At last the physician received the final results from the Class II and entered the drawing room. When the doctor came in, Kitty flushed crimson and her eyes filled with tears. All her illness and treatment struck her as a thing so stupid, ludicrous even! Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders and vitasonic recalibrations? But she could not grieve her mother, especially as her mother considered herself to blame.
“May I trouble you to sit down, princess?” the celebrated doctor said to her.
He sat down with a smile, facing her, felt her pulse, and again began asking her tiresome questions. Suddenly sensing an opportunity to be of use to her mistress, Tatiana pirouetted over and took first position directly between the doctor and Kitty.
“Excuse me, doctor,” she said, her sweet, still-developing soprano Vox-Em tone showing surprising strength. “But there is really no object in this. For this is the third time you’ve asked her the same things!” Kitty looked up with wide-eyed gratitude at this intercession, experiencing for the first time that mysterious feeling of true, deep kinship between a human and her beloved-companion; and then, arm in arm, Kitty Shcherbatskaya and her pink-hued android left the room.
The celebrated doctor did not take offense.
“What a charming Class III,” he said to the princess. “However, I had finished…”
And the doctor began scientifically explaining to the princess, repeating word for word the phrases he had heard only a few minutes earlier from the II/Prognosis/M4. At the question whether they should “go abroad,” the doctor plunged into deep meditation, as though resolving a weighty problem. He glanced furtively at the Class II, saw it indicate yes with a barely perceptible 2.5-degree head unit rotation, and thusly pronounced his decision: they were to “go abroad,” but to put no faith in foreign quacks, and to apply to him in any need.
It seemed as though some piece of good fortune had come to pass after the doctor had gone. The mother was much more cheerful when she went back to her daughter, and Kitty pretended to be more cheerful. She even spent a half hour walking the grounds of the estate with Tatiana, which made the rose-accented Class III immeasurably joyful.
“Really, I’m quite well, Mamma. But if you want to go abroad, let’s go!” she said, and trying to appear interested in the proposed tour, she began talking of the preparations for the journey.
So it was that several weeks later the Shcherbatskys marked the coming of Lent by giving up their terrestrial moorings. They traveled first by Puller carriage and then by Grav to Russia’s grand departure port, the town of Pushkin, where stood the pride of the century: the Ballistic Cross-Orbital Cannon.
Thus were the Scherbatskys blasted into space.
CHAPTER 2
THE HIGHEST PETERSBURG SOCIETY is essentially one: in it everyone knows everyone else, everyone visits everyone else. But this great set has its subdivisions. Anna Arkadyevna Karenina had friends and close ties in various circles of this highest society. One circle was her husband’s government official set, consisting of his colleagues and subordinates in the Higher Branches of the Ministry of Robotics and State Administration. Anna found it difficult now to recall the feeling of almost awe-stricken reverence that she had at first entertained for these persons, who were together responsible for the management and advancement of groznium-derived technologies, and therefore for the welfare of all Mother Russia. Now she knew all of them as people know one another in a country town; she knew their habits and weaknesses, and where the shoe pinched each one of them. She knew their relations with one another and with the head authorities, knew who was for whom, and how each one maintained his position, and where they agreed and disagreed.
The second circle with which Anna had ties was preeminently the fashionable world-the world of floating balls, of dinners, of sumptuous dresses. Her connection with this circle was kept up through Princess Betsy Tverskaya, her cousin’s wife, who had an income of a hundred and twenty thousand rubles, and who had taken a great fancy to Anna since she came of age and received her Class III, showed her much attention, and drew her into her set, which followed all the latest trends.
Anna had at first avoided as far as she could Princess Tverskaya’s world, because it necessitated an expenditure beyond her means, and besides in her heart she preferred the first circle. But since her visit to Moscow she had done quite the contrary. She avoided her serious-minded friends in that circle around the Ministry, and went out into the fashionable world. There she saw Vronsky, and experienced an agitating joy at those meetings. She met Vronsky especially often at Betsy’s, for Betsy was a Vronsky by birth and his cousin. Vronsky was everywhere where he had any chance of meeting Anna and speaking to her, when he could, of his love. She gave him no encouragement, but every time she met him there surged up in her heart that same feeling of quickened life that had come upon her that day in the Grav, when he saw her for the first time. She was conscious herself that her delight sparkled in her eyes and curved her lips into a smile, and she could not quench the expression of this delight.
At first Anna sincerely believed, and earnestly expressed to Android Karenina, that she was displeased with him for daring to pursue her. But soon after her return from Moscow, on arriving at a soiree where she had expected to meet him, and not finding him there, she realized distinctly from the rush of disappointment that she had been deceiving herself, and that this pursuit was not merely not distasteful to her, but that it made the whole interest of her life.
Their next meeting occurred soon after, at another soiree, this one at the home of Princess Betsy.
As the princess’s guests arrived at the wide entrance one by one, the stout II/Porter/7e62 noiselessly opened the immense door, letting the visitors pass by into the house. Almost at the same instant the hostess, with freshly arranged coiffure and freshened face, walked in at one door and her guests at the other door of the drawing room, a large room with dark walls, downy rugs, and a brightly lighted table, gleaming with the light of lumiéres, white cloth, a II/Samovar/l(16) in fashionable platinum, and transparent china tea things.
Some guests were amused, and others discomfited, to find in attendance at the gathering a Class III named Marionetta, who had no owner-she was a decom, an android whose owner had died without heir, or else been denounced as a Janus and exiled. Betsy thought it endlessly amusing to have such pitiful creatures at her petites fêtes, where she would treat the humanless robots as if they were her own sad little bear cubs to be baited. Typically decoms were junkered within days of their obsolescence, but Betsy obtained them, it was rumored, through some secret connection in the Ministry-though surely not within the Higher Branches, as no one from that elite cadre would dare enact such brazen pilferage.
Princess Betsy sat down at the table and took off her gloves, handing them with a flourish to Marionetta, who folded them neatly before stowing them carefully in a drawer, pathetically grateful for the small assignment. The party began, and chairs were set with the aid of II/Footman/74s, moving almost imperceptibly about the room; the party settled itself, divided into two groups: one round the samovar near the hostess, the other at the opposite end of the drawing room, round the handsome wife of an ambassador, in black velvet, with sharply defined black eyebrows and a Class III with nearly identical, equally imposing facial features. In both groups conversation wavered, as it always does, for the first few minutes, broken up by meetings, greetings, offers of tea, and, as it were, feeling about for something to rest upon.