Chapter 18: The Order

Twenty years earlier

Adams found Morbius standing over Quinn's workbench with both hands behind his back, wearing the expression Quinn had already learned to hate.

The expression meant that Morbius understood something. Since the educator he wore it a good deal more often.

Quinn had the power distribution drawings spread across the bench of the temporary engineering laboratory and was trying to reconcile three systems that had declined to behave to Federation specification. Morbius had been in the room under four minutes.

"You have the converter backward," he said.

Quinn went on with what he was doing. "I do not."

"The third-stage field is opposing the return path."

"It can't."

"It is."

Quinn turned around. "It's a standard Mark Six."

"Yes."

"I've rebuilt more of them than you've seen."

"Then you have had a great deal of practice doing it incorrectly."

Adams came through the door in time to catch that. "Morning."

Quinn pointed at the xenolinguist. "Take him."

"I'm not sure I'm authorized."

"Then promote yourself, sir."

Morbius, ignoring both of them, reached toward the schematic, and Quinn slapped his hand away from it. The two men looked at one another, and for a moment Adams thought he was about to watch a chief engineer throw a civilian scientist out of a laboratory by the collar.

Then Morbius smiled, and that was harder to stand than the argument had been.

"You changed the regulator yesterday," he said.

Quinn's face did something complicated. "How do you know that?"

"The harmonic distortion changed."

"You weren't here yesterday."

"No."

"The regulator's sealed."

"Yes."

"You can't hear harmonic distortion. Nobody can hear harmonic distortion."

Morbius tilted his head, listening to something that was not available to either of the other men in the room. "No," he said. "Apparently I can."

Adams stopped smiling.

There had been a dozen moments of that kind since Morbius came out of the medical bay, and the trouble with all of them was that no one of them would survive being written into a report. A structural figure corrected before Quinn had finished entering it. A medical question answered before the surgeon gave him the result. A block of Krell notation that had resisted six weeks of work reduced to a working grammar in an afternoon. One at a time, each was a clever man being clever. Together they had begun to keep Adams awake.

He shut the laboratory door behind him.

"Doctor. I sent Starfleet an update."

"I assumed that you would."

"I told them about the educator. I told them what it did to you."

"That is your obligation."

"Good. I'm glad we agree." Adams glanced at Quinn, who had started gathering his drawings with the air of a man who has recognized a conversation that is no longer about engineering. "Stay where you are, Mr. Quinn."

Quinn sighed and put them down again.

"I also told them about the changes," Adams said.

"What changes?"

"Don't."

Morbius's mouth tightened.

"You read Quinn's load figures upside down from two meters away and corrected them without doing any arithmetic. You found a fault in a sealed converter from across a room. Yesterday you translated forty-three lines of Krell notation before lunch."

"Forty-seven."

Quinn shut his eyes.

"Thank you," Adams said. "That's very helpful."

Morbius leaned back against the bench. "What is it you are actually asking?"

"I'm asking what that machine did to you."

"I have told you. It altered the availability of cognitive structures that were already present."

"That's a sentence, Doctor. It isn't an answer."

"It is also accurate."

"It doesn't tell me what you can do now."

Morbius considered it, and when he answered Adams believed him, and that was the part that stayed with him afterward.

"I do not yet know."

Quinn folded his arms. "What about Robby?"

"What about him?"

"You've been looking at him differently since you woke up."

Adams turned his head. "You noticed that as well."

"Captain, I notice when a man who spent six weeks asking an android questions all day long stops asking them."

Morbius said nothing at all.

Adams came a step closer. "Can you understand him now?"

"I understood him before."

"Not his words."

That landed somewhere. Morbius looked toward the closed door as though the android might be standing on the other side of it, which, Adams reflected, he might have been.

"He is extraordinarily sophisticated."

"That isn't what I asked."

"No," Morbius agreed. "It is not."

"Can you understand how he works?"

The silence went on long enough that Quinn stopped pretending to be interested in his drawings.

"Some of it," Morbius said.

"Some," Quinn repeated.

"His primary cognitive architecture is elegant. It is not incomprehensible. A great deal of what I found opaque before was opaque because I lacked the framework to hold it, not because the thing itself is beyond us."

Adams heard the change in the man's voice. It was not wonder. He had heard wonder from Morbius in the first chamber, and it had been the best thing he ever saw in him. This was certainty.

"How much of it can you understand?"

Morbius glanced at Quinn's converter, and then said it.

"Compared with what lies beneath this planet, Robby is very nearly child's play."

Nobody spoke. Morbius appeared to hear the sentence only after it had left him, which Adams noted, and which did not help.

Quinn was staring at him.

Adams was not. He was already composing the transmission in his head, and he had got as far as the second paragraph before he realized that he had stopped listening to either of them.

The Federation Science Council convened nine hours later.

It was not a formal session. There was no chamber, no ceremonial record, and there would be no summary for the newsfeeds. Eight faces sat on eight screens in a secure room beneath Starfleet Command in San Francisco: one admiral, two civilian science directors, a cyberneticist from the Daystrom Institute, a Federation security representative, a legal adviser, a medical specialist, and a woman from the Archaeological Directorate who had not slept properly since the first Bellerophon transmission came in.

Captain J. J. Adams appeared on a ninth screen from a world twenty light years away.

The android designated Robby did not appear at all, and it did not occur to anybody in the room that this was in any way remarkable.

"We have reviewed your latest report, Captain," Komack said.

"Yes, sir."

"Doctor Morbius's condition is stable."

"The surgeon says so."

"And you are satisfied that the change in his cognitive capacity is genuine."

Adams disliked the word satisfied a great deal. "I'm satisfied that something changed."

The medical specialist leaned into her camera. "Can you quantify it?"

"No."

"Has he demonstrated knowledge he could not previously have possessed?"

"Not knowledge. Ability."

The cyberneticist spoke for the first time. "That distinction matters."

"I thought it might."

"What precisely did he say concerning the artificial entity?"

Adams read it off his notes in the flat voice he kept for reading things he wished he had not written down. "Quote. His primary cognitive architecture is elegant. It is not incomprehensible. End quote. And later, quote. Compared with what lies beneath this planet, Robby is very nearly child's play. End quote."

Four of the screens went very quiet.

"Captain," the security representative said, "remind us what access the entity has demonstrated."

"Remote access to Bellerophon data systems."

"Without authorization."

"Yes."

"Without physical connection."

"Yes."

"Can you prevent it?"

"We believe so."

"Believe."

"He hasn't attempted it since the first night."

"That was not my question."

"No, sir. We cannot guarantee it."

"Has the entity shown hostility?" said the cyberneticist.

"No."

"Disobedience?"

Adams took his time. "Not in any sense I would call hostile."

"That is not the same answer."

"No, it isn't."

The legal adviser had the first contact file open. "The record indicates that the entity has declined to answer questions."

"It does."

"Has it refused instructions?"

"Not operational instructions."

"Captain, is it under Starfleet authority?"

Adams did not answer at once.

He was to think about that pause for the rest of his life, which was eleven weeks. It went into the record, and it was the most damaging thing he did that day, and he did it by saying nothing at all.

Komack let it sit, and then gathered it up. "So. We have an autonomous artificial intelligence of unknown age, unknown manufacture and unknown capability, operating within an alien installation whose systems exceed our own. And the one man now capable of understanding its construction has undergone an unexplained alteration of his mind, caused by a second device built by the same people."

"That's a fair summary, sir."

"Then I fail to understand," the security representative said, "why the machine is still running."

The archaeologist came in fast. "Because it is the only functioning cultural witness to the civilization we are here to study. It is a library that remembers being a person."

"That was the argument before Doctor Morbius's change. If Morbius can now read the android's architecture and reach the surrounding systems directly, it is no longer our only interface."

"Understanding an architecture," said the cyberneticist, "is not the same as replacing a mind."

"Nobody proposed destroying it."

The word went across the room and landed badly, and everybody in the room heard it land.

Adams said, "Then what is being proposed?"

"Temporary deactivation," said Komack.

"Sir."

"Until a controlled research team can be sent with proper containment and technical support."

"Admiral, there are forty-two people on this expedition. Not one of them has reported that machine as dangerous. He has hauled roof frames, he has taught himself English out of a library, and last week he carried Doctor Morbius out of a chamber and up four hundred meters of corridor to save his life. If he wanted this expedition dead, we would be dead."

"You have just told this council that you cannot guarantee he is unable to enter your ship's computer."

"He read a library, sir."

"He entered a Starfleet system from the surface of a planet, without permission."

"And changed nothing."

"Captain, you are arguing character."

"I'm reporting behavior. It's the only evidence any of us has ever had about anybody."

Komack's voice did not rise at all, which was, Adams thought, the trouble with the man. "And I am responsible for forty-two Federation citizens in orbit above a planet full of technology we do not understand."

Forty-two, Adams thought, and one more if Julia had her way of counting them.

He did not say it. He had a lifetime afterward to wonder what would have happened if he had.

"If the android is deactivated," the archaeologist said, "we may lose access to that civilization permanently. He is the last one. There is no second copy."

The cyberneticist turned to his camera. "Captain. Can Morbius shut it down without damage?"

"I don't know."

"Then ask him."

"And if he can?" said the security representative.

Nobody answered that for several seconds. Komack finally did.

"Then we remove one unknown from the situation."

Adams looked down at his own hands on the desk and knew precisely what was coming, and found that knowing did not help.

"Captain, pending formal review, Starfleet directs you to suspend operation of the artificial entity designated Robby. There will be no destructive action, no dismantling and no removal from the planet. If Doctor Morbius is able to place the machine in a reversible inactive state, you will do so."

"And if he can't, sir?"

"Then you will isolate it from your expedition and await further instruction."

"Admiral," the archaeologist said.

Komack looked at her screen.

"We are discussing the deliberate shutting off of a being that may be sentient."

The legal adviser answered before the admiral could. "Federation law has established no such status for it."

"Because Federation law has never met him."

"We are not trying a citizenship case," the security representative said. "We are reducing a risk."

Adams heard Julia's voice in his head saying something considerably less parliamentary, and did not enjoy the experience.

Komack looked directly into his camera. "You have your order, Captain."

Adams sat there a moment.

"Yes, sir," he said.