CHAPTER 21

IN THE MORNING Konstantin Levin left Moscow, and toward evening he reached home. On his journey on the Grav he talked to his neighbors about politics and the new gravways, and, just as in Moscow, he was overcome by a sense of confusion of ideas, dissatisfaction with himself, shame of something or other. But when he got out at his own station, when he saw the cyclopian II/Coachman/47-T, its sturdy torso perfectly perpendicular at the controls; when, in the dim light reflected by the station fires, he saw his own sledge, his own four-treaded Puller at its head, trimmed with rings and tassels; when the Coachman mechanically relayed the village news, he began to see what had happened to him in quite a different light. He felt himself, and did not want to be anyone else. All he wanted now was to be better than before.

Then, riding on the coach from the Grav station, came the heat: the radiating warmth of the pit, his pit, which he began to feel on his skin several versts before his massive groznium mine came into view. At last, there it was, a vast and craggy crater blasted out of the countryside. The pit was half a verst long and twice again as wide, its rough rock walls sloping down into a rutted rock-lined bottom, which was dotted with a thousand small smelting fires, which rung twenty-four hours a day with the clang of pickaxes and shovels.

Konstantin Levin climbed from the sledge, waved robustly to a gang of Pitbots with their battered but firm charcoal bodies and wide treads, donned his goggles, and stood at the outer radius of the pit. As he stared down into the vast crater, watching his dozens of diligent Pitbots at work, diligent and industrious as honeybees, scurrying to and fro, churning up the Earth with their axes, he felt that little by little the confusion was clearing up, and the shame and self-dissatisfaction were passing away.

He took a last breath of the sulfurous air and walked with Socrates to the house from the side of the pit. As they walked, Levin expressed to his Class III his new resolutions.

“In the first place, from this day I will give up hoping for any extraordinary happiness,” he said. “Such as marriage might have given me.”

“One, no happiness for you,” Socrates parroted faithfully, his master’s use of the set phrase “in the first place” having activated his recording/retaining function-set.

“Consequently I will not so disdain what I really have.”

“Subset of one: no happiness equals no disdain.”

“Secondly, I will never again let myself give way to low passion, the memory of which tortured me so while I was making up my mind to make an offer.”

“Two: absence of low passion.”

Then Levin remembered his brother Nikolai, and made one further resolution. “I will never allow myself to forget him, Socrates.”

“Three: Nikolai preservation dedication.”

“I will follow him up, and not lose sight of him. I will be ready to help if his illness should continue to worsen.”

The snow of the little quadrangle before the house was lit up by a light in the bedroom window of his old mécanicienne, Agafea Mihalovna. She was not yet asleep.

“You’re soon back again, sir,” said Agafea Mihalovna as Levin and Socrates entered.

“I got tired of it, Agafea Mihalovna. With friends, one is well; but at home, one is better,” he answered, and, together with his beloved-companion, went into his study.