In the Court of the Dragon

Posted on Thu 21st Jun, 2018 @ 10:43pm by

1,213 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: Brushfires
Location: Oblivion

No one knows how it started. No one knows what the oldest part is, or if that oldest part still existent was the first seed of the snowball. There are pieces of ships so old that no one now remembers who built them, when, or where. This is Oblivion. Need living space? Go out and salvage a wreck. Tow it back to the drifter colony. Find or fashion a way to match its airlock to some other piece of the debris already connected. What works? If you have a working atmosphere recycler, trade air to your neighbor for power. A working fusion plant? Same deal, just reversed.

There is no law. People who come to Oblivion have no love for law. There are no safety codes; no one could enforce them, even if they existed. There are guilds. Some have only two or three members. Some have hundreds. The reputation of a guild is something to stand on; something to die for.

Need something? Go to the trade hall. Check the scraps of paper on the 'selling' wall. Or the 'services offered' wall. There's a wall for jobs, a wall for advertisements. Bills are posted, layered over one another and rarely removed. Given the location of the place, it's no coincidence that most of the surface is printed in Romulan, or Klingon, or Terranglo.

No one comes to claim Oblivion. There's nothing of worth to claim. No one comes to clean up Oblivion; it's worth more as a landfill, as a sewer. And what falls in... often doesn't come back out.

In a corridor, painted in bright, primary colors, a woman in denim trousers and a brocade vest over a lawn shirt walks, the lace on her jabot swaying drunkenly. Even the literal rats and similar vermin give her room, hope her eye won't fall on them. "Doctor Death," she is called, and "the Butcher of Clarvis."

She mumbles as she walks slowly along. "Over the entrance on the Rue de Rennes," she says, in a language long forgotten by most, "is a balcony, supported by an iron dragon. Within the court tall old houses rise on either side, and close the ends. Huge gates, swung back during the day, into the walls of the deep archways, close this court; after midnight, one must enter by ringing at certain small doors on the side."

She finds the small door she seeks, and touches it. The door, too, seems reluctant to accept her touch; it melts away and she passes through, into a dome protruding from the side of the hull of a Cruadror battleship -- or perhaps it was an Imseha hospital ship. No one knew, anymore. No one cared. The Doctor seated herself on the floor, leaned back against the wall. "Infrared," she said, and apparently, the ship understood Federation Standard Terranglo. The view shifted, more dots appearing as the dome shifted infra-red radiation into the spectral lengths the Doctor's eyes could perceive.

She reaches into a pocket, removes a device which someone who grew up in Terran space might say resembles a hockey puck. She places it on the deck. Touches it. "Open sesame," she says. Whether the words or the touch or both activate it, who can say? A holograph unfolds, hundreds of glass beads contained in a framework as much imagined as seen. The doctor puts her hand in, touches one of the beads, and a faint, old melody played on a flute fills the space.

A little girl looks in through the open door. "Are you the Doctor?" she asks.

The woman says nothing, but touches a different bead. Dry words fill the space, the voice of a man long dead: "But just like I said, so many times, when you don't want the bird, when you don't need the bird, when you haven't got the first possible use for the bird, (toot) that's when you get it."

"Only mama said to get the Doctor," the girl presses. "My brother is sick."

"I'm not that kind of Doctor," the Doctor answers. "Go find Doctor Tupper's clinic. He'll help your brother." The woman shifts her hand again, touches a different bead. There is no sound this time, only a visual. Atoms -- unless they're stars -- linked together in molecules -- or is it constellations?

"What is that?" The girl asks, not yet gone to seek the clinic.

"A sort of game," the Doctor answers. "Das Glasperlenspiel." She lets her hand fall in her lap. "People need to distract themselves," she says. "Once, a long, long time ago, a war was fought on my home planet over a kilometer of border land. Sometimes it was held by one side; sometimes by the other. When they raided each other's bases, do you know what their favorite plunder was?"

"Food?" the girl asks.

The woman makes a sound of amusement. "Very likely," she admits. "Or perhaps booze. But after that... after they'd feasted and gotten drunk, they wanted a game. Their favorite was one called Mensch ärgere Dich nicht."

"I've never heard of that game," the girl says.

"No one has," the Doctor agrees. "It's forgotten. No one even knows what sort of game it was, other than the suggestion that it was quite aggravating to play."

"I like to play jacks," the little girl asserts.

The doctor nods, and looks up at the dome. "Marbles?" she asks.

"Sometimes."

"Do you see that red dot?" the Doctor asks, pointing up. "Just above the brace, there?"

"Yes."

"That little red dot was a galaxy, three billion years ago. The people there... they played marbles with stars, with suns. We can tell, because no visible light leaves that galaxy. Only heat. Only infrared radiation. They rolled those stars up in marbles, and rolled them all together into the circle."

The little girl looks up, thinking about that. "Why?"

"Who knows?" The Doctor answers. "Perhaps they were afraid of the one-eyed, one-horned, purple people eater. Perhaps they noticed that things are flying apart, and they didn't want their worlds to vanish over the light horizon. Perhaps they were trying to build a galaxy made of computronium, so they could solve the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything."

"Oh."

The doctor reaches into her vest. From an inside pocket, she draws out a leather cigar holder. Opened, it shows a blank space and two aluminium cylinders. "This," she says, sliding one of the cylinders out, handing it to the little girl, "is an auto-injector. It's an immune booster. Give it to your mother, for your brother. Don't tell her I gave it to you. Tell her it came from Doctor Tupper's clinic."

"Why?" the girl asks, accepting the tube.

"Because if she knows it's from me," the Doctor says, sounding tired, "she'll never use it. Go, now, child. And don't look back, or the one-eyed, one-horned purple people eater might get you."

"But I'm not a purple people," the girl says reasonably.

"Go anyway," the Doctor says, letting her head sink back against the bulkhead. Her eyes slide closed, and she murmurs, "the sunken pavement collects unsavory pools...."

But the girl has gone, carrying an auto-injector away from Doctor Death, in hopes that it will bring life.

 

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