Seeing her husband, followed closely by the obnoxious oblong form of Small Stiva, she dropped her hands into the drawer of the bureau as though looking for something. But her face, to which she tried to give a severe and resolute expression, betrayed bewilderment and suffering.
“Dolly!” Stepan Arkadyich said in a subdued and timid voice, while Small Stiva bent at midline in a supplicating position toward Dolichka. In a rapid glance Dolly scanned her husband’s figure, and that of his robot. Man and machine both radiated health and freshness. “Yes, he is happy and content!” she whispered to Dolichka, and the bitter confirmation came from the Class III’s Vox-Em, “Happy. Content.”
“While I…,” Dolly continued, but her mouth stiffened, the muscles of the cheek contracted on the right side of her pale, nervous face.
“What do you want?” Dolly said to her husband in a rapid, deep, unnatural voice.
“Dolly!” he repeated, with a quiver in his voice. “Anna and Android Karenina are coming today.”
“Well, what is that to me? I can’t see them!” she cried.
“But you must, really, Dolly…”
“Go away, go away, go away!” she shrieked, not looking at him, as though this shriek were called up by physical pain.
The Galena Box, its simple external sensors attuned to those vocal tonalities indicative of emotional distress, reactuated, pulsing more rapidly.
Stepan Arkadyich could be calm when he thought of his wife, and could immerse himself in the news feed and drink the coffee that the II/Samovar/l(8) provided; but when he saw her tortured, suffering face, heard the tone of her voice, submissive to fate and full of despair, there was a catch in his breath and a lump in his throat, and his eyes began to shine with tears.
“My God! What have I done? Dolly! For God’s sake!… You know…” He could not go on; there was a sob in his throat. “Might we…” he began, gesturing meaningfully at their two androids. Dolly gave an agitated nod, and both of the Class IIIs were sent into Surcease, with head units slightly forward and sensory circuits deactivated, to allow their masters their absolute privacy.
“Dolly, what can I say…?” He paused, trying to arrange his thoughts appropriately, and there was no machine buzz in the room, not a single milli-Maxwell of hum. In this uncanny silence, Stiva blundered onward. “One thing: forgive… Remember, cannot nine years of my life atone for an instant-”
She dropped her eyes and listened, expecting what he would say, yet silently beseeching him in some way or other to make her believe differently.
“-an instant of passion?” he said, and would have gone on, but at that word, as at a pang of physical pain, her lips stiffened again, and again the muscles of her right cheek worked. The razor wound on Stiva’s upper lip sent a pulse of fresh pain radiating through the nerves of his face.
“Go away, go out of the room!” she shrieked still more shrilly. “And don’t talk to me of your passion and your loathsomeness.”
She tried to go out, but tottered, and clung to the back of a chair to support herself. His face quivered in a fresh wave of agony, and his eyes swam with tears.
“Dolly!” he said, sobbing now. “For mercy’s sake, think of the children! I am to blame, and punish me, make me expiate my fault. Anything I can do, I am ready to do anything! I am to blame, no words can express how much I am to blame! But, Dolly, forgive me!”
She sat down. He listened to her hard, heavy breathing, and he was unutterably sorry for her. She tried several times to begin to speak, but could not. He waited.
“Tell me, after what… has happened, can we live together?” Dolly answered finally, glancing at the stiff, silent form of Dolichka, missing the comfort of her animated presence. “Is that possible? Tell me, eh, is it possible?” she repeated, raising her voice, “after my husband, the father of my children, enters into a love affair with a common household mécanicienne?”
“But what could I do? What could I do?” he kept saying in a pitiful voice, not knowing what he was saying, as his head sank lower and lower.
“You are loathsome to me, repulsive!” she shrieked, getting more and more heated. “Your tears mean nothing! You have never loved me; you have neither heart nor honorable feeling! You are hateful to me, disgusting, a stranger-yes, a complete stranger!” With pain and wrath she uttered the word so terrible to herself-stranger.
He looked at her, and the fury expressed in her face alarmed and amazed him. He did not understand how his pity for her exasperated her. She saw in him sympathy for her, but not love. No, she hates me. She will not forgive me, he thought.
“Dolly! Wait! One word more,” he said.
“Dolichka!” Dolly cried, turning her back to him and agitatedly flicking the red switch beneath her Class III’s chin; the angular machine-woman’s circuits sprang to life, and together the two of them fled the room.
“If you come near me, I will call in the neighbors, the children! Every Class II in the house will know you are a scoundrel! I am going away at once, and you may live here with your jumpsuited mistress!”
And she went out, slamming the door.
CHAPTER 5
STEPAN ARKADYICH WORKED in the Moscow Tower, as a Deputy Vice President for Class I Manufacture & Distribution, Branch: Toys & Misc. It was an honorable and lucrative position, but one which required very little of him. The substantive decisions were made and relayed to him from elsewhere in his department, or from the St. Petersburg Tower, where the Higher Branches of the Ministry had their headquarters. He had received his post through his sister Anna’s husband, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, who held an extremely important position in the Higher Branches, the details of which were unclear and uninteresting to Stiva. But if Karenin had not gotten his brother-in-law this post, then through a hundred other personages-brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, and aunts-Stiva Oblonsky would have received this post, or some other similar one, together with the salary of six thousand absolutely needful for him, as his affairs, in spite of his wife’s considerable property, were in an embarrassed condition.
Half of Moscow and Petersburg were friends and relations of Stepan Arkadyich. He was born in the midst of those who had been and are the powerful ones of this world: men in government, roboticists, engineers, landowners, and above all those with positions in the Ministry. Consequently the distributors of earthly blessings in the shape of places, rents, and precious groznium were all his friends.
Stepan Arkadyich was not merely liked by all who knew him for his good humor, but for his bright disposition, unquestionable honesty, and adorable little walking armoire of a Class III. In Stepan Arkadyich-in his handsome, radiant figure, his sparkling eyes, black hair and eyebrows, and the white and red of his face-there was something that produced a physical effect of kindliness and good humor on the people who met him. “Aha! Stiva and Small Stiva! Here they are!” was almost always said with a smile of delight on meeting the affable pair.
The principal qualities in Stepan Arkadyich that had gained him this universal respect consisted, in the first place, of his extreme indulgence for others, founded on a consciousness of his own shortcomings; secondly, of his perfect liberalism-not the liberalism he read of in the papers, but the liberalism that was in his blood, in virtue of which he treated all men and their machines perfectly equally and exactly the same, whatever their fortune or calling might be; and thirdly-the most important point-his complete indifference to the business in which he was engaged, in consequence of which he was never carried away, and never made mistakes.
Stepan Arkadyich arrived at his place of work and looked adoringly up at the massive onion-shaped bulb that rotated slowly atop the Tower, forever scanning Moscow’s streets. “The Tower, she keeps her loving eye upon us,” went the saying, and indeed there was something decidedly ocular about the single round opening on one side of the giant rotating bulb, keeping its eternal, and eternally loving, watch over the city and her people.