NOVEL NEXT Chapter 42: A Barber, Finally
Amidst Aisya's enthusiastic representations that she knew of a place where the barbers plied their trade for a mere 20 Chit per cut and the average serving of food went for a mouth-watering 3.5 Chit, they took to the train again, traveling from Milhub down to Metternich where they alighted and navigated down escalators and up staircases to an ancillary line's concourse, where they waited no longer than two minutes before boarding the train that took them from Metternich down to Skydome Station. The entire journey was completed in a little more than thirty minutes.
They took to the street, sling-bags strapped tightly and slapping dully against their waists, and found the northwestern edge of the Saltillan world lit a bright orange-yellow and spacious because it was devoid of columnar obelisks. They followed Aisya down winding paths Thete was unfamiliar with, forked left and right and then right and left, until they reached a metal fence about three meters tall.
The first clue which suggested to Betelgeuse that Aisya was up to something not altogether legitimate was that they seemed to take only the sketchiest routes—routes replete with abandoned buildings, crumbling pavements, and ghost-eyed Saltillans watching them with indecipherable intentions. The second clue was that Aisya knelt down, having sheathed her finger in some flexible material, and then pressed the tip of her finger to the fencing—and a second later there was a semi-loud popping sound, and Betelgeuse looked to see that a piece of the fencing's metal wire had been sheared through to make two small tines now stuck out at odd angles.
"So, this is illegal," Betelgeuse said, and Douglas found it apt to echo: "totally illegal, I mean, look at that finger-condom."
"Ha! Don't look too close," Aisya laughed, turning her head sideways. With a practiced hand, and without looking, she passed her finger anti-clockwise round a section of the fence, bright sparks spitting from the intersection between finger and metal. In this way, she carved out with her Incunabulum-blessing a human-shaped hole from that fence, and then she held up the cut-out proudly and motioned for the others to pass through, quickly, before moving through herself and pressing the cut-out back in place and welding the thing back together again with her finger.
They went on through an expanse of concrete and shortly came to a wall that loomed an impossible height and which marked the northwestern boundary of Saltilla. The wall was a monolithic thing of concrete and steel, and it stretched out to either side of them farther than they could see.
It was somewhere here, Aisya explained, and then she headed off Douglas' curious questions with a finger to her lips, leading them slowly down the length of the wall and glancing periodically at her wrist-transceiver.
"There. It's here," she said, finally, her voice low with anticipation, and she tapped a section of granite-gray concrete that looked just like any other.
Before their eyes shadows began to drape across a rectangular section of the wall one-and-a-half men tall, and taller than it was wide. The sound of stone grating on stone filled their ears, and Betelgeuse observed that rectangular section depress into the wall.
The section eventually slid away rightwise to reveal a darkness that framed two coal-dark men, men whose eyes revealed appetites, men who were thin as skeletons and whose threadbare clothes hung loose from their slight and scraggly frames. They funneled out into the Saltillan afternoon, and when the light fell upon their sparsely-haired heads Betelgeuse observed Incunabula pouches peeking out from underneath the strip of cloth wrapped tightly around their torsos. They exchanged several phrases with Aisya, who proceeded to hold up three fingers on her left hand and all five fingers on her right.
They nodded.
Aisya dug into her pocket to retrieve seven pieces of paper-like material bearing the arabic numeral '5', complexly inked in aquamarine. 'Physical currency notes,' thought Betelgeuse, sharing glances with Voke and Douglas. He'd not seen such artifacts except in museums, and he supposed such things were still in use in the Sylvan Protectorate.
Which made some sense, now that he thought about it, if the Sylvan Protectorate wanted to ensure a modicum of independence in matters of monetary policy from the control of the Democracy's financial behemoths. Someone in the Protectorate had assessed the seigniorage of issuing physical currency to be a necessary cost to insulate, although imperfectly, the Protectorate from complete and utter interest-capture by the implementers of its banking system—and Betelgeuse could suspect without feeling presumptuous that these implementers all hailed from the Democracy.
However…
"My money's on there being a Primary somewhere who can forge this shit perfectly," Betelgeuise quipped softly to Voke and Douglas, as he watched Aisya hand the notes over to the dubious rock-dwellers.
"You're really weird, you know that, Betelgeuse?" Voke whispered back.
Aisya led them into the hole after the men, and then a low whine started and the wall slid closed so that no trace of the entrance existed, stranding them in pitch-black darkness. One of the men turned on a torch and held it out, and Betelgeuse' eyes adjusted to see that they were in a cramped corridor strewn with debris and broken crates and sprawling masses of wire.
The ground was covered in a thick layer of dust and criss-crossed with boot-prints, and wherever they stepped they raised tufts of swirling particulates that danced lazily by the wan torchlight lighting their way.
They followed the path which terminated shortly in a make-shift plastic door that looked like it was disintegrating into purple flakes, and they pushed through into—
A new world enveloped in night-time gloom and twinkling with dim OLEDs shone from rooftops snaking away into the darkness. Above their heads was a teeming cacophony of holo-cycles modified for altitude and screaming madly past; a ponderous jetcraft chugged noisily overhead, sputtering noxious fumes from its exhaust, the fumes' underbelly made orange by the flickering signage flanking the group.
The ceiling of this place was much too high up to see, and Betelgeuse found himself in the middle of a crowded street barely wide enough for ten people to walk abreast. The two men who had led them into this place snuck away and melted into the streaming and shifting seas of ragged humanity.
Betelgeuse spun around, taking in the humidity, the odors of unwashed bodies, the smell of sewerage. To his left and right Betelgeuse saw structures that tottered five stories or more, all of them smooshed together wall-to-wall and making one continuous line of uneven teeth. He squinted into the distance but could not see where the line of buildings ended.
"Welcome to the Nook," Aisya said, tapping Betelgeuse' shoulder and smiling, and she had to shout in order to be heard over the ambient din. A hunchbacked man brushed past her brusquely, shooting the milling group a look of impersonal hostility, but her expression barely wavered. "Only costs thirty-five Chit to access."
"That's five whole Credits, woman," Douglas exasperated, and beside him a lanky curmudgeon hacked and spit in their direction and then continued tottering forward. "Not exactly the rock-bottom prices we've been led to believe."
"Man, you're really broke, huh. Relax, I'm paying today. Everything's a fraction of the price compared to the main city, so believe me when I say it's worth it. Cheap thrills galore!" Aisya returned.
"Okay, if you're paying then you're the boss," Douglas heaved a sigh of relief.
"… Where is this place?" inquired Betelgeuse, squinting his eyes at the .
"It's the space between the inner wall and outer wall of Saltilla. See there," Aisya pointed to their left, at the ten-story structure of concrete brutalism cracking and crumbling in places. The door through which they had come was fitted into its base. "That's the inner wall. And there," she pointed to their right, almost hitting an old woman in the face but raising her hand just shy of the elder's white strands, "is the outer wall."
'An interstice. These kinds of places I always count as special,' thought Betelgeuse, lowering his eyes to Aisya.
"We're in the western quadrant Nook, where all the best amenities are, given how frequently it's patronized by the Saltillans in the main-city. If you keep walking down you'll eventually reach the southwestern wall and have to turn left, and technically you can walk Saltilla's entire perimeter and end up at the same place here, though I've never tried. It's not recommended anyway—everyone agrees this is the best entrance, no argument about it!"
"I've heard about the place before," Thete said, her nostrils twitching. "I never thought I'd see it in person. Something smells real good…"
"Hold on, barber, barber," Douglas reminded them.
"Yes, of course. You guys can get your haircut and after that we'll do a proper meal," Aisya flashed her teeth.
They walked several cramped and dirty blocks, passed men pandering to their alcoholism atop concrete slabs streaked with spit and whitish gum, rubbed shoulders with glaring gangsters, endured the importuning of large-faced buxom females. There were hermaphrodites, sissies, femboys, ladyboys, grannyfannies, daddicks, farmerbrowns, jailbait, lolipiddles, albinospots, menstruals, amongst others—a unique category for every individual selling pleasure, markets for pleasure that were alive, dying, budding, burbling, reviving.
They squeezed between two men dressed in flamboyant colors and sporting thuggish faces, their engorged bodies larger than Entuban's, their rotund stomachs sticking out so far it must have affected their balance, their bare forearms rippling with drupulets of muscle alien to the standard musculoskeletal system.
On Aisya's advice the group strapped their Incunabulum-bearing sling-bags around their chests and kept a tight hold on them as they slipped into a less-crowded section of the Nook, where the eaves had fallen off of the flanking buildings and the ground was littered with trash and carcasses of vehicles left where they had crashed. And there were running streams of feces and a smell that was incredibly pungent, the smell of incontinence and death, and there were clotheless creatures that were once human, their genitals and thighs soiled, their skin rough with sores, their welts protruding like purple polyps and glistening wetly by the dying shafts of light splintering from behind boarded-up windows. It was difficult to look at them because they looked vaguely human, the creatures, and Betelgeuse found they made a spectrum of mutation—starting from mostly-human and gradually deteriorating until all that was left were agglomerations of misshapen lumps.
They had no Incunabula with them, these fallen things, and Betelgeuse wondered if they had never gone through the Analysis or if they had had their Incunabula stolen.
Aisya continued on without glancing at them. It was common enough to ignore, was what Betelgeuse supposed. The overhead traffic screamed and droned and continued unabated. Things moved; life at the edge of the city went on.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
It was several minutes until they reached a wider section of the Nook, where the adjacent windows afforded them enough light to navigate around street beggars that were splayed and limbless and the shops looked like they made a semi-honest trade.
Aisya pointed out their destination and they followed wordlessly.
It felt like a very old-fashioned place, something out of the Traditionalist magazines Betelgeuse' mother liked to read and which he had used to leaf through surreptitiously in the hopes of finding one or two scantily clad women—to no avail, and anyway he didn't know what he was expecting, looking under glossy covers framing women clothed in robes and/or patterned camisoles, the women insouciantly posed and all seemingly blessed with a special, impressionable kind of bizarre and artificial beauty. He found that the magazines had very few actual pictures of women in them and were instead replete with photographs of interior decorations and artistic (if eclectic) reminiscences of pre-Old Empire design.
The space they were in—with its large, scuffed rectangular mirrors rimmed with incandescent bulbs, to its peeling faux-leather barber chairs, to the barber's pole affixed to the faux-wood paneling by the entrance, to the longish lintel-sign backlit in faded purples and golds and reading, in Common, 'BRANTON BARBER & COSMETOLOGIST (ALL GENDERS WILLKOMMEN)'—was better kept than Betelgeuse had imagined.
It was also the first time he had come into contact with an actual barber, as in, a human one instead of the multi-armed machines he was familiar with.
The droning buzz of the mechanical razor filled his ears, its amplitude jumping as the cutters scratched tufts of his hair off and onto the plastic sheet drawn over his torso. He could see himself in the mirror, was forced to look at himself, and he saw eyes ringed with dark splotches where there had been none before.
Then the nameless barber pulled a lever attached to the chair and Betelgeuse found himself staring at the ceiling. Somewhere to the side he heard Thete communicating in Aluaa to a man he'd seen when he first entered, the only other prospective patron in the shop.
"You are Earthian?" the barber said in thickly-accented Common, leaning in so close to Betelgeuse that the latter could see up his hairy nostrils. Whatever this feeling was about having another human being cut his hair, it wasn't completely pleasant.
"... Yes."
"We are not having Taffies here often… only forty Chit for you, yes?" the barber continued in a voice that was loud with affected warmth.
"Hey!" Aisya called from a seat diagonally behind him, her voice sounding strangely muffled. There was so little width to the space (it went in deep enough to accommodate all of four barber chairs, but was otherwise sorely lacking in the width department) that if she straightened her leg and stretched her foot she would be able to touch the opposite wall. "Twenty Chit. Two, zero. Twenty. I'm paying."
"Pfagh!" the Saltillan snorted loudly. He had grabbed a comb with his left hand and he used it to section off bits of Betelgeuse hair before letting the razor run across the plastic comb, the metal vibrating across the plastic and causing a zipping that tickled Betelgeuse' brain. "Making someone else paying for you, and it is being a woman! And here I am thinking you Earthians are rich."
"What? What the hell problem you have with a woman paying?!" Aisya raised her voice, irate.
"Tell'im Aisya! Women can pay the bills anytime!" Douglas hollered from the next chair, turning his head as he said it and causing his barber to curse loudly.
"You're too loud, Downie, I'm tryna sleep," Voke called from the chair over, his voice gruff and somnolent.
"Okay, okay," Betelgeuse felt his barber raise his hands, then clamp down again over his scalp, muttering under his breath. "Fem-D vaganta kag. About had it with cunts like these."
Drrzt, drrzt, drrzt. Strands fell over his face and tickled his nostrils.
"… Who are they, these Fem-D," Betelgeuse whispered. Aisya had used the term also, but she clearly didn't consider herself to fall into the category.
The barber ignored him and continued running the mechanical razor over the comb, dzrrt, dzrrt, dzrrt—
"I want to know about them," Betelgeuse insisted, staring at the splotches of mildew that had spread across the ceiling and suddenly realizing that the fungal creatures had invaded here too.
"Just let me be cutting your hair, okay?" the barber snapped irritably.
He will not talk. Maybe he needs a little push.
Betelgeuse reached into himself, felt his Incunabulum pulsing within the sling-bag set upon his lap—and faltered. Something was pushing him to use it, the power of compulsion. He had tasted it once, found it an experience that was exhilarating.
To have control…
A power must be exercised, or it is no power at all. Its use, however, must be properly balanced with limited objectives. Already I see Elder Bennett's 'demon of addiction' lurking in the shadows.
And Betelgeuse' mind conjured an image of his old Edom-Zeta teacher, the Elder who was always looking over his shoulder. Although Elder Bennett had a penchant for sanctimonious cant, Betelgeuse could admit now that he hadn't always hated the attention.
The power to compel would not be so addictive if it didn't seem so unrestrained.
Furthermore: if I can compel others as an Ash grade, then were the assumptions I had about its limitations… were they wrong?
Indeed, the assumption he had been operating under, that the usage of compulsion was tied to the 'grade' of one's Incunabulum—i.e., that only a higher grade could control a lower grade—seemed to him now more than likely incorrect. In the first place, the military hierarchy could not be maintained if such a rule were so strict and unbending—what if a Hollow had to utilize the compulsion upon a White?
Did it mean that Voke was right in some sense, that the grading system was pure bullshit?
It is a grading based on power. You, Betelgeuse Sakar, must use the power that you have. Power unexercised is nothing but deadweight.
The will wanted control. What did it matter if he let it have its way for once?
Betelgeuse closed his eyes and felt for the barber's Incunabulum.
And he found that it, or the will that functioned in accordance with it, was weak and desiccated and malformed, so very unlike the Saltillan drivers' Ash Incunabula, so very unlike his and Frederica's Ash Incunabula.
'What kind of Incunabulum is this?' Betelgeuse mused, his eyes snapping open and his mind sent reeling from the discovery of this strange artifact. It felt to him very much like an inferior thing with very little force, this Incunabulum, and he found the connections—connections between the Incunabulum and the barber's intentionalities—all wrong, as if they had been grafted messily together.
This is something to be studied more. For now, I will have my information.
He let his intentionality overwhelm that man, and the barber's hands were arrested mid-motion. The mechanical razor buzzed, the man's heartbeat pulsed. The air trembled.
"I must insist you tell me about the Fem-D 'cunts'. It will make for interesting conversation," Betelgeuse murmured.
The man's hands started moving again, and Betelgeuse relaxed to hear the tinkle of his hair strands separating.
"Haaa…. Well, since you asked nicely."
"I am asking nicely."
"Heh. What can I be saying about them? They can be stringing together sentences, the feminists, and I would not be hating if they were really caring how difficult life is in the Nook. It is clear they only push the good story to get people on their side. Maybe they are paid by the Gimmarash."
"The… Gimmarash," Betelgeuse echoed.
"Feminist say it is so unfair, the conscription—well, none of Nooksters get conscripted so I don't care shit. But then they are making problems within the stupid women who think a man is making their living hard. And anyway even in main Saltilla only women who are not having children are being conscripted, I hear…"
"You must have a wife, if you care so much about it," Betelgeuse said, shutting his eyes.
"I do, I do," the barber nodded, raising his voice as he did so.
"Keep your voice down."
"Yes," the barber whispered, "but it is more real that the feminists say the rich are eating the poor. This I agree. However they are making hell in my household. Think about it—I am making the money, and my wife is not, where is the reason for criticizening the wife's duties? These Fem-D feminists are making soldiers for some fight that is not our fight."
As is the natural order of things. The subject-matter hardly makes a difference. There are the controllers and the controlled.
"I am done with your hair, sir," the barber said, turning off the razor and dusting the back of Betelgeuse' head with a brush, his left hand simultaneously removing the translucent sheet from around Betelgeuse' torso. "Let me get the mirror—"
A commotion drew his attention to the door.
Betelgeuse turned his head to see, through the clear, rectangular panes fitted into the faux-wood door-piece, a multitude of people running down the street. Someone came up to the door and pushed it open to reveal a pockmarked face. It was a scraggly young man with half his teeth gone, babbling excitedly at breakneck pace, gesturing wildly with an open palm to his right, in the direction where everybody was running towards. Betelgeuse barely caught the word 'Gimmarash' before the youth darted away, and the door was left to swing shut slowly on creaking hinges.
"We have to go!" Voke's gray-haired barber called out. "We finish this later!"
"Hey, you're not done with my hair—" Voke flailed, shouting after the man and turning to see him pushing out the front door, hot on the heels of the scraggly youth. The paunchy middle-aged man who had been talking to Thete followed soon after, Thete calling after him in a confused tone and the man huffing and responding with muttered apologies.
"What's happening?" Betelgeuse asked his barber, who at that point was staring dazedly at the entrance. Betelgeuse raised himself upright, brushing away the bits of hair that had caught onto his forehead scarring; Aisya and Thete had already regained their feet; Douglas ripped off the sheet covering his front and was making confused sounds with his throat.
"… Speaking of the devil! Gimmarash is making voxcast announcement—we are all going to listen!" Betelgeuse' barber managed, his voice a strange mix of uncertainty and excitement as he came out from the strange stupor he found himself in. He shook his head as if to clear it of a fog, and, placing the razor in his hand onto the side-table, made for the door.
Betelgeuse raised his hand and considered utilizing the compulsion again, but then thought better of it. Those in proximity tended to feel its effects, he recalled, and if he were to utilize the power in such a blatant manner he could not guarantee that Thete and Aisya would not become suspicious.
Used correctly, however, the possibilities are endless.