Twenty years earlier
For three days after the Bellerophon fell, Julia Morbius did not go near the western windows.
Edward made the mistake of pointing out that there was nothing to see there.
"The wreckage came down beyond the mountains," he said. "There is nothing visible from the house."
Julia looked at him for a long moment.
"There were people there."
"I know."
"Then do not say there is nothing."
He never said it again.
The house had become impossibly large. It had not been large when the settlement was alive, because there had always been somebody coming through the doors. Cookie with food nobody had asked for and a theory about how it should be eaten. Quinn looking for Edward because something in the power distribution had offended him personally. Farman standing on the terrace with one hand a little too near his pistol and no intention of saying why. Adams arriving with a regulation that everybody had apparently forgotten existed and that he had clearly been saving. The surgeon explaining to Julia, weekly, that being pregnant was not a license to disregard medical advice.
Now there was wind.
On the second afternoon a cup went off the kitchen counter and broke, and Julia was halfway across the room at a run before she understood what the sound had been.
She found three pieces of pottery on the floor. Then she sat down beside them and cried.
Edward found her there. He stopped in the doorway and for perhaps ten seconds did nothing, and Julia, who was not looking at him, knew exactly how long it was.
Then he crossed the room and sat down on the floor next to his wife.
Neither of them said anything.
She had spent eleven years married to a man who could find language for nearly anything. Nine human languages. Four systems that had no human speakers. Since the educator, enough mathematics to describe relationships she could no longer follow across a page.
There was nothing in him now. She found that she did not mind.
She leaned against his shoulder, and after a while his arm came around her.
"They were coming back."
He said nothing.
"Adams said they were coming back."
"I know."
"He would have."
"Yes."
"He was not leaving us."
His arm tightened.
"No."
Julia closed her eyes and saw Cookie at the mess table holding up a list of eleven names for a child who had not been born, one of which was a bourbon. Quinn arguing that Altair was not a terrible beginning for a girl. Farman claiming afterward that he had thought of it first, and Cookie claiming the same thing with more volume, and Adams declining to enter either claim in the log while very plainly having an opinion.
People did not go out of the world in the order you expected. The important things went first, and afterward the ridiculous things turned out to have been the important ones all along.
"I do not know how to do this," she said.
"What?"
She moved one hand at the room, the house, the empty plateau past the windows.
"Us."
His expression began to change, and she put her hand flat on his chest.
"No. Do not solve it."
"I was not."
"You were."
He looked at the broken cup for a while, and she nearly laughed, and then she was crying again instead. That time he held on to her until it stopped.
* *
Edward did not sleep.
Neither did Julia, but Edward did it differently. She would wake and find his side of the bed cold, and find him in the study, or on the terrace looking east toward the mountains. Once she found him outside looking straight up.
On the fourth night she woke and knew before she had opened her eyes.
His field jacket was gone from the chair. So was the portable lamp.
Julia sat on the edge of the bed with both feet on the cold floor, and the child turned over under her ribs.
"Your father," she said, "is an idiot."
The child moved again.
"Yes. I know."
She knew perfectly well where he had gone.
* *
The corridors recognized him before he touched anything.
Light ran ahead of Morbius through passages dark for two hundred thousand years, turning corners before he reached them, waiting at junctions until he had chosen one. There had been a time, a year ago, when he had found that magnificent.
Tonight he found it obedient, and did not examine the difference.
Robby stood in the gallery under the fourth chamber where the shutdown order had left him forty days before. His eyes were closed and his arms were at his sides and nothing about him had altered by so much as a millimeter.
Morbius stood in front of him for a while.
"We need you," he said.
Robby said nothing at all, and that was the entire difficulty.
Morbius went to the maintenance interface.
There was no Adams now. No Science Council, no ship in orbit, no surgeon. There was a woman six weeks from term in a house on an empty plateau, and there was this.
He put his hand against the plate and the system opened to him, and he understood it a great deal better than he had forty days ago, and that should have frightened him. Instead it made the thing possible.
He went through the architecture slowly and with enormous care. Memory. Autonomous reasoning. Motor control. Threat evaluation. Decision authority. And below those, in the deep strata he had only partly mapped, the structures governing what Robby was permitted to want.
He thought about Exo III, which Robby had named for him a year ago as a Krell colony and a closed question. Artificial beings ordered to submit to their own termination. The precise moment at which obedience and continued existence stop being compatible.
Robby had told him what followed. The thought had never entirely left him since.
Morbius found the section of the architecture that governed deliberate harm to living intelligence.
Then he changed it.
He did not take Robby's independence away. He did not make him obedient, which would have been a different crime and, he told himself, a worse one. He built a wall. Whatever else Robby might choose, however hard self-preservation or any other imperative might come to press against it, he would be unable to deliberately harm a living, thinking being.
He was completing the integration when Julia spoke behind him.
"What are you doing?"
He turned. She was in the entrance with one hand flat against the wall and the other under the weight of the child.
"You should not have come down here."
"Do not."
"Julia."
"Do not tell me where I should be. What are you doing to him?"
"Restoring him."
"That is not what I asked."
He looked back at the interface, which was answer enough. She came the rest of the way into the chamber.
"What did you change?"
He said nothing.
"Oh, Edward."
"It is a safeguard."
"Against Robby."
"Against uncertainty."
"That is a very elegant way of saying yes."
"We are alone."
"I had noticed."
"You are six weeks from term."
"I had noticed that as well."
"There is no physician on this planet. No security. No ship. He is stronger than the two of us together and he has independent access to every system in this installation."
"And?"
Morbius looked at her, and for once he did not reach for a better sentence than the one he had.
"And I will not permit another uncertainty into this house."
"What did you do to him?"
"He will be unable to intentionally harm a living intelligent being."
Julia took that in.
"Unable."
"Yes."
"Not unwilling."
"No."
"Unable."
"Yes."
She looked at the android standing with his eyes shut, and then back at her husband.
"You changed him because you are afraid of what he might choose."
"I changed him because I have already buried everybody else."
It stopped her. He had not raised his voice, and that was what made it unanswerable.
"I have you," Morbius said. "And I have her. That is the whole of it."
Her anger did not leave. It only moved over to make room.
"Does he get told what you did?"
"Yes."
"Before you wake him?"
He hesitated, and she closed her eyes.
"Edward."
"I do not know what his response will be."
"That is the point."
"I will tell him afterward."
"Of course you will."
"Julia."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"You do not trust anyone anymore."
He looked at Robby rather than at her.
"No," he said.
She had no answer for that, and she had known she would not have one before she said it.
Morbius put his hand back on the control. Light moved through the wall.
Robby's eyes opened.
