Still in the same anxious frame of mind, as she had been all that day, Anna took pleasure in arranging herself for the journey with great care. With her long, deft fingers Android Karenina opened a discreet mid-body compartment, took out a cushion, and laid it on Anna’s knees. Anna smiled and stroked Android Karenina’s gentle hands in thanks: she had long felt, and felt all the more so at such moments, that she and her darling android enjoyed a bond that was, somehow, stronger than that between other humans and their beloved-companions-even though Android Karenina never breathed a word, indeed lacked even the capacity to elocute, Anna knew in her own heart that there was no one else on Earth, human or robot, who understood or loved her so well.
They were seated across from a kindly elderly lady, but, intending to enjoy a novel, rather than to engage her fellow passengers in conversation, Anna leaned back in her seat and engaged a chitator, putting Android Karenina into partial Surcease. At first her attention was too distracted to follow the story. She could not help listening to the magical, propulsive noises of the Grav as it shot forward on the magnet bed; then the snow beating on the left window and sticking to the pane, and the sight of the muffled II/Gravman/160 rolling by, covered with snow on one side, and the conversations about the terrible snowstorm raging outside distracted her attention.
At last, Anna began to understand the story. Anna Arkadyevna listened and understood, but it was distasteful to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she heard that the heroine of the story had fallen ill with malaria, she longed to move with noiseless steps about a sick room; if the chitator had a pirate ship laying siege to a houseboat, she longed to be the one active in its defense. But there was no chance of doing anything, and she forced herself to relax and let the chitator wash over her.
The heroine of the story was already almost reaching her English happiness, a handsome husband and a lakeside estate, and Anna was feeling a desire to go with them to the estate, when she suddenly felt that he ought to feel ashamed, and that she was ashamed of the same thing. But what had he to be ashamed of? What have I to be ashamed of? she asked herself in injured surprise. She switched off the chitator, sank against the back of the chair, and glanced at Android Karenina to help her understand, but her faceplate in Surcease was perfectly smooth and unreflective, revealing nothing.
There was nothing! She went over all her Moscow recollections. All were good, pleasant. She remembered the ball, remembered Vronsky and the crackle of his hot-whip and his face of slavish adoration, remembered all her conduct with him: there was nothing shameful. And for all that, at the same point in her memories, the feeling of shame was intensified, as though some inner voice, just at the point when she thought of Vronsky, were saying to her, “Warm, very warm, hot.”
“Well, what is it?” she demanded of Android Karenina, though she knew the Class III could hardly respond while in Surcease. “What does it mean? Am I afraid to look it straight in the face? Why, what is it? Can it be that between me and this officer boy there exists, or can exist, any other relations than such as are common with every acquaintance?”
But, as is the way with many people who have difficult questions, but not the will to hear them answered, she asked her questions of a Surceased robot, who of course offered no response.
Anna laughed contemptuously at her own foolishness, and reactivated the chitator; but now she was definitely unable to follow what she heard.
Unthinkingly, she lifted Android Karenina’s smooth hand and laid its cool surface onto her cheek, and almost laughed aloud at the feeling of delight that all at once without cause came over her. She felt as though her nerves were strings being strained tighter and tighter on some sort of screwing peg. She felt her eyes opening wider and wider, her fingers and toes twitching nervously, something within oppressing her breathing, while all shapes and sounds seemed in the uncertain half-light to strike her with unaccustomed vividness.
In this strange and disjointed sense of hyperawareness, it took her eyes a long moment to fully register what she then saw across from her: a koschei, bronzish, pencil-thin and centipedal, crawling on dozens of tiny, hideous feet across the wrinkled neck of the dozing elderly lady seated across from her.
The skittering steps of the miniature bug-robot were hardly heavy enough to wake the sleeping woman, and Anna thanked God at least for that small mercy. Surely the very sight of the skittering koschei-for that must be what this was, one of the hideous little insect-like death-machines used by UnConSciya to terrify the Russian populace-would cause the old woman to panic, and panic would seal her doom. Anna, murmuring a prayer for courage, scrunched forward in her seat, raising one hand, her fore- and middle fingers primed for plucking… slowly, carefully, she raised her hand, never taking her eyes off the automaton crawling in and out of the wrinkled folds of the ancient woman’s neck flesh.
She was about to grasp the glowing, creeping thing, not yet considering what she would do with it once it was in her grasp, when three things happened in rapid succession.
A flat, jellyfish-like blob of undulating silver flew over Anna’s head from behind her and landed with a thick, disgusting splat across the old woman’s face, causing her to wake and begin thrashing in her seat; Anna herself also began screaming, loud enough to wake the devil; and the koschei she had been grasping for escaped her clutches, leapt off the old woman and onto Anna’s forearm, and escaped up the sleeve of her dress.
The sensation of the koschei twitching rapidly forward inside her dress was viscerally horrifying, the countless tiny feet dancing about on her flesh-but worse by far was her knowledge of what was surely the koschei’s intention, programmed like an animal instinct: to find her breastbone, to pierce her flesh, to plunge its heat-sucking electrode antennae into the chambers of her heart. Anna clawed at her chest with one hand, and with the other she desperately flicked Android Karenina’s red switch, praying with every breath that she would not be long in emerging from Surcease.
There was nothing to be done for the elderly woman, even if she could: the jellyfish koschei was still clenched over the old woman’s face and was oozing out in all directions, covering the woman’s body like a wriggling sheath, sucking the heat from her body.
While Anna slapped at her flesh, trying to squash the centipede koschei inside her dress, she became aware that all over the Grav car, other koschei were attacking other passengers. A slavering robotic beast in the shape of a gigantic cockroach, with coal-black wings and teeth like needles, buzzed down the aisle and landed on the eyes of a dignified Petersburg gentleman. Anna saw the roach thing sink its pulsing antennae into a dozen places in the unfortunate man’s face, before her attention was seized by a most welcome distraction: Android Karenina, animated and in action, her smart, thin fingers inside Anna’s bodice, catching up the wriggling koschei, crushing it neatly between thumb and forefinger.
Android Karenina then scooped up her mistress around the waist and hustled them both to the end of the carriage, where they escaped down the running board and toward the platform, for the Grav had made an emergency stop at a rural station. As they stepped from the carriage, the driving snow and the wind rushed to meet them. Android Karenina greeted the cold burst of air silently, but to Anna, the wind seemed as though lying in wait for her; with gleeful whistle it tried to snatch her up and bear her off, but she clung to the cold doorpost, and holding her skirt got down onto the platform and under the shelter of the carriages. The wind had been powerful on the steps, but on the platform, under the lee of the carriages, there was a lull. With a giddy, life-embracing thrill of having survived, she drew deep breaths of the frozen, snowy air, and standing near the carriage looked about the platform and the lighted station.