Connie pushed the thought out of her mind and began to bargain with herself. I will wait twenty more seconds, she thought to herself, and then I will leave and tell Tug that I tried, but no one was home. She reached and yanked the door chimes hastily, as a gesture to prove to herself that she had really tried, that she wasn’t running away. But the door jerked back from her fingers, the chime handle rapping her knuckles as it moved away. Without thinking, she raised the injured fingers to her mouth, and there she stood, sucking at her fingers like an infant with the old man staring out at her.
“Well?” he demanded.
She snatched her hand down from her mouth, tried to find an answer to what wasn’t a question. “Tug,” she blurted stupidly. The grating still stood between her and the old man. Beyond him she could glimpse a very dim and untidy room. He kept staring at her. His eyes had been brown, but the colors seemed to have leaked out into the whites, giving his eyes a smeary look. “Tug sent me to get some recordings from you,” she finally managed.
“Idiot,” the old man hissed at her. “Do shut up, now.” He did something on his side of the door, and the grate suddenly swung out toward her. “Come inside, and quickly now. Quickly!” the old man barked when she hesitated.
She obeyed, stepping inside into the untidiness, feeling her bowels churn as first the grate and then the door shut behind her. It was suddenly darker, and an odor of closeness and spilled food swelled up around her. She stepped forward, stumbled on something, and stood still again. The old man ignored her hesitation and moved deeper into the shadows of the room. “Move something and sit down,” he advised her testily. “I’ll be right back with his things.” And then he was gone, vanished into some darker alcove, leaving her to bumble in the dimness.
The only light came from a single wall strip, set on minimum. It also seemed to be behind the couch or some long, low piece of furniture. She saw the shape of a chair, moved toward it. Something was on it, hard little blocks, many of them.
“Just put them on the floor, or anywhere.”
The voice so close behind her startled her, and she jumped, sending whatever-they-were cascading to the floor.
“Dammit, not like that!” the old man hissed, as if she had done it deliberately.
Her nervousness at the whole situation suddenly blossomed into anger. “I didn’t mean to knock them down. If there were a little more light in here, I could see what I was doing.”
“If there were a little more light in here,” the old man retorted sarcastically, “there wouldn’t be much left to move around. All the stuff in this generation was made photo-sensitive. Light is all it takes to start triggering the breakdown. Remind Tug of that when you give them to him. He’d better plan on using them in the dark, or on rerecording them immediately. Because they’re right on the cusp. Put them in light, and they aren’t going to last long.”
The old man was acting as he spoke. Connie couldn’t see clearly what he was doing, but there was the click of little plastic boxes being stacked against one another. She leaned closer; he was packing box after box into a woven carry sack. He started to fold the cover flap, then paused a moment. Connie could feel him looking at her in the dark.
“Now, he’s going to find more here than he asked for,” the old man declared suddenly. As if the statement marked a decision he had just reached, he knelt stiffly down and reached under the couch. He grunted, struggling with something, and then Connie heard a light thud as something dropped to the floor beneath the couch. The old man dragged out a heavy box, letting it scrape across the flooring. When he pried open the lid, Connie heard a sudden hiss and smelt the telltale sour of preservegas. Illegal for private citizens to have that. She swallowed.
The old man sat down on the floor by the box, his knees popping protestingly as he did so. He took out something wrapped tightly in white film and held it close to his eyes. He grunted in satisfaction and pushed it down deep in the carry sack, talking as he did so. “I know the kind of stuff he told me to watch for. Old literature in nonstandard languages, poetry, damn mystery novels. Well, he got what he paid for. But here’s a little bonus. Maybe the biggest mystery of all. Ever hear of Epsilon Station, kid?”
“Epsilon is a myth,” Connie replied automatically. Everyone had heard of Epsilon, at least everyone old enough to be allowed unsupervised time. Connie thought of her generation sibs clustered in little groups on their rest mats, sharing deliciously scary stories of Epsilon Station. Epsilon Station Humans had mutated, or mutinied, or just opened their own vents one day and spaced themselves away. Epsilon Station had created a plague that killed them all and nearly spread to the rest of the Human population, except that one courageous woman had vented the station to space. Epsiloners had stopped taking growth inhibitors and they grew too big for the station and it just burst open under the pressure. Epsiloners had had their own babies, from their own bodies, and made too, too many people, so they killed one another in the corridors and rioted over food and all lived together in the same dwellings, regardless of age.
Connie thought of the story of the shuttle that went way off course and landed on Epsilon and barely escaped from the plague-ridden survivors there. Later, the crew found a mutant tentacled hand, dead and gripping the air-lock wheel. Epsilon was still out there, looping in an exaggerated orbit, and Beastships that ventured too close had been fired upon. She’d heard that last one at the Merchant Marine Academy, from a student old enough to know better. But the story would still be repeated and passed on. Everyone had heard of Epsilon.
“Bullshit!” the old man hissed. Connie recognized it as an ancient oath. “Epsilon wasn’t a myth. It’s a lesson, and one we shouldn’t forget. The Conservancy vented Epsilon, six hundred years ago. Because Epsiloners dared to live as their ancestors had, dared to believe their right to a natural life was as important as a plant’s. So the Conservancy vented them, before their attitude could spread. It’s all here, right here. And I want Tug to have it. See, here, it’s called A Brief History of the Abomination of Epsilon. Conservancy made it, so they masked the truth with their philosophies and lies, but it’s all there, for anyone with one ear and half an eye. Then a few decades later, they got scared some of us might get smart to them, so they hushed it up. Destroyed all copies and references to Epsilon. You tell Tug to study this one. It’s a real mystery all right. If Epsilon was just a myth to scare little children, why’d they make this record? And then why did they destroy every single copy and everything that referred to this record? You answer me that, kid. Answer me that.”
He crawled over the floor to Connie, and she instinctively backed away. Questions, again. Why did they always ask her questions? The man was crazy. Not just unadjusted, but mentally unbalanced. Dangerous. She backed toward the door. But he only started gathering up the boxes Connie had spilled. “He can have all this shit, too. Can’t sell it. No one’s smart enough to buy it. Some of it’s pretty esoteric, and some of it’s weird, and some of it is just plain useless. So I can’t sell the damn things. Fools don’t know what they’re buying anymore, all they talk about is whether or not it’s a collector’s item. They only want the fancy stuff with the pretty pictures. But these are knowledge, damn it all, and it should be saved by someone, somewhere. Even if it’s some ’throp alien.”
The shock of hearing Tug referred to as ’throp, let alone an alien, kept her silent. Alien? She had grown up knowing that the only aliens