“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 shifting cards from one position to another, until the flickering, phosphorescent 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 circumstances.”
Picard was too entranced by the unfolding scene to respond to Q’s excuses. “Well said!” the stranger laughed lustily. “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 glass 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 hoarfrost 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 starship 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 Enterprise-D.
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 encompass 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 assessing 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 god 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 bloody analytical all the time? Can’t you accept this gripping drama at face value?”
“From you, never,” Picard stated. He refused to accept that an entity 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 space-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 scrape 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 entity 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 distinguishing 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 space 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 associate 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
Preserve the mote? What the blazes did that mean?
Riker’s fists clenched in frustration. This was like trying to communicate with the Tamarians, before Captain Picard figured out that their language was based entirely on mythological allusions. We rely too damn much on our almighty Universal Translator, he thought, so we get thrown for a loop when it runs into problems. He signaled Data to switch off the translation program while he conferred with the others. “‘Preserve/defend mote,’” he echoed aloud. “What mote are they talking about? A speck of spacedust? A solitary atom?” Could this refer to some primal metaphor, such as the Tamarians employed? What was that old quote about “a mote in your eye” or something?
Or, looking at it from a different angle, couldn’t “mote” also be used as a verb? Yes, he recalled, an archaic form of the word “might,” as in “So mote it be.” Preserve might? Preserve possibilities? Riker’s spirit sagged as he considered all the diverse interpretations that came to mind.
“Maybe they don’t mean mote,” Leyoro suggested, “but moat, as in a circle of water protecting a fortress.”
Spoken like a security officer, Riker thought, but maybe Leyoro was on to something here. A moat, a ring of defense…Of course, he realized. “The barrier. The Calamarain don’t think in terms of solids, like walls or fences. To them, the galactic barrier is a big moat, circling the entire Milky Way!”
“That is a most logical conclusion,” Data observed. “As you will recall, they first attacked when the probe attempted to enter the barrier.”
“‘Moat abates/attenuates,’” Troi said, repeating the Calamarain’s original pronouncement. “Perhaps they’re referring to the weaknesses in the barrier that Professor Faal detected.”
“That makes sense,” Riker declared, convinced t
hey had found the answer. He would have to remember to commend Lieutenant Leyoro in his report, assuming they all came out of this alive. “They’re protecting the barrier from us. ‘No assistance/release permitted.’ Maybe that means they don’t want us to escape—or be ‘released’ from—the galaxy.”
That sounds just presumptuous enough to be right, he thought. Lord knows this wouldn’t be the first time some arrogant, “more advanced” life-form had tried to enforce limits on Starfleet’s exploration of the universe. Just look at Q himself, for instance. It was starting to seem like the Calamarain had a lot in common with the Q Continuum. He glanced sideways at the strange woman and child seated at his own auxiliary command station. She appeared to be flipping through a magazine titled simply Q, materialized from who-knows-where, while q watched the tempest visible on the viewscreen. The other Q, he recalled, had warned the captain not to cross the barrier. Could it be that Q and the Calamarain had been on the same side all along?
“This might not be the most judicious occasion to argue the point,” Data stated with characteristic understatement.
“Shields down to twenty-one percent,” Leyoro confirmed.
Riker saw the wisdom in what they were saying. As much as he resented being dictated to by a glorified cloud of hot gas, he was perfectly willing to withdraw from the field of battle this time, provided that the Calamarain could be persuaded to release the Enterprise long enough to let them go home. “Put me through to them again,” he instructed Data.