Kitty admired her more than ever, and more and more acute was her suffering. Kitty felt overwhelmed, and her face showed it. When Vronsky saw her, sailing by in the mazurka, he did not at once recognize her, she was so changed.

“Delightful float!” he said to her, for the sake of saying something.

“Yes,” she answered.

The float concluded with the presentation of Kitty’s Class III, a tall, graceful android constructed with the lithe form and pink coloring of a ballet dancer, just as Kitty in her childish fancy had long desired. The companion robot was named Tatiana, and the beauty of her face and figure were applauded by the crowd. But Kitty could barely muster an appreciative smile, and shortly thereafter she hurriedly left the dance, her new Class III fluttering along behind her, her tutu flapping as they fled.

CHAPTER 20

YES, THERE IS SOMETHING in me hateful, repulsive,” said Levin bitterly to Socrates, who nodded his yellow metal head slowly, reluctantly. Together they came away from the Shcherbatskys’ and walked in the direction of his brother Nikolai’s lodgings. “And I don’t get on with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put myself in such a position.” And he pictured to himself Vronsky, happy, good-natured, clever, that handsome wolf of a Class III bounding along at his feet, so self-possessed, and felt sure he had never been placed in the awful position in which he had been that evening.

“Yes, she was bound to choose him.”

“It had to be,” agreed Socrates sadly. “You cannot complain of anyone or anything.”

“I am myself to blame. What right had I to imagine she would care to join her life to mine?”

“Who are you? What are you?”

“A nobody, not wanted by anyone, nor of use to anybody.”

Man and machine sighed heavily in melancholy unison.

To prepare Levin for what was to be a difficult visit to his brother, Socrates initiated his monitor and displayed for his master a sequence of Nikolai Memories: Nikolai tottering drunkenly, sneering, with his torn coat and his disdain for the world and all the people in it.

“Isn’t he right that everything in the world is base and loathsome?”

“No,” said Socrates, who felt at such times a programmatic responsibility to balance his master’s gloomy emotional state with a more sober analysis. “No, it cannot be.”

“And are we fair in our judgment of brother Nikolai? Of course, from the point of some, tipsy and wearing his torn cloak, accompanied by that battered, old, oil-stained Class III, he’s a despicable person. But I know him differently. I know his soul, and know that we are like him. And I, instead of going to seek him out, went out to dinner, and came here.” Levin sighed again, had Socrates call Nikolai’s address up from his internal archives, and called a sledge. All the long way to his brother’s, Levin continued to view all the vivid Memories familiar to him of his brother Nikolai’s life.

He watched how his brother, while at the university, and for a year afterward, had, in spite of the jeers of his companions, lived like a monk, strictly observing all religious rites, services, and fasts, and avoiding every sort of pleasure, especially women. And afterward, how he had all at once broken out: he had associated with the most horrible people, and rushed into the most senseless debauchery-including, it had been whispered, relationships of an intimate nature with robots, relationships that were forbidden in even the most liberal construction of the Ministry’s laws, and of God’s.

It was all horribly disgusting, yet to Levin it appeared not at all in the same disgusting light as it inevitably would to those who did not know Nikolai, did not know all his story, did not know his heart.

Levin felt that, in spite of all the ugliness of his life, his brother Nikolai, in his soul, in the very depths of his soul, was no more in the wrong than the people who despised him. He was not to blame for having been born with his unbridled temperament and his somehow limited intelligence. But he had always wanted to be good. And now, or so he had written, he had fallen ill-terribly ill, if Levin could judge by his brother’s latest letter, though the precise nature of his illness remained unclear.

I will tell him everything, without reserve, and I will make him speak without reserve, too, and I’ll show him that I love him, and so understand him, Levin resolved to himself, as, toward eleven o’clock, he reached the hotel of which he had the address.

“The top… twelve and thirteen,” the II/Porter7e62 answered automatically to Levin’s inquiries.

The door of No. 12 was half open, and there came out into the streak of light thick fumes of cheap, poor tobacco, and the sound of a woman’s voice, unknown to Levin. But he knew at once that his brother was there; he heard his cough.

“Whom do you want?” said the voice of Nikolai Levin, angrily.

“It’s I,” answered Konstantin Levin, coming forward into the light.

“Who’s I?” Nikolai’s voice said again, still more angrily. He could be heard getting up hurriedly, stumbling against something, and Levin saw, facing him in the doorway, the big, scared eyes, and the huge, thin, stooping figure of his brother, so familiar, and yet astonishing in its weirdness and sickliness. Karnak hunched in the shadows of the corner, a battered and dented old can of an android, with black-orange streaks of rust and acid staining his copper-colored sides.

Nikolai was even thinner than three years before, when Konstantin Levin had seen him last. He was wearing a short coat, and his hands and big bones seemed huger than ever. His hair had grown thinner, the same straight mustache hid his lips, the same eyes gazed strangely and naively at his visitor.

“Ah, Kostya!” he exclaimed suddenly, recognizing his brother, and his eyes lit up with joy. Karnak raised his creaky head and groaned tiredly. But the next second Nikolai’s face took on a quite different expression: wild, suffering, and cruel.

“I wrote to you that I don’t know you and don’t want to know you. What is it you want?”

He was not at all the same as Konstantin had been fancying him. The worst and most tiresome part of his character, what made all relations with him so difficult, had been forgotten by Konstantin Levin when he thought of him, and now, when he saw his face, and especially that nervous twitching of his head, he remembered it all. Karnak let out a strange, metallic belch, and from within him some set of bedeviled gears ground together with an unbearable screech.

“I didn’t want to see you for anything,” he answered timidly. “I’ve simply come to see you.”

His brother’s timidity obviously softened Nikolai. His lips twitched. For the first time, Levin noticed a small, gray pustule pulsing just above his brother’s left eyelid.

“Come to see me. Oh, so that’s it?” Nikolai spat angrily.

“Thaaaaat’s itttt?” croaked Karnak. Socrates took a step away from the other Class III, as if afraid his rust and gear-degeneracy could be infectious.

“Well, come in. Sit down,” Nikolai continued. “Like some supper? Masha, bring supper for three, and fresh humectant for the machine-man. Yes, we have it! No, stop a minute. Do you know who this is?” he said, addressing his brother.

“This woman,” he said, pointing to her, “is the partner of my life, Marya Nikolaevna. I took her out of a bad house,” and Levin knew what was meant by this, and blushed for it. “But I love her and respect her, and anyone who wants to know me,” he added, raising his voice and knitting his brows, “I beg to love her and respect her. She’s just the same as my wife, just the same. So now you know whom you’ve to do with. And if you think you’re lowering yourself, well, here’s the floor, there’s the door.”