When the first customer in over a tenspan finally entered the Earth Outlet on Spacehub R7F, Rico was sprawled across the counter in his kilt and tartan scarf, not so much drunk as drowning in alien spirits. The digitized jangling of many bells interrupted the soft sitar music playing overhead and Rico started, pushing himself away from the counter. He rubbed his face with exaggerated slowness.

A girl, but from where? So hard to tell, what with the bleached Capprunc storybars covering her fingers and those chopped off Yallda-style lobes. She wore a melange of fashions from the more recently discovered planets in the Human Sphere. It wasn't until she spoke without a surrovoice that Rico realized that this woman wasn't just another human alien. She was from home.

"You from Earth?" she asked, "Or just minding the store for some conglomers?"

"Both. Got bought out by a corp out of Dri-6-raph, but still owe them another month of in-house customer service before the cheap labor from Derf gets here and I can go. Real Earthers are hard to find this far out, I guess. Or just too expensive for an Earth culture shop." He shook his head a little, his brain still a bit fuzzy from drinking. "Looking for something in particular?"

"Hadn't seen an Earth Outlet in forever, so I thought I'd stop in and look around."

"No problem. Take your time. If I can be any help--

"I'll let you know." She smiled at him and turned down the Soft Sciences aisle, the twin pyramids of Arcu-style silicate crusted hair bobbing behind her as she walked.

Rico watched the girl shop from one corner of his eye for awhile, feeling the cheap Arcu liquor from the store down on L42 wearing off. Earth booze was definitely better--even Gni nose-ales were better--but since the Explorers had found Arcu, it seemed that Earth culture had been pushed even farther back into the junk closet of the popular mind.

There had been a time, just after it became the eighth addenda to the Human Sphere, when the minutiae of Earth was everywhere. The system's top designers and crowds of giddy young artists from every planet stole inspiration from its culture like so many Dickensian pickpockets. Mao and Freud found their way onto starship hulls and jelly jars; even the works of Warhol, Blakely and DiCaprio were translated and quantized, available on every culture console in the system. Every Earth Outlet in the populated galaxy suctioned up a profit.

Now look at the place: row after row of dusty datipacks and unused replication terminals and this girl the only customer he could hope for all week. Rico slumped into a rolling wingchair. It was a good thing he'd let them buy him out when he did. The business was collapsing around his ears and no sale on marked-down culture was going to bring back the boom days of Earth-chic.

Everyone was crazy about the Arcuans now, with their burnt-down fibercloud dwellings and spastic chaphawatta prayer-courting. At least their booze was effective, thought Rico, though it tasted a little too much like candle wax. He wished the Explorers would hurry up and find some other band of humans on some new planet, just so there'd be an end to the Arcuan fad. Preferably a planet with yeast in their ecosystem and decent alcohol.

"I can't believe they make you wear a kilt," the girl said, surprising Rico as she dropped a datipack on the counter. "I mean, I can see the company insisting you wear Earth clothes, but you're not even Scottish, are you?"

Rico stood up, grunted. "Not a bit. Just another WestHemi mutt. But they gave me a schedule of Earth clothes to make on the replicators and wear, and I have to follow it. It's in my contract. I don't wear what they say and I don't get my customer service kicker at the end of the month." He shrugged. "Usually it's not so bad. Could be worse. . .

The girl blinked. "I guess so. I don't see what's wrong with just getting the new stuff. I mean, Earth is so dated now. It's like costume party stuff. If you're going to be taken seriously in the Human Sphere, you have to keep up with progress."

It was Rico's turn to blink, but he managed not to, gracing her with a noncommittal smile instead. "If we do not remember our history, we are doomed to repeat it," he said. "That came from Earth and it's as fresh and important now as it ever was."

The girl nudged her datipack forward a little. "Well the Arcuans have a saying that 'yesterday destroyed the future, but moment by moment it has already been rebuilt'. Or maybe that's the Yalldans who say that. But anyway, it's about staying right at the edge of time and awareness. And Earth is so far in the past, how can it possibly keep up? There've been ten more planetfulls of humans found since they brought Earth into the Human Sphere." She stopped abruptly, sighed. "You remind me of my great grandmother. She used to always go on about how super the Earth music was when she was young, you know--before. That's who I'm buying this for, my great Grammy Harriet. She says she can't get them back home anymore."

Rico took the hint, smoothed down his kilt and began unlocking the datipack. "You mean she's still on Earth and they can't get--" he looked at her purchase "Popular music from 1960-69?"

"They had some kind of data outage a while back, you remember the one everyone says was probably engineered by some shady corp types just to keep the premium on Earth culture high?"

Didn't work, Rico thought. The girl went on: "I guess some things are only available out here now, and have to be re-imported back to Earth." She flashed him a lopsided All-WestHemi Girl grin. "Grammy used to love this one singer, Eddy Arnold, and wants to rebuild her collection. So I figured I'd subspace it to her for her hundred and fiftieth."

"I should have such a nice great-granddaughter when I get that old," Rico said. But at a hundred fifty, she's still barely halfway into her years. Why doesn't she travel?"

The girl grinned. "Just stuck in her ways I guess. She never left Earth, didn't even enter the Free Ride Lotteries. Happy to bloom where she's planted, I suppose."

Rico finished entering the eighty-two digit code into his keypen and held the digipack aloft. The girl slid Capprunc storybars from two of her fingers and spread them wide, revealing the flat black circle of waveport glass between. Rico mounted the datipack onto the keypen and pointed it at the girl's waveport. The keypen flashed purple to signal that the funds transfer had been completed, and then yellow when the data had been entered into the girl's flesh cache.

Rico was drinking again soon after the girl left. This time an old Earth brew called Ki-Rin. Something about the encounter with the pyramid-haired girl had left him more depressed than he already was, and no alien liquor would do.

Back when he was forty and finally old enough to leave the mandatory carousing and university life behind to move into the job force, it seemed like he held the entire world in the palm of his hand. But even at forty, the entry level jobs were tough to find and even tougher to keep. Like so many others, when his Free Ride came, he took it, eventually settling on Spacehub R7F and opening the Earth Outlet franchise with a Sphere Grant.

He rolled the Ki-Rin around on his tongue, breathing in the smell of the fauxglass bottle and the chemically reconstructed beer. He was drinking up the profits, so to speak, but it wasn't his bottom line to worry about any more, at least once the end of the month came.

The girl was back a few days later. "Why are you drinking every time I come in here?" she asked him.

"Because you're the only one who's even set foot in the store, and now you're probably back with a return."

She wriggled her nose at him. "The datipack had something wrong with it. I tried to listen to the Eddy Arnold song but it just kept repeating the same words over and over."

Rico smiled at her. "They did that a lot back on Earth. Some of the other planets do it too, apart from the Urvsmaw. Those people don't even have music. Too much ambient noise with all that constant rushing wind and peizostatic."

She pressed her lips together, disbelieving. "Are you sure? I'd hate to subspace her something messed up for her birthday. None of the Arcuan stuff, or even the Gni or practically anything modern repeats itself."

"Let me boot it up," Rico said, using the old Earth term deliberately. He took great care not to stagger as he went past her to get the datipack from its place on the shelves. She giggled as he stepped out from behind the counter in his flower printed shorts and rubber topless shoes.

"Should have seen me yesterday," he said as he waved the datipack in front of the store's acoustic waveport. "I had this Fu Manchu thing going on."

The girl smiled and nodded, but Rico could see that the reference was lost on her. He cocked his head as the first song began, then read over the datipack's menu. "Scroll to: Last Word in Lonesome is Me," he subvocalized, pinching the control unit clipped to his flowery shorts. The music stopped suddenly then restarted on the Eddy Arnold tune.

They stood there listening to the short piece for not much more than a milliday. When it was over, the girl was shaking her head, grimacing. "So that's the way it used to be, they just kept saying the same stuff over and over?"

"Sometimes."

Another song came on, this one loud and abrasive. Rico turned it off with a whisper. "The new owners have a no-return policy," he said, raising his shoulders then letting them slump. "But I do think your great-grandmother will enjoy this datipack. There are a lot more in the style of Eddy Arnold on it, and probably a few more of his in that decade. Plus a bunch of the rock 'n' roll music, too."

"That's okay," the girl said, "I don't want to return it." She twirled a finger in her hair, which today was in another Arcuan style: the bob-shave. She reached a hand out and let it rest on the counter. Something about that song made Rico long to take those storybars off her hands and lace his fingers into hers, but he did not.

After a moment, the girl said, "What are you going to do? When the new owners get here, I mean. You should sign up like I did," she went on, not giving him time to respond. "I just joined the Explorers. Maybe I'll even be on the ship that finds the next Human Planet and brings them into the Sphere. That would be so amazing. Can you imagine? Being one of the first to know what the next big thing is going to be, and being young enough to take advantage of it? Well, if we find anything in the next sixty years anyway."

Rico shook his head, ignoring the soft pops of vertebrae as he did, telling himself that he should not be hearing them already when he was still but a pup of fifty-two. "No, I can't. I might go back to Earth, though."

She cringed, withdrew her hand from the counter. The horror-stricken look on the girl's face told him all he needed to know about her feelings on that subject. "Back to Earth?"

They talked a few more minutes, but it seemed like all the warmth had gone out of the Spacehub. Before long, the girl with the Arcuan bob-shave and all that youth still in her departed the store and Rico realized he had never even asked her name.

He closed up early and sat there in the dark, drinking synthetic gin and listening to Eddy Arnold repeat himself for a long, long time, feeling the years swell up and around him like so many twangy steel guitar notes. He thought again about what she had said about the Explorers, and how he still had nearly as much life left in him as she did. He thought and he drank and before long it was morning and his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth just as the left side of his face was stuck to the wingchair. His head was splitting and he realized that damned song was still playing, over and over. He stood up, stripped, tossed his clothes into the dereplicator and then slid a gesic strip under his tongue.

Naked as a man from Gni, Rico checked the garb schedule the new owners had sent ahead. "Loincloth and bone necklaces" he muttered, pressing the replicator's control pad. "Not much better."

He sighed, slumped into the chair, relishing its coolness against the still supple flesh of his back and buttocks. Feeling older than his years and marooned far from home, Rico rocked back and forth. He was waiting for the gesic strip to work its magic on his aching head, waiting for the replicator to signal that it had finished construding his earthwear, waiting for the new owners to come and pay him for his time and send him away with a full credit cache.

The replicator chimed completion first, and Rico stood to dress, moving gingerly to prevent the hangover from lancing into his skull. He applied white chalky paint from a tube to his face and chest, paying careful attention to ensure he matched the printed guidelines exactly.

Back on Earth, they were importing scraps of their own past. Sooner or later, Rico was going to be shipped back himself, perhaps investing before he went in a selection of datipacks filled with Gilgamesh and Custer and Ghandi and Rodin and the Sex Pistols. Drawing whatever profit margin he could from the fallow field of Earth as it used to be.

No one out here understood Rico, appreciated Earth. Not like they should. But back home, maybe there was a big enough market to support a knockoff of Earth Outlet. He grinned at the irony, trying not to think of the girl and the next trendy new planet she might find with the Explorers. Tried not to remember how glad he had been, once upon a time as a younger young man of forty, to finally cut himself free of Mother Earth's gravitational apron strings.

Overhead, Eddy Arnold's voice kept trying to remind him about the last word in lonesome, but Rico already knew that song by heart. His eyes filled up and the bones at his neck rattled as he dabbed a fingertip into the wetness at each corner. Part of him wanted so badly to sing along with that sad dead voice from the past, but there was another part of him that just couldn't. A part that didn't want to sing the song, didn't want to live the song; not any more.

It was the girl. It always came back to a girl, the way things happened on Earth. The thought of her unknown name made him wonder what else about her he might not know.

He pinched the control pad at his waist between two fingers. "Stop," he said to the music, moving toward the door. It shuffled open as he approached. The necklace of bones rattled again and Rico felt the coolness of the Spacehub's main thoroughfare against his all but naked, decidedly non-Aboriginal skin. He looked back at the Earth Outlet's blue-green logo one last time, not even missing the bonus he was walking out on.

Squaring his bare shoulders, Rico set off after the girl, after the strange new planets he knew they could find. The same way men from Earth had been doing for hundreds and thousands of years before him.