Chapter 5
STEPAN ARKADYICH WORKED in the Moscow Tower, as a Deputy Vice President for Class I Manufacture & Distribution, Branch: Toys & Misc. It was an honorable and lucrative position, but one which required very little of him. The substantive decisions were made and relayed to him from elsewhere in his department, or from the St. Petersburg Tower, where the Higher Branches of the Ministry had their headquarters. He had received his post through his sister Anna’s husband, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin, who held an extremely important position in the Higher Branches, the details of which were unclear and uninteresting to Stiva. But if Karenin had not gotten his brother-in-law this post, then through a hundred other personages—brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, and aunts—Stiva Oblonsky would have received this post, or some other similar one, together with the salary of six thousand absolutely needful for him, as his affairs, in spite of his wife’s considerable property, were in an embarrassed condition.
Half of Moscow and Petersburg were friends and relations of Stepan Arkadyich. He was born in the midst of those who had been and are the powerful ones of this world: men in government, roboticists, engineers, landowners, and above all those with positions in the Ministry. Consequently the distributors of earthly blessings in the shape of places, rents, and precious groznium were all his friends.
Stepan Arkadyich was not merely liked by all who knew him for his good humor, but for his bright disposition, unquestionable honesty, and adorable little walking armoire of a Class III. In Stepan Arkadyich—in his handsome, radiant figure, his sparkling eyes, black hair and eyebrows, and the white and red of his face—there was something that produced a physical effect of kindliness and good humor on the people who met him. “Aha! Stiva and Small Stiva! Here they are!” was almost always said with a smile of delight on meeting the affable pair.
The principal qualities in Stepan Arkadyich that had gained him this universal respect consisted, in the first place, of his extreme indulgence for others, founded on a consciousness of his own shortcomings; secondly, of his perfect liberalism—not the liberalism he read of in the papers, but the liberalism that was in his blood, in virtue of which he treated all men and their machines perfectly equally and exactly the same, whatever their fortune or calling might be; and thirdly—the most important point—his complete indifference to the business in which he was engaged, in consequence of which he was never carried away, and never made mistakes.
Stepan Arkadyich arrived at his place of work and looked adoringly up at the massive onion-shaped bulb that rotated slowly atop the Tower, forever scanning Moscow’s streets. “The Tower, she keeps her loving eye upon us,” went the saying, and indeed there was something decidedly ocular about the single round opening on one side of the giant rotating bulb, keeping its eternal, and eternally loving, watch over the city and her people.
Waiting for Stiva at the top of the stairs was the welcome sight of his old friend, Konstantin Dmitrich Levin.
“Why, it’s actually you, Levin, at last!” Stiva said with a friendly mocking smile, taking in Levin and his Class III as he bounded up the stairs toward them, Small Stiva clumsily following one step at a time. “Welcome to the Ministry!” As he uttered the words, both men crossed themselves and glanced upward, as if to heaven—the instinctual gesture of reverence for the most cherished of Russian institutions.
“How is it you have deigned to look me up in this den?” said Stepan Arkadyich, and not content with shaking hands, he kissed his friend. “Have you been here long?”
“I have just come, and very much wanted to see you,” said Levin, looking shyly and at the same time angrily and uneasily around. Stiva could now see Levin’s Class III, an oddly unpleasant-looking, tall, copper-plated humanoid called Socrates, hovering by his side. Ringing Socrates’ chin was an array of useful items—a knife, a corkscrew, a spring, a small shovel, and so on—which jangled on his neck like a thick beard of springs and cogs, and which he tugged as he also looked uneasily around, mimicking his master’s discomfited manner.
“Well, let’s go into my room,” said Stepan Arkadyich, who knew his friend’s sensitive and irritable shyness, and, taking his arm, he drew him along, the trigger-latch that caused the door to his inner office to open with an audible pneumatic gasp.
Levin was almost of the same age as Oblonsky, and had been the friend and companion of his early youth. They were fond of one another in spite of the difference of their characters and tastes, as friends are fond of one another who have been together in early youth. Their bond had been cemented when both boys were merely sixteen, unshaven lads not yet possessed of their Class IIIs. An UnConSciya trap called a godmouth had suddenly yawned open in a Moscow open-air vegetable market a few yards from where they were standing. Levin tackled Oblonsky, who had been obliviously eating a peach, and dragged him to safety before the other boy even realized that the terrible, glowing vortex had appeared. The near miss left a lasting impression on both boys, and guaranteed a lifelong brotherly friendship.
In spite of this bond, each of them, as is often the way with men who have selected careers of different kinds, despised the other’s career—though in discussion he would even justify it. It seemed to each of them that the life he led himself was the only real life, and the life led by his friend was a mere apparition, no more tangible than a communiqué relayed in the monitor of a Class III. Oblonsky could not restrain a slight mocking smile at the sight of Levin. How often he had seen him come up to Moscow from the country where he was doing something, but what precisely Stepan Arkadyich could never quite make out, and indeed he took no interest in the matter. Levin arrived in Moscow always excited and in a hurry, rather ill at ease and irritated by his own want of ease, and for the most part with a perfectly new, unexpected view of things. Stepan Arkadyich laughed at this, and liked it. In the same way Levin in his heart despised the town mode of life of his friend, and his official duties, which he laughed at, and regarded as trifling. But the difference was that Oblonsky, as he was doing the same as everyone did, laughed complacently and good-humoredly, while Levin laughed without complacency and sometimes angrily.
“We have long been expecting you,” said Stepan Arkadyich, going into his room and letting Levin’s hand go as though to show that here all danger was over. “I am very, very glad to see you,” he went on. “That is, to see both of you.”
Socrates bowed awkwardly. Stepan Arkadyich marveled, as he always did on greeting his friend’s Class III, at how different the machine was from his genial, pleasant little Small Stiva. But as they said, everyone gets the Class III that he deserves; such was the miracle of the technology that had created the beloved-companions. Companion robots were built-to-suit, their qualities created to match the needs of the recipient; some were glib and some grave; some reassuring and some critical; every one played the role in the life of the master that the master needed it to play.
“I have to sizzle a whole container of outmoded Ones,” Stiva said to his old friend. “Shall we take turns?”
“Ah, no,” said Levin, with his characteristic unsmiling awkwardness. “No, thank you.”
Oblonsky smiled and flicked a red switch on his desk, which caused a copper panel to slide open. From this hidden chamber he produced a sleek, handsome Ministry-issued Class I called a sizzler, a one-trigger shooting device for neatly destroying small robots. Then from a box beside his desk he took out the first of the Class Is slated for sizzling. They were simple I/Mouse/9s, household favorites for keeping one’s kitchen or backyard free of roaches and other pests. These were perfectly functional—indeed, as Oblonsky held it aloft by the tail, the I/Mouse/9 squeaked and looked around the room with its little glass eyes—but they were no longer desired for distribution, since the I/Mouse/10s had become available.
“Well, how are you?” asked Stiva, and zapped the Class I in its little lifelike face with the sizzler. The thing arced its back and dropped from his hand onto the desk. “When did you come? How is your groznium mine?” Levin was silent.
As it writhed on the desk, the mouselike automaton let out a loud, pained squeal. Stiva wrinkled his nose and shot Levin a helpless, apologetic smile.
“Makes conversation difficult, but it is in their circuits—they can’t help it.”
“They don’t feel pain?” asked Levin.
Stiva selected a second I/Mouse/9 and zapped it in the face. “What? Oh, yes. Certainly they do.” Levin said nothing, only shot a disapproving glance to Socrates, who flashed his dark-yellow eyebank and tugged at his cluster of springs.
“What brings you to our fair Babylon this time?” Stiva inquired with a wink, as he felt around in the box, finally snatching up another squirming I/Mouse/9.
“I have nothing very particular. Only a few words to say, and a question I want to ask you.”
“Well, say the few words, then, at once!”
Levin paused, unsure how to proceed, and turned to his companion android. Socrates regarded him sternly. “Just say it,” urged the Class III tinnily sotto voce.
“I cannot simply say it.”
“Can and must.”
“Do not badger me, Socrates.”
Stiva regarded this conversation with a sardonic expression, and looked knowingly at his own Class III, Small Stiva, who whirred with amusement.
“Well, it’s this,” said Levin to Stiva finally, “but it’s of no importance, though.”
“Oh?” Stiva tossed the next I/Mouse/9 up into the air and sizzled it with a twirling trick shot.
Levin’s face all at once took an expression of anger from the effort he was making to surmount his shyness. Socrates angled his head forward with a significant gesture, bidding his master summon the nerve to say his piece.
“What are the Shcherbatskys doing? Everything as it used to be?” Levin said finally.
Stepan Arkadyich had long known that Levin was in love with his sister-in-law Kitty. His eyes sparkled merrily as he plucked up two I/Mouse/9s at once and sizzled them both with a single shot by allowing the electric burst to flow through the “brain” of the first into the “brain” of the second.
He smiled slowly, teasingly extending Levin’s discomfort. “I can’t answer in a few words, because . . . Excuse me a minute. . . .”
A small II/Secretary/44 with respectful familiarity and modest consciousness flitted through the door on hummingbird-like wings, its end-effector clutching some papers for Oblonsky.
“Sir? Sir?” it said, sir being the one word this Class II was programmed to employ, and flapped the papers. “Si—” Stepan Arkadyich, distracted by his enjoyment of the conversation with Levin, zapped the thing in the face.
“Drat!” Stiva said in frustration, as the II/Secretary/44 sputtered. For a moment Oblonsky thought the machine might be recovered, but the sizzler was a powerful device. The Class II’s faceplate was already melting, bits of exterior plating dripping like tears along its flesh-tinted skull, while it made crazy circles around the room, banging against the desk and the walls. “Small Stiva?” Oblonsky said with resignation. The dutiful Class III opened his torso and, for the second time that day, destroyed a fellow robot inside of himself.
During this incident Levin had completely recovered from his embarrassment. He was standing with his elbows on the back of a chair, and on his face was a look of ironical attention.
“I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it,” he said.
“What don’t you understand?” said Oblonsky, trying to maintain his sardonic smile, though the small cloud of blue-black smoke emerging from Small Stiva’s Third Bay darkened the room along with his mood. Stepan Arkadyich was a relatively prestigious personage, but two destroyed machines in one day was pushing the limits of what would go unnoticed. The last thing he needed, to compound the difficulty of a household in disarray, was the curious attention of the Higher Branches.
“I don’t understand what you are doing,” Levin continued, shrugging his shoulders and gesturing at the sizzler, still smoking in Stiva’s hand. “How can you do all this seriously?”
“Why not?”
“Why, because there’s nothing in it.”
“You think so, but we’re overwhelmed with work.”
“On paper. But, there, you’ve a gift for it,” added Levin.
“That’s to say, you think there’s a lack of something in me?”
“Perhaps so,” said Levin. “But all the same, I admire your grandeur, and am proud that I’ve a friend in such a great person. You’ve not answered my question, though,” he went on, with a desperate effort looking Oblonsky straight in the face.
“Oh, that’s all very well. You wait a bit, and you’ll come to this yourself. It’s very nice for you to have over six thousand acres of groznium-saturated soil in the Karazinsky district, and such muscles, and the freshness of a girl of twelve; still you’ll be one of us one day. Yes, as to your question, there is no change, but it’s a pity you’ve been away so long.”
“Oh, why so?” Levin queried, panic-stricken.
“Oh, nothing,” responded Oblonsky. “We’ll talk it over. But what’s brought you up to town?”
“Oh, we’ll talk about that, too, later on,” said Levin, reddening again up to his ears.
“All right. I see,” said Stepan Arkadyich. “I should ask you to come to us, you know, but my wife’s not quite the thing. But I tell you what: if you want to see them, they’re sure now to be at the skate-maze from four to five. Kitty skates. You drive along there, and I’ll come and fetch you, and we’ll go and dine somewhere together.”
“Capital. So good-bye till then.”