How to describe the Q Continuum to you? Lower your expectations. Language can't capture this, so we're doomed before we start.
A very large room.
An ant hill, both its structure and contents.
The feeling when you stick your hand under cool water.
The tang of tartar sauce, just when the flavor spikes.
A contented yawn.
A board room at the office the moment when they call you in and let you go. "Times are tough, it's not personal," they say, and your sudden awareness of the fluidity of the future, and of time.
Lastly, a lounge chair with proper back support.
The Continuum is more a feeling than a place, although it's most definitely still a place — but the feelings are more accurate to convey. If you need an image, "a very large room" is the closest.
In the recent years of Picard's life, I had returned more and more to the Continuum, and in the last year I was spending most of my time there. For me, a great deal more time than a few years had passed. Timeless time. Time out of time.
A Q doesn't measure their life in years but in their position within the Continuum. In a continuum of individuals there are always the outliers, those of us nearest the edge, some of us on the edge itself — the last of the line. We Q are constantly scooping up the outliers, folding them back into the center, similar to the process of slowly kneading dough. Very slowly. Working through our lumps and air bubbles over billions and trillions of years. It keeps us uniform, which is what's best for the universe; a predictability which won't upset every other species' evolution.
I've been in the center of the Continuum before. In the distant past, I was the most central member, the god of the universe, designing policy, dictating assignments, meting out judgment. All of us have done that at some point. But in the latest eon, I've been the furthest of the outliers, about to be flopped over and kneaded back into the center. Changed, but so slowly it wouldn't seem like change.
Lately I've been craving it. I can feel the shift starting.
I went before the Continuum's most central group to discuss my excitement. I talked a big talk about the momentum of my life, how I could feel it picking up in a different direction, towards the Continuum and not away. How I was starting to intuit the so-called "superior morality" of the Continuum (as I had once badly labeled it for Picard) as being no different from my own morality, and this a natural consequence of nurturing my own omniscience instead of ignoring it. It was a very lovely speech. One of the Q wiped away a tear when he thought no one was looking.
The consensus afterwards was that everyone was glad I was feeling more responsible these days. They told me they looked forward to the natural course of things unfolding. "More than we usually do," said the Q with the tear.
Q met me outside afterwards — the same Q who needled me about Jean-Luc. He was not one of the central Q, but he was working his way there, a few million years further along in the process than I. He was leaning against a blazar at the center of a galaxy, arms folded.
"Well you can fool them," he said, "but some of us know the full story."
The blazar was shooting ionized matter all around us. I brushed it off my shoulders, watching it fall like glitter. "I don't know what you're talking about," I said.
"Your favorite toy's about to expire, so here you are. Maybe you've even convinced yourself this is all your own idea. The timing is convenient, isn't it?"
I frowned at him. Or more accurately, I frowned at the insinuation that I had deceived myself. "Of course it's not my own idea. I'm Q. A Q shifts through the Continuum. The change would happen even if I resisted it."
He patted me on the back. I think he was being comforting. But the ionized matter that had collected on me fluffed into space again, and set me coughing.
"You are resisting it," he said. "What you are, right now, is the least Q of the Q. If you're respectable you're not doing it right. Go and be weird, huh? That's why we like you, you're a freak."
I couldn't respond for coughing. He patted me once more.
"Embrace the edge," he whispered energetically, and then he was gone.
I doubled over, hacking up raw plasma. It was a miserable few moments, made worse by my miserable thoughts. I was thinking how wrong Q was. I hadn't even seen Picard lately. The last time I had seen him, we had fought. How did that qualify him as my toy? What a miserable toy to have, a toy which only infuriates you.
Maybe they'd all been on the edge before, but they forgot what it was like. I was tired of being the odd Q out, no one on the other side of me to make me look tamer by comparison. I wanted normalcy, and being folded into the Continuum, over and over? The thought was a balm on the sting of my loneliness.
When Picard took my hand on the bridge of the Prospero, I tugged him forward a step. At the same time, I transported us to his villa in France, so that his foot landed onto the crunch of the graveled courtyard.
He spun around, registering his new surroundings. It was the twilight hour. Earth's air was humid, almost wet compared to the stuffy ship air.
"My ship," he said. "Where is it?"
"Docked. Not that you could argue with me if it wasn't. It's an interesting stipulation, this not arguing. I think it will hurt you more than it will me."
He looked me up and down, as if reminding himself what he should be concerned about. Me, not the planet, not his ship. "This is your first time here," he said. "At least, I think it is."
"In this century." I inhaled, exhaled, enjoying the sensation in my human lungs. I smelled mint, oregano… and something else, something citrusy. "The place where you grew up. Are you going to show me around?"
"It's a little dark."
"I can fix that," I said, starting to raise my hand.
"Don't." He caught himself. "I mean, I'd prefer it if you didn't. Come this way. Please."
He led me away from the main building to a cottage in the opposite direction, murky in the pinking dusk. A bat swooped over his head, there and gone again.
He went inside first, not holding the door open for me. "The lights," he explained, finding the switch further inside.
I heard him sneeze. When I stepped across the threshold, I felt the itch myself, but wriggled my nose and it was gone. Dust coated every surface inside. Cobwebs laced the stair railing. A dead bug lay upside-down in the corner.
He continued into the cottage, turning on most of the lights. He showed me into the main room, where chairs were gathered around a fireplace opposite a wall of books. Most of the furniture was covered in dust sheets. He uncovered two chairs, gesturing to one of them.
"Have a seat," he said, wrapping up the sheet. "What wine would you like? White or red?"
I stood behind the chair; I didn't sit. "You go to great lengths to trick me into an hour, and this is what you're going to do with it? The clock's ticking, you know."
"I'll bring a red," he said ruefully, and went off.
I looked at the room again. Of course I was perfectly happy for him to waste his time sneezing and fidgeting with his filthy belongings — an unintended benefit of bringing him here. He'd certainly put me through worse, back when I'd had my hour. But I was curious what the place looked like normally.
I snapped, and the house went back in time about thirty weeks or so. I glanced at the fireplace, and it roared to life.
My long shadow fluttered against his wall of books. Interspersed in the books were knick-knacks from Starfleet and artifacts crumbling with age. One book (really, a pamphlet) caught my attention, The Tempest by William Shakespeare. Pressed into the pages was the note I had written for him.
I had forgotten about it.
I read it again. The best human I've met. Too good for rotting. Go explore. My final words to him. My goodbye. I had given more extravagant goodbyes to people I liked half as much. Still, I could feel myself recoiling from the words; it was as though another person had written them. I took the note towards the fire, flicking it into the flames, except only my wrist made the motion. My fingers did not release, and so the note remained in my hand. Curious.
When he came back, I was reclined in the chair, thinking intently. He set the wine on the table next to me.
"Thank you," he said, sitting.
"What for," I asked matter-of-factly.
"For tidying up, and for the fire."
I acknowledged this with a moody grunt. Then I said, "I shouldn't chide you for wasting your time. Speaking to me will be a waste of time no matter what you do. So you should enjoy yourself, right?"
"I don't really have a goal here, Q."
I laughed. I knew neither of us believed that.
"I might have a single goal," he said, "but it's not what you think."
"I can't argue with you, Picard, so you can claim whatever you wish." I nodded to the mantel. "When you bought that clock, you couldn't have known it would count down our final conversation. A conversation with one of the most dangerous beings in the universe. Had we met yet?"
"Marie bought it."
"Well, you've wasted ten minutes. Better get going."
He settled comfortably in his chair, sipping his wine. "Here's a question for you then. What is it you do? I have only heard about your dishonorable exploits, but I'm sure that isn't all you get up to. You mentioned you were orchestrating something when you saw me. Something about volcanoes."
"What is it I do?" I frowned at the question and answered broadly. "I amuse myself."
"Can you be more specific?"
"Not really, no. I doubt you'd understand any of it."
"With a superior intellect like yours, I should hope you could handle the translation. What was happening with the people you were saving from the volcanoes?"
"It was an assignment."
"From the Continuum?"
"Yes."
"Do they often assign you things like that? I suppose the trial of humanity was an assignment. I'll confess to being curious about them."
"The Continuum is none of your business. You're speaking to me, not them."
"I apologize," he said, not very apologetically. "I've simply wondered exactly how you spend your time, how an entity like you amuses yourself, as you say."
I lifted my legs and an ottoman appeared beneath them. Reclining, I sighed at the ceiling, really throwing all of my ennui behind the sound.
"I suppose it's inevitable I would bore you," he said. "That's why I needed you to agree to an hour."
"How tedious," I said, sipping the wine. It was my first taste, and my face wrinkled from the sharpness of it. "Is this really the best you have?"
"To be honest? No. But what's the point in pouring my best for you? I'm sure you'd find fault in that too. I'm not trying to impress you, Q."
"I like us not arguing. I feel very appreciated."
We were silent for a moment. The chirping of crickets outside mingled with the whooshing of the fireplace.
"The ship you gave me," he said, "why did you name it the Prospero?"
"That play on your shelf, of course."
"Why that play?"
"Shakespeare, obviously."
"Could you elaborate?"
"It's been so long since I thought of it. Ariel, me. A storm. An old man doing something important before he died. You fill in the blanks."
"How did you know I'd want a ship?"
He was so insistent. He had obviously prepared for this, the way he was blurting out questions then hunting down my answers. He must have several ready to go. I wondered how I felt about this hour devolving into an interrogation.
"I agreed not to argue," I said. "I did not agree to answer every question you posed."
"Very well. Introduce some other topic."
"Where in your rules am I required to talk at all?"
"Don't be difficult." He put his wine glass aside. "It's an hour of your time. You can control time, can't you? So you can have it back when I'm done with it."
"Which is why it's more accurate to say it's an hour of my attention."
"Yes. Talking."
"Or listening."
"Both."
I sat up in the chair, kicked the ottoman forward. "At the risk of appearing argumentative, I'd like to point out the fact that, moments ago, you accused me of being a bad listener."
"I did?"
"You implied I love the sound of my own voice. It is a lovely voice, but I don't think you were speaking literally."
"Well." He leaned forward, matching my posture. "If I said that, which I'm not disputing… I probably said it in anger. It's not an excuse, but you can make me angry on occasion, Q. In fact, most of the times I've been unfair to you, I did it out of anger, or frustration."
I stared at him, surprised and a little horrified. The firelight illuminated one half of his face, the other half in shadow. He grinned at my expression and continued.
"Those hours you wanted to talk to me, and I refused? I was angry. It isn't easy for someone like me to be so… outmaneuvered. And I didn't believe you were interested, back then. I thought it was a game, a chance to humiliate me. These days I have the benefit of hindsight. A very human compulsion, to look back on one's past and wish one had behaved better…" He caught himself. "That was one of your lessons for me, wasn't it? So it isn't merely a human compulsion."
I was growing more uncomfortable the longer he spoke, and when he was done speaking I rolled my eyes, trying to feign indifference. "Foolish. I never once wanted to humiliate you, not as an end."
"Yes. By the time I realized that, you had left. And at my retirement ceremony, well, you made me angry again."
"Did I?" I said, still feigning indifference.
"In some ways I feel justified for that reaction. It wasn't easy. You didn't make it easy. But there were other moments of that exchange in the reception area… I could have been different. Cooler under pressure."
I felt the tug of something, some emotion I didn't want to identify. It wasn't anger. It was something else, something long neglected. And I went on neglecting it.
"Sometimes, Q," Picard said, angling slightly towards me, "it's as if you are so very powerful, I can conveniently forget," he breathed, sighed, "you're still an individual."
Too much. I stood.
"This is all very interesting," I said casually, "but I'd prefer your best wine."
The wine cellar was on the far side of his kitchen, a short room lined with criss-crossed alcoves and bottles. I ducked through the doorway, and once inside my head nearly touched the ceiling. I put out a tendril of my omniscience — something I was doing more often these days, acting more in line with the other Q. I found his favorite bottle. I opened it, poured a glass.
It wasn't very good. Not because it was sharp like the last one, but there was so much pepper in the aftertaste.
"You're right, I hate it," I said when his shadow darkened the doorway.
"You should aerate it."
"I did. No, this is as good as it gets. And what it deserves…" I poured the bottle into a trashcan, staring at him as I did, as if daring him to tell me otherwise.
He watched, frowning. "Someone somewhere would call this a form of arguing."
"I'm saving you from a terrible fate." I dropped the entire bottle into the can with a loud thunk. I snapped. A new bottle appeared on the high wooden table between us.
"My best wine," I said, "from my cellar, the universe. Something to remember me by."
He grabbed the bottle and immediately started opening it. "Going forward I hope to remember you by you being here, in person."
There was that neglected emotion again. It bubbled forth pleasantly, but I resented that he could do that. That he was going to keep doing that, evidently, unless I put a stop to it.
He was twisting the corkscrew onto the wine bottle when the bottle became impossibly heavy. He had just enough time and strength to set it back onto the table again, and just enough sense to frown at me for an explanation. Smirking, I plucked the bottle away from him and started opening it myself.
"Allow me," I said, materializing new wine glasses. "Maybe while we drink this I'll tell you about the Continuum, human. If you can understand it."
"I'm told my brain is still sharp," he retorted. Clever, but I didn't give him the satisfaction of acknowledging it.
"You're so eager. But you must know drinking this wine will most definitely spoil you on, oh, everything in this cellar. Everything on this planet really. Perhaps every wine in the Federation. You're not concerned?"
He watched me, and I could see he knew I meant more than the wine I was pouring. "Go ahead," he said.
"Really? It took you decades to collect all of this. Wine is what you do. And it isn't as if I would enjoy it any more if you drank. Tastes all the same to me."
He shook his head, with a fraction of an eye roll. "Even the best wines don't spoil me on the others. There is something to appreciate in all of them. Sometimes one appreciates the old things more for having tasted new ones." Moodily he added, "Assuming I have the handle on the metaphor."
His arrogance was palpable. I remembered the feeling of being rebuffed like this before, and just when I was being so careful, so thoughtful in ways he would never appreciate.
He reached for his glass, but I slid it away from him. I drank mine, swilling it, making him wait for my explanation.
"I used to think you and your crew were cute, like children playing pretend. I'd caught you in a game of 'starships and aliens.' You created your rules, swore by them, then forgot about them day-to-day. The worst was your prime directive. Encounter an inferior species and you'd bend over backwards finding excuses for their savagery. But a truly new species, a superior species like the Q Continuum, something a thousand times beyond your comprehension, and you're claiming to be better than us and telling us what to do."
He was wisely considered in his reply. "If I claimed to be an authority over the Continuum, that was imprudent. Of course I am not."
"Oh, but you are, in your own mind. You've always been opinionated about my power. Even now. What else is this?"
"A conversation," he insisted.
A mirthless laugh escaped me. He was still insisting that talking was all this was.
By now, I had put my finger on the emotion, the one I was neglecting. It was affection. It vexed me to admit, but that was the truth. Affection. I couldn't seem to help feeling it for him. Couldn't change it, couldn't get rid of it. It was a silly thing, because he was a silly thing.
But silly things should be neglected. They should make room for important things.
Again I heard Q telling me to be weird, to embrace it. Easy for him to say when his place within the Continuum was sound. The Continuum wouldn't punish me for anything I did — not with a single human — but I had my own higher standard to contend with.
I was Q. Picard was not.
Maybe if he could see it like that he would finally lose interest.
My eyes turned to his. A conversation, he had just said.
"I don't feel like discussing the Continuum," I said, "so why don't you see for yourself?"
He started to react, started to open his mouth to respond. I didn't wait.
I showed him the Continuum. Not a peek either — I took him there, plopped him right down into the middle of it. I had a hunch it would ruin him. At the very least it would change him, and he would need help getting back to normal afterwards.
I was tired of pulling my punches, tired of perpetually sparing him only for him to claim I was being difficult, or worse, playing games. He needed a reminder of just how simple he was.