Twenty years earlier
It never became dramatic. She sometimes wished it would. Drama would have given them something to fight.
Instead she grew tired, and tired became weak, and walking from the bedroom to the terrace became a thing she thought about before doing. Some mornings she felt almost well. Those were the cruel ones.
Alta adjusted with the efficient selfishness of a six year old. She brought books into her mother's room and played on the floor and asked questions and became indignant when Julia fell asleep before the end of a story.
"You're doing it again."
Julia opened one eye. "Doing what?"
"Sleeping."
"I have been practicing."
"I wasn't finished. You were explaining the moons."
"There are three. Now you understand them."
Alta scowled. "Father says understanding a thing takes years."
"Your father has built a career on that belief."
Alta climbed up onto the bed.
"Are you going to die?"
There are moments when a child makes every adult in the house look like a coward.
"Everybody dies."
"That isn't what I asked."
No. It was not.
Julia moved over enough to make room. "I don't know."
Alta considered this with great seriousness. "Father will fix it."
Julia looked toward the doorway, where Edward was standing and had heard.
"Perhaps," she said.
Alta accepted it, because she was six.
Edward did not.
* *
The Krell had built machines that could move mountains. Morbius found one that could rebuild damaged tissue. The difficulty was that he did not know what his wife's tissue was supposed to be rebuilt into.
He found a medical archive that described organs no human being possessed and illnesses no human physician had ever seen. He found a chamber of biological models so exact that Robby believed some of them were preserved at the molecular level, and not one of them was human. He found instruments that could examine living matter without touching it. They examined Julia brilliantly and explained nothing.
For three weeks he went below before sunrise and came back after dark carrying pieces of impossible medicine. Some of it helped the symptoms. None of it changed the course.
She found him one night beside a Krell diagnostic unit he had dragged into the bedroom, a thing the size of a small table giving off a low sound she could feel through the mattress.
"You hate that thing."
"I do not hate machines."
"You hate machines that will not answer you."
"It is answering."
"Then why do you look insulted?"
"It is giving me categories I cannot translate."
"That is not its fault."
"No."
She watched him work for a while. "Edward. Come here."
"In a moment."
"Now."
He looked at the device, and then at her, and then he came and sat in the chair beside the bed.
"How long were you below today?"
"Six hours."
"Nine."
"Robby."
"He had nothing to do with it. I have a window."
For a second he almost smiled.
She found his hand. "The Krell cannot fix me."
"We do not know that."
"I know it."
"You believe it. There are whole medical sectors I have not translated."
"And if the answer is in one of them?"
"Then I will find it."
"And if it is not?"
He looked at her, and she understood again what eleven years of marriage had taught her: Edward Morbius did not fear being wrong nearly as much as he feared there being no answer at all.
"Then I will keep looking."
"That is what frightens me."
His hand tightened on hers.
"I need you here."
"I am here."
"Your body is here."
"Julia."
"Do you know what your daughter asked me this morning?"
He looked away. "Yes."
"She thinks you can fix anything."
"Children believe many things."
"So do you."
He stood up, which told her she had got to the right place.
"Do not turn this into an argument about my work."
"I did not."
"You have been making that argument for six years."
"No. I have been trying to keep my husband from disappearing into a civilization that already killed itself."
He stopped.
She regretted it, and then decided that she did not.
"They achieved things we cannot imagine," he said, to the machine rather than to her.
"And they died."
"That does not make their knowledge worthless."
"No. It makes it incomplete."
He said nothing at all.
When she woke the Krell machine was switched off and Edward was still in the chair.
*
Autumn came to the plateau. The imported plants had no idea what autumn was supposed to mean under that light, but one of the trees made an effort and turned yellow, and Alta brought three leaves inside.
"These are dying."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because that is what they do."
"Do they come back?"
"In spring."
Alta looked suspicious. "How?"
"That is a bigger question."
"Father says everything is a bigger question."
"He would."
Robby was standing at the window. He had become quieter as she weakened, which she noticed because he had never been talkative and there is a difference between silence and less than silence.
"Robby. Come here." He did. "You are worrying."
"I do not know whether that description is accurate."
"Then you are doing an excellent imitation. Go and help her with the leaves."
"I don't need help," said Alta.
"Then help Robby."
"With what?"
"With being less solemn."
Alta looked up at him. "How?"
"I have no idea. It may not be possible."
"I do not believe solemnity is a function I perform," said Robby.
Julia laughed until it hurt, and Alta's face changed, and she stopped.
"I'm all right."
"You always say that."
"Yes."
"I don't think it's true."
"No."
Alta waited. Julia held out her arms, and her daughter climbed up and curled against her, and Robby turned toward the window.
Julia watched him do it and wondered whether that was something else he had learned from them. The courtesy of looking away.
*
At the end there was pain. There was nothing remarkable about it. Human beings had been finding ways to hurt while dying a long time before the Krell built their first machine.
Robby managed the medication out of what was left of the Bellerophon stores, and Morbius checked every dose, even after Robby observed that he had never made an error.
"Everyone makes errors."
"You altered me because you believed I would not."
The room went quiet. Morbius looked at him, and Robby did not look away.
Julia, half awake, said, "Point to the android."
Neither of them understood.
"That was humor."
"I understood it," said Robby.
"Good."
Morbius did not smile, but his hand found hers.
Alta had said goodbye that afternoon without knowing it was goodbye. Julia had insisted. No bedside ritual. No child made to stand beside her dying mother while the adults waited for something wise. She had sat for an hour and talked about the lake, and Julia had kissed her forehead and told her to go with Robby.
"I want to stay."
"I know."
"Why can't I?"
"Because I'm tired."
"You're always tired."
"Exactly."
There were more questions coming. Julia stopped them.
"I love you."
"You say that every day."
"Then you know it."
"Yes."
"Good."
After she had gone, Edward sat down beside the bed and for some time neither of them said anything. The western windows were open and Julia could smell the garden.
"I failed," he said.
"No."
"I had all of it underneath us. Medicine centuries past ours."
"Not ours."
"Knowledge beyond anything humanity possesses."
"And you still could not order the universe about."
He studied her.
"There you are," she said.
"Julia."
"You think that is what knowledge is for. Permission."
"I do not understand you."
"Yes, you do."
She could see the anger gathering, and it was not at her, it was at being helpless, and that was harder to sit beside.
"I could not save Adams."
"No."
"Or the others."
"No."
"And now you."
"You were never supposed to save everybody."
"Then what was I supposed to do?"
It came out almost like a child's question, and for a moment the Krell were gone, and the machines were gone, and the educator was gone, and there was only Edward.
"Be with us."
He closed his eyes.
She rested until the pain had gone by, and then she said, "Alta will leave you one day."
His eyes opened. Even now. Even here.
"No."
"Edward."
"She is six years old."
"She will not always be."
"That is a long way off."
"Not as far as you think."
"She has everything she needs here."
Julia smiled at that, sadly, because it was his answer to everything he had ever loved.
He took his hand away and then put it straight back.
"Do not do that to her."
"Do what?"
"Make being loved a thing she has to escape."
Morbius went completely still.
She had very little left. She spent some of it on his hand.
"Protect her."
"I will."
"No." Her eyes stayed on his. "Love her."
The wind moved the curtain. Edward Morbius had an answer for almost everything, and he had none for that.
Julia closed her eyes, and a few minutes later her breathing stopped.
He did not call Robby. He stayed in the chair holding her hand until the warmth had gone out of it, and then he said her name once, not loudly.
No machine answered.
*
Alta came in after sunset with Robby behind her, and stopped in the doorway.
Children know. They do not always understand, but they know.
"Mother?"
Morbius stood up.
She looked at him, and then at the bed, and crossed the room by herself. Julia's hand was lying above the blanket. Alta touched it.
"She's cold."
Her father could not answer.
She turned to Robby. "Can you make her not dead?"
"No."
She looked back at Morbius, and he shook his head.
"No."
Alta climbed onto the bed and lay down beside her mother.
Morbius started toward her. Robby put one hand out in front of him, not touching him, only closing the path.
"Wait."
For once, Morbius did.
*
They buried Julia at the western edge of the garden. Morbius had wanted the ridge. Alta said her mother liked the garden, and that was the end of it.
There was no ceremony except the one the three of them made. Morbius tried to speak and could not. Alta put a stone on the grave, a pale one threaded with blue that she had found by the lake, and that her father had once told her was worthless, and that her mother had said was an excellent reason to keep it.
Then they went inside.
There had been four of them. Now there were three.
* *
Thirteen years went by.
At seven Alta learned to swim in the lake. At eight she found a lower corridor she had been forbidden to enter, and Robby prevented her from going back by standing in the doorway and declining to move. At nine she read the surviving Bellerophon records. At ten she asked why nobody had ever come back. At eleven she stopped accepting the first answer her father gave her. At twelve she began asking Robby things that Morbius did not know she was asking. At thirteen she could read enough Krell notation to tell when her father was translating too confidently. At fourteen she began keeping parts of herself private, and at fifteen he noticed.
At sixteen she found an interlock in a lower chamber. It took her two years to be certain what it did.
At nineteen she shut it off.
Her father went deeper. The Krell systems opened to him by degrees. He used the educator and recovered and studied and used it again, and problems that had once held him for months became manageable, and then straightforward, and then obvious. He stopped recording every use.
Robby said nothing about that either.
And Alta grew up happy, which was the strange part. She loved the house, and the lake, and Robby, and her father. She did not think of herself as a prisoner, because she had never once seen a road that went anywhere else.
And nothing happened.
No invisible thing crossed the garden. No door opened in the night. No machinery came apart in a locked room. Nothing struck the house, nothing hunted them, and nothing pulled a ship out of the sky, because for nineteen years there was no ship in the sky to pull.
Edward Morbius had a daughter who loved him, an android who could not harm him, and a house standing exactly where he had put it.
He never once asked himself why the thing that killed forty people had let his wife die slowly, in a bed, of an ordinary illness, with nobody to help her.
It would not have occurred to him. He had no reason to connect the two, and no evidence, and no one left alive to raise it.
And two and a half kilometers beneath the garden where they had buried her, the machine went on waiting.
It had no reason to object.
Yet.
