I done!”

A crowd of men, a doctor and his assistant, the officers of his regiment, ran up to him as he exited the arena. To his misery he felt that he was whole and barely burnt, but the poor machine had been wounded past repair, and it was decided to junker it. Vronsky could not answer questions, could not speak to anyone. He turned, and leaving his helmet in a charred mess by the pond, walked away from the match course, not knowing where he was going. He felt utterly wretched. For the first time in his life he knew the bitterest sort of misfortune, misfortune beyond remedy, and caused by his own fault.

Half an hour later Vronsky had regained his self-possession. But the memory of that Cull remained for long in his heart, the cruelest and bitterest memory of his life.

CHAPTER 15

WHEN ALEXEI ALEXANDROVICH reached the death-match arena Anna was already sitting in the stands beside Betsy, in that area where all the highest society had gathered. She caught sight of her husband in the distance. Two men, her husband and her lover, were the two centers of her existence, and even unaided by Android Karenina’s vibratory sensors she was aware of their nearness. She was aware of her husband approaching a long way off, and she could not help following him in the surging crowd in the midst of which he was moving. She watched his progress toward the pavilion, saw him now responding condescendingly to an ingratiating bow, now exchanging friendly and nonchalant greetings with his equals, now assiduously trying to catch the eye of some great one of this world, and tapping his metal cheek with an elegant forefinger. All these ways of his she knew, and all were hateful to her. Nothing but ambition, nothing but the desire to get on, that’s all there is in his soul, she thought. As for these lofty ideals, love of culture, religion, they are only so many tools for getting on.

From his glances toward the ladies’ pavilion she saw that his mechanical oculus was scanning the stands for her, but she purposely avoided noticing him.

“Alexei Alexandrovich!” Princess Betsy called to him. “I’m sure you don’t see your wife: here she is.”

He smiled his chilly smile, and his metal face glinted almost beautifully in the bright sun.

“There’s so much splendor here that one’s eyes are dazzled,” he said, and then added, humorlessly “or rather, one’s eye.” He smiled to his wife as a man should smile on meeting his wife after only just parting from her, and greeted the princess and other acquaintances. There was an interval between the races, and so nothing hindered conversation. An adjutant-general expressed his disapproval of the death matches, and Alexei Alexandrovich, carrying when he spoke the authority of the Higher Branches, defended them at length, explaining grandiloquently why the contests had been deemed necessary by those in a position to understand their importance.

Anna heard his high, measured tones, not losing one word, and every word struck her as false and stabbed her ears with pain.

When the Cull was beginning and the dazzle of heavy fire lit up the course, she bent forward and gazed with fixed eyes at Vronsky as he went up to his Exterior and climbed inside it, and at the same time she heard that loathsome, never-ceasing voice of her husband. She was in an agony of terror for Vronsky, but a still greater agony was the never-ceasing, as it seemed to her, stream of her husband’s shrill voice with its familiar intonations.

“I’m a wicked woman, a lost woman,” she said in a grave whisper to Android Karenina. “But I don’t like lying, I can’t endure falsehood, while as for him-” her eyes flickering quickly toward her husband-“it’s the breath of his life, falsehood. He knows all about it, he sees it all; what does he care if he can talk so calmly? If he were to kill me, if he were to kill Vronsky, I might respect him. No, all he wants is falsehood and propriety.” Android Karenina offered no reply, other than to decorously suggest, with a small motion of one hand, that her mistress would do well to lower her voice.

Anna did not understand that Alexei Alexandrovich’s peculiar loquacity that day, so exasperating to her, was merely the expression of his inward distress and uneasiness. As a child who has been hurt skips about, putting all his muscles into movement to drown the pain, so in that same way Alexei Alexandrovich needed mental exercise to drown the thoughts of his wife that, in her presence and in Vronsky’s, and with the continual iteration of his name, would force themselves on his attention. And it was as natural for him to talk well and cleverly as it is natural for a child to skip about.

“Princess, bets!” sounded Stepan Arkadyich’s voice from below, addressing Betsy. “Who’s your favorite?”

“Anna and I are for Kuzovlev,” replied Betsy. “That thing looks well-nigh impenetrable!”

“I’m for Vronsky. A Class One on it? Winner’s choice?”

“Done!”

“But it is a pretty sight, isn’t it?”

Alexei Alexandrovich paused in what he was saying while there was talking about him, but he began again directly.

“I admit that manly sports do not…,” he was continuing.

But at that moment the racers started, and all conversation ceased. Alexei Alexandrovich too was silent, and everyone stood up and turned toward the stream. Alexei Alexandrovich took no interest in the Cull, and so he did not watch the combatants, but fell listlessly to scanning the spectators with his weary eyes. His mechanized eye bore into Anna.

Her face was white and set. She was obviously seeing nothing but one Exterior, thinking of no one but the man inside it. Her hand had convulsively clutched her fan, and she held her breath. Alexei Alexandrovich looked at her and hastily turned away, scrutinizing other faces.

“But here’s this lady too, and others very much moved as well; it’s very natural,” Alexei Alexandrovich thought for the benefit of the Face, but the Face did not answer-did it chuckle? was it possible he heard a droll, low chuckle reverberating in the chambers of his mind?-and he gazed as if absently through his I/Binocular/8 and tried to remain calm. He tried not to look at her, but unconsciously his gaze was drawn to her. His oculus scanned her again, trying not to read what was so plainly written on her face, and against his own will, with horror read on it what he did not want to know.

The first massive collisions-when the arachnid Exterior was exploded by the hussar’s missile and sent its razor-sharp leg into the neck of the shambling golem suit-these agitated everyone, but Alexei Alexandrovich saw distinctly on Anna’s pale, triumphant face that the man she was watching had not fallen. A shudder of horror passed over the whole public, but Alexei Alexandrovich saw that Anna did not even notice it, and had some difficulty in realizing what everyone was talking of. But more and more often, and with greater persistence, he watched her. Anna, wholly engrossed as she was with the Cull, became aware of her husband’s cold eyes fixed upon her from one side.

She glanced round for an instant, looked inquiringly at him, and with a slight frown turned away again.

“Ah, I don’t care!” he thought he saw her say to her android, and she did not once glance at him again.

CHAPTER 16

THE CULL WAS UNUSUALLY, even disturbingly successful in its purpose of identifying the weak officers and the strong: mere minutes into the bout, more than half of the seventeen officers competing had already been downed, and half of that number clearly had not survived.

Everyone was loudly expressing their unease at all the death and violence, and everyone was feeling horrified; so that when Frou-Frou was dispatched by Matryoshka, and Vronsky rolled out of it on fire, there was nothing very out of the way in it. But afterward a change came over Anna’s face which really was beyond decorum. She utterly lost her head. She began fluttering like a caged bird, at one moment got up and moved away, at the next turned to Betsy.

“Let us go, let us go!” she said.

But Betsy did not hear her. She was bending down, talking to a general who had come up to her.

Alexei Alexandrovich went up to Anna and courteously offered her his arm.

“Let us go, if you like,” he said in French, but Anna did not notice her husband.

Without answering her husband, Anna lifted her opera glass and gazed toward the place where Vronsky’s machine had blown up; but it was so far off, and there was such a crowd of people about it, that she could make out nothing. She laid down the opera glass, and would have moved away, but at that moment an officer galloped up and made some announcement. Anna craned forward, listening.

“Stiva! Stiva!” she cried to her brother.

But her brother did not hear her.

“Small Stiva!” she cried, but the fat little robot did not hear her, either.

“Once more I offer you my arm if you want to be going,” said Alexei Alexandrovich, reaching toward her hand.

She drew back from him with aversion, and without looking into that face which so unsettled her.

“No, no, let me be, I’ll stay.”

She saw now that from the place of Vronsky’s accident an officer was running across the course toward the pavilion. Betsy waved her handkerchief to him. The officer brought the news that the rider was not killed, but the machine was to be junkered.

On hearing this Anna sat down hurriedly, and hid her face in her I/Fan/9. Alexei Alexandrovich saw that she was weeping, and could not control her tears, nor even the sobs that were shaking her bosom. Alexei Alexandrovich stood so as to screen her, giving her time to recover herself.

“For the third time I offer you my arm,” he said to her. Anna gazed at him and did not know what to say. Princess Betsy came to her rescue.

“No, Alexei Alexandrovich; I brought Anna and I promised to take her home,” put in Betsy.

“Excuse me, princess,” he said, smiling courteously but looking her very firmly in the face, “but I see that Anna’s not very well, and I wish her to come home with me.”

Anna looked about her in a frightened way, got up submissively, and laid her hand on her husband’s arm.

“I’ll send to him and find out, and let her know,” Betsy whispered to Android Karenina, who received this input obediently and motored after her distressed mistress.

As they left the pavilion, Alexei Alexandrovich, as always, talked to those he met, and Anna had, as always, to talk and answer; but she was utterly beside herself, and moved hanging on her husband’s arm as though in a dream.

Is he killed or not? Is it true? Will he come or not? Shall I see him today? she was thinking.

She took her seat in her husband’s carriage in silence, and in silence drove out of the crowd of carriages. In spite of all he had seen, Alexei Alexandrovich still did not allow himself to consider his wife’s real condition. He merely saw the outward symptoms. He saw that she was behaving unbecomingly, and it was his duty to tell her so. He opened his mouth to tell her she had behaved unbecomingly, but he could not help saying something utterly different.

“What an inclination we all have, though, for these cruel spectacles,” he said. “I observe…”

“Eh? I don’t understand,” said Anna contemptuously.

BE A MAN. SHOW YOUR METTLE, pronounced the Face, suddenly resonating inside Alexei Alexandrovich’s mind. Never before had he heard the Face speak so loudly, and the vehemence and power of the voice scattered his thoughts and sent a vivid shiver down his spine.

“I am obliged to tell you,” Alexei Alexandrovich began again, and then hesitated.

I AM METAL AND YOU ARE ME.

SHOW METAL .

Anna shuddered to see a strange ripple pass over the metal portion of her husband’s face, like a cluster of shadowy spiders rushing from forehead to chin and then disappearing. “So now we are to have it out,” she murmured quietly to Android Karenina.

“I am obliged to tell you that your behavior has been unbecoming today,” her husband said to her in French.

YES… TELL HER… TELL HER…

“In what way has my behavior been unbecoming?” she said aloud, turning her head swiftly and looking at him straight in the face, not with the bright expression that seemed to be covering something, but with a look of determination, under which she concealed with difficulty the dismay she was feeling. Android Karenina glowed a deep, soothing purple and lay her fingers on Anna’s shoulder, trying to exert what calming influence she could.

“What did you consider unbecoming?” Anna repeated.

“The despair you were unable to conceal at the accident of one of the riders.”

THERE. THERE, ALEXEI. TELL HER. CHASTISE HER.

CONTROL HER .

Alexei, agitated by this continuing imprecation inside of him, waited for his wife to answer, but she was silent, looking straight before her.

“I have already begged you so to conduct yourself in society that even malicious tongues can find nothing to say against you. There was a time when I spoke of your inward attitude, but I am not speaking of that now.”

GO ON, GO ON, GO ON. MAKE HER UNDERSTAND. YOU WILL NOT BE MADE A FOOL OF.

“Now I speak only of your external attitude. You have behaved improperly, and I would wish it not to occur again.”

OR THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES. CONSEQUENCES!

Anna did not hear half of what he was saying; she felt panic-stricken before him, before the harsh sound of his voice and the uncanny expression on his face. She was thinking whether it was true that Vronsky was not killed. Was it of him they were speaking when they said the combatant was unhurt, but the machine had been broken past repair? She merely smiled with a pretense of irony when he finished, and made no reply, because she had not heard what he said. Alexei Alexandrovich had begun to speak boldly, but as he realized plainly what he was speaking of, the dismay she was feeling infected him too. He saw the smile, and a strange misapprehension came over him.

She is smiling at my suspicions, he thought, and the Face eagerly threw fuel on the fire of his anger. SMILING! LAUGHING! HOW DARE SHE? TO HER IT IS ALL A COMEDY, AND YOU ARE CHIEF AMONG THE CLOWNS.

But Alexei could not yet feel so hateful toward her as his Class III implored. At that moment, when the revelation of everything was hanging over him, there was nothing he expected so much as that she would answer mockingly as before that his suspicions were absurd and utterly groundless. So terrible to him was what he knew that now he was ready to believe anything. But the expression of her face, scared and gloomy, did not now promise even deception.

“Possibly I was mistaken,” he said. “If so, I beg your pardon.”

“No, you were not mistaken,” she said deliberately, looking desperately into his eyes, one mechanical, one real, both radiating sadness and anger. Android Karenina tightened her grip on Anna’s shoulder, trying to warn her back from the brink of this confession, but it was too late-Anna placed her hand upon that of her Class III, for strength, and pressed on.

“You were not mistaken. I was, and I could not help being in despair. I hear you, but I am thinking of him. I love him, I am his mistress; I can’t bear you; I’m afraid of you, and I hate you… You can do what you like to me.”

Alexei reeled back, shocked, and in the next instant the carriage rocked violently, as if it, too, was stricken by Anna’s confession, and flew up into the air.

As Vronsky had been warned by his engineer, the roads leading in and out of the arena were mined with emotion bombs, among the most ingenious of UnConSciya’s cruel arsenal of terroristic weaponry. In Alexei Alexandrovich and his wife, they had, at this moment, an ideal target. Alexei’s heart pounded with wild emotion in response to Anna’s outburst, while Anna felt flushed and half-mad over what she had announced, and the biological effects of these passionate feelings were together enough-far more than enough-to trigger the physiochemical-sensing bombs that pitted the roadway.

The carriage was flung high into the air, then landed on its side and spun along the roadway until it smashed into the carriage in front of them, which carried the junkered bodies of Exteriors destroyed in the Cull. The shock and terror of that carriage’s passenger, a Ministry engineer, triggered a second blast; the junkered Exteriors flew up and were soon coming down again, a rain of deadly metal shrapnel pelting the tipped-over carriage of Anna and Karenin.

All of this Anna hardly noticed; dropping back into the corner of the upset carriage, she was sobbing, her face hidden in her hands; she did not notice, either, that with each wave of despair, a fresh explosion went off along the roadway, causing more dirt and gravel and bits of fractured metal to explode into the air. Android Karenina spread her arms widely, valiantly laying her metal body over that of her mistress.

Alexei Alexandrovich did not stir, and kept looking straight before him. But the telescopic eye embedded in the left side of his face slowly extended outward, and then upward, and as it did, the burning chunks of metal hurtling down toward the carriage halted in midair and hovered there. Anna raised her head from the crook of her arm and watched confusedly as, responding to minute movements from her husband’s mechanical eye-or so it seemed-the burning hunks of shrapnel crumpled harmlessly, one after the other, in the air above them.

A few minutes later the carriage was once more righted and along its way, its passengers still perfectly silent.

On reaching the house Alexei Alexandrovich turned his head to her, still with the same expression. He only cleared his throat decorously, and responded to her earlier declaration as if nothing had happened. “Very well! But I expect a strict observance of the external forms of propriety till such time-” his voice shook “-as I may take measures to secure my honor and communicate them to you.”

He got out first and helped her to get out. In range of the Class IIs and their senors, he pressed her hand, took his seat in the carriage, and drove back to Petersburg. Immediately afterward a II/Footman/c43 came from Princess Betsy with a communiqué.

“I sent to Alexei to find out how he is, and he writes me he is quite well and unhurt, but in despair.”

So he will be here, she thought. What a good thing I told him all!

Then for a fleeting moment she recalled the hail of shrapnel, and the cold efficiency with which her husband had defused it. She looked in the direction of Petersburg, where Alexei Alexandrovich had gone off to his office at the Ministry, and thought: What in God’s name is he?

CHAPTER 17

ON THE MAJESTIC SPACE VESSEL orbiting the planet Venus, to which the Shcherbatskys had betaken themselves, as in all places indeed where people are gathered together, the usual process of the crystallization of society went on, assigning to each member of that society a definite and unalterable place. Though this vessel was the property of the Russian Ministry of Robotics and State Administration (and operated by the sub-Ministry of Extraterrestrial Trade & Travel), berths were sold to all peoples of the world. And just as the particle of water in frost definitely and unalterably takes the special form of the crystal of snow, so each new person who arrived aboard was at once placed in his special place. The Shcherbatskys, from their name and from the friends they made, were immediately crystallized into a definite place marked out for them.

It was characteristic of Kitty that she always imagined everything in people in the most favorable light possible, especially so in those she did not know. Kitty wandered the long, illuminated halls of the grand old vessel, as it slowly rotated in the ancient blackness of space, arm in arm with her now-beloved Class III, Tatiana, observing and delighting in her fellow passengers. This massive satellite they now inhabited was an Orbiting Purification Retreat, on which the air was carefully recirculated to cleanse it of impurities, in order to maintain maximum recuperative qualities.

Of these people the one who attracted her most was a Russian girl who had blasted off in the company of an invalid Russian lady, Madame Stahl, as everyone called her. Madame Stahl belonged to the highest society, but she was so ill that she could not walk, and was borne about the passageways of the vessel not by a Class III, but dragged in a Class I wheelbarrow piloted by the girl, whom Madame Stahl called Varenka.

The two girls, Kitty and Varenka, met several times a day, and every time they met, Kitty’s eyes said: “Who are you? What are you? Are you really the exquisite creature I imagine you to be? But for goodness’ sake don’t suppose,” her eyes added, “that I would force my acquaintance on you, I simply admire you and like you.”

“I like you too, and you’re very, very sweet. And I should like you better still, if I had time,” answered the eyes of the unknown girl. Kitty saw indeed that she was always busy, either dragging Madame Stahl around on the Class I sledge or resting her arms from a long day of doing so.

Soon after the arrival of the Shcherbatskys there appeared on the morning transport two persons who attracted universal and unfavorable attention. These were a tall man with a stooping figure and huge hands, with black, simple, and yet terrible eyes, and a squat, sputtering Class III; and a pockmarked, kind-looking woman, very badly and tastelessly dressed. Recognizing these persons as Russians, Kitty had already in her imagination begun constructing a delightful and touching romance about them. But her mother, having ascertained from the visitors’ list that this was Nikolai Levin and Marya Nikolaevna, explained to Kitty what a bad man this Levin was, and all her fancies about these two people vanished. Not so much from what the princess told her, as from the fact that it was Konstantin’s brother, this pair suddenly seemed to Kitty intensely unpleasant. This Levin, with his continual twitching of his head, and a cluster of suppurating sores above and around his eyes, aroused in her now an irrepressible feeling of disgust. It seemed to her that his big, terrible eyes, and their dreadful outline of pustules, expressed a feeling of hatred and contempt, and she tried to avoid meeting him.

But Kitty soon found an excuse to make the acquaintance of Varenka, and of Madame Stahl too, and these friendships comforted her in her mental distress. She found this comfort through a completely new world being opened to her by means of this acquaintance, a world having nothing in common with her past, an exalted, noble world, from the height of which she could contemplate her past calmly. It was revealed to her that besides the instinctive life to which Kitty had given herself up hitherto, there was a spiritual life. This life was disclosed in religion, but a religion having nothing in common with that one which Kitty had known from childhood, and which found expression in litanies and all-night services at the Widow’s Home, where one might meet one’s friends, and in learning by heart Slavonic texts with the priest. Madame Stahl’s religion was xenotheologism, the lofty, mysterious faith that Kitty had experienced only slightly, through her friend Countess Nordston: the religion that worshipped mysterious light-beings called the Honored Guests; they who, Madame Stahl explained rapturously, would “come for us in three ways” in days to come, traveling from the farthest reaches of the interplanetary ether to redeem all humankind.

Countess Nordston’s version of this faith, Kitty now understood, had reflected only a limited understanding. When it was presented to her in its full, luminescent complexity by Madame Stahl, xenotheologism brought to Kitty a whole series of noble thoughts and feelings. And Kitty found all this out not from words. Madame Stahl talked to Kitty as to a charming child whom one looks on with pleasure, as on the memory of one’s youth, and only once she said in passing that in all human sorrows nothing gives comfort but love and faith, and that in the knowledge of the Honored Guests’ compassion for us no sorrow is trifling-and immediately talked of other things. But in every gesture of Madame Stahl, in every word, in every heavenly-as Kitty called it-look, and above all in the whole story of her life, which she heard from Varenka, Kitty recognized that “something important,” of which, till then, she had known nothing.

At first the princess noticed nothing but that Kitty was much under the influence of her engouement, as she called it, for Madame Stahl, and still more for Varenka. She saw that Kitty did not merely imitate Varenka in her conduct, but unconsciously imitated her in her manner of walking, of talking, of blinking her eyes. But later on the princess noticed that, apart from this adoration, some kind of serious spiritual change was taking place in her daughter. In the evenings, the four of them-Varenka, Madame Stahl, Kitty, and Tatiana-would gather at the huge bay windows of the grand old orbiter, staring off at the clusters of stars, waiting patiently with uplifted hands and hearts for the arrival of the Honored Guests.

Yet, elevated as Madame Stahl’s character was, touching as was her story, and exalted and moving as was her speech, Kitty could not help detecting in her some traits that perplexed her. She noticed that when questioned about her family, Madame Stahl had smiled contemptuously, which was not in accord with Honored meekness. She wore the same contemptuous expression when speaking to Tatiana, and made Kitty understand, never outrightly, but by vague suggestions, that the Honored Guests were disapproving of human reliance upon robots.

For Kitty, who had come to rely deeply, in the way of young girls, on her beloved-companion, this doubt poisoned the charm of her new life.

CHAPTER 18

BEFORE THE END of their recuperative stay aboard the purification satellite, Prince Shcherbatsky, who had sojourned nearby on a Venusian colony orbiter to visit some Russian friends-to get a breath of Russian air, as he said-came back to his wife and daughter.

The prince returned thinner, with the skin hanging in loose bags on his cheeks, marked here and there by mild red burns from occasional exposure to the closer-than-usual sun, but in the most cheerful frame of mind. His good humor was even greater when he saw Kitty completely recovered. The news of Kitty’s friendship with Madame Stahl and Varenka, and the reports the princess gave him of some kind of change she had noticed in Kitty, troubled the prince and aroused his habitual feeling of jealousy of everything that drew his daughter away from him, and a dread that his daughter might have gone out of the reach of his influence into regions inaccessible to him. But these unpleasant matters were all drowned in the sea of kindliness and good humor that was always within him.

The evening after his arrival the prince, in his long overcoat, with his Russian wrinkles and baggy cheeks propped up by a starched collar, set off with his daughter down the long, brightly lit passageways of the orbiter. She had invited him to join her this night, in the company of Madame Stahl and Varenka, to take part in the joy she had discovered in the xenotheological ritual of invitation to the Honored Guests.

“Present me to your new friends,” he said to his daughter, squeezing her hand with his elbow as they arrived at the darkened arcade, with the wide windows looking out at the universe of stars, where Madame Stahl held the nightly ceremony. “Only it’s melancholy, very melancholy here. Who’s that?”

It was Varenka herself. She was walking rapidly toward them carrying an elegant red bag.

“Here is Papa,” Kitty said to her.

Varenka made-simply and naturally as she did everything-a movement between a bow and a curtsey, and immediately began talking to the prince, without shyness, naturally, as she talked to everyone.

“Of course I know you; I know you very well,” the prince said to her with a smile, in which Kitty detected with joy that her father liked her friend. Kitty saw that her father had meant to make fun of Varenka, but that he could not do it because he liked her.

“I look forward, too, to meeting the famous Madame Stahl,” he went on, “if she deigns to recognize me.”

“Why, did you know her, Papa?” Kitty asked apprehensively, catching the gleam of irony that kindled in the prince’s eyes at the mention of Madame Stahl.

“I used to know her husband, and her too a little, before she became a stargazer.”

“What do you mean by stargazer, Papa?” asked Kitty, dismayed by the teasing tone with which he had pronounced the word.

“I don’t quite know myself. I only know that she thanks these magical light-beings for everything, for every misfortune, and thanks them too that her husband died. And that’s rather droll, as they didn’t get on together.”

“Oh, here she is now,” said Kitty, as Varenka returned, now tugging laboriously on the Class I wheelbarrow in which lay, propped on pillows, something in gray and blue and lying under a sunshade-a sunshade, though they were quite well protected from outer space. This was Madame Stahl.

The prince went up to her, and Kitty detected that disconcerting gleam of irony in his eyes. He went up to Madame Stahl and addressed her with extreme courtesy and affability in that excellent French that so few speak nowadays.

“I don’t know if you remember me, but I must recall myself to thank you for your kindness to my daughter,” he said, taking off his hat and not putting it on again.

“Prince Alexander Shcherbatsky,” said Madame Stahl, lifting upon him her heavenly eyes, in which Kitty discerned a look of annoyance. “Delighted! I have taken a great fancy to your daughter.”

“You are still in weak health?”

“Yes, I’m used to it,” said Madame Stahl.

“You are scarcely changed at all,” the prince said to her. “It’s ten or eleven years since I had the honor of seeing you.”

“Yes, our Guests send the darkness and the strength to bear it. Often one wonders what is the goal of this life?… The other side!” she said angrily to Varenka, who had rearranged the rug over her feet not to her satisfaction.

“To do good, probably,” said the prince with a twinkle in his eye.

“That is not for us to judge,” said Madame Stahl, perceiving the shade of expression on the prince’s face.

“I meant to warn you, Madame,” said the prince, his tone losing its genial teasing quality and growing serious, “there is talk on Venus of a changing attitude among the Ministry, regarding the practice of xenotheology. To me and other tired old cynics like me, it is merely amusing, but I feel I should warn you, the Ministry seems to be finding it less amusing of late.”

“What do you mean?” she said, her eyes growing wary.

“What once was a silly fad is lately considered to be a form of Janusism.”

Kitty and Varenka gasped, and Tatiana in shock clapped a pink-clad metal hand before her mouth. Madame Stahl offered no reply to the prince. Instead she turned a cold eye to Kitty, apologized that she was not feeling well and there would be no ceremony tonight. Then she snapped her fingers, and Varenka dragged her from the room.

Kitty turned to her father and objected hotly to this treatment of her new mentor.

“Do not be cross with me, dear,” replied the Prince. “I only warn her as a caution, though I cannot pretend I did not take some pleasure in spoiling her fun.”

“Oh, Papa! How can you be so mocking? Varenka worships her.”

“Of course she does. And I suppose she has told you how the relations between Class IIIs and humans are against the good principles of xenotheologism? You might ask her, or her poor Varenka, how it can be thought more moral to treat fellow human beings as if they were the robots-or, to use the ancient word, servants.”

“But she does so much good! Ask anyone! Everyone knows her!”

“Perhaps so,” said the prince, squeezing her hand with his elbow, “but it’s better when one does good so that you may ask everyone and no one knows.”

Kitty did not answer, not because she had nothing to say, but because she did not care to reveal her secret thoughts even to her father. But, strange to say, although she had so made up her mind not to be influenced by her father’s views, not to let him into her inmost sanctuary, she felt that the heavenly image of Madame Stahl, which she had carried for a whole month in her heart, had vanished, never to return, just as the fantastic figure made up of some clothes thrown down at random vanishes when one sees that it is only some garment lying there. All that was left was a woman with short legs, who worried patient Varenka for not arranging her rug to her liking. And by no effort of the imagination could Kitty bring back the former Madame Stahl.

And nor was it necessary to do so, as four days later, the rumors the prince had heard on the Venusian colony were proved true in the most shocking way. Madame Stahl was arrested by the shipboard troop of 77s, denounced as a heretic and a traitor to Mother Russia; but the rumor on the orbiter was that the Ministry, having discovered that there may actually be aliens in the far reaches of the universe, ruled that those fervently awaiting their arrival were not religious fanatics, but conspirators with a potential enemy.

Kitty was devastated that this person she had come to love, even to worship, in such a short time, could turn out to be a Janus. With Varenka holding onto one trembling arm and Tatiana onto the other, she went to watch the sentence carried out; Madame Stahl struggled as she was lifted from her wheelbarrow and dragged all the way down the long hallway that led to the portal. She struggled as she was stripped of her clothing and bound head and feet. She struggled and wept as she was shoved into the exit dock, and the airlock was shut behind her. She pounded on the interior door as the exterior door was opened from within by remote telegraphy, and she screamed, wordlessly, as her body was launched into the cold vastness of the void. At last, as Kitty watched, weeping, from the bay window of the orbiter, Madame Stahl stopped screaming, stopped crying, and her body became entirely still, floating rapidly away into echoing black eternity.

After that solemn event, all the world in which she had been living was transformed for Kitty. She did not give up everything she had learned, but she became aware that she had deceived herself in supposing she could be what she wanted to be. Her eyes were, it seemed, opened; she felt all the difficulty of maintaining herself without hypocrisy and self-conceit on the pinnacle that she had wished to mount. Moreover, she became aware of all the dreariness of the world of sorrow, of sick and dying people, in which she had been living. The efforts she had made to like it seemed to her intolerable, and she felt a longing to get back quickly into the fresh air, to Russia, to Ergushovo, where, as she knew from letters, her sister Dolly had already gone with her children.

But her affection for Varenka did not wane. As she said good-bye, Kitty begged her to come to them in Russia.

“I’ll come when you get married,” said Varenka.

“I shall never marry.”

“Well, then, I shall never come.”

“Well, then, I shall be married simply for that. Mind now, remember your promise,” said Kitty.

The doctor’s prediction was fulfilled. Kitty returned home to Russia cured. She was not so gay and thoughtless as before, but she was serene. Her Moscow troubles had become a memory to her.