CHAPTER 5

WELL, WHAT AM I GOING to do with my life?” said Levin to Socrates the next morning, as they joined a team of peasants, delivering a freshly excavated batch of ore to the smeltworks. “How am I to set about it?”

He was trying to express to his Class III the range of ideas and emotions he had passed through since their visit to Dolly and her family. Socrates, employing his advanced circuits for logic, sorted all his master’s thoughts and feelings into a thought matrix for him. Thought Category A was the renunciation of his old life, of his utterly useless education. This renunciation gave Levin satisfaction, and was easy and simple. Thought Category B was a series of mental images related to the life he longed to live now. The simplicity, the purity, the sanity of this life he felt clearly, and he was convinced he would find in it the content, the peace, and the dignity, of the lack of which he was so miserably conscious.

But Thought Category C turned upon the question of how to effect this transition from the old life to the new. And there nothing took clear shape for him. Socrates, in his efficient and meticulous way, rapidly divided and subdivided the possibilities:

POSSIBILITY 1. Have a wife?

POSSIBILITY 2. Have work and the necessity of work?

POSSIBILITY 3. Leave Provokovskoe?

POSSIBILITY 4. Buy land?

POSSIBILITY 5. Become a member of a peasant community?

POSSIBILITY 6. Marry a peasant girl?

“But how am I to set about such things?” Levin said confusedly in reply, and Socrates’ logistical circuits set busily back to work.

“Never mind, never mind,” Levin said then. “I’ll work it out later. One thing’s certain, this night has decided my fate. All my old dreams of home life were absurd.”

“Absurd,” Socrates seconded reluctantly, not wishing to confirm such a dismal verdict, but unwilling also to contradict his master in such a mood.

“It’s all ever so much simpler and better to . . . to . . .”

“Master?”

“How beautiful!” Levin exclaimed, and Socrates tilted back his head unit to take in the sight: a daylight meteor shower, with dozens of golden-red stars dancing in their turns across the clear blue sky. “How exquisite a sight on this exquisite morning! And when and how do such things come to be! Just now I looked at the sky, and there was nothing in it—-just the clouds and the gentle glow of the sun. And now, this display of stunning beauty! Yes, and so imperceptibly too my views of life changed!”

Shrinking from the cold, Levin walked rapidly, looking at the ground. “What’s that? Someone’s coming,” he said suddenly, catching the tinkle of bells, and lifting his head.

“At forty paces, master . . . there . . .”

Indeed, at forty paces, a carriage harnessed to a four-treaded Puller was driving toward him along the grassy road on which he was walking. The treads were shallow, designed primarily for city travel rather than the countryside, but the dexterous Class II driver held a careful hand on the shaft, so that the treads stayed on the smooth part of the road.

This was all Levin noticed, and without wondering who it could be, he gazed absently at the coach.

In the coach was an old lady dozing in one corner, and at the window, evidently only just awake, sat, perfectly still, a young girl holding in both hands the ribbons of a white cap. With a face entirely absent of thought or attention she stared out the window of the carriage. Levin realized that this girl was hibernating, in the state of chemically induced suspended animation into which ill people are commonly placed to better bear the rigors of the journey to and from an orbital.

At the moment Levin realized upon whom he was gazing, her subdermal anesthesia wore off, and slowly she began to wake. Her eyes blinked once, and then again, and then fell shut—but her face was alive again, full of light and thought, full of a subtle, complex inner life that was remote from Levin.

He watched, wonderingly, as the eyes—such familiar eyes—slowly opened again, like flowers newly budding. And then she recognized him, and her face, in the hazy glow of gradually returning consciousness, lighted up with wondering delight.

He could not be mistaken. There were no other eyes like those in the world. There was only one creature in the world who could concentrate for him all the brightness and meaning of life. It was she. It was Kitty. He understood that she was driving to Ergushovo from the Grav station. And everything that had been stirring Levin during that sleepless night, all the resolutions he had made, all the branching algorithmic calculations that Socrates had produced, all vanished at once. He recalled with horror his dreams of marrying a peasant girl. Only there, in the carriage that had crossed over to the other side of the road, and was rapidly disappearing, only there could he find the solution to the riddle of his life, which had weighed so agonizingly upon him of late.

She did not look out again. The sound of the carriage-treads faded; the drone of the II/Driver could scarcely be heard. The barking of dogs showed the carriage had reached the village, and all that was left was the empty fields all around, the village in front, and he and Socrates wandering lonely along the deserted high road.

He glanced at the sky, expecting again to see the meteor shower, that miracle of blazing torches pirouetting though the daylight. But there was nothing in the sky; there, in the remote heights above, a mysterious change had been accomplished. The sky was empty of falling stars; it had grown blue and bright; and with the same softness, but with the same remoteness, it met his questioning gaze.

“No,” he said to Socrates, “however good that life of simplicity and toil may be . . .”

“You cannot go back to it.”

“No, dear friend, I cannot. I love her.”