Android Karenina - By Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy & Ben H. Winters & Leo Tolstoy Page 0,141

with . . .” He lowered his voice to a whisper, drawing nearer his brother’s wrecked flesh, and said, “the robots.”

Karnak’s leg fell off, and he fell to the ground with a scrape and clank. Socrates, politely, lifted the other machine back up and placed him in his previous position against the wall.

Suddenly Nikolai stirred, and began to say something, entirely ignoring Levin’s whispered comment about the Class Ills and speaking instead of his health. He found fault with the doctor, regretting he had not a celebrated Moscow doctor with a II/Prognosis/4 or higher. Levin saw that he still hoped.

Seizing the first moment of silence, Levin got up, anxious to escape, if only for an instant, from his agonizing emotion, and said that he would go and fetch his wife.

“Very well, and I’ll tell Karnak to tidy up here. It’s dirty and stinking here, I expect. Karnak! Clear up the room,” the sick man said with effort. Karnak swiveled his head unit uncertainly, his aural sensors detecting some distant sensory input.

“Well, how is he?” Kitty asked with a frightened face when Levin went to fetch her.

“Oh, it’s awful, it’s awful! What did you come for?” said Levin.

Kitty was silent for a few seconds, looking timidly and ruefully at her husband; then she went up and took him by the elbow with both hands.

“Kostya! Take me to him; it will be easier for us to bear it together. You only take me, take me to him, please, and go away,” she said. “You must understand that for me to see you, and not to see him, is far more painful. There I might be a help to you and to him. Please, let me!” she besought her husband, as though the happiness of her life depended on it.

Levin was obliged to agree, and regaining his composure, and completely forgetting about Marya Nikolaevna by now, he went again to his brother with Kitty.

Stepping lightly, and continually glancing at her husband, showing him a valorous and sympathetic face, Kitty donned the mask and gloves and gown, went into the sickroom, and, turning without haste, noiselessly closed the door. With inaudible steps she went quickly to the sick man’s bedside, and going up so that he had not to turn his head, she immediately clasped in her fresh, young, thickly gloved hand, the skeleton of his huge hand, pressed it, and began speaking with that soft eagerness, sympathetic and not jarring, which is peculiar to women.

“We have met, though we were not acquainted, on the Venus orbiter,” she said. “You never thought I was to be your sister?”

“Would you have recognized me?” he said, with a radiant smile at her entrance.

“Yes, I would. I am sorry to have found you unwell, and I hope I can be of some use to you.”

“And I to you, and to your machines.” Nikolai smiled, and from this quiet statement Levin gathered that his brother had indeed heard his allusion to the robots, and was willing despite his grave health to help keep their beloved-companions safe.

It was decided that when the time came for Levin and Kitty to return to Pokrovskoe (meaning, though none spoke the words aloud, when Nikolai had passed into the Beyond), their Class Ills would stay here, their exterior trim radically downgraded, masquerading as Class IIs at work in a local cigarette factory—the owner of which, Nikolai felt sure, would accept a small payment to hide the robots among his workforce—and spending their Surceased nights in the dingy factory basement.

CHAPTER 11

AS THE HOURS and then days passed, Levin found he could not look calmly at his brother; he could not himself be natural and calm in his presence. When he went in to be with the sick man, his eyes and his attention were unconsciously dimmed, and he did not see or distinguish the details of his brother’s position. He smelled the awful odor, saw the dirt, disorder, and miserable condition, and heard the groans, and felt that nothing could be done to help. While Kitty directed her full attention and sympathy to the dying man, and Socrates anxiously circumnavigated the room, Levin’s mind wandered, like a landowner traveling the acres of his life. He surveyed all that was pleasurable, like his pit-mining operation and his beloved Kitty, and he surveyed all those tracts causing him concern: the mysterious, wormlike mechanical monsters rampaging the countryside; the circuitry adjustment protocol, which seemed to Levin an inexplicable and unjustified exercise of state power against the citizenry;