CHAPTER 19

ANDROID KARENINA, HAVING ESCAPED the crowd of Toy Soldiers who set upon her at the carriage and having found Anna nowhere in sight, retreated to the safe house in an obscure Moscow neighborhood where her one confidante in this world awaited: a squat and bearded man in a dusty white laboratory coat, who wore a small box with numerous small buttons on his belt.

The man from UnConSciya recounted to Android Karenina what had become of Anna Arkadyevna. The Class IX robot from the future took the news of Anna’s fate with evident sadness, her eyebank flashing to melancholy blue.

“And the body?”

He nodded, smoothed his dirty beard. “We shall disintegrate all trace of it, that Tsar Alexei may not discover the Mechanism.”

“No,” said Android Karenina, softly. “I have another idea.”

*    *    *

The Phoenix godmouth disgorged Anna Karenina’s body in the same place, on the magnet bed of the Moscow Grav, on a cold day some years earlier. At the moment the body emerged from the maw of the godmouth, the sky ricocheted with a queer sort of thunder—a crack in the sky that echoed across all the infinities of that instant and was noted with apprehension both by Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky, who was at the station to meet his mother, and by Anna Arkadyevna Karenina, a fashionable lady and the wife of a prominent government minister.

Shortly thereafter, there occurred a frightful commotion on the platform, as the news raced about of a grim discovery: a pair of battered bodies, a man and a woman, evidently smashed by the rushing weight of the oncoming Grav, had been discovered together upon the magnet bed. Count Vronsky, who only moments earlier had been introduced to Anna Karenina and utterly bewitched, now felt deeply disconcerted by the sight of these two corpses, man and woman, lying together amid the grim finality of death.

Though station workers had quickly covered the bodies under a cloth, a delicate hand could be seen extending outward plaintively toward the platform. Vronsky looked again at Anna, with whom he had been so immediately smitten, to find her staring in unspeaking horror at the scene. Overcome by a distinct sense of cosmic unease, he bowed politely and bid her farewell. If she took notice of him, she gave no sign.

Vronsky made no further effort to pursue an acquaintance with Madame Karenina; did not ask her for the mazurka at Kitty Shcherbatsky’s float; and remained in Moscow for the remainder of the season.