“Delighted,” said Yashvin with a smile, from which Vronsky could see that he liked Anna very much.

Yashvin said good-bye and went away; Vronsky stayed behind.

“Are you going too?” she said to him.

“I’m late already,” he answered. “Run along! I’ll catch you up in a moment,” he called toYashvin.

She took him by the hand, and without taking her eyes off him, gazed at him while she ransacked her mind for the words to say that would keep him.

“Wait a minute, there’s something I want to say to you,” and taking his broad hand she pressed it on her neck. “Oh, was it right my asking him to dinner?”

“You did quite right,” he said with a serene smile that showed his even teeth, and he kissed her hand.

“Alexei, Petersburg is strange now-it is lonely and strange without the Class Ills,” she said, pressing his hand in both of hers. “Soon ours will be taken from us as well. We will be safer in the provinces, Alexei, safer and happier.”

“I cannot agree with you, dear, given what Yashvin was telling me only just before you came in. These aliens, these so-called Honored Guests, rampage everywhere outside the cities; they say that now, when a person falls ill, his family packs up and flees as rapidly as possible, because soon a large, beaked reptile with dozens of eyeballs will burst forth from inside him and join the hordes. Yashvin says it is quickly becoming very like a full-scale invasion, and speaks as though the provinces will soon be entirely overrun.”

“Alexei, I am miserable, and scared. Where can we go? And when?”

“Soon, soon. You wouldn’t believe how disagreeable our way of living here is to me too,” he said-but then he drew away his hand, and turned his face away.

He is happy that there are these aliens in the woods, she thought bitterly. Happy for a reason to keep us here.

“Well, go, go!” she said in a tone of offense, and she walked quickly away from him.

CHAPTER 17

AT DINNER, YASHVIN SPOKE of the sensational new opera then in residence at Petersburg’s grand Vox Fourteen; Anna, much to Vronsky’s alarm, determined that they should get a box for the evening. After dinner, Yashvin went to smoke, and Vronsky went down with him to his own rooms. After sitting there for some time he ran upstairs. Anna was already dressed in a low-necked gown of light silk and velvet that she had had made on the moon, and had set Android Karenina to a charming pearl-white glow that was particularly becoming.

“Are you really going to the theater?” he said, trying not to look at her.

“Why do you ask with such alarm?” she said, wounded again at his not looking at her. “Why shouldn’t I go?” She appeared not to understand the motive of his words.

“Oh, of course, there’s no reason whatever,” he said, frowning.

“That’s just what I say,” she said, willfully refusing to see the irony of his tone, and quietly turning back her long, perfumed glove.

“Anna, for God’s sake! What is the matter with you?” he said, exasperated.

“I don’t understand what you are asking.”

“You know that it’s out of the question to go.”

“Why so?”

He shrugged his shoulders with an air of perplexity and despair.

“But do you mean to say you don’t know…?” he began.

“But I don’t care to know!” she almost shrieked. “I don’t care to. Do I regret what I have done? No, no, no! If it were all to do again from the beginning, it would be the same. For us, for you and for me, there is only one thing that matters, whether we love each other. Other people we need not consider. Why can’t I go? I love you, and I don’t care for anything,” she said, glancing at him with a peculiar gleam in her eyes that he could not understand. “If you have not changed to me, why don’t you look at me?”

He looked at her. He saw all the beauty of her face, set against Android Karenina’s gentle pearl-white glow. But now her beauty and elegance were just what irritated him.

“My feeling cannot change, you know, but I beg you, I entreat you,” he said again in French, with a note of tender supplication in his voice, but with coldness in his eyes.

She did not hear his words, but she saw the coldness of his eyes, and answered with irritation:

“And I beg you to explain why I should not go.”

“Because… because…” He hesitated, and then grasped for an explanation which was not the true cause of his reluctance, but which nevertheless had the virtue of being quite true: “Because of Android Karenina! Flaunting yourself in public in the company of your Class III will only give your husband and his minions a perfect opportunity to subject her to his ridiculous circuitry adjustment program after all.”

“This is a risk I am willing to take,” she said, filled with spite toward him, toward Alexei Karenin, and toward their whole pitiful situation. Only her Class III did she love and hold blameless, and now she turned tenderly to Android Karenina. “A risk that we are willing to take. Aren’t we, my beloved-companion?”

In answer, Android Karenina flashed her eyebank tenderly at her mistress, and motored off behind her to the Vox Fourteen.

CHAPTER 18

VRONSKY FOR THE FIRST TIME experienced a feeling of anger against Anna, almost a hatred for her willfully refusing to understand her own position. This feeling was aggravated by his being unable to tell her plainly the cause of his anger. If he had told her directly what he was thinking, he would have said:

“In that dress, with that android-cast glow, to show yourself at the theater is not merely equivalent to acknowledging your position as a fallen woman, it is flinging down a challenge to society-that is to say, cutting yourself off from it forever.”

What Alexei Kirillovich could not yet understand was that such concerns simply did not matter any longer. After that night at the Vox Fourteen, a night that would be long remembered and long mourned by the people of Russia, he would understood much better.

Left alone in the wake of her departure, he finally got up from his chair and began pacing up and down the room.

“And what’s today?”

Lupo gave a gruff yelp, tilted his head, and scraped the hard wooden floor four times with his right front claw. “Yes, of course, the fourth night. Yegor and his wife are there, and my mother, most likely. Of course all Petersburg’s there. By now she’s gone in, taken off her cloak and come into the light.” Vronsky threw himself back into the chair and patted his lap for Lupo to leap into it. “What about me? What about us? Are we frightened? From every point of view-stupid, stupid!… And why is she putting me in such a position?” he said with a gesture of despair.

“Come, friend,” Vronsky snarled, and his fierce beloved-companion obeyed. “We’re going to the theater.”

When they arrived at the palatial Vox Fourteen it was half past eight and the performance was in full swing. The II/Boxkeeper/19, recognizing Vronsky as he peeled off his fur coat, called him “your Excellency.” In the brightly lighted corridor there was no one but the II/Boxkeeper/19 and two II/Attendant/77s listening at the doors. Through the closed doors came the sounds of the discreet staccato accompaniment of the orchestra, and a single female voice rendering distinctly a musical phrase. The door opened to let the Boxkeeper slide through, and the phrase drawing to the end reached Vronsky’s hearing clearly. But the doors were closed again at once, and Vronsky did not hear the end of the phrase and the cadence of the accompaniment, though he knew from the thunder of applause that it was over.

When he entered the Vox Fourteen, brilliantly lighted with I/Lumiére/7s and gas jets, the noise was still going on. On the stage the singer, bowing and smiling, with bare shoulders flashing with diamonds, was, with the help of the tenor who had given her his arm, gathering up the bouquets that were flying awkwardly over the footlights. Then she went up to a gentleman with glossy pomaded hair parted down the center, who was stretching across the footlights holding out something to her, and all the public in the stalls as well as in the boxes was in excitement, craning forward, shouting and clapping. The conductor from his podium assisted in passing the offering, and straightened his white tie. Vronsky walked into the middle of the stalls, and, standing still, began looking about him. His attention turned upon the familiar, habitual surroundings, the stage, the noise, all the familiar, uninteresting, particolored herd of spectators in the packed theater. There were no Class Ills. No beloved-companions lounging at their master’s elbows, shedding flattering light, fetching spectacles and lighting cigarettes. All these people-the uniforms and black coats, the dirty crowd in the upper gallery, and in the boxes and front rows, the real people, the people of society-but not a robot moving among them.