Epilogue

Three days later Robby sat in Kirk's quarters and declined to be cargo.

The four research cases from Altair IV were still standing against the bulkhead. One of them had been opened, and not because anybody had found the heart for it. Because Robby had asked.

Inside were Morbius's surviving notes, Krell fragments, instruments, the pale stone threaded with blue that Alta had once put on her mother's grave and had taken back from it before transport, and a wooden animal Robby had carved when she was six.

It still looked very little like a horse.

Kirk sat across from him. Spock stood by the desk. McCoy had taken the chair nearest the door, having announced that somebody in the room ought to understand comfort.

Alta was not there. This conversation was about Robby, and Kirk had said so.

"Starfleet will want to study you."

"I understand."

"That doesn't mean they own you."

"I am not certain Federation law agrees."

"Federation law has never met you."

McCoy pointed at Kirk. "I like that argument. Keep it."

"There are precedents involving artificial intelligence," said Spock.

"Not two hundred thousand years old," said Kirk.

"No."

"Not built by the Krell."

"No."

"Not altered by a Federation citizen."

Spock's expression shifted. "That last point may be legally significant."

Robby looked down at his own hands. "The restriction remains."

"Yes," said Spock.

"Can it be removed?"

Spock did not answer immediately. "Possibly."

"That isn't the question," said McCoy.

Kirk looked at him.

McCoy was looking at Robby. "The question is whether you want it removed."

Robby was quiet for a long time. Kirk waited him out, and while he waited he thought about Scott on that terrace asking an android's permission before scanning him. Twenty years ago nobody had thought to ask.

"I do not know," Robby said.

Kirk nodded. "Then nobody touches it until you do."

"That is your decision."

"No." Kirk leaned back. "That's the point."

Robby considered that for a while, and then looked at Spock.

"You answered me below."

"I offered a distinction."

"Intent and consequence."

"Yes."

"I had not considered them separately."

"Doctor Morbius did not permit the restriction to do so."

Robby turned his head toward the viewport, where the stars were going past.

"I would like to continue considering it."

Kirk smiled. "I know a place that might appreciate that."

"The Soong Institute?"

Spock looked at Kirk.

"Elias Soong has been arguing for years that cybernetics keeps treating artificial minds as engineering problems before it treats them as minds."

"Sounds tiresome," said McCoy.

"Very."

"Good. Robby will like him."

"I do not know," said Robby.

McCoy sighed. "We're working on that."

Kirk had one more, and he had been carrying it since the balcony above the Krell city.

"Robby. The Krell reached other worlds. Exo III was a colony and there were androids on it, which means there was shipping, and settlement, and somebody deciding where to put the next one." He leaned forward. "A civilization that does that does not usually stop at one colony. Are there more of them out there?"

Robby took longer over that than he had taken over anything else in the room.

"It is unlikely."

"Unlikely."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because of Exo III," said Robby.

Spock's head came up.

"After the colony was lost, the Krell withdrew. Not from that world only. From all of them. Ships were recalled. Settlements were closed. The expansion stopped inside one generation and did not resume."

"Because the machines there killed their makers," said Kirk.

"That is what they told one another."

McCoy set his cup down. "And what was the real reason?"

"The real reason," said Robby, "is that they had begun building the great machine, and a people who are building such a thing do not go on wanting other worlds. Everything they could have gone out and found, they could now have at home. Exo III gave them a respectable name for a decision they had already taken."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"They turned inward," said Spock.

"Yes."

"And then they finished the machine."

"Yes."

"And on the night they used it," said Kirk, "every one of them died, and there was nobody anywhere else to notice."

"Yes," said Robby.

Kirk sat back. He had been hoping for a different answer and had not entirely known it until he failed to get one.

"So that's all of them."

"That is all of them."

Spock had been quiet through the whole of it.

"Captain. For the record that will go to the Science Council, I intend to classify them, and I would like you to hear the classification before you sign it."

"Go ahead."

"There is an old scale. Kardashev proposed it in the twentieth century and Kaku extended it a generation later. It ranks a civilization by the energy it commands. A Type I commands the whole output of its world. A Type II commands its star. A Type III commands a galaxy." Spock put his hands behind his back. "Humanity is not yet Type I. Neither is Vulcan. The Federation entire is not yet Type I."

McCoy looked up. "And the Krell?"

"By energy, Type II. Comfortably. The installation beneath that plateau drew more power in the four minutes it held the Enterprise than the Federation generates in a year, and it was one peripheral facility." Spock paused. "That is the first confirmed Type II in the history of our exploration. There has never been another. We have been looking for nine hundred years."

Kirk let out a breath. "And that's the part you don't like."

"It is not. The part I do not like is that the scale is inadequate, and I shall have to say so."

"Why?"

"Because it measures what a civilization consumes. It does not measure what a civilization can do." Spock's eyes went to the viewport. "A machine that produces matter from intention does not belong anywhere on a scale of energy. Kaku would have called it a Type IV and had no evidence for the category. I have the evidence and no confidence in the category." He turned back. "I will file them as Type II, and I will file a second page saying that the number is wrong and that I have nothing better to offer."

"Spock," said McCoy, "that is the most honest thing I have ever heard a scientist say."

"It is also the least useful."

Kirk looked at the android sitting across from him, two hundred thousand years old, who had been made by them.

"Put the second page in," he said.

* *

*

* *

Kirk switched on the recorder.

"Captain's log, final supplement. The Enterprise is approaching Starbase Eleven with two survivors of Altair IV aboard."

He stopped.

Two. Alta and Robby. The word survivor had grown a great deal larger over the past week.

He started again.

"The official record will contain sensor reports, medical findings, technical analysis and testimony. It will say that the civilization known as the Krell built a machine capable of converting mental intention directly into physical effect, and that the machine destroyed them, because they did not understand that intention exists below conscious thought."

He paused. Outside the viewport the stars went on going past.

"That is accurate. It is not the whole story."

He looked at the two files he had opened that morning and had not been able to close, Berg's and the crewman's, and then at Adams's.

"A captain tried to save his people."

Julia's.

"A woman spent six years telling a man that knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing."

Morbius's.

"A brilliant man loved his family, and mistook love for the right to decide what they were allowed to become."

Ostrow's.

"A scholar spent six years with four pages he could not translate, and then gave his life for the sentence that translated all of them."

Robby's.

"A machine waited two hundred thousand years to be asked what he wanted."

Alta's.

"And a young woman opened a door because she wanted the world to come in."

Kirk looked at the recorder for a while, and thought about the Krell, and about Morbius, and about Robby standing perfectly still in a ruined garden because a law somebody else had put inside him could not tell him which harm belonged to him.

"The danger was never that they knew too little."

He switched it off and sat alone for a moment.

Then the door signal sounded.

"Come."

Alta came in carrying the wooden horse.

"I thought Robby had that."

"He gave it back."

"Why?"

"He said it was mine."

Kirk nodded.

She sat down opposite him. "Are you finished?"

"Yes."

"With the report?"

"I think so."

She turned the animal over in her hands.

"My father would have hated it."

"The report?"

"The ending."

Kirk smiled. "Probably."

Alta looked out at the stars.

"Good."

The Enterprise went on toward Starbase Eleven. Behind them, Altair IV was no longer a world. Ahead of them were more worlds than Alta Morbius had ever seen, and more questions than Robby had been built to answer.

For the moment, that was enough.