by Leo Tolstoy
Seeing her, he found himself face to face with one of the pictures of his daydream of family life.
“You’re like a hen with your chickens, Darya Alexandrovna.”
“Ah, how glad I am to see you!” she said, holding out her hand to him.
“Glad to see me, but you didn’t let me know. I got a communiqué from Stiva that you were here.”
“From Stiva?” Dolly asked with surprise.
“Yes. He said that you are here, and that he thinks you might allow me to be of use to you,” said Levin. He was embarrassed through a sense that Darya Alexandrovna would be annoyed by receiving from an outsider help that should by rights have come from her own husband.
Dolly certainly did not like this little way of Stepan Arkadyich’s of foisting his domestic duties on others. But she was at once aware that Levin was aware of this. It was for just this fineness of perception, for this delicacy, that she liked Levin.
And his usefulness to her was immediately proved apparent, when in the next instant the carriage in which Dolly and her children were riding rose ten feet up into the air, as if borne aloft on the crest of a geyser. Levin and Socrates stared upward to where the vehicle was balanced on the frontal section of a hideous wormlike beast, like an earthworm swelled to an unnatural size. As Levin and Socrates tried to conceive of the provenance of such a creature, the carriage fell with a bone-rattling bang from the heights to which the thing had borne it. The children, unhurt but wildly terrified, screamed and huddled in their mother’s skirts, while the creature turned its frontal portion toward Levin; he saw now its toothless chasm of a mouth, the dark indentations in lieu of eyes, the entire absence of a nose. But most of all that mouth-a gray and puckering maw, smacking wetly, a physical incarnation of the idea of appetite. The upper portion of the long body writhed balefully, with the lower half still hidden from view, only in part emerged from the earth.
A sound accompanied the motion of the beast, a repetitive mechanical click, tikka tikka tikka tikka tikka…
“It is like a… like a…” Levin began, speaking over this insistent tattoo, his mind turning wildly.
“A koschei, master,” said Socrates, fumbling in his beard for some weapon with which to confront the apparition. “Like an enormous koschei.”
There was no more time to speak, as the worm darted suddenly downward. Levin leapt backward, but too late: The puckering ring of the thing’s mouth closed around his thigh. Most shocking to Levin in this moment was that what he felt tightening around his upper leg was not the disturbing, clammy warmth of worm flesh, but the sharp, cold bite of metal.
Socrates shouted, “Master!” and leapt to his side, while in the carriage Dolly and the children shrieked and wept.
Levin slapped roughly at the face of the beast with his riding crop, estimating from the dark indentations where its eyes might be. He slashed a scar into the face, and some kind of bright-yellow muck poured forth from of the wound; the smell was not like that of any bodily fluid, but more like…
“Humectant,” blared Socrates, waving the chemometer he had pulled from his cluster of machinery. “Our foe is definitively inorganic.”
Whatever it was, the monster still had Levin’s leg caught in its maw, even as it had had fully emerged from its hole in the dirt, unspooling to some fifteen yards in length. Socrates grasped it at its midpoint and tugged with the full strength of his groznium arms. With a hideous screeching noise the worm tore in two, and more of the bright-yellow goo sprayed forth, before, in a matter of seconds, the wound cleanly stitched itself closed, a new mouth formed on what had been the rear portion of the beast, and now there were two of the writhing things. The second one rapidly wriggled free from Socrates’ end-effectors and into the coach with Dolly and the children.
“Sorry,” Socrates muttered, as the horrid tikka tikka tikka doubled in volume, approaching now a near-deafening level.
“I do not understand,” shouted Levin above the din, kicking at the head of the beast with his one free foot. “The Higher Branches declared that all koschei had been flushed from the countryside.”
“And surely this thing is too big to be a koschei!” added Dolly from the carriage, where she stomped at the segmented, gray body of the worm with one boot heel.
Dolly’s youngest boy Grisha crept silently forth from the backseat of the carriage and reactivated his Class I plaything, determined in the naive and valiant way of children to play what part he could in fending off this attack. He aimed the toy at the eyes of the creature and pressed the trigger to activate a sudden and powerful flash of light; the effect was instantaneous and gratifying-like a mole recoiling from the glare of sunlight, the worm-like machine-monster hissed, writhed away, and spun back toward the safety of its underground warren from which it had emerged.
“Why, Grisha!” said Dolly. Levin, meanwhile, still caught in the maw of the original of the two worm-beasts, called out to his beloved-companion. “Socrates!” he hollered. “Would you mind terribly…”
The tall and angular Class III, however, was already in motion, grabbing out of his beard a I/Flashpop of exactly the sort Grisha had used, only vastly more powerful. The burst of irradiation the device subsequently dispensed sent the first worm skittering after its mate, back into the hole-and left a dread silence in its wake, the rattling click at last stilled. It left, too, Konstantin Levin clutching at his bruised leg, Dolly and her family heaving great breaths of exhaustion and relief, and Socrates scouring the dirt for whatever evidence he could find of what, exactly, they had just encountered.
As the carriage resumed its slow progress back to Ergushovo, Levin and Socrates rode beside, discussing the possible provenance of the strange, wormlike attack-robots. The obvious answer was that these were simply a new model of koschei, more powerful than any UnConSciya had previously unleashed-but something about that answer felt dissatisfying to Levin, and Socrates with his higher-level analytical functionality agreed. Could the smaller, more typical wormlike koschei have grown somehow? But what could have caused them to do so?
“Well, whatever has set this unholy machine upon us,” Dolly put in, “I am certainly glad that you were here to act in our defense.”
“Of course,” said Levin, “Though your Grisha seemed more than up to the challenge!”
The youngest of Dolly’s brood beamed his pleasure at the compliment. The children knew Levin very little, and could not remember when they had seen him, but they experienced in regard to him none of that strange feeling of shyness and hostility that children so often experience toward hypocritical, grown-up people, and for which they are so often and miserably punished. Hypocrisy in anything whatsoever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wideawake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised. Whatever faults Levin had, there was not a trace of hypocrisy in him, and so the children showed him the same friendliness that they saw in their mother’s face.
Here, in the country, with children, and with Darya Alexandrovna and her plump, matronly Class III, Dolichka, Levin was in a mood, not infrequent with him, of childlike light-heartedness that she particularly liked in him. After dinner, Dolly, sitting alone with him on the balcony, began to speak of Kitty.
“You know, Kitty’s coming here, and is going to spend the summer with me.”
“Really,” he said, flushing, and at once, to change the conversation, he said: “Then I’ll send you a new cow, shall I? I heard from Stiva you had a bit of trouble with your II/MilkExtractor/47. If you insist on a bill you shall pay me five rubles a month; but you really shouldn’t.”
“No, thank you. We can manage very well now.”
And Levin, to turn the conversation, explained to Dolly the theory of cow-keeping, based on the principle that the cow is simply a kind of machine, designed for the transformation of food into milk, and so on.
He talked of this, and passionately longed to hear more of Kitty, and, at the same time, was afraid of hea
ring it. He dreaded the breaking up of the inward peace he had gained with such effort.
“Yes, but still all this has to be looked after, and who is there to look after it?” Dolly responded, without interest.
“Pardon,” interrupted Socrates, and they all turned to look at the robot; under the weight of their collective stare, he absently began flicking a switch on his hip assembly, on and off, on and off. “I have been running a full analysis on the matter of the worm-beast. I cannot compute: If it is true that the creature we encountered is but a larger version of the koschei that have previously infested the land-for what reason? Why would a simple UnConSciya device grow to such a size? And… how?”
“Oh dear!” said Dolichka.
And, thought Levin, loathe to float such a possibility within the hearing of Darya Alexandrovna and her her children, or even to Socrates, can it be that there are other things the Ministry is hiding from us?
CHAPTER 4
KITTY REPORTS IN HER LATEST communiqué that there’s nothing she longs for so much as quiet and solitude,” Dolly said.
“And how is she-better?” Levin asked in agitation.
“Thank God, she’s quite well again. I never believed her lungs were affected.”
“Oh, I’m very glad!” said Levin, and Dolly fancied she saw something touching, helpless, in his face as he said this and looked silently into her face.
“Let me ask you, Konstantin Dmitrich,” she said then, smiling her kindly and rather mocking smile, “why is it you are angry with Kitty?”
“I? I’m not angry with her,” said Levin.
“Yes, you are angry. Why was it you did not come to see us or them when you were in Moscow?”
“Darya Alexandrovna,” he said, blushing up to the roots of his hair, “I wonder really that with your kind heart you don’t feel this. How it is you feel no pity for me, if nothing else, when you know…”
“What do I know?”
“You know I made an offer and that I was refused,” said Levin, and all the tenderness he had been feeling for Kitty a minute before was replaced by a feeling of anger for the slight he had suffered.
Dolly traded expressions of mock astonishment with Dolichka.
“What makes you suppose I know?”
“Because everybody knows it…”
“That’s just where you are mistaken; I did not know it, though I had guessed it was so.”
“Well, now you know it.”
“All I knew was that something had happened that made Kitty dreadfully miserable, and that she begged me never to speak of it, and then they left to orbit Venus. And if she would not tell me, she would certainly not speak of it to anyone else. But what did pass between you? Tell me.”
“I have told you.”
“When was it?”
“When I was at their house the last time.”
“Do you know that,” said Darya Alexandrovna, “I am awfully, awfully sorry for her. You suffer only from pride…”
“Perhaps so,” said Levin, “but-”
She interrupted him.
“But she, poor girl… I am awfully, awfully sorry for her. Now I see it all.”
“Well, Darya Alexandrovna, you must excuse me,” he said, getting up and signaling to Socrates his readiness to depart.
“No, wait a minute,” she said, clutching him by the sleeve, as tears came into her eyes. “Wait a minute, sit down. If I did not like you, and if I did not know you, as I do know you…”
The feeling that had seemed dead revived more and more, rose up and took possession of Levin’s heart.
“Yes, I understand it all now,” Dolly said. “You can’t understand it; for you men, who are free and make your own choice, it’s always clear whom you love. But a girl’s in a position of suspense, with all a woman’s or maiden’s modesty, a girl who sees you men from afar, who takes everything on trust-a girl may have, and often has, such a feeling that she cannot tell what to say.”
“Yes, if the heart does not speak…”
“No, but I mean even when the heart does speak! You mean, you make an offer when your love is ripe or when the balance has completely turned between the two you are choosing from. But a girl is not asked. She is expected to make her choice, and yet she cannot choose, she can only answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”
Yes, to choose between me and Vronsky, thought Levin, and the dead thing that had come to life within him died again, and weighed on his heart and set it aching. Socrates, with an uncharacteristic gesture of physical tenderness, placed a comforting arm across his master’s hunched and agitated shoulders as Levin recalled Kitty’s words. She had said: “No, that cannot be…“
“Darya Alexandrovna,” he said dryly, “I appreciate your confidence in me, but I believe you are making a mistake. But whether I am right or wrong, that pride you so despise makes any thought of Katerina Alexandrovna out of the question for me, you understand, utterly out of the question.”
“I will only say one thing more,” Dolly said. “You know that I am speaking of my sister, whom I love as I love my own children. I don’t say she cared for you; all I meant to say is that her refusal at that moment proves nothing.”
“I don’t know!” said Levin, jumping up. “If you only knew how you are hurting me. It’s just as if a child of yours were dead, and they were to say to you: He might have been like this, or like that, and if you could travel back in time… but man cannot travel in time! The experiment has been attempted and abandoned, so what is the use of imagining!”
“How absurd you are!” said Dolly, looking with mournful tenderness at Levin’s excitement. “Yes, I see it all more and more clearly,” she went on musingly. “So you won’t come to see us, then, when Kitty’s here?”
“No, I shan’t come. Of course I won’t avoid meeting Katerina Alexandrovna, but as far as I can, I will try to save her the annoyance of my presence.”
“You are very, very absurd,” Dolly repeated, looking with tenderness into his face.
Levin and Socrates said good-bye and drove away while Dolly and her beloved-companion bade them farewell from the front yard of the house at Ergushovo. Before she turned back into the house Dolly paused, her hands frozen at her hips, as she listened to a faint but distinct noise from the middle distance:
Tikka tikka tikka.
Tikka tikka tikka. Tikkatikkatikkatikka…
“Oh dear oh dear,” said Dolichka, and Dolly murmured her agreement. “Oh dear, indeed.”
CHAPTER 5
WELL, WHAT AM I GOING to do with my life?” said Levin to Socrates the next morning, as they joined a team of peasants, delivering a freshly excavated batch of ore to the smeltworks. “How am I to set about it?”
He was trying to express to his Class III the range of ideas and emotions he had passed through since their visit to Dolly and her family. Socrates, employing his advanced circuits for logic, sorted all his master’s thoughts and feelings into a thought matrix for him. Thought Category A was the renunciation of his old life, of his utterly useless education. This renunciation gave Levin satisfaction, and was easy and simple. Thought Category B was a series of mental images related to the life he longed to live now. The simplicity, the purity, the sanity of this life he felt clearly, and he was convinced he would find in it the content, the peace, and the dignity, of the lack of which he was so miserably conscious.
But Thought Category C turned upon the question of how to effect this transition from the old life to the new. And there nothing took clear shape for him. Socrates, in his efficient and meticulous way, rapidly divided and subdivided the possibilities:
POSSIBILITY 1. Have a wife?
POSSIBILITY 2. Have work and the necessity of work?
POSSIBILITY 3. Leave Provokovskoe?
POSSIBILITY 4. Buy land?
POSSIBILITY 5. Become a member of a peasant community?
POSSIBILITY 6. Marry a peasant girl?
“But how am I to set about such things?” Levin said confusedly in reply, a
nd Socrates’ logistical circuits set busily back to work.
“Never mind, never mind,” Levin said then. “I’ll work it out later. One thing’s certain, this night has decided my fate. All my old dreams of home life were absurd.”
“Absurd,” Socrates seconded reluctantly, not wishing to confirm such a dismal verdict, but unwilling also to contradict his master in such a mood.
“It’s all ever so much simpler and better to… to…”
“Master?”
“How beautiful!” Levin exclaimed, and Socrates tilted back his head unit to take in the sight: a daylight meteor shower, with dozens of golden-red stars dancing in their turns across the clear blue sky. “How exquisite a sight on this exquisite morning! And when and how do such things come to be! Just now I looked at the sky, and there was nothing in it-just the clouds and the gentle glow of the sun. And now, this display of stunning beauty! Yes, and so imperceptibly too my views of life changed!”
Shrinking from the cold, Levin walked rapidly, looking at the ground. “What’s that? Someone’s coming,” he said suddenly, catching the tinkle of bells, and lifting his head.
“At forty paces, master… there…”
Indeed, at forty paces, a carriage harnessed to a four-treaded Puller was driving toward him along the grassy road on which he was walking. The treads were shallow, designed primarily for city travel rather than the countryside, but the dexterous Class II driver held a careful hand on the shaft, so that the treads stayed on the smooth part of the road.
This was all Levin noticed, and without wondering who it could be, he gazed absently at the coach.
In the coach was an old lady dozing in one corner, and at the window, evidently only just awake, sat, perfectly still, a young girl holding in both hands the ribbons of a white cap. With a face entirely absent of thought or attention she stared out the window of the carriage. Levin realized that this girl was hibernating, in the state of chemically induced suspended animation into which ill people are commonly placed to better bear the rigors of the journey to and from an orbital.
