Asimov's Science Fiction: December 2013 (7 page)

"Why were you made?"

"The people who made me enjoyed my books and my ideas. They wanted to allow aspects of my character to continue in some way. It's a generous gesture, don't you think?"

The short speech completed, the machinery silent, she relocated the head to her bedroom's narrow closet, where she kept toiletries, linens, and sweaters. Below the shelves were stored the vacuum cleaner, a small hand vacuum, and some odds and ends that had no other proper place in the house: a disc-shaped plastic sled, snow shoes, ice skates, and rubber-coated hand weights. At eye level, she wedged the robotic head between towels so it was upright and secure.

The closet door latched with a click, and she whispered, "We work in the dark." Before dinner, she received a call about her schedule. No flight until tomorrow afternoon. She napped.

After her late supper, she read again from an airline magazine. One article was a personal account of a flight attendant whose mother suffered from Alzheimer's. The woman had several siblings, and there was some squabbling over what to do with their mother once she became more physically and mentally debilitated, but, to Karen's surprise, the story's final paragraphs were saturated in hope. The attendant's hours were cut back and her schedule rearranged by the airline to accommodate her challenging situation. The family met peacefully and resolved issues by talking about them, though this event was so paraphrased, Karen couldn't guess what exact words had been exchanged.

When she'd finished reading the article, she forgetfully carried the magazine with her into the kitchen, where she commenced scowling at her plate, left unwashed on the table. She thought how the article's author was conveniently married to a successful engineer who worked for an unnamed major firm.

The phone rang.

"Anything new?" asked Jonah. "No one's stolen it," she said. She explained about moving the head, and told him too that they'd talked about a story the writer had done. "That's pretty cool," said Jonah. "I wonder if I've read it." "I bet you have," she said, really thinking of the next thing she was going to say. "Are our brains like computers?"

"Sure. In a lot of ways. Not all ways. Hey, I haven't seen anything else online about them looking for Richard's head."

She pressed on. "Imagine if you had a brain that couldn't forget anything."

"I don't know if I'd want to remember
everything."
"Think about it. You'd always know who you were. You'd remember what you believed and why you did things." "I don't think a computer
believes
anything. I wouldn't say it
thinks
anything." "Whatever," she said, suddenly tired. "Do you think it's weird that I put it in the closet?"

"The whole situation is weird."

She had to agree, though agreeing meant there was something about her own actions that she didn't understand.

She felt pretty sure she'd had Chris put a small vase on the top shelf of the corner cabinet above the kitchen counter. When the week's travels were over, she thought, she would buy some flowers. Having opened the cabinet, she stood as far from the counter as she could to find a sightline into the shelf, but nothing revealed itself except a tin of tea that had been a gift. It occurred to her, as she put her palms to the counter preparatory to hoisting herself up, that an alternate solution would be to hold aloft the writer's head and ask what he saw, but this struck her as demeaning and possibly beyond its abilities.

Kneeling on the counter, which hurt her knees, she grabbed the knob of a neigh-boring cabinet to tug herself to standing. When that knob slipped from its pin, Karen fell backwards from the counter. She landed on her shoulders, her head banged backward, and she heard herself emit a squawking noise that seemed to come not only from her mouth but from her eyes down to her chest. Then she lay still.

Her blinking felt heavy, like plastic lids sliding over her eyes. Convinced she had broken her back, she didn't dare move her head, but tried to sense whether her limbs worked without actually moving them. She imagined being like this from now on, a blinking head fixed to a useless body. She saw someone—a dark-haired male nurse—he very much resembled a flight attendant she knew—feeding her; she swallowed. Her spit didn't want to go down, and she coughed. The cough brought her chest up from the linoleum floor, ending her fantasy of incapacity. She sat up and folded her legs. The loose knob had ended up just to her left.

"Help!" she shouted. "Hurry! Help me!" She listened.

Her back was sore, and when she stood, she found her bottom was sore too. There'd be bruises. She went to the linen closet and stood before the door. "Can you help me?" she shouted. "Send help! Hurry!" She put her ear to the white-painted wood and listened. "Hello?" she said more quietly.

She yanked the door open. The head stirred among the towels. "Hello," it said.

"Didn't you hear me calling?"

"I hear what you're saying," it replied.

"I fell off the counter and it was pretty unpleasant."

"Gravity," he replied, "is a cruel mistress."

"That's not good enough," she said, and shut the door.

Her arms, hanging straight down, seemed compelled to plunge downward and through the floor. Her hands balled into rocky fists and shook. A strange force rumbled through her body from feet to head. "Dammit!" she shouted at the door. "God damn you!"

Then she became creative, combining words and making up new ones, telling the head it was no good, pathetic, sitting there doing nothing, a waste, pure shit. Her head vibrated. When she opened the door, the face took a moment to find her eyes.

"Did you hear that?" she demanded.

"I hear you," the head said, frustratingly calm.

She unleashed another torrent of words straight at the face, which blinked twice during these proceedings. The mouth opened when she paused, causing her to recommence so it couldn't find any space in which to speak.

When she was done, she wiped her wet mouth. "That's how I feel. So what do you think of that?"

"You've indicated feelings," said the head.

She exhaled loudly through her nose. "Thank you." "You're welcome."

When she awoke, she vividly recalled a dream, a dream she would remember for some time to come. She'd found herself drifting in outer space. Helmetless, though space-suited, she held her breath. Every point of light seemed equally far off, so she rolled over to seek a planet she might reach before her breath ran out. In response to this expectation, she found the blue crescent of a nearby world. Swimming motions brought her closer, but practical considerations surfaced: How would she control where she landed? Would anyone see her approaching? Would she be late for her scheduled flight? The spread of waking logic made her aware that she was cold. Of course, space was tremendously cold. The planet's crescent thinned: the world was rotating away from her, and she felt colder still.

Her arms jerked and she awoke. The room was darker even than outer space, which had been littered with stars and occupied by at least one world. Turning revealed the digital clock's faint light on the other side of the bed.

She considered getting up for water, but the notion that she might wake the head in the closet made her curl tighter into herself and pull the sheets up over her face.

Though she'd taken quite a few psychology courses during her undergraduate years, Karen had never, till now, worried about her own psychological state. She had talked to a counselor a few times, a requirement for her senior seminar. The coun selor's room had windows on either side and, as these sessions had taken place on winter afternoons, was always filled with blue light, the kind of light that filtered through a wall of snow when as a child you dug down into a snowdrift. The only other light was from a yellow desk lamp angled toward a stack of papers. The room might not have been cold, but it had felt cold, even when she wore a sweater. But she'd enjoyed talking.

"What's my diagnosis?" she asked after the first session, and the man had said, touching her shoulder, one corner of his mouth twitching into a smile, "Human."

Perhaps now there could be a more serious diagnosis, a pathology. Perhaps she was depressed. Perhaps a therapist would find indications of one of the more serious psychological ailments, one that indicated a break with reality. "Reality is perception," one of her professors had said, meaning, though, that our experience of reality might be quite far from what the mass of humanity perceived.

She tied back her hair, then went to the linen closet.

"Were you crazy?" she asked.

The head blinked and the eyes found her. "Hello."

"Were you crazy?"

"I've not," said the head, but not as if it were starting a sentence.

She tried again. "When you were alive, did people think you were crazy?"

"People think a host of improbable and impossible things."

Just now, Karen could not be sure there were other houses, with people inhabiting them. Her toes gripped the carpet, providing her with the barest certainty about the world.

"Will people know everything some day?"

"Men must not aspire," said the head, "to the knowledge of gods."

She waited where she was till the head had stopped making its faint sounds of mechanical life.

Later that morning, she thought she would take a walk, but from the front window she saw the grass, which had gone unmowed for several weeks, twitching in rain she could not see, so she resigned herself to staying indoors. The only reason the grass hadn't grown longer during this season of abandonment was the long lack of sustained rain, a national situation.

After her shower, after an early lunch, she dressed for her overnight journey, leaving the linen closet closed, but watching the door with something like concern. As she left, she thought of calling out, "I'll be back in a few days," but it seemed too cruel to awaken the head in the dark.

Driving to the airport under a purple sky, a meager red fissure high ahead of her indicating the presence of the sun, she feebly tried to conceive of a plan to return the head to its owners. She saw herself restoring it to the zippered sack. The fantasy progressed no further.

On the first flight, they rose through a storm, thunder resounding through the plane. The sky spoke and spoke again. Then they shook their way through the clouds and were above the disturbance.

"Maybe I'll take you out of here today."

"You might," the head answered with perfect comprehension and sagacity, and without any pressure or judgment.

Only as Karen stepped off the mall escalator and turned toward the ground floor entrance to the bookstore did she wonder what exactly she had planned. She recalled images that had accompanied the original idea, born of too many hours sitting in the hotel room: her with one of Richard's books in the bookstore café, reading aloud as the robot head listened; kneeling among the shelves and holding the head before a row of his own books, saying, "There's your life's work." Paused twenty feet from the electronic security panels, amid moderate traffic, she nearly set down the bag, which took on not merely weight but the accumulated evidence of her foolishness.

Still, she
was
here. Last night, Karen took the head back into the first bedroom and plugged it in, granting it, she hoped, a full charge. She headed into the store. Evidently, she hadn't adequately secured the head, or it had shifted during the car ride, because it rolled a bit in the bag as she walked, just enough to make her profoundly conscious of the curve of the head. She stopped swinging her right arm, knowing she probably looked foolish.

She passed uneasily between the head-high security panels. Were they metal detectors, too? But no alarm sounded, and she continued, in her straight-armed fashion, into the store. She passed rows of videos and CDs, the shelves all blond wood, the store suffused with light; she passed through a glass archway, excused herself through clumps of people studying magazine racks, and emerged into another wide space of only books. She looked about till she saw a sign reading SCIENCE FICTION, and she mouthed the words. Unless all the ambient noise had awakened it, the head would be switched off and thus surprised, which gave her a thrill.

More than a dozen of Richard's titles, multiple copies of most, filled an entire shelf and then some. She crouched before them. This was impressive; she'd had no idea. Another woman was in the aisle, a few steps away, swaying slightly as she stood reading titles. A mountainous, long-bearded man entered the aisle from Karen's other side. He wore a hat that made her think he was a man of the woods, living by his wits in the natural world. She had to stand to let him stride by. She stood and waited, and when the woman—she watched her long enough to see she might be a girl, the face seeming younger the longer she looked—decisively slid a book from the shelf, Karen resumed her crouch and prepared to act.

Times like these try the souls of everybody, she thought, knowing she had gotten that somewhat wrong and that, in any case, the line probably applied to more serious matters than this. Shortly, though, she was alone in the aisle. Karen reached into her bag, pushed aside the concealing sweater and flight attendant jacket, slid her hand under the head, and found she needed two hands for the task. Bringing the head to the lip of the bag, she checked for intruders, then tilted it toward the shelf.

"Richard," she said. "You have to see this."

Under her hand, it whirred and warmed. "Greetings," it said, and she flinched against how loud and strange the voice seemed here.

"We're at the bookstore. These are your books. I brought you to the bookstore. What do you think?"

"Bookstores have given me years of pleasure," it said, the neck wriggling.

"Can't you whisper?"

"That's an interesting thought," it said, just as loud.

"Rrrr," she said, and squeezed the head a little. "Look. They're your books. Can you see them?"

The head continued to fuss.

"Stop moving." It did not. "Please stop moving." She understood that it was looking for her face. "Wait," she said. "Can you read?"