Leo Tolstoy & Ben Winters

by Android Karenina

  She had not been near Anna again since the destruction of Korsunsky’s Class III, and now again she saw her suddenly quite new and surprising. She saw in her the signs of that excitement of success she knew so well in herself; she saw that she was intoxicated with the delighted admiration she was exciting. She knew that feeling and knew its signs, and saw them in Anna—saw the quivering, flashing light in her eyes, and the smile of happiness and excitement unconsciously playing on her lips, and the deliberate grace, precision, and lightness of her movements.

  It’s not the admiration of the crowd that has intoxicated her, Kitty thought, but the adoration of one. And that one? Can it be he? Every time he spoke to Anna the joyous light flashed into her eyes, and the smile of happiness curved her red lips. She seemed to make an effort to control herself, to try not to show these signs of delight, but they came out on her face of themselves. But what of him? Kitty looked at him and was filled with terror. What was pictured so clearly to Kitty in the mirror of Anna’s face, she saw in him as well. What had become of his always self-possessed, resolute manner, and the carelessly serene expression of his face? Now every time he turned to her, he bent his head, as though he would have fallen at her feet, and in his eyes there was nothing but humble submission and dread. I would not offend you, his eyes seemed every time to be saying, but I want to save myself, and I don’t know how. On his face was a look such as Kitty had never seen before.

  “Kitty, what is it?” said Countess Nordston, setting down gracefully on the carpet beside her. “I don’t understand it.”

  Kitty’s lower lip began to quiver; she got up quickly.

  “Kitty, the chime has sounded. You’re not dancing the mazurka?”

  “No, no,” said Kitty in a voice shaking with tears.

  Countess Nordston found Korsunsky, with whom she was to dance the mazurka; he was sunk in a corner, insensible to the world around him, sobbing quietly and cradling the melted wreck of his beloved-companion’s head in his lap. The countess shook him vigorously and told him to get a hold of himself and go ask Kitty.

  Kitty danced in the first couple, and luckily for her she had not to talk, because Korsunsky was all the time weeping for his dear Portcullis, and how “there must have been some mistake, there must have been.” Vronsky and Anna floated almost opposite her. She saw them with her long-sighted eyes, and saw them, too, close by, when they met in the figures, dipping and swooping, spinning and leaping over each other on those trickily swift triple-time mazurka air-blasts. The more she saw of them, the more convinced she was that her unhappiness was complete. She saw that they felt themselves alone in that crowded room. And on Vronsky’s face, always so firm and independent, she saw that look that had struck her, of bewilderment and humble submissiveness, like the expression of an intelligent dog when it has done wrong.

  Anna smiled, and her smile was reflected by him. She grew thoughtful, and he became serious. Some supernatural force drew Kitty’s eyes to Anna’s face. She was fascinating against the deep black midnight shadows cast by Android Karenina; fascinating were her round arms with their bracelets, fascinating was her firm neck with its thread of pearls, fascinating the straying curls of her loose hair, gaily swaying in the airstreams, fascinating the graceful, light movements of her little feet and hands, fascinating was that lovely face in its eagerness, but there was something terrible and cruel in her fascination.

  Kitty admired her more than ever, and more and more acute was her suffering. Kitty felt overwhelmed, and her face showed it. When Vronsky saw her, sailing by in the mazurka, he did not at once recognize her, she was so changed.

  “Delightful float!” he said to her, for the sake of saying something.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  The float concluded with the presentation of Kitty’s Class III, a tall, graceful android constructed with the lithe form and pink coloring of a ballet dancer, just as Kitty in her childish fancy had long desired. The companion robot was named Tatiana, and the beauty of her face and figure were applauded by the crowd. But Kitty could barely muster an appreciative smile, and shortly thereafter she hurriedly left the dance, her new Class III fluttering along behind her, her tutu flapping as they fled.

  CHAPTER 20

  YES, THERE IS SOMETHING in me hateful, repulsive,” said Levin bitterly to Socrates, who nodded his yellow metal head slowly, reluctantly. Together they came away from the Shcherbatskys’ and walked in the direction of his brother Nikolai’s lodgings. “And I don’t get on with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put myself in such a position.” And he pictured to himself Vronsky, happy, good-natured, clever, that handsome wolf of a Class III bounding along at his feet, so self-possessed, and felt sure he had never been placed in the awful position in which he had been that evening.

  “Yes, she was bound to choose him.”

  “It had to be,” agreed Socrates sadly. “You cannot complain of anyone or anything.”

  “I am myself to blame. What right had I to imagine she would care to join her life to mine?”

  “Who are you? What are you?”

  “A nobody, not wanted by anyone, nor of use to anybody.”

  Man and machine sighed heavily in melancholy unison.

  To prepare Levin for what was to be a difficult visit to his brother, Socrates initiated his monitor and displayed for his master a sequence of Nikolai Memories: Nikolai tottering drunkenly, sneering, with his torn coat and his disdain for the world and all the people in it.

  “Isn’t he right that everything in the world is base and loathsome?”

  “No,” said Socrates, who felt at such times a programmatic responsibility to balance his master’s gloomy emotional state with a more sober analysis. “No, it cannot be.”

  “And are we fair in our judgment of brother Nikolai? Of course, from the point of some, tipsy and wearing his torn cloak, accompanied by that battered, old, oil-stained Class III, he’s a despicable person. But I know him differently. I know his soul, and know that we are like him. And I, instead of going to seek him out, went out to dinner, and came here.” Levin sighed again, had Socrates call Nikolai’s address up from his internal archives, and called a sledge. All the long way to his brother’s, Levin continued to view all the vivid Memories familiar to him of his brother Nikolai’s life.

  He watched how his brother, while at the university, and for a year afterward, had, in spite of the jeers of his companions, lived like a monk, strictly observing all religious rites, services, and fasts, and avoiding every sort of pleasure, especially women. And afterward, how he had all at once broken out: he had associated with the most horrible people, and rushed into the most senseless debauchery—including, it had been whispered, relationships of an intimate nature with robots, relationships that were forbidden in even the most liberal construction of the Ministry’s laws, and of God’s.

  It was all horribly disgusting, yet to Levin it appeared not at all in the same disgusting light as it inevitably would to those who did not know Nikolai, did not know all his story, did not know his heart.

  Levin felt that, in spite of all the ugliness of his life, his brother Nikolai, in his soul, in the very depths of his soul, was no more in the wrong than the people who despised him. He was not to blame for having been born with his unbridled temperament and his somehow limited intelligence. But he had always wanted to be good. And now, or so he had written, he had fallen ill—terribly ill, if Levin could judge by his brother’s latest letter, though the precise nature of his illness remained unclear.

  I will tell him everything, without reserve, and I will make him speak without reserve, too, and I’ll show him that I love him, and so understand him, Levin resolved to himself, as, toward eleven o’clock, he reached the hotel of which he had the address.

  “The top . . . twelve and thirteen,” the II/Porter7e62 answered automatically to Levin’s inquiries.

  The door of No. 12 was half open, and there came out into the streak o
f light thick fumes of cheap, poor tobacco, and the sound of a woman’s voice, unknown to Levin. But he knew at once that his brother was there; he heard his cough.

  “Whom do you want?” said the voice of Nikolai Levin, angrily.

  “It’s I,” answered Konstantin Levin, coming forward into the light.

  “Who’s I?” Nikolai’s voice said again, still more angrily. He could be heard getting up hurriedly, stumbling against something, and Levin saw, facing him in the doorway, the big, scared eyes, and the huge, thin, stooping figure of his brother, so familiar, and yet astonishing in its weirdness and sickliness. Karnak hunched in the shadows of the corner, a battered and dented old can of an android, with black-orange streaks of rust and acid staining his copper-colored sides.

  Nikolai was even thinner than three years before, when Konstantin Levin had seen him last. He was wearing a short coat, and his hands and big bones seemed huger than ever. His hair had grown thinner, the same straight mustache hid his lips, the same eyes gazed strangely and naively at his visitor.

  “Ah, Kostya!” he exclaimed suddenly, recognizing his brother, and his eyes lit up with joy. Karnak raised his creaky head and groaned tiredly. But the next second Nikolai’s face took on a quite different expression: wild, suffering, and cruel.

  “I wrote to you that I don’t know you and don’t want to know you. What is it you want?”

  He was not at all the same as Konstantin had been fancying him. The worst and most tiresome part of his character, what made all relations with him so difficult, had been forgotten by Konstantin Levin when he thought of him, and now, when he saw his face, and especially that nervous twitching of his head, he remembered it all. Karnak let out a strange, metallic belch, and from within him some set of bedeviled gears ground together with an unbearable screech.

  “I didn’t want to see you for anything,” he answered timidly. “I’ve simply come to see you.”

  His brother’s timidity obviously softened Nikolai. His lips twitched. For the first time, Levin noticed a small, gray pustule pulsing just above his brother’s left eyelid.

  “Come to see me. Oh, so that’s it?” Nikolai spat angrily.

  “Thaaaaat’s itttt?” croaked Karnak. Socrates took a step away from the other Class III, as if afraid his rust and gear-degeneracy could be infectious.

  “Well, come in. Sit down,” Nikolai continued. “Like some supper? Masha, bring supper for three, and fresh humectant for the machine-man. Yes, we have it! No, stop a minute. Do you know who this is?” he said, addressing his brother.

  “This woman,” he said, pointing to her, “is the partner of my life, Marya Nikolaevna. I took her out of a bad house,” and Levin knew what was meant by this, and blushed for it. “But I love her and respect her, and anyone who wants to know me,” he added, raising his voice and knitting his brows, “I beg to love her and respect her. She’s just the same as my wife, just the same. So now you know whom you’ve to do with. And if you think you’re lowering yourself, well, here’s the floor, there’s the door.”

  And again his eyes traveled inquiringly over all of them. Karnak’s big, rusty head lolled in its neck socket.

  “Why I should be lowering myself, I don’t understand.”

  “Then, Masha, bring supper: three portions, the humectant, the spirits and wine. . . . No, wait a minute. . . . No, it doesn’t matter. Go along.”

  As they ate, Nikolai coughed and spat big clumps of mucous onto the floor, and Levin noticed a second gray pustule, slightly larger than the first, throbbing on his brother’s cheek. It was difficult to eat.

  “Yes, of course,” said Konstantin Levin, as his brother rambled about some new idea he had, a theory about forming a new membership association for Class IIIs. He tried not to look at the patch of red that had come out on his brother’s projecting cheekbones.

  “Why such an association? What use is it?”

  “Why? Because robots have been made slaves, just as the peasants once were in the time of the Tsars! We feel we can treat them as objects, because we have created them, but we created them to possess consciousness, and to have free will—”

  “Free will as bounded by the Iron Laws,” Levin reminded his brother.

  “Yes, yes, the Iron Laws. But free will they nevertheless possess, free will of a kind. And just as God made man to pursue his own ends as he saw fit, surely we must allow magnificent automatons like these to try and get out of their slavery,” said Nikolai, exasperated by the objection. He gestured to Karnak, as if his own Class III’s magnificence were evidence enough—and at that moment one of Karnak’s arms fell off with a weak, tinny clank.

  Levin sighed, looking meanwhile about the cheerless and dirty room. This sigh seemed to exasperate Nikolai still more.

  It became increasingly difficult for Nikolai even to speak, as he was consumed by a series of shuddering coughs. Finally he stepped out onto the landing to expectorate mightily over the side; he found enjoyment, he announced wickedly, evacuating his sputum onto passing sledges—he considered it the one small pleasure that life had still afforded him.

  Left alone with Marya Nikolaevna, Levin turned to her.

  “Have you been long with my brother?” he said to her.

  “Yes, more than a year.” She lowered her voice, turning away from Karnak’s sensors, although it seemed to Levin that they were pitifully befogged and incapable of registering much. “Nikolai Dmitrich’s health has become very poor. Nikolai Dmitrich drinks a great deal,” she said.

  “That is . . . how does he drink?”

  “Drinks vodka, and it’s bad for him.”

  “And a great deal?” whispered Levin.

  “Yes,” she said, looking timidly toward the doorway, where Nikolai Levin had reappeared. Soon he resumed his tired oration, turning to a bizarre warning that: “If we do not allow robots to control their own destiny, they will control ours.” But his speech had begun to falter, and he passed abruptly from one subject to another. Konstantin, with the help of Masha, persuaded him not to go out anywhere, and got him to bed hopelessly drunk.

  Masha promised to write to Konstantin in case of need, and he departed. As he and Socrates descended the creaky stairs, Levin considered his suspicion that there was something wrong with his brother far beyond the effects of drink, and wondered what exactly it could be.

  CHAPTER 21

  IN THE MORNING Konstantin Levin left Moscow, and toward evening he reached home. On his journey on the Grav he talked to his neighbors about politics and the new gravways, and, just as in Moscow, he was overcome by a sense of confusion of ideas, dissatisfaction with himself, shame of something or other. But when he got out at his own station, when he saw the cyclopian II/Coachman/47-T, its sturdy torso perfectly perpendicular at the controls; when, in the dim light reflected by the station fires, he saw his own sledge, his own four-treaded Puller at its head, trimmed with rings and tassels; when the Coachman mechanically relayed the village news, he began to see what had happened to him in quite a different light. He felt himself, and did not want to be anyone else. All he wanted now was to be better than before.

  Then, riding on the coach from the Grav station, came the heat: the radiating warmth of the pit, his pit, which he began to feel on his skin several versts before his massive groznium mine came into view. At last, there it was, a vast and craggy crater blasted out of the countryside. The pit was half a verst long and twice again as wide, its rough rock walls sloping down into a rutted rock-lined bottom, which was dotted with a thousand small smelting fires, which rung twenty-four hours a day with the clang of pickaxes and shovels.

  Konstantin Levin climbed from the sledge, waved robustly to a gang of Pitbots with their battered but firm charcoal bodies and wide treads, donned his goggles, and stood at the outer radius of the pit. As he stared down into the vast crater, watching his dozens of diligent Pitbots at work, diligent and industrious as honeybees, scurrying to and fro, churning up the Earth with their axes, he felt that little by little the confu
sion was clearing up, and the shame and self-dissatisfaction were passing away.

  He took a last breath of the sulfurous air and walked with Socrates to the house from the side of the pit. As they walked, Levin expressed to his Class III his new resolutions.

  “In the first place, from this day I will give up hoping for any extraordinary happiness,” he said. “Such as marriage might have given me.”

  “One, no happiness for you,” Socrates parroted faithfully, his master’s use of the set phrase “in the first place” having activated his recording/retaining function-set.

  “Consequently I will not so disdain what I really have.”

  “Subset of one: no happiness equals no disdain.”

  “Secondly, I will never again let myself give way to low passion, the memory of which tortured me so while I was making up my mind to make an offer.”

  “Two: absence of low passion.”

  Then Levin remembered his brother Nikolai, and made one further resolution. “I will never allow myself to forget him, Socrates.”

  “Three: Nikolai preservation dedication.”

  “I will follow him up, and not lose sight of him. I will be ready to help if his illness should continue to worsen.”

  The snow of the little quadrangle before the house was lit up by a light in the bedroom window of his old mécanicienne, Agafea Mihalovna. She was not yet asleep.

  “You’re soon back again, sir,” said Agafea Mihalovna as Levin and Socrates entered.

  “I got tired of it, Agafea Mihalovna. With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better,” he answered, and, together with his beloved-companion, went into his study.