The girl was easy to identify. Her blond curls and striking Betazoid eyes distinguished her from the other gleeful youngster. But where had that child, a brown-haired boy in a white sailor’s costume, come from? Had someone dropped off another kid without him noticing? He wasn’t aware of any other children visiting the ship, but he was only an ensign; no one told him anything.
Could this be some sort of test or surprise inspection? Maybe the new kid wasn’t really here at all but was just a holographic image that had appeared from nowhere while he wasn’t looking. He checked out the holographic control display embedded into his desk, but found nothing out of the ordinary.
“Milo?” he called out. Perhaps the eleven-year-old had noticed something. “Did you see anybody come by in the last half hour or so?”
“Uh-uh,” Milo grunted rather sullenly, never looking away from his computer game. Whitman suspected that Milo thought he was much too old for the children’s center and was taking it out on the babysitter.
“Are you sure?” Whitman asked. It just didn’t make any sense. How could there be an extra kid?
“Uh-huh,” Milo said, extremely uninterested in anything any grown-up had to say. On the terminal before him, several invading Tholian warships bit the dust in a computer-generated blaze of glory.
Whitman closed his eyes and massaged his temples, growing increasingly agitated by this uncrackable dilemma. The way he saw it, there was no way he could ask anyone for an explanation without looking like a careless and incompetent idiot. His stomach began to churn unhappily. Maybe if I just keep my eyes shut, he thought desperately, and count to ten, everything will go back to normal and I’ll have the right number of kids again.
It was a ridiculous, pathetic fantasy, but it made as much sense as what had already happened so far. He squeezed his eyes shut and counted slowly under his breath. He swallowed hard, then opened his eyes.
Only one toddler sat on the carpet, staring up at the ceiling with unrestrained wonder. Whitman couldn’t believe his luck, until he noticed the wobbly stack of blocks rising up in front of him. He craned his neck back and followed the tower of blocks to its top—where he saw the other child, the one in the sailor suit, teetering at the top of an impossibly tall block pile that reached above Whitman’s head. The boy’s unruly brown hair brushed the ceiling and he giggled happily, completely unfrightened by his precarious perch. The other child clapped her tiny hands together, cheering him on.
“Oh…my…God,” Whitman gasped, unable to believe his eyes. Then he clapped his hands over his mouth, afraid to exhale for fear of bringing down the tower of brightly colored blocks. Across the room, Milo, intent on his one-man war against the Tholian marauders, was oblivious of the miracle.
The baby reached out his hand and two more blocks lifted off the floor and drifted upward into his waiting fingers. Whitman rubbed his eyes and struggled to figure out what was happening. Had something gone wrong with the artificial gravity? Could this be some bizarre holographic malfunction? Stranger things had been known to happen; he’d heard a few horror stories about near-fatal accidents within the old Enterprise’s holodecks, like that time a holographic Moriarty had almost taken over the ship. Or when Counselor Troi was nearly gunned down during a Western scenario.
Whitman picked up his padd and dropped it over the desk. The padd fell straight down, just like it was supposed to, so the gravity was working fine. But how then had the little boy managed to erect such a ridiculous structure?
He cautiously snuck out from behind the desk, arms outstretched to catch the teetering toddler if and when he plummeted to the floor. He had to fall soon, Whitman told himself. The ramshackle pile of blocks looked like an avalanche waiting to happen. It could collapse at any second. When it did, would he be able to grab the kid before he crashed to the ground? What would Whip Parsi do at a time like this? He hit the medical emergency alert button, summoning help in advance of the ghastly plunge that was sure to come.
The child continued to stack his blocks. Having run out of room between himself and the roof, the boy blithely turned himself upside down and crawled out onto the ceiling. He began lining up his new blocks in a row across the length of the ceiling while he hung there effortlessly like a fly upon a wall. “Choo-choo!” he burbled.
Whitman suddenly felt very silly holding his arms out. A gravity screwup, he thought. It has to be. Never mind that he still didn’t know how this kid got here in the first place. He was about to contact Engineering when the door whished open and Counselor Troi rushed in. Her hair was disheveled and she looked like she’d come straight from bed, pausing only to throw on a fresh uniform.
“Gee, you’re fast,” Whitman said, remembering his medical alert from mere moments ago.
“The captain sent me,” she explained.
“No security team?” Baeta Leyoro asked, sounding both incredulous and offended.
“That is correct, Lieutenant,” Picard confirmed. “I believe that Counselor Troi is better suited to handle this situation.” If the infant q had indeed been deposited in the holographic children’s center, then Deanna’s empathic skills and training were more likely to keep the child under control than a squadron of phaser-wielding security officers, assuming that any of them had even a prayer of stopping q from wreaking havoc aboard the ship. This is all Q’s fault, he thought angrily. He simply can’t resist making my life difficult.
Leyoro fumed visibly. The dark-haired security chief abandoned her station at tactical and marched into the command area to face Picard. “Permission to speak frankly, sir?” she requested. Her eyes blazed like a warp-core explosion.
“Go ahead, Lieutenant,” he said. With Q and his mate absent for the time being, there might be no better time to hear what Leyoro had to say. Will Riker paid close attention to the irate officer as well, while the rest of the crew carried on with their work, no doubt listening attentively.
She stood stiffly in front of him, her hands clasped behind her back. “With all due respect, sir, I cannot do my job effectively if you keep countermanding my recommendations. If you have no faith in me as your head of security, then perhaps you should find someone else.”
Just for a second, Picard wished that Worf had never accepted that post at Deep Space Nine. “Your service record is exemplary,” he told her, “and I have a great deal of confidence in you. However, dealing with Q, any Q, is a unique situation that calls for unorthodox approaches, like sending a counselor in place of a security team.”
“I believe I am accustomed to coping with unexpected circumstances,” she maintained. “In the past, I have smuggled defectors across the Neutral Zone in an uncloaked ship, rescued political prisoners from a maximum-security Tarsian slave labor camp, and even repelled a Maquis raid with nothing more than a single shuttlecraft and a malfunctioning photon torpedo.”
Having thoroughly examined Leyoro’s file before granting her the post of security chief, Picard knew that she was not exaggerating in the slightest. If anything, she was understating her somewhat colorful (and faintly notorious) history. Not to mention rebelling against her own government when the Angosian soldiers escaped from that lunar prison colony, he thought.
Still.
“Despite your varied accomplishments,” he insisted, “a Q is unlike any threat that you could have encountered before. Force and shows of force can accomplish nothing where a Q is concerned.” He hoped Leyoro would understand what he was saying and not take the matter personally. “This is not about you or your capabilities, but about what a Q can do. Namely, anything.”
Leyoro appeared mollified. She relaxed her stance and stopped radiating anger. The furnace in her eyes cooled to a smolder. “So,” she asked, “how do you deal with an entity like Q?”
“Lieutenant,” he answered, “I’ve been trying to figure that out for a good ten years now.”
Beverly Crusher arrived at Holodeck B only minutes after Troi. Not that any of them really needed to have hurried. The baby q looked quite conte
nt to play with his blocks up on the ceiling. Watching him was a disorienting, vaguely vertiginous experience. Troi kept glancing down at the floor to make sure that she wasn’t simply looking at a reflection in a mirrored ceiling.
She wasn’t.
“Now what do we do?” she asked aloud. “Send a shuttle up there to fetch him?”
“I may have a better idea,” Beverly answered, “but first let’s get the rest of these kids out of here.” At the doctor’s suggestion, Percy Whitman began corralling the little Faal girl and herding her toward the door. Troi felt sorry for the poor ensign; she could sense his anxiety and confusion. She had attempted to explain to him quickly about Q and Q and q, but he remained as rattled as before.
“Percy,” she whispered as he passed by. “Feel free to drop by my office later if you want to talk about this.”
He nodded weakly and gave the tiny Betazoid girl a pat on the back to keep her moving. Enthralled by the astounding spectacle of her peer’s visit to the ceiling, the other toddler was not very eager to leave. She started crying, but Percy ssshed her effectively and led her out the door. Sitting upside down above everyone’s heads, merrily stringing his blocks across the ceiling, q did not notice his playmate being escorted away. Troi breathed a little easier when the youngest of Professor Faal’s children disappeared into the corridor. She had summoned Faal himself to the holodeck, but the scientist could just as easily claim the children outside the chamber, safely away from the baby q’s unpredictable activities.
That left only the eleven-year-old at the computer terminal. Milo, she recalled from Lem Faal’s personal files. She began to inch her way along the edge of the chamber, hoping to sneak the older boy out without attracting q’s attention. “Milo,” she called in a hushed tone. “Milo?”
Caught up in his game, he had not yet observed any of the oddities taking place nearby, nor did he hear her call his name. Troi admired the intensity of his focus even as she wished that he would lift up his head from the screen for just one moment. She had no idea what the baby q might do to another child if provoked, but she didn’t want to find out.
The door to the holodeck was sliding shut behind Ensign Whitman when Lem Faal stormed into the simulated child-care center. His thinning hair was disordered and a heavy Betazoid robe, made of thick, quilted beige fabric, was belted at his waist. “What’s this all about?” he said irritably, sounding as if he had been unpleasantly roused from sleep. “What’s going on with my children? First, I got an urgent call, then that strange young man out there”—he gestured toward the corridor—“said something about an upside-down baby?” Beverly tried to shush Faal, fearing he’d startle q, but the scientist spotted the child upon the ceiling first. “By the Sacred Chalice,” he whispered, taken aback. His red-rimmed eyes widened. His mouth fell open and he gasped for breath.
The situation was getting more complicated by the moment, Troi realized. She had to get both Faal and the remaining child out of here. “Milo?” she thought urgently, hoping to reach the Betazoid child on a telepathic level.
“Ha!” the boy shouted in triumph, leaning back in his chair and pumping his fist in the air. “Eat hot plasma, Tholian scum!”
His cry of victory startled q, who evidently forgot about canceling gravity. Durafoam blocks rained upon the floor while the surprised baby dropped like a rock. “Oh no!” Beverly shouted.
Without thinking about it, Troi ran to the center of the room and threw out her arms. Will had always teased her about her total inability to play the ancient Terran game of baseball, but now she relied on every hour she had ever spent practicing in the holodeck to wipe the grin from his face. Her heart pounded. Her breath caught in her throat. Nothing else mattered. There was only the falling baby and the hard metal floor beneath the orange carpeting.
Ten kilograms of quite corporeal child landed in her arms and she breathed once more. She hugged the boy against her chest, taking care not to press her combadge by mistake. For the spawn of two transcendental, highly evolved beings, little q felt surprisingly substantial. Tears sprung from his eyes as Troi shifted her load to make him more comfortable. Memories of her own infant, Ian Andrew, and of holding him much like this, came back to her with unexpected force.
Beverly Crusher rushed to her side, a medical tricorder in her hand.
“Is he all right?” Troi asked her urgently. It felt very strange—and scary—not to be able to sense the baby’s emotions. “Was he hurt by the fall?”
“I don’t even know if it’s possible for him to be hurt,” Beverly answered. She began to scan the child with the peripheral unit of her tricorder, then remembered impatiently that conventional sensors were useless where a Q was concerned. She put the tricorder away and examined the boy with her hands. “No swelling or broken bones,” she announced after a moment. “I think he’s more scared than injured.”
The baby’s descent, and Troi’s spectacular catch, had seized the attention of both Professor Faal and his son.
“Dad?” Milo said, spotting his father from across the room. “What’s happening? Where did that baby come from?” Another thought occurred to him and he looked around the simulated child-care facility. “Hey, where’s Kinya?”
But Faal was too intent upon the miraculous, gravity-defying infant to answer his son’s queries, or even look away from the bawling child in Troi’s arms. “I don’t understand,” he protested, his gaze shifting from q to the ceiling and back again. “Was that some sort of trick?”
“It’s a baby Q,” Troi volunteered, trying to put a little distance between Faal and Beverly so that the doctor would have more room to work in.
“Q,” he whispered, awestruck. Troi didn’t like the sound of his breathing, which was wet and labored. She felt glad that Beverly was close by, and not only for the baby’s sake. “But it looks so…ordinary?”
Milo left his computer game behind and hurried to join his father. He looked completely baffled, but Troi sensed his happiness at his father’s arrival. “Q?” he asked. “What’s a Q?”
“An advanced life-form,” Faal intoned, more to himself than to the boy. He remained intent on the baby Q. “A higher stage of evolution, transcending mere corporeal existence.”
“That?” Milo said, incredulous. Troi detected a spark of jealousy within him, no doubt ignited by his father’s absorption with the superhuman infant. “It’s just a stupid baby.”
Did little q understand him? For whatever reason, the baby started crying louder, approaching the earsplitting wail that had earlier resounded throughout the entire ship. “Hush,” Troi murmured, rocking him gently, but the child kept crying.
“Hang on,” Beverly said, “I bet I have a prescription for that.” She reached into the pocket of her blue lab coat and pulled out a cherry-red lollipop. “Here, try this.”
The child’s cries fell silent the moment he saw the bright red sweet. His pudgy fingers wrapped around the stick and he began sucking enthusiastically on the candy. Troi didn’t require any special gifts to sense q’s improved spirits.
“The oldest trick in pediatric medicine,” Beverly explained with a smile. “I never come to a children’s center, holographic or otherwise, without one. Once I got here, I had planned to use it to lure him down off the ceiling.” She approached Troi to inspect the baby. “You know, he actually looks a little like Q.”
“Try not to hold that against him,” Troi said. The sucker had calmed q for a time, but she wondered how long that could last. She didn’t mind holding the child for a while, even though she realized that wasn’t much of a long-term solution. He looks so angelic now, it’s easy to forget how dangerous he might be.
Troi hoped the doctor had brought some extra lollipops for later. “You say his mother is much like Q?” Crusher asked.
“So I’m told,” Troi answered. She had to admit that she was curious to meet Q’s mate. I guess there really is someone for everyone, she thought. “At least her ego is supposed to be just as immense.”
&
nbsp; Professor Faal’s interest in the child remained more scientific. He scrutinized the baby like it was a specimen on a petri dish, squinting at the child the closer he got to Troi and the baby Q. Troi was struck by the intensity of his fascination with the child. Then again, she recalled, maybe I’ve simply become too accustomed to Q and his kind. She imagined that any scientist would find a Q an irresistible puzzle. “Doctor,” Faal said to Crusher, noticing the equipment she was carrying, “might I borrow your tricorder at once.”
“It won’t do you any good,” she warned him, but handed him the instrument. He began scanning q with the tricorder, then scowled in frustration at the (non) readings it displayed. “Dammit, it’s not working.” At his side, Milo tried to see what his father was reacting to, standing on his tiptoes to peer past his father’s arm. Frankly, Troi wished she could somehow persuade Faal to return with Milo to his own quarters, leaving them alone to deal with q, but she suspected it would take wild horses to drag the scientist away from such a unique specimen of advanced alien life.
Beverly considered the child thoughtfully. “It’s funny,” she said eventually. “I’m kind of surprised that his mother would be willing to leave him alone in the care of a primitive species like us.”
“Unless maybe she thought we couldn’t possibly do him any harm?” Deanna suggested. “Even if we tried, that is.”
“If he’s like any other toddler,” Beverly said, “then he’s perfectly capable of hurting himself by accident.” She frowned, disturbed by her own chain of reasoning. Troi could sense her concern growing. “It just doesn’t make sense. Why leave a precious child like this with people who completely lack the ability to look after him properly?”
An unexpected burst of light caught them all off guard. “If you must know,” said the woman who suddenly appeared in their midst, “I had my eye on him the whole time.”
This had to be the female Q, Troi realized. She looked much as the captain had described her, except that now she had assumed the attire of a twentieth-century American tourist on a summer vacation: sandals, pink plastic sunglasses, a large-brimmed hat, and a light cotton sundress with a Hawaiian print design. She held a paper fan in one hand and a flyswatter in the other, both rather gratuitous in the controlled environment of the Enterprise. Where does she think she is, Troi wondered, the Amazon rain forest? She recognized a bit of baby q in his mother’s features, finding this evidence of a family resemblance vaguely reassuring in its similarity to a common, everyday aspect of humanoid parentage.