Kitty and Varenka gasped, and Tatiana in shock clapped a pink-clad metal hand before her mouth. Madame Stahl offered no reply to the prince. Instead she turned a cold eye to Kitty, apologized that she was not feeling well and there would be no ceremony tonight. Then she snapped her fingers, and Varenka dragged her from the room.
Kitty turned to her father and objected hotly to this treatment of her new mentor.
“Do not be cross with me, dear,” replied the Prince. “I only warn her as a caution, though I cannot pretend I did not take some pleasure in spoiling her fun.”
“Oh, Papa! How can you be so mocking? Varenka worships her.”
“Of course she does. And I suppose she has told you how the relations between Class IIIs and humans are against the good principles of xenotheologism? You might ask her, or her poor Varenka, how it can be thought more moral to treat fellow human beings as if they were the robots-or, to use the ancient word, servants.”
“But she does so much good! Ask anyone! Everyone knows her!”
“Perhaps so,” said the prince, squeezing her hand with his elbow, “but it’s better when one does good so that you may ask everyone and no one knows.”
Kitty did not answer, not because she had nothing to say, but because she did not care to reveal her secret thoughts even to her father. But, strange to say, although she had so made up her mind not to be influenced by her father’s views, not to let him into her inmost sanctuary, she felt that the heavenly image of Madame Stahl, which she had carried for a whole month in her heart, had vanished, never to return, just as the fantastic figure made up of some clothes thrown down at random vanishes when one sees that it is only some garment lying there. All that was left was a woman with short legs, who worried patient Varenka for not arranging her rug to her liking. And by no effort of the imagination could Kitty bring back the former Madame Stahl.
And nor was it necessary to do so, as four days later, the rumors the prince had heard on the Venusian colony were proved true in the most shocking way. Madame Stahl was arrested by the shipboard troop of 77s, denounced as a heretic and a traitor to Mother Russia; but the rumor on the orbiter was that the Ministry, having discovered that there may actually be aliens in the far reaches of the universe, ruled that those fervently awaiting their arrival were not religious fanatics, but conspirators with a potential enemy.
Kitty was devastated that this person she had come to love, even to worship, in such a short time, could turn out to be a Janus. With Varenka holding onto one trembling arm and Tatiana onto the other, she went to watch the sentence carried out; Madame Stahl struggled as she was lifted from her wheelbarrow and dragged all the way down the long hallway that led to the portal. She struggled as she was stripped of her clothing and bound head and feet. She struggled and wept as she was shoved into the exit dock, and the airlock was shut behind her. She pounded on the interior door as the exterior door was opened from within by remote telegraphy, and she screamed, wordlessly, as her body was launched into the cold vastness of the void. At last, as Kitty watched, weeping, from the bay window of the orbiter, Madame Stahl stopped screaming, stopped crying, and her body became entirely still, floating rapidly away into echoing black eternity.
After that solemn event, all the world in which she had been living was transformed for Kitty. She did not give up everything she had learned, but she became aware that she had deceived herself in supposing she could be what she wanted to be. Her eyes were, it seemed, opened; she felt all the difficulty of maintaining herself without hypocrisy and self-conceit on the pinnacle that she had wished to mount. Moreover, she became aware of all the dreariness of the world of sorrow, of sick and dying people, in which she had been living. The efforts she had made to like it seemed to her intolerable, and she felt a longing to get back quickly into the fresh air, to Russia, to Ergushovo, where, as she knew from letters, her sister Dolly had already gone with her children.
But her affection for Varenka did not wane. As she said good-bye, Kitty begged her to come to them in Russia.
“I’ll come when you get married,” said Varenka.
“I shall never marry.”
“Well, then, I shall never come.”
“Well, then, I shall be married simply for that. Mind now, remember your promise,” said Kitty.
The doctor’s prediction was fulfilled. Kitty returned home to Russia cured. She was not so gay and thoughtless as before, but she was serene. Her Moscow troubles had become a memory to her.
PART THREE: WHAT LIES WITHIN
CHAPTER 1
ONCE, INA PREVIOUS YEAR, Levin had gone to look in on the work in the groznium mine, and being made very angry by the deteriorated condition of the chief II/Excavator/8, and the lazy mécanicien who had not reported it, he had sought recourse in what would become his favorite means for regaining his temper: he retrieved an antique pickaxe (such as peasants had once wielded) from the cellar of his home, donned a helmet and everlit, was lowered by the great pneumatic dumbwaiter to the floor of the mine pit, chose a tunnel extension, entered the inky blackness, and began to dig.
He liked the work so much that he had several times tried his hand at mining since. This year, ever since the early spring, he had cherished a plan for digging for a whole day together with the nimble Pitbots, lightshedding Glowing Scrubblers, and big and inexhaustible II/Extractor/4s who served in his groznium mine.
“I must have physical exercise, or my temper will certainly be ruined,” he announced one spring day to loyal Socrates, who was bent at the Herculean task of tabulating the receipts and filling out the Ministry paperwork relating to that season’s excavation and extraction. “I fancy the spring extraction is in full swing. Tomorrow I shall start mining.”
Socrates lifted his head, and looked with interest at his master.
“Mine like a Pitbot? All day long?”
“Yes, it’s very pleasant,” said Levin.
“Splendid exercise, except you’ll hardly be able to stand it,” replied Socrates, without a shade of irony.
“No, I don’t think so. It’s so delightful, and at the same time such hard work, that one has no time to think about it.”
The next morning, Konstantin Levin got up earlier than usual, but he was detained reviewing communiqués from the Ministry’s Department of Groznium Management, and by the time he arrived pit-side and donned his goggles, air canister, lead-lined suit, and thick-soled boots, the miners were already at the declension point.
He stared down from the outer rim of the crater, surveying his beloved gash in the earth. Lying in rich deposits in this crater and the soil below it were vast quantities of groznium, the Miracle Metal, the blood of Russian life. But before it could be transformed into devices of every shape and class, it had to be pried out by the mechanical axes of the Pitbots and the shovels of the imperturbable Extractors; pried from where it lay buried in thick chunks along tunnel walls; from where it sat in thick clusters along cragged rock walls, each rough nugget of groznium more valuable than any diamond.
Gripping the edge of the dumbwaiter as it descended, Levin gazed at the cluster of tunnel entrances on the far wall of the pit: in and out of the tunnel entrances flowed his dear rough-hewn Class IIs like ants, clutching their buckets and axes in their sturdy end-effectors. He waited impatiently, his soul crying out to begin work, as the dumbwaiter clicked slowly downward, inch by inch, before at last depositing him on the floor of the pit.
From the declension point, he hastily picked his way down the sloping crater wall into the heart of the pit, and the main tunnel entrance. The robots swarmed around him-the industrious surface-machines; the Pitbots gunmetal gray where they weren’t yet caked in ore; the Glowing Scrubblers shedding their famous dirty-red subterranean glow; and the heavy, tank-like Extractors, rumbling like sentient carriages, their shovellike face attachments primed to bore into the soil. Levin counted forty-two robots altogether.