Chapter 3
ON THE SUNDAY of St. Peter’s week Dolly drove to mass for all her children to take the sacrament. Driving home from church, with all her children round her, their heads still wet from their bath, and a kerchief tied over her own head, Dolly was getting near the house, when the II/Coachman/199’s antennae began to quiver, and his Vox-Em rumbled, “Gentleman coming . . . gentleman coming . . . the master of Provokovskoe . . .”
Dolly peeped out in front, and was delighted when she recognized in the gray hat and gray coat the familiar figure of Levin walking to meet them. She bade the children sit up straight and prepare to greet Konstantin Dmitrich Levin, and Grisha grumbled as he put away the I/Flashpop/4 with which he was irritating his sister. Dolly was glad to see Levin at any time, but at this moment she was specially glad he should see her in all her glory. No one was better able to appreciate her grandeur than Levin.
Seeing her, he found himself face to face with one of the pictures of his daydream of family life.
“You’re like a hen with your chickens, Darya Alexandrovna.”
“Ah, how glad I am to see you!” she said, holding out her hand to him.
“Glad to see me, but you didn’t let me know. I got a communiqué from Stiva that you were here.”
“From Stiva?” Dolly asked with surprise.
“Yes. He said that you are here, and that he thinks you might allow me to be of use to you,” said Levin. He was embarrassed through a sense that Darya Alexandrovna would be annoyed by receiving from an outsider help that should by rights have come from her own husband.
Dolly certainly did not like this little way of Stepan Arkadyich’s of foisting his domestic duties on others. But she was at once aware that Levin was aware of this. It was for just this fineness of perception, for this delicacy, that she liked Levin.
And his usefulness to her was immediately proved apparent, when in the next instant the carriage in which Dolly and her children were riding rose ten feet up into the air, as if borne aloft on the crest of a geyser. Levin and Socrates stared upward to where the vehicle was balanced on the frontal section of a hideous wormlike beast, like an earthworm swelled to an unnatural size. As Levin and Socrates tried to conceive of the provenance of such a creature, the carriage fell with a bone-rattling bang from the heights to which the thing had borne it. The children, unhurt but wildly terrified, screamed and huddled in their mother’s skirts, while the creature turned its frontal portion toward Levin; he saw now its toothless chasm of a mouth, the dark indentations in lieu of eyes, the entire absence of a nose. But most of all that mouth—a gray and puckering maw, smacking wetly, a physical incarnation of the idea of appetite. The upper portion of the long body writhed balefully, with the lower half still hidden from view, only in part emerged from the earth.
A sound accompanied the motion of the beast, a repetitive mechanical click, tikka tikka tikka tikka tikka . . .
“It is like a . . . like a . . .” Levin began, speaking over this insistent tattoo, his mind turning wildly.
“A koschei, master,” said Socrates, fumbling in his beard for some weapon with which to confront the apparition. “Like an enormous koschei.”
There was no more time to speak, as the worm darted suddenly downward. Levin leapt backward, but too late: The puckering ring of the thing’s mouth closed around his thigh. Most shocking to Levin in this moment was that what he felt tightening around his upper leg was not the disturbing, clammy warmth of worm flesh, but the sharp, cold bite of metal.
Socrates shouted, “Master!” and leapt to his side, while in the carriage Dolly and the children shrieked and wept.
Levin slapped roughly at the face of the beast with his riding crop, estimating from the dark indentations where its eyes might be. He slashed a scar into the face, and some kind of bright-yellow muck poured forth from of the wound; the smell was not like that of any bodily fluid, but more like . . .
“Humectant,” blared Socrates, waving the chemometer he had pulled from his cluster of machinery. “Our foe is definitively inorganic.”
Whatever it was, the monster still had Levin’s leg caught in its maw, even as it had had fully emerged from its hole in the dirt, unspooling to some fifteen yards in length. Socrates grasped it at its midpoint and tugged with the full strength of his groznium arms. With a hideous screeching noise the worm tore in two, and more of the bright-yellow goo sprayed forth, before, in a matter of seconds, the wound cleanly stitched itself closed, a new mouth formed on what had been the rear portion of the beast, and now there were two of the writhing things. The second one rapidly wriggled free from Socrates’ end-effectors and into the coach with Dolly and the children.
“Sorry,” Socrates muttered, as the horrid tikka tikka tikka doubled in volume, approaching now a near-deafening level.
“I do not understand,” shouted Levin above the din, kicking at the head of the beast with his one free foot. “The Higher Branches declared that all koschei had been flushed from the countryside.”
“And surely this thing is too big to be a koschei!” added Dolly from the carriage, where she stomped at the segmented, gray body of the worm with one boot heel.
Dolly’s youngest boy Grisha crept silently forth from the backseat of the carriage and reactivated his Class I plaything, determined in the naive and valiant way of children to play what part he could in fending off this attack. He aimed the toy at the eyes of the creature and pressed the trigger to activate a sudden and powerful flash of light; the effect was instantaneous and gratifying—like a mole recoiling from the glare of sunlight, the worm-like machine-monster hissed, writhed away, and spun back toward the safety of its underground warren from which it had emerged.
“Why, Grisha!” said Dolly. Levin, meanwhile, still caught in the maw of the original of the two worm-beasts, called out to his beloved-companion. “Socrates!” he hollered. “Would you mind terribly . . .”
The tall and angular Class III, however, was already in motion, grabbing out of his beard a I/Flashpop of exactly the sort Grisha had used, only vastly more powerful. The burst of irradiation the device subsequently dispensed sent the first worm skittering after its mate, back into the hole—and left a dread silence in its wake, the rattling click at last stilled. It left, too, Konstantin Levin clutching at his bruised leg, Dolly and her family heaving great breaths of exhaustion and relief, and Socrates scouring the dirt for whatever evidence he could find of what, exactly, they had just encountered.
As the carriage resumed its slow progress back to Ergushovo, Levin and Socrates rode beside, discussing the possible provenance of the strange, wormlike attack-robots. The obvious answer was that these were simply a new model of koschei, more powerful than any UnConSciya had previously unleashed—but something about that answer felt dissatisfying to Levin, and Socrates with his higher-level analytical functionality agreed. Could the smaller, more typical wormlike koschei have grown somehow? But what could have caused them to do so?
“Well, whatever has set this unholy machine upon us,” Dolly put in, “I am certainly glad that you were here to act in our defense.”
“Of course,” said Levin, “Though your Grisha seemed more than up to the challenge!”
The youngest of Dolly’s brood beamed his pleasure at the compliment. The children knew Levin very little, and could not remember when they had seen him, but they experienced in regard to him none of that strange feeling of shyness and hostility that children so often experience toward hypocritical, grown-up people, and for which they are so often and miserably punished. Hypocrisy in anything whatsoever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wideawake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised. Whatever faults Levin had, there was not a trace of hypocrisy in him, and so the children showed him the same friendliness that they saw in their mother’s face.
Here, in the country, with children, and with Darya Alexandrovna and her plump, matronly Class III, Dolichka, Levin was in a mood, not infrequent with him, of childlike light-heartedness that she particularly liked in him. After dinner, Dolly, sitting alone with him on the balcony, began to speak of Kitty.
“You know, Kitty’s coming here, and is going to spend the summer with me.”
“Really,” he said, flushing, and at once, to change the conversation, he said: “Then I’ll send you a new cow, shall I? I heard from Stiva you had a bit of trouble with your II/MilkExtractor/47. If you insist on a bill you shall pay me five rubles a month; but you really shouldn’t.”
“No, thank you. We can manage very well now.”
And Levin, to turn the conversation, explained to Dolly the theory of cow-keeping, based on the principle that the cow is simply a kind of machine, designed for the transformation of food into milk, and so on.
He talked of this, and passionately longed to hear more of Kitty, and, at the same time, was afraid of hearing it. He dreaded the breaking up of the inward peace he had gained with such effort.
“Yes, but still all this has to be looked after, and who is there to look after it?” Dolly responded, without interest.
“Pardon,” interrupted Socrates, and they all turned to look at the robot; under the weight of their collective stare, he absently began flicking a switch on his hip assembly, on and off, on and off. “I have been running a full analysis on the matter of the worm-beast. I cannot compute: If it is true that the creature we encountered is but a larger version of the koschei that have previously infested the land—for what reason? Why would a simple UnConSciya device grow to such a size? And . . . how?”
“Oh dear!” said Dolichka.
And, thought Levin, loathe to float such a possibility within the hearing of Darya Alexandrovna and her her children, or even to Socrates, can it be that there are other things the Ministry is hiding from us?