by Greg Cox
(I’m here,) the voice said, (I’m almost with you).
WHEN? he pleaded, his own voice sounding like an explosion compared to the other. WHEN?
(Soon. There are a few obstacles to overcome, but soon. I give you my word.)
What did it mean by that? The message was too vague, too indefinite, to curb his constant craving to defeat the wall. The bug and the smoke tormented him, teasing him with their pretended proximity. He needed an answer now.
Let me in, he said. Let you out. Away, away, no more decay. Let me in, again and again.
(Yes!) the voice affirmed. (I will make it happen, no matter what.)
The voice droned on, but he grew bored and stopped listening. The bug captured his attention once more, so small and fragile, but not yet undone by the suffocating smoke. Buzz, buzz, little bug, he whispered. Flitter free while you can. He assumed the shape of an immense arachnid, stretching out his will in all directions like eight clutching limbs.
A spider is coming to gobble you up….
Eleven
He was no longer on the bridge. A cool white mist surrounded Picard on all sides, obscuring his vision, but the familiar sounds and smells of the bridge were gone, informing him unequivocally that he had left the Enterprise. He looked around him quickly and saw only the same featureless fog everywhere he glanced. The Calamarain? he wondered briefly, but, no, this empty mist was utterly unlike the luminescent swirls of the living plasma cloud. This place, odorless, soundless, textureless, was more like…limbo. He stamped his feet upon whatever surface was supporting him, but the mist absorbed both the force and the sound of his boots striking the ground so that not an echo escaped to confirm the physicality of his own existence. He was lost in a void, a sensation that he remembered all too well.
I’ve been here before, he thought. That time I almost died in sickbay and Q offered me a chance to relive my past. The memory did nothing to ease his concerns. That incident had been a profoundly disturbing, if ultimately illuminating, experience, one that he was in no great hurry to endure again. More important, what about the Enterprise? Only seconds before, or so it seemed to him, he had placed the ship on red alert in response to the approach of the Calamarain. “Dammit,” he cursed, punching a fist into his palm in frustration. This was no time to be away from his ship!
“Q!” he shouted into the mist, unafraid of who or what might hear him. “Show yourself!”
“You needn’t bellow, Jean-Luc,” Q answered, stepping out of the fog less than two meters away from Picard. His Starfleet uniform, proper in every respect, hardly suited his sardonic tone. “Although I wish you could have simply listened to me in the first place. You have no idea how strenuously I regret that you forced me to go to such lamentable lengths to convince you.”
“I forced you?” Picard responded indignantly. “This is intolerable, Q. I demand that you return me to the Enterprise at once.”
Q tapped his foot impatiently. “Spare me, Picard. Time is scarce. Just this once, can’t we skip the obligatory angry protestations and get on with business?”
“Your business, you mean,” Picard said. “My business is on my ship!”
“That’s what you think,” Q replied. He crossed his arms upon his chest, looking quite sure of himself. “Take my word for this, Jean-Luc. You’re not going back to the Enterprise—E, F, or G—until we are finished, one way or another. Or don’t you trust Riker to keep the ship in one piece that long?”
That’s not the point, he thought, but part of him was forced to concede the futility of talking Q out of anything. If there was one thing he had learned since their first meeting in Q’s “courtroom” over a decade ago, it was that attempting to reason with or intimidate Q was a waste of time. Perhaps the best and only option was to let the charade play out as quickly as possible, and hope that he could get back to his life and duties soon enough. Not a very appealing strategy, he thought, but there it is.
He took stock of their surroundings, ready to take on Q’s latest game. The empty mist offered no clue as to what was yet to come. “What is this place, Q,” he asked, “and don’t tell me it’s the afterlife.”
“Like you’d know it if you saw it,” Q said. “You wouldn’t recognize the Pearly Gates if you had your pathetic phasers locked on them.” He paused and scratched his chin reflectively. “Actually, they aren’t so much pearly as opalescent…but I digress. This shapeless locale,” he said, sweeping out his arms to embrace the entire foggy landscape, “is merely a starting point, a place between time, where time has no sway.”
“Between time?” Picard repeated, concentrating on every word Q said. This duplicitous gamester played by his own arcane rules, he knew, and sometimes doled out a genuine hint or clue in his self-aggrandizing blather. The trick was to extract that nugget of truth from the rest of Q’s folderol. “I thought you said earlier that time was scarce.”
“By the Continuum, you can be dim, Jean-Luc,” Q groaned, wiping some imaginary sweat from his brow. “Sometimes I feel like I’m teaching remedial metaphysics to developmentally stunted primates. Here, let me demonstrate.”
Q grabbed hold of the drifting fog with both hands and pulled it aside as though it were a heavy velvet curtain. Picard glimpsed two figures through the gap in the mist, standing several meters away. One was a tall, balding man in a red-and-black Starfleet uniform that was a few years out of style. A lethal-looking scorch mark marred the front of his uniform, above his heart. The other figure was clad in angelic white robes that seemed composed of the very mist that framed the scene. A heavenly light illuminated the second figure from behind, casting a sublime radiance that outlined the robed figure with a shimmering halo. Looking on this tableau, one could be forgiven for assuming that this auroral figure was a veritable emissary from Heaven, if not the Almighty Himself.
Picard knew better. He recognized the figures, and the occasion, instantly. They were himself and Q, posed as they had been when he first confronted Q in this very same mist, shortly after he “died” from a malfunction in his artificial heart. Caught up in their own fateful encounter, the other Picard and Q paid no heed to the onlookers now witnessing themselves at an earlier time. Picard could not hear what his younger self was saying to the younger Q, but he remembered the exchange well enough. There had been a time, after he woke up in sickbay under Beverly Crusher’s ministrations, when he had half-convinced himself that he had merely experienced an unusually vivid and perceptive dream, but, in his heart of hearts, which bore no relation to the steel and plastic mechanism lodged in his chest, he had always known that the entire episode had really happened. Even still, it gave him a chill to watch the bizarre occurrence unfold once more.
He was tempted to shout out a warning to his earlier self, but what could he say? “Whatever you do, don’t let Q tempt you into changing your past”? No, that would only defeat the entire purpose of that unique, autobiographical odyssey and deprive his other self of the hard-earned insights he had so painfully achieved over the course of that unforgettable journey. He couldn’t bring himself to say a word.
“Seen enough?” Q asked. He withdrew his hands and the fog fell back into place, sealing away the vision from the past. “I must say, I seemed particularly celestial there. Divinity looks good on me.”
“So you think,” Picard retorted, but his heart was not in the war of words. That flashback to his old, near-death experience shook him more than he wanted to admit. “Why show me that?” he asked. “I have not forgotten what happened then.”
“You still don’t understand,” Q said. “That didn’t happen before. It’s happening now. Here, everything happens now. But when we return to the boring, linear reality you know, the clock hands will resume their dogged, dreary rounds.” He held his hands up in front of his face. “Excuse me while I watch my fingernails grow. Let me know when you’re through with your futile efforts to comprehend the ineffable.”
Picard ignored Q’s taunts. Figuring out the rules of this game was the onl
y way he was going to find his way back to the Enterprise. “Is that what this is all about? The same routine as before, you’re going to make me face up to another chapter of my past?” He couldn’t help trying to guess what heartrending tragedy he might be forced to relive. The death of Jack Crusher? That nasty business back at the Academy? His torture at the hands of Gul Madred? Dear god, he prayed, don’t let it be my time among the Borg. I couldn’t bear to be Locutus once again. He cast off his fears, however, and faced his opponent defiantly. “You must be getting old, Q,” he said. “You’re starting to repeat yourself.”
To his surprise, Q began to look more uncomfortable than Picard, as though the relentless puppeteer was genuinely reluctant to proceed now that the moment of departure had arrived. “Oh, Picard,” he sighed, “how I wish we were merely sightseeing in your own insignificant existence, but I’m afraid it’s not your disreputable past we must examine, mon capitaine, but my own.” He took a deep breath, quelling whatever trepidations he possessed, then gave Picard a devil-may-care grin. “Starting now.”
The mist converged on Picard, swallowing him up. For what could have been an instant or an eternity he found himself trapped in a realm of total, blank sensory deprivation—until the universe returned. Sort of.
Where am I? Picard wondered. What am I?
There was something wrong with his eyes, or, if not wrong precisely, then different. He could see from three distinct perspectives simultaneously, the disparate views blending to grant him a curiously all-inclusive image that made ordinary binocular vision seem flat by comparison. He searched his surroundings, finding himself seemingly adrift amid the blackness of space. An asteroid drifted by, its surface pitted with craters and shadows, and he glimpsed a blazing yellow sun in the distance, partially eclipsed by an orbiting planet. I don’t understand, he thought. How can I be surviving in a vacuum? Am I wearing a pressure suit, or did Q not bother with that? It was hard to tell; he couldn’t feel his arms or his legs. He tried to look down at his body, but all he could see was a bright white glare. What had Q done to him?
“Q!” he shouted, but what emerged from his throat was a long, sibilant hiss. Make that throat s, for, to his utter shock, he felt the vibrato of the hiss in no less than three separate throats. This is insane, he thought, struggling not to panic. Over the years, he had almost grown accustomed to being miraculously transported here and there throughout the universe by Q’s capricious whims, but he had never been transported out of his own body before—and into something inhuman and strange. “Q?” he hissed again, desperate for some sort of answer.
“Right behind you, Jean-Luc,” Q answered. Picard had never been so relieved to hear that voice in his entire life. Somehow, merely by thinking about it, he managed to turn around and was greeted by an astounding yet oddly familiar sight:
A three-headed Aldebaran serpent floated in the void only a few meters away. A trio of hooded, serpentine bodies rose from a glowing silver sphere about which smaller balls of light ceaselessly orbited. The heads, which each resembled Earth’s king cobra, faced Picard. Strips of glittering emerald and crimson scales alternated along all three of the snakelike bodies. Three pairs of cold, reptilian eyes fixed Picard with their mesmerizing stare. A threesome of forked tongues flicked from the serpentine faces. “Welcome,” the snakes said in Q’s voice, “to the beginning.”
Of course, Picard thought. Not only did he recognize the triple serpent, an ancient mythological symbol dating back to well before the onset of human civilization, but he recalled how Q had once assumed this form before, at the onset of his second visit to the Enterprise. But this time, it seemed, Q had done more than merely transform himself into the fantastical, hydra-headed creature; he had somehow mutated Picard as well. Straining the unfamiliar muscles of his outermost necks, Picard turned his eyes on himself. Even though he had already guessed what he would find, it still came as a terrible shock when he saw, from two opposing points of view, two more serpentine heads rising from the radiant globe that was now his body. For a second, each of his outer heads looked past the central serpent so that Picard found himself staring directly into his own eyes—and back again. The jolt was too much for his altered nervous system to endure and he quickly looked away to see the other hydra, Q, hovering nearby. “So what do you think of your new body, Captain?” he asked. “Tell me, are three heads truly better than one?”
“Good Lord, Q,” Picard exclaimed, trying his best to ignore the peculiar sensation of speaking through three sets of jaws, “what have you done?” He had to pray that his unearthly transformation was only a temporary joke of Q’s, or else he would surely go mad. Good god, did he now have three separate brains, three different minds to lose?
“Merely trying to inject a note of historical verisimilitude into our scenic tour of my past,” Q stated. “Relatively speaking, that is. Understand this, Picard: there is no way your primitive consciousness can truly comprehend what it means to be part of the Q Continuum, so everything I show you from here on has been translated into a form that can be perceived by your rudimentary five senses. It’s a crude, vastly inadequate approximation of my reality, but it is the best your mind can cope with.” Q drifted closer to Picard, until the transformed starship captain could see the individual scales overlapping each other along the lengths of each extended throat. The flared hoods behind each head puffed up even larger. “Anyway,” Q went on, “it seemed more appropriate, and more accurate, to take these shapes during this stage of our excursion, given that the evolution of the humanoid form is still at least a billion years away at this point. In fact, this was one of my favorite guises way back in the good old days, before you overreaching humanoids came down from the trees and started spreading your DNA all over the galaxy.”
“Billions of years?” Picard echoed, too stunned at Q’s revelations to even register the usual insults and patronizing tone. “Where…when…are we?”
“Roughly five billion years ago, give or take a few dozen millennia.” Q’s leftmost head nipped playfully at the head next to it. “Ouch. You know, sometimes I surprise even myself.” The central head snapped back while the head on the right continued speaking. “Tell me the truth, Jean-Luc, don’t you get tired of Data’s painfully precise measurements? How refreshing it must be to deal with someone—like myself, say—who is quite comfortable rounding things off to the nearest million or so.”
Picard watched his own heads nervously, unsure when or how he might start turning on himself. There was something horribly claustrophobic about being trapped in this inhuman form, deprived of his limbs and hands and all the normal physical sensations he was accustomed to after sixty-plus years of existence as a human being. He felt a silent scream bubbling just beneath the thin surface of his sanity. “Q, I find this new form…very distracting.”
It was possibly the greatest single understatement in his life.
“Oh, Jean-Luc,” Q sighed, sounding disappointed, “I had hoped you were more flexible than that. After all, you coped with being a Borg for a week or two. Is a tri-headed serpent god all that much harder?”
“Q,” Picard pleaded, too far from his own time and his own reality to worry about his pride. “Please.”
“If you insist,” Q grumbled. “I have important things to show you and I suppose it wouldn’t do to have you fretting about your trivial human body the whole time. You might miss something.” The triple necks of the Q-serpent wrapped themselves around each other until the three heads seemed to sprout from a single coiled stalk. Picard was briefly reminded of Quetzalcoatl, the serpent deity of the ancient Aztecs. Quetzalcoatl…Q? Could there be a connection?
He might never know.
“Pity,” the triune entity continued, “you hadn’t begun to scratch the possibilities of this identity.” A flash of light illuminated the darkness for a fraction of a second, and then Q appeared before Picard in his usual form, garbed in what looked like a simple Greek chiton fastened over his left shoulder. A circlet of laurel leaves
adorned his brow. Simple leather sandals rested upon nothing but empty space.
Picard’s trifocal vision coalesced into a single point of view. Gratefully, he looked down to see his human body restored to him. So relieved was he to have arms and legs again, he barely noted at first that he was now attired in an ancient costume similar to the one Q now wore. He remained floating in space, of course, protected from the deadly vacuum only by Q’s remarkable powers, but that was a level of surreality that he felt he could cope with. Just permit me to be myself, he thought, and I’m ready for whatever Q has up his sleeves.
“Happy now?” Q pouted. He wiggled his fingers in front of his face and scowled at the sight. “I hope you realize what a dreadful anachronism this is. Be it on your head, and you a professed archaeologist!”
“I feel much better, thank you,” Picard answered, regaining his composure even while conversing in open space. He glanced down at his own sandaled feet and saw nothing but a gaping abyss extending beneath him for as far as his eyes could see. He was not experiencing a null-gravity state, though; he knew what that felt like and this was quite different. Q was somehow generating the sensation of gravity, so that he felt squarely oriented despite his surroundings. Up was up and down was down, at least for the moment. He fingered the hem of his linen garment, noting the delicate embroidering along the border of the cloth. God is in the details, he thought, recalling an ancient aphorism, or was that the devil? “What is this?” he asked, indicating the chiton. “Another anachronism?”
“A conceit,” Q said with a shrug, “to give a feel of antiquity. As I explained before, and I hope you were paying close attention, this is nothing like what I really looked like at this point in the galaxy’s history, but simply a concession to your limited human understanding.”