NEW: VOY "West: Your Possible Pasts" PG-13 J, Q 1/6
Alara Rogers
Author: Alara Rogers
Contact: al...@mindspring.com
Series: VOY
Rating: PG-13
Part: 1/
Characters: J, Q, Suzy-Q, Qjr, other Q
Summary: Part of "West" series. Q gives Janeway a gift containing all
of the memories from her time in the Delta Quadrant that she lost to
amnesia or temporal loops, or which belonged to an exact double.
Disclaimer: This story is set in the Pocket Books universe; it takes
place after "Before Dishonor" by Peter David, and draws on events from
"String Theory" (a trilogy by Jeffrey Lang, Kirsten Beyer and Heather
Jarman), "Star Trek: Destiny" (a trilogy by David Mack) and "Full
Circle", a novel by Kirsten Beyer. There's also a throwaway reference
to "Q-Squared" by Peter David, although most of that novel was jossed
by Voyager canon, and another to the events of the Excalibur series by
Peter David, and specifically to the concept behind the short story
"Q'uandary" by Terri Osborne in "No Limits", the Excalibur anthology,
although I do not consider the exact details of that short story
binding on my fictional universe. Bookverse stories or novels that I
have not specifically mentioned may or may not be "canon" for this
universe; since books contradict each other and get jossed by canon, I
pick and choose what parts of the bookverse to treat as "canon". Of
course, as always, this story is based on "Star Trek: Voyager", which
is owned by Paramount Pictures. All characters are created by
Paramount, except q, created by Heather Jarman, and Queria, q-ling and
the asshole Q, all created by me.
Author's Notes: Written for the Star Trek Big Bang on Livejournal.
This is part of my series "West", stories exploring Janeway's fate
after what happened to her in the bookverse. It's actually envisioned
as the second story; Strange New Worlds is currently the first,
although it's a placeholder and I intend to expand it. Also, while it
probably goes without saying I feel the need to say it: I'm very
grateful to my beta, Rocky, for her assistance with this work, but any
mistakes are my own and anything you don't like about the story is my
fault. :-)
Warnings, spoilers, pairings: This is not a pairing-fic, but it's not
entirely gen either; there are background and/or flashback pairings of
Janeway/Chakotay, Janeway/Paris, Janeway/Q, Picard/Q, Janeway/Picard,
Q/"Lady Q", "Lady Q"/original female Q, Harry Kim/q (young female Q
created by Heather Jarman in "String Theory"), and Q Jr unsuccessfully
hitting on q. There is non-explicit het sex in flashbacks, including
sex between giant sentient salamanders. There is also canonical
character death, multiple times. Consider all the books named in my
disclaimer to be spoilered except "Full Circle" and "Q'uandrary".
****
they flutter behind you, your possible pasts
some bright-eyed and crazy, some frightened and lost
a warning to anyone still in command
of their possible future, to take care...
--Pink Floyd, "Your Possible
Pasts"
Being dead wasn't boring, Janeway had found, but it was frustrating
and lonely.
She didn't know precisely how long it had been since she'd died --
assimilated by the Borg, made into their Queen, and restored to
herself with Seven's help for just long enough to help Seven destroy
the cube she was on, resulting in her physical death. A Q -- not the
one Janeway and humanity in general were most familiar with, but the
one who'd presented herself as that one's jealous lover, the first
time Janeway had met her -- had warned her, in a maddeningly vague
way, against going to the Borg cube to study it after Picard and his
crew had killed the previous Queen. Of course Janeway hadn't followed
the warning -- there had been no details beyond "you'll die if you go
there", and quite aside from the ethics of taking warnings from semi-
omnipotent aliens in the first place, she hadn't trusted the Q, who
she'd referred to in her own mind as Lady Q to distinguish her from
her more famous companion. And when she'd been assimilated, Lady Q had
shown up to say "I told you so", and when she'd died, Lady Q had
appeared to her and offered her... something. An extension of
existence, a new form of life. She had explicitly *not* offered
Janeway resurrection, but implied that Janeway had some sort of great
destiny ahead of her as something new, and said that she couldn't
restore Janeway's human life because destiny didn't move backward, and
mortals don't return from the dead.
Janeway had pointed out that the famous Ambassador Spock had managed
to return from the dead. Lady Q had dismissed the idea.
But any kind of existence was better than nothingness, and where there
was life, or unlife, or whatever this was, there was hope. So Janeway
had taken her up on it, and had ended up in the Q Continuum, viewing
it through the lens of metaphor as she had the last few times she'd
been here. The metaphor for "ordinary existence" in the Continuum
turned out to be surprisingly mundane. She had a house, though it
varied as to whether the house was her quarters on Voyager or her
apartment at Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco or her mother's
house in Indiana, where she'd grown up. When she traveled the
Continuum with Lady Q or her son, who'd proven very eager to show his
Aunt Kathy around his home, the spaces between "houses" looked like
21st century California freeways or cobblestoned Main Streets or
winding country roads past stately manors or busy city thoroughfares,
and there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to exactly what
representation she was going to see at any given time. The bottomless
cups of coffee Lady Q had promised her before she'd come here were
available from her house's "replicator", as was any other foodstuff
she could think of, but she never felt hungry or thirsty or sleepy,
and she never felt full or jittery or over-caffeinated; she could eat
or drink anything she wanted, for the taste, and never fill up on it,
but she never *needed* food or drink. And she didn't need to shower or
use sanitary facilities of any kind. And she didn't need, and hadn't
been able, to sleep.
As an alien world to explore, the Continuum was fascinating, and she
had enjoyed traveling around it and meeting various other Q. She'd met
Lady Q's new mate, a Q who had apparently had dealings of her own with
humanity and had asked to be called Queria, and their new baby, an
energetic little girl who alternately manifested as an infant and a
toddler, and she'd ended up playing with the baby – who she called q-
ling -- because her parents were turning a blind eye toward the child
doing things like kidnapping hapless Romulan Commanders to be her
"dolly", and it was obvious someone had to teach the poor thing how to
respect mortals, because her parents clearly weren't going to. She'd
met a Q who referred to herself with a lowercase, as q, who seemed to
be some sort of perpetual college student and had had mysterious
dealings with Tom Paris and Harry Kim that they'd never told Janeway
about. She'd met Amanda Rogers, the Q who had been born in human form.
And there had been several others she'd been introduced to as well.
The one being she hadn't seen that she had expected to see was Q,
himself. Since she came to the Continuum, he had apparently been
refusing to answer anyone's attempts to communicate with him. The
other Q didn't appear to think this was anything unusual, but she was
surprised at how... *rejected* she felt about it. Lady Q had claimed
her primary motive for saving Janeway's life had been Q's interest in
her, and yet, Q hadn't even shown up to say hello. Not that she
particularly *wanted* to deal with the annoying entity, but she was
here on his home turf now; the least he could have done was to
acknowledge her presence.
Most of the time, the Q left her to her own devices, in her lonely
"home". At first, she'd used the resources of the Continuum to look in
on the people she'd left behind. She'd seen Chakotay's devastation
when she hadn't made it to their anniversary rendezvous, and Mark had
come in her place and told him the news. She'd seen her mother crumple
up in her grief, seen her sister weep, seen B'Elanna howl for her.
She'd seen Tom and Harry and Tuvok and the Doctor all grieve for her
in their separate ways, and Seven retreat into her shell, colder and
more inhuman than ever now that the person who had given her back her
humanity had died at what Seven believed was Seven's own hand. And she
couldn't communicate with any of them.
It made her want to scream, want to beat her head, or preferably Lady
Q's, against the wall. She was alive, at least in some sense, but she
had no way to tell any of the people she loved. And she had seen the
Borg preparing to mass against the Federation in a wave of genocidal
fury, and she couldn't warn them... and hadn't known what she'd tell
them if she could, because she hadn't honestly known what they could
do to stop the Borg. The trick that she and Seven had used would take
out one cube, at best, if the Borg hadn't already adapted to it, which
they probably had.
In the end, she watched as the Federation defeated the Borg by sheer
luck, making contact with the beings who had accidentally created the
Borg and persuading them to help -- which had resulted in the Borg
being absorbed into a gestalt with pacifistic highly advanced aliens
who had come much closer to the Borg ideal of perfection than the Borg
themselves had managed thus far, the individual drones freed of
mindless conformity and allowed to return to their separate
identities, but still part of a communal whole. After that Janeway had
stopped watching her world so much. The sense of urgency she felt, the
desparate need to see how the conflict with the Borg turned out, had
been fulfilled... and now all there was to do was to see how her loved
ones reacted to her loss, and how they lived on without her, and it
was just too damn depressing and isolating. So now she spent her time
exploring the universe from the safety of her living room, using the
resources of the Continuum -- which manifested to her as a computer
she could query, just like the ones at home except with vastly more
knowledge available in its databanks, and rather more of a personality
-- to see and learn about places that no human had never been.
Right now, she was studying one of the Milky Way's distant neighbor
galaxies, the Greater Magellanic Cloud.
There were no humanoids anywhere in the Greater Magellanic Cloud.
Janeway had always known that the prevalence of humanoids in the Milky
Way galaxy was largely an artifact of some species that had seeded the
worlds with life like themselves, or perhaps with some sort of genomic
template to guide evolution to create life like themselves, but it was
amazing to actually *see* what a galaxy without that seeding looked
like. The types of life in the Greater Magellanic Cloud were far more
varied than what she was used to in the Milky Way -- there were
methane-breathing bags of gas and plasmoid sun-dwellers and more
creatures of crystal or silicon than she had imagined could exist. As
she surveyed world after world of incomprehensibly alien life on the
viewscreen in her living room, with text annotations that provided
additional information popping in and out all over the images as she
thought questions about what she was seeing, Janeway's heart hurt with
a bittersweet mixture of joy and pain. Here she was with access to
probably the universe's most comprehensive database of everything,
able to explore strange new worlds and learn anything she had the time
and desire to find out from the comfort of her living room... and she
had no one to share it with and no way to visit any of those worlds in
person.
She was imprisoned in a scientist's paradise, but it was still a
prison. So far none of her attempts to send a message home, or
persuade a Q to do it for her, had worked -- most of the ones she'd
met had been friendly enough, but they'd all been quite clear on the
concept that she was dead in her home universe, and not permitted to
transmit information out of the Q Continuum, or leave it. But she
hadn't given up hope yet. Somehow, someday, she'd find a way to let
her loved ones know that she still existed, or find a way to return to
them.
The chime of an incoming call, sounding exactly like a door chime on
Voyager, rang out. Startled, Janeway looked away from the giant
viewscreen in front of her. "Who--?"
"Hey, Kathy, I know you're in there. Come on over, I've got a present
for you."
Janeway was on her feet in an instant. "Q!" She had half expected
him to teleport into her living room, but no, that was only his voice,
on what her mind insisted on perceiving as a Starfleet-like comm
system even though she was well aware that it was probably a
telepathic transmission or something. "Where have you been? I've
been trying to contact you for--" The habit of trying to count time in
units like weeks and days hadn't died in her yet, even though there
was no way whatsoever to mark time in the Continuum. "--ever since I
got here. All I or any of your friends have been able to get is your
answering message."
"Yeah, I know. I'm done with my project. So why don't you come
over? I'll show it to you."
Why, exactly, had she wanted to see him anyway? "Perhaps you'd
forgotten this, but I'm human, Q. I can't make my way around the
Continuum without help." It wasn't that she couldn't leave, it was
that she couldn't find her way around. The Continuum looked different
every time she saw it, and she couldn't form a mental map of the place
because the places she wanted to go seemed to change their spatial
relation to each other at random, as if they moved around within the
Continuum.
"Oh, just go out your side door. You'll get here."
"You can't come to me?"
"I could, but I come to you all the time. You've never come to *my*
place. So here you are in the Continuum, so the least you could do is
come visit me now that you can. Don't put all the social obligation
on me."
She wanted to wring his neck, but that was hardly a new feeling when
dealing with Q, and it wasn't as if she had enough friends in the
Continuum that she could alienate what could very likely be her most
powerful champion simply because he was an annoying asshole. Most of
the Q ignored her completely; the handful that were willing to talk to
her were nice enough -- well, except for Lady Q, who seemed to take
pride in her own insufferable arrogance -- but only Junior acted as if
she was anything more than a mildly amusing guest to be polite to for
a time, and Junior was a child and had no influence on the rest of the
Q. Oh, and q-ling doted on her, but q-ling was a baby and had even
less influence than her older half brother. She hadn't seen Q since
she'd come to the Continuum, a fact she'd found deeply unnerving given
that, next to his son, he was the Q she knew best, and in theory Lady
Q had brought her here because of his interest in her, which made it
almost frightening that he'd been holed up someplace refusing to see
her. The only thing that had made her feel better about it was the
fact that apparently he'd been refusing to see everyone. If he wanted
to see her *now*, well, she was still afraid she might need him here.
So she sighed, and said, "Fine, I'll go out my side door. How will I
find you after that?"
"I think you'll find it surprisingly obvious."
So she went out of the living room, which looked like her ready room
on Voyager except with a large viewscreen, the size of the one on the
bridge, and her mother's comfy old sofa in front of it, and over to
the kitchen, which was an exact replica of the tiny kitchen from her
apartment in San Francisco, except that it had a side door which
looked just like the side door from her mother's house in Indiana.
Today. Tomorrow it might all look different. If "tomorrow" even made
sense in a place where she never slept and there was no day or night.
Janeway opened the side door and stepped through it.
Usually when she went through any of the doors she ended up in a place
that was, at least, recognizably outdoors. A small-town main street,
a quiet suburban boulevard, a jungle wilderness, a farm, a back yard,
a snowy hill, something like that. This time, she ended up in what
looked like a brightly lit machine shop, with all sorts of equipment
she had no hope of recognizing. She passed a table that had what
looked like a terrarium on it, with a rolling green field punctuated
by jagged tall rocks on which roamed particularly vicious-looking
miniature doglike animals, the size of tiny children's toys, and a
handful of golden-skinned aliens the size of her thumb trying to fight
off the creatures with glowing crystalline weapons. On another table
there was a bin with bits of glowing string tossed in it. She reached
out for one of them.
"Ah-ah, don't touch," Q said, smacking her hand away as if she were a
toddler.
He hadn't been behind her a moment ago. Janeway turned to face him.
"What are they?"
"Strings."
"Yes, I can see that, but--"
"No, you don't get it. They're *strings*."
"Oh." She nodded in sudden comprehension. "As in, string theory?"
"Exactly."
"Why are the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy lying
around in a box on a table in..." she looked around. "What is this
place, anyway?"
"It's my workroom, and I keep 'em around because you never know when
they'll come in handy."
That was remarkably uninformative, but she really didn't expect much
better from Q. "You said you had something to show me? An
explanation for why you've been practically hiding ever since I got to
the Continuum?"
"I'm touched you were actually looking for me. Miss me, Kathy?"
Janeway refused to rise to the bait. "I'm here in your home
dimension, presumably at your behest, and yet you didn't seem to have
any interest in helping me settle in. If you were completely
uninterested in me, why would you have had Lady Q save me?"
"Does she know you call her that?"
"Who? Lady Q?"
Q snickered. "I assure you, dear captain... or it's admiral now,
isn't it? Q is *not* by any stretch of the imagination a lady."
"I have to call her something. Everyone here is named Q. It's
hopelessly confusing if I don't give *some* of you different names."
"And yet you have no problem knowing nineteen separate humans named
Thomas."
"I only know two of them well, and they have last names if I need to
distinguish them. I can't very well be calling you folks Q Smith and
Q Jones."
Q laughed. "No, I admit that would be utterly ridiculous. But do me
a favor, don't call her Lady Q to her face. I'll never hear the end
of it if you do."
They approached the center of the workroom, where there were multiple
computer workstations, and a small blue planet hanging in mid-air
above one of them. "Why am I seeing computer workstations in here,
Q? What could you possibly be doing that would translate into a
metaphor of workstations?"
"Running simulations. I have six different model universes going.
Don't bang your head on Sevorin Nine."
Janeway looked at the planet. "Is that really a planet, or just a
representation of one?"
"It's really a planet. Don't touch it."
"I'm surprised that the ninth planet in a solar system could possibly
look so much like Earth."
"Binary system."
"Or it was, until you removed it from its solar system and brought it
to the Continuum?"
"Oh, it's still there. But it's also still here. I'm not done making
the thing yet. There are explorers heading toward the Sevorin system
to try to colonize it, and I want to have a really nifty surprise for
them."
"Rather like the surprise you have back in that terrarium?" She
motioned behind them.
"Oh, *those* guys. The ones fighting the giant caninoids?"
"Yes. Those."
"Yeah, maybe someday they'll figure out that treating every alien
species as if it were an animal, and exterminating all the animal
species they encounter, is not such a good idea. The caninoids
haven't got opposable thumbs, but aside from not being tool users
they're very smart. Well, for mortals, anyway. The Methidar could
have gotten a lot farther if they'd tried to play nice with the
caninoids, but if they'd done that I guess they wouldn't be Methidar."
"I suppose it's too much to ask that you don't transport sentient
beings into terrariums in your workroom to be devoured by sentient
wild dogs because they don't understand how to make friends with other
species."
"You're right, it's absolutely too much to ask. I don't criticize
*your* hobbies. And since yours have a distressing tendency to kill
you, I think I have a lot more room to talk than you do." He walked
around the computers and picked up a glowing ball from a table.
"Here."
"Here? Here what?"
"Here it is. It's taken me quite some time to put this together for
you, so I hope you appreciate it. I don't usually put a lot of work
into making people presents, you know."
"Why would you make me a present?"
Q shrugged. "Perhaps I feel guilty about my role in your death."
"You didn't have a role in my death. You weren't there."
"Exactly!" Q said. "I told Q, I wasn't going to get involved. I
wasn't going to watch, I wasn't going to try to persuade you, I wasn't
going to fruitlessly entangle myself with your impending demise. I'm
done with trying to talk Kathryn Janeways out of rushing headlong into
oblivion. And, of course, she went to do it instead for some
incomprehensible reason, and you refused to listen to her, and you
died. And I can't help but think, if I'd been there, maybe I could
have gotten through to you. You had no good reason to trust *her*,
but maybe you'd actually have listened to me. ...Of course I know
better, but I can't quite overcome feeling just a bit remorseful over
the fact that I refused to get involved at all and now you're dead."
"I thought Lady Q had come to get me because you wanted me here,"
Janeway said carefully.
"I'm omnipotent, Kathy. Why would I need to work through a proxy? If
I wanted to get you, I'd have gotten you myself. What made you think
Q was doing it for my benefit, anyhow?"
"She said... that she didn't care what happened to me, but that you
did, and that meant that she had to care."
Q snorted. "Thus implying that *she* cares what *I* care about.
Which would contradict oh, pretty much everything she's said to *me*
for the last five thousand years, but who's counting?"
She thought of what Lady Q had said. *"What Q says and what Q feels
are two entirely different things, and you never heard me say that."*
It had sounded much less antagonistic, much more loving than the
relationship Q had painted when he'd brought Junior to *Voyager* as a
teen. Even when Lady Q had revealed that she had a baby with another
Q, she had still made it sound as if she genuinely cared about Q. Now
Janeway was completely confused. "I take it the two of you are not in
fact together," she said dryly.
"What was your first clue?"
"The fact that she'd had a baby with a different Q was a bit of a
tipoff."
Q rolled his eyes. "Oh, that doesn't mean anything. Queria's been
jonesing for a baby for millennia; I'm not surprised she wanted to
have the second one ever, and I'm not surprised she asked a Q with
experience to co-parent, and *I* most certainly was not going to do
it. No, it's really got much more to do with her viciousness when she
told Junior that she was disowning him and disavowing both of us
because I'd ruined him." He shook his head. "Why are we talking
about her anyway? This isn't a present for *her*." Q held it out to
her. "Don't you want to open it?"
There were images in the ball, shifting constantly. She saw Harry Kim
with graying hair, *Voyager* badly damaged and in disarray, aliens she
had never met, Chakotay weeping over Seven's blackened body,
B'Elanna's body lying in sickbay, the Borg Queen... "What is it?" she
asked.
"Your possible pasts," Q said, his tone uncharacteristically somber.
"My... possible pasts? What does that mean?"
"You're familiar with quantum realities, of course."
It wasn't a question. "Of course," she said. "Every time we make a
choice, it's supposed to create an alternate timeline, a branch in
quantum reality."
"Right," Q said. "But, of course, there's another way to make an
alternate timeline. And you, personally, did it many, many times
while you were in the Delta Quadrant."
"An *alternate* timeline? I know of ways to *change* the timeline..."
"No, you don't. You know of a way to create an alternate timeline;
you just *think* it changes the timeline. Pretty much every time
you've traveled in time, it hasn't actually changed the timeline you
originated from; it just spins off a new timeline, but since you
remain in the new one and can never return to the old one, you never
know."
"That makes no sense. If that were true, every time someone travels
in time they'd disappear, forever."
"You'd prefer to believe that reality is constantly shifting around
you and you have no control over it? Because if *you've* been
involved in as many temporal incursions as you have, imagine how many
occur all over Starfleet. Now multiply that by every sentient race in
the galaxy."
"So it's not possible to change the past? All you can do is create a
new timeline?"
"Pretty much, yes. There are ways to do it, but not the way you do,
blundering helplessly through time like blind infants crawling in a
field of broken glass and landmines. You have to know what you're
doing and you have to have a precise level of control over time
itself. So every time you, or any member of your crew, has gone back
in time to try to change things, all you've done is to spin off a new
timeline. There *might *have been one or two exceptions here and
there, but for the most part, it's all you're capable of."
"And the alternate admiral Janeway? The one from the future?"
Janeway asked. "Was she one of the exceptions?" Q shook his head.
"So it was all for nothing, then. She came back, warned us, and died
to change the past... but that time still exists. She didn't change
anything." She was surprised at how depressing that thought was.
"She knew that before she left," Q said.
Startled, Janeway looked up at him. "She did?"
Q looked out into the open space of his workroom, his expression oddly
melancholy. "I told her myself. With words of one syllable. And
pretty pictures. I'm quite certain she got the concept." He turned
back to Janeway. "Really, Kathy, did you honestly believe you were
selfish enough to wipe out twenty-six years of history, erase children
who would thus never be born, just to get home *faster?* I know your
little trained minions were willing to wipe out fifteen years to save
you, but that was to save your entire ship and they'd all had pretty
miserable lives, aside from Chakotay's finally getting a girlfriend.
And that was a Maquis and Mr. Hey, Reality's Not Stable Anyway Kim.
But you! You're such a stickler for the rules. Did you really think
you'd break the Temporal Prime Directive, erase Samantha Wildman's
little granddaughter and every other child conceived in those twenty-
six years, just because Chakotay was miserable before he died, Tuvok
became demented and Seven died?"
"Then why did she *do* it? Why sacrifice herself to simply create a
new timeline, when she couldn't actually affect any of her own past?"
Q's expression grew dark. "She had her reasons," he said sourly.
More brightly he added, "And you can find out what they were, if you
want. All you have to do is take my gift."
"Is that... the other Admiral Janeway's memories?" A girl who had to
be Miral Paris, except she was six or seven, was showing off a crayon
drawing of a stick figure with a red shirt, black pants and crayon-red
hair.
"Some of them are, yes." Q stood in front of her, looking intently
down into her eyes. "These are all your possible pasts, Kathy. Your
career in the Delta Quadrant was marked by a virtually endless series
of temporal loops, repeated incursions, quantum duplications, near-
exact copies, and all sorts of other events that created iterations of
you who collected memories that you did not inherit. Remember the
time you and Paris were investigating a planet that blew itself up,
and you found yourself transported back a day before the destruction
and managed to stop the disaster?"
Janeway frowned. "No."
"Of course you don't! Because in your timeline it never happened.
You changed it. How about the time you fought the Krenim maniac with
the timeship?"
"No..."
"Exactly. Then there was the time you blew up your ship to prevent
being captured by the Viidians and allow your other ship to get away.
You remember *that*, right?"
"I remember that we had decided her ship would be the one to survive,
because it was in much better shape... and then the Viidians invaded
her ship, but couldn't detect ours. So she sent us Harry and Naomi,
to replace the ones we'd lost, and self-destructed her *Voyager*."
"She's in here. How about the bio-mimetic copy of you who died trying
to make her way back to Earth?"
"I don't know anything about that."
"Well, now you can. Every copy of you, every temporal iteration,
every you who got her fool self killed doing something anyone with
common sense would have known better than to do because you were so
damn obsessed with getting home... you can experience all of their
memories. They won't feel like your own, of course. They'll seem
like... hmm... extremely realistic dreams, perhaps. Things that
happened to you, that you can remember happening to you, but you'll be
able to feel that they didn't actually affect the course of your
life. You won't get confused and start thinking that Tuvok's going
senile or something; the memories of your own timeline will still be
marked to you as more important, more relevant as the Borg would say.
But you'll know all the things that could have happened to you except
that you or someone else traveled in time to stop them... or, viewed
from another perspective, you'll know everything you did where you
lost the memories because you changed the timestream."
"They don't sound like pleasant memories."
"They aren't. You die in the vast majority of them."
"I die in my own, real memories, too."
"Well, then you're used to it."
She looked up at him. "This is a gift? No strings attached? I'm not
going to come back later and find out this was some sort of horrible
test and I failed because I trusted you to actually give me a present
and it was some kind of trap instead?"
He smiled wryly. "I don't test you, Kathy. Picard's the Exemplar of
Humanity and I don't test humanity anymore anyway. It's exactly what
I said it is. Your memories, for good and for ill. And if you regret
taking them, I can always take them back."
"Then I accept." She reached out, and he placed the ball in her
hands. She looked down into it, watching from the perspective of her
own eyes as Tom Paris, and presumably she, had dealings with some
alien race she didn't recognize. "Thank you, Q. How does it work?"
"Put your face against it, and the memories will melt into you. Then
you'll be able to remember them at your leisure. They might jump
around a bit at first, but you'll get the hang of it."
Janeway looked into the ball. "How long are they? I know the
admiral's memories must cover 26 years, but do any of the other sets
have so much?"
"No, that's the longest one. Most of the others are no longer than a
year or two, some of them merely a day or a few hours."
"Then can you separate out that set of memories? I want them --
eventually -- but twenty-six years is more than half my life. That's
a lot to absorb at once."
"Tell you what." Q took back the ball and started fiddling with it,
poking something that looked like a screwdriver deep into it. "I'm
fixing it so that each time you touch it to your head, you'll get a
different set of memories, in what passes for sequential order when
you're talking about time loops. So the first one will be the first
temporal event you encountered in the Delta Quadrant, and so on, until
you get to the last, and that will be Admiral Janeway... well, the
other Admiral Janeway."
"That sounds good. Thanks." She took the ball back from him. It was
warm, and a little bit tingly. "Have you really been working on this
the whole time since I came to the Continuum?"
"Well, you have to understand that from *my* perspective, with all the
alternate timelines *I* can access, it's difficult to tell the
difference between a timeline you created by making a different choice
and a timeline someone created with a temporal incursion. So yes, it
took me quite a bit of effort to isolate these, specifically. These
are only the ones that loop back into the timeline you exist in -- or
in the case of the duplicates, the ones that happened in your
timeline."
She was at a loss for words. "...Thank you." Q had attempted to give
her presents before -- bribes like returning to Earth, flowers,
puppies -- and had once allowed Junior to give her information that
would shave time off her journey. But he'd never come up with
anything this thoughtful before, or anything that seemed like it had
cost him any effort at all. It made her nervous, and she thought of
pointing out that this did not establish any sort of romantic
relationship between them, but by now she knew enough other Q that if
he got any inappropriate ideas, she could go to one of his friends and
family to intercede on her behalf. "This is very kind of you."
"You're welcome," he said. "Door's that way."
"What, you're not going to walk me to the door?"
The moment the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. There
were people she could be teasing, almost flirtatious with, but Q
wasn't one of them -- or at least hadn't been in the past. When he'd
come to her for help with Junior, he'd shown no sign of romantic
interest in her at all, to the point where he'd teleported into her
bathtub while she was bathing, naked, and had shown every sign of not
even noticing her nudity. In fact, as much of a relief as it had been
that he hadn't taken the opportunity to hit on her, she'd also found
it oddly disappointing, almost unintentionally insulting, that he had
acted as if she were asexual, although she'd pointed out to herself
that really it was more that he was acting like *he* was asexual,
which he probably was. How compatible could a species that reproduced
by touching their fingertips together actually be with humans? Maybe
Q had only had sexual desires until he had offspring. Or maybe he'd
never had them at all and he'd been faking it because he'd wanted a
child and thought he had to be with a human to get one. He'd
certainly never really seemed all that interested in her, despite the
things he'd said. Humans who were aroused had dilated pupils, faster
heartbeats, sweatier palms -- all things that Q's human form hadn't
had on the occasions when he'd tried to seduce her.
"If you're going to play helpless Southern belle, I'm going to put you
back in that dress I had you wearing during the war," Q said, amused.
"I'm not a Southern belle. I'm a Hoosier. We fought for the Union,
you know."
"Of course I know. Why would I have cast myself as Union if you'd
really been a Southerner? Realistically, we were the rebels. Though
we were fighting for freedom, not the right to enslave others."
"Why didn't you pick the Revolutionary War, then?"
Q shrugged. "I liked the costumes better. Come on, I've got stuff to
do. I'll walk you back to your home." He headed back through the
workroom, and she followed.
"I appreciate it. There don't appear to be any stable landmarks I can
recognize in the Continuum."
"You'll get the hang of it. Oh, hey, would you look at that?" He was
looking into the terrarium. Janeway followed his gaze, and saw two
golden-skinned aliens sitting around a campfire with half a dozen
caninoids, all of them tearing meat from the bones of something she
hoped hadn't been sentient.
"Did they make friends?" she asked.
"Two of them did, in the end. The rest, sadly, are deceased. I'll
let them integrate a bit more, experience more of caninoid society,
and then I'll send them back home to make their report and we'll see
how it goes from there."
"Why do the humanoids have a name for their species and the caninoids
don't?"
"Because you couldn't pronounce--" and here he made a sound that
sounded exactly like a cheerful bark, with a tiny bit of growl mixed
in at the end of it.
"Oh."
"Cheer up, the caninoids can't say the word 'human' either. Here's
the door. Your house is back on the other side of it."
"Thanks," Janeway said. "Are you going to disappear again, or will I
be seeing you around?"
Q shrugged. "I'm a busy guy. But I'm sure we'll run into each other
sooner or later."
She didn't know quite what to make of Q's nonchalance, given how
emphatic he'd been about interfering with her life in the past. But
then, in the past, Q had only come to her when he wanted to see her.
Maybe he was actually a largely antisocial entity who only bothered to
come interact with mortals on the rare occasions when he felt the need
for some companionship... okay, that probably wasn't true, but it
certainly did change the power dynamics between them somewhat that she
could come to where *he* lived rather than vice versa. Besides, maybe
he actually was busy. She had ample evidence from the time she'd
already spent in the Continuum that he did have a life outside of
tormenting humans... though judging from his workroom, at least some
of that life seemed to involve tormenting species that weren't human.
Janeway went through the door with a last nod at Q, and found herself
in her living room this time, although the side door had been in the
kitchen when she'd gone through it. The couch had also morphed from
Gretchen Janeway's threadbare old thing from her childhood to a plush,
soft, enormous semi-circular sofa that could have fit the entire
command crew of *Voyager* sitting around it, facing the viewscreen.
The giant sofa made her feel acutely lonely -- she had no one to sit
on that giant sofa with her. Even when other Q came to visit, they
took her out of here to go on trips; they never stayed in her home
with her.
Instead of sitting down on the inappropriately large sofa, Janeway
went to her bedroom, where her equally inappropriately large bed was
at least no lonelier than her bed had been for the past nine years or
so. She wasn't tired -- she was never tired anymore -- but she felt
an instinctive need for the additional privacy of a bedroom before she
undertook this, even though it wasn't as if there was anyone else in
the house who could walk in on her. She wished her boots off --
whenever she wasn't paying attention her clothing turned into a
replica of the Starfleet uniform she'd worn as captain of *Voyager*
for seven years, but she could remove or alter any part of her clothes
just by thinking about it hard enough -- and sat down on the bed,
cradling the ball in her hands.
Time to learn the things she'd forgotten in the shifts of time.
Janeway pressed the ball to her head.
//The shockwave alerts her that something has happened. Voyager
investigates, and finds that an entire planet has just wiped itself
out with a dangerous form of energy. They're out in the middle of
nowhere, in a region they know nothing of, and even if their original
charter hadn't been exploration, knowledge is power and power is
safety; she needs to know if this is a threat to Voyager, so she takes
an away team and goes to the planet's surface. Paris reports seeing
people alive for a moment, and Tuvok reports that subspace has
fractured; Paris just nearly fell through a hole in time. Janeway
orders transport, but she and Paris both fall through time themselves,
landing a day before the disaster.
Fortunately the people look more or less human, and the only one who
sees them appear out of nowhere is a little boy. They use their first
contact training to get by, but end up getting swept up in a protest
against polaric energy, the dangerous energy form that will destroy
the planet tomorrow, and then they're taken captive by the protestors,
who believe them to be spies. When Janeway sees evidence that possibly
these protestors might be accidentally responsible for causing the
disaster, she makes a decision -- influenced, she has to admit, by the
presence of the little boy who fancies himself an intrepid
investigative reporter, who's been following them around and checking
their stories for holes, the little boy who will be wiped out in an
instant along with everyone else on this planet -- to try to stop the
disaster. There's a very good chance that it's the presence of Paris
and herself here that will cause the disaster; the protestors who are
planning something or other have moved up their timetable in response
to the unknown that Janeway and Paris present. Originally they'd
planned to do whatever they're going to do in a week. If there's any
chance that she and Paris *caused* this by their presence, they have
to do what they can to stop it.
The protestors end up shooting their way into the plant because she
won't help them, and Paris takes a bullet to save the little boy. At
his insistence, she leaves him behind, and goes after them with a
weapon, to force them to stop. Her crew have been intermittently
contacting her through the fractures; perhaps she should have expected
them to try to launch a rescue right before the detonation point. The
subspace fracture widens, becomes visible, and she realizes that
*Voyager* is trying to open a fracture in subspace large enough to
pull her and Paris through... and, with horror, she realizes she was
right. It's the rescue attempt that will cause the disaster. The
subspace fracture is going to cut through the polaric energy conduit
and this entire world's death will be on her hands.
She grabs her phaser from the bag one of the protestors is holding and
fires into the widening subspace fracture, knowing that the energies
her phaser produces will counteract the energies *Voyager* is
generating, blocking the opening of the subspace rift. It closes and
--//
Janeway blinked and looked around herself. That was... a trifle
disorienting. The clock said it had been less than a minute... which
meant nothing, because clocks in the Continuum weren't reliable, but
some inventor friend of Q's had made her the clock and told her that
while it was in her home, it would more or less keep accurate time to
what she expected. Except that it ran 12 hours, not 24 -- literally;
it didn't even use AM/PM. Apparently the inventor hadn't thought she
needed more than 12 hours in a "day", since she no longer slept and no
one else in the Continuum paid any attention to time at all. Still.
It felt like she'd lived an entire day in a moment... but Q was
right. It was dreamlike. The memories were rigorously logical,
unlike the bizarre nature of dreams; they felt like something that
*could* have happened, but not exactly like something that actually
had.
If Q was right, and it was impossible to literally create a new
timeline, then what had happened to her and to Tom Paris? The
memories stopped at the exact moment she had done what she'd believed
would wipe out that timeline. If it hadn't, then the planet would
have still been destroyed. But it hadn't been. She remembered that
planet, remembered Kes reporting a dream that everyone had been
killed. Neelix hadn't known anything about the planet and scans had
revealed it to be likely pre-warp, so they had given it a wide berth,
although they'd shown it to Kes on the viewscreen to reassure her. If
she hadn't wiped out that timeline, if she'd just created a different
one somehow through her actions, that didn't imply that she would
transit *into* that timeline -- did it? How would she move through
time without actually committing an act of time travel, unless she had
reset the timeline completely?
She'd have to ask Q. Later. Right now, she was curious. What was
the next memory?
Again, Janeway touched the ball to her head.