“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 o
f 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.”
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 c
onfirmation, 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.