“Ah, is that it, then? This is the reason you have dragged me back to Moscow, to this dreary life: so you can play the alien-slaying hero?”
Vronsky threw up his hands. “Anna! What can be the meaning of this?”
“There’s no meaning in it to you, because you care nothing for me. You don’t care to understand my life.”
For an instant she had a clear vision of what she was doing, and was horrified at how she had fallen away from her resolution to keep peace between them. But even though she knew it was her own ruin, she could not restrain herself, could not keep herself from proving to him that he was wrong, could not give way to him. “How is it,” she said, “though you boast of your straightforwardness, you don’t tell the truth?”
“I never boast, and I never tell lies,” he said slowly, restraining his rising anger. “It’s a great pity if you can’t respect…”
“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be. And if you don’t love me anymore, it would be better and more honest to say so.”
“No, this is becoming unbearable!” cried Vronsky getting up from his chair; and stopping short, facing her, he said, speaking deliberately: “What do you try my patience for?” looking as though he might have said much more, but was restraining himself. “It has limits.”
“What do you mean by that?” she cried, looking with terror at the undisguised hatred in his whole face, and especially in his cruel, menacing eyes.
“I mean to say…” he was beginning, but he checked himself. “I must ask what it is you want of me?”
“What can I want? I want love, and there is none. So then all is over.”
She turned toward the door.
“Stop! Stop!” said Vronsky, with no change in the gloomy lines of his brows, though he held her by the hand. “What is it all about? I said that we must bring Pyotr to serve us on the moon, and on that you told me I was lying, that I was not an honorable man.”
Pyotr, as if on cue, entered the room and tripped over the ottoman, sending the tea tray with its contents clattering across the floor.
“Yes, and I repeat that the man who reproaches me with having sacrificed everything for me,” she said, recalling the words of a still earlier quarrel, “that he’s worse than a dishonorable man-he’s a heartless man.”
“Oh, there are limits to endurance!” he cried, and hastily let go her hand. Pyotr rose unsteadily and gathered up the tea things to start again.
“He hates me, that’s clear,” Anna said, speaking the words in exactly the warm and confidential voice she once used to spill her utmost thoughts to her beloved-companion. Alexei Kirillovich listened in silence, without looking round, while she walked with faltering steps out of the room. “He loves himself, and he loves the New Russia, that’s even clearer,” she said in addition, no longer caring that she was speaking aloud. “I want love, and I want robots, and both are gone. So, then, all is over.” She repeated the words she had said, “And it must be ended.” She knew what Android Karenina would do: she would glow deep lilac with sympathy, would reflect Anna’s own emotions back to her in cooler colors, would open her effectors and lend her mistress consolation and calm.
But Android Karenina was gone.
In the bedchamber, Anna threw the lock and slumped into the armchair. Thoughts of where she would go now, whether to the aunt who had brought her up, to Dolly, or simply alone to the moon, and of what he was doing now alone in his study; whether this was the final quarrel, or whether reconciliation were still possible; and of what all her old friends in Petersburg would say of her now; and of how Alexei Alexandrovich would look at it, and many other ideas of what would happen now after this rupture, came into her head; but she did not give herself up to them with all her heart. At the bottom of her heart was some obscure idea that alone interested her, some secret she knew and yet did not know… she could not get clear sight of it. Thinking once more of Alexei Alexandrovich, she recalled the time of her illness after her confinement, and the feeling which never left her at that time. “Why didn’t I die?” she cried, and the words and the feeling of that time came back to her. And all at once she knew what was in her soul. Yes, it was that idea which alone solved all.
“Yes, to die!… And the shame and disgrace of Alexei Alexandrovich and of Seryozha, and my awful shame, it will all be saved by death. To die! and he will feel remorse; will be sorry; will love me; he will suffer on my account.” With the trace of a smile of commiseration for herself, she sat down in the armchair, taking off and putting on the rings on her left hand.
She heard a pounding at the door, but, as though absorbed in the arrangement of her rings, she did not even turn toward it. Let him knock, she thought, let him worry. Vividly she pictured from different sides his feelings after her death.
The knock was not from the door, however, but the windowpane. It shattered violently and an Honored Guest burst into the chamber and flew across the room toward her, shrieking horribly, its dozens of grimy yellow eyes flashing, its razor-sharp beak aimed like a dagger at her breast. Anna rolled from the armchair, scrabbled backward and threw her hands over her face, and now the beast was atop her, slashing at her with its three-fingered talons, jabbing at the flesh of her throat with its snaggled aculeus. She screamed Vronsky’s name, clawed back at the thing, her fingers scrabbling uselessly across the tough, crocodilian hide. A drip of the monster’s saliva landed on her clavicle and burned like boiling tea.
The alien screeched and jabbered. Why, Anna asked herself, why did she fight? A moment ago she had felt the desire to die; why not let this terrible eater of flesh consume her and be done with it? But even as her mind raced, her desperate fingers were seeking a vulnerability to exploit; she sought out the soft underside of the squamous beast, finding the belly meat and digging in her nails-the thing howled and pulled off, allowing room for Anna, bracing her heels in the wooden floor, to fling herself up and the alien off her.
The multitude of eyes blinked off-sync, and a hot stream of saliva flooded from its jagged snout and pooled on the floor, burning a smoking hole in the wood. In this moment’s respite, Anna jumped on the armchair like a timid woman in fear of a mouse, removed one of her heeled shoes to brandish as a weapon, and heard Vronsky call “Anna!” from the other side of the door, followed by the reverberant thud of his shoulder against the wood.
The creature was up and in motion, ropy talons entangling themselves around her torso, arms like knotted saplings, needled mouth driving up toward her neck. Anna screamed; there was nowhere to hide, no counter-attack to launch; her vision filled with the furious nictitation of the beast; on the street outside she heard a queer pulsing tikkatikkatikka; death had come for her, now, in the form of this space monster… Anna’s world went black… and snapped back to light, and to life, at the familiar, snapping sizzle of a hot-whip. She felt the grip of the alien slacken and release. The whip cracked again, and then again, and Anna opened her eyes to see the stinking corpse of the alien sliding slowly down her frame into a slack, sizzling heap at her feet. Anna, trembling, looked to Vronsky, who stood calmly in the doorway, his hot-whip already retracting into its hip-sheath.