Chapter 22
COME, IT’S ALL OVER, and thank God!” was the first thought that came to Anna Arkadyevna, when at the Moscow Grav Station she bid good-bye to her brother, who stood blocking the entrance to the carriage till the third bell was heard. She sat down on her lounge beside Android Karenina, and looked about her in the twilight of the sleeping carriage.
On the morning after the float, Anna Arkadyevna had sent her husband a telegram that she was leaving Moscow the same day.
“No, I must go, I must go.” She had explained to her sister-in-law the change in her plans in a tone that suggested that she had to remember so many things that there was no enumerating them: “No, it had really better be today!”
Stepan Arkadyich came to see his sister off at seven o’clock. Kitty had not come, sending a note that she had a headache.
“Thank God!” Anna murmured to her beloved-companion as they settled in the carriage. “Tomorrow I shall see Seryozha and Alexei Alexandrovich, and my life will go on in the old way, all nice and as usual.”
Still in the same anxious frame of mind, as she had been all that day, Anna took pleasure in arranging herself for the journey with great care. With her long, deft fingers Android Karenina opened a discreet mid-body compartment, took out a cushion, and laid it on Anna’s knees. Anna smiled and stroked Android Karenina’s gentle hands in thanks: she had long felt, and felt all the more so at such moments, that she and her darling android enjoyed a bond that was, somehow, stronger than that between other humans and their beloved-companions—even though Android Karenina never breathed a word, indeed lacked even the capacity to elocute, Anna knew in her own heart that there was no one else on Earth, human or robot, who understood or loved her so well.
They were seated across from a kindly elderly lady, but, intending to enjoy a novel, rather than to engage her fellow passengers in conversation, Anna leaned back in her seat and engaged a chitator, putting Android Karenina into partial Surcease. At first her attention was too distracted to follow the story. She could not help listening to the magical, propulsive noises of the Grav as it shot forward on the magnet bed; then the snow beating on the left window and sticking to the pane, and the sight of the muffled II/Gravman/160 rolling by, covered with snow on one side, and the conversations about the terrible snowstorm raging outside distracted her attention.
At last, Anna began to understand the story. Anna Arkadyevna listened and understood, but it was distasteful to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she heard that the heroine of the story had fallen ill with malaria, she longed to move with noiseless steps about a sick room; if the chitator had a pirate ship laying siege to a houseboat, she longed to be the one active in its defense. But there was no chance of doing anything, and she forced herself to relax and let the chitator wash over her.
The heroine of the story was already almost reaching her English happiness, a handsome husband and a lakeside estate, and Anna was feeling a desire to go with them to the estate, when she suddenly felt that he ought to feel ashamed, and that she was ashamed of the same thing. But what had he to be ashamed of? What have I to be ashamed of? she asked herself in injured surprise. She switched off the chitator, sank against the back of the chair, and glanced at Android Karenina to help her understand, but her faceplate in Surcease was perfectly smooth and unreflective, revealing nothing.
There was nothing! She went over all her Moscow recollections. All were good, pleasant. She remembered the ball, remembered Vronsky and the crackle of his hot-whip and his face of slavish adoration, remembered all her conduct with him: there was nothing shameful. And for all that, at the same point in her memories, the feeling of shame was intensified, as though some inner voice, just at the point when she thought of Vronsky, were saying to her, “Warm, very warm, hot.”
“Well, what is it?” she demanded of Android Karenina, though she knew the Class III could hardly respond while in Surcease. “What does it mean? Am I afraid to look it straight in the face? Why, what is it? Can it be that between me and this officer boy there exists, or can exist, any other relations than such as are common with every acquaintance?”
But, as is the way with many people who have difficult questions, but not the will to hear them answered, she asked her questions of a Surceased robot, who of course offered no response.
Anna laughed contemptuously at her own foolishness, and reactivated the chitator; but now she was definitely unable to follow what she heard.
Unthinkingly, she lifted Android Karenina’s smooth hand and laid its cool surface onto her cheek, and almost laughed aloud at the feeling of delight that all at once without cause came over her. She felt as though her nerves were strings being strained tighter and tighter on some sort of screwing peg. She felt her eyes opening wider and wider, her fingers and toes twitching nervously, something within oppressing her breathing, while all shapes and sounds seemed in the uncertain half-light to strike her with unaccustomed vividness.
In this strange and disjointed sense of hyperawareness, it took her eyes a long moment to fully register what she then saw across from her: a koschei, bronzish, pencil-thin and centipedal, crawling on dozens of tiny, hideous feet across the wrinkled neck of the dozing elderly lady seated across from her.
The skittering steps of the miniature bug-robot were hardly heavy enough to wake the sleeping woman, and Anna thanked God at least for that small mercy. Surely the very sight of the skittering koschei—for that must be what this was, one of the hideous little insect-like death-machines used by UnConSciya to terrify the Russian populace—would cause the old woman to panic, and panic would seal her doom. Anna, murmuring a prayer for courage, scrunched forward in her seat, raising one hand, her fore- and middle fingers primed for plucking . . . slowly, carefully, she raised her hand, never taking her eyes off the automaton crawling in and out of the wrinkled folds of the ancient woman’s neck flesh.
She was about to grasp the glowing, creeping thing, not yet considering what she would do with it once it was in her grasp, when three things happened in rapid succession.
A flat, jellyfish-like blob of undulating silver flew over Anna’s head from behind her and landed with a thick, disgusting splat across the old woman’s face, causing her to wake and begin thrashing in her seat; Anna herself also began screaming, loud enough to wake the devil; and the koschei she had been grasping for escaped her clutches, leapt off the old woman and onto Anna’s forearm, and escaped up the sleeve of her dress.
The sensation of the koschei twitching rapidly forward inside her dress was viscerally horrifying, the countless tiny feet dancing about on her flesh—but worse by far was her knowledge of what was surely the koschei’s intention, programmed like an animal instinct: to find her breastbone, to pierce her flesh, to plunge its heat-sucking electrode antennae into the chambers of her heart. Anna clawed at her chest with one hand, and with the other she desperately flicked Android Karenina’s red switch, praying with every breath that she would not be long in emerging from Surcease.
There was nothing to be done for the elderly woman, even if she could: the jellyfish koschei was still clenched over the old woman’s face and was oozing out in all directions, covering the woman’s body like a wriggling sheath, sucking the heat from her body.
While Anna slapped at her flesh, trying to squash the centipede koschei inside her dress, she became aware that all over the Grav car, other koschei were attacking other passengers. A slavering robotic beast in the shape of a gigantic cockroach, with coal-black wings and teeth like needles, buzzed down the aisle and landed on the eyes of a dignified Petersburg gentleman. Anna saw the roach thing sink its pulsing antennae into a dozen places in the unfortunate man’s face, before her attention was seized by a most welcome distraction: Android Karenina, animated and in action, her smart, thin fingers inside Anna’s bodice, catching up the wriggling koschei, crushing it neatly between thumb and forefinger.
Android Karenina then scooped up her mistress around the waist and hustled them both to the end of the carriage, where they escaped down the running board and toward the platform, for the Grav had made an emergency stop at a rural station. As they stepped from the carriage, the driving snow and the wind rushed to meet them. Android Karenina greeted the cold burst of air silently, but to Anna, the wind seemed as though lying in wait for her; with gleeful whistle it tried to snatch her up and bear her off, but she clung to the cold doorpost, and holding her skirt got down onto the platform and under the shelter of the carriages. The wind had been powerful on the steps, but on the platform, under the lee of the carriages, there was a lull. With a giddy, life-embracing thrill of having survived, she drew deep breaths of the frozen, snowy air, and standing near the carriage looked about the platform and the lighted station.
The carriages, posts, people, everything that was to be seen was covered with snow on one side, and was getting more and more thickly covered. For a moment there would come a lull in the storm, but then it would swoop down again.
Meanwhile, inside the carriage from whence they had escaped, a troop of 77s charged in, heads spinning rapidly, spitting pincer-tipped cords from their midsections to catch up koschei, sending rapid-fire bursts of bolts around the carriage, pinning the little beasts against chair backs and doorposts. Anna saw several more of the dog-sized cockroach koschei, along with at least one blackly gleaming spider-bot and a small cadre of flying wasp koschei, which buzzed and swooped through the carriage like demonically possessed birds, stinging passengers in their necks and ears.
Android Karenina gently turned her mistress’s eyes from such horrors, and for a long time they stood quietly in the freezing dark of the station. But then it sounded like the tenor of the battle was changing, and Anna risked another glance through the window; what she saw heartened her, for it seemed that koschei were being dispatched rapidly now, one after the other, their hideous clacketing metal feet stilled, their fangs loosened from the necks and arms of the passengers.
Anna realized after a moment that the changing tide of the fight appeared to be the doing of one man—not a 77 at all, but a regimental soldier in a crisp silver uniform, who moved briskly but unpanicked up and down the length of the carriage, slashing and shooting and calling out orders with a loud, authoritative voice. And even before Anna heard the rumbling growl of a mechanical wolf, before she could see the sizzle and crackle of a hot-whip in action, before she could see his face, she knew that it was he.
The battle won, the koschei thrown together into a portable sizzle unit and destroyed, Vronsky emerged from the carriage, put his hand to the peak of his cap, bowed to her, and asked if she had been hurt? Could he be of any service to her? She gazed rather a long while at him without answering, and, in spite of the shadow in which he was standing, she saw, or fancied she saw, both the expression of his face and his eyes. It was again that expression of reverential ecstasy which had so worked upon her the day before. More than once she had told herself during the past few days, and again only a few moments before, that Vronsky was for her only one of the hundreds of young men, forever exactly the same, that are met everywhere, that she would never allow herself to bestow a thought upon him. But now at the first instant of meeting him, she was seized by a feeling of joyful pride. She had no need to ask why he was here. She knew as certainly as if he had told her that he was here to be where she was.
“It is lucky you were on this train, it seems, Count Vronsky,” she said. “But what are you coming for?” she then added, barely masking the irrepressible delight and eagerness that shone in her eyes.
“What am I coming for?” he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. “You know that I have come to be where you are,” he said. “I can’t help it.”
At that moment the wind, surmounting all obstacles, sent the snow flying from the carriage roofs, and clanked some sheet of iron it had torn off, while the mechanisms of the Grav’s engine eased back to life. All the awfulness of the storm, all the terror of the koschei, seemed to her almost splendid now. He had said what her soul longed to hear, though she feared it with her reason. She made no answer, and in her face he saw conflict.
“Forgive me, if you dislike what I said,” he said humbly.
He had spoken courteously, deferentially, yet so firmly, so stubbornly, that for a long while she could make no answer. Android Karenina, for all this long silence, looked off with studied disinterest into the distance, while Lupo, less instinctively decorous, sniffed with curiosity at the hem of her skirts.
“It’s wrong, what you say, and I beg you, if you’re a good man, to forget what you’ve said, as I shall forget it,” she said at last.
“Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget. . . .”
“Enough, enough!” she cried, trying assiduously to give a stern expression to her face, into which he was gazing greedily. And clutching at the cold doorpost, she clambered up the steps and got rapidly into the corridor of the carriage. Settled again in the carriage, fumigated and revivified already by the Grav’s assiduous crew of IIs, she cued in Android Karenina’s monitor a Memory of what had just occurred. As she watched, she realized instinctively that the momentary conversation had brought them fearfully closer; and she was panic-stricken and blissful at it. The overstrained condition which had tormented her before did not only come back, but was intensified, and reached such a pitch that she was afraid every minute that something would snap within her from the excessive tension. She did not sleep all night. But in that nervous tension, and in the visions that filled her imagination, there was nothing disagreeable or gloomy: on the contrary, there was something blissful, glowing, and exhilarating. Even the painful recollection of the multitudinous cold steel feet of the koschei, tickling their way up toward her breastbone, could not dampen this powerful rush of feeling.
Toward morning Anna sank into a doze, sitting in her place, and when she woke it was daylight and the Grav was gliding into the Petersburg station. At once thoughts of home, of husband and of son, and the details of that day and the following came upon her.
* * *
At Petersburg, as soon as the Grav stopped and she got out, the first person that attracted Anna’s attention was her husband. “Oh, mercy! That face!” she murmured to Android Karenina. Covering the right side of Alexei Alexandrovich’s face as always, nearly entirely hiding it, was a mask of steely silver, descending from brow to chin, with only enough metal cut away to allow his nose and mouth their full functioning. While Alexei’s left eyebrow could and did twitch sardonically, and while his left cheek could and did rise in wry humor, the corresponding parts on the opposite side were hidden behind an unreadable sheen of metallic cold, laced with dark veins of pure groznium—not tempered or alloyed by the Ministry’s metallurgists, but the raw, scarlet-black ore itself. Where his right eye once had sat was a large aperture, a cyborgicist’s reinvention of a human eye socket, from which emerged a telescoping oculus. It was with this rotating orbital that Alexei Alexandrovich was now scanning the crowd, looking for his wife.
Catching sight of her, he came to meet her, his lips sliding into their habitual, sarcastic smile, and his left human eye looking straight at her, while its mechanized companion eye mechanically scanned the station. An unpleasant sensation gripped at her heart when she met his obstinate and weary glance, as though she had expected to see him different. She was especially struck by the feeling of dissatisfaction with herself that she experienced on meeting him. That feeling was an intimate, familiar feeling, like a consciousness of hypocrisy, which she experienced in her relations with her husband. But hitherto she had not taken note of the feeling; now she was clearly and painfully aware of it.
“Yes, as you see, your tender spouse, as devoted as the first year after marriage, burned with impatience to see you,” he said in his deliberate, high-pitched voice, and in that tone which he almost always took with her, a tone of jeering at anyone who should say in earnest what he said. He took his wife’s valise from Android Karenina, offering her Class III no greeting, and naturally receiving none in return.
“Is Seryozha quite well?” Anna asked.
“This is all the reward,” said he, “for my ardor? He’s quite well. . . .”