Star Trek: The Q Continuum (14 page)

Picard hoped that Q was exaggerating where Will Riker was concerned, but he saw Q’s point. Various ancient theologians throughout the galaxy, he recalled, had argued that even God could not undo the past. It was comforting to know that Q recognized the same limitation, at least where his own yesterdays were concerned. Picard took a closer look at the adolescent figure not too far away. “What is he…you…doing now?”

Before their eyes, the teen Q rose to his feet, dusted some stray solar matter from his bare knees, and stretched out his arms. Suddenly he began to grow at a catastrophic rate, expanding his slender frame until he towered like a behemoth above his older self and Picard. He seemed to grow immaterial as well, so that his gargantuan form caused nary a ripple in the ongoing thermonuclear processes of the star. Soon he eclipsed the great golden sun itself, so that its blazing corona crowned his head like a halo. His outstretched hands grazed the orbits of distant solar systems.

“I don’t understand,” Picard said. “How can we be seeing this? What is our frame of reference?” The gigantic youth loomed over them, yet he was able to witness the whole impossible scene in its entirety. He tore his gaze away from the colossal figure to orient himself, but all he could see was the sparkle of stars glittering many light-years away. Somehow they had departed from the sun completely without him even noticing. “What is this place? Where are we now?”

“Shhh,” Q said, raising a finger before his lips. “You must be quite a pain at a concert or play, Picard. Do you always insist on examining the stage and the curtains and the lighting before taking in the show?” He quietly applauded the boy’s grandiose dimensions. “Just go with it. That which is essential will become clear.”

I hope so,
Picard thought, feeling more awestruck than enlightened.
There must be some point to this, aside from demonstrating that Q was as flamboyant and egotistical in his youth as he is in my own time.

The boy Q inspected his own star-spanning proportions and laughed in delight. It was an exuberant laugh, Picard noted, but not a particularly malevolent one. Picard was reminded of the optimistic, idealistic, young giants in H. G. Wells’s
The Food of the Gods,
a novel he had read several times in his own boyhood. Most unexpectedly, he found himself liking the young Q.
Pity he had to grow into such a conceited pain-in-the-backside.

“I was adorable, wasn’t I?” Q commented.

Is that what he wants me to know?
Picard thought.
Merely that he was once this carefree boy?
“Even Kodos the Executioner was once a child,” he observed dryly. “Colonel Green is said to have been a Boy Scout.”

“And Jean-Luc Picard built ships in bottles and flew kites over the vineyards,” Q shot back. “Evidence suggests that he may have briefly understood the concept of fun, although some future historians dispute this.”

Picard bristled at Q’s sarcasm. “If this is some misguided attempt to reawaken my sense of fun,” he said indignantly, “might I suggest that your timing could not be worse. Snatching me away while my ship is in jeopardy is hardly conducive to an increased appreciation of recreation. Perhaps you should postpone this little pantomime until my next scheduled shore leave?”

Q rolled his eyes. “Don’t be such a solipsist, Jean-Luc. I told you before, this isn’t about you. It’s about me.” His head tilted back and he stared upward at the Brobdingnagian figure of his younger self. “Look!” he exclaimed. “Watch what I’m doing now!”

Without any other warning except Q’s excited outburst, the teen Q began to shrink as swiftly as he had grown only moments before. His substance contracted and soon he was even smaller than he had been originally, less than half the height of either Picard or the older Q. But his process of diminution did not halt there, and he quickly became no larger than a doll. Within seconds, Picard had to get down on his knees, kneeling upon seemingly empty space, and strain his eyes to see him. The boy Q was a speck again, as he had been when Picard had first spied him across the immeasurably long radius of the solar core. A heartbeat later, he vanished from sight. Picard looked up at the other Q, who had a devious smile on his face. “Well?” Picard asked, frustrated by all this pointless legerdemain. “He’s gone.”

“Au contraire, mon capitaine,”
Q said, waving a finger at the puzzled human. “To Q, there is no zero,” he added cryptically. “Let’s go see.”

In a blink, Picard was somewhere else. It was a strangely colorless realm, a shapeless world of stark black and white without any shading in between. The utter darkness of space had been supplanted by an eerie white emptiness that seemed to extend forever, holding nothing but flying black particles that zipped about ceaselessly, tracing intricate patterns in the nothingness. A slow-moving particle arced toward Picard and he reached out to pluck it from its flight. The black object streaked right through his outstretched hand, however, leaving not a mark or a tingle behind, leaving Picard to wonder whether it was he or the particle that was truly intangible.

He hoped it was the particle. Certainly, he thought, patting himself for confirmation, he felt substantial enough. He could hear his own breathing, feel his heart beating in his chest. He felt as tangible, as real, as he had ever been.

But where in all the universe was he now?

Total silence oppressed him. There were no sounds to hear and no odors to smell. Not even the limbo where Q had first transported him, with its swirling white mists, had seemed quite this, well, vacant. For as far as his eyes could see, there were only three objects that seemed to possess any color or solidity: himself, Q, and a now-familiar young man cavorting among the orbiting particles. Picard watched as the adolescent Q did what he had not been able to do and caught on to one of the swooping particles with his bare hands. Compared with the youth, it looked about the size of a type-1 phaser and completely two-dimensional. It dangled like a limp piece of film from his fingertips.

Picard looked impatiently at the Q he knew. “What are you waiting for? Explain all this, or do you simply enjoy seeing me confused and uncertain?”

“There is nothing simple about that joy at all, Jean-Luc, but I suppose I do have to edify you eventually. This,” he said grandly, “is the domain of the infinitesimal. What you see buzzing about you, smaller than the very notion of sound or hue, are quarks, mesons, gluons, and all manner of exotic subatomic beasties. Or rather, to be more exact, they are the
possibilities
of micro-micro-matter, discrete units of mathematical probabilities following along the courses of their most likely speeds and directions. Whether they actually exist at any one specific time or place is open to interpretation.”

“Spare me the lecture on quantum theory,” Picard said, doing his best not to sound impressed. He hated to give Q the satisfaction of watching him play the dumbstruck mortal, but, if Q was in fact telling the truth about their present location, if they were actually existing on a subatomic level, then it was hard not to marvel at the sights presented to him. “Is that really a quark?” he asked, pointing to the young Q’s immaterial plaything. The boy was peering into the thin black object as if he saw something even smaller inside it.

“Cross my heart,” his older self said, “an honest-to-goodness quark, not to be confused with that grasping barkeep on you-know-where.”

Picard had no idea whom Q was referring to, and he didn’t really care. Perhaps the greatest challenge posed by Q, he reflected, was to see past his snideness to the occasional tidbits of actual revelation. Picard took a moment just to bask in the wonder of this uncanny new environment, one never before glimpsed by human eyes. It was sobering to think that, ultimately, everything in existence was composed of these phantom particles and their intricate ballet.

“‘The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself,’” he recited, recalling his precious Shakespeare. “‘Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve; and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on.’”

“My goodness, Picard,” Q remarked, “are you moved to poetry?”

“Sometimes poetry is the only suitable response to what the universe holds for us,” Picard answered. The essential building blocks of matter darted around him like flocks of birds on the wing. “This is fascinating, I admit, but I fail to see the relevance to your earlier warnings and prohibitions. What has this to do with my mission to the galactic barrier?”

“More than you know,” Q stated. An hourglass materialized in his hands and he tipped it over, letting the sands of time pour down inexorably. “Keep watching. Here’s where things start to get messy.”

The boy Q held the quark up in front of him, like a scrap of paper, then thrust his arm into the quark up to his elbow. His hand and lower arm disappeared as if into a pocket-sized wormhole. He dug around inside the quark for a moment, the tip of his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth in his concentration, until he seized hold of something and yanked it back toward his body. It looked to Picard like he was turning the quark inside out.

Instantly, the entire submicroscopic realm changed around them all, becoming a sort of photonegative version of its prior self; Picard looked about him to see a dimension of total blackness, lightened only by flying white particles. Black was white and white was black and the young Q gazed goggle-eyed at what he had wrought. “I don’t understand,” Picard said. “What’s happening?”

“Quiet,” Q shushed him, his gaze fixed on his younger self, who was whooping and hollering in triumph. He appeared very pleased with himself, unlike the curiously somber Q standing next to Picard. Clearly, this memory held no joy for Q, although Picard could not tell why that should be so.
Am I missing something?
Picard wondered.

“Q!” a booming Voice exploded out of the darkness, startling both Picard and the adolescent Q, but not, conspicuously, the Q Picard was most accustomed to. He knew exactly what was coming.

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” the Voice boomed again.

The boy glanced about guiltily, dropping the now snow-white quark like a hot potato. He struck Picard as the very portrait of a child caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar. The inverted quark flopped like a dead thing at the boy’s feet, and he tried to kick it away casually, but it stuck to the sole of his sandal. “Um, nothing in particular,” he replied to the Voice, trying unsuccessfully to shake the quark from his foot. “Why do you ask?”

“YOU KNOW WHY. YOU ARE TOO YOUNG TO TRIFLE WITH ANTIMATTER. WHY HAVE YOU DEFIED THE EDICTS OF THE CONTINUUM?”

The Voice sounded familiar to Picard, although its excessive volume made it hard to identify.
Where have I heard it before?
he thought.
And what was that about antimatter?
He surveyed his surroundings another time; was all of this actually antimatter? He was used to conceiving of antimatter as a fairly abstract concept, something tucked away at the heart of warp engines, safely swaddled behind layers of magnetic constriction. It was difficult to accept that antimatter was all around him, and that, contrary to the fundamental principles of physics, no explosive reaction had resulted from his contact with this realm. Antimatter, in any form, was intrinsically dangerous. Small wonder the rest of the Continuum frowned on the young Q’s impulsive experiments.

Sheepishness gave way to defiance as the teen Q realized there was no way to escape the blame. “It’s not fair!” he declared. “I know what I’m doing. Look at this!” He snatched the telltale quark from his foot and waved it like a flag. “Look all around! I did this—me!—and nothing got hurt. Nothing important, anyway.”

“THE WILL OF THE CONTINUUM CANNOT BE FLOUTED.”

Without any fanfare, the quantum realm reversed itself, returning to its original monochromatic schema. Once again, inky particles glided throughout a blank and silent void. “I liked it better the other way,” the boy Q muttered to himself. Picard glanced at his companion and saw that the older Q was quietly mouthing the same words.

“YOU MUST BE DISCIPLINED. YOU ARE REQUIRED TO SPEND THE NEXT TEN MILLION CYCLES IN SOLITARY MEDITATION.”

“Ten million!” the boy protested. “You have to be joking. That’s practically forever!” He flashed an ingratiating smile, attempting to charm his way out of hot water. “Look, there’s no harm done. How about I just promise not to do it again?”

“THE JUDGMENT OF THE CONTINUUM CANNOT BE QUESTIONED. TEN MILLION CYCLES.”

“But I’ll be ancient by then!” the young Q said.

“Ouch!” his future self responded.

“MAKE IT SO,” the Voice declared, and Picard suddenly realized whom the Voice reminded him of.
Me. The Voice sounds like me.
Was that why Q had always delighted in provoking him, he speculated, or was the similarity merely an unusually subtle joke on Q’s part? Either way, it appeared obvious that Q had developed a grudge against authority figures at a very early age.

“Just you wait,” the boy vowed bitterly, more to himself than to his oppressor.

“One of these days I’ll show you what I can really do, you wait and see.”

“THE TEN MILLION CYCLES BEGIN NOW,” the Voice stated, apparently unimpressed by the youth’s rebellious attitude.
Do I really sound that pompous?
Picard had to wonder.
Surely not.

Staring sullenly at his feet, the young Q vanished in a twinkle of light. Picard could not tell if he had transported himself willingly or if he had been yanked away by the Continuum. He supposed it didn’t matter much.

“Believe me, Jean-Luc,” Q said, gazing mournfully at the spot his earlier self had occupied, “when I was that young, ten million cycles really did feel like an eternity.”

Picard found it hard to sympathize, especially when he was being held against his will while the
Enterprise
faced unknown dangers. “Was this extended flashback really necessary?” he asked. “It comes as no surprise to learn that you started out as a juvenile delinquent.”