CHAPTER 10

SHE IS AWAKE,” Vronsky called to Anna, who responded happily and ran in to give Dolly a kiss. “I shall escort the princess to her cabin, and we’ll have a little talk,” he said, “if you would like that?” he added, turning to her.

“I shall be delighted,” answered Darya Alexandrovna, rather astonished. She saw by Vronsky’s face that he wanted something from her. She was not mistaken. As soon as they had passed through the little gate back into the garden, he looked in the direction Anna had taken, and having made sure that she could neither hear nor see them, he began:

“You guess that I have something I want to say to you,” he said, looking at her with laughing eyes. “I am not wrong in believing you to be a friend of Anna’s.” He took off his hat, and taking out his handkerchief, wiped his head, which was growing bald. Dolly made no answer, and merely stared at him with dismay. When she was left alone with him, she suddenly felt afraid; his laughing eyes and stern expression scared her. The wolf-robot, Lupo, trotted beside them, and she saw with distaste that he was working at a hunk of the alien’s hide with his back teeth. The most diverse suppositions as to what Vronsky was about to speak of to her flashed into her brain. He is going to beg me to come to stay in this rebel cantonment with them with the children, and I shall have to refuse; or isn’t it Vassenka Veslovsky and his relations with Anna? Or perhaps about Kitty, that he feels he was to blame? All her conjectures were unpleasant, but she did not guess what he really wanted to talk about to her.

“You have so much influence with Anna, she is so fond of you,” he said. “Do help me.”

Darya Alexandrovna looked with timid inquiry into his energetic face, which under the lime trees was continually being lighted up in patches by the sunshine, and then passing into complete shadow again. She waited for him to say more, but he walked in silence beside her, scratching with his cane in the gravel.

“You have come to see us, you, the only woman of Anna’s former friends—I know that you have done this not because you regard our position as the right one but because, understanding all the difficulty of the position, you still love her and want to be a help to her. Have I understood you rightly?” he asked, looking round at her.

“Oh, yes,” answered Dolly, retracting her I/Sunshade/6, “but . . .”

“No,” he broke in, and unconsciously, oblivious of the awkward position into which he was putting his companion, he stopped abruptly, so that she had to stop short too. “No one feels more deeply and intensely than I do all the difficulty of Anna’s position; and that you may well understand, if you do me the honor of supposing I have any heart. I am to blame for that position, and that is why I feel it.”

“Yes, but here, so far—and it may be so always—you are happy and at peace. Not literally at peace, far from it given the severity of the threats that face you, but at peace in your hearts, which is after all the more valuable. I see in Anna that she is happy, perfectly happy, she has had time to tell me so much already,” said Darya Alexandrovna, smiling; and involuntarily, as she said this, at the same moment a doubt entered her mind whether Anna really was happy.

But Vronsky, it appeared, had no doubts on that score. “Yes, yes,” he said, “I know that she has revived after all her sufferings; she is happy. She is happy in the present. But I? . . . I am afraid of what is before us. . . . I beg your pardon, you would like to walk on?”

“No, I don’t mind.”

“Well, then, let us sit here.”

Darya Alexandrovna sat down on a garden seat in a corner of the avenue. He stood up facing her.

“I see that she is happy,” he repeated, and the doubt whether she was happy sank more deeply into Darya Alexandrovna’s mind. “But can it last?”

A junker named Vespidae, employing a very limited propeller-driven hovering capacity as he patrolled the perimeter of the camp, swung low overheard and flashed an all-clear light on its undercarriage to Vronsky, who gave a desultory wave in return and continued.

“Whether Anna and I have acted rightly or wrongly is another question, but the die is cast,” he said, “and we are bound together for life. We are united by all the ties of love that we hold most sacred. We have a child. We have these machine-men and -women who have sought what they perceive as safety in our shadow. But the conditions of our position are such that thousands of complications arise that she does not see and does not want to see. And that one can well understand. But I can’t help seeing them.” Vronsky absently ran his fingers along Lupo’s spine, and the dog thrummed with pleasure. Dolly wondered what Vronsky was getting at.

“My child,” he said suddenly. “Can we raise her here, in such a situation? And what of the future? My daughter will be hunted for all her life, bearing the mark of the rebel, whether she would choose to or not, for she will never be given the choice. We have made it for her, by our actions. Can I will her such an existence!” he said, with a vigorous gesture of refusal, and he looked with gloomy inquiry toward Darya Alexandrovna.

She made no answer, but simply gazed at him. He went on: “One day a son may be born, my son, and he too will have the results of this choice, he too will have the consequences thrust upon him. He will be an outcast, an escapee from society, and worse—if this redoubt of ours should be found and our defenses destroyed, my child would in the course of events be killed, or worse, raised by him: as a Karenin! You can understand the bitterness and horror of this position! I have tried to speak of this to Anna. It irritates her. She is happy now, she has taken what she sees as her principled position on the Robot Question. She enjoys the thrill of this wilderness existence we now lead. She cannot look far enough down the road to contemplate the kind of future we are engendering. She does not understand, and to her I cannot speak plainly of all this. . . .”

He paused, evidently much moved.

“Yes, indeed, I see that. But what can Anna do?” queried Darya Alexandrovna.

“Yes, that brings me to the object of my conversation,” he said, calming himself with an effort. “It is my great hope that I might give up this life and marry Anna properly, within the bounds of society.”

“I am surprised to hear you say so,” replied Dolly. She looked about her, her gesture taking in the whole of Vozdvizhenskoe. “I would have said you were so happy here, at the head of your robot regiment. . . .”

“But they could be brought into service! With me at their head! Can you imagine . . .”

“Into service?”

“Of the state, of the Ministry,” Vronsky turned his gaze back toward the farmhouse, as if ensuring Anna did not overhear. “I am prepared to play what part it is thought I would play best in the New Russia being created by our leaders.” Dolly raised a hand to her mouth, but said nothing.

“I have built this world in the woods because I have stood for the honor of Anna Karenina. But in truth I have no problem, no practical problem that is to say, with the direction of the Higher Branches, with the changes they seek to implement. My differences with Alexei Alexandrovich are personal, not political.”

“But after your departure . . . your disappearance . . . how can the Higher Branches allow your return? How could Karenin?”

“If Anna asked he would allow it: I’m sure of it. Her husband agreed to a divorce—at that time your husband had arranged it completely. And now, I know, he would not refuse it. He would grant her a divorce, and forgiveness for both of us. It is only a matter of sending him a communiqué. He said plainly at that time that if she expressed the desire, he would not refuse. Of course,” he said gloomily, “it is one of those pharisaical cruelties of which only such heartless men are capable. He knows what agony any recollection of him must give her, and knowing her, he must have a communiqué,” he said, with an expression as though he were threatening someone for its being hard for him. “And so it is, princess, that I am shamelessly clutching at you as an anchor of salvation. Help me to persuade her to write to him and ask for a divorce and for amnesty.”

This last word he spoke with emphasis, though quietly. But Lupo, who had padded up to them midway through their conversation and had been sitting contentedly as usual at his master’s feet, heard—with his extraordinary, lupine aural circuitry, he heard, and with his survival instincts he understood. For Vronsky and Anna to be given amnesty, they would surely have to comply with the “adjustment protocol.”

The wolf-machine let loose a long, low growl, which Vronsky did not, or affected not, to hear.

“Use your influence with her, make her record a communiqué. I don’t like—I’m almost unable to speak about this to her.”

“Very well, I will talk to her,” said Darya Alexandrovna, and for some reason she suddenly at that point recalled Anna’s strange new habit of half-closing her eyes. And she remembered that Anna dropped her eyelids just when the deeper questions of life were touched upon. Just as though she were half-shutting her eyes to her own life, so as not to see everything, thought Dolly. “Yes, indeed, for my own sake and for hers I will talk to her,” Dolly said in reply to his look of gratitude. They got up and walked to the farmhouse.

They passed Lupo, prowling in and out of the old henhouse, sniffing at Tortoiseshell’s stubby groznium tail. It was as if he were already more at home in this company than at the side of his master. Vronsky did not call out to him.