* * *
The Higher Branches of the Ministry, led by Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, now unquestionably their dominant figure, moved forward with the momentous Project: the collection of all Class III robots to undergo “adjustments,” the precise nature of which were still a great mystery to the public in general, who would be affected. Softening the blow was the civil and decorous manner of the young officers assigned to enact the adjustment provision; reportedly recruited from the highest ranks of the Caretakers, these young men soon became known as Toy Soldiers, what with their neatly pressed blue uniforms and slim black boots. In pairs or groups of three they appeared on doorsteps all over the country, inquiring respectfully whether any Class III robots were among the household. With handheld Class I devices they diligently recorded the names and generational information of each beloved-companion, and carefully provided a receipt before the machine was loaded in the back of a coach.
Anyone who thought to question the Toy Soldiers as to the precise nature of the planned circuitry “adjustments” was told firmly but with gentleness that such concerns were the responsibility of the Ministry, and wouldn’t we all do well to put our trust in our leaders? In general, this response was considered satisfactory, and the people accepted their receipts and bade calm farewell to their Class Ills.
Even Stepan Arkadyich Oblonsky, whose beloved-companion Small Stiva flashed his usually cheerful eyebank tremulously as he was led away, waved merrily and called out, “Never fear, little Samovar. I shall see you again soon.” Stepan Arkadyich tried mightily, by dint of a peculiar internal ability he cherished, to block out unpleasant thoughts and associations, to forget what he had seen in Karenin’s basement office in the Moscow Tower. There could be no connection, he assured himself, between Karenin’s strange experiments and what was happening now. “Wouldn’t we all do well to put our trust in our leaders?” he chastened his tearful wife, Darya Alexandrovna, as her kind and matronly Dolichka was led away.
“Wouldn’t we?”
CHAPTER 2
THE GEARS OF LIFE turned and turned again, ever forward, and in time the anxious confusion surrounding the departure of Small Stiva and Dolichka was replaced in the household of Oblonsky by joyful anticipation, as preparations began for the wedding of Dolly’s sister, Kitty Shcherbatskaya, to Stepan’s oldest friend, Konstantin Dmitrich Levin.
When they arrived at the church, a crowd of people, principally women, was thronging round the church lighted up for the wedding. Those who had not succeeded in getting into the main entrance were crowding about the windows, pushing, wrangling, and peeping through the gratings.
More than twenty carriages had already been drawn up in ranks along the street by the Class II police robots, their bronze weather-protected outercoating primed against the rusting frost. More carriages were continually driving up, and ladies wearing flowers and carrying their trains, and men taking off their helmets or black hats kept walking into the church. The church windows, programmed for the occasion by a highly sought-after display gadgeteer, glowed brightly with the life of the Savior, one luminously delineated scene shifting seamlessly into the next. This ornate display, along with the gilt on the red background of the holy picture-stand, the silver of the lusters, and the stones of the floor, and the rugs, and the banners above in the choir, the steps of the altar, the cassocks and surplices—all were flooded with light.
The only thing missing was the loving couple. Every time there was heard the creak of the opened door, the conversation in the crowd died away, and everybody looked round expecting to see the bride and bridegroom come in. But the door had opened more than ten times, and each time it was either a belated guest or guests, who joined the circle of the invited on the right, or a spectator, who had eluded the II/Policeman/56s, and went to join the crowd of outsiders on the left. The Galena Box sent its waves of oscillation through the room, but was proving insufficient to dampen the mood of confused anxiety; both the guests and the outside public had by now passed through all the phases of anticipation. The long delay began to be positively discomforting, and relations and guests tried to look as if they were not thinking of the bridegroom but were engrossed in conversation.
At last one of the ladies, glancing at her I/Hourprotector/8, said, “It really is strange, though!” and all the guests became uneasy and began loudly expressing their wonder and dissatisfaction.
Kitty meanwhile had long ago been quite ready, and in her white dress and long veil and wreath of orange blossoms she was standing in the drawing room of the Shcherbatskys’ house. Beside her was her pink-flushed Class III, Tatiana, one of the last beloved-companions left in Moscow. Kitty had been allowed to forestall her Class III’s collection for “adjustment” until after the wedding, thanks to the intercession of her father, Prince Shcherbatsky with a childhood friend who sat on the Higher Branches. (“A girl cannot be wed without the soothful presence of her Class III,” the prince had pleaded; meanwhile, all across Russia, less well-connected brides were somehow making do.) Tatiana was looking out of the window, and had been for more than half an hour piping a soft and calming lullaby from her Third Bay, to keep her mistress from becoming too anxious that her bridegroom was not yet at the church.
Levin meanwhile, in his trousers, but without his coat and waistcoat, was walking to and fro in his room at the hotel, with Socrates pacing directly behind him, his beard clanking. (He, too, had been granted a reprieve, exhausting the favors due to the old prince). Man and machine took turns poking their heads out of the door and looking up and down the corridor. But in the corridor there was no sign of the Class II who had been dispatched to bring Levin his shirtfront, which had been forgotten. The shirtfront had been left at home by Levin’s best man, Stepan Arkadyich, who placed the blame on Small Stiva—or rather, the absence of Small Stiva. Oblonsky had assumed that his beloved-companion, ever mindful of such details, would bring the necessary accoutrements, and it slipped his mind entirely that his dear friend was by now at a Robot Processing Facility in Vladivostok, in deep Surcease with his mechanical guts splayed out on a workbench.
While Socrates frantically paced, Levin addressed Stepan Arkadyich, who was smoking serenely.
“Was ever a man in such a fearful fool’s position?” he said.
“Yes, it is stupid, and I feel awful,” Stepan Arkadyich assented, smiling soothingly. “I’m a simple block of wood without my Little Samovar. But don’t worry, it’ll be brought directly.”
“No, what is to be done!” said Levin, with smothered fury. “What if it’s been lost?”
“It’s not been lost,” reassured Stepan Arkadyich.
“It may have been lost. Yes, probably it’s lost,” intoned Socrates.
“That is not helpful,” said Stepan Arkadyich with a glare suggesting a wish that Socrates, too, were in a Vladivostok R.P.F. Addressing himself to Levin, he said: “Just wait a bit! It will come round.”
And so while the bridegroom was expected at the church, he was pacing about his room like a caged Huntbear, peeping out into the corridor, and with horror and despair recalling what absurd things he had said to Kitty and what she might be thinking now.
At last the II/Runner/470 zipped into the room with the shirt held aloft from a pincer, like a dog with a bagged quail. Three minutes later Levin ran full speed into the corridor not looking at his I/Hourprotector/8 for fear of aggravating his sufferings.
“It’s eleven thirty. . . ,” moaned Socrates, motoring quickly behind him. “eleven thirty-one! We are very late, very late indeed!”
“Not helpful,” sighed Stepan Arkadyich as he tossed his cigarette into an ashtray, where it sputtered, hissed, and disappeared. “Not helpful at all.”
CHAPTER 3
“THEY’VE COME!” “Here he is!” “Which one? The tall yellow robot?” “No, fool! The robot’s master!” “Rather young, eh?” were the comments in the crowd, when Levin at last walked with Socrates into the church.
Stepan Arkadyich told his wife the
cause of the delay, and the guests were whispering it with smiles to one another. Levin saw nothing and no one; he did not take his eyes off his bride as she walked up the aisle toward him.
Everyone said she had lost her looks dreadfully of late, and was not nearly so pretty on her wedding day as usual; but Levin did not think so. He looked at her hair done up high, with the long white veil and white flowers and the high, stand-up, scalloped collar, her strikingly slender figure, and it seemed to him that she looked better than ever—not because her beauty was accented by these flowers, this veil, this gown from Paris, and by the gentle pink backlight shed by Tatiana—but because, in spite of the elaborate sumptuousness of her attire, the expression of her sweet face, of her eyes, of her lips was still her own characteristic expression of guileless truthfulness.
“I was beginning to think you meant to run away,” she said, and smiled at him.
“It’s so stupid, what happened to me, I’m ashamed to speak of it!” he said, reddening.
Dolly came up, tried to say something, but could not speak, cried, and then laughed unnaturally. She was more affected than she had anticipated by the absence of Dolichka. How perfectly ridiculous, she thought, to have no nimble metal fingers to hand her tissues, no strong metal shoulder to lean on, at her own sister’s wedding!
Kitty looked at her, and at all the guests, with the same absent eyes as Levin.
Meanwhile the officiating clergy had gotten into their vestments, and the priest and deacon came out to the lectern, which stood in the forepart of the church. The priest turned to Levin saying something, but it was a long while before Levin could make out what was expected of him. For a long time they tried to set him right and made him begin again—because he kept taking Kitty by the wrong arm or with the wrong arm—till he understood at last that what he had to do was, without changing his position, to take her right hand in his right hand. When at last he had taken the bride’s hand in the correct way, the priest walked a few paces in front of them and stopped at the lectern. The crowd of friends and relations moved after them, with a buzz of talk and a rustle of skirts. Someone stooped down and pulled out the bride’s train. The church became so still that one could hear the faint buzz of the I/Lumiére/7s in their sconces.
All eyes were fixed upon the altar, and no one noticed that outside the church, the II/Policeman/56s were motoring in arbitrary circles, periodically colliding harmlessly, a sure sign of having been severely, and purposefully, maltuned.
The little old priest in his ecclesiastical cap, with his long, silverygray locks of hair parted behind his ears, was fumbling with something at the lectern. “Drat it, Saint Peter, where’d’ya keep the things?” he muttered in frustration; but while the church’s sacramental robot had been permitted to remain in its place at the altar, its analytical core had been removed for the Ministry’s adjustment. At last the priest put out his little old hands from under the heavy silver vestment with the gold cross on the back of it.
“A GIRL CANNOT BE WED WITHOUT THE SOOTHFUL PRESENCE OF HER CLASS III,” THE PRINCE HAD PLEADED
The priest initiated two I/Lumiére/7s, wreathed with flowers, and faced the bridal pair. He looked with weary and melancholy eyes at the bride and bridegroom, sighed, and putting his right hand out from his vestment, blessed the bridegroom with it, and also with a shade of solicitous tenderness laid the crossed fingers on the bowed head of Kitty. Then he gave them the lumiéres, and taking the censer, moved slowly away from them.
“Can it be true?” thought Levin, and he looked round at his bride. Looking down at her he saw her face in profile, and from the scarcely perceptible quiver of her lips and eyelashes he knew she was aware of his eyes upon her.
She did not look round, but the high, scalloped collar, which reached her little pink ear, trembled faintly. He saw that a sigh was held back in her throat, and the little hand in the long glove shook as it held the thin illuminated Class I.
All the fuss of the shirt, of being late, all the talk of friends and relations, their annoyance, his ludicrous position—all suddenly passed away and he was filled with joy and dread.
It was that precise cocktail of strong feeling that triggered the first of the emotion bombs.
It exploded with pinpoint precision beneath the seat of a single parishioner, an elderly second cousin of Kitty’s seated in the third pew from the back. The blast unleashed all the destructive force of a traditional explosion, but all concentrated on this one unfortunate soul, furiously vibrating every molecule in his body and turning his insides to a gelatinous paste. So precise was this terrible blast of force, however, that even the parishioners to the left and right of the man did not realize what had transpired, that the wedding was suddenly under attack by agents of UnConSciya. The wedding guest simply slumped forward in his seat, and might have been sleeping: an impolite but hardly shocking action by an elderly man at a church service.
“Blessed be the name of the Lord,” the solemn syllables rang out slowly one after another, as the priest intoned the liturgy, setting the air quivering with waves of sound. The brains of the murdered second cousin, essentially turned to liquid, leaked slowly from his ears.
“Blessed is the name of our God, from the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,” the little old priest said in a submissive, piping voice, still fingering something at the lectern. And the full chorus of the unseen choir rose up, filling the whole church, from the windows to the vaulted roof, drowning out a lone woman’s panicked shrieking from the back of the church.
“This man is dead! My God, what has—what’s happened?!”
A second emotion bomb ignited, this time beneath a young peasant woman with her head wrapped in colorful scarves—like the elderly relative, she collapsed in her place, her insides instantly emulsified.
The triumphant and praiseful sound of the choir grew ever stronger, and joy and mystery swelled in the bosoms of Levin and his bride, amplifying the danger for all present. The officiants prayed, as they always do, for peace from on high and for salvation; for the long life of the Higher Branches they prayed; and for the servants of God, Konstantin and Ekaterina, now pledging their troth. The closer the liturgy drew to the fateful moment, when Kitty and Levin would together enter the mysterious country of matrimonial connection, the more palpable was the bubbling admixture of dread and joy in their respective hearts; and with every upswell of that queer emotional tide, more of the quiet, precise bombs went off, each one more brutally effective than the last. Kitty and Levin stared into each other’s eyes, lost in tender feeling and contemplation of their intertwined fates, as the grim toll of their love grew every second.
“Vouchsafe to them love made perfect, peace and help, O Lord, we beseech Thee,” came the voice of the head deacon. Levin heard the words, and they impressed him.
“How did they guess that it is help, just help that one wants?” he whispered to Socrates, who stood faithfully at his elbow.
“Help!” cried Princess Shcherbatskaya. “My Lord, help!” Her sister, Kitty’s aunt, had suddenly jerked in her seat, twisted her body unnaturally, and tumbled forward into the princess’s lap. Levin and Kitty wheeled around from the altar, at last to behold the bedlam unfolding around them: a horror becoming worse every moment, as dread-joy bombs went off like celebratory I/Flashpop/4s at a child’s birthday party. Kitty screamed, her hands clutching at the side of her face in horror, as another explosion—no longer silent, indeed, louder than a sky full of thunder—shattered the electronically programmed window, sending shards of Savior-emblazoned glass raining down.
The first decisive action to stem the tide of violence came from the two beloved-companion robots. In a single smooth gambol, Tatiana tackled her mistress to the ground and arched backward into a bridge to protect her from the hail of glass. Socrates, plucking a well-worn physiometer from the tangle of tools in his beard, waded into the crowd to begin triage, and Levin could only rush to keep up.
“Why does it continue?” Kitty shouted to Levin, a
s he and his faithful machine-man surveyed the damage and tended to the wailing wounded. “If this is an emotion bombing”—for such was the only logical conclusion—“and if the bombs are fed by our joy at entering the blessed state of marriage, then why have they not stopped, now that our happiness is entirely subsumed?” Tatiana, meanwhile, with fluttering phalangeals deflected a fresh rain of glass and splintered wood.
Levin smiled despite himself. What a woman! How clever she is, to make such an astute analysis amid such dreadful circumstances. “Oh, God,” he said in sudden horror. “It’s me. I am happy! Heavenly Father, forgive me, but I am happy! I look at her, and even in such straits I cannot help it: I love her, and I feel joy!”
As if in grim confirmation of Levin’s realization, at the moment he uttered the word “joy” a blast rattled the back of the hall.
He looked about him in horror, marveling at the power of his love, trying and failing to squelch its power in his breast; and then Kitty lunged at him, her gown of lush white and lace billowing out behind her, clawing feverishly at his eyes and pulling viciously at his beard. Levin, shocked, covered his head against the onslaught, and, in that wild, pained instant, he was so surprised at her assault that his love for Kitty transformed into its opposite.
“Stop it,” he shouted at his beloved. “For God’s sake, stop! Are you insane?”
He grasped her wrists to cease the onslaught; she collapsed, spent, against his chest, weeping. Socrates looked up, beeping questioningly in the sudden hush that followed.
For as Konstantin Dmitrich’s joy waned, so had the attack. The emotion bombs were silenced and the devastated church grew silent and terribly still, but for the moaning and weeping of the wounded.
“She is a very capable woman,” said Socrates, admiringly.
Leo Tolstoy & Ben Winters Page 31
