Human Female was never out of his thoughts, especially with this prime example by his side.
It was curious (but he had never been acculturated to think it was undesirable in any way) that he had to look up when he spoke to her. She was easily six feet tall. She was also, he learned, extraordinarily strong for a Human Female, though to Sandy she seemed willowy. She had red hair that came down her back in two, long, twisty braids; she had green eyes and a strong, almost beaked nose; and it astonished Sandy that in all his twenty-odd years he had never before realized that the ideal Human Female beauty was composed of red, braided hair, green eyes, and a nearly beaked nose.
The only thing that kept him from thinking of nothing else, in fact, was the fact that there were so many other things that were, in different ways, almost equally exciting. Shopping, for instance. When they reached the place where shopping was performed the sign over the door said:
BERNEE’S
Other signs said:
SLAX
SPORTERS
JOGGING
CASUALS
The signs were fascinating to look at for Sandy, because they lighted up in bright colors, because they moved before his eyes, and most of all because they said such tantalizingly mysterious, ineffably human things as the cryptic:
Double Coupon Credits on Thursdays!
In spite of the constant flashing of the signs, the three newcomers were the only ones in the store looking at the signs. Everyone else, store clerks and shoppers as well, was gaping at Obie and Polly.
Obie was clowning again. He had found a huge shoe—it was a window display, certainly not anything meant for any human being to wear—and was holding it against his own immense foot. The laughter embarrassed Sandy, but a cautious peek at Marguery Darp showed that she was laughing, too, and so apparently Obie was not giving any real offense.
Anyway, the process was fascinating. This wasn’t pretend shopping, as they had practiced on the ship, but really taking “money” and exchanging it with a “salesperson” for “clothes.”
“Actually,” Marguery Darp explained, “you don’t really need any money right now.”
“I don’t?”
“Oh, no. You’re our guests. InterSec will pick up your hotel bills—and travel, and all that kind of thing. But if you want to pay for personal purchases yourself—”
“I’d like that,” Sandy assured her. “Where do I get some ‘money’?” That was the easiest part. Marguery took away a couple of his gold nuggets and came back with a sheaf, as thick as her thumb, of rectangular pieces of printed paper.
“That should last for a while,” she said. “Don’t you think?”
“There’s plenty more gold where that came from,” he assured her gallantly. He had already begun fingering some of the clothes. The stuff the Hakh’hli costumers had run up for him, he discovered at once, was nothing like the Real Thing. Trousers were not slick and poreless. Trousers came in soft fabrics that somehow nevertheless held a crease, and inside they were often lined with some fabric even softer. Moreover (ah, so that was how they did it!) the trousers were equipped with “zippers” in the front, so that they could be opened when necessary. Neckties weren’t simple strips of cloths. They were sewn as tubes, and inside was something that stiffened them so they appeared flat. Shoes were not pressed out of a single kind of plastic; they had one kind of thing for the upper parts, a harder kind for the soles, and a hard but springy kind for the heels. Jackets had pockets on the inside. Belts weren’t just ornaments; they had to go through little loops on the trousers, and then they held the trousers up. Hats didn’t just keep your head warm, they protected the scalp from the sun. Socks, underwear, shirts—oh, everything was different, really. And a lot nicer!
The only problem was that none of these wonderful things seemed to fit Lysander Washington at all.
He could squeeze his massive torso into the largest sizes, all right, but then a sweater became almost a calf-length smock, sleeves hung down past his fingertips, and the legs of the trousers had to be rolled up nearly a foot. Marguery explained that those difficulties could be dealt with, though. They just required paying over a few hundred more of these “dollars,” because the store had on its premises half a dozen humans whose only work was to cut and shape the factory-made clothing items to the particular requirements of the individual human frame. “So just pick out things you like,” she said, “and we’ll see about getting them fitted.” She glanced worriedly toward the front of the store, where Obie and Polly were raucously telling the Earth humans the Hakh’hli names for “foot” and “head” and other, less public, anatomical areas. “I’d better see what’s going on,” she said. “Excuse me just a minute.”
So Sandy was allowed to wander almost by himself, marvelling. So many articles of clothing! For so many different parts of the anatomy, in so many fabrics, so many textures, so many colors—and with so very many buttons, laces, zippers, cuffs, pockets, patches, fringes, ruffs, and things of every imaginable kind, structural, ornamental or, Sandy decided, just plain silly. (What could possibly be the purpose of an undergarment without a crotch? It might, he thought, conceivably be an adaptation for the pendulant male anatomy, but why was it in a section marked “Ladies’ Lingerie”?)
He saw that a young woman was gaping at him. She had just come out of an alcove marked “Dressing Room,” and she had tried on a bikini bathing suit; it occurred to him that he should not be in this particular place. He turned hastily away and blundered into the men’s outerwear section of the huge store, which was filled with racks twenty yards long of nothing but “sports coats,” or nothing but “slacks,” or “suits,” or “formal wear.”
He wandered on, until he found himself in the section devoted to shoes. He admired the glossy, glassy finish of some of them—could almost see his own face reflected, though grossly distorted, in the polished surfaces. And the colors! Lavender inset with diamonds of pale green; peach and pale blue; rainbow scarlet, orange, yellow—why had Marguery urged him to get the dull blacks and browns? For that matter, why had the shoes she suggested for him all been flat, when here were rack after rack of perfectly beautiful ones in all colors, with heels that would easily add five inches to his height?
He smiled forgivingly to himself. No doubt she simply liked the idea of being taller than he was. No matter; he had found the shoes he liked. He marched with a pair in each hand to a desk and asked the astonished woman behind it, “Do you have these in my size, please?”
Marguery straightened that out for him. It seemed that shoes were gender-specific things, and men didn’t ordinarily wear such tall heels, but apart from that everything went very easily—not only because buying clothes was considered a quite ordinary, routine kind of thing to do, but because even the sales clerks and the tailors were thrilled to be helping the stranger from an alien spaceship. Everything else waited while the whole staff ran around to do Sandy’s orders. The other customers didn’t mind any more than the store personnel. They crowded around when he was in the open, and some of the men peered openly through the curtains while he was in the changing room. There was no hostility in them, as far as Sandy could tell. Curiosity, yes, a lot of that; but even more, he felt, they were welcoming. Welcoming.
He was home.
And the only really worrying thing was that, with all these humans around him, especially all these human females (none of them as big and glorious as Marguery Darp, but all of them definitely female, all the same), he could not help a certain arousal.
When one of the salesgirls turned her head away, flushed and smiling, as she helped measure his trouser length, and several of the onlookers giggled among themselves, he realized that the bulge of his arousal was showing through the fabric; and what did one do about that?
Among the Hakh’hli, that was an occasion for rejoicing. Any female nearby would have been glad to cooperate. But he wasn’t among the Hakh’hli.
All the films that ever Sandy had watched had not told him exactly how one went about getting it on with a human Earth female, however assiduously he studied them for clues. It wasn’t that there weren’t definite protocols. Indeed, the mating rituals were in fact the main subject of most of the films, especially the ones where the boy and the girl sang love songs to each other and then danced away to the music of an invisible orchestra. Sandy could easily have played the part of Fred Astaire as, in that first, accidental glance, he knew at once that Ginger Rogers was the only woman in the world for him—and was spurned by her with apparent loathing—and, by singing in her ear and whisking her through a waltz or tango, finally melted her frozen heart and tap-danced away with her to, presumably, a bed. But he never heard that invisible orchestra. Besides, he couldn’t dance.