“Well, that’s all right then; now I’m satisfied. I’ll send him away,” said Levin.
“What do you mean! Are you crazy?” Dolly cried in horror. “Nonsense, Kostya, only think!” she said, laughing. “You can go now,” she said to Masha. “No, if you wish it, I’ll speak to Stiva. He’ll take him away. He can say you’re expecting visitors. Altogether he doesn’t fit into the house.”
“No, no, I’ll do it myself.”
“But you’ll quarrel with him?”
“Not a bit. I shall so enjoy it,” Levin said, his eyes flashing with real enjoyment. “Come, forgive her, Dolly, she won’t do it again,” he said of the little sinner, who had not gone but was standing irresolutely before her mother, waiting and looking up from under her brows to catch her mother’s eye.
And what is there in common between us and him? thought Levin, and he went off to look for Veslovsky.
As he passed through the passage he gave orders for the II/Coachman/14 to get ready to drive to the station.
Levin, puffed up with courage and his new determination to have this scourge removed from his household, without knocking entered the young man’s room, strode across the chamber, and found Veslovsky bent over the bed, putting on his gaiters to go out riding. Veslovsky, taken by surprise, stood up rapidly and turned around, stammering an apology for his unkempt appearance.
Levin was too shocked to reply: above the rumpled shirtfront, Veslovsky had no face. There was no skin between ear and ear, hairline and chin, and staring back at Levin instead was a mass of churning gears and rapidly moving small parts in the place where a face should be. Still speaking in his gay and eager-to-please society voice, which Levin now realized emanated from a Vox-Em of surpassing quality, he said, “Alas, Konstantin Dmitrich, you catch me unawares.”
Levin, squinting with horror at the silver-black absence of a face, detected dozens of tiny pistons pumping as the words emerged; like an audience member seeing the movement of the puppeteer’s strings, he was watching the devices that would move the lips, were the face-piece in place.
“Good Lord, man,” Levin said idiotically. “You are a robot.”
“You have discovered my secret, friend,” came Veslovsky’s voice from the head unit. The robot sighed, and Levin watched as two tiny half-circles of gears shifted minutely along the upper portion of the face-hole; no doubt this was the system set that created an ironic lift of the eyebrows in other circumstances. “And though I was sent here to observe, not to destroy, my circuits are rather extraordinarily adaptable.”
Levin stepped backward, suddenly aware that Veslovsky stood between himself and the door.
“It is not useful to the Ministry that you or anyone of your circle should be aware of my true nature. And thus…”
The Veslovsky-machine emitted a piercing shriek and flash of light, and then grabbed the disoriented Levin firmly by the throat. Levin grunted and gurgled and stared into the deathly emptiness of the machine-face, as the robot lifted him from the ground like tearing a tree out by the roots.
“Society is changing, Konstantin Dmitrich,” Veslovsky said with an air of melancholy, grinding two heavy groznium-infused thumbs into the sides of his neck. “Your commitment to your Class III is admirable, but there is no use fighting the future.” Levin could not respond; his head was getting weaker and his windpipe throbbed as the last air escaped from his lungs. In a weirdly squeamish gesture, under the circumstances, the robot turned his head away, as if Levin’s dying gasps were too gruesome a sight for his delicate sensibilities.
Levin’s oxygen-depleted brain took him on a long, slow Memory sequence through the days of his life. He saw himself at eighteen, first attuning his gleaming new beloved-companion, Socrates… on his wedding day, choked by love and terror… at age six, his sister crying over a malfunctioning Class I dance-toy…
… the ballerina…
Konstantin Dmitrich struggled to maintain focus… the ballerina had spun too fast, whirling dangerously, shooting off sparks. What had Mother done?
Summoning every ounce of his remaining strength, Levin flailed back with his powerful right hand and pushed open the wooden shutters of the bedroom; immediately the powerful sound and fresh smell of pouring rain filled the room. Levin kicked out at his adversary’s thin ankle, trying not to injure but to dislodge it… to throw it just enough off balance to…
There! Levin drove his whole body forward and with his last reserves of air he pushed the machine-man backward until it was bent over the sill, the cruel mechanical non-face outside and looking up, lashed by the rain.
“An old wives’ tale that happens to be true,” Mamma had said, so many years ago, cracking the faceplate of the Class I ballerina toy with the peen of a hammer. “Just get a bit of rainwater behind the eyes…”
“Grazzle… furglazzle…,” spat the Veslovsky machine nonsensically, as its insides popped and hissed. “Grllllllll…” Levin, unrelenting, kept him-it, he told himself-it!-under the fierce flow of the rain like a man bathing a reluctant pet. At last the hands on his throat slackened their grip, and Levin breathed hard, watching with grim fascination as Veslovsky melted into some sort of hideous, unwholesome, forced Surcease. Levin then collapsed beneath the window, the robot slumped beside him with its head lolling from the neck at a crooked angle, still spitting out nonsense phrases in wildly modulated tones. “Vizz… poj… markkkklzz…”
Finally, like a real dying man summons one final burst of lucidity, the thing that had been Veslovsky spoke very quietly, in perfect Russian: “You can’t escape. You can’t win.”
With that, the last energy fled from his body, and Veslovsky ceased to be.
“What madness is this?” Stepan Arkadyevitch said when, after hearing from Dolly that his friend was being turned out of the house, he found Levin in the garden. “Mais c’est ridicule! “What fly has stung you? Mais c’est du dernier ridicule! What did you think, if a young man…”
“Please don’t go into it! I can’t help it. I feel ashamed of how I’m treating you and him,” replied Levin, absently massaging the sides of his neck. “But it won’t be, I imagine, a great grief to him to go, and his presence was distasteful to me and to my wife.”
And Levin gave Oblonsky an apologetic nod, signaling the conclusion of the interview and dismissing his friend from the garden; when Stepan Arkadyich had angrily departed, Levin returned to smoothing over the uneven patch of soil where he had buried the disassembled pieces of Vassenka Veslovsky.
CHAPTER 6
SOME WEEKS AFTER the stormy conclusion of Vassenka Veslovsky’s tenure at Pokrovskoe, Kitty answered the door at the sound of a quiet though insistent knocking, and found on the doorstep a very thin woman wrapped in a ratty old blanket. Immediately Kitty beckoned the bedraggled creature inside, assuming this was one of the poor peasants they had lately heard of, those wandering the countryside, their homes having been destroyed by the alien marauders. Kitty had even heard that some had found employment in the homes of the wealthy as intimate worker-friends-in other words, as poor substitutes for the absented Class Ills, though she herself was horrified by the idea of employing a human in that function.
But once inside, the woman pushed back the cowl of the blanket, revealing not the haggard face of a hungry peasant, but an obsidian faceplate, flashing a frantic electric green.
“It’s…” Kitty put a hand before her mouth. “My goodness, it’s a Class III!”