She heard the bell ring before she was ready. When she went into the drawing room it was not he, but Yashvin, who met her eyes. Vronsky was watching the Memory of Sergey, and he made no haste to look round at her.
“We have met already,” she said, putting her little hand into the huge hand of Yashvin, whose bashfulness was so queerly out of keeping with his immense frame and coarse face. “We met last year at The Cull. Shut that off,” she said, indicating sharply to Android Karenina to dim the Memory, and glancing significantly at Vronsky’s flashing eyes. “Were the matches good this year?”
Having talked a little while, and noticing that Vronsky glanced at the clock, Yashvin asked her whether she would be staying much longer in Petersburg, and unbending his huge figure reached after his cap.
“Not long, I think,” she said hesitatingly, glancing at Vronsky.
“So then we shan’t meet again?”
“Come and dine with me,” said Anna resolutely, angry, it seemed, with herself for her embarrassment, but flushing as she always did when she defined her position before a fresh person. “The dinner here is not good, but at least you will see him. There is no one of his old friends in the regiment Alexei cares for as he does for you.”
“Delighted,” said Yashvin with a smile, from which Vronsky could see that he liked Anna very much.
Yashvin said good-bye and went away; Vronsky stayed behind.
“Are you going too?” she said to him.
“I’m late already,” he answered. “Run along! I’ll catch you up in a moment,” he called toYashvin.
She took him by the hand, and without taking her eyes off him, gazed at him while she ransacked her mind for the words to say that would keep him.
“Wait a minute, there’s something I want to say to you,” and taking his broad hand she pressed it on her neck. “Oh, was it right my asking him to dinner?”
“You did quite right,” he said with a serene smile that showed his even teeth, and he kissed her hand.
“Alexei, Petersburg is strange now—it is lonely and strange without the Class Ills,” she said, pressing his hand in both of hers. “Soon ours will be taken from us as well. We will be safer in the provinces, Alexei, safer and happier.”
“I cannot agree with you, dear, given what Yashvin was telling me only just before you came in. These aliens, these so-called Honored Guests, rampage everywhere outside the cities; they say that now, when a person falls ill, his family packs up and flees as rapidly as possible, because soon a large, beaked reptile with dozens of eyeballs will burst forth from inside him and join the hordes. Yashvin says it is quickly becoming very like a full-scale invasion, and speaks as though the provinces will soon be entirely overrun.”
“Alexei, I am miserable, and scared. Where can we go? And when?”
“Soon, soon. You wouldn’t believe how disagreeable our way of living here is to me too,” he said—but then he drew away his hand, and turned his face away.
He is happy that there are these aliens in the woods, she thought bitterly. Happy for a reason to keep us here.
“Well, go, go!” she said in a tone of offense, and she walked quickly away from him.
CHAPTER 17
AT DINNER, YASHVIN SPOKE of the sensational new opera then in residence at Petersburg’s grand Vox Fourteen; Anna, much to Vronsky’s alarm, determined that they should get a box for the evening. After dinner, Yashvin went to smoke, and Vronsky went down with him to his own rooms. After sitting there for some time he ran upstairs. Anna was already dressed in a low-necked gown of light silk and velvet that she had had made on the moon, and had set Android Karenina to a charming pearl-white glow that was particularly becoming.
“Are you really going to the theater?” he said, trying not to look at her.
“Why do you ask with such alarm?” she said, wounded again at his not looking at her. “Why shouldn’t I go?” She appeared not to understand the motive of his words.
“Oh, of course, there’s no reason whatever,” he said, frowning.
“That’s just what I say,” she said, willfully refusing to see the irony of his tone, and quietly turning back her long, perfumed glove.
“Anna, for God’s sake! What is the matter with you?” he said, exasperated.
“I don’t understand what you are asking.”
“You know that it’s out of the question to go.”
“Why so?”
He shrugged his shoulders with an air of perplexity and despair.
“But do you mean to say you don’t know . . .?” he began.
“But I don’t care to know!” she almost shrieked. “I don’t care to. Do I regret what I have done? No, no, no! If it were all to do again from the beginning, it would be the same. For us, for you and for me, there is only one thing that matters, whether we love each other. Other people we need not consider. Why can’t I go? I love you, and I don’t care for anything,” she said, glancing at him with a peculiar gleam in her eyes that he could not understand. “If you have not changed to me, why don’t you look at me?”
He looked at her. He saw all the beauty of her face, set against Android Karenina’s gentle pearl-white glow. But now her beauty and elegance were just what irritated him.
“My feeling cannot change, you know, but I beg you, I entreat you,” he said again in French, with a note of tender supplication in his voice, but with coldness in his eyes.
She did not hear his words, but she saw the coldness of his eyes, and answered with irritation:
“And I beg you to explain why I should not go.”
“Because . . . because . . .” He hesitated, and then grasped for an explanation which was not the true cause of his reluctance, but which nevertheless had the virtue of being quite true: “Because of Android Karenina! Flaunting yourself in public in the company of your Class III will only give your husband and his minions a perfect opportunity to subject her to his ridiculous circuitry adjustment program after all.”
“This is a risk I am willing to take,” she said, filled with spite toward him, toward Alexei Karenin, and toward their whole pitiful situation. Only her Class III did she love and hold blameless, and now she turned tenderly to Android Karenina. “A risk that we are willing to take. Aren’t we, my beloved-companion?”
In answer, Android Karenina flashed her eyebank tenderly at her mistress, and motored off behind her to the Vox Fourteen.
CHAPTER 18
VRONSKY FOR THE FIRST TIME experienced a feeling of anger against Anna, almost a hatred for her willfully refusing to understand her own position. This feeling was aggravated by his being unable to tell her plainly the cause of his anger. If he had told her directly what he was thinking, he would have said:
“In that dress, with that android-cast glow, to show yourself at the theater is not merely equivalent to acknowledging your position as a fallen woman, it is flinging down a challenge to society—that is to say, cutting yourself off from it forever.”
What Alexei Kirillovich could not yet understand was that such concerns simply did not matter any longer. After that night at the Vox Fourteen, a night that would be long remembered and long mourned by the people of Russia, he would understood much better.
Left alone in the wake of her departure, he finally got up from his chair and began pacing up and down the room.
“And what’s today?”
Lupo gave a gruff yelp, tilted his head, and scraped the hard wooden floor four times with his right front claw. “Yes, of course, the fourth night. Yegor and his wife are there, and my mother, most likely. Of course all Petersburg’s there. By now she’s gone in, taken off her cloak and come into the light.” Vronsky threw himself back into the chair and patted his lap for Lupo to leap into it. “What about me? What about us? Are we frightened? From every point of view—stupid, stupid! . . . And why is she putting me in such a position?” he said with a gesture of despair.
“Come, friend,” Vronsky snarled, and his fierce beloved-companion obeyed. “We’re goi
ng to the theater.”
When they arrived at the palatial Vox Fourteen it was half past eight and the performance was in full swing. The II/Boxkeeper/19, recognizing Vronsky as he peeled off his fur coat, called him “your Excellency.” In the brightly lighted corridor there was no one but the II/Boxkeeper/19 and two II/Attendant/77s listening at the doors. Through the closed doors came the sounds of the discreet staccato accompaniment of the orchestra, and a single female voice rendering distinctly a musical phrase. The door opened to let the Boxkeeper slide through, and the phrase drawing to the end reached Vronsky’s hearing clearly. But the doors were closed again at once, and Vronsky did not hear the end of the phrase and the cadence of the accompaniment, though he knew from the thunder of applause that it was over.
When he entered the Vox Fourteen, brilliantly lighted with I/Lumiére/7s and gas jets, the noise was still going on. On the stage the singer, bowing and smiling, with bare shoulders flashing with diamonds, was, with the help of the tenor who had given her his arm, gathering up the bouquets that were flying awkwardly over the footlights. Then she went up to a gentleman with glossy pomaded hair parted down the center, who was stretching across the footlights holding out something to her, and all the public in the stalls as well as in the boxes was in excitement, craning forward, shouting and clapping. The conductor from his podium assisted in passing the offering, and straightened his white tie. Vronsky walked into the middle of the stalls, and, standing still, began looking about him. His attention turned upon the familiar, habitual surroundings, the stage, the noise, all the familiar, uninteresting, particolored herd of spectators in the packed theater. There were no Class Ills. No beloved-companions lounging at their master’s elbows, shedding flattering light, fetching spectacles and lighting cigarettes. All these people—the uniforms and black coats, the dirty crowd in the upper gallery, and in the boxes and front rows, the real people, the people of society—but not a robot moving among them.
Or so it appeared to Count Vronsky.
He had not yet seen Anna. He purposely avoided looking in her direction. But he knew by the direction of people’s eyes where she was. He looked round discreetly, but he was not seeking her; expecting the worst, his eyes sought out Alexei Alexandrovich. To his relief he was not in the theater that evening.
“How little of the military man there is left in you!” his friend Serpuhovskoy was saying to him. “A diplomat, an artist, something of that sort, one would say.”
“Yes, it was like going back home when I put on a black coat,” answered Vronsky, smiling and with a few clicks activating his opera glass.
“Well, I’ll own I envy you there. When I come back from abroad and put on this,” he touched his epaulets, “I regret my freedom.”
Serpuhovskoy had long given up all hope of Vronsky’s career, but he liked him as before, and was now particularly cordial to him.
“What a pity you were not in time for the first act!”
Vronsky, listening with one ear, moved his opera glass from the stalls and scanned the boxes. Near a lady in a turban and a bald old man, who seemed to wave angrily in the moving opera glass, Vronsky suddenly caught sight of Anna’s head, proud, strikingly beautiful, with Android Karenina’s pearl glow casting intricate shadows through the lace of her collar. She was in the fifth box, twenty paces from him. She was sitting in front, and, slightly turning, was saying something to Yashvin. The setting of her head on her handsome, broad shoulders, the restrained excitement and brilliance of her eyes and her whole face reminded him of her just as he had seen her at the float in Moscow. But he felt utterly different toward her beauty now. In his feeling for her now there was no element of mystery, and so her beauty, though it attracted him even more intensely than before, gave him now a sense of injury. She was not looking in his direction, but Vronsky felt that she had seen him already.
When Vronsky turned the opera glass again in that direction, he noticed that Anna’s friend Princess Varvara was particularly red, and kept laughing unnaturally and looking round at the next box. Anna, de-telescoping her I/Fan/6 and tapping it on the red velvet, was gazing away and did not see, and obviously did not wish to see, what was taking place in the next box. Yashvin’s face wore the expression which was common when he was losing at cards. Scowling, he sucked the left end of his mustache further and further into his mouth, and cast sidelong glances at the next box.
In that box on the left were the Kartasovs Vronsky knew them, and knew that Anna was acquainted with them. Madame Kartasova, a thin little woman, was standing up in her box, and, her back turned upon Anna, she was putting on a mantle that her husband was holding for her. Her face was pale and angry, and she was talking excitedly. Kartasov, a fat, bald man, was continually looking round at Anna, while he attempted to soothe his wife. When the wife had gone out, the husband lingered a long while, and tried to catch Anna’s eye, obviously anxious to bow to her. But Anna, with unmistakable intention, avoided noticing him, and talked to Yashvin, whose cropped head was bent down to her.
Vronsky could not understand exactly what had passed between the Kartasovs and Anna, but he saw that something humiliating for Anna had happened. He knew this both from what he had seen, and most of all from the face of Anna, who, he could see, was taxing every nerve to carry through the part she had taken up. And in maintaining this attitude of external composure she was completely successful. Anyone who did not know her and her circle, who had not heard all the utterances of the women expressive of commiseration, indignation, and amazement, that she should show herself in society, and show herself so conspicuously with her lace and her beauty, and with the audacity to parade her Class III in such circumstances—anyone would have admired the serenity and loveliness of this woman, without suspecting that she was undergoing the sensations of a man in the stocks.
Knowing that something had happened, but not knowing precisely what, Vronsky felt a thrill of agonizing anxiety, and hoping to find out something, he went toward the box where she sat. Working his way through the aisles toward her, he jostled as he came out against the colonel of his regiment, talking to two strangers.
The colonel greeted him with genial familiarity, and hastened to introduce him to the others. The colonel’s companions were young, with neat hairstyles under regimental caps, high cheekbones, and cold, green-gray eyes.
“Excuse me, gentlemen, but I must pass. Good evening, sir,” he said curtly, ignoring the two strangers and addressing only his old friend, the colonel. The men did not step aside, however, but to the contrary formed a tight, jostling ring around him, chattering familiarly.
“Ah, Vronsky! When are you coming to the regiment? We can’t let you off without a supper. You’re one of the old set,” said one of the men. But even as he smiled politely, still glancing up toward Anna’s box and trying to shoulder past, Vronsky saw that all three, even his old friend the colonel, wore not the bronze uniform of his regiment, but the crisp blue of the Toy Soldiers. Vronsky turned away from them, silently appealing to the colonel to let him by . . . and noticed with a start, as he looked directly into the colonel’s round, handsome eyes, that this was not his old friend at all.
The face was almost the same face—the same set of the jaw, the same roll of flesh below the chin, the same bristly black mustache—but a cunning simulacrum of his friend’s appearance, not the real thing.
Vronsky recoiled. “I can’t stop, awfully sorry, another time,” he said, and tried again to break free, to get to the carpeted stairs that led to Anna’s box.
“No, no,” replied the colonel-who-was-not-the-colonel genially. “We insist.” One of the other soldiers grinned, as if preparing to invite Vronsky for a drink or a game of Flickerfly. “Say, the adjustment protocol is moving toward completion. How strange it is that your Class III remains uncollected.”
“Oh yes!” said the third soldier. “Why, we could rectify that situation right away!”
Lupo hissed and showed his teeth. Vronsky murmured a demurral while his left hand,
hidden by his cloak, moved discreetly toward his belt. Although not, apparently, as discreetly as he had hoped.
“Oh, that won’t do, your Excellency,” said the “colonel” with a smile. “That won’t do at all.”
The colonel’s face blurred, wavered, and was replaced in a terrible instant by a silver-black mass of churning gears. Vronsky yelped in startlement as the same hideous transformation unfolded on the other men: the skin of their faces retracted, revealing not flesh but gears—gears rolling in gears, tiny pistons pumping up and down, winding tracks—all in the approximate shape of a human face, but made from the stuff of robots.
“Good God,” Vronsky had time to say, before a tongue of flame shot forth from the mouth-space on the colonel’s face, or rather where the face had been a moment ago. Vronsky ducked in the last moment and caught the blast with the top of his head. He cried out in pain, smelling his own singed flesh and burnt hair, and drew his smoker to open fire; Lupo launched himself forward on his strong hind legs and landed on the chest of one of the counterfeit soldiers, groznium teeth sinking into groznium Adam’s apple. The robot cried out and went down in what appeared to be some genuine form of pain, while Lupo wrestled and thrashed at his neck.
Abstractedly, Vronsky heard the panicked screams of the other theatergoers; he ducked and rolled away from a second fire-blast, crouching behind a red-upholstered seat and returning fire. The non-colonel winced as he absorbed a fusillade that would have killed a real human several times over.
Vronsky cursed, and then heard, from the other side of the box, a strangely commonplace refrain coming from the third soldier. “Here boy,” the soldier said, crouching down and patting at his lap. “Here, Lupo.”
Vronsky, rolling away from a third belch of fire from his antagonist, nearly laughed at the implausibility of such a plan—until he saw that Lupo had indeed released his toothsome clasp on the one robot’s neck and was trotting, spellbound, toward the other. “What in the . . .”
Leo Tolstoy & Ben Winters Page 38
