“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.”
“Says the man who was nearly expelled from Starfleet Academy—twice,” Q replied. “And we’re not done yet.” He flipped over the hourglass once more, reversing the flow of sand. “This was only the beginning.”
There’s more? Picard thought. How much longer did Q intend to keep him away from his ship? “No more,” he began to protest, but his angry words were swallowed up by another flash of supernatural light, leaving the quarks to continue alone their endless and invisible pavanes.
He was on his way again—to only Q knew where.
Interlude
Lieutenant Reginald Barclay did his best to ignore the ceaseless hum of the Calamarain as he inspected the battered probe, but that was easier said than done. He was all too aware that the steady drone in the background emanated from the same entities, called the Calamarain according to Chief La Forge, that had inflicted the damage he was now evaluating. If they could do this to the molded duranium-tritanium casing, what could they do to ordinary human flesh and blood?
Barclay shuddered, glad that no one was present to witness his attack of nerves. Sometimes his imagination was just a little too vivid for his own peace of mind, even if Counselor Troi tried occasionally to convince him that his rich imagination could be a source of strength rather than a
liability, provided he managed to control it rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, that was about the only eventuality he couldn’t imagine.
And who wouldn’t be worried, now that the captain was missing, too? Abducted by Q, from what Chief La Forge said. Barclay had a great deal of faith in Captain Picard’s ability to keep the ship intact despite the numerous—too numerous, as far as Barclay was concerned—hazards encountered in deep space, but how could the captain extricate them from this crisis if he wasn’t even aboard? It was enough to make even a Klingon nervous…maybe.
The probe, plucked from the Calamarain’s grasp moments before its imminent destruction, rested on the floor of Transporter Room Five. Approximately four meters in length, it was a conical, metallic object with a bulbous, multifaceted head constructed of triple-layered transparent aluminum. The matte black finish of the probe was scorched and dented while the once-transparent head, resembling the eye of an enormous insect, appeared to have been partially melted by whatever forces had assailed the probe. The formerly clear sensor windows had clouded over, turning opaque and milky. A fissure along the right side of the cone revealed a sliver of charred circuitry beneath the ruptured hull.
A full-color, three-dimensional picture of a similar crevice opening up along the length of the Enterprise itself forced its way into Barclay’s mind, but he pushed it away as fast as he could. That’s the way, he told himself. Just focus on the job. He scanned the probe with his tricorder, detecting no significant residual radiation, before gingerly laying his hands on the blasted surface of the mechanism. To his surprise, it felt slightly warm to the touch, despite having been beamed in straight from the cold of interstellar space. He consulted his tricorder again and observed that the metals composing the hull remained agitated at an atomic level, although the degree of ionic activity was swiftly falling off as the disrupted matter restabilized. He recorded the data into the memory of the tricorder and charted its progress for several seconds. The forced acceleration of the atoms within the alloy, along with the resulting stresses of its molecular bonds, were consistent with the sort of tachyon overload La Forge had suggested he look out for. Tachyons definitely seemed to be the Calamarain’s weapons of choice, but what kind of harm could they impose on Federation technology, not to mention innocent Starfleet officers?
Convinced that he had learned as much as he could from the torn and toasted exterior of the probe, he proceeded to the next stage of the autopsy, wincing slightly at the more alarming connotations of that term. First, he confirmed that the deuterium microfusion propulsion unit at the rear of the probe was indeed deactivated; fortunately, class-2 sensor probes were not equipped with warp capacity, so he didn’t have to worry about any loose particles of antimatter poking a hole into reality as he knew it. Next, using a delicate phaser scalpel, he peeled off a section of the burnt outer casing, exposing the intricate navigational and sensory apparatuses within.
The probe’s innards did not look much better than its supposedly protective sheath. Most of the circuitry was fused and useless now. Still, he chipped the carbon scoring away from one of the output ports and plugged a palm-sized data-retrieval unit into the central memory processor in hope of rescuing whatever scraps of information might have survived the tachyon barrage. There’s probably not much left, he thought glumly, but here goes nothing.
Unexpectedly, the retrieval unit whirred to life at once and began humming almost as loudly as the Calamarain themselves. “Hey!” he said out loud to the empty transporter room. Maybe the internal damage wasn’t as bad as it looked.
He waited until the unit had recorded all available data onto an isolinear chip, then began dissecting the entire mechanism, methodically extracting the coprocessors one at a time, scanning every component with his tricorder to record the extent of the damage (if any), then moving on to the next one. It was slow, laborious work and Barclay soon found himself wishing that Chief La Forge had been able to spare another engineer to assist him at the task.
Not that he was all too eager to return to Engineering, not while there was still a chance he might run into Lem Faal again. That distinguished and ever-so-intimidating scientist still gave him dirty looks every time Barclay had to come by Faal’s temporary workstation to check with Mr. La Forge about something or another. I can’t believe I almost wrecked the pulse generator, he thought, reliving those awful, endless seconds for the one thousandth time. His cheek still burned where Faal almost hit him. Barclay knew that he had completely thrown away any chance he had of taking part in the historic experiment, even assuming the Calamarain let the operation proceed as planned. Another wasted opportunity, he thought, the latest in a long string of self-administered wounds to his Starfleet aspirations. Counselor Troi insisted that his reputation among his peers wasn’t nearly as bad as he feared, but sometimes he wondered if she was just being nice.
At times like this, he thought, his mind wandering somewhat, it was very tempting to sneak away to the nearest holodeck and escape from the stress and humiliations of the real world. Perhaps he could relive some of his greatest holovictories, like defeating Baron Diabolis in Chapter Twenty-Three of The Quest for the Golden Throne or outwitting Commander Kruge before the Genesis Planet completely self-destructed. The latter was one of his proudest moments; after seventythree tries, he’d actually managed to save Spock without sacrificing the original Enterprise, which was even better than the real Kirk had been able to do. Perhaps next time he could save David Marcus, too….
No, he thought, shaking his head to clear his mind of past and future fantasies. He had worked too hard to get a handle on his holodiction problem to backslide now, especially when Chief La Forge and the others were depending on him. He refocussed all his concentration on the job at hand, using the phaser scalpel to separate two fused coprocessors, then gently pulled a melted chip out of its slot.
A glint of blue flame peeked out from beneath the slot and Barclay scooted backward on his knees, half-expecting the entire probe to explode in his face like a defective torpedo. When nothing of the sort occurred, he crept back toward the probe, his tricorder outstretched before him. Funny, he noted; the tricorder wasn’t reporting any excess heat or energy.
There was definitely something there, though: an incandescent blue glow that seemed to come from somewhere deeper within the inner workings of the perhaps-not-totally lifeless probe. Not entirely trusting his instruments, Barclay held up his open palm in front of the mysterious radiance. His skin didn’t detect any heat either, but he thought he felt a peculiar tingling along his nerve endings. He might be imagining the sensations, he reminded himself, painfully aware of his own tendency toward hypochondria. He still remembered, with excruciating accuracy, that time last month when he paged Dr. Crusher in the middle of the graveyard shift, thoroughly convinced that he was dying from an accidental overdose of genetronic radiation and in immediate need of massive hyronalyn treatments, only to discover that there was nothing wrong with him except a slight case of heartburn. Maybe it was best, he concluded, to reserve judgment on the whole question of whether he was really feeling something or not.
But what was causing that glow? It wasn’t very intense, more like the bioluminescent gleam of a Rigelian firefly, but he couldn’t account for what might be producing the light. Wait a sec, he thought, a hypothesis forming in his mind. Maybe bioluminescence was precisely what he was looking at. Excitement overcoming his trepidations, he reached down with both hands and pried out an entire shelf of singed isolinear coprocessors, then looked back eagerly into the cavity he had exposed. There, beneath the discarded rows of coprocessors, was the source of the lambent blue sheen: the newfangled bio-gel packs that were rapidly becoming the next generation of Starfleet data-processing technology. The organic memory cells, designed to accelerate the transfer and storage of information from the probe’s sensors, looked surprisingly undamaged compared with the rest of the probe’s entrails; they were laid out in a sequence of finger-sized sacs connected by sem
ipermeable silicate membranes that appeared to have remained intact despite the pummeling endured by the probe. Now that the preceding layer of circuitry had been removed, he could see that all of the gel packs were imbued with the same strange, unaccountable incandescence that had first attracted his attention.
Even though the bio-organic technology was relatively new, having been introduced on the ill-fated U.S.S. Voyager before that ship ended up in the Delta Quadrant, Barclay knew the packs didn’t ordinarily glow this way; they were intended to store information, not energy. Something must have happened to them during the probe’s interrupted voyage to the barrier. You know, he thought, the light from the packs kind of looks like the glow of the galactic barrier.
Inspiration struck him like the blast of a holographic disruptor beam (set well within conventional safety parameters). He quickly scanned the gel-filled sacs to confirm that the curious glow was not an aftereffect of a tachyon overload. This had nothing to do with the Calamarain then, and perhaps everything to do with the probe’s brief proximity to the barrier itself.
According to the latest scientific theories, which Barclay had studiously reviewed before getting kicked off the wormhole project, the energies that composed the galactic barrier were largely psychokinetic in nature. He had not programmed his tricorder to scan for any psionic traces before, but now he recalibrated the sensor assemblies to detect emanations along the known psychic frequencies and checked out the probe again.
Voilà, he thought, feeling much as he had when he found the (holographic) lost Orb of the Prophets; there they were, distinct pockets of psionic energy contained within the shining gel packs. Obviously, the bio-neural material within the packs had somehow absorbed small quantities of psionic energy from the barrier. Is that why the Calamarain attacked the probe, he wondered. It was even possible that the borrowed psionic power had helped protect the organic components of the probe from the Calamarain’s tachyon bombardment.