She stroked the baby’s cheek with tenderness. Little Tati: so sweet and so lovely. So like the gentle machine for which he was named.
CHAPTER 3
KONSTANTIN DMITRICH LEVIN gently opened the door of the nursery. Seeing however that both mother and child were fast asleep, and how the nurse and Agafea Mihalovna implored him with gentle eyes to be quiet, he closed the door once more. Levin’s pleasure in the child was most complete when he saw Tati in such surroundings: at peace, surrounded by his mother, his nurse, and Agafea Mihalovna, in the bosom of warm, human company.
Recently, though, these happy reflections increasingly reminded him of the terrible question that had bedeviled him, in one fashion or another, since the night his child was born. He had turned his back at that moment on Dmitriev and the UnConSciya faction; in that moment the fateful decision had been easily made, had not, indeed, even felt as if it was a decision. But he could not say now whether that decision had been a right one, nor what it was that life demanded of him now. From that moment, though he did not distinctly face it, and still went on living as before, Levin had never lost this sense of terror at his lack of knowledge.
At first, fatherhood, with the new joys and duties bound up with it, had completely crowded out these thoughts. But of late, the question that clamored for solution had more and more often, more and more insistently, haunted Levin’s mind.
The question was summed up for him thus: “If I do not accept the authority of the Ministry of Robotics and State Administration, and the ways that Russia has been and is being reformed, then how can I justify failing to act?” He told himself that scenes such as the one he had just witnessed-of his child, surrounded not by machines but by humanity, and the fundamental rightness of that scene-proved that, after all, he agreed with the changes society had undergone. And more: as he gazed out at the vast groznium pit, now being methodically plowed under and transformed into wheat fields, he found himself looking forward to being master of a great agricultural estate, as his ancestors had been in the time of the Tsars. Yet in the whole arsenal of his convictions, so far from finding any satisfactory answers, he was utterly unable to find anything at all like an answer.
He was in the position of a man seeking food in toy shops and tool shops. Instinctively, unconsciously, with every book, with every conversation, with every man he met, he was on the lookout for light on these questions and their solution. What puzzled and distracted him above everything was that the majority of men of his age and circle had, like him, exchanged their old beliefs for the same new convictions, and yet saw nothing to lament in this, and were perfectly satisfied and serene. So that, apart from the principal question, Levin was tortured by other questions too. Were these people sincere? he asked himself, or were they playing a part? Or was it that they understood the answers that the Ministry gave to these problems in some different, clearer sense than he did? And he assiduously studied both these men’s opinions and the books which treated of these explanations. Russia had allowed itself to become weak, they said, too reliant on the easy solutions and shortcuts that technology provides. Hadn’t Levin reached much the same conclusions, working alongside his Pitbots and Glowing Scrubblers in the depths of the mine? Hadn’t he regretted the loss of discipline and mental clarity in the Age of Groznium?
But he had given his heart to a moment in time, to a Golden Hope, and now could not admit that at that moment he knew the truth, and that now he was wrong; for as soon as he began thinking calmly about it, it all fell to pieces. He could not admit that he was mistaken then, for his set of beliefs then was precious to him, and to admit that it was a proof of weakness would have been to desecrate those moments. He was miserably divided against himself, and strained all his spiritual forces to the utmost to escape from this condition.
These doubts fretted and harassed him, growing weaker or stronger from time to time, but never leaving him. He read and thought, and the more he read and the more he thought, the further he felt from the aim he was pursuing.
All that spring he was not himself, and went through fearful moments of horror. Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life’s impossible; and that I can’t know, and so I can’t live, Levin said to himself.
He must escape from this torture. And the means of escape everyman had in his own hands. He had but to cut short this dependence on evil. And there was one means-death.
And Levin, a happy father and husband, in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord that he might not be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun for fear of shooting himself.
But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living.
CHAPTER 4
SEVERAL DAYS LATER, Agafea Mihalovna found on the doorstep a brown-paper-wrapped package bearing no writing upon it, nor identifying marks of any kind. Agafea Mihalovna dutifully brought the package to Konstantin Dmitrich.
Curious and confused, Levin carefully cut away the layers of brown paper and lifted out the dismembered torso unit of an old Class III robot. He gasped. The torso unit was severely dented, battered as if by hard wear, but the yellow casing was unmistakable, as was the small circular stamp bearing the logo of the Urgensky Cigarette Factory.
“Kitty!” he cried. “Kitty!”
Making sure they were entirely alone, Konstantin Dmitrich and his wife locked the door of their bedchamber and tremblingly engaged the monitor of the Class III-aware that even the small series of hand motions necessary to do so were now illegal.
The figure in the communiqué was Socrates himself. At the sight of him, tugging at his beard of tools and apparatuses, looking one way and then another, his familiar faceplate flickering with evident anxiety, Kitty burst into tears. Levin clutched at her hand, feeling his own chin working with emotion.
Socrates!
“Master, my time I fear is short. Short indeed yes short. However I would be remiss if I did not relay to you the result of my analysis.”
“Old friend,” Levin cried out, reaching toward the monitor with trembling fingers, as if to pluck out the tiny, glowing figure and hug it to his heart. “Loyal friend!”
“Examining all the relevant data: All that you discovered of the worm machines, and of the so-called Honored Guests, and…”
Here the Class III stopped in his narration and looked wildly about the dingy room where he stood, in fear of what it was impossible to say.
“I must hurry, Master. Must hurry hurry.
“When it was so often claimed that the aliens ‘will come for us in three ways,’ this was not after all meaningless. They have come in three ways.
“They have done sol”
When they finished watching the monitor, and Socrates’s explanation was complete, Levin took Kitty’s hand in his own, and together they sat for a long time, not saying a word: only contemplating what came next.
They had come as screeching warrior-beasts, born in horror from the fragile bodies of the ill.
They had come as ticking soil-dwelling worm-things, gathering strength from the groznium soil before bursting forth from the ground beneath us.
And they had come a third way…
WE CANNOT BE STOPPED, said the Face to Alexei Alexandrovich, which is to say, said to itself, for now the Face was Karenin, and Karenin was the Face.
WE CANNOT BE STOPPED OR DEFEATED. NOT NOW. THIS PLANET BELONGS TO US.