Star Trek: New Worlds, New Civilizations

by Michael Jan Friedman

  Finally, we reach a shady restaurant with a red cloth awning and three tables set out beneath it—just the way it was described to me. Only one of the tables is occupied by a young couple. Geneb guides me to the one beside it, where some kinjun birds are pecking at crumbs.

  As we approach, a waiter comes out and good-naturedly flicks a wet rag at the birds, dispersing them. Then he wipes the table, smiles at us and pulls out a chair. “Please,” he tells me. “Have a seat.”

  I take it. Geneb sits down opposite me and orders a cold drink. I order one too, along with a piece of tuwaly pie. I’ve developed an addiction to tuwaly, a peppery-tasting fruit, in the short time I’ve been here.

  I look around. “So it happened in this restaurant?” I ask.

  “At this very table,” my companion tells me.

  When Oram and Sisko reached Dinaaj, the captain still didn’t know where the vedek was taking him. Hot and road-weary, he allowed Oram to bring him to a restaurant with a red awning in the marketplace.

  There was a heavyset man eating foraiga at one of the tables there. Foraiga was a much-loved delicacy Bajorans couldn’t get their hands on during the occupation. Even afterward, few of them could afford it, so the man was obviously a person of means.

  Oram knew the heavyset man and vice versa, so they sat down at his table. However, the man, as the story is now told, had turned his back on the Prophets, and he didn’t know that Sisko was the Emissary. All he knew was that the vedek’s companion was an off-worlder—a tourist or a visiting scientist or some such thing.

  Somewhere along the line, Oram brought up the fact that Sisko had admired a certain valley. It turned out that the man owned land in that valley. It was then that Sisko began to understand why the vedek had brought him to Dinaaj, and to this man in particular. “Would you consider selling that piece of land?” the captain asked, or so the story goes.

  “I hadn’t given it much thought,” the heavyset man replied. “But I suppose I would if the price was right.”

  “And what price would you think is right?” asked Sisko.

  The landowner thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Fifty thousand litas sounds fair.”

  Sisko laughed heartily. “For fifty thousand litas,” he said, “I could buy half of Kendra Province.”

  The man smiled smugly. “But not the half that holds that valley.”

  And so it went, the two of them bargaining for the better part of an hour. Finally, they settled on the sum of thirty-five thousand litas. Then a woman in the marketplace cried out and threw herself at Sisko’s feet.

  “Emissary,” she said with tears in her eyes, “how can I thank you for all you’ve done?”

  The captain smiled and helped the woman up. “Don’t thank me,” he told her. “Thank the Prophets.”

  At that point, the landowners eyes widened and he got up from his seat as if it were on fire. “Emissary …?” he stammered. Suddenly remembering a promise he had made during the Occupation, only if the Emissary paid him thousands of litas would he return to the path of the Prophets.

  “I may be the Emissary,” he said, “but I’m also just a man. Now as I recall, we agreed on a price. All we have to do is sign the papers.”

  And that, they say, is how the Emissary of the Prophets became a landholder in Kendra Province.

  I sit at the table where the Emissary sat, exulting in the shade, and sip my cold drink. Every now and then, I munch on a piece of tuwaly pie, which is every bit as good as I hoped.

  The young couple finishes their meal and walks away, their hands entwined. A vendor extols the virtues of perfumes with exotic names. Another hawks renewal scrolls for the coming Gratitude Festival.

  This is just a restaurant, I tell myself. And Benjamin Sisko was just a Terran who happened to be stationed in the vicinity of Bajor. That’s what the cynic in me insists.

  But there’s another part of me that feels honored to be walking in the footsteps of the Emissary.

  The arrival of the Emissary so soon after the end of the Occupation was seen as part of the blessing of the Prophets. Consequently everything concerning Captain Sisko’s interaction with Bajor has taken on mythic proportions. Representations of the “land purchase” are becoming as common as a prayer madalla in many homes.

  Q CONTINUUM

  BEYOND HORIZONS

  Members of the Q Continuum have been known to be paradoxically antagonistic, even petulant, in their behavior, while displaying a control over physical reality that makes them seem near-omnipotent.

  EXCERPTED FROM THE PERSONAL LOGS OF KATHRYN JANEWAY, CAPTAIN OF THE U.S.S. VOYAGER, WHICH HAS BEEN LOST FOR FIVE YEARS IN THE DELTA QUADRANT …

  I will try to record this as I am experiencing/have experienced it. But for reasons you’ll come to understand, that experience is unfolding/has unfolded in ways my mind (still) has trouble interpreting.

  I know this: In one moment, I’m standing on the U.S.S. Voyager along with Tuvok—my chief security officer—and two members of the immortal and virtually omnipotent Q Continuum. One of the Qs, who I will call Q2, wants to die. The other, who simply calls himself Q, wishes to stop him. Both of them have agreed to let me be their judge in the dispute.

  Q2 wants to show me the kind of existence he hopes to escape. So in the next moment, all four of us find ourselves in a desert. My first impression is that it could be in the southwestern part of North America, circa twentieth century.

  We’re standing beneath a flawless blue sky, on a two-lane ribbon of asphalt that stretches across a sea of green and yellow scrub from one purple-hilled horizon to the other. Baking in the sun, the asphalt has an oily, unpleasant smell to it. On one side of the road, poles, with wires strung between them, rise like doleful guardians at intervals of a hundred paces.

  They lead us to a whitewashed, clapboard house with a peaked roof and two neoclassical red gasoline pumps in front of it. The pumps have a layer of dust on them. They don’t look as if they’ve been used in a very long time.

  Walking across the house’s gravel apron, we see an old hound dog panting in the heat with his tongue hanging out. He looks up at us with the kind of utter disinterest I’ve never seen in a dog before. Then he lowers his head onto his paws and gazes into the distance again.

  There are two people on the house’s front porch. One is a dark man with a neatly trimmed mustache, a dark vest, and an open-collared shirt. He’s sitting in a wooden chair half in the sun and half in shadow, smoking a corncob pipe and reading a thick, dog-eared tome called The Old.

  Above the man’s head hangs a battered, old black-and-white clock, the hands of which have been torn off and lost. Above that, a worn sign tells us that this place NEVER CLOSES.

  Beside the man, a woman, whose bright red hair is done up in a permanent wave, pores through a slender magazine called The New. The magazine’s cover depicts a couple from Earth’s gala Roaring Twenties dancing the night away. As the woman turns a page, she purses her full, red lips and her elegant chiffon gown flutters in the wind.

  Like the hound, neither of them takes much notice of us. They just look up for a moment, then go back to their reading material.

  Nonetheless, I greet them. I don’t get any reaction worth mentioning.

  Q2 frowns wistfully. “I apologize for their lack of hospitality,” he tells me. “We’re not used to visitors here. In fact, you’re the only ones who’ve ever come.”

  We walk on around the house and spot some other people. One of them is a man in a cream-colored suit playing a pinball game called Galaxy. Two others, a young man and a young woman in polite summer-wear and straw hats, are engaged in a game of croquet on a rectangle of unexpectedly green lawn; the balls resemble class-M planets.

  None of these people seem all that intrigued by us either. By then, I don’t suppose I’m surprised.

  There’s no buzz of insects in the air, no flight of birds crossing the sky. Just the smell of paint cooking slowly in the sun.

  Once, Q2 tells us, this pla
ce was the setting for an exciting and energetic dialogue, a constant exchange of ideas and perspectives. But that isn’t the case any longer.

  “Because it has all been said,” he explains. “Everyone has heard everything, seen everything … they haven’t had to speak to each other in ten millennia.” He shrugs sadly. “There’s nothing left to say.”

  So what do they do? They take turns being the man on the porch, the woman standing beside him, the pinball player, the dog … even the scarecrow erected near the patch of green lawn, who wears a cranberry-and-black Starfleet uniform for some reason I can’t fathom. An endless round played out against the backdrop of eternity.

  True, Q2 is a disenfranchised soul, a dissident whom we had found in a rogue comet. And also true, this is only a distillation of the Q Continuum’s extradimensional reality, a sensory format designed for our limited intelligences to handle.

  Still, I’ve never seen such complacency, such sterility, such stagnation, And the worst part of it, the heart-wrenching, insupportable sadness of it, is that these people can do anything their minds imagine.

  Yet here they are, doing nothing, imagining nothing, consigning their endless potential to a stifling and unnecessary regimentation. But who am l, a mere mortal, to tell them how wrong it seems?

  I know this: The Q standing in the desert alongside Q2 was the one who visited the U.S.S. Enterprise-D several times from 2364 on, taunting and tantalizing Captain Jean-Luc Picard for his own amusement. In 2370, he showed up again on the Enterprise-D-but not just on another of his whims.

  This time he was acting as an official agent of the Continuum. And it wasn’t just the lives of Picard and his crew that hung in the cosmic balance—it was the continued existence of the entire species.

  Picard, as a representative of the species, was presented with a paradox in which he would be responsible for mankind’s destruction by creating an anti-time phenomenon. Q himself added the wrinkle of having Picard shift haphazardly among three time periods, all the while retaining his awareness of what was happening in each.

  Was Q helping the captain—or making his problem more difficult? I’ve always wondered. I don’t suppose I’ll ever really know. However, Picard solved the paradox, proving to the Continuum that a human, and by logical extension all humanoids, could expand his perceptions and explore the unknown questions of existence.

  Ironically, Q himself—and indeed, his entire Continuum—was proving just the opposite was true of themselves. After prolonged eons of enlightenment and growth, they were beginning to lose sight of their need to expand, to change. As powerful as they were, they were becoming afraid of the unknown.

  When Q2 grew tired of the Continuum’s ennui and decided to end it all, he became a marked man—or more accurately, a marked Q. The Continuum recognized the danger he presented to their society. It was then that they imprisoned him in the comet from which Voyager eventually rescued him.

  Human perceptions are inadequate to embrace the full scope of the Q Continuum. For those rare visitors to their domain, the Q make concessions to these limitations, offering “less evolved” life-forms images their minds can contain, if not completely understand.

  I know this: Having seen all Q2 intended us to see, the four of us vanish from the unchanging desert of the Q Continuum. We appear on Voyager again, where I begin to mull over what I’ve learned so I can eventually deliver my verdict.

  But at the same time, I don’t leave the desert. I remain there in front of the white clapboard house with its collection of lost souls—and so does the Q who bedeviled Jean-Luc Picard.

  How is this possible? I’m not certain. But I know from Starfleet files that members of the Continuum can manipulate time and space. I imagine that this is an alternate timeline, then, or perhaps some kind of divergent reality for which I don’t even have a name.

  “Ah, Kathy,” says Q, smiling a conspiratorial smile. “How perceptive you are for a being of such unimpressive pedigree.”

  “Careful,” I reply. “You’ll turn my head.”

  “Come with me,” Q tells me, “and I’ll show you wonders in heaven and earth undreamt of in your philosophy.”

  “Shakespeare,” I observe. “More or less.”

  Q grunts, putting on an expression of annoyance. “Was he the one who took credit for it? It figures.”

  Then he ascends onto the porch, passing the man in the rocking chair and the woman in the chiffon dress, and opens the screen door. A moment later, he disappears inside the house. I follow, knowing neither why I’m going along nor what to expect.

  As I leave the heat of the desert behind, a series of smells hits me in the face: strong coffee and sizzling bacon, buttery flapjacks, and fried eggs. I like them. A lot. After all, our replicator privileges are rationed on Voyager.

  What I see first is a yellow Formica lunch counter that seems to go on forever, but is only a few meters long when I really think about it. There’s a swiveling metal fan on top of the counter. It sweeps back and forth, driving dust motes with small, welcome gusts of cool air.

  Then I realize they’re not dust motes at all. They’re tiny starships of a design I’ve never seen before.

  A single waitress stands behind the counter. She wears a lime-green uniform with a stained white apron. Her ample brown hair is tucked into a hair net for the sake of cleanliness.

  She has several more arms then a humanoid typically does.

  On the wall behind her hangs a pink and blue cardboard sign. It tells customers, DON’T ASK FOR CREDIT.

  Why did Q lay this particular scene before Captain Janeway? Was Q trying to say that Homo sapiens have evolved beyond the belief in gods and monsters, but not food, and therefore are still primitive, needy? Or could it just be as simple as, “There is nothing like a good cup of coffee?”

  There are three people sitting at the counter on tin-plated stools with pale blue imitation-leather seats. The first one is a blue-haired old woman in a floral shift with knee-high stockings. She’s eaten half of a candy bar. The label says, Milky Way.

  The second person at the counter is a tow-headed boy of eight or nine, dressed in a white T-shirt and overalls. He’s rolling spitballs and blowing them out through a straw. They leave fiery little trails before they fall to the floor. I get the impression that the boy may be related to the old woman, but I don’t know that for sure.

  The third person is rail-thin and leather-skinned, perhaps of Native American descent like my first officer. His black eyes flick over me in a way I’m not certain I like.

  He’s got a bowl of thick, green soup in front of him. It bubbles and splashes as if there’s something alive in it, something primordial. He takes a dollopful in his spoon and swallows it.

  Three booths are situated along the wall, upholstered in the same blue imitation leather. Their tables are yellow like the countertop and striped with light that slants through the venetian blinds—though there’s no window behind them to admit light in the first place. All three of the booths are occupied. The first one contains an Asian couple. He’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a white baseball cap; she’s wearing blue slacks and a white Western-yoked blouse.

  When they see me, they take out a couple of antique plastic pistols and fire them at me. Believing Q won’t let any harm come to his guest, I try not to flinch. To my relief, all that comes out of the guns are a couple of flags that say, BIG BANG.

  The second booth has only one person in it—a bald man in matching gray pants and shirt whose face has been burned red by the sun. He’s removing long, red worms from a hole in his tabletop, but there’s no corresponding opening in the bottom of the table.

  The third booth is host to a couple of teenage girls decked out in brightly colored dresses and too much makeup. They have stars in their eyes. I mean that literally.

  Q turns to me. “You see?”

  I shake my head as the fan wafts a breeze at me, moving a stray lock of my hair. “See what?”

  He glances at the waitress. �
�Forgive her. She’s usually much more perceptive than this.”

  “She’s forgiven,” the waitress answers without even looking at me. She picks up the old woman’s cup with one hand and uses another to refill it with coffee. A third hand produces a rag and wipes down her counter.

  “What are you trying to show me?” I ask Q.

  “What are we trying to show her?” he inquires of the waitress.

  The woman looks up and frowns. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  I scan the place again as the fan makes its rounds, but I don’t draw any conclusions. “Not to me,” I respond helplessly.

  The waitress casts a disparaging glance at Q. “Didn’t I tell you not to bring mammals in here?”

  Q looks at me. “So you did. But I thought you might make an exception just this once.”

  The waitress glares at Q. “If she makes a mess, you’re the one who’s going to clean it up. Not me.”

  He nods. “Understood.”

  The woman turns to me again. “Used to be everyone ate in the booths. Now we’re getting some counter traffic again.”

  I study her as the fan favors me with another breeze, sending tiny starships soaring my way. “That’s all?”

  Her expression turns disparaging again. “Of course not. That was just the beginning. Then came the cuffs.”

  “The cuffs?” I echo, as lost as ever.

  “The cuffs,” the waitress iterates. And then I see it. The boy in the overalls, the rail-thin man with the leathery skin … their pants are cuffed. And the people in the booths? Not a cuff in sight.

  I turn to Q and shrug. “Cuffs at the counter and no cuffs in the booths. What’s it mean?”

  Q smiles. “It means things are getting complicated in heaven and earth. Whether that’s good or bad depends on your philosophy.”

  I know this: Eventually, Q2 got the death he wanted. But his story didn’t end there. Inspired by the force and purity of his conviction, half the Continuum—including Picard’s Q—rose up and rebelled against the forces of the status quo. Before anyone realized what was happening, a bloody war was being waged in the fields of the Continuum.