And Levin, a happy father and husband, in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord that he might not be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun for fear of shooting himself.
But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living.
CHAPTER 4
SEVERAL DAYS LATER, Agafea Mihalovna found on the doorstep a brown-paper-wrapped package bearing no writing upon it, nor identifying marks of any kind. Agafea Mihalovna dutifully brought the package to Konstantin Dmitrich.
Curious and confused, Levin carefully cut away the layers of brown paper and lifted out the dismembered torso unit of an old Class III robot. He gasped. The torso unit was severely dented, battered as if by hard wear, but the yellow casing was unmistakable, as was the small circular stamp bearing the logo of the Urgensky Cigarette Factory.
“Kitty!” he cried. “Kitty!”
Making sure they were entirely alone, Konstantin Dmitrich and his wife locked the door of their bedchamber and tremblingly engaged the monitor of the Class III-aware that even the small series of hand motions necessary to do so were now illegal.
The figure in the communiqué was Socrates himself. At the sight of him, tugging at his beard of tools and apparatuses, looking one way and then another, his familiar faceplate flickering with evident anxiety, Kitty burst into tears. Levin clutched at her hand, feeling his own chin working with emotion.
Socrates!
“Master, my time I fear is short. Short indeed yes short. However I would be remiss if I did not relay to you the result of my analysis.”
“Old friend,” Levin cried out, reaching toward the monitor with trembling fingers, as if to pluck out the tiny, glowing figure and hug it to his heart. “Loyal friend!”
“Examining all the relevant data: All that you discovered of the worm machines, and of the so-called Honored Guests, and…”
Here the Class III stopped in his narration and looked wildly about the dingy room where he stood, in fear of what it was impossible to say.
“I must hurry, Master. Must hurry hurry.
“When it was so often claimed that the aliens ‘will come for us in three ways,’ this was not after all meaningless. They have come in three ways.
“They have done sol”
When they finished watching the monitor, and Socrates’s explanation was complete, Levin took Kitty’s hand in his own, and together they sat for a long time, not saying a word: only contemplating what came next.
They had come as screeching warrior-beasts, born in horror from the fragile bodies of the ill.
They had come as ticking soil-dwelling worm-things, gathering strength from the groznium soil before bursting forth from the ground beneath us.
And they had come a third way…
WE CANNOT BE STOPPED, said the Face to Alexei Alexandrovich, which is to say, said to itself, for now the Face was Karenin, and Karenin was the Face.
WE CANNOT BE STOPPED OR DEFEATED. NOT NOW. THIS PLANET BELONGS TO US.
Tsar Alexei had ordered the regiments to fight the aliens in the Nest, and had therefore consigned them to their doom, and left Russia undefended against the onslaught to come. He had done this because that was what the Face wanted, and the man called the Tsar was now entirely the puppet of the Face.
The alien soldiers known as Honored Guests had killed and been killed, but the alien leaders had won their war against humanity years ago. They had won from the moment that Alexei Alexandrovich, with the Face already a part of him, had ascended to power in the Ministry.
The aliens had won from the day of Karenin’s ascendance, and nothing could stop that now, because that day had long passed.
Karenin-that-was-not-Karenin cackled from inside his gleaming silver caul with a terrible laugher; while, somewhere in the deep recesses of what once had been a human heart, there floated and glittered the memory of a woman, a woman he had loved.
CHAPTER 5
LEVIN STRODE ALONG the highroad, absorbed not so much in his thoughts-he could not yet disentangle them-as in his spiritual condition, unlike anything he had experienced before. The words uttered by Socrates in the communiqué had acted on his soul like an electric shock, suddenly transforming and combining into a single whole the whole swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughts that incessantly occupied his mind.
The Golden Hope was not a fight for the sake of robots, or for the importance of technology, but for human freedom. Karenin was the enemy, not because he would take groznium technology from the people, but because he was an alien creature bent on the subjugation of all humanity.
Levin was aware of something new in his soul, and tested this new thing, not yet knowing what it was.
He wished to express this new rush of understanding to his old coconspirator, his darling Kitty.
She understands, he thought; she knows what I’m thinking about. Shall I tell her or not? Yes, I’ll tell her. But at the moment he was about to speak, she began speaking… and he found that she had nearly the same thoughts, almost in the same words.
On that day, in that moment, they began to make their plans. Somehow they would seek out whatever remnants of UnConSciya had survived the summer purges, and begin to regain their trust and rebuild the resistance. Levin would secretly seal off one corner of his mine, ensuring that there was enough of the Miracle Metal left for him to begin experiments. Quietly, invisibly, they would keep humanity’s flame burning until the Golden Hope could finally fly free. Someday, they would find a way to overturn the evil that Karenin had brought to their world, no matter the lengths to which they must go.
Night fell. As they spoke, Levin gazed up into the high, cloudless sky, where somewhere the alien invaders hovered.
“Do I not know that that is infinite space, and that it is not a round arch? But, however I screw up my eyes and strain my sight, I cannot see it not round and not bounded, and in spite of my knowing about infinite space, I am incontestably right when I see a solid, black dome, and more right than when I strain my eyes to see beyond it. That is how we must think of the future, of the rest of our lives. We cannot see it, but we know it is there to take-and we know it belongs to us, if we have the strength and the courage to seize hold of it.”
Kitty kissed him gently, and went off to bed.
Levin pictured the future in his imagination. Can this be purpose? he thought, afraid to believe in the feelings carrying him away. “Socrates, I thank thee!” he said, gulping down his sobs, and with both hands brushing away the tears that filled his eyes.
“This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy and enlightened all of a sudden, as I had dreamed, just like the feeling for my child. There was no surprise in this either. Faith-or not faith-I don’t know what it is-but this feeling has come just as imperceptibly through suffering, and has taken firm root in my soul.
“I shall go on in the same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why hope lives in my breast, and I shall still go on hoping; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no longer meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”