Free Asimov's Science Fiction: December 2013 by Penny Publications

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