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"How can you not have the latest Dirk Sprocket, Drift Detective?" Beka asked as she leaned forward in her pilot's chair. "It's been a month!"
The bored looking guy onscreen said, "There was a copy at El Dorado."
"Somebody rented that while we were there. One copy for rent in this whole section of space?"
"It's not my fault. Its publisher is controlling its rental rights and distribution very carefully. Go buy it if you want it that badly."
"I love Dirk Sprocket, but they're not holo-novels you buy. I read each one once, maybe twice if I want to make sure that the clues actually work." Besides, she had debt up to her eyeballs. Buying something she'd read maybe twice when she could rent it much cheaper didn't compute.
"We have what we have. Our site is updated daily, so comming me, sweet as it may be, isn't going to get you a different answer."
"Beka," Rev said, "patience is--"
"Something I'm not known for."
Still looking at the site on his screen, Harper said, "Hey, boss, they have a book on the Bellerophon written by a human! That one done by a Perseid was so far off that it was more like a comedy than a history."
"You're an aficionado of Earth things?" the rental guy asked.
"Yeah."
"We just got a very old Earth novel in that was put on new media, from a find a few months ago. It may be a few thousand years old." Such finds happened often enough that they couldn't immediately be sneered at as fakes.
Harper asked, "What's its name?"
"Bridget Jones's Diary. From what I can tell, it's geared more toward women, but the historical detail might make it interesting for you. It takes place in the pre-United Earth era."
The problem with talking to these people face to face was that they always tried to make you spend more. Beka said, "It's chick lit, Harper."
"Yeah, but it's historically interesting chick lit, and the rental price isn't bad," he answered. "I'll put that on my list."
She better get the guy off the comm before he got them to spend more. "Thanks. We'll order from the site. Get Dirk Sprocket in, will you? Valentine out." To Harper she said, "I don't get your taste in novels," as she scanned the item's description. It sounded dull and annoying.
"I've been there, lived that on horror and true crime novels. Romance is just depressing right now, since you're still resisting my charms."
"Yeah, and I'll continue to, but who cares about some bimbo trying to lose weight, stop smoking, and get laid thousands of years ago?"
"One man's mundane and desperate existence is another man's Technicolor." It sounded like a quote, and Beka figured out the meaning from context, because she had no idea what Technicolor was. "Beka, for me it's about the history. It was a time on Earth when the only people who could screw up the planet were human beings. We were masters of our own destiny then. I'm sure that the Vedrans had good intentions, but look where it led us."
"Yeah, into better space travel."
"And a broader universe," Rev said.
"Yeah, but humans lost something. The Vedrans come to us with tech way advanced beyond our own and say, 'How quaint. You're still using that? Buy this and try it instead.' And it's better, but we don't know how their tech evolved to get there, and the evolution is where the fun is. So much great stuff humans made was an accident or side effect of the search for something else. We lost that. Nobody wanted to go back and rebuild the wheel on what the Vedrans gave them because then they'd miss out on more advances. We're borrowers instead of innovators. Well, except for the designer genes/Nietzschean thing, and look where that went." Harper suddenly looked very earnest, which always disturbed Beka. "Do you ever feel like everybody else thinks we're the cockroaches of the universe? 'We' being humans?"
"Nope." Harper had weird lapses in his sense of self-worth sometimes, and Beka wondered if it came from growing up on a slave planet.
"We were only in the Commonwealth because the Perseids liked us. The Vedrans didn't think we were worth the trouble."
"Ancient history. The Vedrans hightailed it when the Fall started to look really rough, and the Commonwealth is dust, so they don't matter anymore. We're here."
"Sure. But the fantasy of this kind of book is that the bimbo only had to worry about losing weight, trying to stop smoking, and getting laid. Since I had starvation, plagues, rampaging Magog and Nietzscheans, and slavers to worry about, it looks to me like she had an attractive life."
Feeling that everything had gotten too serious, Beka said, "You're still trying to get laid."
"Rub it in. Please." Harper smiled a little. "People trying to get laid is a theme for the ages, always in style. You know, there are people who probably think that our mundane lives are pretty exotic."
"People are idiots."