Star Trek: The Q Continuum (13 page)

It was possibly the greatest single understatement in his life.

“Oh, Jean-Luc,” Q sighed, sounding disappointed, “I had hoped you were more flexible than that. After all, you coped with being a Borg for a week or two. Is a tri-headed serpent god all that much harder?”

“Q,” Picard pleaded, too far from his own time and his own reality to worry about his pride. “Please.”

“If you insist,” Q grumbled. “I have important things to show you and I suppose it wouldn’t do to have you fretting about your trivial human body the whole time. You might miss something.” The triple necks of the Q-serpent wrapped themselves around each other until the three heads seemed to sprout from a single coiled stalk. Picard was briefly reminded of Quetzalcoatl, the serpent deity of the ancient Aztecs.
Quetzalcoatl…Q? Could there be a connection?

He might never know.

“Pity,” the triune entity continued, “you hadn’t begun to scratch the possibilities of this identity.” A flash of light illuminated the darkness for a fraction of a second, and then Q appeared before Picard in his usual form, garbed in what looked like a simple Greek chiton fastened over his left shoulder. A circlet of laurel leaves adorned his brow. Simple leather sandals rested upon nothing but empty space.

Picard’s trifocal vision coalesced into a single point of view. Gratefully, he looked down to see his human body restored to him. So relieved was he to have arms and legs again, he barely noted at first that he was now attired in an ancient costume similar to the one Q now wore. He remained floating in space, of course, protected from the deadly vacuum only by Q’s remarkable powers, but that was a level of surreality that he felt he could cope with.
Just permit me to be myself,
he thought,
and I’m ready for whatever Q has up his sleeves.

“Happy now?” Q pouted. He wiggled his fingers in front of his face and scowled at the sight. “I hope you realize what a dreadful anachronism this is. Be it on your head, and you a professed archaeologist!”

“I feel much better, thank you,” Picard answered, regaining his composure even while conversing in open space. He glanced down at his own sandaled feet and saw nothing but a gaping abyss extending beneath him for as far as his eyes could see. He was not experiencing a null-gravity state, though; he knew what that felt like and this was quite different. Q was somehow generating the sensation of gravity, so that he felt squarely oriented despite his surroundings. Up was up and down was down, at least for the moment. He fingered the hem of his linen garment, noting the delicate embroidering along the border of the cloth.
God is in the details,
he thought, recalling an ancient aphorism,
or was that the devil?
“What is this?” he asked, indicating the chiton. “Another anachronism?”

“A conceit,” Q said with a shrug, “to give a feel of antiquity. As I explained before, and I hope you were paying close attention, this is nothing like what I really looked like at this point in the galaxy’s history, but simply a concession to your limited human understanding.”

“And the Aldebaran serpent?” Picard pressed. “Was that your true form?”

Q shook his head, almost dislodging his crown of leaves. “Merely another guise, one better suited to a time before you mammals began putting on airs.”

“If anyone can be accused of putting on airs,” Picard replied, “it’s you. You’ve done little but flaunt your alleged superiority since the time we first encountered you. Frankly, I’m not convinced.”

“Yes, I recall your little speech right before we departed the bridge,” Q said. “Would you be surprised to know that I share some of your opinions about the more…shall we say, heavy-handed…tendencies of the Continuum?”

“I know that you’ve been on the outs with your own kind at least once,” Picard answered, “which gives me some hope that the Continuum itself might be rather more mature and responsible.” It dawned on him, not for the first time, that almost everything he knew about the rest of the Q Continuum had come from Q’s own testimony, hardly the most reliable of sources. He resolved to question Guinan more deeply on the subject, if and when he ever had the opportunity. “Well?” he asked, surveying this desolate section of space. On the horizon, the eclipsing planet no longer passed between himself and the nearest sun, permitting him an unobstructed view of the seething golden orb, which he registered as a typical G-2 dwarf star, much like Earth’s own sun. It was a breathtaking sight, especially viewed directly from space, but he was not about to thank Q for letting him see it. “Why are we here?” he demanded. “What is it you wish to show me?”

“The beginning, as I said,” Q stated. With a wave of his arm, he and Picard began to soar through the void toward the immense yellow sun. The hot solar wind blew in his face as the star grew larger and larger in his sight. It was a thrilling and not entirely unpleasant experience, Picard admitted to himself. He felt like some sort of interstellar Peter Pan, held aloft by joyous spirits and a sprinkling of pixie dust.

“Picture yourself in my place,” Q urged, “a young and eager Q, newly born to my full powers and cosmic awareness, exploring a shiny new galaxy for the first time. Oh, Picard, those were the days! I felt like I could do anything. And you know what? I was right!”

At that, they plunged into the heart of the roaring sun. Picard flinched automatically, expecting to be burnt to a crisp, but, as he should have known, Q’s omnipotence protected them from the unimaginable heat and brilliance. He gaped in awe as they descended first through the star’s outer corona as it hurled massive tongues of flame at the surrounding void, not to mention, Picard knew, fatal amounts of ultraviolet light and X-rays. Listening to the constant crackle and sizzle of the flames, he could not help recalling how the
Enterprise
had nearly been destroyed when Beverly, in command while he and the others were being held captive by Lore, had flown the ship into another star’s corona in a daring and ultimately successful attempt to escape the Borg. Yet here he was, without even the hull of a starship to shield him against the unleashed fury of the sun’s outer atmosphere.

Next came the chromosphere, a thin layer of fiery red plasma that washed over Picard like a sea of hot blood, followed by the photosphere, the visible surface of the sun. Picard had thoroughly studied the structure of G-2 stars at the Academy, of course, and subjected hundreds of stars to every variety of advanced sensor probe, but none of that had prepared him for the reality of actually witnessing the surface of a sun firsthand; he gawked in amazement at churning energies that should have been enough to incinerate him a million times over. Not even the legendary lake of fire within the Klingon homeworld’s famed Kri’stak Volcano compared to the raging inferno that seemed to consume everything in sight except him and Q.

Despite Q’s protective aura, Picard felt as if he were standing naked in a Vulcan desert at high noon. Sweat dripped from his forehead while rivers of perspiration ran down his back, soaking the simple linen garment he wore.
Humidity on the surface of a sun?
It was flagrantly impossible; he had to assume that Q had inflicted this discomfort on him purely for the sake of illusion. Picard was none too surprised to note that Q himself looked perfectly cool and comfortable. “I get the idea, Q,” he said, wiping more sweat from his brow and flinging it toward his companion. Tiny droplets evaporated instantly before reaching their target. “It’s very hot here. Do you have anything less obvious to teach me?”

“Patience,” Q advised. “We’ve barely begun.” He dabbed his toe in the boiling gases beneath their feet and Picard felt whatever was supporting him slip away. He began to sink even deeper into the bright yellow starstuff. A mental image of himself being dipped into hot, melted butter leaped irresistibly to the forefront of his consciousness. Reacting instinctively, he held his breath as his head sank beneath the turbulent plasma, but he needn’t have bothered; thanks to Q, oxygen found him even as he drowned in the sun.

They dropped through the photosphere until they were well within the convection zone beneath the surface of the sun. Here rivers of ionized gas, not unlike those that composed the Calamarain, surged throughout the outer third of the sun’s interior. Picard knew the ambient temperature around him had to be at least one million degrees Kelvin. They dived headfirst into one of the solar rivers and let the ferocious current carry them ever deeper until at last, like salmon leaping from white water, they broke through into the very heart of the star.

Now he found himself approaching the very center of a stellar furnace that beggared description. Here untold amounts of burning hydrogen atoms, transformed into helium by a process of nuclear fusion, produced a temperature of more than fifteen million degrees Kelvin. Not even the warp core aboard the
Enterprise
was capable of generating that much heat and raw energy. The visual impression Picard received was that of standing in the midst of a single white-hot flame, and the heat he actually felt was nearly unbearable. Every inch of exposed skin felt raw and dry and sunburned. Acrid chemical fumes stung his eyes, nose, and throat. The crackle of the spurting flames far above him gave way to a constant pounding roar. Overall, the intense gravitation and radiation at the solar core were so tremendous that they practically overwhelmed his senses, and yet somehow he was still able to see Q, who looked rather bored until his eyes lit on something
really
interesting. “Look, there I am,” he announced.

Brushing tears away from his eyes, Picard stared where Q was pointing, but all he could see was a faint black speck in the distance, almost imperceptible against the dazzling spectacle of the core. They flew closer to the point of darkness and soon he discerned an individual figure sitting cross-legged in the middle of the gigantic fusion reaction. He seemed to be toying with a handful of burning plasma, letting the ionized gas stream out between his fingers. “Another golden afternoon,” Q sighed nostalgically, seemingly oblivious of Picard’s intense discomfort. “How young and inexperienced I was.”

Picard coughed harshly, barely able to breathe owing to the caustic fumes and searing heat. The choking sounds jarred Q from his reminiscing and he peered at Picard dubiously. “Hmm,” he pronounced eventually, “perhaps there is such a thing as too much verisimilitude.” He snapped his fingers, and Picard felt the awful heat recede from him. He gulped down several lungfuls of cool, untainted air. It still felt warm all around him, but more like a sunny day at the beach than the fires of perdition. “I hope you appreciate the air-conditioning,” Q said, “although it does rather spoil the effect.”

The effect be damned,
Picard thought. He was here as an abductee, not a tourist. He gave himself a moment to recover from the debilitating effects of his ordeal, then focused on the individual Q had apparently brought him here to see.
A young and inexperienced Q?
This he had to see.

Picard flew close enough to discover that the figure did indeed resemble a more youthful version of Q, one not yet emerged from adolescence. To his surprise, something about the teen reminded Picard of Wesley Crusher, another wide-eyed young prodigy, although this boy already had a more mischievous twinkle in his eye than Wesley had ever possessed. “Portrait of the artist as a young Q,” Picard’s companion whispered with a diabolical chuckle. “Beware.” As he and Picard looked on, the young man, dressed as they were in the garb of ancient Greece, isolated a ribbon of luminous plasma, stretching it like taffy before imbuing it with his own supernatural energies so that it shimmered with an eldritch radiance that transcended conventional physics. He pulled his new creation taut, then flung it free. The fiery ribbon shot like a rubber band toward the ceiling of the core and soon passed out of sight. “I had forgotten about that!” Q marveled. “I wonder whatever happened to that little energy band?”

With a start, Picard remembered the inexplicable cosmic phenomenon that had driven Tolian Soran to madness—and, in more ways than one, claimed the life of James T. Kirk. Surely Q couldn’t be claiming to have created it during an idle moment in his boyhood, could he? “Q,” he began, shocked and appalled at the implications of what he suspected, “about this energy band?”

“Oh, never mind that, Jean-Luc,” Q said, dismissing the question with a wave of his hand. “Do try not to get caught up in mere trivia.”

Only Q could be so blasé, Picard thought, about the genesis of a dangerous space-time anomaly, and so negligent as to the possible consequences of his actions. He opened his mouth, prepared to read Q the riot act, when the boy came up with a new trick that rendered Picard momentarily speechless. Miniature mushroom clouds sprouted from the teen Q’s fingers and he hurled them about with abandon, paying no heed to either Picard or the older Q. A toy-sized nuclear blast whizzed by Picard, missing his head by a hair. “Can he see us?” Picard asked, ducking yet another fireball.

“If he wanted to, of course,” Q answered. A nuclear spitwad passed through him harmlessly. “But he has no reason to even suspect we are here, so he doesn’t.”

I suppose that makes sense,
Picard thought. He could readily accept that the older Q was more adept at stealth and subterfuge than his youthful counterpart. He wondered if Q felt the least bit uncomfortable about peeking in on his past like this. “Aren’t you at all tempted,” Picard asked, “to speak to him? To offer some timely advice, perhaps, in hopes of changing your own past?”

“If only I could,” Q said in a surprisingly melancholy tone. Picard was disturbed to see what appeared to be a genuine look of sorrow upon his captor/companion’s face.
What kind of regrets,
Picard mused,
can plague such as Q?

The moment passed, and Q regained his characteristic smugness. “You’re not the only species, Jean-Luc, that worries incessantly about preserving the sanctity of the timeline. If changing one human life can start a historical chain reaction beyond any mortal’s powers to predict, imagine the sheer universal chaos that could be spawned by tampering with a Q’s lifetime.” He shuddered, more for effect than because of any actual chill. “Remind me to tell you sometime about how your own Commander Riker owes his very existence to a momentary act of charity by one of my contemporaries. It’s quite a story, although completely irrelevant to our present purposes.”