NEW: VOY "West: Your Possible Pasts" PG-13 J, Q 2/6

[Alara Rogers]

Headers in first post.

//She is feverish, burning. She can barely breathe. The being who
tends to her is her crew, son of her mentor; that, she remembers. At
moments she recalls that he did this to her, that he brought her to
this place where everything is here and at the same moment and she can
see everywhere and she can't comprehend it, it overwhelms her, she is
omnipresent and she is attenuating, drifting apart, her mind
stretching to the breaking point and she wants it to stop and she
wants it to never stop because she wants it all, everything there is
to see, everything there is to know...

Then he makes it stop. He takes them to a planet. She is angry and
grateful. He did this to her; he made her something else. It's hard
for her to remember, physically, exactly what she used to be. Most of
her earlier memories have been discarded; they don't fit properly in
her new brain. What does fit is the cosmos. Not all of it, not at
once, not the way it was -- that almost drove her insane. But she
remembers the entire universe spread out below her, remembers being
apart from it and above it and flooded with knowledge, and she retains
much of that knowledge.

She is a god.

He gave her this. He tore her from her old life, and for that she's
still angry at him, so when she rewards him for giving her the cosmos
by fucking him, she pins him down with her dominance, using her mind
to hold him almost, but not quite, helpless. Telling him mind to
mind, as she controls his body into position, that she is going to
take him, and she will be in complete control, and he will love every
moment of it.

Everything she says comes true. He submits to her willingly. He
could have resisted; he couldn't have won, but if he'd put up a fight
she'd have let him go. She isn't a rapist. But he wants her, and he
wants her to dominate him completely, to make him do everything that
he wants to do. His mind is not made for dominance, it's made for
flight. He grasps the pattern of the universe even more than she
does; he can hold it in his mind, he can navigate it, but he cannot
control another being with the force of his will, as she can. He
doesn't want to.

They return to their realm, the realm of everything, and he takes them
where she directs. There is a blue planet that for some reason she
thought it was important to go back to, but when she gets there it's
covered with the same bipedal life she sees everywhere else and she
can't bring herself to care, can't even remember why she wanted to be
here. A hot, dry, rocky world of deserts is even less appealing.
They go farther, farther. To the dark between the galaxies. To other
galaxies, teeming with life that isn't bipedal, and she finds it
fascinating, but there will be more time for study later. She's
pregnant with a litter now, and the vastness of the universe is all
well and good but she wants a place of safety for her babies.
Besides, there are other realms, realms outside the realm of
everything, and while it may seem paradoxical to imagine that there is
something outside of everything, it's a paradox she grasps with ease.
The universe is layers upon layers, dimensions inside dimensions, and
she is ambitious. Everywhere in the universe she has come from isn't
enough for her; she wants to know what lies outside the universe. But
she needs her young to grow up first.

She orders her mate to take them to a world near the place and time
where first they became what they are, a warm wet world. There are
predators, but with the power of their minds she and her mate easily
defeat anything that threatens them. They themselves are not
predators. The rich flora of the swamp offers everything they want,
everything they need.

When the babies are born she is pleased that it's done with, but
dissatisfied somehow. Her mate is besotted with them, playing with
them endlessly. She's not sure what he sees in them. She loves them,
of course, and she feels protective of them, but... they're lumps.
They can't yet grasp the fullness of the cosmos as she can, and
they're holding her back. She can't travel the universe as long as
she has them to worry about, because they can't transit yet. And
dimly, she remembers that she never wanted offspring, that in her old
life there was some way, some technique she used, to fuck and never
get pregnant. She can't remember what it was. She also remembers that
in her old life she spent a lot of time surrounded by attractive males
and *not* fucking them. Maybe that was what she did. She regrets
having to do it again, but she doesn't want another litter; these
burden her far too much already. When they're grown, when they can
travel, maybe then she'll enjoy them. Right now, though, they are a
responsibility she dislikes.

When she senses the bipeds approach, it is a relief. They are the
beings she knew, in her old life, before her mate kidnapped her and
opened the door to everywhere. She wants a life of exploration and
adventure and discovery, not a life of looking after young. They will
help her, she thinks. They'll take her and her mate and their babies
back to... the place they used to live, the flying metal box... and
she will show them how to transit, and they will all become like her.
And then there will be beings who can watch her children for her while
she and her mate transit, and more importantly, many beings who share
her love of discovery, who will enjoy seeing the things she can show
them.

They take her and her mate away. She tells her children she and her
mate will be back for them. And then they put her in a room and
bathe her in some sort of radiation and she--//

Janeway jerked to a sitting position. She hadn't even been aware of
lying down in the first place, but the memory was even more powerful,
more overwhelming, than the last one had been, and --

"Oh, God," she whispered. Her children. The offspring she had joked
about with Paris, because she hadn't been able to remember anything at
all of what she'd been and they'd looked like salamanders or something
and she'd thought they were *animals* and when the Doctor said their
DNA was stabilized as the new form of life and there was no human
template to revert to she'd been relieved because what kind of human
could you get from turning creatures who'd been giant salamanders all
their lives into people? Would she have had mentally disabled babies,
beings who looked human but weren't sentient? Better to leave them --
but no, no, they'd *been* sentient, they'd been able to talk to her
telepathically and oh god she'd thought they were a burden she'd
wanted to rid herself of them, dump them on babysitters but not like
this, not *abandon* them.

"Computer. Where are my children?"

It would have been a ridiculous question to ask the computer aboard
*Voyager*, which wouldn't even have known she had children and
certainly couldn't have had any clue where they were, but the
"computer" here was the metaphor she used to communicate with the
Continuum as a whole to get information. And the fate of her children
would be known to the Q Continuum. That, she was sure of.

In the voice of the Starfleet computer, but with considerably more
snark, the computer said, "Oh, so you finally noticed you have some?
That took a while."

"Where *are* they now?"

"Wait a minute, I've got a message for you on this subject."

The computer voice was replaced by Q's voice. "Ah. So you finally got
to the part about your children."

"Goddamnit, Q! If you've known all along I had children, why didn't
you *tell* me?"

"Kathy, Kathy, Kathy. Why are you arguing with a recording? I can't
really hear you -- well, okay, maybe I can if I'm paying attention,
but honestly, I'm probably not. You're not talking to me, you're
talking to a message I left for you."

She took a deep breath. Okay. She was essentially talking to a
holoprogram of Q, not the entity himself, and it wouldn't be able to
answer any of the questions Q could. "Then give me the message."

"First of all, you need to talk to Q." A mental image formed of a
youngish Caucasian male human, maybe in his late 20's or early 30's,
with light brown hair, wearing a lab coat and a light summer shirt
with the slogan printed on it "I DON'T HAVE AS MANY ETERNITIES AS IT
WOULD TAKE TO EXPLAIN EXACTLY HOW DUMB YOU ARE." "He's an asshole,
even if his politics are in the right place," Q's recording continued,
"and he's going to be difficult for you to deal with, but he has the
answers to the questions you haven't thought to ask yet about the
whole thing. As for the question you're actually asking, though: they
don't want you to find them, and the Continuum will honor their
wishes. I'll tell you this: all three are alive, and relatively happy,
and not salamanders any more... well, not most of the time anyway. But
you are not going to meet them or even find out where they are until
*they* decide they want to see you."

Of course. She had promised them she would come back, and she never
had. They weren't human; the kind of being she had been, from the
memories, did not understand technology, but their psionic powers and
ability to understand pure conceptual physics was far beyond human.
They would have known she wasn't dead, but they hadn't known how to
transit, they had never been at Warp 10 themselves, and they wouldn't
have understood that she'd been turned back into a human and lost all
memory of them.

"Where is Q?" she asked the computer, meaning the one that Q's message
had directed her to.

"Out of town," the computer said, unhelpfully.

Janeway clenched her fists in frustration. So the Q that "her" Q --
her Q? Humanity's Q, maybe -- wanted her to talk to, to learn the
answers to "the questions she hadn't thought to ask" (and what the
hell was that supposed to mean?), was not currently available. And if
*Q* called him an asshole and said he was difficult, Janeway wasn't
entirely sure she even *wanted* to meet the guy. But her children
didn't want to see her, didn't want to hear her explanation, and
without talking to the other Q Janeway couldn't even begin to imagine
how she could track them down to beg their forgiveness.

She took a deep breath. Which was ironic, since she was dead and
didn't actually need to breathe -- she'd tested it, and found that she
could hold her breath indefinitely if she chose, but if she stopped
concentrating on *not* breathing she'd eventually forget and start
breathing again. "Let me know when he's back in town," Janeway said.
"I want to talk to him."

"No, you don't," the computer said. "Really."

Her eyebrows went up at that. The personification of the knowledge of
the Q Continuum was warning her off this guy? How bad did he have to
be for other Q to think he was that big of an asshole? "You're right,
I really don't, but Q says he has information I need."

"It's your life," the computer said, the way a human might have said
"It's your funeral." "You'll be notified."

"Thank you." There was no point in thanking the computers back home,
but she thought there was a reasonably good chance that the
personification of the Q Continuum's database was sentient, and it
never hurt to be polite.

She got up and left the bedroom, heading out to the living room with
the viewscreen. "Computer, show me Tom Paris."

The screen lit up. Tom was with a white-haired woman she didn't
recognize... no, wait, she did. That was Sveta, an old Maquis comrade
of Chakotay's, walking through a forest.

"I thought... he'd have come to terms with it," Tom was saying. "I
mean, the Borg attack was hard on everyone, and I know he never really
got over Admiral Janeway's death, but... he's right, isn't he? He's
not ready to come back to *Voyager*."

Sveta shook her head. "He's not the man he was once. I don't even know
who he is any more."

"I don't know if that's fair..."

"I do. The Chakotay I remember wouldn't *wallow* in his pain."

"Go back," Janeway instructed the computer. "I want to see the start
of Tom's conversation with Chakotay."

The view jumped back in time. Tom was coming up on Chakotay, who
looked like some sort of wild man, his hair long and unkempt, his
beard thick and rough. She'd never seen Chakotay look like this. It
was as if he'd given up any attempt at personal hygiene. "His life
signs are strong," Tom was saying, looking at a tricorder, failing to
notice that Chakotay was practically in front of him.

"Probably because I'm right here," Chakotay said.

Their conversation was tense. Tom reported that *Voyager* was under
new orders, big ones, and if Chakotay wanted his command back, he'd
better put his demons to bed and come back. Chakotay retorted that he
and his demons still had things to work out, but whether or not he
came back shouldn't affect Tom's decision about his own level of
participation. Sveta accused Chakotay of wallowing in his past, and
suggested that he go lay down and die if he was so eager to stop
living, and stormed off; Tom gave Chakotay a combadge, insisting that
he take it so he could come back quickly if he changed his mind, and
then left as well.

Janeway's guts twisted. She didn't want to watch this anymore. She had
hit her head against the brick wall of the Q's unwillingness to let
her send a message home ever since her death, and while she hadn't
given up, she had come to acknowledge that there would be no quick or
easy way to communicate with them. Watching Chakotay destroying
himself, in part because of what he'd been through during the Borg
invasion, but mostly because of her death, was an agony she simply
couldn't put herself through, not while she was powerless to talk to
him. "Turn it off," she told the computer, and felt guilty about doing
so, as if she *should* be putting herself through the hell of watching
Chakotay's self destruction because it was her fault for dying, or not
being persuasive enough when she tried to get the Q to help her, or
something.

She'd wanted to see what Tom was doing, because of the memories she'd
just acquired, but now she didn't want to see anything that would
remind her of what was happening to Chakotay because of her death. She
needed something to distract herself. Janeway went back to the
bedroom, where the ball of memories was still lying on the bed. Better
to learn about the past than to try to watch the present she was
locked out of.

She lay back on the bed and touched the ball to her head again.

//After Torres begins the proton burst procedure, the antimatter drain
reverses, and power levels start to come back up. And then Janeway
sees herself, a ghostly image crossing the bridge of a woman from a
war zone, looking like hell. Kim tells her there was a slight spatial
fluctuation for a moment there. She has him run scans, and goes to
check on Ensign Wildman's baby. Mother and child are healthy and
happy. But there's a duplicate of Kes, unconscious, in sickbay.

The second Kes tells her a horror story, of a hull breach on deck 15,
where Kim had discovered a spatial rift. Harry Kim, dead. New baby
Wildman, dead. The power supplies draining and not restored, while the
ship took damage from proton bursts. Janeway has Torres stop the
proton burst procedure immediately, recognizing that the damage to the
other Voyager is likely being caused by her own.

Chakotay, Kim and Torres have found evidence that there is in fact
another Voyager, a quantum duplicate somehow occupying the same space-
time they are. She remembers experimenters at Kent State demonstrating
that matter -- but not antimatter -- can be duplicated by a divergence
of subspace fields. The two ships are identical copies but are using
the same antimatter, which is somehow caught between them.

They find a way to communicate with the other ship. The other Janeway
is suspicious, but Janeway tells her enough to prove her bona fides --
the events they both just lived through, the events she knows the
other ship experienced because Kes told her, childhood memories that
neither of them had shared with anyone else. They coordinate and
attempt to merge the two ships, but that just makes matters worse.

There are no good options. She has Torres investigate the possibility
of completely dividing the two ships. But that won't work because if
they try to disrupt the antimatter supply, both ships will be
destroyed. Doing nothing will also destroy both ships. The other
Janeway has had her Torres investigate the possibility of evacuating
to her *Voyager*, and it won't work -- when she goes to the other
Voyager to discuss options with her counterpart and she brings it up,
the other Janeway tells her that Torres' research indicates that
moving more than five to ten people across the rift would destabilize
the whole thing and kill them all. The other Janeway makes a largely
pointless suggestion, mostly to get Janeway off her ship, and Janeway
realizes that the other is going to destroy her own ship. She argues
that the other Janeway should hold off—there has to be a way to save
them all. The other Janeway insists that it is her decision. Janeway
demands fifteen minutes to try to come up with an alternative, and her
counterpart agrees. She returns to her own ship.

While they are still trying to come up with a plan, they are invaded
by Viidians. They have no weapons, no shields, no way to protect
themselves, and they are quickly overrun. The Viidians march through
the ship, harvesting organs and killing her people. She realizes,
horrified, that they have no hope. But there's the other ship. If her
ship cannot survive anyway, then she'll be the one to take the step of
self-destruct. She has Harry Kim take New Baby Wildman to the other
ship, to replace the Kim and baby that the other ship lost. She sets
the self-destruct in silent mode, so the Viidians won't know what
she's planning. And when the Viidians finally reach the bridge,
moments before the destruct sequence engages, she smiles at them in
triumph and rage, and welcomes them to her bridge, to their deaths.

Self destruct initiates.//

This time she screamed as she returned to herself, caught in the
memory of being blasted apart -- something that the version of herself
who had actually died that way could only have experienced for a
fraction of a second, but she who was both dead and alive could feel
it long enough to form a scream.

And then she came fully to herself, lying on the bed, which had
changed while she was lost in the memory. Now it was the small bed
she had slept in as a very little girl, when Phoebe was still so small
she was in a crib. The bed was in fact far too small for Janeway now,
and her legs were hanging off the edge at the bottom. Irritated, she
swung herself around and sat up. She didn't sleep anymore, not since
she'd died, but if she was going to lay down on her bed and let her
consciousness become otherwise occupied, the least the bed could do
was not turn into something she couldn't fit into any longer while she
wasn't paying attention.

That one had been hard. Much worse than the last two. But Q had
warned her, after all. *"The vast majority of them end with your
death."* And she'd figured she could handle it, because hadn't she
died already? What was another death?

But the other Janeway hadn't just died. She'd taken her entire crew
with her -- except for Harry and Naomi, who'd come from that other
reality. Janeway herself had expected to be the one to do it, with her
damaged ship and some crew already dead. The other one hadn't seen it
coming, hadn't been steeling herself for the possibility already. The
sudden invasion of the Viidians had taken her by surprise.

Would she have fought back harder, if there hadn't been another crew,
another set of lives she could save by destroying her ship? Janeway
was fairly sure she would have; killing herself and the crew to take
out the Viidians would have made very little sense so early, with so
few alternate options for defeating the Viidians explored, if one of
them hadn't had to destroy themselves anyway. The other her had seen
it as pressing the reset button. So many of her crew were already
dead, overwhelmed by the Viidians. Let the ship that had lost only
Harry and Naomi survive, with the copies of Harry and Naomi that had
been on her ship. Sending more would create an imbalance, and would be
unfair, since it wasn't possible to send them all. Let there be just
one of each member of *Voyager*'s crew again.

That could have been her. It would have been her. If the Viidians
hadn't come, she would have blown herself up and the other Janeway
would have been her, and now she would be here in the Q Continuum
reviewing the memories of her counterpart, just as Janeway was now.
There was almost literally no difference between them – only the
experiences of that day. And now, the Janeway that still existed had
those memories, so now there was no difference at all.

She remembered when she'd been aboard the Federation timeship, and
they'd "integrated" her with earlier selves, putting memories from
multiple different timelines into the same person. Was that what Q was
doing now? Was his gift a way to integrate herself? She would recover
the pasts she had overwritten, and they, the other Janeways, would
exist again in her?

Abruptly she felt restless. She stood and left the room, heading for
the front door of her "house." The memory of that death was raw in
her, and she needed to do something to prove that she was still alive.
Even though technically she wasn't. But the other Janeway had ceased
to exist at the moment of death, and she had not, so this was at least
something like a life. Perhaps she couldn't sleep and she never needed
to pee and she never felt hungry and she could eat for the taste as
much as she liked without ever growing full, but she could think and
see and hear and feel. It was good enough.

The world outside her door was filled with light, despite the distinct
lack of a sun anyplace. There were no shadows; the light was bright
but indirect, coming from everywhere at once. Today the sky was an
eerie gold, a color she'd only ever seen on worlds unsuited for human
life, and her home looked like a cottage in the center of a vast
meadow, a winding path leading through exotic gardens full of plants
in hundreds of different colors that were not even mostly shades of
green, out to a "road" that was actually a conveyer belt. Janeway
blinked; this was new. A couple of Q were laying on the belt in lawn
chairs, one in a bikini and lying on her stomach as if she were trying
to get a tan on her back, the other dressed like the hero of a romance
holonovel about pirates and reading a book while drinking Romulan ale.
Janeway stepped onto the belt, and it sped up, which should have made
her stumble backwards, but didn't. Physics was sometimes optional in
the Continuum.

The belt rolled past "houses", each with a more bizarre and alien
architecture, until she reached a large open field with a lake in the
center. There were beings -- she assumed they were all Q -- sitting
around on the grass or playing some sort of sport with each other. She
spotted Junior and q, sitting on a picnic blanket. q noticed her and
waved wildly at her. "It's Janeway! Hey, kiddo, it's your aunt!
Janeway, come on over!"

Janeway stepped off the conveyer belt and headed over to the blanket
in the grass. "Hello," she said. Junior looked slightly disgruntled.
"I hope I'm not interrupting anything."

q smiled a mischievous, we're-getting-away-with-something grin. "We're
going to have *lunch*," she said, putting an emphasis on the word that
made it sound much more sordid than an actual lunch could possibly
ever be. Janeway remembered the Q predilection for public sex, and
decided to make excuses and leave.

"Well, I'm sure you'd prefer to be left alone to it, then," she said.

Junior rolled his eyes. "It's just food, Aunt Kathy. *You* eat all the
time." He opened up the picnic basket, stuck his hand in, and lifted
out what looked suspiciously like a tiny white star, which he popped
in his mouth. q put her hand to her mouth with an expression of
delighted horror, as if he'd just done something totally socially
inappropriate and she found it shocking and exciting. "No big deal,"
Junior said with his mouth full.

"I'm missing something," Janeway said. "Did you just eat a *star*?"

"Right from the galactic core," q said proudly. "Harvested just before
nova. They're *delicious* that way."

"I dunno, I like the red giants," Junior said. "They're so... fluffy."

"Yeah, but you gotta admit the pre-novas are the juiciest."

"If you like them juicy, yeah. Me, I've got all the juice I need right
here." He flexed his arm. Janeway was absolutely sure *something* was
getting lost in translation here.

"I'm going to have one," q said, conspiratorily, and plucked a sullen
yellow star out of the basket. She put it to her mouth and sucked on
it, drawing tendrils of solar flare into her mouth with an expression
of bliss. Junior watched her with the universal teenage male goggle-
eyed fixation of a boy with a crush watching the object of his desire
doing something overtly sensual.

"I really don't know what you two are actually doing, but I think the
metaphor is breaking down somewhere," Janeway said. "And I suspect I
should probably be moving on."

"No, come on, stay here! We've never had a picnic," q said. "You can
give us advice. Do we need ants?"

"I've had plenty of picnics where there were no ants," Janeway said.

Junior took something that looked like a chocolate-frosted cupcake
covered with oregano out of the basket and handed it to Janeway.
"Here, this is human food. I think. Anyway it can't kill you, so try
it, Aunt Kathy."

She looked suspiciously at the cupcake. "This isn't some sort of
stellar phenomenon, is it?"

"No, it's *dremouillin.* It's kind of like a cupcake." He grinned.
"The first time I ever used my powers I made one of these."

"Your dad used to joke about your sweet tooth," q said. "Didn't you
once pretend to be some species' god and demand that they give you
cupcakes?"

"Something like that, yeah. And then they tried to pass off these
crappy burned things, and they told me their gods had always been
happy with crappy burned things before, so I set their fields on fire
and asked them how much they liked to eat burned food."

"That was terrible!" Janeway said, appalled that Q and Lady Q had
actually let Junior do that much damage to some hapless mortals.

"Oh, relax, Aunt Kathy, I fixed it after they groveled enough. Then
they made me some really nice ones. See, I didn't have the hang of
making food that actually had a taste yet, and if I was in a body I
always liked to taste things, so I needed other people to give me
stuff like cupcakes." He held it out to her again. "Come on, try it.
I don't want us to be the only people eating here."

She took the cupcake. "Are those... real stars? They don't have
inhabited planets, do they?"

q shook her head. "They're real, but no, they don't have inhabited
planets -- nothing in the galactic core does. The radiation's too
severe." Again she grinned in illicit pleasure. "Too bad you can't try
one. They're *marvelous."* To emphasize her point, she sucked on the
star again, which apparently drew 110% of Junior's attention.

"What am I missing here? You two are acting... well, oddly."

"Nothing much." Junior laid back on the grass, sprawled out in an
elaborate pose of unconcern. "Lots of older Q think it's really
scandalous to *eat*. So, you know, maybe someone looking at us sitting
here munching on stars might be all like 'oh my, I can't believe
they're *doing* that', but you know what? I totally don't care. Let
them be all embarrassed or offended or something. I'm gonna eat if I
want to." He grabbed another star out of the basket and bit into it,
long strands of solar plasma dripping from his lips and from the
center of the remains of the star, still in his hand. It looked like
he'd just bitten into a giant ball of melted mozzarella cheese, if
mozzarella cheese looked exactly like a star.

"Didn't we see some Q having sex in public the last time you took me
out to one of these open spaces?" Janeway asked.

"Why, were you looking for something erotic?" q asked. "Because I can
recommend watching the Si'yaath in their yearly mating season, if you
want to watch something that gets most humanoids really aroused.
Deltans aren't bad to watch either, but those Si'yaath, they're like
poetry in motion. Really hot erotic poetry." She glanced at the field.
"No one here seems to be getting it on at the moment, but I'm sure if
you sit here long enough someone will... but you miss so many of the
nuances of Q relations when you're viewing it through your humanoid
metaphor, I'd really recommend watching the Si'yaath instead."

Janeway felt her face to be bright red, and wondered idly how that
even worked now that she was dead. "Uh, no, no thank you, that's not
what I meant," she said. "I was just thinking how odd it was that you
have no privacy taboos about sex, but you're uncomfortable with eating
in public."

"We're uncomfortable with eating at *all*," q said. "You're supposed
to get all your energy from the Continuum. Drawing energy from an
alternate source is... well, back in the day it just wasn't done."

Junior finished off his star, smacking his lips. "If I'm going to be
totally weird, I'm going to go all the way," he said. "I don't need to
care what a bunch of dried-up, overly evolved, stagnant old farts
think of me. I'm the wave of the future, baby."

"Sure," q said, sounding like she was trying to convince herself to be
as cavalier about it as Junior was. If Janeway remembered correctly,
q was much, much older than Junior, despite her youthful appearance;
she was the youngest of the original Q, the last to be created by the
Continuum before they gave up reproduction entirely, so only Amanda,
Junior, q-ling and the few Q who had been brought in as mortals were
younger than she was, but that still meant she was hundreds of
millions of years old. Janeway wondered if her college-woman act was
entirely a put-on or if she really did think of herself as someone
barely out of adolescence, despite being so much older than the only
adolescent Q in the Continuum. She might be desperate to reject the
beliefs she and the other Q had held for aeons, simply to prove to
herself that she was young and relevant. "And anyway, the Continuum
runs on sex, more or less. The joining of individual Q to one another,
in pairs or larger numbers, helps us remain... well, continuous."

"And that's why I think you should teach me all about it," Junior
said, trying to sound suave... Janeway thought, anyway, because he was
failing at it pretty badly, so it was hard to be sure exactly *what*
he was going for.

"Right, kiddo, because I have nothing better to do than screw around
with babies," q said, amused.

Junior looked offended. "You had sex with a mortal! He was *much*
younger than me!"

"And yet he was present when you were conceived," q said. "Which goes
to show, it's not the years, it's what you do with them. Besides, if I
had Q for *my* dad, I would not go about trying to make a thing about
other people having sex with mortals."

"This has nothing to do with my dad. I'm talking about you and me."

"There is no you and me. You're too young for me."

"I'm too young for everyone! Even my *babysitter* turns me down, and
she was only a few hundred years old when I was born!"

"Yeah, but she fought in the war. That makes her more of a grownup
than *me*."

"I totally see the Continuum staging another war just to give me a
chance to get taken seriously as an adult and get laid finally."

"Yeah, that's not happening," q agreed.

Janeway sighed. They both seemed so damn young. How could an entity
several million years old possibly seem like such a child? It had to
be an act. Although, Junior's father was pretty damn immature
sometimes too. Maybe it was a Q trait. With no adversity, nothing to
test themselves against, they simply stayed at the same maturity
levels for millions, perhaps billions of years. "I'm going home,
children. Enjoy your stars."

"Hey, you never tried my *dremouillin*," Junior complained.

"Maybe later," Janeway said, and carried it with her back to the
road... which was no longer a conveyer belt, or in fact a road at all.
There was a bank of doors with signs above them, saying things like
"Home", "Q and Queria's Place", "The University", "Someplace You're
Not Allowed To Go", "Central Database", and "The Middle Of Nowhere",
among others. She was a bit curious about "Someplace You're Not
Allowed To Go", but decided not to push her luck, not without a Q
accompanying her. What she was really interested in was "The Middle
Of Nowhere", curious as to how any part of the Continuum had earned
that designation, but again, she had no reliable transportation home
without a Q accompanying her. But she didn't simply want to head
home; she was still restless, still... well, honestly, somewhat
lonely. With the memory of death cold in her brain, reawakening
memories of her own recent death, she wanted to go somewhere that
there would be people, who would pay attention to her and not spend
all their time in such intensive flirting she was concerned they'd
actually start making out in front of her, given the complete lack of
any sense of privacy that the Q seemed to have.

And Q had claimed the Q didn't have sex. She was beginning to think
that nearly everything he'd told her about the Continuum during the
war had been, at best, half-truths.

Janeway went through the door to "Q and Queria's Place", finally. She
ended up in a nursery, walls decorated with incomprehensible
hieroglyphics in bright primary colors. Queria, a Q who manifested as
a tall human woman with curly dark hair, dark eyes and Mediterranean
skin, was sitting in a rocking chair, wearing a single-breasted gown
with a distinctly Ancient Grecian look to it, with q-ling in infant
form nursing at her exposed breast. q-ling looked like a six-month-
old, all chubby pink cuteness with a faint dusting of reddish fuzz on
her head. "Kathryn," Queria said, smiling at her. "What brings you
here?"

"I was coming back from the park, and this was one of the few options
that wasn't going home that I was confident about getting home
*from*." There was a soft plush armchair across from Queria's rocking
chair, and she sat down in it. "I was interested in some company, but
Junior and q at the park seem mostly to be interested in each other.
And in eating stars."

Queria laughed. "Oh dear. q is so hopelessly immature. Maybe
spending some time with an actual adolescent will kick-start her
growth out of arrested adolescence; Amanda was never pushy enough to
force herself on q, so Junior's the first adolescent Q she's really
had dealings with."

"Has she really been... well, a college student... for a billion
years?"

"She's only a few hundred million years old, honestly, and no, for
most of that she was decidedly *more* immature. We don't seem to grow
up unless we have to. Q, for instance, has behaved for most of his
existence as if he was barely into his twenties, if that, by human
standards." She meant the Q Janeway was most familiar with,
"humanity's Q" as some seemed to call him. "He's matured tremendously
since the war... which probably has as much to do with becoming a
political leader and having a child to raise as it does with the war
itself."

"I suppose. I've only spoken to him three times... well, on three
occasions, since the war. The time he brought Junior to *Voyager* and
demanded my advice, another incident involving Junior looking for
advice himself, and very recently."

"He finally came out of hiding?" Queria leaned forward as he rocked.
"Did he give it to you yet?"

"The 'present' he had for me? Yes. It's been... interesting, living
memories of my own that I never had."

"I'm sure it is," Queria said. "Are you done with it?"

"No, I'm sure I have quite a few of them to go. He put them in...
well, not chronological order, but I suppose the order in which the
loops closed, in my life. I've only gotten through three."

"Only three? Oh, you're missing all the best ones."

"What do you know about it?" Janeway asked, curious.

"Everything Q does. I'm a Q, remember? What one of us knows, we all
know... if we care. Which I do, of course."

"Do you all share memories, the way... well, like the way the Borg can
access memories provided by each other on assimilation?"

"Mostly, but memories are tagged by identity, whereas the Borg strip
identity markers off their shared pool of memories... and mark most of
them as irrelevant. In our case, nothing is irrelevant and the
identity of the Q who provided the memory is critical." She leaned
back. "So why stop at three?"

Janeway shrugged. "I was feeling restless. I wanted to explore a
bit, but I can't really make my way around the Continuum on my own. I
found my way to a park where I met Junior and q, but when I tried to
get back... well, there were doors, leading different places. I was
actually interested in going somewhere I haven't been before, but I
couldn't be sure of getting back."

"That's you in a nutshell, isn't it, Kathryn?" Queria said, her tone
calm and mild but with the faintest hint of a rebuke in it. "You want
to explore strange new worlds, go places no one has ever been... as
long as you can be sure you can get back home again. Not very
adventurous, for an explorer."

"I don't just explore for my personal amusement; I do it for humanity,
for all the worlds of the Federation, to increase our knowledge in
general. If I can't get home, then it doesn't really matter so much
what I've learned."

"It's not enough to learn for its own sake?"

"I'm not an island. No human is. I'm connected to all the people I
care about, all the organizations I belong to, all the
responsibilities I have." They weren't actually discussing her desire
to go through the door labeled "Middle of Nowhere" now at all, Janeway
knew. This was about Lady Q's declaration that she couldn't return to
her life, and her determination that somehow, some way, she would.

"Don't those obligations ever end?"

"Not as long as I have consciousness, and as long as I remember who I
am."

"I used to be human," Queria said. She leaned back and looked away.
"Many of us play games where we take mortal form for a time and put
aside our powers... we *can* use the powers, but it's considered
cheating, so we don't. I took it a step further. I incarnated myself
as a human infant, blocked off all my memories of who and what I was,
and arranged to be raised as a human being. If Q hadn't shown up on
my doorstep and forced me to regain my memories when I was in
Starfleet Academy, right around the time that Amanda had been born, I
might still be there, living a human life, thinking I was human."

"You ended it when you learned the truth?"

"No, I ended it when I heard about the war. I lived as a human,
knowing that I was a Q and that I would be all-powerful when I died,
for... oh, it must have been over twenty years. I stayed, because I
had friends, and family, and lovers, and responsibilities... and when
it came time, I died as a human. And all those connections broke, all
those responsibilities ended. None of those people will ever see me
again. It doesn't mean I don't love them or miss them, but I have
become something other than human, and it would be wrong of me to try
to relate to them the way I did when I was human."

"But you were coming home. Maybe you were leaving people behind, but
you were coming home to people you'd known much longer -- people you
thought of as your own."

Queria laughed. "Touché." She removed q-ling from her breast. As soon
as the baby was detached, q-ling vanished in a flash of light and
reappeared in the form of a toddler with wild red curls. "Aunt
Kathy!" The child flung herself at Janeway and hugged her leg
fiercely.

"Hello, q-ling."

"I'm going to go play now bye!" The child ran off.

"What are you really doing when it looks like you're nursing her?"
Janeway asked Queria.

"I'm afraid I don't understand the question."

"Everything I see is a metaphor. I understand that. I couldn't make
sense of what the Continuum actually looks like, so what I see is
metaphors that make it understandable to me. But sometimes the
metaphors break down, and sometimes they don't make sense. If the Q
don't eat, why did it look like you were breastfeeding q-ling?"

"Because I was. Well, not breastfeeding, technically, but an infant Q
requires a processed feed of energy from the Continuum to survive;
they can't handle linking to the Continuum and taking it directly like
we do. Q and Q figured out that they could keep a Q infant alive in
the Continuum with shields around him to keep him from dissolving into
the Continuum, but that meant he couldn't absorb energy, so they had
to feed it to him. It's similar to the way we exchange energies with
each other, but much more controlled, with a much narrower feed."

"And... Q did this, too? With Junior?"

"Absolutely."

Janeway grinned. "If I had seen him do it, what would the metaphor
have shown me?"

"Well, either you'd have seen a man breastfeeding or you'd have seen Q
in female form, whichever you were more able to accept, I suppose. We
don't actually have gender. Or sex roles in reproduction, for that
matter. At the very end of the creation process for Junior, when he
was almost fully made, Q separated from him much too early and left Q
stuck with the final steps, and Junior almost dissolved back into her
as a result, so his separation from her as an individual entity was
actually much more painful and difficult than it needed to be... but
she was never *pregnant* with him."

"Why am I not surprised that Q left Lady Q stuck with the hard part at
the end?" Janeway murmured.

"Oh, don't be so hard on Q. He has a really serious phobia of losing
his individuality in another Q; as soon as Junior was recognizably a
separate person Q started to panic, because the nature of the
connection between the parent and the child required the parent to be
completely open to the child. He held out as long as he could. It
isn't as if any of us foresaw how it would work before the two of them
got into it, and there are always mistakes with prototypes."

"Junior's not a prototype, though. He's a person."

"Yes, and I think he's turned out surprisingly well, given how little
any of us knew about what it means to rear a child. But I do think q-
ling will benefit from having parents who've learned what mistakes not
to make."

"I hear the second child is usually easier," Janeway said.
"Experience does help. But she'll be different because she's a
different person, so you'll make different mistakes with her than Q
and Lady Q did with Junior."

"True enough." Queria put her hand on Janeway's shoulder. "So. How
badly do you want to go exploring the Continuum without dragging a
chaperone with you?"

"Why?"

"You've had the critical memory. The experience you had as one of
the... well, there isn't a name for them, is there? As a hyper-
evolved amphibious sentient. With the memory of the perception of
reality, of time and space, that you had at that time, I can give you
the ability to navigate the Continuum on your own power."

"Will that... change me?"

"Every experience we have, every ability we acquire, changes us. But
it won't turn you into a salamander, if that's what you're afraid of.
You'll be able to perceive the, hmm, the *spatialness* of the
Continuum the way we do -- see where things are in relation to other
things, see the connections that will allow you to go from place to
place. It'll still be cloaked in metaphors, though, and most of your
thought process will remain exactly as it is now."

"Do you know where my children are?"

Queria stepped back. "That doesn't exactly sequit, now does it?"

Janeway took a deep breath. She liked Queria well enough, but the
entity did seem to go out of her way on occasion to use the most
pretentious vocabulary possible. "Q said there's a particular Q I need
to talk to, who's not in the Continuum at the moment. And that the
children I had when I was, um, an amphibious sentient... don't want to
talk to me."

"Well, they don't," Queria said.

"So you know where they are too."

"Everything, remember?" Queria looked away. "Before I would allow you
to play with my daughter, of course I needed to know everything
possible about the children you had, and how it is you came to abandon
them."

"I didn't... not deliberately. I thought... none of us knew that Tom
and I had become a different kind of sentient being, or that the
children were sentient. When we were reverted, we had no memories of
what we'd been. I didn't know--"

"I know. Do you think I'd have let you touch my daughter if you had
deliberately and with forethought abandoned your children?" Queria
said sharply. She moderated her tone. "I know it wasn't your fault.
To be honest, so do they. But it's not my place to forgive you for
it. It's theirs, and what they know intellectually is very different
from what they feel to be true, and they think you are probably too
alien for mutual understanding, anyway. Which might have been true
before, but now that you're in the Continuum... I'll tell them that
now you know about them, and you want to meet them. Perhaps it will
change things."

"Thank you," Janeway said.

"But it will help you to understand them, if you accept the ability to
travel within the Continuum. It will make you just a tiny bit more
like them, while still remaining yourself."

Janeway looked at her hard. "It will make me just a tiny bit more
like a Q, as well, won't it."

"Just a bit," Queria agreed. "But it's not as if you're entirely
human any more anyway. You did notice that you don't quite have
biological needs anymore, didn't you?"

"I did." Janeway sighed. Her only reason to refuse this was to cling
to her humanity. And if Queria was telling the truth, simply the fact
that she could remember being the being she had turned into would
enable her to absorb this new ability; if it entailed any loss of
humanity, taking in those memories of being a non-humanoid sentient
had already triggered the loss. "Go ahead."

Queria took her hand. Janeway didn't feel any different, but Queria
said, "It's done. Go on, see if you can go somewhere."

"There was a sign before that said 'The Middle of Nowhere'," Janeway
said. "Where does that lead to?"

"Look at your memory of the door."

And she did, and she could see behind it, trails through aether like
the paths she and Tom had transited when they had been something other
than human. Abruptly she felt a sense of *knowing*, a spatial sense
of where she was in relation to everything around her the way she knew
where everything was in her hometown in Indiana. A mental map. And
what she could visualize, in the Continuum, she could have.

She opened the door from q-ling's nursery and looked out onto a vast
expanse of desert. "The Middle of Nowhere," Queria said behind her.

"Is it dangerous?"

"No, just boring."

"I'm up for boring," Janeway said, and stepped through the door.

****