by Peter David
“Hello, Q,” said McHenry.
SOLETA
VOLAK STARED AT THE SILENT statue of a young woman whom he had always called daughter, gazing out the window for yet another day, just as she had been doing every day for the last week since she had returned to Vulcan.
“Burgoyne. And Selar. They are shipmates of yours, are they not?”
Soleta had barely said ten words since coming back. It was as if she was in a sort of mental fugue state. Upon hearing those names, however, she turned and looked at her father as if noticing for the first time that he was there. “Yes. They are.”
“They were here, on Vulcan. Caused quite a bit of commotion. Some very spirited debate over . . .”
He had lost her attention again. She was staring outside once more. “It is an impressive view, is it not.”
No reply.
“I find it . . . oddly reassuring.”
No reply.
“There is much in life that is uncertain. To wake up each morning and be able to look out upon Vulcan and see it much as I left it the previous evening brings with it a certain degree of reassurance. It is the same as it ever was and, logically, will remain that way.”
“No,” Soleta said. “Nothing remains the same. Everything changes.”
“Soleta . . . do you wish to discuss what happened?”
“I see no logical reason to do so, Father. Discussing it will not alter what has passed. And since I doubt that such circumstances will arise once more, they have no bearing on the future.”
There was a long pause, and Volak took a deep breath, as if steadying himself. “What was he like? The Romulan.”
Soleta did not bother to ask how Volak had figured out that was where she was going. Instead she simply said, “He is dead and poses no further threat to you or to anyone.”
“Dead.” Volak raised an eyebrow. “How did he die?”
She looked up at Volak. “Saving my life.”
It was not the answer that he had expected, but one could not have told by the barely discernible flicker of surprise on his face. “I see. So he reformed. He was not totally an irredeemable individual.”
“Actually . . . he was. Irredeemable, and manipulative, and scheming. Just like all Romulans.”
“All?”
She thought for a moment about the children she had seen frolicking on the statue. She thought about how normal everyone around her had seemed. How she had even felt brief embers of pride flickering within her.
Then she remembered Mekari’s foul breath, his mouth upon hers, his body pressed up against her. And worse, she could hear the distant but distinct laughter of Rajari in her imagination. Laughing at her foolishness, at her gullibility. She had allowed herself to trust someone against all logic, and she had paid for it. She, and all the other Romulans who had died in the explosion. Whatever those children would grow up to be, it would be something just like their sires. Whatever their architectural accomplishments, it was just a façade of nobility to hide hearts full of bile and betrayal.
“All,” she said flatly.
Volak clearly considered her words for a time. Then he said, “It must be most difficult for you. You know of your Romulan blood . . .”
“Father, I do not wish to—”
Ignoring her preferences in the matter, Volak continued, “. . . and you feel that it diminishes you. Taints you. Makes you that which repulses you. Fosters a degree of self-hatred and loathing.”
“All right, Father,” she suddenly said with barely restrained exasperation. “Let us say that you are right. That I feel exactly the way you describe. What am I supposed to do now? What would logic dictate? What would Vulcan philosophies of rational thought and discourse propose? When I feel unclean down to my very DNA, when the circumstances of my own creation fill me with nausea, what answer could there possibly be? What solution would you propose?”
Volak looked her straight in the eyes.
“Get over it,” he said.
She stared at him. “Get over it? That’s it?”
“You will find, Soleta, that the answer to most of life’s difficulties can be boiled down to that essence. There are many trappings to aid you in doing so. You can embrace those trappings for what they are, pick and choose those that suit your immediate needs, and prolong the process. Or, as would be the logical thing to do, you could simply envision in your mind the desired outcome—”
“That outcome being my getting over it.”
“Correct. Then embrace that outcome, accept what you are since you cannot change what you are, and move on.”
“It is not that easy, Father.”
“Not for a human,” he agreed. “Nor for a Romulan. For a Vulcan . . . yes . . . it is.”
She thought about that for a bit. “Get over it.”
“Yes.”
She let out a low, steady sigh. “When will I know that I have gotten over it?”
“When you no longer need ask if you have.”
“I see.”
Volak went away then and said nothing more to her that day, or the next.
Two days later, she rose from her chair, the motion catching Volak’s attention, drawing him away from the text he was reading. He looked at her with a cocked eyebrow.
“Are you over it?” he inquired.
“I believe so.”
“Then you are not.”
A day and a half later, he was preparing dinner in the kitchen when Soleta walked in. She stared at him with reserve.
“Are you over it?” he asked. It was the first words he’d said to her since the last time.
“Yes.”
“Good. Then let us go out to dinner and leave behind this repast that I am in the process of botching.”
“A most logical course of action,” said Soleta.
And they went out to dinner, with Soleta carrying a carefully maintained expression of contemplative serenity on her face, and Rajari’s laughter still ringing in her mind.
McHENRY & KEBRON
Q, THE MASTER COMPLICATOR, the terror of worlds, the occasional redeemer of the universe, stared at McHenry with both ill-concealed contempt and also morbid fascination. “How did you know it was me?”
“I didn’t,” McHenry said reasonably. “I guessed. I didn’t know for sure until you appeared just now.”
“That’s not the question and you know it.” He looked at him askance. “What sort of odd appearance is that? That’s not what you’re supposed to look like.” He snapped his fingers and both McHenry and Kebron were enveloped in flashes of light. When the glare faded, the genetic surgery that had created their exteriors was gone. McHenry was back to his human appearance, while the enormous Kebron had been restored to his Brikar status.
Zanka let out a shriek. “Kebron!” And then her brain simply overloaded from sensory input. She sagged and then passed out. Adulux could have caught her and prevented her from hitting the floor, but he made no motion to do so since he himself was transfixed by what he was seeing in front of him. So Zanka fell with no impediment from her husband.
“What . . . are you?” Adulux managed to gasp out. He pointed at Q. “And who is he? And . . . and . . .”
“Oh, be quiet,” Q said in irritation. Immediately a large tube appeared around Adulux, completely enveloping him. He called out, pounding on the tube, but his voice couldn’t be heard and even the thudding of his fists was undetectable audibly.
As if Adulux had simply vanished from the face of existence, Q promptly lost interest in him and looked back to McHenry. “A human and a Brikar, operating side by side in disguise to help some groundworms on a backward world. You must be from Starfleet. Only they would go to such involved lengths to aid a bunch of lesser beings who are simply not worth it. But how do you know of me?” he asked.
“You’re not serious,” said McHenry. “How could I not? Pictures of you have been circulated to every officer in Starfleet. Entire treatises have been written as to your methods of operation. There’s a paper cal
led ‘The Q Scenario’ which analyzes all your previous activities and everything you can be expected to do in any given situation.”
Q’s eyes widened and he started to laugh. It was not an especially pleasant sound. The laughter grew and grew until it was echoing back upon itself, building in volume until Kebron’s head was ringing. McHenry, however, didn’t react at all. He just stood there, his gaze never wavering from Q.
“Everything I can be expected to do?” Q finally managed to get out. “Do you mean to say that some Starfleet drones actually endeavored to second-guess everything that I, an omniscient, omnipotent being who walked creation when the first light was aborning, and will be there to shut the light out at creation’s end, might do? The nerve! The presumption! What imbeciles thought that they could know me so well, that they would have the slightest scintilla of hope in even beginning to scratch the surface of me!”
“Jean-Luc Picard, and Commanders Data and Riker.”
Q paused a second when he heard that. Then he shrugged. “Oh. Well . . . they might have a shot. A very small shot, to be sure, but a shot.” Then he shook off the momentary doubt. “In any event, that’s not the point.”
“No, Q. The point is that this sort of petty indulgence is beneath you. Showing up on a backwater world and playing with the minds of people who can’t even begin to comprehend you for what you are?” He shook his head and actually looked a bit sad. “It’s a little beneath you, don’t you think?”
“I suppose,” Q sighed, and to Kebron’s surprise he actually had a touch of melancholy about him. “But that was why I did it, really. I mean, I have so many responsibilities now. A wife, a son, the future of the Q Continuum to think about. And I found that I missed my old self. The sadistic torturing of lesser beings, the sense of accomplishment in reducing uncomprehending inferior species to gibbering idiocy for no reason other than to see them gibber . . .” He sighed. “Those were the good old days.”
“You’re insane,” said Kebron.
Q looked at him in irritation and snapped his fingers. Kebron vanished. In his place was a small, red block.
“From Brikar to brick,” Q said, eminently pleased with himself.
“Change him back, Q,” said McHenry.
“Oh, as if you have anything to say in the matter,” Q shot back. “You, who come along and spoil my fun. Are you that upset about the state of your friend? Perhaps you’d like to join him for a bit.”
He snapped his fingers once more. He didn’t have to. It was really more for dramatic flair than anything else, a slightly showboat tendency that he had undoubtedly picked up from hanging about humans too much.
A brief flash of light enveloped McHenry. And when it faded . . .
. . . McHenry was still there. He simply stood with his arms folded, watching Q with an almost distant boredom.
“Change him back, Q.”
Q looked at the fingers he’d snapped as if they’d betrayed him. Then he looked back at McHenry, then his fingers once more. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I had no trouble transforming you from that ridiculous appearance to your true self. But why couldn’t I change you now to—?”
“Q . . . please.” There was no begging in McHenry’s voice. It sounded more as if he was simply making an endeavor to be polite.
Clearly befuddled, almost as an afterthought, Q gestured and Kebron snapped back to his normal state.
“You can do anything, Q. We both know that,” McHenry said. “Please put things back the way they were. Take these two people,” and he gestured toward Adulux and Zanka, “and put them back with no memory of what happened here. You can do that, I’m sure.”
“Of course I can,” Q said with obvious impatience. “But how did—?”
“And as for the three students, put them back but let them keep their memories, so they can remember what it feels like to suffer at the hands of a power greater than their own. That way they’ll be disinclined to toy with the lives of others.”
Q was nodding absently, but he was still staring at McHenry. Kebron, who was still trying to figure out what had just happened to him moments before, and why time seemed to have jumped for him, was looking from one to the other with the sense that something was occurring here that he wasn’t totally following.
“What is it about you?” demanded Q finally. “There’s something about you . . . you’re not what you appear to be.”
“Which of us is?” said McHenry mildly.
He frowned, and it seemed to Kebron as if Q were somehow mentally X-raying McHenry, using his infinite senses to analyze in great detail every aspect of McHenry’s being. McHenry took a step back, and it seemed to Kebron as if, for the first time, he was actually uncomfortable.
Then Q’s face cleared. “Of course.” There was something akin to amusement in his voice. “Oh, of course. I should have realized. How very embarrassing,” he said, and he did indeed sound a bit chagrined, which was—to put it mildly—rather unusual for Q. “I didn’t recognize you for who and what you were before.”
And now McHenry appeared disconcerted. “Drop it, Q. Now,” he said sharply.
But Q didn’t seem the least bit perturbed by McHenry’s controlled distress. “With all that you know . . . with all that you are . . . why in the universe are you hanging around with these Starfleet types?”
“Because I am a Starfleet type,” McHenry said tightly. It was the closest to looking upset that Kebron had ever seen McHenry. “Now let’s drop this, all right?”
“Oh, but I don’t want to.”
“I do.”
There was something in the way McHenry said it that Kebron actually found chilling. He was going to brook no further discussion of the matter . . . and there was an implicit warning to Q that there might be dire consequences if he endeavored to push the subject.
At first Q looked obviously amused that anyone would so much as entertain the notion that they could take some sort of forceful bottom line with him. Then he saw that McHenry looked deadly serious. It was a surprising thing to see. In all the years that Kebron had known McHenry, going all the way back to the Academy, the most extreme reaction he’d ever seen out of McHenry was vague confusion.
McHenry didn’t take his eyes off Q. He seemed to be concentrating rather fiercely. Q, for his part, had a poker face.
Finally, he said, “I do believe that this experiment has been something of a success. But the entire secret of any game is knowing when it’s time to put it away.”
He gestured, and there was a blinding flash of light . . .
Three students—one Andorian, and two Tellarites—who had never known inconvenience, or personal worry, or any sort of discomfort at all, found themselves back in their small shuttle vessel in the middle of space. Their university, situated in its gleaming satellite home, hovered not far away.
The three of them looked at each other, and then without another word, angled their ship toward the satellite. Once docked and aboard, they never set foot out of the university again during the rest of their tenure. And every so often, they would wake up screaming, or be known to jump for no reason whenever extremely bright lights happened to be shone in their direction.
Zanka and Adulux found themselves on the surface of Liten.
They had no idea what had happened. They had no clue as to how they had come to be standing in a field at night.
All they knew was that they were utterly terrified for no reason that they could begin to articulate. And in their mutual terror, they threw their arms around each other, held each other close. In their panic, their lips came together, and they began to do things to each other, greedily, desperately, anxious to find some aspect of normality even though they did not fully understand the abnormality that they had just been through.
They sank to the ground of the field. And when they arose some hours later, Adulux never raised a hand to her or to any other being again. He was peaceful, benign, the most unviolent individual that anyone on Liten had ever laid eyes on.
<
br /> Six months later, Zanka left him anyway for an extremely well built Liten with rippling muscles and an air of calm self-confidence. She never quite knew what attracted her to him. Adulux, for his part, was too at peace to care.
“Oh. You’re back. And what do you gentlemen want?”
Kebron and McHenry looked at each other in confusion, and then at their surroundings.
They were in the Strange New Worlds, the pub on Earth in which they had last seen their fellow crew-mates.
Kebron had absolutely no idea what to say.
McHenry didn’t hesitate. He held up two fingers and said, “Two synthehols.”
“You certainly know how to live dangerously,” said the waitress, as she turned on her heel and went to fetch their drinks.
“Why are we here?” said Kebron.
“That’s a good question,” McHenry replied thoughtfully. “Philosophers have been debating that for many a—”
“Not in this world. Here. In this pub.”
“Oh.” McHenry shrugged. “Q sent us here. Maybe he thought we needed a drink. So I guess you’d call our mission a success. Here’s to us. And you, Kebron. How did it feel to be out of that superhard skin of yours for once?”
Kebron thought of Zanka pressing herself up against him, of the lips on his. Of the warmth.
“Boring,” he said quickly. Then he looked suspiciously at McHenry. “You. Q.”
“That’s two. Twenty-four more, you’ll have the whole alphabet.”
But Kebron was not to be distracted. “The way he reacted to you . . .”
“He was just trying to mess with your mind, Kebron,” McHenry said dismissively. “You know that. He likes to confuse people, make them wonder about each other, second-guess each other. It was all just some big game to him. Don’t dwell on it. If you do, you’ll be playing right into his hands.”
