Android Karenina (23 page)

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.

T
HERE 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.

W
HEN 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.