CHAPTER 7

WITCH HAZEL PULLED UP the carriage and looked round to the right, to a field of rye, where a dozen or so ragged-looking Class III robots were sitting on a cart. Witch Hazel was just going to jump down, but on second thought she shouted to the other robots instead, and beckoned them to come up. The wind that seemed to blow as they drove dropped when the carriage stood still; gadflies settled on the steaming Puller engine and sizzled. One of the robots got up and came slowly toward the carriage, a tall, blue metal android with a conical head who bowed deeply and was introduced by Witch Hazel as Antipodal. A second robot, also moving toward the carriage but much more slowly than the first, must have been built as a regimental Class III, for it was in an animal shape—one appropriate to its name, which Dolly learned to be Tortoiseshell.

Decoms, thought Dolly, surveying the sorry-looking handful of metal men and women, and shaking her head sadly. A world of poor, pitiful decoms.

The scenery was no more inspiring. An iron-sided silo stood bare and slightly tilted, patterns of dust caked over the circular windows. The barn was in little better shape, with stray tiles peeling off the roof and an overwhelming smell of rotting feed coming from within. The farmhouse itself was a ramshackle afair, with weeds and climbing plants growing helter-skelter up the sides, covering the windows and snaking in and out of the doorway.

A curly-headed old man in a ragged mécanicien’s jumpsuit, with a bit of bast tied round his hair and his bent back dark with perspiration, came toward the carriage, quickening his steps, and took hold of the mudguard with his sunburnt hand.

“Welcome toVozdvizhenskoe,” he scowled. “I hope you are a friend, and not foe, for I’d hate to have to kill such a nice-looking woman so early in the day.”

“What?”

“I’m only making a jest, madame, a bit of a jape. But whom do you want? The count himself? Or she, the Queen of the Junkers?”

“Well, are they at home, my good man?” Darya Alexandrovna said vaguely, not knowing how to ask about Anna, even of this unusual man, apparently a mécanicien for illegal, decommissioned robots.

“At home for sure,” said the functionary, shifting from one bare foot to the other, and leaving a distinct print of five toes and a heel in the dust. “Sure to be at home,” he repeated, evidently eager to talk. “Only yesterday a couple more of these pitiful tin souls arrived.” He gestured with genial distaste to Witch Hazel and the others. “What do you want?” He turned round and called to Tortoiseshell, who was emitting a basso tone from somewhere within his eponymous outer covering.

“Ah, here they come now in their finery.”

Dolly looked in the direction the queer man indicated and saw two shambling monster-machines: Vronsky and Anna, in homebuilt Exterior battle-suits, making the rounds of their encampment. Out front was the first of the suits, evidently Anna’s, measuring some twelve feet or more and painted on its front with the oversize eyes and glittering crown of some royal personage in a children’s carnival; then came Vronsky in a new version of his late lamented Frou-Frou, bearing the same powerful shape and weaponry, but homebuilt and therefore more ragged, without the same careful soldering and high quality of materials that typify a regimental Exterior.

Trotting along beside them on a military surplus two-tread was Vassenka Veslovsky in his Scotch cap with floating ribbons, his stout legs stretched out before him, obviously pleased with his own appearance. Darya Alexandrovna could not suppress a good-humored smile as she recognized him. (She had no way of knowing, for how could she, that this was not the Vassenka Veslovsky she had been so entertained by at Pokrovskoe, although it was externally identical and possessed of the same thought-modeling and associative programming.) As Dolly watched, Anna’s queenly Exterior shambled to a halt, and Anna climbed out of the torso of the battle-machine, shook out her hair, and began quietly grooming the war-bot: rubbing oil into its joints, testing its reflexes, and so on. The sureness of her understanding of the complicated piece of machinery, combined with the ease and grace of her deportment, impressed Dolly.

For the first minute it seemed to her unsuitable for Anna to ride inside an Exterior. The concept of riding within a battle-suit was, in Darya Alexandrovna’s mind, overly masculine for a lady. But when she had scrutinized her, seeing her closer, she was at once reconciled to the idea of her sister-in-law at the controls of one of the motorized death-dealers. In spite of her seemingly out-of-place elegance, everything was so simple, quiet, and dignified in the attitude, the dress, and the movements of Anna that nothing could have been more natural. Vronsky was carefully piloting Frou-Frou Deux (this was the new Exterior’s name), trying to “ride the kinks out,” as the expression went, and being derided for not taking enough care by the fat little Englishman, Vronsky’s engineer, who brought up the rear of the party on foot.

Anna’s face suddenly beamed with a joyful smile at the instant when, in the little figure huddled in a corner of the old carriage, she recognized Dolly. On reaching the carriage she leapt out of the torso of her Exterior, pulled free of the wires that controlled the machine, and ran up to greet her friend.

“I thought it was you and dared not think it. How delightful! You can’t fancy how glad I am!” she said, at one moment pressing her face against Dolly and kissing her, and at the next holding her off and examining her with a smile.

“Here’s a delightful surprise, Alexei!” she said, looking round at Vronsky, who had emerged from his own Exterior and out into the cold country air to walk toward them. Vronsky, carefully plucking free from his own set of sensor-wires, went up to Dolly.

“You wouldn’t believe how glad we are to see you,” he said, giving peculiar significance to the words, and showing his strong white teeth in a smile. “Lupo! Come!” The wolf-robot bounded from around an outbuilding, his repaired visual sensors gleaming brightly as he raced to the side of his master.

Vassenka Veslovsky took off his cap and greeted the visitor by gleefully waving the ribbons over his head. Dolly noticed as she and Anna hugged happily that the small crowd of decom robots focused their sensors on Vronsky and Anna with obvious love and admiration. As her eyes passed over the stolid Tortoiseshell, the upright Antipodal, and the enigmatic Witch Hazel, Dolly paused to consider the sorry fate of these creatures. Had they escaped their respective fates due to the intercession of loving masters, or through some dumb stroke of luck? What mixed and confusing messages must they be receiving from the Iron Laws coded in their wiring, now that the very Ministry that created them had ordered their destruction!

But as they strolled toward the house, Anna chattering happily about the world they were building at Vozdvizhenskoe, what struck Darya Alexandrovna most of all was the change that had taken place in Anna, whom she knew so well and loved. Any other woman, a less close observer, not knowing Anna before, or not having thought as Darya Alexandrovna had been thinking on the road, would not have noticed anything special in Anna. But now Dolly was struck by that temporary beauty, which is only found in women during moments of love, and which she saw now in Anna’s face.

Everything in her face, the clearly marked dimples in her cheeks and chin, the line of her lips, the smile which, as it were, fluttered about her face, the brilliance of her eyes, the grace and rapidity of her movements, the fullness of the notes of her voice, even the manner in which, with a sort of angry friendliness, she answered Veslovsky when he asked permission to climb into her Exterior, just to see how it feels—it was all peculiarly fascinating, and it seemed as if she were herself aware of it, and rejoicing in it. The snide and ironical title given her by the mécanicien now felt exactly right to Dolly: Anna, dignified and powerful in this pastoral redoubt, seemed like nothing so much as a warrior queen. The Queen of the Junkers.

“Ah, and here she is,” Anna grinned as they approached the porch of the dilapidated farmhouse. With fervor she embraced her own Class III, Android Karenina.