Chapter 16
THE CULL WAS UNUSUALLY, even disturbingly successful in its purpose of identifying the weak officers and the strong: mere minutes into the bout, more than half of the seventeen officers competing had already been downed, and half of that number clearly had not survived.
Everyone was loudly expressing their unease at all the death and violence, and everyone was feeling horrified; so that when Frou-Frou was dispatched by Matryoshka, and Vronsky rolled out of it on fire, there was nothing very out of the way in it. But afterward a change came over Anna’s face which really was beyond decorum. She utterly lost her head. She began fluttering like a caged bird, at one moment got up and moved away, at the next turned to Betsy.
“Let us go, let us go!” she said.
But Betsy did not hear her. She was bending down, talking to a general who had come up to her.
Alexei Alexandrovich went up to Anna and courteously offered her his arm.
“Let us go, if you like,” he said in French, but Anna did not notice her husband.
Without answering her husband, Anna lifted her opera glass and gazed toward the place where Vronsky’s machine had blown up; but it was so far off, and there was such a crowd of people about it, that she could make out nothing. She laid down the opera glass, and would have moved away, but at that moment an officer galloped up and made some announcement. Anna craned forward, listening.
“Stiva! Stiva!” she cried to her brother.
But her brother did not hear her.
“Small Stiva!” she cried, but the fat little robot did not hear her, either.
“Once more I offer you my arm if you want to be going,” said Alexei Alexandrovich, reaching toward her hand.
She drew back from him with aversion, and without looking into that face which so unsettled her.
“No, no, let me be, I’ll stay.”
She saw now that from the place of Vronsky’s accident an officer was running across the course toward the pavilion. Betsy waved her handkerchief to him. The officer brought the news that the rider was not killed, but the machine was to be junkered.
On hearing this Anna sat down hurriedly, and hid her face in her I/Fan/9. Alexei Alexandrovich saw that she was weeping, and could not control her tears, nor even the sobs that were shaking her bosom. Alexei Alexandrovich stood so as to screen her, giving her time to recover herself.
“For the third time I offer you my arm,” he said to her. Anna gazed at him and did not know what to say. Princess Betsy came to her rescue.
“No, Alexei Alexandrovich; I brought Anna and I promised to take her home,” put in Betsy.
“Excuse me, princess,” he said, smiling courteously but looking her very firmly in the face, “but I see that Anna’s not very well, and I wish her to come home with me.”
Anna looked about her in a frightened way, got up submissively, and laid her hand on her husband’s arm.
“I’ll send to him and find out, and let her know,” Betsy whispered to Android Karenina, who received this input obediently and motored after her distressed mistress.
As they left the pavilion, Alexei Alexandrovich, as always, talked to those he met, and Anna had, as always, to talk and answer; but she was utterly beside herself, and moved hanging on her husband’s arm as though in a dream.
Is he killed or not? Is it true? Will he come or not? Shall I see him today? she was thinking.
She took her seat in her husband’s carriage in silence, and in silence drove out of the crowd of carriages. In spite of all he had seen, Alexei Alexandrovich still did not allow himself to consider his wife’s real condition. He merely saw the outward symptoms. He saw that she was behaving unbecomingly, and it was his duty to tell her so. He opened his mouth to tell her she had behaved unbecomingly, but he could not help saying something utterly different.
“What an inclination we all have, though, for these cruel spectacles,” he said. “I observe . . .”
“Eh? I don’t understand,” said Anna contemptuously.
BE A MAN. SHOW YOUR METTLE, pronounced the Face, suddenly resonating inside Alexei Alexandrovich’s mind. Never before had he heard the Face speak so loudly, and the vehemence and power of the voice scattered his thoughts and sent a vivid shiver down his spine.
“I am obliged to tell you,” Alexei Alexandrovich began again, and then hesitated.
I AM METAL AND YOU ARE ME.
SHOW METAL.
Anna shuddered to see a strange ripple pass over the metal portion of her husband’s face, like a cluster of shadowy spiders rushing from forehead to chin and then disappearing. “So now we are to have it out,” she murmured quietly to Android Karenina.
“I am obliged to tell you that your behavior has been unbecoming today,” her husband said to her in French.
YES . . . TELL HER . . . TELL HER. . . .
“In what way has my behavior been unbecoming?” she said aloud, turning her head swiftly and looking at him straight in the face, not with the bright expression that seemed to be covering something, but with a look of determination, under which she concealed with difficulty the dismay she was feeling. Android Karenina glowed a deep, soothing purple and lay her fingers on Anna’s shoulder, trying to exert what calming influence she could.
“What did you consider unbecoming?” Anna repeated.
“The despair you were unable to conceal at the accident of one of the riders.”
THERE. THERE, ALEXEI. TELL HER. CHASTISE HER.
CONTROL HER.
Alexei, agitated by this continuing imprecation inside of him, waited for his wife to answer, but she was silent, looking straight before her.
“I have already begged you so to conduct yourself in society that even malicious tongues can find nothing to say against you. There was a time when I spoke of your inward attitude, but I am not speaking of that now.”
GO ON, GO ON, GO ON. MAKE HER UNDERSTAND. YOU WILL NOT BE MADE A FOOL OF.
“Now I speak only of your external attitude. You have behaved improperly, and I would wish it not to occur again.”
OR THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES. CONSEQUENCES!
Anna did not hear half of what he was saying; she felt panic-stricken before him, before the harsh sound of his voice and the uncanny expression on his face. She was thinking whether it was true that Vronsky was not killed. Was it of him they were speaking when they said the combatant was unhurt, but the machine had been broken past repair? She merely smiled with a pretense of irony when he finished, and made no reply, because she had not heard what he said. Alexei Alexandrovich had begun to speak boldly, but as he realized plainly what he was speaking of, the dismay she was feeling infected him too. He saw the smile, and a strange misapprehension came over him.
She is smiling at my suspicions, he thought, and the Face eagerly threw fuel on the fire of his anger. SMILING! LAUGHING! HOW DARE SHE? TO HER IT IS ALL A COMEDY, AND YOU ARE CHIEF AMONG THE CLOWNS.
But Alexei could not yet feel so hateful toward her as his Class III implored. At that moment, when the revelation of everything was hanging over him, there was nothing he expected so much as that she would answer mockingly as before that his suspicions were absurd and utterly groundless. So terrible to him was what he knew that now he was ready to believe anything. But the expression of her face, scared and gloomy, did not now promise even deception.
“Possibly I was mistaken,” he said. “If so, I beg your pardon.”
“No, you were not mistaken,” she said deliberately, looking desperately into his eyes, one mechanical, one real, both radiating sadness and anger. Android Karenina tightened her grip on Anna’s shoulder, trying to warn her back from the brink of this confession, but it was too late—Anna placed her hand upon that of her Class III, for strength, and pressed on.
“You were not mistaken. I was, and I could not help being in despair. I hear you, but I am thinking of him. I love him, I am his mistress; I can’t bear you; I’m afraid of you, and I hate you. . . . You can do what you like to me.”
Alexei reeled back, shocked, and in the next instant the carriage rocked violently, as if it, too, was stricken by Anna’s confession, and flew up into the air.
As Vronsky had been warned by his engineer, the roads leading in and out of the arena were mined with emotion bombs, among the most ingenious of UnConSciya’s cruel arsenal of terroristic weaponry. In Alexei Alexandrovich and his wife, they had, at this moment, an ideal target. Alexei’s heart pounded with wild emotion in response to Anna’s outburst, while Anna felt flushed and half-mad over what she had announced, and the biological effects of these passionate feelings were together enough—far more than enough—to trigger the physiochemical-sensing bombs that pitted the roadway.
The carriage was flung high into the air, then landed on its side and spun along the roadway until it smashed into the carriage in front of them, which carried the junkered bodies of Exteriors destroyed in the Cull. The shock and terror of that carriage’s passenger, a Ministry engineer, triggered a second blast; the junkered Exteriors flew up and were soon coming down again, a rain of deadly metal shrapnel pelting the tipped-over carriage of Anna and Karenin.
All of this Anna hardly noticed; dropping back into the corner of the upset carriage, she was sobbing, her face hidden in her hands; she did not notice, either, that with each wave of despair, a fresh explosion went off along the roadway, causing more dirt and gravel and bits of fractured metal to explode into the air. Android Karenina spread her arms widely, valiantly laying her metal body over that of her mistress.
Alexei Alexandrovich did not stir, and kept looking straight before him. But the telescopic eye embedded in the left side of his face slowly extended outward, and then upward, and as it did, the burning chunks of metal hurtling down toward the carriage halted in midair and hovered there. Anna raised her head from the crook of her arm and watched confusedly as, responding to minute movements from her husband’s mechanical eye—or so it seemed—the burning hunks of shrapnel crumpled harmlessly, one after the other, in the air above them.
A few minutes later the carriage was once more righted and along its way, its passengers still perfectly silent.
* * *
On reaching the house Alexei Alexandrovich turned his head to her, still with the same expression. He only cleared his throat decorously, and responded to her earlier declaration as if nothing had happened. “Very well! But I expect a strict observance of the external forms of propriety till such time—” his voice shook “—as I may take measures to secure my honor and communicate them to you.”
He got out first and helped her to get out. In range of the Class IIs and their senors, he pressed her hand, took his seat in the carriage, and drove back to Petersburg. Immediately afterward a II/Footman/c43 came from Princess Betsy with a communiqué.
“I sent to Alexei to find out how he is, and he writes me he is quite well and unhurt, but in despair.”
So he will be here, she thought. What a good thing I told him all!
Then for a fleeting moment she recalled the hail of shrapnel, and the cold efficiency with which her husband had defused it. She looked in the direction of Petersburg, where Alexei Alexandrovich had gone off to his office at the Ministry, and thought: What in God’s name is he?