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support the vicious pace of change that has sand-blasted the human world until all the edges people cling
to are jagged and brittle.
Beyond the lobsters, the cat finds an anonymous eternity server: distributed file storage, unerasable, full
of secrets and lies that nobody can afford to suppress. Rants, music, rip-offs of the latest Bollywood hits:
the cat spiders past them all, looking for the final sample. Grabbing it a momentary breakup in
Manfred's spectacles the only symptom either human notices the cat drags its prey home, sucks it
down, and diffs it against the data sample Annette's exocortex is analyzing.
I'm sorry, my love. I just sometimes feel he sighs. Age is a process of closing off opportunities
behind you. I'm not young enough any more: I've lost the dynamic optimism.
The data sample on the pirate server differs from the one Annette's implant is processing.
You'll get it back, she reassures him quietly, stroking his side. You are still sad from being mugged.
This also will pass. You'll see.
Yeah. He finally relaxes, dropping back into the reflexive assurance of his own will. I'll get over it, one
way or another. Or someone who remembers being me will....
In the darkness, Aineko bares teeth in a silent grin. Behind its feline eyes, a braid of processes running
on an abstract virtual machine asks it a question that cannot be encoded in any human grammar.Watch
and wait, it replies to the alien tourist.They'll figure it out, sooner or later.
Copyright © 2001 by Charles Stross.
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Touch Painby Cecilia Tan
Cecilia Tan is the author ofThe Velderet ,Black Feathers , andTelepaths Don't Need Safewords, and
has edited over thirty anthologies of erotic science fiction for Circlet Press. Her stories have appeared in
Ms. magazine,Best American Erotica , andAbsolute Magnitude . Touch Pain is her first tale for
Asimov's .
[Back to Table of Contents]
I met Lizette the summer after my mother died. I was doing that thing they call keeping busy, working
afternoons at the Arts Coop shelving books and doing handiwork. Stuart Green introduced us, actually,
ironic as that may seem what with Stuart having been the last man I attempted to date, what, twenty
years ago? Maybe he felt like he was making up for it somehow. Anyway, it was Stuart, soft around the
middle and gray around the edges, who tugged on my sleeve one late summer day and said, There's
somebody you should meet.
I carried my box of used books to a wicker table in the corner and stood there holding them while he
introduced Lizette Pierce, and then stood there shuffling his feet. Lizette rose after a moment and said
Nice to meet you, and tried to shake my hand, whereupon I put the books down on a chair and Stuart
said something about needing to get back to the store. He went to the coffee bar, asked for something to
go, and then waved as he crossed the street to his place. Convenient, this little slice of culture in our
upstate town. Clustered at one end of Main we've got Earthways Stuart's new age health food
place a handmade furniture outlet, and the Arts Coop: part bookstore, part art gallery, part café in
what used to be the old post office. The new post office wasn't new anymore, either; they'd built it
when I was a child. But the old postwar building still reminded me of riding my father's shoulders to pick
up Christmas packages from distant relatives. Whenever I walked into the place, I could almost hear the
echoey sound of the clerks bantering and see Mr. Grimes, the postmaster, peering at me from under his
visor.
I soon figured out why Stuart insisted Lizette and I meet. Stuart was one of the few who knew for sure
that she and I did have one significant feature in common. Despite the obvious differences she was ten
years younger than me, a well-groomed flowery kind of woman, while I am a denim-jacketed lumberjack
type ... I didn't ask how he knew about her. He only knew about me as a result of our ill-fated prom
date and my radical change in appearance after my first semester of college. It was nosy of him, but I
liked her; she had a nice smile and she liked books. It wasn't long before I had asked her out to the place
for dinner.
The house had been empty of my mother for seven months then eight if you counted the month she
spent in the hospital and now the house was mine, really mine. I'd come back to live with her four years
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