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humans
do.”
    “And what’s that?”
    “I don’t know. I’ve only just got
here.”
    Drukk was beginning to feel that
Braxx probably had the right idea about smashing this thing up
after all. “But, looking at all those thousands of pictures, and
using your incredible analytical powers, could you not perhaps form
some kind of hypothesis about how the humans do it?”
    The ship was silent for a second or
two. “Hmm,” it said. “I’ve just looked at them all again and I
think the answer must be to wear clothes.”
    “Clothes? What’s that?”
    The ship threw up an image of a
naked Loosi Beecham, rotating it slowly. “This is the human’s
natural state. Yet this is how they frequently appear.” The image
changed to show the creature’s skin changing colour and texture and
hanging in folds. “I thought at first that they were undergoing
physical changes in their exodermic layers but now I’m fairly sure
that they are covering their bodies in pieces of woven fabric and
sometimes skins removed from other species. They call it
clothing.”
    There were several cries of “Yeuk!”
and similar expressions of disgust. “But why would they do that?”
Drukk demanded.
    “That’s what I thought. They
obviously don’t do it to insulate their bodies or to protect
themselves from the environment. It would be inconceivable that a
species would have evolved that cannot live comfortably on its home
planet without protection. So it has to be for some other reason.
My guess is that they use clothing to identify one another. This
would account for the otherwise inexplicable variety of styles,
textures and colours.”
    It seemed odd in the extreme but,
as the old Corps saying went, “There’s nowt so queer as
aliens.”
    “But we don’t have any of this
‘clothing’,” Drukk said. “Where can we get some?”
    In an instant, the Loosi image
disappeared and was replaced with a picture of a large building.
“This,” said the ship, “is what the humans call a ‘department
store’. You will find there are twenty-nine of them within three
hundred kilometres of this site.”
    -oOo-
    Wayne went early to O’Shaunessey’s.
In fact, he went straight there from meeting Sam. He’d had three
pints of Guinness and a cheese sandwich before he started to feel
better.
    His life was not really what he’d
expected. As a child, he’d been totally oblivious to most of what
went on around him. His parents’ coaching in the various social
skills had washed over him with barely a trace. His expensive,
private schooling had made hardly a dent in his blissful ignorance.
Yet he had not had a happy life. His natural intelligence and
sensitivity had made him a target for every bullying jock in the
school—including the ones that taught there—and his family treated
him like an alien being. He had a couple of friends but even Wayne
could see that they were sad and dysfunctional types. The three of
them clung to each other like men overboard, clinging to deckchairs
in a big, cold ocean.
    His only solace had been his music.
He learned the piano before he learned to write and played the
violin in the school orchestra with a skill his teachers seized on
in their determination to find something with which he could help
the school win prizes. But his true love was the guitar. His father
didn’t understand at first—the guitar was a perfectly acceptable
classical instrument—but one day he came home from work early to
find Wayne playing along to some old Eric Clapton recordings and he
knew that all hope was lost, that his only son was a hopeless
waster and would never amount to anything. “At least I still have
Sam,” he raged at his totally bemused son. “At least one of my
children is going to amount to something.”
    “It’s only the blues Dad.”
    “The blues, is it? Let me tell you
about the blues, young man. The blues is raising an idiot son who
will never find a job. The blues is being a tired old man who can’t
even depend