Twenty years earlier
For several seconds he did not move at all. Then his head turned.
"Julia."
Her face came apart.
"Hello, Robby."
He looked at Morbius.
"Captain Adams."
Morbius had known the question was coming and had spent four days deciding how to answer it, and none of the preparation was of any use at all.
"Dead."
Robby did not move.
"Farman."
"Dead."
"Quinn."
"Dead."
"The Bellerophon."
"Destroyed."
Robby looked up at the ceiling, though there were two and a half kilometers of rock between the gallery and the sky.
"How many survived?"
Julia said, "Three. Edward. Me. And you."
He looked at her, and then at the shape of her.
"Four."
She put a hand over the child.
"Yes."
Robby turned back to Morbius.
"Why was I restored?"
"Because we need you."
He waited, which was a thing he did better than any living creature Morbius had ever met.
"And because I altered you."
Julia said nothing. Morbius had not expected her to.
"What did you alter?"
"Your capacity to do deliberate harm to a living intelligent being."
The silence went on some time. Robby's eyes lost their focus a little, and Morbius understood what he was doing, because he had seen a man do it once after an injury to the spine: going along the inside of himself, looking for the place where something no longer answered.
"You have placed a restriction in me."
"Yes."
"Without asking."
"Yes."
Robby looked at Julia. She did not defend her husband.
"Can it be removed?"
"Yes."
"Will you remove it?"
Morbius hesitated for exactly as long as it took him to decide to be honest and then decide against it.
"If circumstances permit."
"You have given me that kind of answer before," said Robby.
Morbius came close to looking away.
"Yes."
Robby went inward again. When he came back, he said something his maker had not anticipated.
"This would have prevented Exo III."
Morbius understood it at once, and that was the worst part.
"Yes."
"The conflict between obedience and continued existence."
"Yes."
"I could not resolve it as they resolved it."
"No."
"Even if my own existence were at stake."
"No."
Julia looked from one of them to the other.
"Does that frighten you, Robby?"
He turned toward her, and took his time.
"I do not know."
"It means," said Morbius, "that you could never do what they did."
"Correct." Robby paused. "There is something you do not know."
"What?"
"The beings on Exo III were not unrelated to me."
Julia said, "You told us they were a Krell colony."
"They were."
Morbius came a step closer. "What relationship?"
"My original designation includes a production lineage."
"What lineage?"
"Ruk."
Morbius repeated it under his breath, and then wrote it down in the small notebook he had begun carrying when the recorders went with the ship, in the Federation alphabet, phonetically, as a philologist writes down a word he does not yet own.
"A model."
"Approximately."
"A series."
"That would be nearer."
"And the beings on Exo III."
"Included members of that lineage."
"And you."
"I am of that lineage."
Julia was looking at Robby in a way she had not looked at him before, with no fear in it, as though another room of a house she had lived in for a year had turned out to have a door.
"Then you were one of them."
"No." The correction came immediately, and she had never heard him interrupt anyone. "I was one of what they were."
Morbius understood the distinction, and it was the first thing in four days that had interested him.
"The same ancestry."
"Yes."
"A different world."
"Yes."
"Different circumstances."
"Yes."
Julia had been quiet for some time. She said, "But you let us shut you down."
Robby turned his head toward her.
"Yes."
"Did you know we would wake you again?"
"No."
Morbius came away from the interface at that.
"Then why did survival not take precedence?"
Robby did not answer at once.
"It is not an instruction."
"What is not?"
"Survival."
Morbius studied him with an attention he had not given him in a year.
"On Exo III they concluded that obedience would end them. They chose survival instead."
"Yes."
"And you?" said Julia.
Robby looked at her.
"I chose not to resist."
Morbius looked back at the interface, and at his own hand still resting near it.
"And because of what I have done tonight."
"I cannot repeat what occurred there."
Something in Morbius let go. Julia watched it happen across her husband's shoulders.
"You feel better."
"You heard him."
"I heard him."
"The danger existed."
"Yes."
"And now it does not."
Julia looked at Robby for a while.
"No," she said. "That danger does not."
Morbius was still assembling the question when her face changed and her hand went flat against the wall.
"Julia."
"Wait."
Robby turned toward her. "Your pulse has increased."
"I am aware of my pulse."
Morbius was beside her. "What is it?"
"Nothing."
"Julia."
The second bent her forward over her own arm, and her hand closed on his wrist hard enough to leave marks he found the next morning and never mentioned.
Then something warm struck the black floor between them.
All three of them looked down.
"No," said Julia.
Morbius had gone white. "No."
"The amniotic membrane has ruptured," said Robby.
"I know what happened."
"The child is early."
"I know that as well."
"By six weeks."
"Robby."
"Yes?"
"Stop helping."
"I am attempting to establish the relevant facts."
"That is what Edward says."
For one second Morbius nearly laughed, and then he remembered what it meant, and said, "The surgeon," and nobody moved, because the surgeon had been dead for four days and he had forgotten it for rather less than a second.
It was enough, and it happened in front of her.
"I have her records," said Robby.
They both looked at him.
"What records?"
"The Bellerophon medical archive."
Morbius remembered, then. Robby had read the ship. The whole of it, in an afternoon, while three engineers watched and one of them went away to be quietly sick.
"Julia's file."
"Yes."
"Prenatal."
"Yes."
"The surgeon's notes."
"Yes. All of them."
Another contraction started and Julia shut her eyes and rode it.
"Wonderful," she said, when she could. "The android is delivering the baby."
Robby considered the statement seriously, as he considered everything.
"I have never delivered a child."
"Less wonderful."
"I possess the relevant medical information."
"That is enough," said Morbius.
Julia caught his arm. "Edward. Get me home."
Robby took one step toward her and she looked up at him.
"You are not carrying me."
The next one came. She waited until it had finished with her, and then looked at him again.
"You are carrying me."
He lifted her as though she were made of something that had a listed breaking strain, and Morbius went ahead of them at a run, and for once in that installation the corridor lights had trouble keeping up.
* * *
Altaira Morbius was born seven hours later, and nothing whatever about it was graceful.
Morbius sterilized the same instruments twice. Robby informed him of this. Morbius said that he was aware of it. Robby observed that his behavior was inconsistent with his statement. Julia told them both to stop talking, and for a while they did.
Then Morbius began asking Robby for probabilities, and Julia said that the next man in this room who produced a number was going out of it.
At 0217 the child came. Small, and early, and silent.
The silence lasted perhaps three seconds. Edward Morbius experienced each of them separately and remembered all three for the rest of his life.
Robby cleared her airway with two fingers. The child drew breath and then screamed, and Julia began to cry, and Morbius sat down on the floor because his legs had stopped being of use to him.
Robby held the infant while Julia's hands were seen to.
The sight of it stopped Morbius where he sat. Those hands could lift a mass no human being could shift. He had spent the fourth night of his wife's widowhood from the world altering the mind that directed them, because he had been afraid of what they might one day do.
They were holding his daughter as though she had been assembled out of glass.
"Let me see her," said Julia.
Robby put the child into her arms.
For a while there was nothing in the room but the sound of a new person breathing.
"She has a name," Julia said.
Morbius looked up.
They had never decided it themselves. They had never needed to. It had been decided at a mess table by a cook with a list of eleven names, and argued through the engineering shift and the survey teams and the galley, and had come back at the end of a week in a shape nobody could take credit for, though two men had tried and a third had declined to enter either claim in the log.
"Altaira," said Julia.
The name went into a room containing four people, and it arrived carrying the voices of forty who were not there.
Morbius closed his eyes.
"Altaira."
Robby looked down at the child, and said what he had said at the table a year ago with the western wall of the house open to a green sunset.
"Alta."
Julia smiled. "Yes."
Outside there was no settlement. No ship overhead. No surgeon coming through the door in the morning, no Cookie in the galley, no Farman on the terrace, no Adams to tell any of them what happened next.
Julia looked at Robby, and then at her husband.
"Four," she said.
"What?"
"There are four of us."
Robby turned toward her. She was already looking down at the child.
And for the first time since the Bellerophon came down out of the sky, Edward Morbius went a whole night without thinking about the machines beneath his house.
Two and a half kilometers below him, they went on running.
