Chapter 18
VRONSKY FOR THE FIRST TIME experienced a feeling of anger against Anna, almost a hatred for her willfully refusing to understand her own position. This feeling was aggravated by his being unable to tell her plainly the cause of his anger. If he had told her directly what he was thinking, he would have said:
“In that dress, with that android-cast glow, to show yourself at the theater is not merely equivalent to acknowledging your position as a fallen woman, it is flinging down a challenge to society—that is to say, cutting yourself off from it forever.”
What Alexei Kirillovich could not yet understand was that such concerns simply did not matter any longer. After that night at the Vox Fourteen, a night that would be long remembered and long mourned by the people of Russia, he would understood much better.
Left alone in the wake of her departure, he finally got up from his chair and began pacing up and down the room.
“And what’s today?”
Lupo gave a gruff yelp, tilted his head, and scraped the hard wooden floor four times with his right front claw. “Yes, of course, the fourth night. Yegor and his wife are there, and my mother, most likely. Of course all Petersburg’s there. By now she’s gone in, taken off her cloak and come into the light.” Vronsky threw himself back into the chair and patted his lap for Lupo to leap into it. “What about me? What about us? Are we frightened? From every point of view—stupid, stupid! . . . And why is she putting me in such a position?” he said with a gesture of despair.
“Come, friend,” Vronsky snarled, and his fierce beloved-companion obeyed. “We’re going to the theater.”
When they arrived at the palatial Vox Fourteen it was half past eight and the performance was in full swing. The II/Boxkeeper/19, recognizing Vronsky as he peeled off his fur coat, called him “your Excellency.” In the brightly lighted corridor there was no one but the II/Boxkeeper/19 and two II/Attendant/77s listening at the doors. Through the closed doors came the sounds of the discreet staccato accompaniment of the orchestra, and a single female voice rendering distinctly a musical phrase. The door opened to let the Boxkeeper slide through, and the phrase drawing to the end reached Vronsky’s hearing clearly. But the doors were closed again at once, and Vronsky did not hear the end of the phrase and the cadence of the accompaniment, though he knew from the thunder of applause that it was over.
When he entered the Vox Fourteen, brilliantly lighted with I/Lumiére/7s and gas jets, the noise was still going on. On the stage the singer, bowing and smiling, with bare shoulders flashing with diamonds, was, with the help of the tenor who had given her his arm, gathering up the bouquets that were flying awkwardly over the footlights. Then she went up to a gentleman with glossy pomaded hair parted down the center, who was stretching across the footlights holding out something to her, and all the public in the stalls as well as in the boxes was in excitement, craning forward, shouting and clapping. The conductor from his podium assisted in passing the offering, and straightened his white tie. Vronsky walked into the middle of the stalls, and, standing still, began looking about him. His attention turned upon the familiar, habitual surroundings, the stage, the noise, all the familiar, uninteresting, particolored herd of spectators in the packed theater. There were no Class Ills. No beloved-companions lounging at their master’s elbows, shedding flattering light, fetching spectacles and lighting cigarettes. All these people—the uniforms and black coats, the dirty crowd in the upper gallery, and in the boxes and front rows, the real people, the people of society—but not a robot moving among them.
Or so it appeared to Count Vronsky.
He had not yet seen Anna. He purposely avoided looking in her direction. But he knew by the direction of people’s eyes where she was. He looked round discreetly, but he was not seeking her; expecting the worst, his eyes sought out Alexei Alexandrovich. To his relief he was not in the theater that evening.
“How little of the military man there is left in you!” his friend Serpuhovskoy was saying to him. “A diplomat, an artist, something of that sort, one would say.”
“Yes, it was like going back home when I put on a black coat,” answered Vronsky, smiling and with a few clicks activating his opera glass.
“Well, I’ll own I envy you there. When I come back from abroad and put on this,” he touched his epaulets, “I regret my freedom.”
Serpuhovskoy had long given up all hope of Vronsky’s career, but he liked him as before, and was now particularly cordial to him.
“What a pity you were not in time for the first act!”
Vronsky, listening with one ear, moved his opera glass from the stalls and scanned the boxes. Near a lady in a turban and a bald old man, who seemed to wave angrily in the moving opera glass, Vronsky suddenly caught sight of Anna’s head, proud, strikingly beautiful, with Android Karenina’s pearl glow casting intricate shadows through the lace of her collar. She was in the fifth box, twenty paces from him. She was sitting in front, and, slightly turning, was saying something to Yashvin. The setting of her head on her handsome, broad shoulders, the restrained excitement and brilliance of her eyes and her whole face reminded him of her just as he had seen her at the float in Moscow. But he felt utterly different toward her beauty now. In his feeling for her now there was no element of mystery, and so her beauty, though it attracted him even more intensely than before, gave him now a sense of injury. She was not looking in his direction, but Vronsky felt that she had seen him already.
When Vronsky turned the opera glass again in that direction, he noticed that Anna’s friend Princess Varvara was particularly red, and kept laughing unnaturally and looking round at the next box. Anna, de-telescoping her I/Fan/6 and tapping it on the red velvet, was gazing away and did not see, and obviously did not wish to see, what was taking place in the next box. Yashvin’s face wore the expression which was common when he was losing at cards. Scowling, he sucked the left end of his mustache further and further into his mouth, and cast sidelong glances at the next box.
In that box on the left were the Kartasovs Vronsky knew them, and knew that Anna was acquainted with them. Madame Kartasova, a thin little woman, was standing up in her box, and, her back turned upon Anna, she was putting on a mantle that her husband was holding for her. Her face was pale and angry, and she was talking excitedly. Kartasov, a fat, bald man, was continually looking round at Anna, while he attempted to soothe his wife. When the wife had gone out, the husband lingered a long while, and tried to catch Anna’s eye, obviously anxious to bow to her. But Anna, with unmistakable intention, avoided noticing him, and talked to Yashvin, whose cropped head was bent down to her.
Vronsky could not understand exactly what had passed between the Kartasovs and Anna, but he saw that something humiliating for Anna had happened. He knew this both from what he had seen, and most of all from the face of Anna, who, he could see, was taxing every nerve to carry through the part she had taken up. And in maintaining this attitude of external composure she was completely successful. Anyone who did not know her and her circle, who had not heard all the utterances of the women expressive of commiseration, indignation, and amazement, that she should show herself in society, and show herself so conspicuously with her lace and her beauty, and with the audacity to parade her Class III in such circumstances—anyone would have admired the serenity and loveliness of this woman, without suspecting that she was undergoing the sensations of a man in the stocks.
Knowing that something had happened, but not knowing precisely what, Vronsky felt a thrill of agonizing anxiety, and hoping to find out something, he went toward the box where she sat. Working his way through the aisles toward her, he jostled as he came out against the colonel of his regiment, talking to two strangers.
The colonel greeted him with genial familiarity, and hastened to introduce him to the others. The colonel’s companions were young, with neat hairstyles under regimental caps, high cheekbones, and cold, green-gray eyes.
“Excuse me, gentlemen, but I must pass. Good evening, sir,” he said curtly, ignoring the two strangers and addressing only his old friend, the colonel. The men did not step aside, however, but to the contrary formed a tight, jostling ring around him, chattering familiarly.
“Ah, Vronsky! When are you coming to the regiment? We can’t let you off without a supper. You’re one of the old set,” said one of the men. But even as he smiled politely, still glancing up toward Anna’s box and trying to shoulder past, Vronsky saw that all three, even his old friend the colonel, wore not the bronze uniform of his regiment, but the crisp blue of the Toy Soldiers. Vronsky turned away from them, silently appealing to the colonel to let him by . . . and noticed with a start, as he looked directly into the colonel’s round, handsome eyes, that this was not his old friend at all.
The face was almost the same face—the same set of the jaw, the same roll of flesh below the chin, the same bristly black mustache—but a cunning simulacrum of his friend’s appearance, not the real thing.
Vronsky recoiled. “I can’t stop, awfully sorry, another time,” he said, and tried again to break free, to get to the carpeted stairs that led to Anna’s box.
“No, no,” replied the colonel-who-was-not-the-colonel genially. “We insist.” One of the other soldiers grinned, as if preparing to invite Vronsky for a drink or a game of Flickerfly. “Say, the adjustment protocol is moving toward completion. How strange it is that your Class III remains uncollected.”
“Oh yes!” said the third soldier. “Why, we could rectify that situation right away!”
Lupo hissed and showed his teeth. Vronsky murmured a demurral while his left hand, hidden by his cloak, moved discreetly toward his belt. Although not, apparently, as discreetly as he had hoped.
“Oh, that won’t do, your Excellency,” said the “colonel” with a smile. “That won’t do at all.”
The colonel’s face blurred, wavered, and was replaced in a terrible instant by a silver-black mass of churning gears. Vronsky yelped in startlement as the same hideous transformation unfolded on the other men: the skin of their faces retracted, revealing not flesh but gears—gears rolling in gears, tiny pistons pumping up and down, winding tracks—all in the approximate shape of a human face, but made from the stuff of robots.
“Good God,” Vronsky had time to say, before a tongue of flame shot forth from the mouth-space on the colonel’s face, or rather where the face had been a moment ago. Vronsky ducked in the last moment and caught the blast with the top of his head. He cried out in pain, smelling his own singed flesh and burnt hair, and drew his smoker to open fire; Lupo launched himself forward on his strong hind legs and landed on the chest of one of the counterfeit soldiers, groznium teeth sinking into groznium Adam’s apple. The robot cried out and went down in what appeared to be some genuine form of pain, while Lupo wrestled and thrashed at his neck.
Abstractedly, Vronsky heard the panicked screams of the other theatergoers; he ducked and rolled away from a second fire-blast, crouching behind a red-upholstered seat and returning fire. The non-colonel winced as he absorbed a fusillade that would have killed a real human several times over.
Vronsky cursed, and then heard, from the other side of the box, a strangely commonplace refrain coming from the third soldier. “Here boy,” the soldier said, crouching down and patting at his lap. “Here, Lupo.”
Vronsky, rolling away from a third belch of fire from his antagonist, nearly laughed at the implausibility of such a plan—until he saw that Lupo had indeed released his toothsome clasp on the one robot’s neck and was trotting, spellbound, toward the other. “What in the . . .”
A fresh gout of fire spilled over the seat, and Vronsky narrowly avoided it, got off a quick smoker blast at the face-hole of the pretended colonel, and was then distracted again—this time by the sound of weapons firing above.
Anna’s box.
“No!” he cried.
He looked up, to where two more of the Toy Soldiers in their handsome blue uniforms stood, with smokers drawn and aimed at Anna’s heart. And fat, foolish Kartasov, who mere minutes ago had presented no more significant a threat than societal disapprobation, had revealed his own churning, silver-black death-robot face—from whose mouth-space was billowing a swirling, malevolent column of blue-black smoke.
This cloud snaked forward, Vronsky saw with some relief, not toward Anna but toward Android Karenina; his relief lasted only until Anna boldly jumped forward, interposing herself between the strange cloud and her beloved-companion.
I should not have let her come to the opera. How could I have let her come?
Cursing, Vronsky leapt from behind the barricade of the seat row and leveled his most deadly blast yet at the robot colonel, crossing the trajectories of his two smokers in a deadly effluxion that he knew would drain the weapons, creating a fire pattern so powerful he could technically face court martial for employing it indoors; the least of my worries, he thought drily, watching with satisfaction as the robot’s torso melted into a sodden mass.
He was dashing for the door of the box when he heard a pitiful yip from behind him—Damn it, he thought. Lupo. It appeared that the blue uniformed man-machine, just by staring in the dog’s eyes and calling him, had drawn Lupo nearly all the way to his lap—where, Vronsky noticed with horror, the Toy Soldier held a long, nasty-looking groznium scimitar, of exactly a sort he had seen used to junker animal-form Class Ills in the most direct and irrevocable way. He jerked on the triggers of his smokers, knowing it was no use: his maneuver had exhausted the weapons and they were dead metal in his hands. “Stay!” he shouted to Lupo. “Stay, boy!” But Lupo, caught by the mysterious power glowing out of the soldier’s eyes-that-were-not-eyes, continued the forward trot toward his own doom.
Vronsky, in one swift and terrible movement, snapped his hot-whip to life and flicked it at his own Class Ill’s aural sensors. In an instant, the wolf was blinded, the cruel spell was broken, and Vronsky scooped him up under his arm—except that now they faced the Toy Soldier, unarmed. Their faceless opponent drew back the gleaming groznium scimitar and was about to swing . . .
Suddenly Anna Karenina and her companion robot, their hands joined in one powerful fist, smashed down on him from the balcony above. The robot collapsed, and Vronsky, still clutching poor, blinded Lupo beneath his arm, ran to the woman and machine-woman.
“Are you hurt?”
“Not so badly as they,” Anna replied smartly, clutching at her leg as she smoothed her skirts and struggled to her feet. Vronsky glanced up at the theater box, and saw the two Toy Soldiers slumped over the sides of the railing, broken like dolls, and the Kartasov robot with its head unit entirely torn off.
“How—” he began, but Anna interrupted: “Alexei, we must go.” She was gesturing at the prone Toy Soldier, whose machine-face, stilled at the moment of injury, had begun to whir and glow back to life.
The mechanical soldier leaped to his feet, hissed angrily, raised his gleaming sword—and was set upon again: this time by a massive beast, resembling a madman’s hallucination of a jungle lizard, standing upright, with a cluster of yellow-grey eyeballs and the long, razored snout of a bird of prey. The inhuman monster’s beak gored the groznium belly of the Toy Soldier, while his ragged claws laced into the arms and legs of the machine-man. As soon as the robot stopped moving, the beast bounded away, leaping over the heads of Anna, Vronsky, and their Class Ills, and down the aisles.
“It’s . . . my Lord, it’s . . .” Vronsky stammered.
“It is our chance, Alexei,” cried Anna. “For God’s sake, run!”
* * *
This alien was the first of many.
Twitching, snarling, slavering, their massive reptilian heads bubbling with eyeballs; their craggy, ridged snouts ending in knife-like beaks; their clutching, slashing claws; their long, scaly tails dragging against the lush carpets—the aliens poured in a great, fearsome horde into the Petersburg Vox Fourteen, dozens and dozens of them, yowling in a loud, high-pitched shriek as they sped up and down the aisles.
But the Vox Fourteen was well defended, more so than anyone had realized: the Toy Soldiers, robots in the form of men, were, it seemed, everywhere. As Vronsky and Anna rushed headlong for the exits, all over the Vox Fourteen people jumped to their feet and revealed themselves to be robots. Husbands, wives, soldiers, singers—hundreds of pretend people, all secreted by the Ministry of Security among the thousands of theatergoers; as, it was later realized, they must have been secreted everywhere. As their shocked companions watched, their faces wavered, blurred, disappeared, and were replaced by the deadly weapon-faces of the Toy Soldiers, and they joined combat with the Honored Guests.
But as has been the way of combat since the times of the Greeks and Romans, it was those with the least stake in the conflict who suffered the most grievously: as the robotic Toy Soldiers defended the Petersburg Vox Fourteen from the onslaught of the alien invaders, it was the human beings who died. The robots shot at the aliens and the humans were caught in the crossfire; the aliens slashed and tore at the robots and the humans were slashed and torn. Not one in ten made it out alive; not one in ten escaped the scalding glow of the smoker or the ragged claw of the lizard-beast, or the trampling boot heels of their fellow theatergoers, desperate for escape.
By morning the stage of the Vox Fourteen was littered with blood and bodies, the aisles with shredded hunks of alien flesh, the orchestra pit with groznium shrapnel and tangles of wire. But Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky had long since made their escape.
* * *
By the time the first fingers of dawn crept along the windowsills and into her rented rooms, Anna was packing hurriedly. They were fugitives now, and both knew it. Some new life would have to be forged, a new place found; the alien threat aside, she and Vronsky had obviously earned the status of outlaws, fugitives from the strange new society that was being built—under the leadership, Anna thought darkly, of her own husband.
When Vronsky went up to her, she was in the same dress as she had worn at the theater, madly throwing her things into a valise; as each new article of clothing was tossed in, Android Karenina rapidly took it up again, folded it neatly with fast-flying phalangeals, and placed it back in careful order.
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TWITCHING, SNARLING, THEIR MASSIVE REPTILIAN HEADS BUBBLING WITH EYEBALLS, THE ALIENS POURED INTO THE OPERA HOUSE
“Anna,” said Vronsky, passionately, “I nearly lost you.”
“You, you are to blame for everything!” she cried, with tears of despair and hatred in her voice.
“I begged, I implored you not to go, I knew it would be unpleasant. . . .”
“Unpleasant!” she cried. “Hideous! Those men—”
“Robots, Anna, they are robots!”
“You think I don’t know that! As long as I live I shall never forget it. But I will tell you Alexei, those vicious robot soldiers and bloodthirsty creatures were scarcely worse than the sneering expression of Madame Kartasov and her husband.”
“In fairness, Kartasov was also a robot.”
She scowled and continued her feverish preparations for departure.
“Forget it, you must forget all that,” said Vronsky, pacing back and forth, Lupo at his heels. “There are more important things to occupy us now.”
“I hate your calm. You ought not to have brought me to this. If you had loved me . . .”
“Anna! How does the question of my love come in?”
“Oh, if you loved me, as I love, if you were tortured as I am . . . !” she said, looking at him with an expression of terror.
He was sorry for her, and angry notwithstanding. He assured her of his love because he saw that this was the only means of soothing her, and he did not reproach her in words, but in his heart he reproached her. He spoke softly to her again of a place he knew, where they could be together and be safe, at least for now, along with their Class Ills.
And the asseverations of his love, which seemed to him so vulgar that he was ashamed to utter them, she drank in eagerly, and gradually became calmer. The next hour, completely reconciled, they and their battered beloved-companions left for the country.