by Leo Tolstoy
But then… then he heard the whisper.
DESTROY IT
DESTROY IT
DESTROY THE CHILD
DESTROY
And he knew in that instant that the struggle was not over. He knew that besides the blessed spiritual force controlling his soul, there was another, a brutal force, as powerful, or more powerful, which controlled his life, and that this force would not allow him that humble peace he longed for. There had been a period of detente, and now it was at an end. His Face, his dear friend and most fearsome enemy, had returned.
DESTROY, it whispered.
CONTROL
DESTROY
CHAPTER 12
HAVING RECEIVED SEVERAL anxious communiqués relating to his sister’s difficult confinement and long recovery, Stepan Arkadyich and his beloved-companion Small Stiva traveled from Moscow to pay her a visit.
They found her in tears. Small Stiva immediately joined Android Karenina in tending to Anna’s physical condition, turning up her Galena Box, smoothing the bedcovers with his flattened end-effectors, and refilling the ice water of his master’s ailing sister. As for Stepan Arkadyich himself, he immediately and quite naturally fell into the sympathetic, poetically emotional tone which harmonized with her mood. He asked her how she was, and how she had spent the morning.
“Very, very miserably. Today and this morning and all past days and days to come,” she said.
“I think you’re giving way to pessimism. You must rouse yourself, you must look life in the face.”
“Rouse! Rouse!” beeped Small Stiva, up-actuating the Galena Box.
“I have heard it said that women love men even for their vices,” Anna began suddenly, “but I hate him for his virtues. I can’t live with him. Do you understand? The sight of him has a physical effect on me, it makes me beside myself. But what am I to do? I have been unhappy, and used to think one couldn’t be more unhappy, but the awful state of things I am going through now, I could never have conceived. Would you believe it, that knowing he’s a good man, a splendid man, that I’m not worth his little finger, still I hate him. I hate him for his generosity. And there’s nothing left for me but…”
She would have said “death,” but Stepan Arkadyich would not let her finish.
“You are ill and overwrought,” he said. “Believe me, you’re exaggerating dreadfully. There’s nothing so terrible in it.”
And Stepan Arkadyich smiled. No one else in Stepan Arkadyich’s place, having to do with such despair, would have ventured to smile (the smile would have seemed brutal); but in his smile there was so much sweetness and almost feminine tenderness that his smile did not wound, but softened and soothed. His gentle, soothing words and smiles were as soothing and softening as almond oil. And Anna soon felt this.
“No, Stiva,” she said, “I’m lost, lost! Worse than lost! I can’t say yet that all is over; on the contrary, I feel that it’s not over. I’m an overstrained string that must snap. But it’s not ended yet… and it will have a fearful end.”
“No matter, we must let the string be loosened, little by little. There’s no position from which there is no way of escape.”
“I have thought, and thought. Only one…”
Small Stiva burbled cheerily, trying to lift everyone’s spirits, but Stiva felt that his pleasantness was, for once, unwarranted, and sent the little bot into Surcease.
“Listen to me,” he said to Anna. “You can’t see your own position as I can. Let me tell you candidly my opinion.” Again he smiled discreetly his almond-oil smile. “I’ll begin from the beginning. You married a man twenty years older than yourself. You married him without love and not knowing what love was. It was a mistake, let’s admit.”
“A fearful mistake!” said Anna.
“But I repeat, it’s an accomplished fact. Then you had, let us say, the misfortune to love a man not your husband. That was a misfortune; but that, too, is an accomplished fact. And your husband knew it and forgave it.” He stopped at each sentence, waiting for her to object, but she made no answer. “That’s so. Now the question is: Can you go on living with your husband? Do you wish it? Does he wish it?”
“I know nothing, nothing.”
“But you said yourself that you can’t endure him.”
“No, I didn’t say so. I deny it. I can’t tell, I don’t know anything about it.” She gripped the bedcovers, and then whispered: “There’s something else, Stepan. Something in his character I cannot fathom, something…”
She could not finish, and Stepan Arkadyich did not pursue the point. But in his mind he returned to the Moscow sub-basement, and saw again what Karenin had shown him there, and felt again the fear and confusion he had experienced on that day.
“Yes, but let…”
“There’s nothing, nothing I wish… except for it to be all over.”
“But he sees this and knows it. And do you suppose it weighs on him any less than on you? You’re wretched, he’s wretched, and what good can come of it?” With some effort Stepan Arkadyich brought out his central idea, and looked significantly at her. “But divorce would solve the difficulty completely.”
She said nothing, and shook her cropped head in dissent. But from the look in her face, which suddenly brightened into its old beauty, he saw that if she did not desire this, it was simply because it seemed to her an unattainable happiness.
“I’m awfully sorry for you! And how happy I should be if I could arrange things!” said Stepan Arkadyich, smiling more boldly. “Don’t speak, don’t say a word! God grant only that I may speak as I feel. I’m going to him.”
Anna looked at him with dreamy, shining eyes, and said nothing.
* * *
Outside the room, Alexei Alexandrovich heard all, and the Face heard all, and took its chance to strike.
YOU SEE? it shouted, the cruel and taunting voice bouncing like rocket fire off the corners of his mind.
YOU SEE WHAT YOUR FORGIVENESS HAS EARNED YOU?
Alexei flushed with shame and anger and returned to his room, where he paced like a caged animal. Louder and louder grew the vituperative roar of the Face.
NO MORE GENTLENESS.
NO MORE FORGIVENESS.
ONLY CONTROL.
Stepan Arkadyich, with the same, somewhat solemn expression with which he used to take his presidential chair at his board, walked into Alexei Alexandrovich’s room. Alexei Alexandrovich was walking about his room with his hands behind his back, lost deep in the violent eddies of his mind.
“I’m not interrupting you?” said Stepan Arkadyich, on the sight of his brother-in-law. To conceal this embarrassment he took out a Class I cigarette case he had just bought that opened in a new way, and, flicking the blue-green toggle, took a cigarette out of it.
“No. Do you want anything?” Alexei Alexandrovich asked, while into his mind’s eye came a picture of the Class I exploding, of Stepan Arkadyich’s fat, smirking face melting off of his skull.
LET HIM PAY.
LET THEM ALL PAY.
“Yes, I wished… I wanted… yes, I wanted to talk to you,” said Stepan Arkadyich, with surprise, aware of an unaccustomed timidity.
This feeling was so unexpected and so strange that he did not believe it was the voice of conscience telling him that what he was meaning to do was wrong.
Alexei Alexandrovich meanwhile looked with angry eyes at Small Stiva, that squat, twittering fool of a Class III.
SOON. SOON ITS TIME TOO WILL COME.
Stepan Arkadyich made an effort and struggled with the timidity that had come over him.
Alexei knew what Stepan Arkadyich would say, and knew as well what his reply would be. Let her have her divorce; let her go; who cared? What did it matter? There were weightier matters at hand. He had wrested control of his Project back from his opponents; Stremov lay in a Petersburg basement, buried to his neck in rock and gravel, never to mount another challenge.
His focus must remain on his work: even now new ideas were flooding into his h
ead; even now the Project was evolving… becoming exactly what the Face had always wanted it to be.
SO LET HER GO. LET HER GO WITH HER HANDSOME BORDER OFFICER.
“I hope you believe in my love for my sister and my sincere affection and respect for you,” he said, reddening.
Alexei Alexandrovich stood still and said nothing.
LET THEM ROAM FREE LET THEM TASTE FREEDOM. LET THEM ENJOY IT WHILE THEY CAN.
“I intended… I wanted to have a little talk with you about my sister and your mutual position,” he said, still struggling with an unaccustomed constraint. “If you will allow me to give my opinion, I think that it lies with you to point out directly the steps you consider necessary to end the position.”
“If you consider that it must be ended, let it be so,” Alexei Alexandrovich interrupted him.
“Then you would consent to a divorce?” Stiva said timidly, dragging on his cigarette. Small Stiva’s irritating, tinny Vox-Em repeated the stupid word: “Divorce? Divorce?”
“Let her be divorced. LET HER DIE,” Alexei Alexandrovich said suddenly and harshly, the silver mask pulsing and undulating, veins of hot groznium alive inside it. “LET HER BODY BE BORNE TO THE FAR WINDS OF THE UNIVERSE, ONLY LET ME NEVER SEE HER, OR HIM, OR YOU AGAIN!”
Stepan Arkadyich went slack-mouthed: whatever horrid thing Anna had warned him of, whatever force lurked inside of Alexei Alexandrovich, it was that which he was in conversation with now, not the man.
“Yes, I imagine that divorce-yes, divorce,” Stepan Arkadyich repeated, backing away. “That is from every point of view the most rational course for married people who find themselves in the position you are in. What can be done if married people find that life is impossible for them together? That may always happen.”
Alexei Alexandrovich raised his fists and screamed, “GET OUT!”
The scream poured forth from him like a wave roaring up from the depths of the roiling sea; it threw Stiva and Small Stiva across the room, and they slammed against the opposite wall. Stiva’s head rang from the impact, and a deep dent was knocked in Small Stiva’s heretofore unbendable exterior.
When Stiva crawled out of his brother-in-law’s room he was scared, deeply scared, of what he had just witnessed; but that did not prevent him from being glad he had successfully brought the matter to a conclusion.
* * *
Alexei Alexandrovich threw on his coat and stomped off through the snow-crusted streets, and within a half hour was at his St. Petersburg office. Waiting for him there was a crowd of fashionable young men, all of them thin-framed and handsome, each wearing black boots and a neat blond mustache.
“My friends,” he said, and the blond men nodded in unison. “The Project begins in earnest. Find the Class IIIs.
“Find them all.”
CHAPTER 13
VRONSKY’S WOUND HAD BEEN a dangerous one, filling his lungs with smoke and leaving him with a system of nasty burns along his chest, and for several days he had lain between life and death.
And yet he felt that he was completely free from one part of his misery. By his action he had, as it were, washed away the shame and humiliation he had felt before. He could now think calmly of Alexei Alexandrovich. He recognized all his magnanimity, but he did not now feel himself humiliated by it. Besides, he got back again into the beaten track of his life. He saw the possibility of looking men in the face again without shame, and he could live in accordance with his own habits. One thing he could not pluck out of his heart, though he never ceased struggling with it, was the regret, amounting to despair, that he had lost her forever. That now, having expiated his sin against the husband, he was bound to renounce her, and never in the future to stand between her with her repentance and her husband, he had firmly decided in his heart; but he could not tear out of his heart his regret at the loss of her love, he could not erase from his memory those moments of happiness that he had so little prized at the time, and that haunted him in all their charm.
Serpuhovskoy had arranged Vronsky’s appointment at the head of a new and elite regiment, one being formed to take on this still-unnamed grave threat spoken of by the Ministry of War, and Vronsky agreed to the proposition without the slightest hesitation. But the nearer the time of departure came, the bitterer was the sacrifice he was making to what he thought his duty.
His wounds had healed, and he was making preparations for his departure for the new regiment, when late in the afternoon he answered his door to find Android Karenina, staring at him in her cold and quiet way, her eyebank glowing an unceasing and meaningful purple. The Class III did not say a word, only held out a hand, and pointed back to the carriage in which she had come.
“She desires to see me?”
Without even troubling himself to finish his preparations, forgetting all his resolutions, without asking when he could see her, where her husband was, Vronsky went with Android Karenina and together they drove straight to the Karenins’. He ran up the stairs seeing no one and nothing, Lupo chasing at his heels, and with a rapid step, almost breaking into a run, he went into her room. And without considering, without noticing whether there was anyone in the room or not, he flung his arms round her, and began to cover her face, her hands, her neck with kisses.
Anna had been preparing herself for this meeting, had thought what she would say to him, but she did not succeed in saying anything of it; his passion mastered her. She tried to calm him, to calm herself, but it was too late. His feeling infected her. Her lips trembled so that for a long while she could say nothing.
“Yes, you have conquered me, and I am yours,” she said at last, pressing his hands to her bosom.
“So it had to be,” he said. “So long as we live, it must be so. I know it now.”
“That’s true,” she said, getting whiter and whiter, and embracing his head. “Still there is something terrible in it after all that has happened.”
“It will all pass, it will all pass; we shall be so happy. Our love, if it can be stronger, will be strengthened by there being something terrible in it,” he said, lifting his head and parting his strong teeth in a smile.
Lupo paced in giddy circles, but Android Karenina stood perfectly still at the edge of the room: simple purple beauty in the long shadows of late afternoon, watching the reunion with her quiet joy.
Anna could not but respond with a smile-not to Vronsky’s words, but to the love in his eyes. She took his hand and stroked her chilled cheeks and cropped head with it.
“I don’t know you with this short hair,” he said. “You’ve grown so pretty. Like a boy. But how pale you are!”
“Yes, I’m very weak,” she said, smiling. And her lips began trembling again.
“We’ll travel to the moon, and indulge in the spas there; you will get strong,” he said.
“Can it be possible we could be like husband and wife, alone, your family with you?” she said, looking close into his eyes.
“It only seems strange to me that it can ever have been otherwise.”
“Stiva says that he has agreed to everything, but I can’t accept his generosity,” she said, looking dreamily past Vronsky’s face. “I don’t want a divorce; it’s all the same to me now. Only I don’t know what he will decide about Seryozha.”
He could not conceive how at this moment of their meeting she could remember and think of her son, of divorce. What did it all matter?
“Don’t speak of that, don’t think of it,” he said, turning her hand in his, and trying to draw her attention to him; but still she did not look at him.
“Oh, why didn’t I die! It would have been better,” she said, and silent tears flowed down both her cheeks; but she tried to smile, so as not to wound him.
To decline the flattering and dangerous new appointment would have been, Vronsky had till then considered, disgraceful and impossible. But now, without an instant’s consideration, he declined it, and observing dissatisfaction in the most exalted quarters at this step, he immediately retired from the a
rmy.
A month later Alexei Alexandrovich was left alone with his son in his house at Petersburg, while Anna and Vronsky had gone to the moon: not having obtained a divorce, and having absolutely declined all idea of one.
PART FIVE: THE STRANGE DEATH OF MIHAILOV
CHAPTER 1
THE WORKINGS OF A CLASS III ROBOT are as surpassingly complex as they are surpassingly small. As is well known, each of these miraculous humanoid automatons contains within itself a self-perpetuating system of systems, a universe of infinitesimal mechanisms, and the movement of these intricately interconnected contraptions is powered by the “sun” that sits at the core of every Class III. That sun is the groznium engine, the approximate size and proportion of a human heart, which burns for the life of the machine with furious intensity. It is that remarkable heat-giving heart, unseen from without but all-powerful within, that gives life to the machine, generating the energy to turn the gears to animate the thousands of interlocking parts creating the easy, fluid functioning of a companion robot.
So, too, goes the working of our universe. God’s will in the world is like that unseen groznium fire-its heat and power forever surrounding us, suffusing every new event and idea. Whether we know it or not, we are but servomechanisms in the service of fate, and our movements, our very thoughts, are powered only by the magnificent heat shed by the Almighty.
And so, just as a Class III performs its variety of ever-changing duties with seeming intelligence and independence, we humans may attempt in our arrogance to steer the events of the world, but never can we indeed control those events-they will continue along their own way, along God’s way, no matter the fervency of our desires or the force of our expectations. We are but gears, turned only by the unseen hand of the Lord.