CHAPTER 17

ACCEPT WHAT YOU ARE,” Android Karenina had said; Anna tried to shake those grim and terrible words from her mind. Yes; what was the last thing I thought of so clearly? She tried to recall it. Yes, of what they say, the struggle for existence and hatred is the one thing that holds men together.

No, it’s a useless journey you’re making, she said, mentally addressing a party in a coach evidently going for an excursion into the country. And the dog you’re taking with you will be no help to you. They sought happiness, as she had, but all happiness would soon be drowned in the rising tide of the New Russia. Unless . . . unless . . .

No, she thought, her humanity asserting itself, as it were, against the logical imperatives of the Mechanism inside her. I cannot!

Leaning momentarily against an ancient stone wall of an old factory to catch her breath, she saw a factory hand almost dead drunk, with hanging head, being led away by a policeman. Come, he’s found a quicker way, she thought. Count Vronsky and I did not find that happiness either, though we expected so much from it.

Anna now for the first time turned that Visionary-Hundredfold through which she was seeing everything onto her relations with him. What was it he sought in me? Not love so much as the satisfaction of vanity. She remembered his words, the expression of his face, which recalled an abject setter-dog, in the early days of their connection. And everything now confirmed this. Yes, there was the triumph of success in him. Of course there was love too, but the chief element was the pride of success. He boasted of me. Now that’s over. There’s nothing to be proud of. Not to be proud of, but to be ashamed of. He has taken from me all he could, and now I am no use to him. The zest is gone, as the English say. That fellow wants everyone to admire him and is very much pleased with himself, she thought, staggering past a red-faced clerk, who gaped at her disheveled, exhausted appearance. Yes, there’s not the same flavor about me for him now. Only imagine I were to tell him this truth that I have discovered, that I am not a proper woman at all, but a Class XII android; he will flee from me. He will report me to the Ministry, he will ensure that I am melted in the Tower basement, and he will be glad for his freedom.

She felt she saw the truth distinctly in the piercing light.

We walked to meet each other up to the time of our love, and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions. And there’s no altering that, especially now. Now I see that it never could have been otherwise—he is a person, and I a machine. But . . . She opened her lips, aroused by the thought that suddenly struck her. If I could be anything but a mistress, passionately caring for nothing but his caresses; but I can’t and I don’t care to be anything else. If without loving me, from duty he’ll be good and kind to me, without what I want, that’s a thousand times worse than unkindness! That’s—hell! If I cannot have his love, his passion, I would rather be the killing machine Android Karenina tells me I have been engineered to be! And that’s just how it is. For a long while now he hasn’t loved me. And where love ends, hate begins.

“A ticket to Petersburg?”

She realized now that she had stopped her progress just outside the gates of the Grav station; she had utterly forgotten where and why she was going, and only by a great effort she understood the question.

“Yes,” she said, and, answering her befuddled inquiry, the ticket-taker gruffly informed her that the Grav had some minutes still before it was bound to arrive. As she made her way through the crowd to the first-class waiting room, she gradually recollected all the details of her position, and the plans between which she was hesitating. To go to St. Petersburg and complete this terrible errand; or to stay, to seek out Vronsky, explain what she was, stake her hopes on his understanding, his willingness to begin afresh under such changed circumstances. And again at the old sore places, hope and then despair poisoned the wounds of her tortured, fearfully throbbing heart. As she sat on the star-shaped sofa waiting for the Grav, she gazed with aversion at the people coming and going, and they were all hateful to her. She thought of how Vronsky was at this moment complaining too of his position, not understanding her sufferings, and how she would find him, and what she would say to him. Then she thought that life might still be happy, and how miserably she loved and hated him, and how fearfully her heart was beating. If her mind had been overrun by the machine, her heart at least belonged to her. . . .

A tear, comprised of a complex assortment of proteins and silicates suspended in an aqueous solution, rolled slowly down her cheek.