by Leo Tolstoy
Levin was too shocked to reply: above the rumpled shirtfront, Veslovsky had no face. There was no skin between ear and ear, hairline and chin, and staring back at Levin instead was a mass of churning gears and rapidly moving small parts in the place where a face should be. Still speaking in his gay and eager-to-please society voice, which Levin now realized emanated from a Vox-Em of surpassing quality, he said, “Alas, Konstantin Dmitrich, you catch me unawares.”
Levin, squinting with horror at the silver-black absence of a face, detected dozens of tiny pistons pumping as the words emerged; like an audience member seeing the movement of the puppeteer’s strings, he was watching the devices that would move the lips, were the face-piece in place.
“Good Lord, man,” Levin said idiotically. “You are a robot.”
“You have discovered my secret, friend,” came Veslovsky’s voice from the head unit. The robot sighed, and Levin watched as two tiny half-circles of gears shifted minutely along the upper portion of the face-hole; no doubt this was the system set that created an ironic lift of the eyebrows in other circumstances. “And though I was sent here to observe, not to destroy, my circuits are rather extraordinarily adaptable.”
Levin stepped backward, suddenly aware that Veslovsky stood between himself and the door.
“It is not useful to the Ministry that you or anyone of your circle should be aware of my true nature. And thus…”
The Veslovsky-machine emitted a piercing shriek and flash of light, and then grabbed the disoriented Levin firmly by the throat. Levin grunted and gurgled and stared into the deathly emptiness of the machine-face, as the robot lifted him from the ground like tearing a tree out by the roots.
“Society is changing, Konstantin Dmitrich,” Veslovsky said with an air of melancholy, grinding two heavy groznium-infused thumbs into the sides of his neck. “Your commitment to your Class III is admirable, but there is no use fighting the future.” Levin could not respond; his head was getting weaker and his windpipe throbbed as the last air escaped from his lungs. In a weirdly squeamish gesture, under the circumstances, the robot turned his head away, as if Levin’s dying gasps were too gruesome a sight for his delicate sensibilities.
Levin’s oxygen-depleted brain took him on a long, slow Memory sequence through the days of his life. He saw himself at eighteen, first attuning his gleaming new beloved-companion, Socrates… on his wedding day, choked by love and terror… at age six, his sister crying over a malfunctioning Class I dance-toy…
… the ballerina…
Konstantin Dmitrich struggled to maintain focus… the ballerina had spun too fast, whirling dangerously, shooting off sparks. What had Mother done?
Summoning every ounce of his remaining strength, Levin flailed back with his powerful right hand and pushed open the wooden shutters of the bedroom; immediately the powerful sound and fresh smell of pouring rain filled the room. Levin kicked out at his adversary’s thin ankle, trying not to injure but to dislodge it… to throw it just enough off balance to…
There! Levin drove his whole body forward and with his last reserves of air he pushed the machine-man backward until it was bent over the sill, the cruel mechanical non-face outside and looking up, lashed by the rain.
“An old wives’ tale that happens to be true,” Mamma had said, so many years ago, cracking the faceplate of the Class I ballerina toy with the peen of a hammer. “Just get a bit of rainwater behind the eyes…”
“Grazzle… furglazzle…,” spat the Veslovsky machine nonsensically, as its insides popped and hissed. “Grllllllll…” Levin, unrelenting, kept him-it, he told himself-it!-under the fierce flow of the rain like a man bathing a reluctant pet. At last the hands on his throat slackened their grip, and Levin breathed hard, watching with grim fascination as Veslovsky melted into some sort of hideous, unwholesome, forced Surcease. Levin then collapsed beneath the window, the robot slumped beside him with its head lolling from the neck at a crooked angle, still spitting out nonsense phrases in wildly modulated tones. “Vizz… poj… markkkklzz…”
Finally, like a real dying man summons one final burst of lucidity, the thing that had been Veslovsky spoke very quietly, in perfect Russian: “You can’t escape. You can’t win.”
With that, the last energy fled from his body, and Veslovsky ceased to be.
***
“What madness is this?” Stepan Arkadyevitch said when, after hearing from Dolly that his friend was being turned out of the house, he found Levin in the garden. “Mais c’est ridicule! “What fly has stung you? Mais c’est du dernier ridicule! What did you think, if a young man…”
“Please don’t go into it! I can’t help it. I feel ashamed of how I’m treating you and him,” replied Levin, absently massaging the sides of his neck. “But it won’t be, I imagine, a great grief to him to go, and his presence was distasteful to me and to my wife.”
And Levin gave Oblonsky an apologetic nod, signaling the conclusion of the interview and dismissing his friend from the garden; when Stepan Arkadyich had angrily departed, Levin returned to smoothing over the uneven patch of soil where he had buried the disassembled pieces of Vassenka Veslovsky.
CHAPTER 6
SOME WEEKS AFTER the stormy conclusion of Vassenka Veslovsky’s tenure at Pokrovskoe, Kitty answered the door at the sound of a quiet though insistent knocking, and found on the doorstep a very thin woman wrapped in a ratty old blanket. Immediately Kitty beckoned the bedraggled creature inside, assuming this was one of the poor peasants they had lately heard of, those wandering the countryside, their homes having been destroyed by the alien marauders. Kitty had even heard that some had found employment in the homes of the wealthy as intimate worker-friends-in other words, as poor substitutes for the absented Class Ills, though she herself was horrified by the idea of employing a human in that function.
But once inside, the woman pushed back the cowl of the blanket, revealing not the haggard face of a hungry peasant, but an obsidian faceplate, flashing a frantic electric green.
“It’s…” Kitty put a hand before her mouth. “My goodness, it’s a Class III!”
“A fugitive,” said Levin, hastening down the stairs and closing the front door behind the machine.
The Class Ill’s name was Witch Hazel, and she would not speak of who her mistress was, or how she had escaped the circuitry adjustment protocol; there could be no doubting, however, that her journey had been a perilous one. Witch Hazel’s head unit jerked nervously about as she spoke, and she generally displayed all the sensory twitchiness and navigational confusion inherent in masterless beloved-companions. She insisted instead that she had a communiqué to deliver, which turned out to be intended not for Kitty and Levin, but for Darya Alexandrovna.
Dolly was duly summoned, and the communiqué viewed-it was from Anna Karenina, and its substance was simple: Dolly was invited to visit Anna and Vronsky in their secret encampment. Witch Hazel would act as her guide.
Darya Alexandrovna decided right away to accept this invitation and go to see Anna. She was sorry to annoy her sister and do anything Levin disliked. She quite understood how right the Levins were in not wishing to have anything to do with Vronsky. But she felt she must go and see Anna, and show her that her feelings could not be changed, in spite of the change in her position. It was decided that she and Witch Hazel would leave the next morning; the machine-woman, whose reluctance to speak further of her past and current situation was manifestly clear, gratefully accepted a dosing of humectant and was Surceased for the night.
That she might be independent of the Levins for the expedition, Darya Alexandrovna sent to the village to hire a carriage for the drive; but Levin, learning of it, went to her to protest.
“What makes you suppose that I dislike your going? But, even if I did dislike it, I should still more dislike your not taking my carriage and engine,” he said. “Hiring Coachmen in the village is disagreeable to me, and, what’s of more importance, they’ll undertake the job and never get you there. I have a four-tr
eaded II/Puller. And if you don’t want to wound me, you’ll take mine.”
Darya Alexandrovna had to consent, and Levin made ready for his sister-in-law a four-tread and carriage set-not at all a smart-looking conveyance, but capable of taking Darya Alexandrovna the whole distance in a single day, if the pointedly vague information of the location and direction of travel that Witch Hazel had provided could be believed.
Dolly and the robot, by Levin’s advice, started before daybreak. The road was good, the carriage comfortable, and the carriage hummed along merrily, and on the box sat the junker, the mysteriously ownerless robot. With the steering shaft in her end-effectors, Witch Hazel’s formerly nervous, scattered mien dissipated, leaving Dolly to wonder whether, before the adjustment protocol had torn her from her duties, this robot had been beloved-companion to a hunter or racewoman.
As Dolly rode, she thought. At home, looking after her children, she had no time to think. So now, during this journey of four hours, all the thoughts she had suppressed before rushed swarming into her brain, and she thought over all her life as she never had before, and from the most different points of view. Her thoughts seemed strange even to herself, the words bouncing around in her skull-how odd, this Class-III-less life, without Dolichka to speak her thoughts aloud to! At first she thought about the children, about whom she was uneasy, although the princess and Kitty (she reckoned more upon her) had promised to look after them. If only Masha does not begin her naughty tricks, if Grisha isn’t bit by the dog, and Lily isn’t upset again! she thought.
Witch Hazel, at this point in the journey, pulled the coach off to the side of the road and, with stammering apologies, fit her passenger with a silken blindfold. “We must be drawing closer to our destination,” Dolly thought out loud, her musings turning to her sister-in-law.
They attack Anna. What for? Am I any better? I have, anyway, a husband I love-not as I should like to love him, still I do love him, while Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame?
She wants to live. God has put that in our hearts. Very likely I should have done the same. Even to this day I don’t feel sure I did right in listening to her at that terrible time when she came to me in Moscow. I ought then to have cast off my husband and have begun my life fresh. I might have loved and have been loved in reality. And is it any better as it is? I don’t respect him. He’s necessary to me, she thought about her husband, and I put up with him. Is that any better? She remembered his dull words of comfort when Dolichka was taken away, and blamed him for that, too.
As the carriage bumped along, the road becoming more rutted and uneven as they drew toward their destination, the most passionate and impossible romances rose before Darya Alexandrovna’s imagination. Anna did quite right, and certainly I shall never reproach her for it. She is happy, she makes another person happy, and she’s not broken down as I am, but most likely just as she always was, bright, clever, open to every impression, thought Darya Alexandrovna-and a sly smile curved her lips, for, as she pondered on Anna’s love affair, Darya Alexandrovna constructed on parallel lines an almost identical love affair for herself, with an imaginary composite figure, the ideal man who was in love with her. And Dolichka lived and stood arm in arm with her as she, like Anna, confessed the whole affair to her husband. And the amazement and perplexity of Stepan Arkadyich at this avowal made her smile.
It was with such daydreams she reached the turning of the highroad that led to the rebel encampment at Vozdvizhenskoe.
CHAPTER 7
WITCH HAZEL PULLED UP the carriage and looked round to the right, to a field of rye, where a dozen or so ragged-looking Class III robots were sitting on a cart. Witch Hazel was just going to jump down, but on second thought she shouted to the other robots instead, and beckoned them to come up. The wind that seemed to blow as they drove dropped when the carriage stood still; gadflies settled on the steaming Puller engine and sizzled. One of the robots got up and came slowly toward the carriage, a tall, blue metal android with a conical head who bowed deeply and was introduced by Witch Hazel as Antipodal. A second robot, also moving toward the carriage but much more slowly than the first, must have been built as a regimental Class III, for it was in an animal shape-one appropriate to its name, which Dolly learned to be Tortoiseshell.
Decoms, thought Dolly, surveying the sorry-looking handful of metal men and women, and shaking her head sadly. A world of poor, pitiful decoms.
The scenery was no more inspiring. An iron-sided silo stood bare and slightly tilted, patterns of dust caked over the circular windows. The barn was in little better shape, with stray tiles peeling off the roof and an overwhelming smell of rotting feed coming from within. The farmhouse itself was a ramshackle afair, with weeds and climbing plants growing helter-skelter up the sides, covering the windows and snaking in and out of the doorway.
A curly-headed old man in a ragged mécanicien’s jumpsuit, with a bit of bast tied round his hair and his bent back dark with perspiration, came toward the carriage, quickening his steps, and took hold of the mudguard with his sunburnt hand.
“Welcome toVozdvizhenskoe,” he scowled. “I hope you are a friend, and not foe, for I’d hate to have to kill such a nice-looking woman so early in the day.”
“What?”
“I’m only making a jest, madame, a bit of a jape. But whom do you want? The count himself? Or she, the Queen of the Junkers?”
“Well, are they at home, my good man?” Darya Alexandrovna said vaguely, not knowing how to ask about Anna, even of this unusual man, apparently a mécanicien for illegal, decommissioned robots.
“At home for sure,” said the functionary, shifting from one bare foot to the other, and leaving a distinct print of five toes and a heel in the dust. “Sure to be at home,” he repeated, evidently eager to talk. “Only yesterday a couple more of these pitiful tin souls arrived.” He gestured with genial distaste to Witch Hazel and the others. “What do you want?” He turned round and called to Tortoiseshell, who was emitting a basso tone from somewhere within his eponymous outer covering.
“Ah, here they come now in their finery.”
Dolly looked in the direction the queer man indicated and saw two shambling monster-machines: Vronsky and Anna, in homebuilt Exterior battle-suits, making the rounds of their encampment. Out front was the first of the suits, evidently Anna’s, measuring some twelve feet or more and painted on its front with the oversize eyes and glittering crown of some royal personage in a children’s carnival; then came Vronsky in a new version of his late lamented Frou-Frou, bearing the same powerful shape and weaponry, but homebuilt and therefore more ragged, without the same careful soldering and high quality of materials that typify a regimental Exterior.
Trotting along beside them on a military surplus two-tread was Vassenka Veslovsky in his Scotch cap with floating ribbons, his stout legs stretched out before him, obviously pleased with his own appearance. Darya Alexandrovna could not suppress a good-humored smile as she recognized him. (She had no way of knowing, for how could she, that this was not the Vassenka Veslovsky she had been so entertained by at Pokrovskoe, although it was externally identical and possessed of the same thought-modeling and associative programming.) As Dolly watched, Anna’s queenly Exterior shambled to a halt, and Anna climbed out of the torso of the battle-machine, shook out her hair, and began quietly grooming the war-bot: rubbing oil into its joints, testing its reflexes, and so on. The sureness of her understanding of the complicated piece of machinery, combined with the ease and grace of her deportment, impressed Dolly.
For the first minute it seemed to her unsuitable for Anna to ride inside an Exterior. The concept of riding within a battle-suit was, in Darya Alexandrovna’s mind, overly masculine for a lady. But when she had scrutinized her, seeing her closer, she was at once reconciled to the idea of her sister-in-law at the controls of one of the motorized death-dealers. In spite of her seemingly out-of-place elegance, everything was so simple, quiet, and dignified in the attitude, the dress, and the movements of
Anna that nothing could have been more natural. Vronsky was carefully piloting Frou-Frou Deux (this was the new Exterior’s name), trying to “ride the kinks out,” as the expression went, and being derided for not taking enough care by the fat little Englishman, Vronsky’s engineer, who brought up the rear of the party on foot.
Anna’s face suddenly beamed with a joyful smile at the instant when, in the little figure huddled in a corner of the old carriage, she recognized Dolly. On reaching the carriage she leapt out of the torso of her Exterior, pulled free of the wires that controlled the machine, and ran up to greet her friend.
“I thought it was you and dared not think it. How delightful! You can’t fancy how glad I am!” she said, at one moment pressing her face against Dolly and kissing her, and at the next holding her off and examining her with a smile.
“Here’s a delightful surprise, Alexei!” she said, looking round at Vronsky, who had emerged from his own Exterior and out into the cold country air to walk toward them. Vronsky, carefully plucking free from his own set of sensor-wires, went up to Dolly.
“You wouldn’t believe how glad we are to see you,” he said, giving peculiar significance to the words, and showing his strong white teeth in a smile. “Lupo! Come!” The wolf-robot bounded from around an outbuilding, his repaired visual sensors gleaming brightly as he raced to the side of his master.
Vassenka Veslovsky took off his cap and greeted the visitor by gleefully waving the ribbons over his head. Dolly noticed as she and Anna hugged happily that the small crowd of decom robots focused their sensors on Vronsky and Anna with obvious love and admiration. As her eyes passed over the stolid Tortoiseshell, the upright Antipodal, and the enigmatic Witch Hazel, Dolly paused to consider the sorry fate of these creatures. Had they escaped their respective fates due to the intercession of loving masters, or through some dumb stroke of luck? What mixed and confusing messages must they be receiving from the Iron Laws coded in their wiring, now that the very Ministry that created them had ordered their destruction!