by Greg Cox
“Oh, there are dangers you haven’t even conceived of yet,” Q promised, a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “Perhap I’ll introduce you to them someday.”
Don’t trouble yourself on my account, Picard thought. He watched with growing uneasiness as the female Q, babe in arms, wandered away. Although Q did not seem to be up to any particular deviltry on this occasion, he saw no reason to encourage their stay. “Is that all?” he asked.
“Actually, there is one more little matter,” the female Q said, although she seemed less interested in Picard than in young Milo Faal. She joined the boy at his father’s bedside, and spoke to him with unexpected gentleness. “Milo, I think you know you still have a piece of the Q inside you. I’m afraid I have to ask for it back.”
“That’s all right,” Milo said. He looked sadly at the wreckage of his father, perhaps considering all the anxiety and unhappiness that Lem Faal had caused in his thirst for that same power. “I don’t want it.”
The female Q smiled approvingly and laid her hand upon Milo’s inattentively combed hair. Picard saw a soft purple glow sparkle between the woman’s outstretched fingers before fading away. More important, he also watched with relief as the eerie white sheen in Milo’s eyes faded as well, leaving behind eyes as big and brown and recognizably Betazoid as Deanna Troi’s. “Thank you,” the woman said. “You’re a very well-behaved boy. For a mortal.”
And with that, she vanished without further ado, taking her own preternaturally precocious child with her. “Well, I suppose I’ll be heading on, too,” Q commented. “I’m overdue for a rendezvous in the Delta Quadrant.”
“Before you go,” Picard delayed him, knowing he would probably regret it, but discovering there was one final question that he could not resist posing. “After all we’ve been through these last few days, both in the past and the present, could it be that, perhaps, you have finally learned your lesson about the evils of testing other sentient beings?”
Q smiled impishly, looking altogether incorrigible and unrepentant. “But, Jean-Luc, how do you know that this entire odyssey hasn’t been a particularly ingenious test?”
And then he was gone, leaving Picard with even more questions than before. Questions with a capital Q.
Epilogue
Begin again. Again, begin and begin….
Behind the wall once more, he howled in frustration. For one brief interval, not more than a tormenting twinkling in the endless expanse of eternity, the galaxy had been his again. Worlds without end had awaited his wicked wiles and wild, wayward will. But then Q had taken it all away. Q!
Ever again. Forever again.
He scratched and clawed and snapped at the wall, which refused to yield to his frenzied need to strike back at Q. The wall was as permanent and punishing as it had ever been, any minute cracks and crevices healed and sealed, leaving him not even a sliver of a window into the great, glittering galaxy he might never see again. A galaxy of smoke and specks and Q and Q and Q….
Forever and ever. Ever and forever. Forever and never.
The voice on the other side, the voice that had come at his call, bringing with it a fleeting fraction of freedom, had gone silent, leaving him alone in the dark and the cold and the eternal emptiness. Had he ever really been free at all? He couldn’t be sure anymore. His mind rebelled at the very thought of what had occurred—and what lay ahead. Space was vast and time was long, and all he had now was space and time, forever and ever and ever. It was enough to drive him sane.
A new beginning had ended. His new ending had only begun….
A Look Inside
The Q Continuum
with Greg Cox
Kevin Dilmore: Thanks for sitting down with me, Greg. I hope I don’t force you to reach too far into your memory because I’d like to start by talking about your first Star Trek novels, Devil in the Sky and Dragon’s Honor.
Greg Cox: Actually, I was just talking about Devil in the Sky with someone this morning. A friend of mine finally got around to reading it these umpteen years later.
KD: How did you get involved in Star Trek writing?
GC: Well, I’ve known John [Ordover, one of Pocket Books’ Star Trek editors] for years. In fact, we were editors at Tor [Books] together. We shared a cubicle, practically. I started writing [media] tie-in books with John Gregory Betancourt when he and I wrote a bunch of Batman stories for some anthologies edited by Martin Greenberg. John had read the Batman stories, and at that point he had moved from Tor over to Pocket for Star Trek, and asked whether we would like to do a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine book for him. At that time, Deep Space Nine was just gearing up, and there was sort of a mad crunch to get as many books as possible in the pipeline so they could launch the book series at the same time as the TV series.
KD: You’re kidding? So that was a fast start for you both.
GC: John suddenly needed a whole bunch of new Star Trek writers to help get a line of Deep Space Nine books off the ground. In fact, we started working on the book before I had seen a single episode of Deep Space Nine. I was sent a series bible and the script for the first episode. That’s what a lot of us early Deep Space Nine authors had to work with. The show had finally come on while I was writing the book, so I got to watch the show a little bit.
KD: I thought it was great that you used your book to link Deep Space Nine with the original series by using the Horta as a character.
GC: I have to give credit where credit is due. That in fact was John Ordover’s idea. He actually called me up and asked if we wanted to write a book about Hortas and Deep Space Nine.
KD: But that started a trend with your Star Trek fiction and its free blending of elements from all of the shows.
GC: You’re right, which I guess made me the right person for that, because since then I’ve been madly tying together loose ends of Star Trek continuity. I always end up referring back to the old show somehow.
KD: Is that fun for you to do?
GC: Oh, yeah. In this case, I got to watch [the original series’ episode] “Devil in the Dark” over and over again. [laughs] The division of labor on that book was very simple, by the way. If it’s on the space station, I wrote it. If it’s with the away team, Betancourt wrote it. Star Trek is good that way in that you have the story function of the away team on its mission and the B-plot back on the starship or the space station or wherever. We were able to say, “OK, you go off with Kira, Bashir, and Dax and play with them, and I’ll stay at the station with Quark, Odo, and O’Brien. And to this day, I feel like I’ve never actually written Kira.
KD: After writing with Betancourt, you ended up paired with Kij Johnson for Dragon’s Honor. How did that come about?
GC: This was a different scenario but, again, all roads lead back to Tor Books. Kij at one time was managing editor of Tor Books, so I knew her from way back. Where Devil in the Sky started out as a true collaboration for which we truly divvied up the plot to write in a collaborative fashion, Dragon’s Honor started out as a solo novel by Kij. Then Kij ran into real-life situations intruding on her work, she was no longer going to make the deadline, and I was asked to dive in and help her finish off this book. In my head, I still think of that as “the Kij book” because she invented the characters, the plot and everything, and basically did a detailed first draft of the book. When I came in, I basically did a second draft, rewriting what she already had written. That was sort of an ad-hoc collaboration as a favor to a friend to help finish a book when she had gotten a new job and had to move across the country.
KD: Then next was the Star Trek: Voyager book.
GC: Yes. I had done two collaborations, and the collaborations were each fun although they were completely different experiences. At that point, I was nagging John Ordover to please let me do a solo novel. And this ended up being the same situation for me as the Deep Space Nine book: Voyager in the offing and the show wasn’t on the air yet and John suddenly needed to get six or seven Voyager books off the ground. In that case, he sent me just
a twelve-page bible for the series. I remember writing my outline and starting to write the novel before I had seen a single episode of Voyager but just based on that bible, which turned out to be much more tentative than the Deep Space Nine thing. A lot of stuff that was in that original [Voyager] bible didn’t wind up happening in the series. That was the weird thing about writing something like that: You have no idea who the characters are going to be or what relationships might develop or anything. For example, if I had known the Doctor was going to be such fun, I would have given him a bigger part in the book.
KD: Or in the case of Deep Space Nine, the friendship that developed between Bashir and O’Brien.
GC: My friend who just read Devil in the Sky said this morning, “Boy, Julian is immature and sort of callow in this book.” Well, go back and watch the first six episodes or so. He was a bit annoying and immature in those days. He got an infusion of maturity later on in time for the sixth season. But look back at those opening scenes when he’s flirting with Dax and seems to have an antagonistic relationship with Kira. I remember that was something that people complained about, the fact that they were so nasty to each other in the book. Go back and watch the pilot. They get off on the wrong foot with each other. At that point, all I knew was that first script, in which Kira and Bashir seemed to not get along and not like each other. We took that and ran with it.
KD: That’s what you had to work with then.
GC: Right. The problem with Dax was that I firmly believe that her character was not defined until season two, and we had no idea what to do with her. The reason she had such a small part in that book was that we didn’t have much of a sense of her personality from the script or the first few episodes. In fact, I think that John Ordover came back to us and told us we had to put more Jadzia scenes in there. “But we can’t figure Jadzia out!” [laughs]
KD: That’s a disadvantage when compared to working with the original crew, whom you had kicked around in your head for more than thirty years at that time.
GC: Oh, yeah. They’re burned into my brain, and so is the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew. With the others, since I wrote them so early on, there is stuff that makes me think, “Oh, if I had known this, that and the other thing, well…
KD: So with your fourth book, Assignment: Eternity, you hit the last of the four shows at the time. Was it your idea to write a novel for the original series at that point?
GC: Actually, I had been bugging John to write a Gary Seven book for years. This was something I had been lobbying for, and we certainly had been knocking the idea around. I think I even did an early version of the proposal and sent it in to Kevin Ryan, who was John’s predecessor at Pocket, but it was passed on for whatever reason. So we went back into the forest a lot to try different ideas. At one point, it was going to be a Picard and Gary Seven novel. I think we did a couple of drafts of an outline for that.
KD: That’s an interesting take on things.
GC: And strange but true, at one point John wanted to do a Kirk-versus-Q novel.
KD: Really?
GC: Yes, and I actually did an outline or so for that, but we ultimately decided not to do that. At that point, I rewrote the outline and turned Q into Gary Seven. Ironically enough, I finally got my Gary Seven and Kirk novel. That was a long and circuitous path for it to take.
KD: But waste nothing. If you have an idea that you think is worth exploring, don’t just toss it away completely.
GC: Oddly enough, the first idea I had to write something for Pocket Books turned out to be the fourth book I wrote.
KD: Obviously, Gary Seven is a character who really resonated with you.
GC: Yeah, I have very fond memories of Gary Seven. I think that his episode [“Assignment: Earth”] seemed to be crying out for a sequel, it was a pilot for an intended TV series and it was implied that Gary and Roberta and Isis were going to have all of these exciting adventures down the road. It seemed like an obvious hook.
KD: So with those four novels done, you then are offered a big and very ambitious writing project with The Q Continuum books. How did that start off?
GC: That was generated partially by John Ordover, who basically thought that The Q Continuum would be a great title of a trilogy or a miniseries. He called me up and said, “Greg, how would you like to do a trilogy about Q?” That was as much of a plot as he had. He basically was in love with the title. At first, I remember being sort of intimidated, thinking, “Oh my God, I’m not sure I’ve got nine hundred pages of Q in me.” But I went back and watched all of the Q episodes again. And that was my very first trilogy, which was an interesting experience for me. So I worked up an outline, got it all approved, and I dived into it. And yes, it was a great big chunk of time. I spent a lot of time on the first book. It was a challenge in that I’d never done a trilogy before. The main thing I remember trying to figure out is how much plot I needed. Originally, I overloaded the plot with lots of subplots that didn’t end up making it into the finished book. Spreading it all over three books was a challenge.
KD: Would you change anything at this point then?
GC: In retrospect, if I had I to do it over again, I’d give Riker a little bit more to do. He doesn’t have enough to do in Book Two.
KD: Book Two was more focused on the Tkon Empire than anything else. It struck me as a look at the machinations of these superbeings on this Job-like race.
GC: Yes. That makes it somewhat odd for a Star Trek book, which made me a bit nervous while I was writing it. There were big chunks of the book that don’t have Picard or Riker or anybody in it. I extrapolated the Tkon Empire from what basically were five lines of dialogue from [the ST:TNG first-season episode] “The Last Outpost.” It seems to be my destiny in Star Trek to get entire novels out of two lines of dialogue in [the original series’ episode] “Space Seed.”
KD: [laughs] But we’ll save talk of your Eugenics Wars books for another time. So, justify for the reader your rationale for spending so much time on the Tkon Empire. Why was it so important to these books?
GC: I wanted to show something horrible happening in the past for which 0 and his gang of evil, glowing energy beings were responsible. You don’t want a threat to be too abstract, such as “Oh, there’s this nasty thing on the other side of the galactic barrier, and boy, it would really be bad if it got through.” It’s too abstract unless you see it actually doing something so you can get a sense of its capabilities. And I didn’t want to invent something new. My philosophy of writing Star Trek novels is not to invent a new alien race when there’s one floating around waiting to be grabbed. In fact, Star Trek is littered with dead civilizations that seem to have imploded at some point. The Tkon Empire seemed a logical place to go.
KD: So in that theme of drawing from existing aliens and beings, did you immediately go to the idea of rounding up these energy beings with the idea of their being on a scale of power equitable with Q’s?
GC: That probably was the uniting theme. There is almost this sense that the Star Trek universe is full of these weird, glowing balls of energy that do nasty things. I think I had an idea along those lines. One of the discarded ideas for one of the proposed Gary Seven novels involved dragging all of those things into play. But you want something comparable to The Q Continuum. At one point, I was going to have Redjac join the evil extraterrestrials, but I decided that it was getting a little crowded and Redjac was one of those things that ended up on the cutting-room floor. I figured that I already had four glowing energy beings that live on fear or whatever. And, if you’ll notice, Redjac makes a cameo in the first part of The Eugenics Wars.
KD: And they are different kinds of characters. The Gorgan, for example, uses children as his conduits of power. What did you enjoy about writing him?
GC: For all of them, I went back and watched all of the episodes to try and stay more or less consistent with their patterns of corruption. I thought I had Gorgan in character; that’s the main thing I remember. I kept trying to make his technique
different from the “god-thing” from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and the creature from [the original series episode] “The Day of the Dove.” Incidentally, I ended up giving that creature a name because it didn’t have a name in the original episode.
KD: [laughs] I noticed that you worked it into a line of Q’s dialogue, when he calls it the Beta XII-A entity and says that is the name given to the being in the Starfleet database. That’s also the name it was given in the Star Trek Encyclopedia [by Michael Okuda and Denise Okuda].
GC: Well, logically, it was not going to call itself the Beta XII-A entity. So I had to come up with a name for it, and Paramount was very nice about letting me do that.
KD: But that’s the only reference like that. In the book, you use (*) to represent the concept to the reader. I guess it doesn’t matter what you call it as long as the reader knows what’s going on.
GC: Given that we’re in a book in which one of the characters is named Q and one is named 0, the bar had been raised for weird, extraterrestrial names. The problem is that it has come back to bite me, sometimes. When you find yourself doing a live reading somewhere, sometimes you think, “Oh good God, what have I done to myself? How am I going to pronounce this?” Or worse yet, you get a call from the audio book people wanting to know how to pronounce such-and-such. “Uh, I have no idea. I just typed it.”
KD: [laughs] And given what you have to work with—a swirl of colored lights—I think that would have been much harder for you to get a grip on that character’s motivation and action. It just sat there and spun.
GC: Again, I just tried to be consistent with its M.O. [method of operation] in “Day of the Dove” and basically escalate things.
KD: And that was your approach with The One as well?
GC: Here, it was a case where I thought it was very logical to revisit the idea because of the nature of the two barriers: The galactic barrier on the rim of the galaxy and the Great Barrier in the center of the galaxy. It seemed that if I was dealing with a creature on the other side of the galactic barrier, I ought to deal with the one on the other side of the Great Barrier, particularly to the extent that the same people who banished 0 beyond the galactic barrier would also be involved with however the god-thing from Star Trek V was trapped.