BUT EXPRESS WHAT? WHAT DECISION? the Face asked innocently, and Alexei Alexandrovich had no ready reply.
“But after all,” Alexei added,” what has occurred? Nothing!”
NOTHING ?
He hesitated. “Yes. Nothing. She was talking a long while with him. But what of that? Surely women in society can talk to whom they please. And then, jealousy means lowering both myself and her.”
For some reason Alexei remembered at this moment Sarkovich, the underling from his department who had made impertinent overtures to Anna. Alexei had not been jealous, for then, as now, he had considered the emotion beneath him. He next recalled, with a twinge of unease, how he had later found the man out to be a Janus. Or, rather, the Face-having performed unbidden the relevant set of analyses-had discovered that the man was a spy for UnConSciya, Alexei Alexandrovich had announced the finding, and Sarkovich had been appropriately punished.
For some reason this led Alexei Alexandrovich’s restless mind to a more recent recollection-the encounter at the Grav station with Vronsky and his incessantly barking Class III. He had been thinking how much he wished the animal would be quiet, had even been saying to himself: Quiet. Quiet! And then, echoing through the chambers of his mind came the Face repeating the same word: QUIET!
And the next moment the irritating canine Class III had been lying on the floor of the Grav station, quivering and stricken.
Now, shaking these reflections away, postponing their analysis for another time, he entered the dining room of his house and said aloud, “Yes, I must decide and put a stop to it, and express my view of it…”
DECIDE HOW? HOW MUST WE DECIDE?
But Alexei’s thoughts, like his body, went round a complete circle, without coming upon anything new. He noticed this, rubbed his forehead, and sat down in Anna’s boudoir.
And the worst of it all, he thought, is that just now, at the very moment when my great work is approaching completion-he was thinking of the long-term project for Class III improvement, a project of which the Face represented but the first phase-when I stand in need of all my mental peace and all my energies, just now this stupid worry should fall foul of me. But what’s to be done? I’m not one of those men who submit to uneasiness and worry without having the force of character to face them.
HERE IS WHAT YOU MUST DO, pronounced the Face in a calming, even fatherly tone. YOU MUST THINK IT OVER, COME TO A DECISION, AND PUT IT OUT OF YOUR MIND.
There was the sound of a carriage driving up to the front door. Alexei Alexandrovich halted in the middle of the room.
CHAPTER 5
ANNA CAME IN with hanging head, with Android Karenina at her heels, glowing an easy nighttime red-orange glow. On seeing her husband, Anna raised her head and smiled, as though she had just woken up.
“You’re not in bed? What a wonder!” she said, letting fall her hood, and without stopping, she went on into the dressing room. “It’s late, Alexei Alexandrovich,” she said, when she had gone through the doorway.
“Anna, it’s necessary for me to have a talk with you.”
“With me?” she said, wonderingly. She came out from behind the door of the dressing room, and looked at him. His one human eye blinked back, while the mechanical iris of the other dilated with a barely audible whir, adjusting automatically to the room’s semidarkness. “Why, what is it? What about?” she asked, sitting down. “Well, let’s talk, if it’s so necessary. But it would be better to get to sleep.”
Anna said what came to her lips, and marveled, hearing herself, at her own capacity for lying. How simple and natural were her words, and how likely that she was simply sleepy! She felt herself clad in an impenetrable force field of falsehood.
“Anna, I must warn you,” he began, and flicked Android Karenina-her Class III-into Surcease, exercising a crude patriarchal prerogative that caused Anna’s eyes to widen with startlement. The warm glow that Android Karenina had been shedding snapped off, plunging the room into a preternatural gloom.
“Warn me?” Anna said, when she had recovered from the start of surprise. “Of what?”
She looked at him so simply, so brightly, that anyone who did not know her as her husband knew her could not have noticed anything unnatural, in either the sound or the sense of her words. Moving bit by minute bit, his steely oculus scanned every inch of her flesh, gathering in an instant a universe of physiognomic datum points: the subtle flinch of her retinas, her skin’s agitated flush. He saw that the inmost recesses of her soul, which had always hitherto lain open before him, were closed against him. More than that, he heard from her tone that she was not even perturbed at that, but, as it were, said straight out to him: Yes, it’s shut up, and so it must be, and will be in the future. Now he experienced a feeling such as a man might have, returning home and finding his own house locked up.
BUT PERHAPS THE KEY MAY YET BE FOUND, suggested the ever-thinking Face of Alexei Alexandrovich.
“I want to warn you…” he said in a low voice, and then found himself embarrassed, unable to continue.
“Yes?”
Alexei Alexandrovich continued, lamely, “To, to warn you of the likelihood of more UnConSciya violence, in the form of koschei. A woman was set upon by a leech-like machine-beast, and had her spinal column pierced and drained of its fluid, as she shopped in the open-air fruit and vegetable market Thursday last.”
“Very well,” replied Anna Karenina, and smiled with evident relief, as if daring him to continue, to announce the true cause of his vexation.
HAVE STRENGTH, FRIEND ALEXEI. HAVE STRENGTH.
“I want to warn you, too, that through thoughtlessness and lack of caution you may cause yourself to be talked about in society. Your too-animated conversation this evening with Count Vronsky-” he enunciated the name firmly and with deliberate emphasis-“attracted attention.”
He talked and looked at her laughing eyes, which frightened him now with their impenetrable look.
HAVE STRENGTH.
“You’re always like that,” Anna answered, as though completely misapprehending him, and, of all he had said, only taking in the last phrase. “One time you don’t like my being dull, and another time you don’t like my being lively. I wasn’t dull. Does that offend you?”
Alexei Alexandrovich shivered, and out of old habit raised a hand before his chin and tapped a neat fingernail against the cold, hard metal of his right cheek.
“Oh, please, don’t do that, I so dislike it,” she said. “But what is this all about? What do you want of me?”
Alexei Alexandrovich struggled to speak. Indeed, what did he want of her? The answer came from his Class III: INSTEAD OF DOING WHAT YOU HAD INTENDED-THAT IS TO SAY, WARNING YOUR WIFE AGAINST A MISTAKE IN THE EYES OF THE WORLD-YOU HAVE UNCONSCIOUSLY BECOME AGITATED OVER WHAT WAS THE AFFAIR OF HER CONSCIENCE.