by Leo Tolstoy
“Gentlemen, I beg that you pardon my wife the rashness of her young age and tenderhearted spirit. Naturally we shall comply and submit these machines for the necessary adjustments. But I wonder if you, in your official capacity, might first perform a service for a local landowner.”
Speaking rapidly, directing his words primarily to the first Toy Soldier, the one who seemed to him to have the friendliest nature, Levin explained what he and Socrates had observed at the old farmhouse: the skeleton stripped of flesh; the signs of struggle; the puddle of viscous ochre goo. He told them, too, of his own encounter with the gigantic, wormlike koschei outside Ergushovo. “Could you not, as long as your official business has brought you to this province, ride out to these spots I have mentioned and investigate? The threat of such unusual and deadly monsters is a cause of deep distress, as you can imagine, to myself and my household.”
But the Toy Soldier to whom Levin directed his appeal scratched his head and squinted, seemingly entirely uninterested in the bizarre creatures Levin spoke of. “That is indeed a most alarming tale,” he said softly, “but it does not, alas, have to do with us and our business.” Levin glanced from the corner of his eye at Socrates, and saw that he had brought one end-effector up to gently touch Tatiana where her torso unit met her lower portion-a touchingly human gesture. “Sir, we have precise instructions from the Ministry.”
Levin was inwardly cursing the seeming singlemindedness of the soldiers when the other one, who had been standing mute with arms crossed, seeming not to pay attention, held up an open palm. “This wormlike machine,” he said, “did it emit a sound-like a sort of ticking, a tikka tikka tikka sound?”
Levin nodded his assent, at which the Toy Soldier sighed and spoke in a whisper to his companion. As they turned on their slim black boots and walked back toward the door, the first of the soldiers glanced amiably over his shoulder at Levin, and said in a casual tone, “We shall return shortly, and complete our previously announced business here. We have no desire to perform our commission by force.”
“No,” said the second soldier, as he pulled the big front door of the manor house behind them. “Not yet.”
Kitty burst into tears, running to her Class III and hiding her face in Tatiana’s thin metal bosom. “I could not bear for her to be taken!” she said through her tears.
“Nor I, my dear,” was Levin’s reply, as he looked gravely out the front window, watching the Toy Soldiers ride off. “Nor I.”
“And what will they do with them? I mean, really do?”
“I don’t know, Kitty.”
“Madame?” interjected Tatiana anxiously, as Levin and Kitty embraced.
“Sir?” echoed Socrates.
“Yes, yes, beloved-companions,” Levin said. “You are quite right. Now we must leave Pokrovskoe. And fast.”
CHAPTER 9
IMMEDIATELY THERE COMMENCED in the Levin household that frenzy of activity, among robots and humans alike, attendant upon a rapid and secret flight to safety. What to take? How much luggage? How best to travel undetected? And where to go?
“I shall take the Class Ills with me to the small provincial town of Urgensky, where my brother Nikolai is residing,” Levin said. “In his last communiqué he said his own Class III, Karnak, has not been taken in for adjustment. We may hope that Urgensky is too out of the way, with too few Class III companion robots in residence there, to be considered worth the effort of the state to collect them.”
Kitty’s face changed at once.
“When?” she said.
“Immediately! A visit to my ailing brother is a perfectly reasonable excuse for travel, and I shall carry the Surceased robots with my luggage.”
“And I will go with you, can I?” Kitty said.
“Kitty! What are you thinking of?” he said reproachfully.
“How do you mean?” she said, offended that he should seem to take her suggestion unwillingly and with vexation. “Why shouldn’t I go? I shan’t be in your way. I-”
“The journey is to be long, and likely dangerous,” said Levin, all the fire of their earlier quarrel returning. “Why should you-”
“Why? For the same reason as you.”
“Ah!” said Levin, and bitterly muttered to Socrates, though loud enough for Kitty to hear. “At a moment of such gravity, she only thinks of her being dull by herself, alone here in the pit-house without me or Tatiana.”
“Now now,” counseled Socrates, looking guiltily at Kitty. “Do not be cross with her.”
“No!” said Levin sternly. “It’s out of the question.”
Tatiana brought Kitty a cup of tea from the I/Samovar/1(8); Kitty did not even notice her. The tone in which her husband had said the last words wounded her, especially because he evidently did not believe what she had said.
“I tell you, that if you go, I shall come with you; I shall certainly come,” she said hastily and wrathfully.
“It is out of the question!”
“Why out of the question? Why do you say it’s out of the question?”
“Because I’ll be going God knows where, by all sorts of roads and to all sorts of hotels. And my brother lives in entirely unsuitable circumstances! That would be reason enough to bar your coming, before one even considers the danger of our being discovered by agents of the Ministry and prosecuted as Januses for disobeying the compulsory adjustment order. You would be a hindrance to me,” said Levin, trying to be cool.
“What dangers you can face, I can!” replied Kitty hotly.
“Yes, yes. But think, too, of where we are going, and whom we will meet. For one thing then, this woman’s there whom you can’t meet.”
“I don’t know and don’t care to know who’s there and what. My husband is undertaking a risk, to protect his beloved-companion as well as mine, and I will go with my husband too…”
“Kitty! Don’t get angry. But just think a little: this is a matter of such importance that I can’t bear to think that you should bring in a feeling of weakness, of dislike to being left alone. Come, you’ll be dull alone, so go and stay at Moscow a little.”
“There, you always ascribe base, vile motives to me,” she said with tears of wounded pride and fury. “I didn’t mean, it wasn’t weakness, it wasn’t… I feel that it’s my duty to be with my husband when he’s in trouble, but you try on purpose to hurt me, you try on purpose not to understand…”
“No, this is awful! To be such a slave!” cried Levin, getting up, and unable to restrain his anger any longer. But at the same second he felt that he was beating himself.
“Then why did you marry? You could have been free. Why did you, if you regret it?”
He began to speak, trying to find words not to dissuade but simply to soothe her. But she did not heed him, and would not agree to anything. He bent down to her and took her hand, which resisted him. He kissed her hand, kissed her hair, kissed her hand again-still she was silent. But when he took her face in both his hands and said “Kitty!” she suddenly recovered herself, and began to cry, and they were reconciled.
It was decided that they should go together, as soon as possible. The robots were put in Surcease, and locked together in a trunk.
CHAPTER 10
THE HOTEL IN URGENSKY, the provincial town where Nikolai Levin was living, was one of those provincial hotels which are constructed on the newest model of modern improvements, with the best intentions of cleanliness, comfort, and even elegance, but owing to the public that patronizes them, are with astounding rapidity transformed into filthy taverns with a pretension of modern improvement that only makes them worse than the old-fashioned, honestly filthy hotels.
There remained only one filthy room, which would barely fit the two of them, and their robots, once revivified. Levin was feeling angry with his wife because what he had expected had come to pass: at the moment of arrival, when his heart throbbed with emotion and anxiety to find his brother and make whatever arrangements were necessary to find a place where the Class Ills could stay h
ere undetected, he had to be seeing after her.
“Go, do go!” she said, looking at him with timid and guilty eyes.
He went out of the door without a word, and at once stumbled over his brother’s consort, Marya Nikolaevna, who had heard of his arrival and had not dared to go in to see him. She was just the same as when he saw her in Moscow; the same woolen gown, and bare arms and neck, and the same good-naturedly stupid, pockmarked face, only a little plumper.
Speaking rapidly and with obvious apprehension, Marya Nikolaevna expressed her relief at seeing him: Nikolai’s illness, she explained, had dramatically worsened, and indeed she feared he was now at death’s door.
“What? Well, and how is he at present?”
“Very bad. He can’t get up. His body writhes with pain, and there is in the texture of his flesh a strange and unseemly rippling. I fear the worst. Come,” Marya Nikolaevna continued. “He has kept expecting you.”
The door of his room opened and Kitty peeped out. Tatiana’s head peeped out just under hers. Levin crimsoned both from shame and anger with his wife, who had put herself and him in such a difficult position; but Marya Nikolaevna crimsoned still more. She positively shrank and flushed to the point of tears, and clutching the ends of her apron in both hands, twisted them in her red fingers without knowing what to say or what to do.
For the first instant Levin saw an expression of eager curiosity in the eyes with which Kitty looked at this awful woman, so incomprehensible to her; but it lasted only a single instant.
“Well! Have you explained to her our plan, regarding the Class III robots?” she turned to her husband and then to her.
“But one can’t go on talking in the corridor like this!” Levin said, looking angrily at a gentleman who walked jauntily at that instant across the corridor, as though going about his affairs. Could this be one of them? A Toy Soldier? Some other agent of the state, disguised in everyday clothes?
“Well then, come in,” said Kitty, turning to Marya Nikolaevna, who had recovered herself, but noticing her husband’s face of dismay, she added, “or go on; go, and then come for me,” and she and Tatiana went back into the room.
Levin went to his brother’s room. There he was aghast to see the instructions etched above the door, but he obeyed them nonetheless, donning the elaborate sickroom costume of mask, gown, and gloves.
“My poor brother,” he murmured to Socrates, who was donning his own mask; of course a companion robot required no protection from human infection, but the costume would at least delay his immediate detection as a machine-man, should a doctor or other stranger happen into the room.
Levin, from Marya’s descriptions, had expected to find the physical signs of the approach of death more marked-greater weakness, greater emaciation, but still almost the same condition of things. He had expected himself to feel the same distress at the loss of the brother he loved and the same horror in face of death as he had felt then, only in a greater degree.
In this little, dirty room with the caution posted by the door, with the painted panels of its walls filthy with spittle, and conversation audible through the thin partition from the next room, in a stifling atmosphere saturated with impurities, on a bedstead moved away from the wall, there lay, covered with a quilt, a body. One arm of this body was above the quilt, and the wrist, huge as a rake handle, was attached, inconceivably it seemed, to the thin, long bone of the arm, smooth from the beginning to the middle. The head lay sideways on the pillow. Levin could see the scanty locks wet with sweat on the temples and the tense, transparent-looking forehead.
Propped against the opposite wall was Karnak, Nikolai’s staggering rust-bucket of a Class III, if anything more decrepit and dilapidated than the last time Levin had seen him. “One can see why the Ministry has no interest in adjusting such machines,” whispered Levin to Socrates, who had instinctively recoiled from the sad, shrunken metal figure.
As they approached the bed, any doubt that this wracked figure was Levin’s dear brother became impossible. In spite of the terrible change in the face, Levin had only to glance at those eager eyes raised at his approach, only to catch the faint movement of the mouth under the sticky mustache, to realize the terrible truth that this death-like body was his living brother.
When Konstantin took him by the hand, the thick, white protective gloves feeling scarcely protection enough, Nikolai smiled. There was at that moment the scrape of a boot heel in the hallway outside, and Levin looked up sharply: was it them? Had they been found already? Socrates pulled his mask higher over his face, his eyebank flashing unsteadily.
“You did not expect to find me like this,” Nikolai articulated with effort.
“Yes… no,” said Levin. The sound of the footsteps faded down the hallway.
A great swell of flesh bubbled up from Nikolai’s midsection, as if his body was a balloon and air had been temporarily forced into one part of it. Levin looked away, as Nikolai winced and groaned.
“How was it you didn’t let me know before that you were suffering so?”
Nikolai could not answer; again the flesh of his torso bubbled grotesquely, and again he gritted his teeth and scowled with evident agony.
Levin had to talk so as not to be silent, and he did not know what to say, especially as his brother made no reply. His odd condition was not, it appeared, contained to his midsection; as Levin watched, one of Nikolai’s eyes bulged grotesquely, and then the other. He tried to speak and his swollen tongue lolled like bread dough onto his cheek. Containing his horror and revulsion, Levin said to his brother that his wife had come with him. When his tongue detumesced and he could speak again, Nikolai expressed pleasure, but said he was afraid of frightening her by his condition. A silence followed-Levin would not say so, but he had precisely the same fear.
“Let me explain the reason we have come,” Levin then said. “It has to do with…” He lowered his voice to a whisper, drawing nearer his brother’s wrecked flesh, and said, “the robots.”
Karnak’s leg fell off, and he fell to the ground with a scrape and clank. Socrates, politely, lifted the other machine back up and placed him in his previous position against the wall.
Suddenly Nikolai stirred, and began to say something, entirely ignoring Levin’s whispered comment about the Class Ills and speaking instead of his health. He found fault with the doctor, regretting he had not a celebrated Moscow doctor with a II/Prognosis/4 or higher. Levin saw that he still hoped.
Seizing the first moment of silence, Levin got up, anxious to escape, if only for an instant, from his agonizing emotion, and said that he would go and fetch his wife.
“Very well, and I’ll tell Karnak to tidy up here. It’s dirty and stinking here, I expect. Karnak! Clear up the room,” the sick man said with effort. Karnak swiveled his head unit uncertainly, his aural sensors detecting some distant sensory input.
“Well, how is he?” Kitty asked with a frightened face when Levin went to fetch her.
“Oh, it’s awful, it’s awful! What did you come for?” said Levin.
Kitty was silent for a few seconds, looking timidly and ruefully at her husband; then she went up and took him by the elbow with both hands.
“Kostya! Take me to him; it will be easier for us to bear it together. You only take me, take me to him, please, and go away,” she said. “You must understand that for me to see you, and not to see him, is far more painful. There I might be a help to you and to him. Please, let me!” she besought her husband, as though the happiness of her life depended on it.
Levin was obliged to agree, and regaining his composure, and completely forgetting about Marya Nikolaevna by now, he went again to his brother with Kitty.
Stepping lightly, and continually glancing at her husband, showing him a valorous and sympathetic face, Kitty donned the mask and gloves and gown, went into the sickroom, and, turning without haste, noiselessly closed the door. With inaudible steps she went quickly to the sick man’s bedside, and going up so that he had not to turn his
head, she immediately clasped in her fresh, young, thickly gloved hand, the skeleton of his huge hand, pressed it, and began speaking with that soft eagerness, sympathetic and not jarring, which is peculiar to women.
“We have met, though we were not acquainted, on the Venus orbiter,” she said. “You never thought I was to be your sister?”
“Would you have recognized me?” he said, with a radiant smile at her entrance.
“Yes, I would. I am sorry to have found you unwell, and I hope I can be of some use to you.”
“And I to you, and to your machines.” Nikolai smiled, and from this quiet statement Levin gathered that his brother had indeed heard his allusion to the robots, and was willing despite his grave health to help keep their beloved-companions safe.
It was decided that when the time came for Levin and Kitty to return to Pokrovskoe (meaning, though none spoke the words aloud, when Nikolai had passed into the Beyond), their Class Ills would stay here, their exterior trim radically downgraded, masquerading as Class IIs at work in a local cigarette factory-the owner of which, Nikolai felt sure, would accept a small payment to hide the robots among his workforce-and spending their Surceased nights in the dingy factory basement.
CHAPTER 11
AS THE HOURS and then days passed, Levin found he could not look calmly at his brother; he could not himself be natural and calm in his presence. When he went in to be with the sick man, his eyes and his attention were unconsciously dimmed, and he did not see or distinguish the details of his brother’s position. He smelled the awful odor, saw the dirt, disorder, and miserable condition, and heard the groans, and felt that nothing could be done to help. While Kitty directed her full attention and sympathy to the dying man, and Socrates anxiously circumnavigated the room, Levin’s mind wandered, like a landowner traveling the acres of his life. He surveyed all that was pleasurable, like his pit-mining operation and his beloved Kitty, and he surveyed all those tracts causing him concern: the mysterious, wormlike mechanical monsters rampaging the countryside; the circuitry adjustment protocol, which seemed to Levin an inexplicable and unjustified exercise of state power against the citizenry; and worst of all, the unspeakable illness eating his dear brother alive.