I,Q

by John de Lancie

  I heard gunfire. Whoever was shooting at me was getting closer. Suddenly, a blast blew me off my feet, and when I sat up again, I saw a sizable crater just a few yards away. A little more to the right, and I would have been Q-bits.

  I was about to stand up and make my displeasure known when a blast blew yet another crater to my left. These guys weren’t kidding! I had to get to that building and fast!

  From around the corner came a group of heavily armed men. They were heading right for me, phasers slung under their arms—there was no point in my running. My only hope was to try to bluff. But it was going to be a hard “sell” convincing them I was omnipotent, with my clothes in disarray, my hair disheveled, and a fine layer of grime on my face. So, I just sat there. As I waited for them to reach me, I watched people bashing in the display window of a store. It occurred to me, as they were grabbing merchandise, that they might be exercising their political “voice,” as in the days of old when commonfolk looted under the guise of “expressing” themselves.

  As these protesters, for I have to give them the benefit of the doubt, ran off in one direction, the trio of armed individuals arrived. They were Romulans.

  The biggest, and probably the dumbest, took a step forward and stared at me. I said nothing. In circumstances such as these, discretion is the better part of valor.

  Everyone thinks Shakespeare made that up but who is Shakespeare? Certainly not the drunken sot I knew who couldn’t spell his name the same way twice and willed his second-best bed to his wife in a document that is simplistic to the extreme. Truth be told, I made it up. Along with a bunch of other ditties like, “To thine own self be true”; “a rose by any other name”; “all the world’s a stage”; and “let them eat cake,” which that unwashed, uppity ingrate rejected on the assertion that the word “cake” should be changed to “fried dough”! What a jerk! I brought a plague upon his house and gave the line to someone else. Someone who had a head on her shoulders, for a while at least, and who understood its meaning and poetry. Don’t talk to me about Shakespeare!

  Now where was I . . . oh, I remember. The greasy Romulans.

  “I know you,” said the leader after scrutinizing me a moment. “There are . . . drawings of you in ancient Romulan texts . . . except you have ears like ours. You are the Laughing God.”

  Apparently my reputation had spread from Tervil IX. “So I am called,” I said solemnly. This was going to be child’s play.

  “You do not appear godlike,” he said. Oops! He was a Romulan who felt the clothes made the man.

  “I appear however I wish,” I replied archly.

  One of the other Romulans—shorter and more pugnacious—said contemptuously, “He is no god. Look at him!”

  “Stare into my eyes at your own peril,” I said in as low and menacing a voice as I could muster.

  Apparently it was neither low nor menacing enough, for the shorter Romulan abruptly brought his weapon up and aimed it squarely at my head. With a sneer, he said, “I will take that dare. If you are a god . . . strike me down . . . now!”

  And then, as his finger started to tighten on the trigger, he suddenly lurched forward, his head snapping back, and just for a moment I was extremely impressed with myself because clearly my powers had returned.

  He then sagged forward, blood trickling from his mouth, and directly behind him stood a gray and grizzled Klingon, his curved sword upraised in triumph, a large smear of blood running the length of the blade. He shouted one of those annoying Klingon battle cries that always sound like a cross between a belch and a hiccup, and he charged!

  The Romulans brought their phasers up, but the Klingon was remarkably quick. With a single slice he cut off the big Romulan’s hands at the wrists. The other Romulan was a little faster and managed to fire a shot that tagged the old Klingon squarely in the chest and knocked him off his feet. The Klingon hit the ground clutching his wound and growling. Klingons have this thing about not showing pain, which is kind of ridiculous since everyone else could see he had a hole in his chest the size of a grapefruit. So, while this big lug was writhing around on the ground trying to pretend nothing was wrong, the Romulan calmly stood over him and took aim to finish him off.

  Out of nowhere, a blade cut squarely into the Romulan’s throat, just above the collarbone. It was a surprise to us all, especially the Romulan. As the top of his uniform took on a dark green tint from the rapidly spreading blood, he grasped at the knife and tried to pull it out. But the edges of the blade were serrated, and the only way to remove it was to tear a huge, gaping hole in his neck. While the Romulan busily tried to decide what to do, he rather conveniently fell over and died. That left alive the other Romulan, who had lost both his hands. In an attempt to keep himself from bleeding to death he jammed his wrists under his armpits. He looked up at me, his face getting distinctly green. “Please . . .” he implored.

  “Please?!” I said. “I don’t think ‘Please’ is the magic word today; you’ll have to try again. How about Swordfish?” He looked at me as if I had lost my mind. I looked at him as if he had lost his wrists and was making a big mess all over the place. “Go on,” I said, “give it a try. It’s not ‘please’ and it’s not ‘pretty please,’ but I’ll give you a hint . . . it’s got ‘My liege’ in the sentence.” He had no idea what I was talking about so, rather than continue the ordeal, he gave up the ghost. These guys are simply not party animals.

  As I watched his soul slither down the street, I heard the sound of feet scuttling behind me and turned to see to whom they belonged. I was assuming that one of them would be the individual who had thrown the knife. Indeed it was. And she was a woman! She was accompanied by several more Klingons.

  “Dax, isn’t it?” I asked. “Jadzia Dax?”

  She stared at me blankly for a moment, and then she recognized me. I could see it in her eyes. But she said nothing at first. Instead she knelt next to the fallen Klingon, and gently stroked his face. “Kor . . .” she whispered. “We should have been faster. . . . I’m sorry.”

  “Have I taught you nothing, Jadzia?” growled the old warrior. “No apologies . . .”

  “. . . no fear . . . no tomorrow,” she finished the sentence, intoning it in a way that indicated she had heard it any number of times.

  “No . . . tomorrow . . .” agreed the one called Kor . . . and then his eyes rolled up into the top of his head, and he was gone.

  Dax and the others clustered around him for a moment . . . and then Dax suddenly pitched her head back and unleashed the most ear-splitting howl I’d ever heard. To make matters worse, the others took up the cry. There is nothing more embarrassing than standing on a street corner with a bunch of Klingons braying. It’s so embarrassing! I looked at my feet, I looked up in the sky, and finally I just joined them. What the hell, a good cry is therapeutic and the way they were doing it was tantamount to a sonic colonic.

  Don’t get me wrong; it’s not the most hideous sound in the universe. The most hideous sound in the universe is the mating call of the six-legged male giz’nt, one of the most short-lived species ever. The giz’nt’s call was so atrocious, so bloodcurdling, no one could stand to be within fifty feet of it, and that included female giz’nts. But male giz’nts, being notoriously chauvinistic, were unaware of this. Consequently their calls never managed to attract any females. They survived for a brief time by mating with females who happened to be sleeping, thus enabling the males to sneak up on them. In those instances, the mating call served more as a sort of paralyzing bellow that froze the female in her place so that—even once she was awake—she couldn’t get away fast enough. Unfortunately, it was too little, too late, and the giz’nt died off within a few generations. Every so often, evolution simply makes mistakes.

  I finally clapped my hands over my ears and shouted, “Must you?!”

  They mercifully stopped, and Dax approached me slowly. Her hair was down, long, and somewhat ratty. She was not wearing a Starfleet uniform as she had been when I last saw her. Instead
she was clad in Klingon battle garb. Upon closer inspection, I realized that one of her eyes was missing. How careless, I thought; it’s one thing to lose your purse, quite another to lose your eye.

  “Q,” she said in a voice dripping with contempt. “I should have known you’d be behind all this.”

  “Then you would have known wrong,” I told her. “I’m as much in the dark about all this as you. Maybe more.”

  “You expect me to believe you?”

  “I don’t have any expectations one way or the other. But let’s say, for your sake, that I’m lying. Very well.” I folded my arms. “Why would I be lying?”

  She opened her mouth to reply, but clearly nothing readily occurred to her. She looked to the others, but they shrugged mutely. She looked back at me. “All right,” she said, with a low growl that seemed to be a permanent part of her voice. “Let’s say you’re not. Tell me what you do know.”

  “The universe is coming to an End.” Every time I said it I felt like Chicken Little, but it was the truth!

  She considered for a moment, and then sighed heavily. “Figures.”

  “Makes everything else seem rather moot, doesn’t it?”

  “It does indeed. What about this place?” She took in the entirety of it with a nod. “Do you have any idea where this is?”

  One of the Klingons rumbled, “We are in Sto-Vo-Kor.”

  “Ah. Well, that certainly clears that up,” I said.

  Still, for all my sarcasm, it seemed as much an explanation as any other. “Sto-Vo-Kor” was the Klingon equivalent of warrior heaven and purgatory, all mixed into one. The charming part of the notion was that they were not acting under the watchful eye of any Klingon god, for as they were fond of saying, Klingons had killed their gods many centuries before.

  “Yes, well, on the chance we might be somewhere else, I was hoping that Q might be able to provide us with some answers.” She clearly didn’t give much credence to this idea that we were in Sto-Vo-Kor.

  “Would that I had some to provide. And not having answers is not my favorite position in life, I can assure you of that,” I told her. “What about you? The last time I saw you was on Deep Space 9. What are you doing here, in the company of these . . . individuals?”

  “Deep Space 9?” She raised a questioning eyebrow. “Haven’t seen the place in several years. I am . . . I was,” and she looked sadly at the fallen body of the grizzled Klingon, “the adopted sister of Kor. I saved his life during an expedition that went awry, we formed a tight bond, and he invited me into his family. I found I had a taste for battle, and I accepted the life he offered.”

  “I see.” Truth to tell, I had paid little attention to Deep Space 9 and didn’t know what she was talking about. For all I knew, this wasn’t even the same Dax, but a Jadzia Dax from another reflection of the multiverse. After all, I had already encountered an alternate Picard. It had quickly become apparent to me that nothing in this place was what it seemed. “Have you spotted a woman and a child, by any chance? The woman is—”

  Dax put up a hand to stop me. “I’ve seen more women and children than I can possibly count,” she said. “No point in describing them to me. Every one I’ve seen has been a charred, burned corpse. It just . . .” Her eyes grew cold, and her fingers started to spasm as if she were anxious to throttle somebody. “What people are doing to each other . . . and it’s all their fault . . . it makes me want to . . .” Her fury had come upon her so quickly that I was transfixed. She grabbed the hilt of the knife she had buried in the Romulan and yanked it out of his neck. It tore a hole the size of my fist. She bent over and wiped the blade clean on his pants leg before shoving it back into her scabbard, then snarled in a feral manner. “All their fault . . .” she continued.

  “Who would ‘they’ be?” I asked.

  “The Romulans!” said the ugliest of the Klingons, who was standing a few paces off. The other Klingons nodded in agreement.

  I couldn’t quite grasp what they were talking about. “The Romulans? You . . . can’t seriously think that the Romulans are responsible for the End of the universe?”

  “We don’t care about that,” Dax said tightly. “Do you see all this?” She indicated again the vista of burning buildings, “This . . . this is a result of the battle between the Romulans and us.”

  “What battle?”

  She looked at me askance. “For someone who’s omniscient, you have a lot of questions.”

  “I’m new in town. What battle?” I asked again.

  Another Klingon took a step forward and rumbled, “This place—there are a number of races here, but there are also many Romulans and many Klingons. That is how we know that this is Sto-Vo-Kor.”

  “Because there are Romulans here?”

  “Because we are being given a chance to settle old scores and we believe—as do many of the others—that this is . . .”

  Suddenly phaser blasts shot over our heads. “We’ve been out in the open too long!” Dax snapped, apparently as angry at herself as she was at anyone else. “Karg, suppressing fire! Everyone else, fall back!”

  “Klingons do not retreat!” one of them said angrily.

  “You’re not retreating!” I offered. “You’re just advancing in the opposite direction! Do what she says!”

  There was the briefest of pauses, but then they followed her, Karg lagging behind to fire a round of blasts for the purpose of driving back any pursuers. I could only assume that they were deferring to her status as adopted sibling to the late Kor, not that that was going to do Kor any good. There was obviously no time to pick up Kor’s body and bring it along. I didn’t even see where the Romulans were shooting from, but I knew if I had to throw my lot in with anyone, it might as well be the group who hadn’t tried to kill me at first sight. So I followed Dax.

  She was quite a woman. I wondered if she shaved. Maybe at a more quiet time I’d get a chance to ask her.

  We ducked behind a burned-out building. The inside had been gutted, but the walls provided some degree of cover. We paused, catching our breaths, although I admit I seemed far more out of breath than anyone else. “You believe we are where!?” I asked Karg. He looked at me with a totally blank stare. I had to remind him that less than thirty seconds ago he had presented an idea about where he thought we were . . . hello! and while I didn’t think he had a hope of being correct in whatever his theory was, I was open to any and all speculations. Now that his memory was jogged, he shared his idea with me.

  “We are facing a final, ultimate test,” said Karg. “The Romulans have always plagued us, tried to annihilate us. Now they are here, in Sto-Vo-Kor itself! No place is sacred! No place is beyond their defiling touch! This . . . this is the great Afterlife War that has been long predicted in Klingon scripture. The most valiant of Klingons to face their most despicable of enemies. Here, all the injustices shall be made right! And here, we will annihilate every last Romulan, and that will dictate which race lives and which dies! What we do here will have ripple effects to the land of the living, and beyond that! To—”

  “Karg, are you stupid?!” bellowed Dax, and she turned and struck him. The blow rocked him and, although it didn’t knock him over, he looked surprised. “How can this be the land of the dead!? Kor is dead! Others are dead! How do you die in the land of the dead? Do you get deader? Think! Think, you great Klingon oaf!”

  She had a point, but I liked his story. I just needed: “Once upon a time . . .”

  Karg’s eyes glared with such fury that I thought they were about to leap from his head. “I do not care who you are or what your rank,” he snarled, “you do not address me in that manner, and if you ever lay a hand on me again, I—”

  “This is total foolishness,” I said, trying to calm them both down. “What are you arguing about, anyway? It’s moronic.”

  Karg turned his glare on me. “You . . . dare to insult me? You call me a moron?”

  “No! . . . Yes . . . Well, not really. Do the math,” I said.

  “Da
x,” he said and stabbed a finger at her, “I shall deal with you later. But this one,” and he suddenly pulled out his huge curved sword, “I will attend to right now!”

  He was standing no more than three feet away. No one was going to be able to stop him from slicing me in half. And all I was doing was trying to help!

  You know it always amazes me when I reflect upon the eons gone by, just how worked up some individuals get about what they know the least. Take Earth for instance: millions . . . no, billions of people cut down in the prime of life over arguments as silly as “what’s on the other side of the mountain?” Mind you, no one has ever been to the other side of the mountain and come back to tell of it, but that fact has absolutely no bearing on the discussion at hand. Great “Cities of the Mind” spring up with accompanying “Maps of the Imagination” to guide you there. And hold on to your head if you don’t go along with all this nonsense. Expressing even the modest sentiment that perhaps the proof is insufficent is enough to get you burned at the stake. Good thoughts are not enough; good deeds must be codified; individual expressions of charity must be brought into line. Why? To control. Give me a child to the age of twelve and I’ll deliver back to you a superstitious savage for the rest of its life. This was precisely the circumstance I found myself in at that very moment.

  And then fate lent a hand. Suddenly, the top floor of the burnt-out building exploded. Debris rained down, and the Romulans attacked from both sides. We were outnumbered. Numbers, however, don’t necessarily mean anything to a Klingon, for one of them can fight with the strength of ten.

  “Wait!” I shouted. “This is fruitless! What point is there in carrying this hatred into oblivion? If—if . . .”