Vassenka Veslovsky took off his cap and greeted the visitor by gleefully waving the ribbons over his head. Dolly noticed as she and Anna hugged happily that the small crowd of decom robots focused their sensors on Vronsky and Anna with obvious love and admiration. As her eyes passed over the stolid Tortoiseshell, the upright Antipodal, and the enigmatic Witch Hazel, Dolly paused to consider the sorry fate of these creatures. Had they escaped their respective fates due to the intercession of loving masters, or through some dumb stroke of luck? What mixed and confusing messages must they be receiving from the Iron Laws coded in their wiring, now that the very Ministry that created them had ordered their destruction!
But as they strolled toward the house, Anna chattering happily about the world they were building at Vozdvizhenskoe, what struck Darya Alexandrovna most of all was the change that had taken place in Anna, whom she knew so well and loved. Any other woman, a less close observer, not knowing Anna before, or not having thought as Darya Alexandrovna had been thinking on the road, would not have noticed anything special in Anna. But now Dolly was struck by that temporary beauty, which is only found in women during moments of love, and which she saw now in Anna’s face.
Everything in her face, the clearly marked dimples in her cheeks and chin, the line of her lips, the smile which, as it were, fluttered about her face, the brilliance of her eyes, the grace and rapidity of her movements, the fullness of the notes of her voice, even the manner in which, with a sort of angry friendliness, she answered Veslovsky when he asked permission to climb into her Exterior, just to see how it feels-it was all peculiarly fascinating, and it seemed as if she were herself aware of it, and rejoicing in it. The snide and ironical title given her by the mécanicien now felt exactly right to Dolly: Anna, dignified and powerful in this pastoral redoubt, seemed like nothing so much as a warrior queen. The Queen of the Junkers.
“Ah, and here she is,” Anna grinned as they approached the porch of the dilapidated farmhouse. With fervor she embraced her own Class III, Android Karenina.
CHAPTER 8
ANNA LOOKED AT Dolly’s thin, careworn face, with its wrinkles filled with dust from the road, and she was on the point of saying what she was thinking, that is, that Dolly had gotten thinner. But, conscious that she herself had grown handsomer, and that Dolly’s eyes were telling her so, she sighed and began to speak about herself.
“You are looking at me,” Anna continued, “and wondering how I can be happy in my position? Not only separated from my husband, lacking even the benefit of a formal divorce, but now on the opposite side as he in a divide over the very future of our country! Well-it’s shameful to confess, but I… I’m inexcusably happy. Something magical has happened to me, like a dream, when you’re frightened, panic-stricken, and all of a sudden you wake up and all the horrors are no more. I have awoken. I have lived through the misery, the dread, and now for a long while past, especially since we’ve been here, I’ve been so happy!” she said, with a timid smile of inquiry looking at Dolly. “For once I know what I want: to be with this man,” she indicated Vronsky with a shy gesture, “and to stand alongside him for a principle in which I believe: that the ownership of beloved-companion robots is an ancient right, inviolable, a sacred privilege of the Russian people.”
“How glad I am!” said Dolly smiling, involuntarily speaking more coldly than she wanted to. “I’m very glad for you.”
But Anna did not answer. “How do you look at my position, what do you think of it?” she asked.
“I consider…,” Darya Alexandrovna began, and she would have gone on to say what she knew that Stiva would insist she say, were he here: that there were legal channels through which to express one’s grievances with governmental programs; that Class III robots were to be mourned, certainly, but it was folly to stake one’s own life on the fate of machines; and that “we must put our trust in our leaders.”
“I consider…” Darya Alexandrovna began again, but at that instant Vassenka Veslovsky blundered past them, riding in Anna’s majestic Exterior, bumbling heavily along and sending a spray of electrical fire over their heads into the lintels of the farmhouse.
“This thing is out of control, Anna Arkadyevna!” he shouted, laughing. Anna did not even glance at him.
“I don’t think anything,” Dolly said, and, lacking the courage to bring up those points that she knew her husband would have made, continued vaguely, “but I always loved you, and if one loves anyone, one loves the whole person, just as they are and not as one would like them to be…”
Anna, taking her eyes off her friend’s face and dropping her eyelids-this was a new habit Dolly had not seen in her before-pondered, trying to penetrate the full significance of the words.
And obviously interpreting them as she would have wished, she glanced at Dolly. “If you had any sins,” she said, “they would all be forgiven you for your coming to see me and for these words.” And Dolly saw that tears stood in her eyes. She pressed Anna’s hand in silence. Android Karenina sat cross-legged on the porch at Anna’s feet, her faceplate calm and still, emitting a calming hum from her Third Bay. It struck Dolly that to say her piece-to urge Anna to abandon this world and this cause-would mean urging her to abandon her Android Karenina… and thus to suffer exactly as she had suffered in the loss of her Dolichka.
“Well, tell me more, won’t you?” said Dolly, getting to her feet and looking avidly about the grounds of Vozdvizhenskoe. After a moment’s silence she repeated her question. “Tell me more! These marvelous fire pits, are they only intended for fixing what things you have found, or do you intend to smelt groznium and build new robots as well? How many there are of them!”
At last Anna was drawn out of her melancholy humor and into conversation. She explained to her friend about the layout of the camp; about the decoms who had arrived and from where they had come; about her hopes that this place could be a safe haven for junkers who would otherwise meet their fiery doom in the furnaces below the Moscow Tower.
As they spoke, crouched unseen just past the porch was Vassenka Veslovsky, standing totally-that is, robotically-still, his aural sensors on alert.
Next, Anna and Dolly rose and spent a fascinated hour watching Vronsky drill a small group of decoms in a cleared-out wheat field behind the barn. In tromping lockstep, the dozen or so dented robots formed into rows, the rows shifted into columns, columns merged into little phalanxes, phalanxes split and regrouped and melted in and out of one another in a series of precise military maneuvers. Interlocking, delicate, balletic, their metal torsos glinting marvelously in the noonday sun, the robots practiced these maneuvers, while Vronsky and Lupo prowled amongst them, barking orders and making small adjustments. As Dolly and the obviously proud Anna watched, Vronsky seemed to rage at the slowness of his mechanical charges, chewed on the ends of his mustache with feigned frustration, all the while quite evidently swollen with self-satisfaction at the ever-growing skill of his ragged troops.
And Vassenka Veslovsky turned up to make a nuisance of himself, mainly by parading next to Vronsky as if he, too, were a commander of some sort, peppering him with all sorts of questions: “How many precisely do you have? What capabilities do they have? How well do they take such orders?”