He and Socrates watched as the Caretaker loudly demanded answers of his prisoner, answers which evidently did not come quickly enough: the 77 restraining the Janus snaked a gold-tipped cord from a compartment in his upper torso and attached it roughly to the man’s left temple. A blast of voltage traveled from the 77’s core into the man’s forehead, and the Janus gibbered and shook, his body rattling from the pain.
The Janus’s wife, still standing in the doorway, shrieked and fainted dead away on her stoop.
“Swift justice,” said Socrates, but at this bit of violence Levin grimaced and turned away. Noting his master’s pained expression, Socrates echoed back what he himself had said a moment ago: “Probably he is an agent of UnConSciya. Almost certainly, now that I have had a chance to reflect. “But Socrates had not run an analysis on the question, could not really know, and Levin said nothing. This time it was Socrates who re-engaged his own monitor, drawing his master back into the soothing consolations of the past.
In his student days Levin had all but been in love with the eldest daughter of the Shcherbatsky family, Dolly, but she was soon married to Oblonsky. Then he began being in love with the second. He felt, as it were, that he had to be in love with one of the sisters, only he could not quite make out which. But Natalia, too, had hardly made her appearance in the world when she was married to the mathementalics engineer Lvov. Kitty was still a child when Levin left the university. Young Shcherbatsky began in the mines, was crushed in a cave-in, and Levin’s relations with the Shcherbatskys, in spite of his friendship with Oblonsky, became less intimate. But when early in the winter of this year Levin came to Moscow, after a year in the country, and saw the Shcherbatskys, he realized which of the three sisters he was indeed destined to love.
But Levin was in love, and so it seemed to him that Kitty was so perfect in every respect that she was a creature far above everything terrestrial; and that he was a creature so low and so earthly that it could not even be conceived that other people and she herself could regard him as worthy of her. Levin’s conviction that it could not be was founded on the idea that in the eyes of her family he was a disadvantageous and worthless match for the charming Kitty, and that Kitty herself could not love him.
In her family’s eyes he had no ordinary, definite career and position in society; yes, he had his patch of rough land in the country, but like all pit-operators he was ultimately a functionary, proudly mining his soil on behalf of the Ministry, which owned all the Russian groznium beds; while his contemporaries by this time, when he was thirty-two, were already one a colonel, and another a robotics professor, another director of a bank, or Vice President of a Division, like Oblonsky. But he (he knew very well how he must appear to others) was a country gentleman, occupied only in extraction and excavation and smelting; in other words, a fellow of no ability, who had not turned out well, and who was doing just what, according to the ideas of the world, is done by people fit for nothing else.
The mysterious, enchanting Kitty herself could not love such an ugly person as he conceived himself to be, and, above all, such an ordinary, in no way striking person. He had heard that women often did care for ugly and ordinary men, but he did not believe it, for he judged by himself, and he could not himself have loved any but beautiful, mysterious, and exceptional women.
After spending two months in Moscow in a state of enchantment, seeing Kitty almost every day in society, into which he went so as to meet her, his circuits (to employ the crass expression) went haywire: he abruptly decided that it could not be, and went back to the country. But after several months…
“No! No, please-”
This was the voice of the Janus’s wife.
“We confess. We have done it. My husband and I. We released the koschei at St. Catherine Square… Thursday last. It was us! Please-”
“This, madame, we were already aware,” said the Caretaker in command of the troop of state robots, casually brushing a speck of dirt from his gleaming golden uniform. Meanwhile a second cord had writhed forward from a second compartment in the 77’s bulky torso, and attached itself to the other side of the man’s temples. Again electricity flowed from within the 77, along the deadly conduits of the cords, and into the Janus’s skull. His body lifted off the ground, his feet rattled like empty cans, and then he went slack.
As Levin and Socrates looked on, the gold-uniformed Caretaker shouted an order at the 77, and the old man was lifted by the massive man-machine like a sack of potatoes, and tossed bodily into the river, while the crowd of peasants cheered lustily.
“Master?” came the cautious inquiry from Socrates’ Vox-Em, when all was concluded and the troop of 77s had disappeared.
“Never fear, old friend. My stomach is strong enough to bear witness to the cost of safety for Mother Russia. Still… rather an ill omen for my undertaking in the city.”
Levin sighed as he rose from the café table, and bid Socrates to rise with him. He could not leave without completing his quest. After spending two months alone in the country, he was convinced that his feeling for Kitty was not one of those passions of which he had had experience in his early youth; that this feeling gave him not an instant’s rest; that he could not live without deciding the question, would she or would she not be married to him, and that his despair had arisen only from his own imaginings, that he had no sort of proof that he would be rejected. And he had now come to Moscow with a firm determination to make an offer, and get married if he were accepted. Or… he could not conceive what would become of him if he were rejected.
The body of the Janus bobbed past them, floated down the river, and away.
CHAPTER 7
AT FOUR O’CLOCK, conscious of his heart hammering like a maltuned Class I sleep-waker, Levin stepped out of a hired sledge at the skating park, and turned along the path to the frozen mounds and the skate-maze, knowing that he would certainly find her there, as he had seen the Shcherbatskys’ carriage at the entrance.
It was a bright, frosty day. Rows of carriages, sledges, drivers, and policemen-not 77s, just workaday Moscow II/Policeman/12s in their cheerful bronze weather-coating-were in the approach. Crowds of well-dressed people, with hats bright in the sun, swarmed about the entrance and along the well-swept little paths between the little houses adorned with carving in the Russian style. The old, curly birches of the gardens, all their twigs laden with snow, looked as though freshly decked in sacred vestments.
Levin walked along the path toward the skate-maze, while angular Socrates, programmed to dampen his master’s anxiety when it grew too frenzied, droned in his ear:
“You mustn’t be excited. You must be calm. Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet!”
But the more Levin tried to heed this warning, and keep himself composed, the more breathless he found himself. An acquaintance met him and called him by his name, but Levin did not even recognize him. He went toward the elaborate interlacing paths of magnetized track that made up the skate-maze, heard the familiar electric purr of skates gliding above its surface and the sounds of merry voices. He walked on a few steps, and the skating ground lay open before his eyes, and at once, amidst all the skaters, he knew her.
He knew she was there by the rapture and the terror that seized on his heart. She was talking to a woman at the opposite end of the ground, both ladies hovering just above track level, their skates set on neutral as they conversed. There was apparently nothing striking either in Kitty’s dress or in her attitude. But for Levin she was as easy to find in that crowd as a rose among nettles. Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light on all around her. In that moment, it was to Levin like she was the Eye in the Tower, keeping loving watch over all Moscow.