A second bell sounded, and was followed by moving of luggage, noise, shouting and laughter. It was so clear to Anna that there was nothing for anyone to be glad of, that this laughter irritated her agonizingly, and she would have liked to stop up her ears not to hear it. At last the third bell rang, there was the electric crackle in the air, the loud, bright hum of the repulsion magnets engaging, and the man next to her crossed himself. It would be interesting to ask him what meaning he attaches to that, thought Anna, looking angrily at him. She rapidly rose from the bench; in a moment she forgot the couple who had so irritated her, and she stood on the platform, breathing the fresh air.
Yes, what did I stop at? That I couldn’t conceive a position in which life would not be a misery, that we are all created to be miserable; some of us are created by God, and some of us by man. We all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one understands the truth, what is one to do?
Yes, I’m very much worried, for my mind has been subsumed by a machine, a machine with a deadly purpose in contravention of all that my heart cries out that I am! This is what reason was given me for, to escape; so then one must escape: why not put out the light when there’s nothing more to look at, when it’s sickening to look at it all? But how?
Why are they talking, why are they laughing? It’s all falsehood, all lying, all humbug, all cruelty!…
The cruelty, the cruelty of this machine that was a part of her, forever a part. She had insisted to Android Karenina that she could not perform such a mission, and yet-as long as she lived, this cruel Mechanism would be lurking within her, bidding her to kill, to destroy, to do evil.
With a rapid, light step she went down the steps that led from the platform to the magnet bed and saw in the near distance the approaching Grav.
She looked at the lower part of its carriages, at the rivets and wires and the long, vibrating pylons of the first carriage slowly oscillating, and tried to measure the middle between the left and right pylons, and the very minute when the Grav would arrive.
There, she said to herself, looking into the shadow of the carriage, as the sunlight reflected magnificently off the spotless prow of the Grav. There, in the very middle, and I will punish him, and I will escape from this hateful machine that I have become.
A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself. And exactly at the moment when she could wait no longer, she drew her head back into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and lightly, as though she would rise again at once, dropped on to her knees. And at the same instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. Where am I? What am I doing? What for? She tried to get up, to drop backward but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back. Lord, forgive me all! she thought, feeling it impossible to struggle.
And the monitor on which she had viewed that great communiqué filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.
“I WILL PUNISH HIM, AND I WILL ESCAPE FROM THIS HATEFUL MACHINE THAT I HAVE BECOME”
CHAPTER 19
ANDROID KARENINA, HAVING ESCAPED the crowd of Toy Soldiers who set upon her at the carriage and having found Anna nowhere in sight, retreated to the safe house in an obscure Moscow neighborhood where her one confidante in this world awaited: a squat and bearded man in a dusty white laboratory coat, who wore a small box with numerous small buttons on his belt.
The man from UnConSciya recounted to Android Karenina what had become of Anna Arkadyevna. The Class IX robot from the future took the news of Anna’s fate with evident sadness, her eyebank flashing to melancholy blue.
“And the body?”
He nodded, smoothed his dirty beard. “We shall disintegrate all trace of it, that Tsar Alexei may not discover the Mechanism.”
“No,” said Android Karenina, softly. “I have another idea.”
The Phoenix godmouth disgorged Anna Karenina’s body in the same place, on the magnet bed of the Moscow Grav, on a cold day some years earlier. At the moment the body emerged from the maw of the godmouth, the sky ricocheted with a queer sort of thunder-a crack in the sky that echoed across all the infinities of that instant and was noted with apprehension both by Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky, who was at the station to meet his mother, and by Anna Arkadyevna Karenina, a fashionable lady and the wife of a prominent government minister.
Shortly thereafter, there occurred a frightful commotion on the platform, as the news raced about of a grim discovery: a pair of battered bodies, a man and a woman, evidently smashed by the rushing weight of the oncoming Grav, had been discovered together upon the magnet bed. Count Vronsky, who only moments earlier had been introduced to Anna Karenina and utterly bewitched, now felt deeply disconcerted by the sight of these two corpses, man and woman, lying together amid the grim finality of death.
Though station workers had quickly covered the bodies under a cloth, a delicate hand could be seen extending outward plaintively toward the platform. Vronsky looked again at Anna, with whom he had been so immediately smitten, to find her staring in unspeaking horror at the scene. Overcome by a distinct sense of cosmic unease, he bowed politely and bid her farewell. If she took notice of him, she gave no sign.
Vronsky made no further effort to pursue an acquaintance with Madame Karenina; did not ask her for the mazurka at Kitty Shcherbatsky’s float; and remained in Moscow for the remainder of the season.
EPILOGUE: THE NEW HISTORY
IN THE SLANTING EVENING SHADOWS cast by the baggage piled up on the platform, Vronsky in his long regimental overcoat and gleaming silver hat, with his hands in his pockets, strode up and down, like a proud lion displaying himself for an admiring crowd, turning sharply after twenty paces. His beloved-companion robot, Lupo, strutted along behind him as always, the silver paneling of his lupine frame glimmering beautifully in the late-day sun, as together man and machine awaited departure on their newest assignment.
Vronsky’s old friend and fellow soldier Yashvin fancied, as he approached him, that Vronsky saw him but was pretending not to see. This did not affect Yashvin in the slightest: interested only in his own advancement, and distinctly aware of the high regimental perch Vronsky now inhabited, Yashvin was above all personal dignity. At that moment Yashvin looked upon Vronsky as a man at the pinnacle of a remarkable career, and would think himself foolish to miss any opportunity to thrust himself before the great man. He went up to him.
Vronsky stood still, looked intently at him, recognized him, and going a few steps forward to meet him, shook hands with him very warmly.
“Well, now, Alexei Kirillovich,” said Yashvin. “As strange as it feels to see any Russian soldier setting off on such a mission, I can imagine none other but you undertaking it. Did you ever imagine we would see such a day arrive?”
“I have had a feeling for some years that things were going this way,” said Vronsky, turning his head for a moment to admire the figure of a fashionable woman with a charming, fuchsia Class III. “Since the rise of Stremov, you know, with his decidedly liberal bent on the Robot Question. After the death of the… oh, dear, you know the fellow I mean. With the unusual face.”