“What are you crying for, mother?” Seryozha said, waking completely up. “Mother, what are you crying for?” he cried in a tearful voice.
“I won’t cry… I’m crying for joy. It’s so long since I’ve seen you. I won’t, I won’t,” she said, gulping down her tears and turning away. “Come, it’s time for you to dress now,” she added after a pause, and, never letting go his hands, she sat down by his bedside on the chair, where his clothes were ready for him.
“How do you dress without me? How…” she tried to begin talking simply and cheerfully, but she could not, and again she turned away.
“I don’t have a cold bath, Papa didn’t order it. Why, you’re sitting on my clothes!”
And Seryozha went off into a peal of laughter. She looked at him and smiled.
“Mother, darling, sweet one!” he shouted, flinging himself on her again and hugging her. It was as though only now, on seeing her smile, he fully grasped what had happened.
“I don’t want that on,” he said, taking off her hat. And as it were, seeing her afresh without her hat, he fell to kissing her again. “Why do you carry a smoker? Mother!”
“But what did you think about me?You didn’t think I was dead?”
“They said you were killed! By a koschei that came upon you in the marketplace, while you shopped for apples.”
“Not so!”
“They said it attached itself at the base of your spine, and then burrowed all the way up to your brain.”
“No, indeed, my darling!”
“They said when you were found, your face was so mutilated, it was almost impossible to recognize it.”
Anna’s eyelashes fluttered furiously, as she attempted to conceal her dismay at the wishful thinking that had clearly gone into that particular detail of the story Karenin had concocted for Seryozha.
“I never believed it,” the boy said.
“You didn’t believe it, my sweet?”
“I knew, I knew!” he repeated his favorite phrase, and snatching the hand that was stroking his hair, he pressed the open palm to his mouth and kissed it. He afforded a sweet glance, too, to Android Karenina, who issued a small hum of pleasure and tried in vain to straighten his mess of childish curls with her slender phalangeals.
“You must go,” said Kapitonitch from the door, a note of desperation in his voice. “He must not discover you here. I should not have permitted it. Please, madame.” But neither mother nor son would permit their reunion to be interrupted.
The old mécanicien shook his head, and with a sigh he closed the door. “I’ll wait another ten minutes,” he said to himself, clearing his throat and wiping away tears. “I have made a mistake. A terrible mistake.”
Anna could not say good-bye to her boy, but the expression on her face said it, and he understood. “Darling, darling Kootik!” she used the name by which she had called him when he was little, “you won’t forget me? You…,” but she could not say more.
“Of course not, mother,” he responded simply. And then, seeming to think of something suddenly, he said, “She has not been collected for circuitry adjustment?”
“Not yet, dear son, not yet.”
“Oh. Then are you among the deserving?”
“What?
“Father says only the deserving ones will have their Class Ills returned to them after their circuits have been properly adjusted. Only the deserving are to own robots from now on.”
Anna’s eyes widened in bafflement. “And who has your father spoken of, as being amongst the ‘deserving?’”
Seryozha thought for a moment, and then let out a gale of childish laughter. “Why, he himself, I suppose! None other than he!”
How often afterward she thought of words she might have said. But now she did not know how to say it, and could say nothing. She only trembled, and clutched dearly at Android Karenina like a drowning woman clutches at a lifeboat. Seryozha only understood that his mother was unhappy and loved him. He knew that his father would wake soon, and that his father and mother could not meet, or the consequences would be disastrous. Android Karenina pulled on her mistress’s arm, as it was past time for them to depart, but silently Seroyzha pressed close to her and whispered, “Don’t go yet. He won’t come just yet.”
The mother held him away from her to see what he was thinking, what to say to him, and in his frightened face she read not only that he was speaking of his father, but, as it were, asking her what he ought to think about his father.
“Seryozha, my darling,” she said, “you must temper his hatred with your goodness. You are the only human thing he has left.”
“I fear him!” he cried in despair through his tears, and, clutching her by the shoulders, he began squeezing her with all his force to him, his arms trembling with the strain.
“My sweet, my little one!” said Anna, and she cried as weakly and childishly as he.
“No… please… sir… no…” came a cry from just beyond the door. Anna had only time to reflect how the voice of a man as strong as Kapitonitch could be reduced, in a moment of terror and desperation, to one like that of a frightened child-when the door flew open with a sharp clatter, and the body of the mécanicien came flying into the room. The corpse slammed into the wall above Sergey’s head and slid down the wall, leaving a slick of blood below the colorful tapestry hanging above the boy’s bed.
Sergey wailed like a bobcat and buried his head in his mother’s arms. Android Karenina threw a protective arm around her mistress, and the three of them huddled together, cowering from the tall and dramatic figure of Alexei Karenin, who stood trembling, filling the doorway with his imposing frame.
A long moment passed, before he let out a scream of primal rage. His eyes-one human, one rotating with a dead buzz in his silver half-face-glared from the doorway at the huddled band, and the dread oculus slowly extended toward them, its minute click foretelling some dire and inalterable fate.
Anna, though in her mind she prayed frantically for the safety of her son, was outwardly as silent as Android Karenina.
Only Sergey spoke, opening his young, pink lips and forming a single word: “Father…”
And even as Alexei Alexandrovich’s cruel mechanical eye quivered in its metal socket; even as he stood with stiffened spine and clenched fists in the doorway; even as every inch of his body seemed to strain with hatred and the desire to destroy; even so, his natural eye softened, and his mouth went slack and moist. From somewhere within him, a single, small word welled up and fought its way to freedom.
“Go.”
Anna hurriedly rose, but in the rapid glance she flung at him, taking in his whole figure in all its details, feelings of repulsion and hatred for him and jealousy over her son took possession of her. How could she go? How could she leave her dear Sergey with this monster?
But Android Karenina, calculating options at lightning speed, knew that there could be no other choice: if they did not go quickly, all would die. The loyal machine-woman lifted her mistress bodily over her shoulder, as a mother carries a sleeping child to bed, and together they fled the house. Anna had not time to undo, and so carried back with her, the parcel of toys she had chosen the day before in a toy shop with such love and sorrow.
CHAPTER 16
AS INTENSELY AS ANNA had longed to see her son, and as long as she had been thinking of it and preparing herself for it, she had not in the least expected what had occurred. The man now living in that house-the man with trembling jaw and destructive oculus, who kept a collection of half-built human faces in a shed-this man was not the same man who once had been her husband. On getting back to her lonely rooms in the hotel, she could not for a long while understand why she was there. “Yes, it’s all over, and I am again alone,” she said to herself, and without taking off her hat she sat down in a low chair by the hearth. Fixing her eyes on a I/Hourprotector/47 standing on a table between the windows, she tried to think.