Deanna Troi shut her eyes, doing her best to filter out the emotions of the crew members present in the conference room as well as, more faintly, throughout the ship. Speak to me, she thought to the gaseous ma.s.s outside the ship. Let me know what you're feeling.

Suddenly, an unexpected "voice" intruded into her thoughts. You have to talk to the commander, it urged her silently. Make him understand. I have to go on with my work. It's vitally important.

She recognized the telepathic voice immediately. Lem Faal. How desperate was he, she worried, that he would take advantage of her sensitivity like this? Please, she told him. Not now. Please leave me alone. She needed to have all her faculties focused on the task of reading the Calamarain.

But my work! he persisted. His telepathic voice, she noted, lacked the hoa.r.s.eness and shortness of breath that weakened his physical voice. It was firm and emphatic, unravaged by disease.

Fortunately, years of dealing with her mother had given her plenty of experience at dispelling an unwanted telepathic presence from her mind. No! Faal protested as he felt her squeeze him out of her consciousness. Wait! I need your help!

"Leave me alone," she repeated, before banishing him entirely.

"Deanna?" Will Riker asked. Her eyes snapped open and she saw him watching her with a confused, anxious expression. So were Data and Lieutenant Leyoro and the others on the bridge. She hadn't realized she had spoken aloud.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I was...distracted."

"By the Calamarain?" the commander asked. She could feel his concern for her well-being.

"No," she answered, shaking her head. She would have to speak to the commander about Faal later; there was something frightening about the scientist's obsession with his experiment, beyond simple determination to see his work completed before death claimed him. First, though, there were still the Calamarain. "Let me try again," she said, closing her eyes once more.

This time Faal did not interfere. Perhaps he had finally gotten the message to keep out of her head. Screening out all other distractions, she opened herself up to the alien emotions seeping into the ship from outside.

They tasted strange to her mental receptors, like some exotic spice or flavor she couldn't quite place. Was that anger/fear or fear/anger or something else altogether? She felt queer impressions suffusing the air around her, like the steady drone of the humming she had heard in the background ever since the cloud had surrounded the ship. They were relentlessly consistent, never quavering or varying in tone or intensity. She couldn't name the feeling, but it was a constant, unchanging, a firm and unshakable conviction/resolution/determination to do what must be done, whatever that might be. She probed as hard as she was able, but the feeling never changed. That was all she could sense, the same inflexible purpose surrounding the Enterprise on all sides.

Convinced that she'd heard enough, she opened her eyes slowly, took a few deep breaths, and let the alien emotions recede into the background. "I'm picking up an increased sense of urgency, of alarm mixed with fury," she stated. "There's a feeling of danger, whether to us or from us I can't say." She hesitated for a second, reaching out across the gulf of s.p.a.ce with her empathic senses. "I think it's a warning...or a threat."

That's a big difference, Riker thought, listening carefully to Deanna's report. Do the Calamarain want to help us or hurt us? Judging from the way they'd knocked the probe about earlier, he'd bet on the latter.

"Thank you, Counselor," Data said, comparing Deanna's impressions against his readings and entering the results into his console. "That was quite helpful. I now have several promising avenues to explore."

Could Data really use Deanna's empathic skills as a Rosetta Stone to crack the Calamarain's language? Riker could only wonder how the android was managing to translate Deanna's subjective emotional readings into the mathematical algorithms used by the Universal Translator. Then again, he remembered, Data had knowledge of hundreds, if not thousands, of languages stored in his positronic brain, making him something of an artificial translator himself. If anybody can do it, he thought.

"Excuse me, Commander," Leyoro said, "but what's that old human expression again? The one about the best offense...?"

Riker permitted himself a wry smile. "Point taken, Lieutenant. Don't worry, I haven't forgotten our phasers."

Given a choice, he'd rather talk than shoot, but the time for talking was swiftly running out.

Interlude

Bug.

It was buzzing over there, just out of reach. A shiny, silver bug. He could see it now, the image refracted through the lens of the wall, deformed and distorted, true, but definitely there. Itty-bitty little bug, buzzing about on the other side, doing teeny-weeny, buggy little things.

Busy bug, he crooned. How fast can you fly? How quick can you die?

He couldn't wait to swat it with his hungry hand. No, not swat it, he corrected himself. He'd play with it first, teach it tricks, then pull off its wings. Soon, he promised, soon to its ruin.

Then the bug wasn't alone anymore. A wisp of smoke drifted over to where the bug flitted. Bug and smoke, he cursed, his mood darkening. He remembered that smoke, oh yes he did, and remembering, hated. A joke on the smoke, ever so long ago. Choke on the smoke. Smoking, choking...choking the bug! Through the fractured gla.s.s of the wall, he watched as the thin, insubstantial wisp of vapor surrounded the bug. No! You can't have it! he raved. It's mine, mine to find, mine to grind!

Impatiently, he reached out for the bug and the smoke, unable to wait any longer, forgetting for the moment all that lay between him and his prizes. But his will collided against the perpetual presence of the wall and rebounded back in pain and fury. He drew inward on himself, nursing his injured pride, while the bug and the smoke circled each other just beyond his grasp. Not now, he recalled, not how. But when, when, WHEN...?

He howled in frustration-and a voice answered. The same voice that had greeted his cries not very long ago. It was a small, barely audible voice, but it sounded faintly louder than it had before, like it was coming from some place not nearly so far away.

(I'm here,) the voice said, (I'm almost with you).

WHEN? he pleaded, his own voice sounding like an explosion compared to the other. WHEN?

(Soon. There are a few obstacles to overcome, but soon. I give you my word.) What did it mean by that? The message was too vague, too indefinite, to curb his constant craving to defeat the wall. The bug and the smoke tormented him, teasing him with their pretended proximity. He needed an answer now.

Let me in, he said. Let you out. Away, away, no more decay. Let me in, again and again.

(Yes!) the voice affirmed. (I will make it happen, no matter what.) The voice droned on, but he grew bored and stopped listening. The bug captured his attention once more, so small and fragile, but not yet undone by the suffocating smoke. Buzz, buzz, little bug, he whispered. Flitter free while you can. He a.s.sumed the shape of an immense arachnid, stretching out his will in all directions like eight clutching limbs.

A spider is coming to gobble you up....

Eleven.

He was no longer on the bridge. A cool white mist surrounded Picard on all sides, obscuring his vision, but the familiar sounds and smells of the bridge were gone, informing him unequivocally that he had left the Enterprise. He looked around him quickly and saw only the same featureless fog everywhere he glanced. The Calamarain? he wondered briefly, but, no, this empty mist was utterly unlike the luminescent swirls of the living plasma cloud. This place, odorless, soundless, textureless, was more like...limbo. He stamped his feet upon whatever surface was supporting him, but the mist absorbed both the force and the sound of his boots striking the ground so that not an echo escaped to confirm the physicality of his own existence. He was lost in a void, a sensation that he remembered all too well.

I've been here before, he thought. That time I almost died in sickbay and Q offered me a chance to relive my past. The memory did nothing to ease his concerns. That incident had been a profoundly disturbing, if ultimately illuminating, experience, one that he was in no great hurry to endure again. More important, what about the Enterprise? Only seconds before, or so it seemed to him, he had placed the ship on red alert in response to the approach of the Calamarain. "Dammit," he cursed, punching a fist into his palm in frustration. This was no time to be away from his ship!

"Q!" he shouted into the mist, unafraid of who or what might hear him. "Show yourself!"

"You needn't bellow, Jean-Luc," Q answered, stepping out of the fog less than two meters away from Picard. His Starfleet uniform, proper in every respect, hardly suited his sardonic tone. "Although I wish you could have simply listened to me in the first place. You have no idea how strenuously I regret that you forced me to go to such lamentable lengths to convince you."

"I forced you?" Picard responded indignantly. "This is intolerable, Q. I demand that you return me to the Enterprise at once."

Q tapped his foot impatiently. "Spare me, Picard. Time is scarce. Just this once, can't we skip the obligatory angry protestations and get on with business?"

"Your business, you mean," Picard said. "My business is on my ship!"

"That's what you think," Q replied. He crossed his arms upon his chest, looking quite sure of himself. "Take my word for this, Jean-Luc. You're not going back to the Enterprise-E, F, or G-until we are finished, one way or another. Or don't you trust Riker to keep the ship in one piece that long?"

That's not the point, he thought, but part of him was forced to concede the futility of talking Q out of anything. If there was one thing he had learned since their first meeting in Q's "courtroom" over a decade ago, it was that attempting to reason with or intimidate Q was a waste of time. Perhaps the best and only option was to let the charade play out as quickly as possible, and hope that he could get back to his life and duties soon enough. Not a very appealing strategy, he thought, but there it is.

He took stock of their surroundings, ready to take on Q's latest game. The empty mist offered no clue as to what was yet to come. "What is this place, Q," he asked, "and don't tell me it's the afterlife."

"Like you'd know it if you saw it," Q said. "You wouldn't recognize the Pearly Gates if you had your pathetic phasers locked on them." He paused and scratched his chin reflectively. "Actually, they aren't so much pearly as opalescent...but I digress. This shapeless locale," he said, sweeping out his arms to embrace the entire foggy landscape, "is merely a starting point, a place between time, where time has no sway."

"Between time?" Picard repeated, concentrating on every word Q said. This duplicitous gamester played by his own arcane rules, he knew, and sometimes doled out a genuine hint or clue in his self-aggrandizing blather. The trick was to extract that nugget of truth from the rest of Q's folderol. "I thought you said earlier that time was scarce."

"By the Continuum, you can be dim, Jean-Luc," Q groaned, wiping some imaginary sweat from his brow. "Sometimes I feel like I'm teaching remedial metaphysics to developmentally stunted primates. Here, let me demonstrate."

Q grabbed hold of the drifting fog with both hands and pulled it aside as though it were a heavy velvet curtain. Picard glimpsed two figures through the gap in the mist, standing several meters away. One was a tall, balding man in a red-and-black Starfleet uniform that was a few years out of style. A lethal-looking scorch mark marred the front of his uniform, above his heart. The other figure was clad in angelic white robes that seemed composed of the very mist that framed the scene. A heavenly light illuminated the second figure from behind, casting a sublime radiance that outlined the robed figure with a shimmering halo. Looking on this tableau, one could be forgiven for a.s.suming that this auroral figure was a veritable emissary from Heaven, if not the Almighty Himself.

Picard knew better. He recognized the figures, and the occasion, instantly. They were himself and Q, posed as they had been when he first confronted Q in this very same mist, shortly after he "died" from a malfunction in his artificial heart. Caught up in their own fateful encounter, the other Picard and Q paid no heed to the onlookers now witnessing themselves at an earlier time. Picard could not hear what his younger self was saying to the younger Q, but he remembered the exchange well enough. There had been a time, after he woke up in sickbay under Beverly Crusher's ministrations, when he had half-convinced himself that he had merely experienced an unusually vivid and perceptive dream, but, in his heart of hearts, which bore no relation to the steel and plastic mechanism lodged in his chest, he had always known that the entire episode had really happened. Even still, it gave him a chill to watch the bizarre occurrence unfold once more.

He was tempted to shout out a warning to his earlier self, but what could he say? "Whatever you do, don't let Q tempt you into changing your past"? No, that would only defeat the entire purpose of that unique, autobiographical odyssey and deprive his other self of the hard-earned insights he had so painfully achieved over the course of that unforgettable journey. He couldn't bring himself to say a word.

"Seen enough?" Q asked. He withdrew his hands and the fog fell back into place, sealing away the vision from the past. "I must say, I seemed particularly celestial there. Divinity looks good on me."

"So you think," Picard retorted, but his heart was not in the war of words. That flashback to his old, near-death experience shook him more than he wanted to admit. "Why show me that?" he asked. "I have not forgotten what happened then."

"You still don't understand," Q said. "That didn't happen before. It's happening now. Here, everything happens now. But when we return to the boring, linear reality you know, the clock hands will resume their dogged, dreary rounds." He held his hands up in front of his face. "Excuse me while I watch my fingernails grow. Let me know when you're through with your futile efforts to comprehend the ineffable."

Picard ignored Q's taunts. Figuring out the rules of this game was the only way he was going to find his way back to the Enterprise. "Is that what this is all about? The same routine as before, you're going to make me face up to another chapter of my past?" He couldn't help trying to guess what heartrending tragedy he might be forced to relive. The death of Jack Crusher? That nasty business back at the Academy? His torture at the hands of Gul Madred? Dear G.o.d, he prayed, don't let it be my time among the Borg. I couldn't bear to be Locutus once again. He cast off his fears, however, and faced his opponent defiantly. "You must be getting old, Q," he said. "You're starting to repeat yourself."

To his surprise, Q began to look more uncomfortable than Picard, as though the relentless puppeteer was genuinely reluctant to proceed now that the moment of departure had arrived. "Oh, Picard," he sighed, "how I wish we were merely sightseeing in your own insignificant existence, but I'm afraid it's not your disreputable past we must examine, mon capitaine, but my own." He took a deep breath, quelling whatever trepidations he possessed, then gave Picard a devil-may-care grin. "Starting now."

The mist converged on Picard, swallowing him up. For what could have been an instant or an eternity he found himself trapped in a realm of total, blank sensory deprivation-until the universe returned. Sort of.

Where am I? Picard wondered. What am I?

There was something wrong with his eyes, or, if not wrong precisely, then different. He could see from three distinct perspectives simultaneously, the disparate views blending to grant him a curiously all-inclusive image that made ordinary binocular vision seem flat by comparison. He searched his surroundings, finding himself seemingly adrift amid the blackness of s.p.a.ce. An asteroid drifted by, its surface pitted with craters and shadows, and he glimpsed a blazing yellow sun in the distance, partially eclipsed by an orbiting planet. I don't understand, he thought. How can I be surviving in a vacuum? Am I wearing a pressure suit, or did Q not bother with that? It was hard to tell; he couldn't feel his arms or his legs. He tried to look down at his body, but all he could see was a bright white glare. What had Q done to him?

"Q!" he shouted, but what emerged from his throat was a long, sibilant hiss. Make that throat s, for, to his utter shock, he felt the vibrato of the hiss in no less than three separate throats. This is insane, he thought, struggling not to panic. Over the years, he had almost grown accustomed to being miraculously transported here and there throughout the universe by Q's capricious whims, but he had never been transported out of his own body before-and into something inhuman and strange. "Q?" he hissed again, desperate for some sort of answer.

"Right behind you, Jean-Luc," Q answered. Picard had never been so relieved to hear that voice in his entire life. Somehow, merely by thinking about it, he managed to turn around and was greeted by an astounding yet oddly familiar sight: A three-headed Aldebaran serpent floated in the void only a few meters away. A trio of hooded, serpentine bodies rose from a glowing silver sphere about which smaller b.a.l.l.s of light ceaselessly orbited. The heads, which each resembled Earth's king cobra, faced Picard. Strips of glittering emerald and crimson scales alternated along all three of the snakelike bodies. Three pairs of cold, reptilian eyes fixed Picard with their mesmerizing stare. A threesome of forked tongues flicked from the serpentine faces. "Welcome," the snakes said in Q's voice, "to the beginning."

Of course, Picard thought. Not only did he recognize the triple serpent, an ancient mythological symbol dating back to well before the onset of human civilization, but he recalled how Q had once a.s.sumed this form before, at the onset of his second visit to the Enterprise. But this time, it seemed, Q had done more than merely transform himself into the fantastical, hydra-headed creature; he had somehow mutated Picard as well. Straining the unfamiliar muscles of his outermost necks, Picard turned his eyes on himself. Even though he had already guessed what he would find, it still came as a terrible shock when he saw, from two opposing points of view, two more serpentine heads rising from the radiant globe that was now his body. For a second, each of his outer heads looked past the central serpent so that Picard found himself staring directly into his own eyes-and back again. The jolt was too much for his altered nervous system to endure and he quickly looked away to see the other hydra, Q, hovering nearby. "So what do you think of your new body, Captain?" he asked. "Tell me, are three heads truly better than one?"

"Good Lord, Q," Picard exclaimed, trying his best to ignore the peculiar sensation of speaking through three sets of jaws, "what have you done?" He had to pray that his unearthly transformation was only a temporary joke of Q's, or else he would surely go mad. Good G.o.d, did he now have three separate brains, three different minds to lose?

"Merely trying to inject a note of historical verisimilitude into our scenic tour of my past," Q stated. "Relatively speaking, that is. Understand this, Picard: there is no way your primitive consciousness can truly comprehend what it means to be part of the Q Continuum, so everything I show you from here on has been translated into a form that can be perceived by your rudimentary five senses. It's a crude, vastly inadequate approximation of my reality, but it is the best your mind can cope with." Q drifted closer to Picard, until the transformed starship captain could see the individual scales overlapping each other along the lengths of each extended throat. The flared hoods behind each head puffed up even larger. "Anyway," Q went on, "it seemed more appropriate, and more accurate, to take these shapes during this stage of our excursion, given that the evolution of the humanoid form is still at least a billion years away at this point. In fact, this was one of my favorite guises way back in the good old days, before you overreaching humanoids came down from the trees and started spreading your DNA all over the galaxy."

"Billions of years?" Picard echoed, too stunned at Q's revelations to even register the usual insults and patronizing tone. "Where...when...are we?"

"Roughly five billion years ago, give or take a few dozen millennia." Q's leftmost head nipped playfully at the head next to it. "Ouch. You know, sometimes I surprise even myself." The central head snapped back while the head on the right continued speaking. "Tell me the truth, Jean-Luc, don't you get tired of Data's painfully precise measurements? How refreshing it must be to deal with someone-like myself, say-who is quite comfortable rounding things off to the nearest million or so."

Picard watched his own heads nervously, unsure when or how he might start turning on himself. There was something horribly claustrophobic about being trapped in this inhuman form, deprived of his limbs and hands and all the normal physical sensations he was accustomed to after sixty-plus years of existence as a human being. He felt a silent scream bubbling just beneath the thin surface of his sanity. "Q, I find this new form...very distracting."

It was possibly the greatest single understatement in his life.

"Oh, Jean-Luc," Q sighed, sounding disappointed, "I had hoped you were more flexible than that. After all, you coped with being a Borg for a week or two. Is a tri-headed serpent G.o.d all that much harder?"

"Q," Picard pleaded, too far from his own time and his own reality to worry about his pride. "Please."

"If you insist," Q grumbled. "I have important things to show you and I suppose it wouldn't do to have you fretting about your trivial human body the whole time. You might miss something." The triple necks of the Q-serpent wrapped themselves around each other until the three heads seemed to sprout from a single coiled stalk. Picard was briefly reminded of Quetzalcoatl, the serpent deity of the ancient Aztecs. Quetzalcoatl...Q? Could there be a connection?

He might never know.

"Pity," the triune ent.i.ty continued, "you hadn't begun to scratch the possibilities of this ident.i.ty." A flash of light illuminated the darkness for a fraction of a second, and then Q appeared before Picard in his usual form, garbed in what looked like a simple Greek chiton fastened over his left shoulder. A circlet of laurel leaves adorned his brow. Simple leather sandals rested upon nothing but empty s.p.a.ce.

Picard's trifocal vision coalesced into a single point of view. Gratefully, he looked down to see his human body restored to him. So relieved was he to have arms and legs again, he barely noted at first that he was now attired in an ancient costume similar to the one Q now wore. He remained floating in s.p.a.ce, of course, protected from the deadly vacuum only by Q's remarkable powers, but that was a level of surreality that he felt he could cope with. Just permit me to be myself, he thought, and I'm ready for whatever Q has up his sleeves.

"Happy now?" Q pouted. He wiggled his fingers in front of his face and scowled at the sight. "I hope you realize what a dreadful anachronism this is. Be it on your head, and you a professed archaeologist!"

"I feel much better, thank you," Picard answered, regaining his composure even while conversing in open s.p.a.ce. He glanced down at his own sandaled feet and saw nothing but a gaping abyss extending beneath him for as far as his eyes could see. He was not experiencing a null-gravity state, though; he knew what that felt like and this was quite different. Q was somehow generating the sensation of gravity, so that he felt squarely oriented despite his surroundings. Up was up and down was down, at least for the moment. He fingered the hem of his linen garment, noting the delicate embroidering along the border of the cloth. G.o.d is in the details, he thought, recalling an ancient aphorism, or was that the devil? "What is this?" he asked, indicating the chiton. "Another anachronism?"

"A conceit," Q said with a shrug, "to give a feel of antiquity. As I explained before, and I hope you were paying close attention, this is nothing like what I really looked like at this point in the galaxy's history, but simply a concession to your limited human understanding."

"And the Aldebaran serpent?" Picard pressed. "Was that your true form?"

Q shook his head, almost dislodging his crown of leaves. "Merely another guise, one better suited to a time before you mammals began putting on airs."

"If anyone can be accused of putting on airs," Picard replied, "it's you. You've done little but flaunt your alleged superiority since the time we first encountered you. Frankly, I'm not convinced."

"Yes, I recall your little speech right before we departed the bridge," Q said. "Would you be surprised to know that I share some of your opinions about the more...shall we say, heavy-handed...tendencies of the Continuum?"

"I know that you've been on the outs with your own kind at least once," Picard answered, "which gives me some hope that the Continuum itself might be rather more mature and responsible." It dawned on him, not for the first time, that almost everything he knew about the rest of the Q Continuum had come from Q's own testimony, hardly the most reliable of sources. He resolved to question Guinan more deeply on the subject, if and when he ever had the opportunity. "Well?" he asked, surveying this desolate section of s.p.a.ce. On the horizon, the eclipsing planet no longer pa.s.sed between himself and the nearest sun, permitting him an un.o.bstructed view of the seething golden orb, which he registered as a typical G-2 dwarf star, much like Earth's own sun. It was a breathtaking sight, especially viewed directly from s.p.a.ce, but he was not about to thank Q for letting him see it. "Why are we here?" he demanded. "What is it you wish to show me?"

"The beginning, as I said," Q stated. With a wave of his arm, he and Picard began to soar through the void toward the immense yellow sun. The hot solar wind blew in his face as the star grew larger and larger in his sight. It was a thrilling and not entirely unpleasant experience, Picard admitted to himself. He felt like some sort of interstellar Peter Pan, held aloft by joyous spirits and a sprinkling of pixie dust.

"Picture yourself in my place," Q urged, "a young and eager Q, newly born to my full powers and cosmic awareness, exploring a shiny new galaxy for the first time. Oh, Picard, those were the days! I felt like I could do anything. And you know what? I was right!"

At that, they plunged into the heart of the roaring sun. Picard flinched automatically, expecting to be burnt to a crisp, but, as he should have known, Q's omnipotence protected them from the unimaginable heat and brilliance. He gaped in awe as they descended first through the star's outer corona as it hurled ma.s.sive tongues of flame at the surrounding void, not to mention, Picard knew, fatal amounts of ultraviolet light and X-rays. Listening to the constant crackle and sizzle of the flames, he could not help recalling how the Enterprise had nearly been destroyed when Beverly, in command while he and the others were being held captive by Lore, had flown the ship into another star's corona in a daring and ultimately successful attempt to escape the Borg. Yet here he was, without even the hull of a starship to shield him against the unleashed fury of the sun's outer atmosphere.

Next came the chromosphere, a thin layer of fiery red plasma that washed over Picard like a sea of hot blood, followed by the photosphere, the visible surface of the sun. Picard had thoroughly studied the structure of G-2 stars at the Academy, of course, and subjected hundreds of stars to every variety of advanced sensor probe, but none of that had prepared him for the reality of actually witnessing the surface of a sun firsthand; he gawked in amazement at churning energies that should have been enough to incinerate him a million times over. Not even the legendary lake of fire within the Klingon homeworld's famed Kri'stak Volcano compared to the raging inferno that seemed to consume everything in sight except him and Q.

Despite Q's protective aura, Picard felt as if he were standing naked in a Vulcan desert at high noon. Sweat dripped from his forehead while rivers of perspiration ran down his back, soaking the simple linen garment he wore. Humidity on the surface of a sun? It was flagrantly impossible; he had to a.s.sume that Q had inflicted this discomfort on him purely for the sake of illusion. Picard was none too surprised to note that Q himself looked perfectly cool and comfortable. "I get the idea, Q," he said, wiping more sweat from his brow and flinging it toward his companion. Tiny droplets evaporated instantly before reaching their target. "It's very hot here. Do you have anything less obvious to teach me?"

"Patience," Q advised. "We've barely begun." He dabbed his toe in the boiling gases beneath their feet and Picard felt whatever was supporting him slip away. He began to sink even deeper into the bright yellow starstuff. A mental image of himself being dipped into hot, melted b.u.t.ter leaped irresistibly to the forefront of his consciousness. Reacting instinctively, he held his breath as his head sank beneath the turbulent plasma, but he needn't have bothered; thanks to Q, oxygen found him even as he drowned in the sun.

They dropped through the photosphere until they were well within the convection zone beneath the surface of the sun. Here rivers of ionized gas, not unlike those that composed the Calamarain, surged throughout the outer third of the sun's interior. Picard knew the ambient temperature around him had to be at least one million degrees Kelvin. They dived headfirst into one of the solar rivers and let the ferocious current carry them ever deeper until at last, like salmon leaping from white water, they broke through into the very heart of the star.

Now he found himself approaching the very center of a stellar furnace that beggared description. Here untold amounts of burning hydrogen atoms, transformed into helium by a process of nuclear fusion, produced a temperature of more than fifteen million degrees Kelvin. Not even the warp core aboard the Enterprise was capable of generating that much heat and raw energy. The visual impression Picard received was that of standing in the midst of a single white-hot flame, and the heat he actually felt was nearly unbearable. Every inch of exposed skin felt raw and dry and sunburned. Acrid chemical fumes stung his eyes, nose, and throat. The crackle of the spurting flames far above him gave way to a constant pounding roar. Overall, the intense gravitation and radiation at the solar core were so tremendous that they practically overwhelmed his senses, and yet somehow he was still able to see Q, who looked rather bored until his eyes lit on something really interesting. "Look, there I am," he announced.

Brushing tears away from his eyes, Picard stared where Q was pointing, but all he could see was a faint black speck in the distance, almost imperceptible against the dazzling spectacle of the core. They flew closer to the point of darkness and soon he discerned an individual figure sitting cross-legged in the middle of the gigantic fusion reaction. He seemed to be toying with a handful of burning plasma, letting the ionized gas stream out between his fingers. "Another golden afternoon," Q sighed nostalgically, seemingly oblivious of Picard's intense discomfort. "How young and inexperienced I was."

Picard coughed harshly, barely able to breathe owing to the caustic fumes and searing heat. The choking sounds jarred Q from his reminiscing and he peered at Picard dubiously. "Hmm," he p.r.o.nounced eventually, "perhaps there is such a thing as too much verisimilitude." He snapped his fingers, and Picard felt the awful heat recede from him. He gulped down several lungfuls of cool, untainted air. It still felt warm all around him, but more like a sunny day at the beach than the fires of perdition. "I hope you appreciate the air-conditioning," Q said, "although it does rather spoil the effect."

The effect be d.a.m.ned, Picard thought. He was here as an abductee, not a tourist. He gave himself a moment to recover from the debilitating effects of his ordeal, then focused on the individual Q had apparently brought him here to see. A young and inexperienced Q? This he had to see.

Picard flew close enough to discover that the figure did indeed resemble a more youthful version of Q, one not yet emerged from adolescence. To his surprise, something about the teen reminded Picard of Wesley Crusher, another wide-eyed young prodigy, although this boy already had a more mischievous twinkle in his eye than Wesley had ever possessed. "Portrait of the artist as a young Q," Picard's companion whispered with a diabolical chuckle. "Beware." As he and Picard looked on, the young man, dressed as they were in the garb of ancient Greece, isolated a ribbon of luminous plasma, stretching it like taffy before imbuing it with his own supernatural energies so that it shimmered with an eldritch radiance that transcended conventional physics. He pulled his new creation taut, then flung it free. The fiery ribbon shot like a rubber band toward the ceiling of the core and soon pa.s.sed out of sight. "I had forgotten about that!" Q marveled. "I wonder whatever happened to that little energy band?"

With a start, Picard remembered the inexplicable cosmic phenomenon that had driven Tolian Soran to madness-and, in more ways than one, claimed the life of James T. Kirk. Surely Q couldn't be claiming to have created it during an idle moment in his boyhood, could he? "Q," he began, shocked and appalled at the implications of what he suspected, "about this energy band?"