Tatiana meanwhile remained crouched over the other Toy Soldier, battering away robotically with clenched fists, dozens of blows a second, until at last the man stopped moving. The lissome Class III then sat coiled over his body for a long moment, the urgent flash of her eyebank slowly returning to its normal, even pulse.
NIKOLAI DMITRICH ISSUED HIS LAST GURGLING SCREAM BEFORE HIS HEAD LOLLED BACKWARD AT A TERRIBLE ANGLE
Through all of this, Levin stared with forlorn confusion at the sickbed where formerly his brother had lain-now but a tangle of sodden sheets, dotted with pieces of scalp, flesh in ill-colored hunks, small, gray piles of shed skin. Socrates gingerly helped Tatiana to her feet, and then bent to examine the battered body of the Toy Soldier, plucking a visionary-hundredfold from the metallic instrument tangle of his beard.
Kitty regarded her Class III with confusion, love, and fear. “I… I cannot express my thanks, that you took such a risk in defending our safety, as well as your own. But, but Tati…,” she trailed off, and Levin was forced to complete the thought for her: “Tatiana, you have violated the Iron Laws. No robot may strike a human being! How could your programming have allowed such an action?”
“I am uncertain,” said Tatiana slowly, anxiously smoothing out her tutu with one trembling end-effector.
“I shall explain,” answered Socrates, looking up from the Toy Soldier’s unmoving form. “This is not the corpse of a human being. This is groznium. These men were robots.”
As he and Kitty bid a tearful farewell to their brave beloved-companions, and began along the road home to Pokrovskoe, Dmitrich Levin was left to contend with twin mysteries: the grisly death of his brother, apparently as the result of having somehow become a sort of human hatching ground for an abominable alien creature; and the revelation that the Ministry’s new elite cadre, the very persons charged with collecting the nation’s Class Ills for adjustment, were not persons at all but perfectly humanoid robots. These mysteries revived in Levin that sense of horror in the face of the insoluble enigma that had come upon him that autumn evening when his brother had slept beside him. This feeling was now even stronger than before; even less than before did he feel capable of apprehending the meaning of life and death, and its inevitability rose up before him more terrible than ever.
But now, thanks to his wife’s presence, that feeling did not reduce him to despair. In spite of death and fear, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him toward love and toward life.
When they arrived home, the provincial doctor confirmed his earlier suppositions in regard to Kitty’s health: her indisposition was a symptom indicating that she was with child.
CHAPTER 13
FROM THE MOMENT when Alexei Alexandrovich understood that all that was expected of him was to leave his wife in peace, without burdening her with his presence, and that his wife herself desired this, he felt the madness that simmered like a kind of fever in the back of his brain begin to burn hotter and hotter-exactly what the Face had hoped for. Let Alexei be weak… let him grant forgiveness… let the woman and her mustachioed brigand live and go free… In time, the Face knew, their continuing existence would be a sharp nettle to torture Alexei’s already anguished mind past the point of no return.
Alexei did not know himself what he wanted now. It was only when Anna had left his house, and the II/Porter/7e62 asked whether he desired the full table setting, though he would be dining alone, that for the first time he clearly comprehended his position, and was appalled by it. Most difficult of all in this position was the fact that he could not in any way connect and reconcile his past with what was now. It was not the past when he had lived happily with his wife that troubled him. The transition from that past to a knowledge of his wife’s unfaithfulness he had lived through miserably already; that state was painful, but he could understand it. If his wife had then, on declaring to him her unfaithfulness, left him, he would have been wounded, unhappy, but he would not have been in the hopeless position-incomprehensible to himself-in which he felt himself now. He could not now reconcile his immediate past, his tenderness, his love for his sick wife, and for the other man’s child with what was now the case; for in return for all this he now found himself alone.
PUT TO SHAME. A LAUGHINGSTOCK. NEEDED BY NO ONE. DESPISED BY ALL.
“Yes,” responded Karenin, pacing the empty rooms of his home.
NOT I THOUGH.
I SHALL NEVER ABANDON YOU.
His confidence buttressed by the supportive exhortations of the Face, Alexei was able to preserve an appearance of composure, and even of indifference. Answering inquiries about the disposition of Anna Arkadyevna’s rooms and belongings, he exercised immense self-control to appear like a man in whose eyes what had occurred was neither unforeseen nor out of the ordinary course of events, and he attained his aim: no one could have detected in him signs of despair.
On the second day after her departure, Alexei Alexandrovich was paid a visit by a shop clerk, to whom he had previously sent word that his wife’s outstanding bills should be sent to her directly.
“Excuse me, your Excellency, for venturing to trouble you. But she is on the moon, where collections efforts are exceedingly difficult.”
Alexei began in his cold and formal way to explain that whatever planet or planetoid his wife cared to live upon was not his concern. But he trailed off, midway through his sentence, his head cocked slightly to the side, listening to an unheard admonition.
HOW DARE HE?
Yes, thought Alexei Karenin. Yes.
“You come to me today in search of money, the money owed to you by Anna Arkadyevna. You come and speak as if you do not know of our situation.”
“Of course, that is, I do know,” the shopkeeper stammered. “I do know of the situation to which you refer.”
“Yes,” Alexei began, and the human portion of his face twisted into a sneer, while his voice changed, emerging unnaturally with the timbre of nails rattling in an empty can: “BUT DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”
“I… I-yes, your Excellency,” the man stammered helplessly, stepping backward slowly as he spoke. “And normally of course before troubling you I would send my Class III. Funny little robot called Wholesale. But, sir, of course he’s been sent for adjustment.”
Alexei Alexandrovich threw his head back and pondered, as it seemed to the clerk, and all at once, turning round, he sat down calmly at the table.
“I am sorry for bothering you. Perhaps it is best that I go. Sir? Sir?”
Letting his head sink into his hands, Karenin sat for a long while in that position, several times attempted to speak and stopped short. Then, at last, he looked up, stared directly at the man, and his ocular device clicked slowly forward.
When it was done-when the shopkeeper’s windpipe had been shattered like the neck of a wine bottle, when his eyes popped out of his head like overripe fruit, when what had been the man’s body lay in a ragged mass on the floor, one hand still clutching Anna’s overdue bill-Alexei Alexandrovich allowed a small smile to creep into the corner of his mouth.
“You may consider it paid, sir,” he said to the corpse as he stepped over it and returned to his bedchamber.