She remembered that her child had been perfectly well again for the last two days. She felt positively vexed with her for getting better from the very moment her communiqué was dispatched. Then she thought of him, that he was here, all of him, with his hands, his eyes. She heard his voice. And forgetting everything, she ran joyfully to meet him.
“Well, how is Annie?” he said timidly from below, looking up to Anna as she ran down to him.
He was sitting on a chair pulling off his warm overboots.
“Oh, she is better.”
“And you?” he said, shaking himself.
She took his hand in both of hers, and drew it to her waist, never taking her eyes off him.
“Well, I’m glad,” he said, coldly scanning her, her hair, her dress, which he knew she had put on for him. All was charming, but how many times it had charmed him! And the stern, stony expression that she so dreaded settled upon his face.
“Well, I’m glad. And are you well?” he said, wiping his damp beard with his handkerchief and kissing her hand.
“Never mind,” she thought, “only let him be here, and so long as he’s here he cannot, he dare not, cease to love me.”
The evening was spent happily and gaily; he told her about the tête-à-tête, about meeting Federov, about Konstantin Dmitrich, and the hope-bomb. Anna knew how by adroit questions to bring him to what gave him most pleasure-his own success. She told him of everything that interested him at home; and all that she told him was of the most cheerful description. But late in the evening, Anna, seeing that she had regained complete possession of him, wanted to erase the painful impression of the glance he had given her for her communiqué.
She said: “Tell me frankly, you were vexed upon viewing my communiqué, and you didn’t believe me?”
As soon as she had said it, she felt that however warm his feelings were toward her, he had not forgiven her for that.
“Yes,” he said, “the communiqué was so strange. First, Annie ill, and then you thought of coming yourself.”
“It was all the truth.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt it.”
“Yes, you do doubt it. You are vexed, I see.”
“Not for one moment. I’m only vexed, that’s true, that you seem somehow unwilling to admit that there are duties…”
“The duty of traipsing about, of drinking and smoking cigars with Levin in a Huntshed!”
“But we won’t talk about it,” he said.
“Why not talk about it?” she said.
“I only meant to say that matters of real importance may turn up. Tomorrow, for instance, I shall have to make a tour of our far perimeters, make sure the fencing is secure.”
“Another reason to abandon me.”
“Oh, Anna, why are you so irritable? If we are going to maintain a fortified rebel camp in defiance of the Ministry, in the heart of an alien-beset wilderness, there will always be challenges and responsibilities that take me outside the doors of this house. But don’t you know that I can’t live without you?”
“If so,” said Anna, her voice suddenly changing, “it means that you are sick of this life… Yes, you will come for a day and go away, as men do…”
“Anna, that’s cruel. I am ready to give up my whole life…”
But she did not hear him.
“If you have more such invitations, I will go with you. If you travel to inspect fortifications, I will go too. I will not stay here. Either we must separate or else live together.”
Vronsky saw the opening he had been looking for, saw a route to the life he had imagined. “Then perhaps, perhaps, Anna, this world we have created is not, after all, a permanently sustainable one.”
Somehow, Android Karenina knew the direction this conversation would take even before her mistress did. Placing the tea things gently on an end table, Android Karenina opened her arms and patted her lap for Lupo; his silvery hide blackened here and there from the hope-bomb fire, the proud wolf padded over and climbed into the robot’s embrace.
“If we only applied for amnesty-begged the Ministry for forgiveness, asked your husband for a divorce. You and I can be together… forever. Be a part of the future of our nation. Be married, and be together, not crouched in the dirt outside society, but within it.“
KNOWING THE DIRECTION THIS CONVERSATION WOULD TAKE, ANDROID KARENINA OPENED HER ARMS AND PATTED HER LAP FOR LUPO
“Together,” Anna said slowly. Her mind was spinning; suddenly, she desired only to have these questions decided.
“You know, that’s my one desire. But for that…”
“We must get a divorce. I will… “Anna lowered her head and sighed. “I will send him a communiqué tonight. I see I cannot go on like this… but tomorrow I will ride out with you to inspect the fortifications.”
“You talk as if you were threatening me. But I desire nothing so much as never to be parted from you,” said Vronsky, smiling.
But as he said these words there gleamed in his eyes not merely a cold look, but the vindictive look of a man persecuted and made cruel.
She saw the look and correctly divined its meaning.
If so, it’s a calamity! that glance told her. It was a moment’s impression, but she never forgot it.
That night, Anna dictated a communiqué to her husband asking him about a divorce, and begging amnesty for herself and for Count Vronsky. A reply came almost immediately, granting only that their petition would be considered, and that only on one condition.
When the moment came, Lupo sat perfectly upright, looking straight ahead like a soldier, while Android Karenina lowered her head unit slightly, not wanting to make a difficult moment more difficult for her beloved mistress. Vronsky and Anna looked at each other, and then at Lupo and Android Karenina, and then reached forward…
Anna went with Vronsky to Moscow. Expecting every day an answer from Alexei Alexandrovich, and after that the divorce, they now established themselves together like married people.
PART SEVEN: THE EMPTY PLACE
CHAPTER 1
IT WAS ALEXEI ALEXANDROVICH who decided to defer judgment in the case of Anna Arkadyevna Karenina and Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky, but really the decision was made by his Face. Once again that malevolent, whispering cranial presence found it convenient to let the question simmer like a slow-boiling pot, to keep it alive and so to torture Karenin.
So for months after their return to Moscow, Vronsky and Anna heard nothing from the Ministry in response to their request for amnesty-only waited, and suffered from the silence hanging over them.
But Alexei Alexandrovich’s festering displeasure was not limited in its effects on his wife and her companion.
All of Russia suffered with them.
When the Class II robots were impounded as the Class Ills had been, the Levins had been three months in Moscow. Kitty would have preferred to enter her period of confinement still living in the family manse, on the slopes of the old groznium pit in Pokrovskoe, but Levin was determined to keep his promise made to the dying Federov, and so moved their household to the city. He did not however attempt to dictate to his wife what would be best; rather, he shared with her the fervency of his desire to support the building resistance against the Ministry’s changes to Russian life, and by his passion Kitty was convinced.
Kitty and Levin, with some self-consciousness, called their vision of Russia’s future, a future in which their poor beloved-companions could come home, their “Golden Hope,” and they felt proud and romantic about their shared determination to make this vision a reality.