Android Karenina (10 page)

“Well, Countess, you have met your son, and I my brother,” she said. “And all my gossip is exhausted. I should have nothing more to tell you.”

“Oh, no,” said the countess, taking her hand. “I could go all around the world with you and never be dull. You are one of those delightful women in whose company it’s sweet to be silent as well as to talk. Now please don’t fret over your son; you can’t expect never to be parted.”

Madame Karenina stood quite still, holding herself very erect, and her eyes were smiling. Vronsky noted with interest how his mother’s beloved-companion, a wiry gray machine-woman called Tunisia, looked distractedly about the carriage during this exchange, while Android Karenina’s careful and attentive posture mimicked that of her mistress precisely.

“Anna Arkadyevna,” the countess was saying to him in explanation, “has a little boy eight years old, I believe, and she has never been parted from him before, and she keeps fretting over leaving him.”

“Yes, the Countess and I have been talking all the time, I of my son and she of hers,” said Madame Karenina, and again a smile lighted up her face, a caressing smile intended for him.

“I am afraid that you must have been dreadfully bored,” he said, promptly catching the ball of coquetry she had flung him. He thrust one
leg forward in an offhandedly dashing pose, displaying the hot-whip that flickered in its transparent sheath along the outer curve of his leg. But apparently she did not care to pursue the conversation in that strain, and she turned to the old countess.

“Thank you so much. The time has passed so quickly. Good-bye, Countess.”

“Good-bye, my love,” answered the countess. “Let me kiss your pretty face. I speak plainly, at my age, and I tell you simply that I’ve lost my heart to you.”

Clichéd as the phrase was, Madame Karenina obviously believed it and was delighted by it. She flushed, bent down slightly, and put her cheek to the countess’s lips, drew herself up again, and with the same smile fluttering between her lips and her eyes, she gave her hand to Vronsky. He pressed the little hand she gave him, and was delighted, as though at something special, by the energetic squeeze with which she freely and vigorously shook his hand.

Just as she did, a great
BOOM
echoed through the Grav station. All present silenced their conversation and paused in their activity—even the industrious II/Porter/7e62s stopped short on their stubby legs and wheeled in small circles, aural sensors pulsing. This
BOOM,
despite its tremendous power, came from no evident source; it was as if a crack had opened in the sky, through which had come the sound of God pounding his fist upon a table. And though others would later deny it, even scoff at the notion, many present later swore that the sky, at the moment of the blast, flickered an uncanny shade of blackish purple.

Vronsky hastened to calm his mother, patting her hand and saying soothingly, “Koschei, Madame. The 77s captured one and detonated it in the station. Likely this was another.” Vronsky was aware, of course, that this was a well-meaning but preposterous falsehood: the
BOOM
had sounded nothing like that of the koschei being junkered in the rubbish bin—indeed it sounded like no explosion he had heard in his life, and he had heard many.

Anna Karenina, meanwhile, stared uneasily up at the sky, feeling the reverberations of the
BOOM
to the pit of her stomach. Only when Android Karenina placed a gentle, reassuring hand at the small of her back could Anna shake off the unpleasant sensation. She then exited with the rapid step which bore her rather fully developed figure with such strange lightness.

“Very charming,” said the countess.

That was just what her son was thinking. Vronsky’s eyes followed her till her graceful figure was out of sight, and then the smile remained on his face. Vronsky saw out of the window how this remarkable woman went up to her brother, put her arm in his, and began telling him something eagerly, obviously something that had nothing to do with him, Vronsky, and at that he felt annoyed.

“Well, Mamma, are you perfectly well?” he said, and gave his mother his arm. But just as they were getting out of the carriage, a small fleet of Class II/StationMaster/44s buzzed officiously past, their alarm lights flashing an urgent red. Obviously something unusual had happened. The crowd who had left the Grav were running back again.

A cold feeling crept over Vronsky, as he caught a whiff of some terrible burning rising off the tracks.

“What? . . . What? . . . Where? . . . Burned? . . . Crushed! was heard among the crowd. Stepan Arkadyich, with his sister on his arm, turned back. They too looked scared, and stopped at the carriage door to avoid the crowd. Vronsky interposed himself between Madame Karenina and the platform edge, instinctively desiring to block from her vision whatever gruesome scene lay on the magnet bed below.

It was a battered corpse, evidently first fallen on the magnet bed then crushed by the rushing force of the oncoming Grav. The rumor making its way rapidly through the agitated crowd said the dead man had been a stowaway, riding the Grav without a ticket, when he was discovered by a troop of 77s. The heavy-booted machine-men had brought the anonymous rider to their Caretaker, who had demanded his name
and occupation. The stowaway had refused to answer and the gold-uniformed Caretaker had dutifully declared him a Janus, a hateful enemy of Mother Russia, and ordered him thrown in front of an arriving Grav.

But Vronsky, who knew that such stories were often mere concoctions to shield the public from some unpalatable truth, retained an agitated feeling about this accident. He averted his eyes from the wrapped, smoldering corpse as the 77s with their strong pipe-like arms tossed it unceremoniously into the back of a carriage.

Before Vronsky and Oblonsky came back, the ladies had heard the tale from other onlookers. Oblonsky was evidently upset. He frowned and seemed ready to cry.

“Ah, how awful! Ah, Anna, if you had seen it! Ah, how awful!” he said.

Madame Karenina walked with her brother, Small Stiva and Android Karenina walking a few paces behind. Anna was lost in thought: twice in the last half hour, a disturbing feeling had passed through her, a penumbra of creeping dread radiating from some unknown origin. This feeling had first occurred when the station rattled with that reverberating
BOOM
and again when she glanced at the platform edge—and seen, despite Count Vronsky’s efforts to block her view, the hooded corpse lifted without ceremony from the magnet bed.

Madame Karenina seated herself in his carriage, and Stepan Arkadyich saw with surprise that her lips were quivering, and she was with difficulty restraining her tears.

“What is it, Anna?” he asked, when they had driven a few hundred yards.

“This death, it touches me somehow,” she said. “I cannot understand it.”

“What nonsense!” said Stepan Arkadyich, his genial nature reasserting itself against the mess and unpleasantness of death. “Our 77s have discovered a traitor, and acted swiftly and appropriately! Bravo, and praise God for our tireless protectors! You’ve come, that’s the chief thing. You can’t conceive how I’m resting my hopes on you.”

“Have you known Vronsky long?” she asked, trying to match her
brother’s easy calm. She glanced at Android Karenina, who bathed her in reassuring silence and a gentle lavender glow. Unusual for a Class III robot, Android Karenina never spoke, only buttressed by her constant reassuring presence Anna’s natural feeling of dignity and reserve.

“Yes,” Stiva answered cheerily. “You know we’re hoping he will marry Kitty.”

“Yes?” said Anna softly. “Come now, let us talk of you,” she added, tossing her head as though she would physically shake off something superfluous oppressing her. “Let us talk of your affairs. I got your letter, and here I am.”

“Yes, all my hopes are in you,” said Stepan Arkadyich.

“Well, tell me all about it.”

T
HOUGH SHE HAD SENT
word the day before to her husband that it was nothing to her whether his sister came or not, Darya Alexandrovna Oblonskaya had made everything ready for her arrival, and was expecting her sister-in-law with emotion.

Dolly was crushed by her sorrow, utterly swallowed up by it. Still she did not forget that Anna, her sister-in-law, was the wife of an official in the Higher Branches of the Ministry, and was a Petersburg
grande dame.
And, thanks to this circumstance, she did not carry out her threat to her husband—that is to say, she remembered that her sister-in-law was coming, along with her elegant and imposing Class III. “And, after all, Anna is in no way to blame,” Dolly said to Dolichka, who nodded vigorously and agreed.

“Oh no, not at all to blame! The dear.”

“I know nothing of her except the very best, and I have seen nothing but kindness and affection from her toward myself.”

“Only kindness, true kindness indeed.”

And it was true that as far as she could recall her impressions of Petersburg at the Karenins’, she did not like their household itself; Karenin was a strange and distant man, as were most men she had ever known from the Higher Branches, and there was something artificial in the whole framework of their family life. “But why should I not receive her? If only she doesn’t take it into her head to console me!” said Dolly to Dolichka, who clucked
“Oh dear” and “I should think not,”
while the two of them together folded laundry.

“All consolation and counsel and Christian forgiveness, all that I have thought over a thousand times, and it’s all no use.”

“No use, no use at all!”

Dolly did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters. She knew that in one way or another she would tell Anna everything, and she was alternately glad at the thought of speaking freely, and angry at the necessity of speaking of her humiliation with her, his sister, and of hearing her ready-made phrases of good advice and comfort. She had been on the lookout for her, glancing at her watch every minute, and, as so often happens, let slip just that minute when her visitor arrived, so that she did not hear the three happy tinkles of the I/Doorchime/6.

She got up and embraced her sister-in-law.

“What, here already!” she said as she kissed her. Dolichka gave a low bow to Android Karenina, who offered a reserved nod in return.

“Dolly, how glad I am to see you!” Anna began.

“I am glad, too,” said Dolly, faintly smiling, and trying by the expression of Anna’s face to find out whether she knew.
Most likely she knows,
she thought, noticing the sympathy in Anna’s face. “Well, come along, I’ll take you to your room,” she went on, trying to defer as long as possible the moment of confidences.

Anna greeted the children, and handed her kerchief and her hat to Android Karenina. She tossed her head and shook out her mass of
black curls.

“You are radiant with health and happiness!” said Dolly, almost with envy.

“I? . . . Yes,” said Anna. They sat down to coffee in the drawing room, and Anna meaningfully sent Android Karenina into Surcease.

“Dolly,” Anna said, pushing the coffee tray away, “he has told me.”

Dolly flicked off her own Class III, but she looked coldly at Anna. She was waiting now for phrases of conventional sympathy, but Anna said nothing of the sort.

“Dolly, dear,” she said, “I don’t want to speak for him to you, nor to try to comfort you; that’s impossible. But, darling, I’m simply sorry, sorry from my heart for you!”

Under the thick lashes of her shining eyes tears suddenly glittered. She moved nearer to her sister-in-law and took her hand in her own vigorous little hand. Dolly did not shrink away, but her face did not lose its blank expression. She said:

“To comfort me is impossible. Everything’s lost after what has happened, everything’s over!”

And as soon as she had said this, her face suddenly softened. Anna lifted the wasted, thin hand of Dolly, kissed it, and said:

“But, Dolly, what’s to be done, what’s to be done? How is it best to act in this awful position—that’s what you must think of.”

“All’s over, and there’s nothing more,” said Dolly. “And the worst of all is, you see, that I can’t cast him off: there are the children, I am tied. And I can’t live with him! It’s a torture to me to see him.”

“Dolly, darling, he has spoken to me, but I want to hear it from you: tell me about it.”

Dolly looked at her inquiringly.

Sympathy and love unfeigned were visible on Anna’s face.

“Very well,” she said all at once. “But I will tell you it from the beginning. You know how I was married. With the education Mamma gave us, I knew nothing. I know they say men tell their wives of their
former lives, but Stiva”—she corrected herself—“Stepan Arkadyich told me nothing. You’ll hardly believe it, but till now I imagined that I was the only woman he had known. So I lived, for eight years.

“You must understand that I was so far from suspecting infidelity, I regarded it as impossible, and then—try to imagine it—with such ideas, for all to be revealed, played back in a communiqué, suddenly all the horror, all the loathsomeness. . . . You must try and understand me. To be fully convinced of one’s happiness, and all at once . . .” continued Dolly, holding back her sobs, “a mistress, my
mécanicienne,
with grease on her jumpsuit, and metal shavings beneath her nails! No, it’s too awful!” She hastily pulled out her handkerchief and hid her face in it. “I can understand being carried away by feeling,” she went on after a brief silence, “but deliberately, slyly deceiving me . . . and with whom? . . . To go on being my husband together with her . . . it’s awful! You can’t understand. . . .”

“Oh, yes, I understand! I understand! Dolly, dearest, I do understand,” said Anna, pressing her hand.

“And do you imagine he realizes all the awfulness of my position?” Dolly resumed. “Not the slightest! He’s happy and contented.”

“Oh, no!” Anna interposed quickly. “He’s to be pitied, he’s weighed down by remorse. . . .”