“Excuse me, princess,” he said, smiling courteously but looking her very firmly in the face, “but I see that Anna’s not very well, and I wish her to come home with me.”
Anna looked about her in a frightened way, got up submissively, and laid her hand on her husband’s arm.
“I’ll send to him and find out, and let her know,” Betsy whispered to Android Karenina, who received this input obediently and motored after her distressed mistress.
As they left the pavilion, Alexei Alexandrovich, as always, talked to those he met, and Anna had, as always, to talk and answer; but she was utterly beside herself, and moved hanging on her husband’s arm as though in a dream.
Is he killed or not? Is it true? Will he come or not? Shall I see him today? she was thinking.
She took her seat in her husband’s carriage in silence, and in silence drove out of the crowd of carriages. In spite of all he had seen, Alexei Alexandrovich still did not allow himself to consider his wife’s real condition. He merely saw the outward symptoms. He saw that she was behaving unbecomingly, and it was his duty to tell her so. He opened his mouth to tell her she had behaved unbecomingly, but he could not help saying something utterly different.
“What an inclination we all have, though, for these cruel spectacles,” he said. “I observe…”
“Eh? I don’t understand,” said Anna contemptuously.
BE A MAN. SHOW YOUR METTLE, pronounced the Face, suddenly resonating inside Alexei Alexandrovich’s mind. Never before had he heard the Face speak so loudly, and the vehemence and power of the voice scattered his thoughts and sent a vivid shiver down his spine.
“I am obliged to tell you,” Alexei Alexandrovich began again, and then hesitated.
I AM METAL AND YOU ARE ME.
SHOW METAL .
Anna shuddered to see a strange ripple pass over the metal portion of her husband’s face, like a cluster of shadowy spiders rushing from forehead to chin and then disappearing. “So now we are to have it out,” she murmured quietly to Android Karenina.
“I am obliged to tell you that your behavior has been unbecoming today,” her husband said to her in French.
YES… TELL HER… TELL HER…
“In what way has my behavior been unbecoming?” she said aloud, turning her head swiftly and looking at him straight in the face, not with the bright expression that seemed to be covering something, but with a look of determination, under which she concealed with difficulty the dismay she was feeling. Android Karenina glowed a deep, soothing purple and lay her fingers on Anna’s shoulder, trying to exert what calming influence she could.
“What did you consider unbecoming?” Anna repeated.
“The despair you were unable to conceal at the accident of one of the riders.”
THERE. THERE, ALEXEI. TELL HER. CHASTISE HER.
CONTROL HER .
Alexei, agitated by this continuing imprecation inside of him, waited for his wife to answer, but she was silent, looking straight before her.
“I have already begged you so to conduct yourself in society that even malicious tongues can find nothing to say against you. There was a time when I spoke of your inward attitude, but I am not speaking of that now.”
GO ON, GO ON, GO ON. MAKE HER UNDERSTAND. YOU WILL NOT BE MADE A FOOL OF.
“Now I speak only of your external attitude. You have behaved improperly, and I would wish it not to occur again.”
OR THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES. CONSEQUENCES!
Anna did not hear half of what he was saying; she felt panic-stricken before him, before the harsh sound of his voice and the uncanny expression on his face. She was thinking whether it was true that Vronsky was not killed. Was it of him they were speaking when they said the combatant was unhurt, but the machine had been broken past repair? She merely smiled with a pretense of irony when he finished, and made no reply, because she had not heard what he said. Alexei Alexandrovich had begun to speak boldly, but as he realized plainly what he was speaking of, the dismay she was feeling infected him too. He saw the smile, and a strange misapprehension came over him.
She is smiling at my suspicions, he thought, and the Face eagerly threw fuel on the fire of his anger. SMILING! LAUGHING! HOW DARE SHE? TO HER IT IS ALL A COMEDY, AND YOU ARE CHIEF AMONG THE CLOWNS.
But Alexei could not yet feel so hateful toward her as his Class III implored. At that moment, when the revelation of everything was hanging over him, there was nothing he expected so much as that she would answer mockingly as before that his suspicions were absurd and utterly groundless. So terrible to him was what he knew that now he was ready to believe anything. But the expression of her face, scared and gloomy, did not now promise even deception.
“Possibly I was mistaken,” he said. “If so, I beg your pardon.”
“No, you were not mistaken,” she said deliberately, looking desperately into his eyes, one mechanical, one real, both radiating sadness and anger. Android Karenina tightened her grip on Anna’s shoulder, trying to warn her back from the brink of this confession, but it was too late-Anna placed her hand upon that of her Class III, for strength, and pressed on.
“You were not mistaken. I was, and I could not help being in despair. I hear you, but I am thinking of him. I love him, I am his mistress; I can’t bear you; I’m afraid of you, and I hate you… You can do what you like to me.”
Alexei reeled back, shocked, and in the next instant the carriage rocked violently, as if it, too, was stricken by Anna’s confession, and flew up into the air.
As Vronsky had been warned by his engineer, the roads leading in and out of the arena were mined with emotion bombs, among the most ingenious of UnConSciya’s cruel arsenal of terroristic weaponry. In Alexei Alexandrovich and his wife, they had, at this moment, an ideal target. Alexei’s heart pounded with wild emotion in response to Anna’s outburst, while Anna felt flushed and half-mad over what she had announced, and the biological effects of these passionate feelings were together enough-far more than enough-to trigger the physiochemical-sensing bombs that pitted the roadway.
The carriage was flung high into the air, then landed on its side and spun along the roadway until it smashed into the carriage in front of them, which carried the junkered bodies of Exteriors destroyed in the Cull. The shock and terror of that carriage’s passenger, a Ministry engineer, triggered a second blast; the junkered Exteriors flew up and were soon coming down again, a rain of deadly metal shrapnel pelting the tipped-over carriage of Anna and Karenin.
All of this Anna hardly noticed; dropping back into the corner of the upset carriage, she was sobbing, her face hidden in her hands; she did not notice, either, that with each wave of despair, a fresh explosion went off along the roadway, causing more dirt and gravel and bits of fractured metal to explode into the air. Android Karenina spread her arms widely, valiantly laying her metal body over that of her mistress.
Alexei Alexandrovich did not stir, and kept looking straight before him. But the telescopic eye embedded in the left side of his face slowly extended outward, and then upward, and as it did, the burning chunks of metal hurtling down toward the carriage halted in midair and hovered there. Anna raised her head from the crook of her arm and watched confusedly as, responding to minute movements from her husband’s mechanical eye-or so it seemed-the burning hunks of shrapnel crumpled harmlessly, one after the other, in the air above them.
A few minutes later the carriage was once more righted and along its way, its passengers still perfectly silent.