Glasshouse

"Okay." I hurry back inside to give Sam his wallet.

Sam is coming downstairs as I go inside. "Here," I say, holding both the wallets out to him, "this one is yours. Can you put these in a pocket for me until I buy one of those shoulder bags? I've got nowhere to put mine."

"Sure." He takes my stuff. "Did you read the tutorial?"

"I started to—I needed something to help me get to sleep. Let's . . . how do we get downtown?"

"I called a taxi. It'll be here to pick us up in a short while."

"Okay." I look him up and down. He's back in costume again. It still looks awkward. I can't help tapping my toes with impatience. "Clothing, first. For both of us. Where do we go? Do you know how the stuff is sold?"

"There's something called a department store, the tutorial said to start there. We might run into some of the others."

"Hmm." A thought strikes me. "I'm hungry. Think there'll be somewhere to eat?"

"Maybe."

Something large and yellow appears outside the door. "Is that it?" I ask.

"Who knows?" He looks twitchy. "Let's go see."

The yellow thing is a taxi, a kind of automobile you hire by the centisecond. There's a human operator up front, and something like a padded bench seat in the rear. We get in, and Sam leans forward. "Can you take us to the nearest department store?" he asks.

The operator nods. "Macy's. Downtown zone. That will be five dollars." He holds out a hand and I notice that his skin is perfectly smooth and he has no fingernails. Is he one of the zombies? I wonder. Sam hands over his "credit card" and the operator swipes it between his fingers, then hands it back. Sam sits back, then there's a lurch, and we're moving. The taxi makes various loud noises, so that I'm afraid it's about to suffer a systems malfunction—there's a loud rumbling from underneath and a persistent whine up front—but we turn into the road and accelerate toward the tu

Sam is frowning over his tablet, then straightens up. "This way," he says. Before I can ask why, he heads off toward one of the nearest buildings, which has a row of doors in it. I follow him.

Inside the store, I get lost fast. There's stuff everywhere, piled in heaps and stacked in storage bins, and there are lots of people wandering about. The ones in the odd-looking uniforms are shop operators who're supposed to help you find things and take your money. There are no assemblers and no catalogues, so I suppose they can only sell the stuff they've got on display, which is why it's all over the place. I ask one of the operators where I can find clothes, and she says, "on the third floor, ma'am." There are moving staircases in a central high-ceilinged room, so I head for the third level and look around.

Clothes. Lots of clothes. More clothes than I've ever imagined in one place—and all of them made of dumb fabric with no obvious way of finding what you want and getting it adjusted to the right size! How did they ever figure out what they needed? It's a crazy system, just putting everything in the middle of a big house and letting visitors take their chances. There are some other people walking around and fingering the merchandise, but when I approach them they turn out to be zombies, playing the part of real people. None of the others are here yet. I guess we must be early.

I wander through a forest of racks hung with jackets until I catch a shop operator. "You," I say. "What can I wear?"

She looks like an orthohuman female, wearing a blue skirt and jacket and those shoes with uncomfortable heels, and she smiles at me robotically. "What items do you require?" she asks.

"I need—" I stop. "I need underwear," I say. The stuff doesn't clean itself. "Enough for a week. I need some more pairs of hose"—since I tore the one on my left leg—"and another outfit identical to this one. And another set of shoes." A thought strikes me. "Can I have a pair of pants?"

"Please wait." The shop operator freezes. "Please come this way." She leads me to a lectern near a display of statues wearing flimsy long gowns, and another operator comes out of a door in the wall carrying a bundle of packages. "Here is your order. Pants, item not available in this department. Please identify a template, and we will supply correctly sized garments."

"Oh." I look around. "Can I choose anything here?"

"Yes."

I spend a couple of kiloseconds wandering the shop floor, looking for stuff to wear. They sell very few pants here, and they look damaged—made of a heavy blue fabric, ripped open at the knees. Eventually I end up in another corner of the store where there's a rack of trousers that look all right, plain black ones with no holes in them. "I want one of these in my size," I say to the nearest operator, a male one.

"Item not available in female fitting," he says.

"Oh. Great." I scratch my head. "Can you alter it?"

"Item not available in female fitting," he repeats. My netlink bings. A red icon appears over the rack of pants: SUMPTUARY VIOLATION.

"Hmm." So there are restrictions on what they'll sell to me? This is getting a

"Please wait." I wait, fidgeting impatiently. Eventually another male operator appears from an inconspicuous door in the shop wall, carrying a bundle. "Your gift item is here."

"Uh-huh." I take the pants, suppress a grin, and think about these irritating shoes and how . . . "Take me to the shoe department. I want a pair of shoes in my size fitting, for a male—"

When I pay using the "credit card," I score a couple more social points: I've made five so far.

I catch up with Sam down in the furniture department about five kiloseconds later. We're both massively overloaded with bags, but he's bought a portable container called a ‘suitcase' and we shove most of our purchases into it. I've bought a shoulder bag and a pair of ankle boots that have soft soles and don't clatter when I walk—I shoved my old shoes into the bag, just in case I need them for some reason—and I'm a lot more comfortable walking around now. "Let's go find somewhere to eat," he suggests.

"Okay." There's an eatery on the other side of the road from Macy's, and it's not unlike a real one, except that the food is delivered by human (no, zombie) attendants, and is supposed to be prepared by other humans in the kitchen. Luckily, this is a simulation, or I'd feel quite ill. For deep combat sweeps they teach you how to synthesize food from biological waste or your dead comrades, but that's different. This is supposed to be civilization, of a kind. We order from a menu printed on a sheet of white film, then sit back to wait for our food. "How did your shopping go?" I ask Sam.

"Not too badly," he says guardedly. "I bought underwear. And some trousers and tops. My tablet says there are a lot of social conventions surrounding clothing. Stuff we can wear, stuff we can't wear, stuff we must wear—it's a real mess."

"Tell me about it." I tell him about my difficulty ordering trousers that didn't have holes in them.

"It says—" He pulls his tablet out. "Ah, yes. Sumptuary conventions. It's not legally codified, but trousers weren't allowed for females early in the dark ages, and skirts weren't allowed for males at all." He frowns. "It also says the customs appear to have changed sometime around the middle of the period."

"You're going to stick by the book?" I ask him, as a zombie walks up and deposits a glass of pale yellow liquid called beer next to each of our settings.

"Well, they can always fine us," he says, shrugging. "But I suppose you're right. We don't have to do anything we're not comfortable with."