Android Karenina Read online

  The Class II’s horrid beeping had not yet ceased, and the malfunctioning of the sartorial unit was more dire than Stepan Arkadyich had realized. It righted itself and shot back across the floor with demonic energy, whirling gyroscopically as it came, firing hot, thick globs of shaving cream toward Stepan Arkadyich’s eyes, its straight-razored end-effector swinging in wild, deadly circles. Stepan Arkadyich cowered back into the corner, his arms flung up helplessly before him.

  Small Stiva, faster and more complex in his functioning than the smartest of Class IIs, which this simple household sartorial certainly was not, easily intercepted the smaller machine. Holding it at arm’s length with one midtorso effector, Small Stiva flung himself open at the torso, revealing the intensely hot groznium furnace that burned within him. Then, suddenly, he let go of the II/Sartorial/943 and let the thing fling itself forward—the errant Class II flew into the torso furnace, and Small Stiva clanged the door shut behind it.

  “My Lord. I have never seen such a severe maltuning in a Class II, to so wantonly contravene the Iron Laws,” mused Stepan Arkadyich, dabbing more blood from his gashed lip with his shirttail. “I am lucky, as ever, that you were here, mon petit ami.”

  Small Stiva whistled proudly and stoked his groznium core for one hot instant—and from within him came the hiss and pop of the II/Sartorial/943’s polymers disintegrating. The casings and trim would be destroyed, but the machine’s thousands of groznium parts, indestructible and reusable, would, by a remarkable process, be “internalized” into Small Stiva’s own biomechanical infrastructure.

  Stepan Arkadyich struggled to his feet and was casting about for a fresh shirt when Dolichka whirred officiously into the room.

  On her monitor was displayed a simple message: “Darya Alexandrovna is going away.” After Stiva had read it glumly and nodded, Dolichka pivoted on her thick metal legs and whirred out. Stepan Arkadyich was silent a minute. Then a good-humored and rather pitiful smile showed itself on his handsome face.

  “Eh, Small Stiva?” he said, shaking his head.

  The android turned his head all the way around, flashed a cheerful red from within his frontal display, and piped, “Worry not, master. For you, all things will turn out right.”

  With a midbody effector he was holding up Stepan Arkadyich’s fresh shirt like a horse’s collar, and blowing off some invisible speck with a burst of air from his Third Bay, he slipped it over the body of his master.

  CHAPTER 3

  STEPAN ARKADYICH, IN SPITE OF his unhappmess and his natural irritation at the sacrifice of a particularly good household Class II, walked with a slight swing of each leg into the diningroom, where coffee was already waiting for him, piping hot from the I/Samovar/1(8).

  Sipping his coffee, he activated Small Stiva’s monitor to display the first of several business-related communiqués he had to review. One was very unpleasant, from a merchant who was buying a small but valuable patch of groznium-rich soil on his wife’s property. To sell this property was absolutely essential; but at present, until he was reconciled with his wife, the subject could not be discussed. The most unpleasant thing of all was that his pecuniary interest should in this way enter into the question of his reconciliation with his wife. And the idea that he might be led on by his interests, that he might seek a reconciliation with his wife on account of the sale of the land—that idea hurt him.

  When he had finished viewing his communiqués, Stepan Arkadyich dismissed Small Stiva, enjoyed a sip of coffee, and allowed the morning news feed to wash over him.

  Stepan Arkadyich took a liberal feed, not an extreme one, but one advocating the views held by the majority. With the liberal party and his liberal feed, Stepan Arkadyich held that marriage is an institution quite out of date, and that it needs reconstruction; that religion is only a curb to keep in check the barbarous classes of the people; that the progress of technology was too slow, especially in the realm of Class III vocalization and action/reaction; and that there could be no mercy shown the terrorists and assassins of UnConSciya—even though it was that very technological progress those terrorists claimed to be fighting for.

  Having finished the feed, a second cup of coffee and a roll and butter, Stiva got up, shaking the crumbs of the roll off his waistcoat; and, squaring his broad chest, he smiled joyously: not because there was anything particularly agreeable in his mind—the joyous smile was evoked by a good digestion, and by the gentle oscillations of the Galena Box.

  Just then Small Stiva bustled back into the room and chirruped out a message. “The carriage is ready,” he said, “and there’s someone to see you with a petition.”

  “Been here long?” asked Stepan Arkadyich.

  “Half an hour.”

  “How many times have I told you to tell me at once?”

  “One must let you drink your coffee in peace,” answered Small Stiva in that affectionately tinny tone with which it was impossible to be angry. For the hundredth time, Stepan Arkadyich promised himself to have the Class III’s relevant circuits adjusted, to tend him more toward formal attendance to duties, and away from pleasant appeasement of perceived wishes—but he knew he never would do so.

  “Well, show the person up at once,” said Oblonsky, frowning with vexation.

  After dealing with the petitioner, Stepan Arkadyich took his hat and stopped to recollect whether he had forgotten anything. It appeared that he had forgotten nothing except what he wanted to forget—his wife.

  “Ah, yes!” He bowed his head, and his handsome face assumed a harassed expression. “To go, or not to go!” he said to Small Stiva, who made a gesture charmingly imitative of a human shrug. An inner voice told Stiva he must not go, that nothing could come of it but falsity; that to amend, to set right their relations was impossible, because it was impossible to make her attractive again and able to inspire love, or to make him an old man, not susceptible to love. Except deceit and lying, nothing could come of it now; and deceit and lying were opposed to his nature.

  “It must be some time, though: it can’t go on like this,” he said to Small Stiva, who said, “No no can’t go on no.” Thus encouraged, Stiva squared his chest, took out a cigarette, took two whiffs at it and flung it into a Class I mother-of-pearl ashtray, which instantly and automatically filled with a half inch of water, extinguishing the smoldering butt. With rapid steps he walked through the drawing room, and opened the other door into his wife’s bedroom.

  CHAPTER 4

  DARYA ALEXANDROVNA, in a dressing jacket, with her now scanty, once luxuriant and beautiful, hair fastened up with hairpins on the nape of her neck, was standing before an open bureau among a litter of all sorts of things scattered all over the room. Hearing her husband’s steps, she stopped, looking toward the door; Dolichka, by angling her linear eyebrows into a sharp V, gave her features a severe and contemptuous expression. Dolly and her companion android alike felt afraid of Stepan Arkadyich, and afraid of the coming interview. They were just attempting to do what they had attempted to do ten times already in these last three days—to sort out the children’s things so as to take them to her mother’s—but again Darya Alexandrovna could not bring herself to do this. She said to Dolichka, as each time before, “Things cannot go on like this! I must take some step to punish him!” and as always Dolichka confirmed her in her opinions, supporting her in all things, exactly as it was the sole purpose of her existence to do.

  “I shall leave him!” Dolly pronounced, and Dolickha in her metallic soprano echoed her: “Yes! Leave!” But Dolly knew in her heart of hearts what Dolichka, in the mechanical limitations of her imagination, could not understand: to leave him was impossible. It was impossible because Darya Alexandrovna could not get out of the habit of regarding him as her husband and loving him. Besides this, she realized that if even here in her own house she could hardly manage to look after her five children properly, along with their several dozen Class IIs and countless Class Is, they would be still worse off where she was going with them all.

>   Seeing her husband, followed closely by the obnoxious oblong form of Small Stiva, she dropped her hands into the drawer of the bureau as though looking for something. But her face, to which she tried to give a severe and resolute expression, betrayed bewilderment and suffering.

  “Dolly!” Stepan Arkadyich said in a subdued and timid voice, while Small Stiva bent at midline in a supplicating position toward Dolichka. In a rapid glance Dolly scanned her husband’s figure, and that of his robot. Man and machine both radiated health and freshness. “Yes, he is happy and content!” she whispered to Dolichka, and the bitter confirmation came from the Class III’s Vox-Em, “Happy. Content.”

  “While I . . . ,” Dolly continued, but her mouth stiffened, the muscles of the cheek contracted on the right side of her pale, nervous face.

  “What do you want?” Dolly said to her husband in a rapid, deep, unnatural voice.

  “Dolly!” he repeated, with a quiver in his voice. “Anna and Android Karenina are coming today.”

  “Well, what is that to me? I can’t see them!” she cried.

  “But you must, really, Dolly . . .”

  “Go away, go away, go away!” she shrieked, not looking at him, as though this shriek were called up by physical pain.

  The Galena Box, its simple external sensors attuned to those vocal tonalities indicative of emotional distress, reactuated, pulsing more rapidly.

  Stepan Arkadyich could be calm when he thought of his wife, and could immerse himself in the news feed and drink the coffee that the II/Samovar/l(8) provided; but when he saw her tortured, suffering face, heard the tone of her voice, submissive to fate and full of despair, there was a catch in his breath and a lump in his throat, and his eyes began to shine with tears.

  “My God! What have I done? Dolly! For God’s sake! . . . You know . . .” He could not go on; there was a sob in his throat. “Might we . . .” he began, gesturing meaningfully at their two androids. Dolly gave an agitated nod, and both of the Class IIIs were sent into Surcease, with head units slightly forward and sensory circuits deactivated, to allow their masters their absolute privacy.

  “Dolly, what can I say . . .?” He paused, trying to arrange his thoughts appropriately, and there was no machine buzz in the room, not a single milli-Maxwell of hum. In this uncanny silence, Stiva blundered onward. “One thing: forgive . . . Remember, cannot nine years of my life atone for an instant—”

  She dropped her eyes and listened, expecting what he would say, yet silently beseeching him in some way or other to make her believe differently.

  “—an instant of passion?” he said, and would have gone on, but at that word, as at a pang of physical pain, her lips stiffened again, and again the muscles of her right cheek worked. The razor wound on Stiva’s upper lip sent a pulse of fresh pain radiating through the nerves of his face.

  “Go away, go out of the room!” she shrieked still more shrilly. “And don’t talk to me of your passion and your loathsomeness.”

  She tried to go out, but tottered, and clung to the back of a chair to support herself. His face quivered in a fresh wave of agony, and his eyes swam with tears.

  “Dolly!” he said, sobbing now. “For mercy’s sake, think of the children! I am to blame, and punish me, make me expiate my fault. Anything I can do, I am ready to do anything! I am to blame, no words can express how much I am to blame! But, Dolly, forgive me!”

  She sat down. He listened to her hard, heavy breathing, and he was unutterably sorry for her. She tried several times to begin to speak, but could not. He waited.

  “Tell me, after what . . . has happened, can we live together?” Dolly answered finally, glancing at the stiff, silent form of Dolichka, missing the comfort of her animated presence. “Is that possible? Tell me, eh, is it possible?” she repeated, raising her voice, “after my husband, the father of my children, enters into a love affair with a common household mécanicienne?”

  “But what could I do? What could I do?” he kept saying in a pitiful voice, not knowing what he was saying, as his head sank lower and lower.

  “You are loathsome to me, repulsive!” she shrieked, getting more and more heated. “Your tears mean nothing! You have never loved me; you have neither heart nor honorable feeling! You are hateful to me, disgusting, a stranger—yes, a complete stranger!” With pain and wrath she uttered the word so terrible to herself—stranger.

  He looked at her, and the fury expressed in her face alarmed and amazed him. He did not understand how his pity for her exasperated her. She saw in him sympathy for her, but not love. No, she hates me. She will not forgive me, he thought.

  “Dolly! Wait! One word more,” he said.

  “Dolichka!” Dolly cried, turning her back to him and agitatedly flicking the red switch beneath her Class III’s chin; the angular machine-woman’s circuits sprang to life, and together the two of them fled the room.

  “If you come near me, I will call in the neighbors, the children! Every Class II in the house will know you are a scoundrel! I am going away at once, and you may live here with your jumpsuited mistress!”

  And she went out, slamming the door.

  CHAPTER 5

  STEPAN ARKADYICH WORKED in the Moscow Tower, as a Deputy Vice President for Class I Manufacture & Distribution, Branch: Toys & Misc. It was an honorable and lucrative position, but one which required very little of him. The substantive decisions were made and relayed to him from elsewhere in his department, or from the St. Petersburg Tower, where the Higher Branches of the Ministry had their headquarters. He had received his post through his sister Anna’s husband, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, who held an extremely important position in the Higher Branches, the details of which were unclear and uninteresting to Stiva. But if Karenin had not gotten his brother-in-law this post, then through a hundred other personages—brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, and aunts—Stiva Oblonsky would have received this post, or some other similar one, together with the salary of six thousand absolutely needful for him, as his affairs, in spite of his wife’s considerable property, were in an embarrassed condition.

  Half of Moscow and Petersburg were friends and relations of Stepan Arkadyich. He was born in the midst of those who had been and are the powerful ones of this world: men in government, roboticists, engineers, landowners, and above all those with positions in the Ministry. Consequently the distributors of earthly blessings in the shape of places, rents, and precious groznium were all his friends.

  Stepan Arkadyich was not merely liked by all who knew him for his good humor, but for his bright disposition, unquestionable honesty, and adorable little walking armoire of a Class III. In Stepan Arkadyich—in his handsome, radiant figure, his sparkling eyes, black hair and eyebrows, and the white and red of his face—there was something that produced a physical effect of kindliness and good humor on the people who met him. “Aha! Stiva and Small Stiva! Here they are!” was almost always said with a smile of delight on meeting the affable pair.

  The principal qualities in Stepan Arkadyich that had gained him this universal respect consisted, in the first place, of his extreme indulgence for others, founded on a consciousness of his own shortcomings; secondly, of his perfect liberalism—not the liberalism he read of in the papers, but the liberalism that was in his blood, in virtue of which he treated all men and their machines perfectly equally and exactly the same, whatever their fortune or calling might be; and thirdly—the most important point—his complete indifference to the business in which he was engaged, in consequence of which he was never carried away, and never made mistakes.

  Stepan Arkadyich arrived at his place of work and looked adoringly up at the massive onion-shaped bulb that rotated slowly atop the Tower, forever scanning Moscow’s streets. “The Tower, she keeps her loving eye upon us,” went the saying, and indeed there was something decidedly ocular about the single round opening on one side of the giant rotating bulb, keeping its eternal, and eternally loving, watch over the city and her people.

  Waiting for S
tiva at the top of the stairs was the welcome sight of his old friend, Konstantin Dmitrich Levin.

  “Why, it’s actually you, Levin, at last!” Stiva said with a friendly mocking smile, taking in Levin and his Class III as he bounded up the stairs toward them, Small Stiva clumsily following one step at a time. “Welcome to the Ministry!” As he uttered the words, both men crossed themselves and glanced upward, as if to heaven—the instinctual gesture of reverence for the most cherished of Russian institutions.

  “How is it you have deigned to look me up in this den?” said Stepan Arkadyich, and not content with shaking hands, he kissed his friend. “Have you been here long?”

  “I have just come, and very much wanted to see you,” said Levin, looking shyly and at the same time angrily and uneasily around. Stiva could now see Levin’s Class III, an oddly unpleasant-looking, tall, copper-plated humanoid called Socrates, hovering by his side. Ringing Socrates’ chin was an array of useful items—a knife, a corkscrew, a spring, a small shovel, and so on—which jangled on his neck like a thick beard of springs and cogs, and which he tugged as he also looked uneasily around, mimicking his master’s discomfited manner.

  “Well, let’s go into my room,” said Stepan Arkadyich, who knew his friend’s sensitive and irritable shyness, and, taking his arm, he drew him along, the trigger-latch that caused the door to his inner office to open with an audible pneumatic gasp.

  Levin was almost of the same age as Oblonsky, and had been the friend and companion of his early youth. They were fond of one another in spite of the difference of their characters and tastes, as friends are fond of one another who have been together in early youth. Their bond had been cemented when both boys were merely sixteen, unshaven lads not yet possessed of their Class IIIs. An UnConSciya trap called a godmouth had suddenly yawned open in a Moscow open-air vegetable market a few yards from where they were standing. Levin tackled Oblonsky, who had been obliviously eating a peach, and dragged him to safety before the other boy even realized that the terrible, glowing vortex had appeared. The near miss left a lasting impression on both boys, and guaranteed a lifelong brotherly friendship.