Asimov's Science Fiction: December 2013 (8 page)

"I've read many books. A lifetime of reading is a life well spent."

"But," she said, and realized her mistake. Why did she think it could read? She turned the face toward her and watched the eyes adjust. "I'll read the titles.
After the World We Knew. Finding Mars. No One Rides This Rocket. Outward Journey.
Oh, they're alphabetical. Which one of those... is one of your books your favorite?"

"The book I'd just written was always my favorite. Then I started another."

"What was the last book you wrote?"

"The last book I wrote was
World Enough But Out of Time."

Two copies. She returned the head to the bag and tugged free one book. For a moment she remained squatting. She'd brought the head all this way. But what else was there to accomplish? When a couple joined her in the aisle, she rose. Bag in one hand, book in the other, she retreated.

Paid, she passed between the panels at the exit and an alarm beeped twice. Even as she looked for what to do, not registering the sweatered man gesturing to her from behind the counter, she thought she would tell them, when they dug through the bag and found the head, "I'm a wigmaker."

The man came around the counter, and she said, "I just paid for this." She pointed into the bag.

"That's okay," he said, his hand signing a blessing to undo the experience. "It happens. Try again."

She did, the alarm sounded, and he said, "Don't worry about it," and she tried to walk in a manner that suggested no haste. Only when she'd reached the escalator to the lower parking level did she wonder at the man's lack of caution. Didn't he know everyone worried about security these days? Wasn't he concerned about what she might have done or what further harm she might cause? Did she really look so obviously above suspicion?

Though no one passing on the sidewalk, or even pressed to the glass, could have seen what she was about, Karen drew the blinds before propping the head on the sofa opposite the windows. Unthinkingly, she hummed a tune she had heard in the mall, a piece she recognized as classical, and the sound woke the head. She wasn't ready to be looked at, so she didn't return the look the eyes gave her, and it whirred to a stop by the time she had finished setting the head between pillows. Coffee table between them, she took her place on the second-hand upholstered chair and put the book in her lap. Only then did she rouse the head by speaking the title, and once she knew her face was found, she announced her intention to read from the book.

"Do you remember this book?"

"I'm fond of all my work."

"World Enough But Out of Time.
That one?" The head seemed to hesitate. "Okay, I'll read it to you."

"Thank you for reading."

She read the first line to herself, then began.

No one will know the things we've known. The computers will record it, but that's not the same. In our great ships, we had reached beyond the solar system. We had broken the barriers imposed by light and time! But time pushes quirkily forward, and not every dream proceeded smoothly.

It was the strangest book. The speaker lived in the distant future, and the narrative ranged between many planets, each more wonderfully vivid than the one before. She read,

The works of mankind were many. Yet no city was more beautiful than Tremayne, the fantastic engine city of the new people. If only I could show you how
high the towers of glimmering silver reached into those amber skies, the constructor machines racing upward and downward in endless acts of creation and reconstruction! Mankind had built as if there were no such thing as gravity.

It seemed as if the novel would settle on this world for a while, since at last a character emerged, Lasemia par-Baran, a daughter of privilege who was being kept in a protected, artificial, and Earth-like environment for unrevealed reasons.

Everything in her life had come from mysterious sources!

She stopped reading. "Oh, I like that. 'Everything in her life had come from mysterious sources!' Do you like hearing me read your book?"

"A good book sounds good."

"So you want me to keep going?"

"You might want to keep going."

"I like reading this out loud like this. It's kind of cool."

The head's eyes shuttled back and forth.

"And this book," she said. "I've never read anything like this."

"That's an interesting situation," said the head.

"Am I going to like the story?"

The mouth clicked open and closed. "That's a difficult question."

"Does this story turn out to be really sad?"

"We do tell sad stories to ourselves," it replied.

She resumed reading.

She slept late, but when she woke, she hurried through her first tasks of putting on sweats, eating breakfast, brushing her teeth, and brushing out her hair before tying it back. She was smiling when she took the head from the linen closet and returned it to the same position on the sofa. She greeted it, and it came to life.

The book lay closed on the coffee table.

"I should have used a bookmark," she said. "I don't remember the exact spot. I guess you remember."

The head seemed to be listening to its own internal actions.

"Where did we leave off in your book?" she asked.

"You must have left it somewhere."

"No." She twisted her mouth. "No. I was reading your book to you and I stopped.

Do you remember where I stopped reading?"

"I'm sure it was a good place to stop."

But she was flipping the pages anyway, and she landed on the spot where she had left off. She touched her finger to the sentence. Then something dreadful occurred to her.

She held the receiver tight to her face. "What did you mean," she asked Jonah, "when you said it didn't think?"

"Did something happen?"

"Just... What did you mean?"

"I mean, something like your android head, it's just math. Right? It's running a program. Making predictions about what you said and what makes sense to say back. We all
kind of
do that. Okay, not really. We understand what people mean when they say something. We
understand.
This kind of thing doesn't..."

"So it's not... thinking?"

"No, this is different. It's not thinking about what you said. Not really. It's not... aware of anything."

Perfunctorily, she thanked him and, though he began another sentence, she hung up. The face didn't quite look at her, but seemed to be focused on the entrance to the kitchen. She stepped into its line of sight and approached.

"Do you recognize me?" she asked.

The mouth opened. "It's nice to see you."

"Have we met before?"

"I'm afraid you'll have to pardon me."

In one breath, she said, "Oh my God I'm such a fool."

She stood there till the head went quiet, and then she had to leave the house.

Overhead, a single tremendous cloud obscured the sun. A group of children, perhaps half a dozen, ran from yard to yard behind the houses, their voices sounding incredibly distant, vanishing completely when she passed a hedge filled with sparrows that hopped within the bushes like popping oil on a skillet, all seeming to say the same thing to one another without any pause. She wanted to walk beyond noise and voices and all human devices and even animal life. Lacking that option, she followed the curve of her street until the enormous cloud moved on. Quickly, the sun did its work. She touched the top of her head; already, her hair was hot. She pivoted about and headed home, now only wanting bed.

On her feet much of the time anyway, she rarely took walks. Sometimes she would spend time on a treadmill or stationary bike at a hotel fitness center, watching the news, thinking how she was a fit person who wouldn't end up like some of the people she saw on the news, overweight, homeless, bereft, stepping warily through the ruins of a neighborhood.

The road curved homeward. She wasn't sure how far she had come, and, never driving this direction, couldn't find a landmark house—the houses, in any case, being much the same. Flowers in window boxes decked the front of one. At another, the garage was open; a man inside pumped up a bicycle tire for a waiting girl. A sound like distant birds was really the sound of those running children she couldn't see, the voices transformed by bouncing off all the brick. Her surroundings seemed stranger with each moment. How had anyone else found themselves in this place at this time? She looked from one side of the street to the other. In none of those houses was someone she knew or anyone who knew her. If she cried out from inside her own house, called for help, would the sounds reach these people inside their walls or their children invisibly careening through the lawns?

She spent a restless night in another city, a city that was too hot. The air conditioning unit chattered all night, loudly, ten minutes at a time between brief breaks. She thought about changing the settings, but the covers weighed too much and her head seemed sunk too low into the doubled pillows, so instead, she thought about her life so far, the various rooms in which she had found herself, the people she'd been with, and the improbability that any of those people was just now thinking of her. She would visit her sister soon, regardless of the grief she would be given. She would spend time with her niece and nephew. She would accept Jonah's offer of a computer. The head... she must stop speaking to the head.

On returning home, she set down her bags at the front door and worked off her shoes. She opened the bedroom closet while unbuttoning her blouse. The head was not there.

Her actions weren't logical, she knew that, but she looked in all the locations she had placed the head. Following this, she opened kitchen cabinets, the basement door, and the door to the car port, then walked from there into the back yard, where the grass had turned yellow-brown. Then she sat on the living room sofa, chewing her upper lip and saying out loud every scenario that occurred to her. Maybe its creators had tracked it down using some kind of homing device, broken into the house, and retrieved their property. They had, for whatever reason, not wanted to make a fuss. She looked at her door. She had had to turn the bolt to enter. She left the living room and checked every window and the back door as well.

She phoned Jonah.

"I hope you didn't change your mind," he said.

"About what?"

"You made the right decision."

She felt a space open behind her eyes. "How did you get in?"

"Chris gave me a copy of the key. Ages ago."

"You shouldn't have that. I didn't know you had a key."

"I'd forgotten about it myself. I remembered this morning."

She sat on the arm of the sofa. The head, explained Jonah, was several miles away on a suburban bridge. Packed in a cardboard box, it was situated along the bridge walkway. She could picture the spot. It had been some time since she'd driven that way, but she could see it clearly nonetheless.

"Like abandoned kittens," she said.

Jonah laughed, but her silence changed his tone. "It's not like that. This is a good way to do it. And, get this, I flipped it face down so if a kid sees it it won't freak him out. Or her out. They'll see the wires. Somebody will turn it in or call the police and... boop! It's done. Back to the owners. You wanted to do it."

She pressed her free hand against her face, heel of the palm to her cheek, fingers touching her hair. "I know that," she moaned.

"Oh, also: I wiped it off. I don't think they can really get fingerprints from it, but I didn't want to take any chances." Something like static came over the line; he must have been scratching his beard. "I think you're safe."

"You didn't need to be so sneaky," she said.

"I'm really sorry. Really. I felt like I should be sort of watching out for you."

"I don't need you to do that."

"No. I'm really sorry."

He could have said, "It wasn't yours to begin with," but he didn't.

"Okay," she said. "Well, you took care of it."

"You should keep an eye on the news. I'll call if I see something online." Neither said goodbye, and she wondered if he was waiting for some more clear sign that she had forgiven him, but she hesitated to provide that so soon.

"Jonah," she said, "do you know why Chris left?"

"Chris just wasn't a very good guy."

"Maybe," she said softly, "he wasn't even real."

"Whoa," said Jonah. "That's a wild idea. I like it!" They both laughed.

The station endlessly cycled through local news, providing the occasional glimpse of a wider world. Every ten minutes, someone pronounced the weather forecast, calling it the "Farcast." A confident-looking woman with aggressively blonde hair appeared briefly between each recorded video segment. Karen watched a town being shelled by mortar fire and thought of people having nowhere to shop, then remembered the meatball sandwich in her bag. She had bought it at the last airport before hurrying to her plane. She raised the television volume and left the room to retrieve and heat her sandwich.

Not sitting to eat, she instead wandered the house, idly inspecting both bedrooms. Change was needed. Why was anything in its present position? Still with a fist-sized chunk of sandwich in her hand, she began to empty her bedroom closet of the linens. The shelves were removable, and a hangar bar was already in place.

She was passing from one bedroom to the next when the woman on the television shouted, "A mysterious box," and Karen missed the next words as she dropped the towels, cried out, and moved closer to the television all at once. She banged her knee on the coffee table.

A two-lane bridge appeared on the screen. The camera seemed positioned rather far off. Something shuddered across the bridge with inhuman persistence.

"Police bomb technicians utilized a robot," said the woman, and though Karen pictured a human-looking robot, she knew they just meant a simple machine that did what it was told and that moved in response to someone operating a joystick.

The image grew marginally larger till she could see that the robot was a cube, rolling on a tank tread, topped by a boxy head at the end of a pole. A single arm, bent at an elbow joint, projected from the cube. The image jumped as the video skipped ahead. There was a burst of smoke, and a moment later she heard the crack of the explosion. Both hands went to her open mouth.