When Vronsky turned the opera glass again in that direction, he noticed that Anna’s friend Princess Varvara was particularly red, and kept laughing unnaturally and looking round at the next box. Anna, de-telescoping her I/Fan/6 and tapping it on the red velvet, was gazing away and did not see, and obviously did not wish to see, what was taking place in the next box. Yashvin’s face wore the expression which was common when he was losing at cards. Scowling, he sucked the left end of his mustache further and further into his mouth, and cast sidelong glances at the next box.
In that box on the left were the Kartasovs Vronsky knew them, and knew that Anna was acquainted with them. Madame Kartasova, a thin little woman, was standing up in her box, and, her back turned upon Anna, she was putting on a mantle that her husband was holding for her. Her face was pale and angry, and she was talking excitedly. Kartasov, a fat, bald man, was continually looking round at Anna, while he attempted to soothe his wife. When the wife had gone out, the husband lingered a long while, and tried to catch Anna’s eye, obviously anxious to bow to her. But Anna, with unmistakable intention, avoided noticing him, and talked to Yashvin, whose cropped head was bent down to her.
Vronsky could not understand exactly what had passed between the Kartasovs and Anna, but he saw that something humiliating for Anna had happened. He knew this both from what he had seen, and most of all from the face of Anna, who, he could see, was taxing every nerve to carry through the part she had taken up. And in maintaining this attitude of external composure she was completely successful. Anyone who did not know her and her circle, who had not heard all the utterances of the women expressive of commiseration, indignation, and amazement, that she should show herself in society, and show herself so conspicuously with her lace and her beauty, and with the audacity to parade her Class III in such circumstances-anyone would have admired the serenity and loveliness of this woman, without suspecting that she was undergoing the sensations of a man in the stocks.
Knowing that something had happened, but not knowing precisely what, Vronsky felt a thrill of agonizing anxiety, and hoping to find out something, he went toward the box where she sat. Working his way through the aisles toward her, he jostled as he came out against the colonel of his regiment, talking to two strangers.
The colonel greeted him with genial familiarity, and hastened to introduce him to the others. The colonel’s companions were young, with neat hairstyles under regimental caps, high cheekbones, and cold, green-gray eyes.
“Excuse me, gentlemen, but I must pass. Good evening, sir,” he said curtly, ignoring the two strangers and addressing only his old friend, the colonel. The men did not step aside, however, but to the contrary formed a tight, jostling ring around him, chattering familiarly.
“Ah, Vronsky! When are you coming to the regiment? We can’t let you off without a supper. You’re one of the old set,” said one of the men. But even as he smiled politely, still glancing up toward Anna’s box and trying to shoulder past, Vronsky saw that all three, even his old friend the colonel, wore not the bronze uniform of his regiment, but the crisp blue of the Toy Soldiers. Vronsky turned away from them, silently appealing to the colonel to let him by… and noticed with a start, as he looked directly into the colonel’s round, handsome eyes, that this was not his old friend at all.
The face was almost the same face-the same set of the jaw, the same roll of flesh below the chin, the same bristly black mustache-but a cunning simulacrum of his friend’s appearance, not the real thing.
Vronsky recoiled. “I can’t stop, awfully sorry, another time,” he said, and tried again to break free, to get to the carpeted stairs that led to Anna’s box.
“No, no,” replied the colonel-who-was-not-the-colonel genially. “We insist.” One of the other soldiers grinned, as if preparing to invite Vronsky for a drink or a game of Flickerfly. “Say, the adjustment protocol is moving toward completion. How strange it is that your Class III remains uncollected.”
“Oh yes!” said the third soldier. “Why, we could rectify that situation right away!”
Lupo hissed and showed his teeth. Vronsky murmured a demurral while his left hand, hidden by his cloak, moved discreetly toward his belt. Although not, apparently, as discreetly as he had hoped.
“Oh, that won’t do, your Excellency,” said the “colonel” with a smile. “That won’t do at all.”
The colonel’s face blurred, wavered, and was replaced in a terrible instant by a silver-black mass of churning gears. Vronsky yelped in startlement as the same hideous transformation unfolded on the other men: the skin of their faces retracted, revealing not flesh but gears-gears rolling in gears, tiny pistons pumping up and down, winding tracks-all in the approximate shape of a human face, but made from the stuff of robots.
“Good God,” Vronsky had time to say, before a tongue of flame shot forth from the mouth-space on the colonel’s face, or rather where the face had been a moment ago. Vronsky ducked in the last moment and caught the blast with the top of his head. He cried out in pain, smelling his own singed flesh and burnt hair, and drew his smoker to open fire; Lupo launched himself forward on his strong hind legs and landed on the chest of one of the counterfeit soldiers, groznium teeth sinking into groznium Adam’s apple. The robot cried out and went down in what appeared to be some genuine form of pain, while Lupo wrestled and thrashed at his neck.
Abstractedly, Vronsky heard the panicked screams of the other theatergoers; he ducked and rolled away from a second fire-blast, crouching behind a red-upholstered seat and returning fire. The non-colonel winced as he absorbed a fusillade that would have killed a real human several times over.
Vronsky cursed, and then heard, from the other side of the box, a strangely commonplace refrain coming from the third soldier. “Here boy,” the soldier said, crouching down and patting at his lap. “Here, Lupo.”
Vronsky, rolling away from a third belch of fire from his antagonist, nearly laughed at the implausibility of such a plan-until he saw that Lupo had indeed released his toothsome clasp on the one robot’s neck and was trotting, spellbound, toward the other. “What in the…”
A fresh gout of fire spilled over the seat, and Vronsky narrowly avoided it, got off a quick smoker blast at the face-hole of the pretended colonel, and was then distracted again-this time by the sound of weapons firing above.
Anna’s box.
“No!” he cried.
He looked up, to where two more of the Toy Soldiers in their handsome blue uniforms stood, with smokers drawn and aimed at Anna’s heart. And fat, foolish Kartasov, who mere minutes ago had presented no more significant a threat than societal disapprobation, had revealed his own churning, silver-black death-robot face-from whose mouth-space was billowing a swirling, malevolent column of blue-black smoke.
This cloud snaked forward, Vronsky saw with some relief, not toward Anna but toward Android Karenina; his relief lasted only until Anna boldly jumped forward, interposing herself between the strange cloud and her beloved-companion.