NOVEL NEXT Chapter 40: In Search of a Barber
They alighted at Metternich Station-Mainline, "the only Mainline station in the western quadrant," Thete had explained, exiting the sparsely populated train and finding themselves stranded in a brimming sea of humanity. The crush of bodies forced them into streams and, as they passed gantries left permanently open, Betelgeuse' wrist-transceiver buzzed and he looked down at the small screen to see that '7 Chit has been deducted from your digiwallet at an exchange rate of 7 Chit : 1 Credit'. Somewhere behind him Douglas was howling about thieves and the rapacity of Capitalism.
It took them almost twenty minutes to cram themselves into an elevator amidst the thronging bustle, and when the lift-doors opened at 'Level 1' it was almost impossible to squeeze out again.
"My God!" Voke shouted over the bobbing heads, exclaiming loud enough that Betelgeuse could hear. Several Saltillans snapped their heads in his direction, and it was difficult to doubt that they were shooting him dirty looks.
"They're on their way to work," Thete said matter-of-factly, once they found each other again, her expression tight and flat even as they were dragged by that crush of people out into the refreshing mix of blues and oranges that painted the Saltillan morning. They spilled with the multitude of people into the thoroughfare and then were half-carried across it by the liquid press of bodies, and it was several tens of meters past the nearest Saltillan column that the pressure holding them up relaxed and Betelgeuse found himself able to move by his own will again.
They walked on for about fifteen minutes, squeezed up against the rushing Saltillans and hemmed in on both sides by the monolithic juts of the dark-chrome Obelisks, when Thete signaled for them to take the left turn into a descending slope.
The Saltillan Obelisks were spaced farther apart here, with clusters of moldy low-rises and the occasional fifty-story skyscraper filling up the lots between them. The farther they went, the worse the buildings looked, until they came across a wide, squat building hung with dilapidated signage and whose flared eaves were shedding blob-flakes of paint onto the asphalt.
'PRILOGIA,' it read, and below it was another sign inked in what Betelgeuse supposed was Aluaan script.
Thete led them into the messy tangle of buildings, and several streets down Betelgeuse found that the sky became blotted out by a spaghetti mass of wires splaying every which way from slanted and bent utility poles. Now ensconced in the sprawl, every structure looked to be in some sort of disrepair, and the people here were of a rough and hungry sort, staring out from flensed faces and sporting bags of skin that hung so low and deep into their cheeks they could hold a lake of tears without overspilling.
Gouts of steam blasted from the jagged fissures spidering across windows, and the ground was cracked and overlapping in places; the group came to a street covered over by a smooth and perforated bed of concrete, and as they stepped across that hollow shell Betelgeuse found his eardrums tickled by the squeaks of a billion varmint creatures, and there was scrabbling and scratching and a vile stench that rose through the holes to assail their olfaction. When finally Douglas saw fit to comment that the place looked 'low-ses', none of them could find in themselves any basis for disagreement.
They penetrated this closed urban jungle about five or six blocks before Thete came to a stop. Before them was a single-story quonset shack fashioned of cheaply-battened, black-streaked metal. A long, metal sheet had been affixed just above the entrance, and the shaded space was buzzing with several distinct groups of people loitering and skulking about. Betelgeuse glanced cursorily at them and observed an eclectic mix of body-sizes, and when they turned to regard the PLPs, all of them, without fail, scrunched their face up in a mix of suspicion and hostility.
"Looks like I remembered the place after all. Go ahead, it's a barber station," Thete urged, pointing toward the scratched and rusted door.
Betelgeuse glanced at her and held the image of her biological eye in his mind for several seconds. Her charcoal pupil was hazed with remembrance, he thought, and there was enough regret in those puffy cheeks and flaring nostrils and possibly-welling-eye that he might have asked her more. But the thought, once contemplated, was discarded immediately because it felt to him absurd to presume so much into her expression.
He went on past the whispering Saltillans, their feline eyes staring out of faces that were dark as night, and pushed past the door into a rectangular space dimly-lit by failing tube-lights, the others following close behind.
The place was forty meters long and ten meters wide and only sparsely patronized. Cheap leather-gloss barber chairs were crammed side-to-side along both lengths, almost a hundred of them, by Betelgeuse' estimation. A cacophony of clanking and whirring filled his ears, as deca-armed robots, one to each barber chair, serviced their customers with a speed and precision only machines could muster.
It reminded him of home, and for the briefest moment Betelgeuse imagined himself amidst the PiLiPaLa-manufactured robots that serviced the barber-facilities back in the mess-stations of Edom-Zeta. He had frequented those places as a child, endlessly fascinated by the chrome-gray marionettes that could speak and be spoken to, like real human beings. Some PiLiPaLa corpo must have made the decision to equip those robots with AI-Tableaux, and eight-year-old Betelgeuse could not have thanked that person more.
But the metallic barbers here in the Prilogia didn't seem the least bit sapient. They were all arms akimbo, squeaking on wheels across a clangorous steel-studded flooring. Their manufacturers hadn't even seen fit to give them rudimentary heads, so that they resembled wheeled mailboxes upon which nine or ten arachnoid limbs were shoddily welded.
Ringing. An older man entered the barber-station behind them and, ignoring the milling PLPs, made for the nearest barber chair. Betelgeuse heard him snap several clipped instructions to a machine, and, once he settled himself into the chair and shifted himself in sporadic jitters upon those uncomfortable-looking cusions, went right away to dreamland, leaving his snoozing barbate head to the robot.
There was no pretense at connection here, but maybe that was fine.
"Shit! Look at the prices on these!" Douglas groaned, reading off the menu taped to an idling robot's backside.
Betelgeuse walked across the space, his footsteps swallowed by the droning din. He came up beside Douglas and scrutinized the laminated document. Each line item was printed in both Common and the official Aluaan abugida. The Common script read:
Short hair man: 84 Chit
Short hair woman: 110 Chit
Long hair man: 210 Chit
Long hair woman: 260 Chit
Special request: +50 Chit
At an exchange rate of 7 Chit : 1 Credit, the standard rate which the Sylvan Protectorate had pegged its currency to, the price did seem to Betelgeuse quite steep. He looked at his wrist-transceiver and flipped through a series of menus to find that he only had 10.5 Credits left over in his digiwallet. Even though Cacliocos and Entuban had borne the brunt of the 70 demerit points TAF Captain Crowley had imposed upon the company, that still left 5 demerit points over to be shared between the four PLPs. Voke, Douglas and Betelgeuse had footed 1 demerit point each, with Thete footing 2 demerit points, at an exchange rate of 1 demerit : 100 Credits.
That meant 100 Credits (comprising two months as a PLP at 50 Credits per month) deducted straight from Betelgeuse' military account, leaving him with -2.5 Credits in his military account and 10.5 Credits in his digiwallet.
Negative money, indeed.
Betelgeuse furrowed his brow. He still had some money in his anonymous civilian Iron-Trade account, about 2500 Credits comprising 2000 Credits earned from his efforts trading low-value Incunabulum research information on the Pecorino black market and 500 Credits 'start-up capital' gifted to him by his father. He wasn't sure of the details, but it did seem that if he were to link his Iron-Trade account to his military account, he would be potentially risking all of the money that he had—there was no telling how many more demerits he would accrue.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
10.5 Credits was therefore everything he had practicable access to, and it fell short of the 84 Chit / 12 Credit service.
"Fuck," Betelgeuse muttered, his mind already working out a way to phrase the complaint against Captain Crowley's unjust imposition of demerits. If he had learnt anything from his father—Edom Zeta's Premier Lawyer—it was that a good argument could go a long way…
"Thete, we can't buy anything! We're too poor! We're even poorer than these low-ses shits!" Douglas hollered. The older man who was snoozing two rows down woke up with a start, and he threw a hostile glare in the PLPs' direction.
"I'm not paying!" shouted Thete back indignantly, folding her arms against her chest. "I got docked 200 Credits. No way I'm giving you guys more charity."
"Alas, the quest is ended in failure. We have no choice but to turn back," Voke sighed dramatically.
They retraced their steps all the way back to Metternich Station-Mainline. The trip back to Milhub began silently because there was no one else in their train carriage, and because none of them, including Douglas, felt like talking.
"It was a good walk," Betelgeuse saw fit to remark, passing his eyes over Voke's and Douglas' crestfallen expressions.
"It'd have been better if we did what we came out to do," Douglas grumbled. "It's like we're going back empty-handed."
Voke glanced at Douglas and then closed his eyes as though the day, young as it still was, had already rendered him exhausted: "Can't make something out of nothing. The city just warn't made for brokies like us. Alas, alas."
"Alas my fuckin' ass. Stop speaking like that, you sound stupid," Douglas snapped. "And ain't it easy for you to say. Aren't your parents loaded? They prolly put like a couple hundred Credits in your bank account, now that I think about it…"
"You're deaf, that's what you are. I told you they just started a restaurant chain—you know how much debt that puts you in? No money! No mo—"
"Okay, you boys need to shut up," Thete chastised, the tips of her fingers curling into her palms. Her eyelids twitched as she resisted the urge to beat some sense into their heads. "Unless you want them to slap some more demerits onto us. The going rate for disturbing the public order is 200 Credits, last I heard."
At this mention Douglas and Voke went mute and turned away to opposite sides to simmer in silence.
They arrived back in Milhub Station without incident and when they exited the Underground Betelgeuse found that the Saltillan day had transitioned to high noon.
Does it ever get boring? The same day, over and over again. There's no rain, no cloud, no variation to the diurnal cycle. A monotonous life, monotonously lived.
The group traveled down the thoroughfare but did not take the fork toward Barracks Block 50. Instead, they went on toward the western corner of the Saltilla Barracks, where Cacliocos had said to meet, outside the Family Ward.
They passed trimmed hedges and flat fields of artificial grass, forked left between Barracks Blocks 7 and 8, and trod down the narrow asphalt path toward a cul-de-sac. There, a group of familiar faces were waiting.
Staff Sergeant Entuban Kanos was the first to acknowledge them, and he raised his right arm high above his head in greeting; Betelgeuse' gaze ran down the thick and tubular limb and saw that it seemed to be slightly bent about his forearm.
'That's where he was injured during the firefight against Hrodwulf,' mused Betelgeuse. The rest of Entuban was hale and hearty and otherwise massive as ever.
Cacliocos was there as well, dressed, like the rest of the Jegorichians, in the green uniform of the PDF, the epaulets on his shoulders threaded with three silver bars, the triple-stripe evidencing his elevation to the rank of Captain. But the face that was drawn out under that black beret was gaunt, having recovered none of the nobility that Betelgeuse had initially seen fit to note.
Sergeants Von Fenak and Allih Belekov, Corporals Karella Jollow and Venna Tajiran, PFC Gelam Shentor, Privates Misha Kern, Julla Abouztani (Julla now sporting a blacksteel prosthesis in place of his foot) and Smit; they were all there, but Cacliocos stood apart from them like an outcast, suffering.
"I think we're underdressed," whispered Voke, pointing to his dark jacket, its blue lapels creasing with the movement.
"They didn't tell us to come in military formal!" Douglas whispered back, anxiety creeping into his voice.
"It's… it's fine. Just don't draw attention to it," Thete managed, looking very uncertain about herself.
Betelgeuse said nothing and walked on ahead, coming before Cacliocos and saluting crisply. The others followed suit, and the Captain gave his return salute without focusing his eyes on any of them.
"We're all here," Cacliocos said hollowly, his eyes wandering.
"It is seeming like all of us here are twenty minutes early for some reason," Entuban said, chuckling sheepishly and rubbing the nape of his neck, but in that awkward place no one felt comfortable responding to Entuban's attempt at lightening the mood.
The Family Ward was just behind them, a five-story block of concrete and steel spanning many hundreds of meters to either side of the assembly area. Into each floor except the first was cut a row of transomed windows spanning the entire length of the structure, but these windows were fitted with panes of tempered glass that were tinted and thus opaque to outside observers.
There was no more talk. Cacliocos led the grim procession from asphalt to concrete and entered the block through a square entrance. They came into a space centered by a stairwell and whose walls were hung with notice boards plastered to brimming with administrative information. They went up the stairs, one floor, two floors, all the way up to the fifth.
And then they shuffled down the gray-splotched concrete flooring, passing unlit rooms half-obscured by louvered windows and bathrooms within which sputtering fans could be heard. The feeling of death hung over the shaded space like a thick miasma.
They ended at a set of red double-doors upon which wainscoting was glued a decoration of flimsily manufactured flower symbols. The symbols were painted gold, but the paint was peeling in places so that they seemed rather morose, rotting things.
Cacliocos adjusted his uniform and brown tie, and inhaled and exhaled several times. Sweat beaded his forehead and ran down between his eyes and nosebridge to well at the horizontal keloid scar upon his upper lip. Betelgeuse didn't think it had anything to do with exertion, the sweat.
They stepped into a place blasted to uncomfortable clarity by white lighting. There were a multitude of people—more than a hundred women and children and elderly all seated in rows of mismatched plastic chairs—and when they turned their eyes behind them to regard the newcomers Betelgeuse saw faces stained with tears and bodies wracked with sorrow. They were Jegorichians, by their skin color and physiognomies.
"There are many of them," Betelgeuse said, nudging Thete.
"It's a Jegorichian memorial," Thete returned drily.
"Women, I mean, there are so many of them. They conscript those of White grade and lower, don't they?"
"They all have children," Thete indicated, pointing with her chin. "Women eligible for conscription are given the option to serve their obligation by bearing children. Two children minimum, if I am remembering correctly."
The front of the space, to which the people had been facing, had been decorated to resemble the chancels of the Democratic Libraries. A table had been placed there as a makeshift altar, and it was covered with a bleached-white cloth. Upon the altar was set objects fashioned of plaster: a crown, a scepter and a book upon a stand, representing an Incunabulum.
The voices raised in prayer petered out and then disappeared into the background.
Several seconds passed in silence, the soldiers looking at the people, the people looking at the soldiers. An old man rose to his feet, tottering precariously, and a woman with long, waist-length hair who was sitting adjacent to the aisle came forward to help him navigate the maze of knees and backrests.
The man was old and balding, but his jaw was cut at a sharp angle and Betelgeuse stared at it and was reminded of someone he had just recently come to know.
"Mizza… Mizza?" the man asked, rasping sounds from a throat gone bad. His eyes were positioned a little too far apart, and now that his face had cracked down the middle with sorrow Betelgeuse found a difficult feeling well up within his soul.
Misha Kern stepped forward to take the man in her arms, and the man's helper stepped back to give her some space. They embraced, and Misha whispered words—Aluaan words, Aluaan consolations—that sounded to Betelgeuse both soothing and sad.
A strangled moan escaped from the old man's mouth, and Misha's body trembled powerfully. Waves of emotion emanated from the two, and they were the emotions of people most intimate to the man who had been named Mizzarin Asaghar.
And those family members who found their loved ones amongst the living visitors started to come forward tentatively, confirming the face and features, then embracing the objects of their scrutiny. Relief. But these counted for a vanishingly small proportion of the people here; the man who must have been Mizzarin's father had begun wailing, and most of the others in the space recoiled and cried themselves, unable to find their children, their husbands, their parents amongst the living.
The old man cried the name of his child, Mizza, Mizza, mixing into his garbled prayers words that were both Common and Aluaa; Misha continued to whisper things into his ears, and they were grasping each other tightly now, gripping each other's clothes so hard their knuckles turned white.
And their sobs mixed with the wails of the others, until the walls of that place reverberated with the lamentations of mourners. The families who had been blessed with live sons, live daughters were lacing themselves together with those who had lost the objects of their love, and they were hugging each other and pressing one into the other, sharing amongst themselves burdens that individuals could not bear alone.
"He is passed, sir. We loved him, but he is passed," Cacliocos whispered to himself, the man still standing near to the door.
Then, more loudly: "It is my duty to inform you of the following."
The grief raged unabated.
He continued, cutting through the squalling tones as firmly as he could, and all the while it was clear to Betelgeuse that he was trying very hard to keep his voice steady: "The following personnel served bravely as part of the Jegorich First Brigade and were killed in action. In memory of the men and women of Second Battalion, Third Company and First Battalion, First Company... let no one forget how they fought and brought glory to Jegorich and the Sylvan Protectorate. From the First Battalion, First Company: Private Mizzarin Asaghar, Private Nanomere Arbahadi, Private Nassar Callagessa…"