"No, sir," Data said. Fortunately, the android did not require sleep like the rest of them, although Data often chose to simulate a dormant state in order to further his exploration of humanity, so Picard had no doubt that Data would work through the night if necessary.

Q yawned, and not from fatigue. "Are we quite through with this dreary business?" he inquired. A nervous-looking Ensign Clarze, who was surely less than eager to be teleported away from his post again, kept his eyes determinedly focused on the screen ahead of him even as Q ambled back to the conn. "Then can I finally prevail upon you to abandon this monumentally misguided exercise? Leave the barrier alone. It is not for the likes of you to tamper with."

Maybe it was exhaustion, maybe it was simply that he had reached his limit, but Picard had suddenly had enough of Q's perpetual snideness and high-handed p.r.o.nouncements. "Get this straight, Q. I take my orders from Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets, not from the Q Continuum and most especially not from you!"

Q recoiled from Picard's vehemence. "Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the Borg this morning," he sniffed. He raised his eyes unto heaven and struck a martyred pose. "Forgive him, Q, for he knows not what he says. I try to enlighten these poor mortals but their eyes are blind and their ears are deaf to my abundant wisdom." He shrugged his shoulders, dropped his arms to his sides, and turned to his mate. "Honeybunch, you talk to him. Tell him I know what I'm talking about."

The female Q was busy wiping her son's nose, but she looked up long enough to fix her brown eyes on Picard and say, "He knows what he's talking about, Captain." She returned to her son and muttered under her breath, "If only he didn't."

"Big wall!" the toddler interjected, adding his own two cents' worth. "Bad! Bad!" He stamped his tiny foot on the floor and the entire bridge lurched to starboard. Picard grabbed on to his armrests to keep from being thrown from the chair. Data padds and other loose instruments clattered to the floor. Riker stumbled forward, but managed to keep his footing. Baeta Leyoro swore under her breath and shot a murderous glare at Q and his family. Yellow alert lights flashed on automatically all around the bridge. An alarm sounded.

"Now, now," the female Q cooed to her son. "Be gentle with the little s.p.a.ceship. You don't want to break it." She patted the child on the head and he looked down at his feet sheepishly. Picard felt the Enterprise's flight path stabilize.

He silenced the alarm and ended the yellow alert by pressing a control on his armrest. Although the crisis seemed to have pa.s.sed, he was unnerved by this demonstration of the baby's abilities. Suppose the child threw a real tantrum? Not even the entire fleet might be able to save them. "Q," he began, addressing the male of the species, "perhaps there is a more suitable location for your son? Children do not belong on the bridge," he said quite sincerely.

"Really?" Q asked. "You gave that insufferable Wesley the run of the place as I recall." He stood on his tiptoes and peered over everyone's heads, as if expecting to find young Wesley Crusher hidden behind a console. Then he lowered his soles to the floor and considered his son. Little q held on to his mother's leg while watching the viewscreen through droopy eyelids. "Still, you may have a point," Q told Picard. "He is looking a trifle bored."

"?" he said to his wife in a language that bore no resemblance to any tongue Picard had ever heard before, one so inhuman that even the Universal Translator was stumped.

"," she replied.

An instant later, the baby disappeared. Picard felt an incalculable sense of danger averted until a new suspicion entered his mind. "Q," he asked warily, "where exactly did the child go?"

Q acted surprised by the question. "Why, Jean-Luc, I understand the Enterprise has excellent child-care facilities."

He and the other Q vanished from sight.

Seven.

Although entire families no longer lived permanently on the Starship Enterprise, Holodeck B could be converted into a children's center to accommodate the offspring of the various diplomats, delegations, and refugees who often traveled aboard the ship. During such times, the holographic center was kept open twenty-four hours a day, to handle the varying circadian rhythms of each alien race as well as to allow for emergency situations. Since alien encounters and other crises could hardly be expected to occur only during school hours, there had to be some place where any mothers and fathers aboard the ship could safely stow their children during, say, a surprise Romulan attack. The last thing anyone wanted was visiting scientists or amba.s.sadors who were unable to a.s.sist in an emergency because they couldn't find a babysitter.

Ensign Percy Whitman, age twenty-five, didn't mind working the graveyard shift at the children's center. The Faal children were still living on Betazed time, according to which it was roughly the middle of the afternoon, but they seemed well behaved and remarkably quiet. That's the nice thing about telepathic kids, he thought. They can talk among themselves without disturbing anyone else. All of which gave him more time to compose his work-in-progress, a holonovel about a sensitive young artist who works nights at a kindergarten for nocturnal Heptarians until he is recruited by Starfleet Intelligence to infiltrate the Klingon High Command.

Tonight the writing was going unusually well. He was already up to Chapter Seven, where the hero, Whip Parsi, fights a duel to the death with the treacherous heir to a hopelessly corrupt Klingon household. "His mighty bat'leth sliced through the sultry night air, keening a song of vengeance, as Whip struck back with all the skill and fury of one born to battle," he keyed into the padd on his desk. Yeah, he thought, transfixed by his own output, that's great stuff. He'd work out the holographic animation later.

A squeal of high-pitched laughter yanked him away from his gripping saga. He looked up from the padd to check on his charges. Everything seemed in order: the two smaller children, roughly two years old in human terms, played happily on the carpeted floor, stacking st.u.r.dy durafoam blocks into lopsided piles that inevitably toppled over, while their eleven-year-old brother played a computer game in one of the cubicles at the back of the room. Childish watercolor paintings of stars and planets decorated the walls.

Another meter-high tower of multicolored blocks collapsed into rubble and the toddlers squealed once more. Nothing to be alarmed about here, Whitman thought. He started to go back to his masterpiece-in-the-making, then paused and scratched his head. Say, hadn't there been only one little tyke before?

He put aside his personal padd and checked the attendance display on the center's terminal. Let's see... Kinya and Milo Faal. That was one all right, a little Betazoid girl and her older brother. He stood up behind the desk and checked out the smaller children again.

The girl was easy to identify. Her blond curls and striking Betazoid eyes distinguished her from the other gleeful youngster. But where had that child, a brown-haired boy in a white sailor's costume, come from? Had someone dropped off another kid without him noticing? He wasn't aware of any other children visiting the ship, but he was only an ensign; no one told him anything.

Could this be some sort of test or surprise inspection? Maybe the new kid wasn't really here at all but was just a holographic image that had appeared from nowhere while he wasn't looking. He checked out the holographic control display embedded into his desk, but found nothing out of the ordinary.

"Milo?" he called out. Perhaps the eleven-year-old had noticed something. "Did you see anybody come by in the last half hour or so?"

"Uh-uh," Milo grunted rather sullenly, never looking away from his computer game. Whitman suspected that Milo thought he was much too old for the children's center and was taking it out on the babysitter.

"Are you sure?" Whitman asked. It just didn't make any sense. How could there be an extra kid?

"Uh-huh," Milo said, extremely uninterested in anything any grown-up had to say. On the terminal before him, several invading Tholian warships bit the dust in a computer-generated blaze of glory.

Whitman closed his eyes and ma.s.saged his temples, growing increasingly agitated by this uncrackable dilemma. The way he saw it, there was no way he could ask anyone for an explanation without looking like a careless and incompetent idiot. His stomach began to churn unhappily. Maybe if I just keep my eyes shut, he thought desperately, and count to ten, everything will go back to normal and I'll have the right number of kids again.

It was a ridiculous, pathetic fantasy, but it made as much sense as what had already happened so far. He squeezed his eyes shut and counted slowly under his breath. He swallowed hard, then opened his eyes.

Only one toddler sat on the carpet, staring up at the ceiling with unrestrained wonder. Whitman couldn't believe his luck, until he noticed the wobbly stack of blocks rising up in front of him. He craned his neck back and followed the tower of blocks to its top-where he saw the other child, the one in the sailor suit, teetering at the top of an impossibly tall block pile that reached above Whitman's head. The boy's unruly brown hair brushed the ceiling and he giggled happily, completely unfrightened by his precarious perch. The other child clapped her tiny hands together, cheering him on.

"Oh...my...G.o.d," Whitman gasped, unable to believe his eyes. Then he clapped his hands over his mouth, afraid to exhale for fear of bringing down the tower of brightly colored blocks. Across the room, Milo, intent on his one-man war against the Tholian marauders, was oblivious of the miracle.

The baby reached out his hand and two more blocks lifted off the floor and drifted upward into his waiting fingers. Whitman rubbed his eyes and struggled to figure out what was happening. Had something gone wrong with the artificial gravity? Could this be some bizarre holographic malfunction? Stranger things had been known to happen; he'd heard a few horror stories about near-fatal accidents within the old Enterprise's holodecks, like that time a holographic Moriarty had almost taken over the ship. Or when Counselor Troi was nearly gunned down during a Western scenario.

Whitman picked up his padd and dropped it over the desk. The padd fell straight down, just like it was supposed to, so the gravity was working fine. But how then had the little boy managed to erect such a ridiculous structure?

He cautiously snuck out from behind the desk, arms outstretched to catch the teetering toddler if and when he plummeted to the floor. He had to fall soon, Whitman told himself. The ramshackle pile of blocks looked like an avalanche waiting to happen. It could collapse at any second. When it did, would he be able to grab the kid before he crashed to the ground? What would Whip Parsi do at a time like this? He hit the medical emergency alert b.u.t.ton, summoning help in advance of the ghastly plunge that was sure to come.

The child continued to stack his blocks. Having run out of room between himself and the roof, the boy blithely turned himself upside down and crawled out onto the ceiling. He began lining up his new blocks in a row across the length of the ceiling while he hung there effortlessly like a fly upon a wall. "Choo-choo!" he burbled.

Whitman suddenly felt very silly holding his arms out. A gravity screwup, he thought. It has to be. Never mind that he still didn't know how this kid got here in the first place. He was about to contact Engineering when the door whished open and Counselor Troi rushed in. Her hair was disheveled and she looked like she'd come straight from bed, pausing only to throw on a fresh uniform.

"Gee, you're fast," Whitman said, remembering his medical alert from mere moments ago.

"The captain sent me," she explained.

"No security team?" Baeta Leyoro asked, sounding both incredulous and offended.

"That is correct, Lieutenant," Picard confirmed. "I believe that Counselor Troi is better suited to handle this situation." If the infant q had indeed been deposited in the holographic children's center, then Deanna's empathic skills and training were more likely to keep the child under control than a squadron of phaser-wielding security officers, a.s.suming that any of them had even a prayer of stopping q from wreaking havoc aboard the ship. This is all Q's fault, he thought angrily. He simply can't resist making my life difficult.

Leyoro fumed visibly. The dark-haired security chief abandoned her station at tactical and marched into the command area to face Picard. "Permission to speak frankly, sir?" she requested. Her eyes blazed like a warp-core explosion.

"Go ahead, Lieutenant," he said. With Q and his mate absent for the time being, there might be no better time to hear what Leyoro had to say. Will Riker paid close attention to the irate officer as well, while the rest of the crew carried on with their work, no doubt listening attentively.

She stood stiffly in front of him, her hands clasped behind her back. "With all due respect, sir, I cannot do my job effectively if you keep countermanding my recommendations. If you have no faith in me as your head of security, then perhaps you should find someone else."

Just for a second, Picard wished that Worf had never accepted that post at Deep s.p.a.ce Nine. "Your service record is exemplary," he told her, "and I have a great deal of confidence in you. However, dealing with Q, any Q, is a unique situation that calls for unorthodox approaches, like sending a counselor in place of a security team."

"I believe I am accustomed to coping with unexpected circ.u.mstances," she maintained. "In the past, I have smuggled defectors across the Neutral Zone in an uncloaked ship, rescued political prisoners from a maximum-security Tarsian slave labor camp, and even repelled a Maquis raid with nothing more than a single shuttlecraft and a malfunctioning photon torpedo."

Having thoroughly examined Leyoro's file before granting her the post of security chief, Picard knew that she was not exaggerating in the slightest. If anything, she was understating her somewhat colorful (and faintly notorious) history. Not to mention rebelling against her own government when the Angosian soldiers escaped from that lunar prison colony, he thought.

Still.

"Despite your varied accomplishments," he insisted, "a Q is unlike any threat that you could have encountered before. Force and shows of force can accomplish nothing where a Q is concerned." He hoped Leyoro would understand what he was saying and not take the matter personally. "This is not about you or your capabilities, but about what a Q can do. Namely, anything."

Leyoro appeared mollified. She relaxed her stance and stopped radiating anger. The furnace in her eyes cooled to a smolder. "So," she asked, "how do you deal with an ent.i.ty like Q?"

"Lieutenant," he answered, "I've been trying to figure that out for a good ten years now."

Beverly Crusher arrived at Holodeck B only minutes after Troi. Not that any of them really needed to have hurried. The baby q looked quite content to play with his blocks up on the ceiling. Watching him was a disorienting, vaguely vertiginous experience. Troi kept glancing down at the floor to make sure that she wasn't simply looking at a reflection in a mirrored ceiling.

She wasn't.

"Now what do we do?" she asked aloud. "Send a shuttle up there to fetch him?"

"I may have a better idea," Beverly answered, "but first let's get the rest of these kids out of here." At the doctor's suggestion, Percy Whitman began corralling the little Faal girl and herding her toward the door. Troi felt sorry for the poor ensign; she could sense his anxiety and confusion. She had attempted to explain to him quickly about Q and Q and q, but he remained as rattled as before.

"Percy," she whispered as he pa.s.sed by. "Feel free to drop by my office later if you want to talk about this."

He nodded weakly and gave the tiny Betazoid girl a pat on the back to keep her moving. Enthralled by the astounding spectacle of her peer's visit to the ceiling, the other toddler was not very eager to leave. She started crying, but Percy ssshed her effectively and led her out the door. Sitting upside down above everyone's heads, merrily stringing his blocks across the ceiling, q did not notice his playmate being escorted away. Troi breathed a little easier when the youngest of Professor Faal's children disappeared into the corridor. She had summoned Faal himself to the holodeck, but the scientist could just as easily claim the children outside the chamber, safely away from the baby q's unpredictable activities.

That left only the eleven-year-old at the computer terminal. Milo, she recalled from Lem Faal's personal files. She began to inch her way along the edge of the chamber, hoping to sneak the older boy out without attracting q's attention. "Milo," she called in a hushed tone. "Milo?"

Caught up in his game, he had not yet observed any of the oddities taking place nearby, nor did he hear her call his name. Troi admired the intensity of his focus even as she wished that he would lift up his head from the screen for just one moment. She had no idea what the baby q might do to another child if provoked, but she didn't want to find out.

The door to the holodeck was sliding shut behind Ensign Whitman when Lem Faal stormed into the simulated child-care center. His thinning hair was disordered and a heavy Betazoid robe, made of thick, quilted beige fabric, was belted at his waist. "What's this all about?" he said irritably, sounding as if he had been unpleasantly roused from sleep. "What's going on with my children? First, I got an urgent call, then that strange young man out there"-he gestured toward the corridor-"said something about an upside-down baby?" Beverly tried to shush Faal, fearing he'd startle q, but the scientist spotted the child upon the ceiling first. "By the Sacred Chalice," he whispered, taken aback. His red-rimmed eyes widened. His mouth fell open and he gasped for breath.

The situation was getting more complicated by the moment, Troi realized. She had to get both Faal and the remaining child out of here. "Milo?" she thought urgently, hoping to reach the Betazoid child on a telepathic level.

"Ha!" the boy shouted in triumph, leaning back in his chair and pumping his fist in the air. "Eat hot plasma, Tholian sc.u.m!"

His cry of victory startled q, who evidently forgot about canceling gravity. Durafoam blocks rained upon the floor while the surprised baby dropped like a rock. "Oh no!" Beverly shouted.

Without thinking about it, Troi ran to the center of the room and threw out her arms. Will had always teased her about her total inability to play the ancient Terran game of baseball, but now she relied on every hour she had ever spent practicing in the holodeck to wipe the grin from his face. Her heart pounded. Her breath caught in her throat. Nothing else mattered. There was only the falling baby and the hard metal floor beneath the orange carpeting.

Ten kilograms of quite corporeal child landed in her arms and she breathed once more. She hugged the boy against her chest, taking care not to press her combadge by mistake. For the sp.a.w.n of two transcendental, highly evolved beings, little q felt surprisingly substantial. Tears sprung from his eyes as Troi shifted her load to make him more comfortable. Memories of her own infant, Ian Andrew, and of holding him much like this, came back to her with unexpected force.

Beverly Crusher rushed to her side, a medical tricorder in her hand.

"Is he all right?" Troi asked her urgently. It felt very strange-and scary-not to be able to sense the baby's emotions. "Was he hurt by the fall?"

"I don't even know if it's possible for him to be hurt," Beverly answered. She began to scan the child with the peripheral unit of her tricorder, then remembered impatiently that conventional sensors were useless where a Q was concerned. She put the tricorder away and examined the boy with her hands. "No swelling or broken bones," she announced after a moment. "I think he's more scared than injured."

The baby's descent, and Troi's spectacular catch, had seized the attention of both Professor Faal and his son.

"Dad?" Milo said, spotting his father from across the room. "What's happening? Where did that baby come from?" Another thought occurred to him and he looked around the simulated child-care facility. "Hey, where's Kinya?"

But Faal was too intent upon the miraculous, gravity-defying infant to answer his son's queries, or even look away from the bawling child in Troi's arms. "I don't understand," he protested, his gaze shifting from q to the ceiling and back again. "Was that some sort of trick?"

"It's a baby Q," Troi volunteered, trying to put a little distance between Faal and Beverly so that the doctor would have more room to work in.

"Q," he whispered, awestruck. Troi didn't like the sound of his breathing, which was wet and labored. She felt glad that Beverly was close by, and not only for the baby's sake. "But it looks so...ordinary?"

Milo left his computer game behind and hurried to join his father. He looked completely baffled, but Troi sensed his happiness at his father's arrival. "Q?" he asked. "What's a Q?"

"An advanced life-form," Faal intoned, more to himself than to the boy. He remained intent on the baby Q. "A higher stage of evolution, transcending mere corporeal existence."

"That?" Milo said, incredulous. Troi detected a spark of jealousy within him, no doubt ignited by his father's absorption with the superhuman infant. "It's just a stupid baby."

Did little q understand him? For whatever reason, the baby started crying louder, approaching the earsplitting wail that had earlier resounded throughout the entire ship. "Hush," Troi murmured, rocking him gently, but the child kept crying.

"Hang on," Beverly said, "I bet I have a prescription for that." She reached into the pocket of her blue lab coat and pulled out a cherry-red lollipop. "Here, try this."

The child's cries fell silent the moment he saw the bright red sweet. His pudgy fingers wrapped around the stick and he began sucking enthusiastically on the candy. Troi didn't require any special gifts to sense q's improved spirits.

"The oldest trick in pediatric medicine," Beverly explained with a smile. "I never come to a children's center, holographic or otherwise, without one. Once I got here, I had planned to use it to lure him down off the ceiling." She approached Troi to inspect the baby. "You know, he actually looks a little like Q."

"Try not to hold that against him," Troi said. The sucker had calmed q for a time, but she wondered how long that could last. She didn't mind holding the child for a while, even though she realized that wasn't much of a long-term solution. He looks so angelic now, it's easy to forget how dangerous he might be.

Troi hoped the doctor had brought some extra lollipops for later. "You say his mother is much like Q?" Crusher asked.

"So I'm told," Troi answered. She had to admit that she was curious to meet Q's mate. I guess there really is someone for everyone, she thought. "At least her ego is supposed to be just as immense."

Professor Faal's interest in the child remained more scientific. He scrutinized the baby like it was a specimen on a petri dish, squinting at the child the closer he got to Troi and the baby Q. Troi was struck by the intensity of his fascination with the child. Then again, she recalled, maybe I've simply become too accustomed to Q and his kind. She imagined that any scientist would find a Q an irresistible puzzle. "Doctor," Faal said to Crusher, noticing the equipment she was carrying, "might I borrow your tricorder at once."

"It won't do you any good," she warned him, but handed him the instrument. He began scanning q with the tricorder, then scowled in frustration at the (non) readings it displayed. "Dammit, it's not working." At his side, Milo tried to see what his father was reacting to, standing on his tiptoes to peer past his father's arm. Frankly, Troi wished she could somehow persuade Faal to return with Milo to his own quarters, leaving them alone to deal with q, but she suspected it would take wild horses to drag the scientist away from such a unique specimen of advanced alien life.

Beverly considered the child thoughtfully. "It's funny," she said eventually. "I'm kind of surprised that his mother would be willing to leave him alone in the care of a primitive species like us."

"Unless maybe she thought we couldn't possibly do him any harm?" Deanna suggested. "Even if we tried, that is."

"If he's like any other toddler," Beverly said, "then he's perfectly capable of hurting himself by accident." She frowned, disturbed by her own chain of reasoning. Troi could sense her concern growing. "It just doesn't make sense. Why leave a precious child like this with people who completely lack the ability to look after him properly?"

An unexpected burst of light caught them all off guard. "If you must know," said the woman who suddenly appeared in their midst, "I had my eye on him the whole time."

This had to be the female Q, Troi realized. She looked much as the captain had described her, except that now she had a.s.sumed the attire of a twentieth-century American tourist on a summer vacation: sandals, pink plastic sungla.s.ses, a large-brimmed hat, and a light cotton sundress with a Hawaiian print design. She held a paper fan in one hand and a flyswatter in the other, both rather gratuitous in the controlled environment of the Enterprise. Where does she think she is, Troi wondered, the Amazon rain forest? She recognized a bit of baby q in his mother's features, finding this evidence of a family resemblance vaguely rea.s.suring in its similarity to a common, everyday aspect of humanoid parentage.

The woman noticed Troi inspecting her. "Well," she asked acidly, "is my ego as large as you antic.i.p.ated?"

Troi blushed, recalling her remarks of a few moments ago. She hoped that the woman was equipped with a sense of humor to go with her extraordinary abilities; otherwise Troi might be in serious trouble. "My apologies. I had no idea you were listening."

"Oh, never mind," the Q stated wearily, as if the matter were far too trivial to waste her time upon. "I suppose divinity must resemble egotism to evolutionarily disadvantaged creatures such as yourself." She swept the children's center with a withering stare. To Troi's surprise, Professor Faal stepped backward apprehensively. The Betazoid scientist remained hard to read, but he almost seemed frightened of the female Q. I guess a harmless baby is one thing, Troi thought, but a full-grown Q in her prime is a good deal more intimidating, even for one of the Federation's finest minds. She reminded herself that Faal, not to mention Milo, were nowhere near as used to encountering the unknown as the crew of a starship. Especially when she just appears out of nowhere.

Having surveyed her surroundings, the female Q focused once more on Deanna. "Which one are you?" she asked. "The headshrinker or the witch doctor?"

Any lingering embarra.s.sment Troi might have felt for inadvertently insulting this Q evaporated abruptly. "I am the ship's counselor, Lieutenant Commander Deanna Troi," she declared, "and this is Dr. Beverly Crusher."

"Whatever," Q replied, sounding faintly bored, but her patrician manner softened a bit when her gaze fell upon the child in Troi's arms. The fan and the flyswatter popped out of existence, and she patted his tiny nose with her finger. "h.e.l.lo, little fellow, have you been having fun among the silly primitives?"

The boy, who was obviously accustomed to his mother appearing from out of nowhere, smiled and showed her his lollipop. "Mama!" he gurgled, and waved the half-eaten sucker in her face. "Yum-yum!"