The Q Continuum_ Q-Space Part 13

"We don't want to recite poetry to them," Riker said, "just call a truce." He stared grimly at the luminescent fog stretching across the main viewer. Jagged bolts of electricity and incessant peals of thunder rocked the s.h.i.+p. "Say h.e.l.lo, Mr. Data."

The android's fingers manipulated the controls at Ops faster than Riker's eye could follow them. "I am diverting power to the primary deflector dish," he explained, "in order to produce a narrow wavelength tachyon stream similar to those the Calamarain appear to use to communicate. If my calculations are correct, our tachyon beam should translate as a simple greeting."

"I hope you're right, Data," Riker said. "It would be a shame if we accidentally insulted them by mistake."

"Indeed," Data replied, c.o.c.king his head as if the possibility had not previously occurred to him, "although it is difficult to imagine how we could conceivably make them more hostile than they already appear to be."

You've got a point there, Riker admitted, given that the Calamarain had spent the last several hours dead set on shaking the Enterprise apart. The sharp decline in the strength of the s.h.i.+p's deflector s.h.i.+elds testified to the force and severity of the Calamarain's a.s.sault. Perhaps now we can finally learn why they attacked us in the first place.

"Greeting transmitted," Data reported. The tachyon emission was invisible to the naked eye, yet Riker peered at the viewer regardless, looking for some sign that the Calamarain had received their message. All he saw, though, were the same churning mists and flashes of discharged energy that had besieged the Enterprise since before the captain disappeared.

Troi abruptly sat up straight in her chair. "They heard us," she confirmed, her empathic senses once more linked to the Calamarain. "I feel surprise...and confusion. They're not sure what to do."

"Good work, Mr. Data," Riker said, hope surging inside him for the first time in nearly an hour, "and you too, Deanna." Was he just deluding himself or had the oppressive thunder actually subsided a degree or two in the last few moments? They weren't out of the woods yet, but maybe the Calamarain had stopped hammering them long enough to contemplate Data's greeting. Go ahead, he thought to his amorphous foes. Think it over some. Give us another chance to make contact!

"Commander," Data alerted him, "short-range sensors detect an incoming transmission from the Calamarain, using the same narrow wavelength they applied earlier."

Hope flared in Riker. Thanks to Data, they still had a prayer of turning this thing around. Too bad Captain Picard isn't here to speak with the Calamarain. He's probably the best diplomat in Starfleet. "Put them through, Mr. Data."

"Yes, Commander," Data said. "Our modified translator is interpreting the transmission now."

A genderless, inhuman voice emerged from the bridge's concealed loudspeakers. The voice lacked any recognizable inflections and sounded as though it were coming from someplace deep underwater. "We/singular am/are the Calamarain," it stated.

"I apologize for the atonal quality of the translation," Data commented, "as well as any irregularities in syntax or grammar. Insufficient time was available to provide for nuance or aesthetics."

"This will be fine," Riker a.s.sured him. "Can the computer translate what I say into terms the Calamarain can understand?"

"Affirmative, Commander," Data said. "You may speak normally."

Riker nodded, then took a deep breath before speaking. "This is Commander William T. Riker of the Stars.h.i.+p Enterprise, representing the United Federation of Planets." He resisted an urge to straighten his uniform; the Calamarain were not likely to appreciate any adjustment in his attire, even if they could see him, which was unlikely. Their senses were surely very different from his own. "Do I have the honor of addressing the leader of the Calamarain?"

There was a lag of no more than a second while Data's program translated his words into a series of tachyon beams; then that chilling voice spoke again. "We/singular speak from/for the Calamarain," it said in its m.u.f.fled, watery tones.

What precisely did it mean by that? Was more than one individual addressing him at once, Riker wondered, or was it merely a verbal conceit, like the royal "we" once employed by Earth's ancient monarchs? Or could it be that the Calamarain genuinely possessed a collective consciousness like the Borg? He repressed a shudder. Anything that reminded him of the Borg was not good news. Riker decided to take the speaker at its word, whoever it or they might be.

"We come in peace," he declared, going straight to the heart of the matter. "Why have you attacked us?"

After another brief pause, the eerie voice returned. "Mote abates/attenuates. No a.s.sistance/release permitted. Stop/eliminate."

What? Riker gave Data a quizzical look, but the android could do nothing but shrug. "I am sorry, Commander, but that is the closest translation," he said.

"Deanna?" Riker whispered, hoping she could decipher the Calamarain's cryptic explanation.

"I sense no deception," she said. "They are quite sincere, very much so. Whatever they're trying to tell us, it's very important to them." She bowed her head and ma.s.saged her brow with both hands, clearly striving to achieve an even greater communion with the enigmatic aliens. "Beneath their words, I'm picking up that same mixture of fear and anger."

Why would the Calamarain be afraid of us? Riker couldn't figure it out. If the events of the last hour or so had proved anything, it was that the Enterprise could not inflict any lasting harm on the Calamarain. If only I knew what they meant, he thought. "I don't understand," he said, raising his voice. "What do you want of us?"

"Preserve/defend mote," the Calamarain insisted obscurely.

Interlude

What is that? the spider asked. That is what?

Something was there, on the other side, that he could not quite identify, something at the center of it all. The smoke surrounded the bug, and the bug surrounded It, but what was It, glowing within the entrapped insect like a candle in a skull? Sparking like a quark in the dark?

There was something Q-ish about it, but different, too. Not the Q, nor a Q, but flavored much the same. It is new, the spider realized with a shock. Newer than new. Q-er than Q.

New... For the first time it occurred to the spider to wonder how much might have changed, there on the other side. But that would depend on how long he'd been outside, wouldn't it, and that would be...? No! Not! No! His mind scuttled away from the question, unable to face the answer that loomed just past his awareness.

Change, change, he chanted, calming himself. Change on the range into something quite strange. Change could be good, especially his own. He could make changes, too, and he would, yes indeed, just as soon as he could.

Everything changes, and will change even more....

Eighteen

Someone was singing in the snow.

Picard had little time to orient himself. An instant ago he had inhabited the arid ruins encircling the Guardian of Forever. Now he seemed to be located amid a frozen wasteland, his boots sinking into the icy crust, cold and distant stars s.h.i.+ning in the dark sky far above him. The rime-covered plain stretched about him in all directions. Like Cocytus, he thought, the ninth and lowest level of h.e.l.l. His breath misted before him, but he did not feel in any danger of freezing to death. Q's work, no doubt. The cold, dry air felt chill against Picard's body, nothing more. Very well then, he thought, disinclined to question his lack of hypothermia. He had more important mysteries to solve, like where was that infernal singing coming from?

The voice, rich and resonant, carried through the glacial cold: "She was a kind-hearted girl, a lissome fair daughter, Who always declined the gifts that I brought her...."

Still unaware of his two humanoid observers, the young Q looked similarly intrigued by the robust voice crooning through the frigid air. Deterred not at all by the forbidding landscape, he trudged across the frosty tundra in search of the source of the melody. Picard and the older Q followed closely behind him, sometimes stepping in his sunken footprints. Starlight trickled down through the endless night, but not enough to truly light their way. Defying logic and conventional means of combustion, Q whipped up a torch, which he held out in front of him. Lambent red flames flickered above his fist, casting an eerie crimson glow upon their frozen path. The sleeves of Q's charcoal robe flapped slowly in the biting winter wind, and Picard found himself wis.h.i.+ng that Starfleet uniforms came complete with gloves and a scarf. Although no new snow fell from the cloudless sky, the breeze tossed loosely packed white flakes into the air, making vision difficult. The icy bits pelted his face, melting against his reddened cheeks and brow.

"But pity's the thing, so I begged for cool water, And then led her away like a lamb to a slaughter...."

They marched for several minutes, during which time Picard observed the utter absence of any signs of animation. Nothing moved upon or above the ice except the windblown particles of snow. Picard wondered if any form of life existed beneath the permafrost, such as that found in Antarctica. Perhaps, if he could place this planet by means of the constellations overhead, it might be worth bringing the Enterprise by to check? Then he recalled that all of this was taking place millions of years in the past. Any life-forms that might exist here and now would most likely be long extinct when he returned to his own time. For all I know, this entire planet and star system may not even exist in the twenty-fourth century.

The soles of his boots crunched through the snow. No, he knew instinctively, there was no life here. This was a dead place, devoid of vitality, empty of possibility. Save for the singing voice, and the soft hiss of the burning torch, the icy plain was locked in silence. Much like the old Klingon penal colony on Rura Penthe, he mused, known to history as the "aliens' graveyard." Surely, that icebound planetoid could have been no more bleak and inhospitable than this.

"Like a lamb to slaughter, yes, like a lamb to the slaughter...."

The echoing refrain grew louder as they neared its origin. Soon Picard spied the figure of a man, human in appearance, sitting upon a granite boulder covered by a thick veneer of frost. He appeared larger than either Q, and his stout frame was draped in heavy clothing that looked as though it had seen better days yet nonetheless retained a semblance of faded glory. His heavy fur coat was frayed around its sleeves and along its hem while his high black boots were scuffed and the heels worn down to the sole. Rags were wrapped around his hands and boots to hold on to his heat, and a ratty velvet scarf protected his throat. A wide-brimmed hat, drooping over his brow, and tattered trousers completed his outfit, giving him an archaic and faintly dispossessed air.

"Who is this?" Picard asked. "I don't recognize him."

"Of course not," Q retorted impatiently. "Your ancestors weren't even a gleam in creation's eye yet."

It wasn't that foolish an observation, Picard thought, considering the timelessness of Q and his ilk. "Is this what he genuinely looked like," he asked his guide, wanting to fully understand what he was witnessing, "or are we dealing in metaphor again?"

"More or less," Q admitted. "In fact, he resembled a being not unlike a Q, whose true form would be patently incomprehensible to your limited human senses."

So this is your interpretation of how he first appeared to you, Picard thought. He must have made quite an impression. Although worn and ragged, the stranger presented an intriguing and evocative figure. Singing to himself, he was engaged in what looked like a game of three-dimensional solitaire. Oversized playing cards were spread out on the snow before him, or floated in fixed positions above the mud-slick ground, arranged in a variety of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal patterns. He looked engrossed in his game, meticulously s.h.i.+fting cards from one position to another, until the flickering, phosph.o.r.escent light of Q's torch fell upon the outermost row of cards. He looked up abruptly, fixing gleaming azure eyes on the young Q, his face that of a human male in his mid-forties, with weathered features and heavy, crinkly lines around his eyes and mouth. "Say, who goes there?" he said, sounding intrigued rather than alarmed.

Q faltered before the stranger's forthright gaze, taking a few steps backward involuntarily. "I might ask you the same," he retorted, his brash manner failing to conceal a touch of obvious apprehension. He thrust out his chest and chin to strike a less nervous pose.

"You must understand," his older self whispered in Picard's ear, "this was the first time since the dawn of my omniscience that I had encountered anything I didn't understand. A little healthy trepidation was only natural under the circ.u.mstances."

Picard was too entranced by the unfolding scene to respond to Q's excuses. "Well said!" the stranger laughed l.u.s.tily. "And you're more than welcome, too. I was starting to think I was the only preternatural deity stuck in the middle of this irksome Ice Age."

"W-who are you?" Q stammered. Fog streamed from his lips; another artistic touch, Picard guessed, courtesy of the other Q. "What are you?"

"Call me 0," he said, doffing his hat to reveal unruly orange hair streaked with silver. "As to where I'm from, it's no place you've ever heard of, I promise you that."

"That's impossible," young Q said indignantly, his pride stung. "I'm Q. I know everything and have been everywhere."

"Then where are you now?" the stranger asked.

The simple question threw Q for a loop. He glanced around, feigning nonchalance (badly), and seemed to be searching his memory. Taking his own inventory of their surroundings, Picard noted a trail of deep, irregularly paced footprints stretching away in the opposite direction from the way they had come. As far as he could see, the tracks extended all the way to the horizon. How long, he wondered, has the stranger been wandering through this wintry Siberian wasteland?

"Er, I'm not sure," Q confessed finally, "but I'm quite certain it's no place worth remembering. Otherwise, I would recognize it at once, as I would your own plane of origin."

The individual who called himself 0 did not take offense at this challenge to his veracity. He simply chuckled to himself and shook his head incredulously. "But there's always someplace else, no matter how far you've been. Some unknown territory beyond the horizon, across the gulf, or hidden beneath a hundred familiar layers of what's real and everyday. There has to be someplace Other or why else do we roam? We might as well just plant ourselves in one cozy cosmos or another and never budge." He clapped his gloved, rag-swaddled hands together, and a curved gla.s.s bottle, filled with an unknown liquid of pinkish tint, appeared in his grasp. He wrenched the stopper from the spout and spit it onto the h.o.a.rfrost at his feet. Roseate fumes poured from the mouth of the bottle.

"For myself," he said, after taking a swig from the carafe, "I don't much care whether you believe me or not, but if I'm not from the parts you know, then where did this come from? Answer that."

He offered the bottle to Q, who looked uncertain what to do. "How do I know you aren't trying to poison me?" he said, striving for a light, jokey tone.

0 grinned back at him. "You don't. That's the fun of it." He shoved the bottle at Q. "Come now, eternity's too short not to take a chance now and then. Caution is for cowards, and for those who lack the gaze and the guts to try something new."

"You really think so?" Q asked. Despite his earlier misgivings, he was clearly curious about the rakish stranger. It struck Picard that 0's professed philosophy was a far cry from the conservative limits imposed on the young Q by the Continuum.

"I know so," 0 declared. He wagged the bottle in front of Q's face, then started to withdraw it. "But maybe you don't agree. Perhaps you're one of those timid, tentative types who never do anything unexpected...."

Impulsively, Q grabbed the carafe by its curved spout and gulped down a sizable portion of the bottle's contents. His eyes bugged out as the drink hit his system like a quantum torpedo. He bent over coughing and gasping. "By the Continuum!" he swore. "Where did you find that stuff?"

0 slapped Q on the back while deftly retrieving the bottle from Q's shaking hand. "Well, I'd tell you, friend," he said, "but then you don't believe in places you've never laid eyes on."

Next to Picard, across the ice from the young Q and his new acquaintance, an older-but-arguably-wiser Q confided in the stars.h.i.+p captain. "It's true, you know," he said, a wistful melancholy tingeing his voice, "I've never tasted anything like it ever again. I've even tried recreating it from scratch, but the flavor is never quite right."

Only Q, Picard thought, could get nostalgic about something that happened millions of years in the past. Still, he thought he could identify with some of what Q was experiencing. He felt much the same way about the Stargazer, not to mention the EnterpriseD.

By now, the young Q had recovered from the effects of the exotic concoction. "That was fantastic!" he blurted. "It was so...different." He said that last word with a tone of total disbelief, then regarded the stranger with new appreciation. "I don't understand. How did you get here, wherever here is? And are there others like you?"

0 held up his hand to quiet Q's unleashed curiosity. "Whoa there, friend. I'm glad you liked the brew, but it seems to me you have the advantage on me. Where are you from, exactly?" His icy blue eyes narrowed as he looked Q over. "And what's this Continuum you mentioned a couple moments ago?"

"But surely you must have heard of the Q Continuum?" Q said, all his misgivings forgotten. "We're only the apex of sentience throughout the entire...I mean, the known...multiverse."

"You forget, I'm not from around your usual haunts," 0 said. "Nor have I always been camped out in this polar purgatory." He swept his arm to encompa.s.s his arctic domain. "A bit of a wrong turn there, I admit, but that's what happens sometimes when you strike out for parts unknown. You have to accept the risks as well as the rewards." He regarded Q with a calculating expression, brazenly a.s.sessing the juvenile superbeing. Picard didn't like the avid gleam in the stranger's eyes; 0 seemed more than simply curious about Q. "Perhaps you'd care to show me just how you got here?"

His game abandoned, 0 began to sweep his playing cards together, combining them into a single stack. Picard peeked at the exposed faces of the cards, and was shocked to see what looked like living figures moving about in the two-dimensional plane of the cards. The suits and characters were unfamiliar to him, bearing little resemblance to the cards used in Enterprise's weekly poker games, but they were definitely animated. He spotted soldiers and sailors, balladeers and falconers and dancing bears among the many archetypes represented upon the metal cards, and apparently crying out in fear as 0 shuffled them together. Although no sounds escaped the deck, the figures shared a common terror and state of alarm, their eyes and mouths open wide, their arms reaching out in panic. "What in heaven's name," Picard started to ask Q, but 0 patted the cards into place, then dispatched the deck to oblivion before Picard could finish his question. Snow-flecked air rushed in to fill the empty void the stack of cards had formerly occupied.

Had the young Q noticed the unsettling nature of the cards? Picard could not tell for certain, but he thought he discerned a new wariness entering into the immature Q's face and manner. Or maybe, he speculated, 0 simply seemed a shade too eager to uncover Q's secrets.

"How I got here?" young Q repeated slowly, displaying some of his later self's cunning and evasiveness. "Well, that's a terribly long and complicated story."

"I've got time," 0 insisted. He clapped his hands and another ice-coated boulder appeared next to his own. He gestured for Q to take a seat there. "And there's nothing I like better than a good yarn, particularly if there's a trace of danger in it." He looked Q over from head to toe. "Do you like danger, Q?"

"Actually, I think I should be going," Q stated, taking a few steps backward. "I have an appointment out by Antares Prime, you see? Q is expecting me, as well as Q and Q."

His retreat was short-lived, for 0 simply rose from his polished stone resting-place and advanced on Q, dragging his left leg behind him. His infirmity caught the young Q by surprise, freezing him in his tracks upon the tundra; Picard guessed he'd never seen a crippled G.o.d before. "Not so fast, friend," 0 said, his voice holding just a trace of menace, a hint of a threat. "As you can plainly see, I can't get around as quickly as I used to." He leaned forward until his face was less than a finger's length from Q, his hot breath fogging the air between them. "Don't suppose you know an easy exit out of this oversized ice cube, do you, boy?"

Picard struggled to translate what he was witnessing into its actual cosmic context. "His leg," he asked Q. "What is the lameness a metaphor for?"

"Just what he said," Q answered impatiently, unheard by the figures they observed. "Must you be so b.l.o.o.d.y a.n.a.lytical all the time? Can't you accept this gripping drama at face value?"

"From you, never," Picard stated. He refused to accept that an ent.i.ty such as 0 appeared to be would actually limp, at least not in a literal human sense.

Q resigned himself to Picard's queries. "If you must know, he could no longer travel at what you would consider superluminal speeds, at least in the sort of normal s.p.a.ce-time reality you're familiar with." He directed Picard's gaze back to the long-ago meeting upon the boreal plain. "Not that I fully understood all that at the time."

"Can't you leave on your own?" the young Q asked, apparently reluctant to divulge the existence of the Guardian to the stranger. Picard admired his discretion, even if he doubted it would last. He knew Q too well.

"Sort of a personal question, isn't it?" 0 shot back indignantly. "You're not making light of my handicap, are you? I'll have you know I'm proud of every sc.r.a.pe and scar I've picked up over the course of my travels. I earned every one of them by taking my chances and running by my own rules. I'd hate to think you were the kind to think less of an ent.i.ty because he's a little worse for wear."

"Of course not. Not at all!" Q replied and his older self groaned audibly. His perennial adversary, Picard observed, was not enjoying this scene at all. He shook his head and averted his eyes as his earlier incarnation apologized to 0. "I meant no offense, not one bit."

"That's better," 0 said, his harsh tone softening into something more amiable. "Then you won't mind if I hitch a ride with you back to your corner of the cosmos?" He flashed Q a toothy grin. "When do we leave?"

"You want to come with me?" the young Q echoed, uncertain. Events seemed to be proceeding far too fast for him. "Er, I'm not sure that's wise. I don't know anything about-I mean, you don't know anything about where I come from?"

"True, but I'm looking to learn," 0 said. He tapped the large rock behind him with the heel of his boot and both boulders disappeared, leaving the frozen plain devoid of any distinguis.h.i.+ng features. "Trust me, there's nothing more to be seen around here. We might as well move on."

When did they become "we," Picard wondered, and the young Q might have been asking himself the same question. "I don't know," he murmured, lowering his torch to create a little more s.p.a.ce between him and 0. "I hadn't really thought-"

"Nonsense," 0 retorted. His robust laughter produced a flurry of mist that wreathed his face like a smoking beard. He threw his arm around Q's shoulders, heedless of the youth's blazing torch. "Don't tell me you're actually afraid of poor old me?"

"Of course not!" Q insisted, perhaps too quickly. Picard recognized the tone immediately; it was the same one the older Q used whenever Picard questioned his superiority. "Why should I be?"

Next to Picard, the older Q glowered at his past. "You fool," he hissed. "Don't listen to him."

But his words fell upon literally deaf ears. Breaking away from 0, the younger Q snuffed out his torch in the snow; then, displaying the same supreme high-handedness that Picard had come to a.s.sociate with Q, he traced in silver the oddly shaped outline of the time portal. "Behold," he said grandly, as if determined to impress 0 with his accomplishment, "the Guardian of Forever."

0 stared greedily at the beckoning aperture, and Picard did not require any commentary from the older Q to know that the younger was on the verge of making a serious mistake. Picard had not reached his advanced rank in Starfleet without learning to be a quick judge of character, and this 0 character struck him as a bold, and distinctly evasive, opportunist at the very least. In fact, Picard realized, 0 reminded him of no one so much as the older Q at his most devious. "You should have trusted your own instincts," he told his companion.

"Now you tell me," Q grumped.

Nineteen.