Twenty years earlier
The house had walls now.
Not all of them, and not yet in the places Julia would have chosen, but enough that a person could stand inside and see what it was going to be. Quinn's people had sealed the western section first. Two bedrooms faced the ridge, with a smaller room between them that Julia had claimed for the child within about four minutes of the roof going on. Morbius had observed that an infant did not require a room of its own. Julia had replied that this was exactly the observation of a man who had never been woken six times in one night, and that she intended to see him corrected on the point.
Adams approved the layout and declined to involve himself further, which Julia thought showed good sense in a captain.
Robby built most of it.
He worked without hurry and almost without sound. Wall sections rated for four men and a lifter went up easily in his hands. He could hold a beam motionless while Quinn measured it twice and then a third time, purely because Quinn disliked being made unnecessary, and he never once remarked on it.
He also never stopped watching.
Julia had the pattern by now. When Adams came onto the site Robby knew where he was without appearing to look. When Farman came, his eyes went to the phase pistol once and then away. Engineers could work beside him for hours, but if one of them moved unexpectedly behind him he had turned before the man finished his second step.
He did none of that with her.
Lately he did almost none of it with Edward, either, and Julia had not yet decided what she thought about that.
That morning her husband found the android waiting beside the eastern foundation while two engineers argued about a support brace.
"Robby."
He turned at once.
"I would like to go below. There is a section I want to examine."
One of the engineers glanced over at that. Robby did not answer immediately. He looked toward the shade canopy, where Julia was sitting on a cargo case with a stack of geological records and one boot up on another crate.
Morbius looked up. "You needn't ask her permission."
"I did not."
Julia looked up. "He was checking whether I was coming."
"Yes," said Robby.
Her husband exhaled through his nose, which was as close as he came to losing an argument in public. Julia closed the record tablet and reached for her jacket.
"Then I suppose I am."
They went down a little after noon, and Robby took them farther than he ever had.
The chambers Julia knew gave way to passages Morbius had seen only as gaps in incomplete scans. The architecture changed as they went, though it took her a while to see how. The walls, everywhere else smooth to the point of blankness, carried patterns here: lines so fine that at first she took them for scratches, until she moved her head and the whole surface reorganized itself into something else.
Morbius stopped twice to record them. Robby waited without comment.
"Edward."
"One moment."
"You said that ten minutes ago."
"They are not decorative."
"I didn't say they were."
"They change according to the position of the observer."
"So does your mood," said Julia, and went on past him.
Robby went with her. Behind them her husband stood a moment longer with his recorder, and then, she was pleased to hear, hurried to catch up.
The passage ended in a chamber no bigger than the Bellerophon's transporter room, and almost entirely empty.
At the center of it stood a chair.
Human was the first word that came to her, and it was wrong, and she knew it was wrong while she was thinking it. The proportions were not right. The back rose too high. The seat was broader than any body needed. From behind, a curved arm came up and over and ended in a translucent plate set exactly where the forehead of whoever sat there would rest.
Morbius stopped in the doorway. "What is this?"
Robby did not answer immediately, and that by itself changed the room.
Julia studied him. "You know what it is."
"Yes."
Her husband stepped toward the chair, and Robby moved.
There was nothing threatening in it. He did not block the way and he did not raise a hand. He came to occupy the space between the man and the machine, the way a wall occupies space, and Morbius stopped walking.
"What does it do?"
Robby looked past him at the thing. "The Krell called it an educator."
"An educational device."
"The word is approximate."
"Then give me the accurate one."
"There is no accurate equivalent in your language."
"There usually isn't," Julia said.
Her husband did not acknowledge that she had spoken. "Describe its function."
Robby appeared to look for a way in. "You possess images that do not come from your eyes."
"Memory."
"More than memory."
Julia had it first, and was sorry she did. "Imagination."
Robby turned to her. "Partly." He raised one hand and touched two fingers to his own forehead, lightly, the way a man indicates a place that aches. "The mind sees what the eyes do not. Objects. Places. Events that have not occurred. Things that cannot exist except within thought."
"The mind's eye," Julia said.
"Yes."
Morbius was looking at the chair again. "And this machine?"
"It permits the mind's eye to act through the system."
"Act how?"
"I do not know how to explain that with the concepts available to you."
"Try."
Robby said nothing at all, which Julia was coming to understand was his way of declining rather than his way of failing.
Her husband went around him to the educator. The plate above the chair was clear, and inside it lay structures too fine for the eye to follow, layer behind layer, like light frozen partway through happening.
He reached for it.
Julia caught his wrist.
"No."
Morbius looked down at her hand, and then at her face. "I am examining it."
"With your fingers."
"It is an instrument."
"It connects to your forehead."
"According to Robby."
"According to the only one in this room who knows what it is."
"I am not a person," Robby said.
Julia did not let go of her husband. "We'll argue about that later."
Robby considered that, and said nothing.
Morbius withdrew his hand, and she released him, and neither of them said anything about it.
"How was it used?"
Robby indicated the chair. "The operator sits. The interface makes contact here." Again the two fingers, at the center of his own forehead. "Then the machine opens."
"Opens what?"
"The operator."
Julia did not like that answer, and liked less how long it took her husband to ask the obvious question, so she asked it. "Opens him to what?"
Robby's eyes stayed on Morbius. "To himself."
Her husband stood perfectly still.
Julia knew that stillness. She had seen it the day the black surface came up out of the trench, and the day the door opened, and the morning Robby first said good afternoon to a room full of people who had been certain he could not speak. It was not curiosity. Curiosity has a stopping point, somewhere past interest and short of danger. Whatever this was in him had none, and she had known that about Edward Morbius since about three weeks after she married him.
"Has a human being ever used it?" she asked.
"No."
"Do you know what it would do to one?"
"No."
"Do you know what it did to the Krell?"
"Yes."
Her husband came around fast. "How?"
"They used it routinely."
"And survived."
"Yes."
"They were not human," Julia said.
Morbius considered her. "No. They were not."
"That's the important part."
"It is one important part."
"It is the only part that matters before a man puts that thing against his head."
"Julia, we came to this planet to learn."
"We came to this planet to study."
"There is a difference between those only if you are afraid of the answer."
She took her hand off his arm and stepped back from him. "No. There's a difference if you want to be alive tomorrow."
Robby watched the two of them and offered nothing.
Morbius turned back to the machine. "What did the Krell use it for?"
"Development."
"Of the mind."
"Yes."
"To learn more quickly."
Robby hesitated. "That is not what it was for."
"Then what was it for?"
"To make what was inside available."
"Available to whom?"
"To the Krell who used it."
"And nothing else? No transfer of knowledge? No library, no record, no instruction?"
"The machine did not give them knowledge."
Julia was watching her husband's face when that answer landed, and she saw that of everything the android had said in the last twenty minutes, this was the one that mattered to him.
"It brought forward what was already there," Morbius said.
Robby inclined his head. "Closer."
Julia stepped between her husband and the chair. "That's enough."
He stared at her.
"For today," she said.
"I have no intention of using it."
"Good."
"I said I have no intention."
"And I said good."
They argued the whole way up, in the lowered voices of two people who have learned to fight quietly in confined spaces, and by the time they reached the surface they had stopped speaking altogether, which with Edward always came next.
By evening the eastern wall of the house was standing.
Adams came by after dinner, walked the framing with Quinn, and signed off on the schedule. Quinn said they would have power and water in four days and was probably telling the truth. Julia stood in the unroofed bedroom and decided where the bed would go. Her husband objected to the placement on the grounds that the morning light would fall directly across his face.
Julia informed him that this was the entire purpose of morning.
He almost smiled. For a few hours that evening, everything was ordinary.
That was the part she remembered afterward. Not the chamber, not the chair. The ordinary hours.
The temporary quarters were cramped, the bunk was tolerable, and the night came down cool off the ridges. Julia went to sleep listening to the wind work at the unfinished wall panels, woke once when the child shifted hard enough to make her catch her breath, and kept a hand there until it settled.
Edward was asleep beside her.
At least she believed he was.
When she woke again, the light coming through the temporary window covering had gone pale green, and the other side of the bunk was empty.
She put her hand on the sheet.
It was cold.
"Edward."
Nothing. She checked the washroom, and it was empty, and his field clothes were gone from the hook, and so was his recorder from the shelf where he put it every night of his life.
Julia closed her eyes a moment.
She did not need to search the site, and she did not need to wake Adams. There was one place on that planet her husband would have gone in the dark without telling her, and she had stood in it eleven hours earlier with her hand around his wrist.
Robby was outside, carrying a sealed equipment case toward the laboratory frame.
"Robby."
He stopped. Whatever was in her voice made him set the case down on the stone, carefully, and turn around.
"Where is Edward?"
"I do not know."
"Did you see him leave?"
"No."
"How long have you been out here?"
"Thirty-seven minutes."
She was already moving. "Come with me."
They crossed the plateau a good deal faster than a woman five months along had any business crossing it, and Robby shortened his stride twice to stay beside her, unasked, and said nothing about it.
At the entrance he said, "You should not hurry."
"Then keep up."
"I am keeping up."
"Good."
They went down. The corridors lit ahead of them, obliging as ever, and Julia thought, with a clarity that frightened her later, that the place had been waiting all night for somebody to come back.
The child moved again. She put a hand against her side and did not slow down.
The door of the chamber stood open.
Edward was on the floor.
For one moment she saw only the shape of him and the dark shape of the chair behind him, and that moment went on a long time, and then she was across the room and down on her knees on the black floor beside him.
"Edward."
His eyes were closed. There was blood under his nose, dried at one corner of his mouth. At the center of his forehead the skin was reddened in a clean oval, the exact size and shape of the plate that hung above the chair.
She put two fingers against his throat and found nothing at all.
She moved them, and pressed, and said his name again, and there was nothing.
Robby was beside her. "Move him," she said.
He hesitated.
"Now."
Robby lifted him as though he weighed nothing at all, and Julia got her hand flat on her husband's chest and went looking again, and found it.
Faint. Uneven. There.
She let her eyes close for less than a second, which was all she permitted herself.
"Get him to the surface."
Robby turned toward the corridor with Morbius in his arms.
Julia looked back once at the educator. The plate above the empty chair was still glowing, softly, the way a lamp glows in a room where somebody has just gone out.
Then she went after them.
