Danny Amor's Online Library/Danny Amor's Online Library - Volume 1.iso/html/startrek/incomplete/onlyhuman.ch2

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Only Human

Part II: Ketaya

    About an hour and a half after they were under way, Q came
up from engineering, where he'd spent the entire time since he'd
dropped off his bag in his room, onto the bridge. "This is
incredible," he said. "Have you any idea what sort of drive you
have?"
    "One that goes very fast, I'm told," T'Laren said. She found
it vaguely amusing that the first thing Q'd done was to examine
the engines-- both her father and Soram had been engineers, and
it struck her as a particularly male thing to do.
    "'One that goes very fast.' Toys in the hands of children."
He paced around the bridge. "Your ship has a *transwarp engine*,
my dear. Have you any *idea* how fast that goes?"
    "Lhoviri said it would do warp-equivalent 13. Federation
starships can't go higher than 10."
    "No one using warp can go higher than 10, T'Laren-- it's a
physical impossibility. Do you know what he's *done*?"
    It was somewhat hard to tell whether Q was agitated or
excited. "Who? Lhoviri?"
    "He's taken a Thetaran drive and jury-rigged it to work in
an obsolete Federation *luxury* yacht, is what he's done. This is
just unbelievable!"
    "Why is it unbelievable?" T'Laren gave up on trying to keep
her eyes on the console, and swiveled to follow Q with her eyes
as he paced. "And what's a Thetaran drive?"
    "The Thetarans were the dominant spacefaring race of a
conglomerate much like your Federation, about... oh, two thousand
years ago, I'd say. At least, that was their peak. They lived out
in what you call the Beta Quadrant, deep in unexplored space, and
they had a highly advanced technology in comparison to the
Federation's, though in real terms they weren't actually any more
advanced than, say Vulcans. Lhoviri's taken one of their drives
and dropped it into this boat, rather like putting a modern
antigrav unit into the body of a 20th-century antique automobile.
He's jury-rigged the connections so it'll run off dilithium
crystals-- have you tried to use the transwarp drive yet?"
    "There didn't seem to be a need."
    "Well, there's no way it'll sustain any power over time.
Dilithium crystals simply can't handle transwarp stresses. If we
try to *use* our superior speed for any length of time, bang, our
crystals are gone." He made an explosion gesture. "The Thetarans
used six-dimensional helical matrix crystals. Dilithium's only a
fourth-dimensional transverse helix. There's no way our dilithium
crystals can maintain the transwarp field without subspace
resonances tearing them apart. Did I ever mention that Lhoviri's
an idiot?"
    "Does this mean we can't use the transwarp drive?"
    "Without transwarp, dear doctor, this cattle boat can only
do 9.6. Not bad, mind you, but not good enough. And yes, we can
use transwarp, if we want to risk blowing our crystals-- and he's
tied the crystals into the secondary power net, which means we
could risk losing *all* power, drifting in space-- we have any
spare dilithium on board?"
    "Not to my knowledge."
    "Get some." He sighed. "I can rig a circuit breaker so the
crystals don't blow, at least. They'll shatter under the stress,
but that's an improvement over an explosion. I just don't know
why he had to do it like this. Why not set up a permanent
negative inertial field around the engines and put an ordinary
warp core in? It would have been so much simpler."
    "Could you do that?" Whatever it was. T'Laren wondered if Q
realized quite how far the technobabble was going over her head.
What was a fourth-dimensional transverse helix, anyway?
    Q laughed unpleasantly. "Not for the past three years," he
said. "What I'm talking about is what we in the business
technically refer to as throwing the laws of physics out the
window."
    "If Lhoviri did something that broke the laws of physics,
wouldn't he have to expend power-- or at least concentration-- to
maintain it?"
    "No, no. I'm talking about setting up a mild singularity-- a
permanent negative inertial field, decreasing our effective mass,
which would conversely increase our potential speed. We'd still
hit the warp 10 barrier, but if you can do 9.999, no one in this
sector of space will be catching you anytime soon. Or he could
have set up a transwarp conduit generation matrix, or-- You're
not following any of this, are you?"
    "I'm no engineer."
    "All right. The take-home lesson, in very simple terms, is
that Lhoviri's an idiot and his non-intervention policy could get
us both killed, unless either I iron the bugs out of dilithium
replication or we stock up somewhere." Q ran out of breath and
sank down in a chair, looking suddenly exhausted, and rather
surprised. "That was fast."
    "Are you all right?"
    He frowned, seeming to think about it. "No... I don't think
so," he said. "Let's see... how quickly I get my breath back...
and I'll tell you."
    T'Laren got up and went over to him. "You've been pushing
yourself too hard," she said severely. "You know you're not well
yet. You should have been resting, not wandering all over our
engine room for an hour and a half."
    "I'm resting now." He lay his head back against the chair,
closed his eyes, and took a few deep breaths. "I hate this."
    "Your weakness, you mean."
    "Yes." Q opened his eyes and glared at her. "And no snide
comments about how it's all my fault. I'm well aware it's my
fault, thank you."
    "I'm not in the habit of making snide comments," T'Laren
said. She decided to change the subject. "Now that you're here,
perhaps we can discuss our itinerary. Where would you like to
go?"
    "I don't know. Where is there?"
    "I had a few different places in mind." She called the
choices up on the computer, more for his sake as she remembered
them perfectly well. "The Federation Archeological Society is
having its annual conference in three weeks. This year the
conference is on Chatimore Prime in the Eyrie system. One of the
main topics of discussion: did the Chatimari evolve from the
Eyrians of Eyrie 2, 3 and 5, or did they evolve independently?"
    "They evolved independently. Actually they were dumped there
by the Preservers. But they're no relation to the Eyrians; they
just look that way because of interbreeding."
    T'Laren looked at him, trying to determine if he were
serious or not. "I don't need to know the answer. I merely wanted
to know if you wish to attend the conference."
    "It'll probably be mind-numbingly dull. Who'll be there? Is
Picard going to-- damn." Q fell silent for a moment. He stared
into nothing with a look that might have been anger, or grief. "I
keep forgetting."
    He showed every sign of becoming lost in introspective pain.
T'Laren handed him a datapad with the list of names on it. "Q.
Here's a list of the attendees."
    Q blinked and took the pad from her, shaking himself out of
the incipient depression. "Right." He studied the pad. "Dull,
dull, dull. I don't know any of these people. I suppose it might
be entertaining to crash the conference and shoot down all their
ridiculous theories, but there has to be more to life than that.
What else is there?"
    "There's the wormhole near Bajor, the one that opens up on
the Gamma Quadrant."
    "Hmm." Q considered that. "The Gamma Quadrant is an
entertaining place, but only if you've got a year or more to
spend there, even if your starship *can* go warp 13. And I'm not
sure I want to spend that much time away from civilization."
    "The Gamma Quadrant is uncivilized?"
    "You know what I mean. It's dangerous for me to be that far
away from anyone who would be sympathetic to me. The entire
universe of people I once wronged seem to know who I am, but none
of the entities I ever helped out apparently remember me."
    "Did you ever help anyone out?"
    "How sharper than a serpent's tooth is a suspicious Vulcan,"
Q said, pressing his hands to his chest in a melodramatic
gesture. "You hurt me, T'Laren, you really do. Of course I helped
people... not that most of them realized what I was doing at the
time. In fact, a large number of the people who want me dead are
people I helped. Not everyone has the perspective to understand
what's good for them."
    T'Laren had her own theories on that, but she let it pass.
"The third possibility I'd thought of was the singularity in the
Abister system. They're apparently holding an open physics
conference regarding it aboard the Yamato-- luminaries from all
over have been invited, not just members of the Federation."
    "Refresh my memory. What is this singularity?"
    "No one knows. The Yamato was stationed there, studying it,
for six weeks, and couldn't figure out what's causing it, so
Starfleet's decided to host a physics conference. Singularities
aren't supposed to simply come into existence for no apparent
reason, as I understand it, and it seems that this may pose a
threat of some kind."
    "Let me see the guest list."
    She handed it to him. He scanned it with evident glee.
"Daedalus!"
    "Who?" There was no 'Daedalus' on the guest list.
    "Dr. Peter Markow. I know him. And a Klingon-- ooh, the
redoubtable Dr. Morakh. Now this I've got to see." He frowned at
the final entry. "Who's this Professor Yalit?"
    "It says she's an associate professor at the Makropyrios."
    "I am well aware of what it says, T'Laren. I can indeed read
most Federation scripts. I thought I knew everyone associated
with the Makropyrios-- it's the most prestigious physics
institute in the Federation, and a good number of its graduates
and professorial staff have ended up on my doorstep." He
scrutinized the datapad. "This says associate professor."
    "Yes. I can read as well, Q."
    "Associate means she doesn't work there, though she might
have once and she almost certainly graduated the place. Let's see
her bio." He called up the biographical notes. These were
painfully brief-- Yalit had graduated the Makropyrios 56 years
ago, with honors, worked there as a lecturer for ten years, and
then left for parts unknown. A publication list was appended, but
with no sourcepoint for her manuscripts. "I don't believe it.
They don't even list her *species* here! What is she, a Romulan?"
    "That would be listed. And Yalit isn't a Romulan name."
    "I've never heard of this woman. Well." Q put down the
datapad. "It seems we're going to the conference on the Yamato
then. What's our ETA?"
    T'Laren did some quick calculations. "At warp 6, three
weeks."
    "Warp *6*? This ship can do warp-equivalent *13* and you
want to tootle along at *6*?"
    "You just told me that traveling at transwarp speeds can
damage our power supply. Unless it's necessary, I'd prefer not to
risk it. The conference doesn't actually begin for 18 days-- and
you need the time to recuperate. If spending an hour and a half
on your feet exhausts you, you would never make it through a two-
week conference."
    "I suppose you have a point." He leaned back in the chair
and closed his eyes again, smiling. "It's difficult to be
annoying when one has to sit down and shut up every fifteen
minutes or so."
    "If I were you, I would find something to take pride in
other than my prowess at being annoying."
    "Like what?" Q opened his eyes. "My good looks? My charm? My
usefulness to the universe? Let's face it, T'Laren, I'm a luxury.
I'm sure the Federation would like to keep me around, but they
don't *need* me. No one needs me. No one's needed me since the
Borg were defeated. Which leaves me exactly two things that I'm
good at: I'm very smart, and I'm very annoying." He shrugged.
"One needs to make the most of one's assets."
    "Making the most of one's deficits, however, is not
generally a useful policy."
    "There you go again, expecting me to be logical. Of course
it's not a useful policy. Very little of what I've done for the
past three years has been useful."
    He was trying to provoke a pointless argument. "Why don't I
walk you back to your room?" T'Laren asked. "I can show you
around Ketaya on the way."
    "Did you ever notice how often you change the subject when
you're talking to me?" Q asked.
    "Did you ever notice how often you continue to discuss a
subject after you have nothing more to say?" T'Laren replied.
    Q's eyebrows went up. "Oh, good. Very good," he said,
nodding slowly. "Very well, T'Laren. Let's go exploring." He
stood up and headed for the back of the bridge. "What's behind
this door?"
    "My quarters," T'Laren said, as the door swooshed open and
he entered.
    She followed close behind. Q was standing in the middle of
her study/living room, looking around. "The privileges of
command," he said. "This is certainly bigger than *my* quarters."
    "The captain's quarters is the largest living suite on the
ship," she said. "Then come the passenger suites, where you are,
and then the crew suites, which are rather tiny, comparatively."
    He wandered into her bedroom. T'Laren considered telling him
that that was extremely rude, and decided against it. In his
current mood, that was no doubt the effect he was aiming for.
"How long have you been living here?" he asked.
    "Four months."
    "No decorations, no pictures of the folks back home... Not
even an obscure Vulcan musical instrument to liven up the decor.
Are all the rooms you've lived in this devoid of personality, or
is it something new you're experimenting with?"
    That hit a nerve. T'Laren remembered telling Anderson that Q
could not offend her unless she chose to be offended, and
concentrated on the disciplines. "They've all been this way," she
said dryly. "It's a Vulcan meditative discipline."
    "Really." He stepped out of the bedroom. "I think you're
attempting humor."
    "If I told you that I found your behavior immensely
offensive and demanded that you stop, would that satisfy you?"
T'Laren asked calmly. "Would you stop probing for weaknesses and
behave like a rational human being? Or will you insist on playing
these games for a few more hours?"
    Q blinked at her. "Do you always do that?"
    "What?"
    "Ask questions based on a conversation's meta-structure.
Normal people don't do that. I think you've been a psychologist
too long."
    "Occasionally it helps," she said.
    "*Do* you find my behavior immensely offensive and want to
demand that I stop?"
    "Undoubtedly if I said 'yes', you would say 'good', and
continue as you've been doing."
    "I take it that means 'yes, but I'm not going to tell you
so.'"
    "You would take it incorrectly. I am aware that your
intention is that I be offended. For the sake of teaching you to
stop behaving offensively, I had considered explaining to you why
your behavior is unacceptable. I think you know why your behavior
is unacceptable, however, and right now perhaps it would be more
valuable to teach you that you cannot offend me."
    "Will you *stop doing that!*" Q exploded. "Every time I say
something you answer as if you're writing a paper on the behavior
of Q! Stop analyzing me!"
    T'Laren raised an eyebrow in an almost-smiling gesture. "It
seems I've found something that offends *you* first," she said.
    "What, is this a contest?"
    "That's your decision. Do you want this to be a contest?"
    He took a deep breath. "No-I-do-not-want-this-to-be-a-
contest," he snapped back at her on one exhalation, and ran out
of air, gasping at the end. "All right. You win. You can do the
metalevels thing as well as I can, you can treat me like an
object for study well enough to *really* get on my nerves, I
concede. You can beat me in a conversational battle anytime I'm
depressed, exhausted and half-dead. I bow to my better. What do
you want me to do?"
    She doubted the games were over-- games were far too
integral a part of the way Q dealt with people-- but the fact
that she'd gotten him to admit they were there and agree to stop
them was a good first step. "I would like for you to let me walk
you back to your room, as you're tired and irritable and could
use a rest. On the way I could show you around the ship, or we
can wait for another time."
    "Fine. Show me around the ship. Whatever."
    T'Laren had heard more enthusiastic reactions in her time,
but at least he was cooperating.
    Ketaya's body was that of a Tamlin-class luxury yacht, a
small ship designed for 2-6 crewmembers and with the ability to
carry up to four passengers, more if they roomed together.
Tamlin-class ships could be privately owned by wealthy people as
their personal transportation, or could be used by a small crew
for ferrying passengers on pleasure cruises. As a result, it was
slightly schizoid, trying in different locations to be either
cozy or luxurious. The observation deck definitely fell on the
luxurious side. T'Laren guided Q back onto the bridge and out the
door in the front, leading onto the balcony for the forward
dining room/observation room. This room spanned three of Ketaya's
four decks, occupying almost all of the forward bow, with a
curved transparent plasteel surface forming the ceiling and three
of the walls, exposing the stars. Right now they were in warp, so
the computer-imaging function was in effect, turning the bizarre
spacescape of subspace into a normal-looking sea of rapidly
moving stars. "This is the main dining room and lounge," T'Laren
said. "We're on the Deck 1 balcony." She gestured downward.
Below, on Deck 2, were six tables, and the pit on Deck 3
contained a fountain, currently deactivated. "This room is
primarily intended for guests aboard a space yacht; I doubt we'll
be using it much."
    "Oh, I agree." Q scowled at the starscape. "This is
horrendously overdone."
    She stepped back onto the bridge and walked around its
perimeter. "This is our transport platform, and down this way, as
you've already discovered, is engineering." T'Laren stepped on
the turbo-platform down to engineering. After a moment, Q joined
her.
    They descended past engineering on Deck 2 down to Deck 3.
"Sickbay's up on Deck 2, along with the crew's quarters, and on
Deck 4, on either side of the airlocks, we keep maintenance
equipment and supply closets." T'Laren stepped off the platform
as it stopped on Deck 3, and Q followed. "This is the passenger
level, so most of the facilities are here. Down that way " she
pointed toward the back of the ship-- "is the swimming pool, the
sauna, and the gym. Right here is the kitchen."
    "What's the point to having a kitchen aboard a starship?" Q
asked. "Don't tell me you can cook."
    T'Laren shrugged. "If you insist," she said. "You've already
dumped your bags in your room, so I presume you know where it is.
If you'd rather have any of the other rooms for some reason,
they're all along this corridor."
    "Who created this monstrosity?" Q stopped in the middle of
the corridor. "I mean, yes, obviously Lhoviri created it, but was
the internal design plan *his* idea? Or did you make this up?"
    "It's a Tamlin-class yacht, with some slight modifications
that I assume are to accommodate the drive. I suggested that he
use this type of plan-- when I was young, my parents took me on a
trip to Vulcan, and we traveled in a Tamlin-class ship. Why?"
    "Because it looks like what would happen if you crossed a
starfaring home with a pleasure liner, an unaesthetic combination
at best. And who designed the decor, and what is their fetish for
the color green?"
    "I did. I like green. If you would prefer a different decor,
by all means design one." She walked to the door of his room and
touched the "open" panel, gesturing for him to go into his room.
    Q went in and collapsed on his bed. "It is unbelievable how
quickly I get tired," he murmured. "I can't even seem to sustain
a conversation."
    What he meant, T'Laren thought, was that he couldn't seem to
sustain a pointless argument, though he was certainly trying his
best. "If you want to take a nap, it'll be a few hours before
we're having dinner."
    "I can't take a nap. I can't sleep without a sedative." He
rolled over and stared at her. "What do you mean by a few hours
before dinner? Is there some set time during which the
replicators produce food, and at no other time can we get a
meal?"
    "I would like you to eat with me, in the kitchen."
    "Why?"
    "Eating together is an important social connector for
humans."
    "It's meaningless to me and you're a Vulcan, so why bother?"
    "You're missing the point," T'Laren said sharply. "I'm here
to teach you how to make social connections with your own
species, not Vulcans. What is meaningless to you is meaningful to
others and costs you very little. So you are going to develop the
habit of eating with other people."
    "And if I refuse?"
    "You will get very hungry."
    Q sat up. "You'd lock me out of the replicator system?"
    "I already have," T'Laren said. "You can't use a replicator
without my supervision." At Q's look of outrage, she tilted her
head slightly. "Consider, Q. Would I be sensible to let a known
suicide risk use a replicator freely?"
    Q's eyes narrowed. "Am I confined to my quarters without
your supervision too?"
    "No."
    "But that would be sensible, too. Why would you let a known
suicide risk walk around freely? I could find my way back to the
airlocks and space myself. Or drown myself in the swimming pool."
    "You could," T'Laren said, nodding. Actually he couldn't.
There were safety interlocks on the airlocks so they couldn't be
opened with a person inside, and the swimming pool would rapidly
drain itself if its biosensors sensed a person in danger of
drowning in it. But she saw no need to tell him that-- he would
interpret it as a challenge and work to get around it, even if he
didn't actually plan to kill himself. "I don't think you will,
though."
    "Then why aren't you letting me use the replicators?" He
stood up and walked over to her. "This is some kind of power
trip, isn't it. You're as bad as Anderson. You simply want to
control my life." Q loomed over T'Laren. "Isn't that it?"
    T'Laren craned her head up to look at him and made no move
from her position.  Her unshakable calm would make him look
paranoid, automatically defusing his argument. It was a useful
technique. "You have twice attempted to kill yourself on what
appeared to be a momentary impulse. Correct me if I'm wrong, but
it seems as if your first two suicide attempts were not planned
in advance. At some moment, it suddenly struck you that your life
was unbearable, and you took the first opportunity at hand to
correct the situation. Am I right?"
    "The third time was planned. I planned that for a month."
    T'Laren nodded. "The third time was also far more serious. I
think you gave a lot of thought to your decision, and tried to
find some other solution. It was less that you wanted to die than
that you thought death was the only alternative to your pain. I
have presented you with another possible alternative, and I
believe you want to try to make this work. You would rather be
happy than dead, am I correct?"
    Q stepped back from her with a snort of contempt. "Of
*course* I'd rather be happy than dead. Anyone would. What kind
of a stupid question is that?"
    "And you are an intelligent man, and aware that if this
solution is to work, it'll take some time to take effect. You
will give me at least a month or two to prove that you can be
happy before deciding that this is hopeless and the best solution
is still death. Yes?"
    "Thank you for putting words in my mouth."
    "Am I right?"
    Q glared. "Yes, yes. You're right, you're perfectly correct,
you're practically omniscient, now get to the point!"
    "I don't need to protect you from planned suicides, Q. For a
while, at least, you won't plan your own death-- you'll give me
some leeway to try to help you. What I need to protect you from
is a sudden overwhelming surge of despair that drowns out your
reason. I am afraid that if you had a close, convenient, painless
method of suicide at hand-- as you would, if you had access to
the replicators-- you might be possessed by a sudden desperate
desire for oblivion and act on it. If it took a few minutes to
arrange your own death, you would have time to reconsider and let
your reason reassert itself." She walked over to him, took his
hand, and guided him gently over to his bed. "And whether you
want to admit it or not, you're glad I took the precaution. You
know you cannot entirely trust yourself, and you're glad that
someone is thinking of how to catch you if you falter."
    He looked as if he would argue with her for a moment. Then
he sat down on the bed, resigned and exhausted-looking. "I
suppose you're right," he whispered, almost silently-- it might
have been inaudible to a human. He looked up at her. "You win.
Call me when you want to have dinner-- I'll be unpacking, or
resting, or something."
    "You should sleep. You look exhausted."
    "I am exhausted, but that doesn't mean I'd be able to sleep.
My mind isn't tired, just this feeble shell it's trapped in. I'll
be all right if I simply rest for an hour or two."
    "All right then." She suspected he'd fall asleep anyway, but
it wasn't worth pressing the point. "I'll get you for dinner in a
few hours."

    To her surprise, he was not asleep when she came to get him.
He was sitting on the floor with the replicator partially
disassembled around him, scowling intently at it. "Excuse me,"
T'Laren said. "What *are* you doing?"
    Q looked up at her and grinned embarrassedly. "Oh, hello,
T'Laren."
    "Am I to take it that you're doing something I would
disapprove of?"
    "I don't believe you ever said I couldn't try to bypass your
security lock," he said, the picture of innocence.
    T'Laren shook her head slightly. "How long will it take you
to put that back together?"
    "Two minutes if I give up on the bypass. This is cleverly
done. Did Lhoviri set up this security system for you?"
    "No. I put it in myself."
    "I thought you said you weren't an engineer." He started to
replace the pieces he'd removed.
    "I'm not. But I used to--" She hesitated, thinking how to
phrase this. "On my old ship, the chief engineer was a fellow
Vulcan, and at one point he placed a software security lock on
the replicator in my quarters. I had a friend bypass it for me.
So he put in a hardware lock. In order to get access to my
replicator, I studied replicator technology and asked another of
the engineers to teach me how to disassemble the lock. In the
process, I learned how to assemble one as well, as well as a good
deal of other mostly useless information about replicators."
    "Why did the chief engineer do that?"
    She shrugged slightly. "Probably for the same reason I put
the lock on your replicator. He... was aware that I was unwell,
though he could not quite identify how. Are you finished?"
    "More or less." He stood up. "I really need access to the
replicators, T'Laren. You can make up some kind of list of
dangerous items you don't want me to have-- you can download the
list from Starbase 56 if you want to-- but I've got to have
access to the replicators."

    "I'll consider it," T'Laren said. "Come on."

    She had thought about cooking a meal for them both, but it
seemed like a great deal of effort to go to for someone who was
not yet capable of appreciating the gesture, so they both ordered
from the kitchen replicator. The kitchen was a small, cozy thing
with a table big enough to seat six, two replicators, a full set
of cooking equipment, and staples in a stasis cabinet. The supply
of staples was low-- T'Laren kept meaning to replicate
replacements, and never got around to it. She had three sayings
in Vulcan hanging on scrolls in various locations in the kitchen,
imitating her mother's habit of putting up homey mottoes without
the incredible sappiness of the mottoes her mother had used.
    "What's that say?" Q asked, pointing at one.
    "Mmm." T'Laren studied it, trying to think how to render it.
"It's a poem from a children's story-- a work by T'Neer, the
Vulcan equivalent of Lewis Carroll."
    "There *is* a Vulcan equivalent of Lewis Carroll?"
    "Not quite, but close. Her work is considered either absurd
or disturbing, and usually said to be unsuitable for children,
despite which children read all of her books."
    "What's it *say*, though?"
    "I'm trying to translate... I'll have to render it in prose,
I'm no poet. '"But don't you like my gift?" Lhoviri asked. "This
is what you wanted, isn't it? Why, I distinctly recall you asking
for this in particular. Don't tell me you don't want it now!" And
no one did tell him that. Because there was no one there who
could speak anymore.'"
    "Oh." Q nodded, grinning. "Your  benefactor must find that
one vastly entertaining."
    "I wouldn't know. He never mentioned it."
    "What about that one?" He pointed at another.
    "It's a witticism. I'm not sure it would translate well into
English."
    "Try."
    "'Those who spend all their time examining their own logic
really ought to have their logic examined.'" At Q's look, she
explained, "It's funny in Vulcan."
    "I'm sure," Q said blandly.
    T'Laren bent over her meal, focused on eating. A minute
passed in silence. Finally Q said, "What do people talk about at
these things?"
    "Generally one avoids talking about anything unpleasant.
Aside from that, however, any topic is acceptable." She looked
up. "For instance, we could discuss the fact that you are about
20% underweight, have no muscle tone to speak of, and desperately
need to build up your strength, and yet you are eating nothing
but a small bowl of linguine in butter sauce and a sugary
chocolate drink."
    Q shrugged. "I wasn't that hungry. Does the replicator know
about the supplement I need? Li says I won't be able to digest
properly on my own for a few months, I have to have a supplement
in my food to help digest it."
    "Yes. Do you realize you have no vegetables, no meat, no
dairy products-- nothing but starch and sugar and a smattering of
fats in the butter sauce? There's not a vitamin to be found in
what you're eating."
    "I'm sure there's one or two."
    "Q, you're badly underweight. You were thin before you
destroyed your entire intestinal tract and needed to be placed on
life-support for two weeks, and you're close to skeletal now. Eat
some meat. Vegetables. Something. That meal would not satisfy
*me*, and my ideal weight is half yours."
    Q sighed. "I told you, I'm not that hungry. Besides, I
thought starch was supposed to be good for gaining weight."
    "I thought so too, until I met a man who eats nothing but
carbohydrates and looks like he's starving to death." T'Laren's
eyes narrowed. "I think this is another of your subconscious
self-destruct attempts. Tomorrow you're going on a diet and
exercise regimen."
    "You want me to *exercise?* In my condition?" Q stared at
her as if she'd just told him to breathe water. "T'Laren, I can't
stay on my feet for half an hour without getting winded and you
think I should *exercise?*"
    "How do you expect to get into better shape?"
    "Let my body heal itself. It's good at that. That's what
it's evolved for."
    "You need to build up muscle and stamina. Your body can't
heal itself if you don't give it raw materials to build with, and
it'll heal faster if you use it." She shook her head. "That is
not a young body, Q. It's by no means an old one, but it's
physiologically at least in its 30's. It can't take this kind of
abuse."
    "It is so a young body. It was in perfect health three years
ago. Well, except for a tendency toward a bad back, but aside
from that it was in perfect health, and it's only three years old
chronologically."
    "That doesn't matter. Physiologically it was past its peak
when you got it. Why did you choose to be in your 30's? Why not
pick, say, 18?"
    Q picked at his food. ""If they'd given me time to think, I
certainly would have asked for it younger. And with no bad back.
And no tendency to hair loss. And while I was at it, I'd have
given it an ESP rating considerably higher than human average,
built up its muscular structure and increased its senses to human
maximum. If I'd had time, I might even have chosen a completely
different body. I might have chosen to be female. Women get a lot
more sympathy than men, I've noticed." He looked up. "But they
didn't give me time.
    "I'd taken this body originally for a completely different
purpose. I wanted a form specifically designed to be intimidating
and challenging on an intellectual and authoritarian level, and I
was aiming it at Picard. I chose a male body, younger than Picard
but old enough to have some authority, taller and stronger-
looking than Picard, because human men instinctively respond to
strange human males as potential threats, especially stronger,
taller ones closer to their physical peak. This is a subconscious
thing, mind you-- most men aren't aware they do it, but they do.
They also learn equally subconscious techniques for defusing the
threat that they themselves present to other men. Unfortunately,
I never bothered to study those techniques when I was a Q, and
now I'm stuck. While the body of a challenger is ideal when one
intends a challenge, it is a very bad idea when one wants
sympathy. As a human, I'd have done a lot better in a weaker-
looking body-- as I said, perhaps a female one, perhaps an
adolescent one, though adolescents don't get much sympathy
either. Alternately, I'd have done better if this body actually
was the specimen of physical perfection that it was when I was
omnipotent. I didn't check for genetic booby traps back when it
was irrelevant to me, and when I said I wanted to be human, they
automatically put me in the human form I'd most often manifested
in, without giving me time to fix it up."
    "Where did you get this form?"
    "Stole it. I picked this one up about a hundred years ago.
There's a story behind it, but not one I much feel like telling.
Suffice it to say that with minor modifications it's genetically
identical to a man who died more or less a century ago."
    "I thought your first contact with humanity was six years
ago."
    Q smiled thinly. "I have rather given that impression,
haven't I."
    "Time travel?"
    "Or outright lies. Take your pick. I prefer to be mysterious
and secretive, myself." He leaned forward, widening his eyes
slightly. "And I don't appear to be alone. Every time you've told
me anything about your own background, you've phrased it in as
vague terms as possible. Believe me, as a master of vagueness
myself, it's an impressive performance. But it does lead me to
wonder what you're hiding."
    T'Laren frowned. "Hiding? It's less that I'm hiding
something than that my life is simply uninteresting."
    "Oh, come now. A Vulcan raised in Texas, working as a
psychologist, drummed out of Starfleet for mental illness, and
you say your background is uninteresting? How can it be anything
but interesting?"
    Perhaps it was a good thing that he was showing an interest
in other people's histories-- it usually did indicate that a
person was becoming less self-centered. T'Laren did wish,
however, that it wasn't her history in particular that he was
interested in. "What do you want to know?"
    "To begin with, why Texas? Were your parents diplomats or
teachers of some sort? What were they doing on Earth, and more
importantly, what were they doing in Texas?"
    "They lived there," T'Laren said dryly. "My parents were
humans."
    Q stared at her for several seconds with a disbelieving
expression before the light dawned. "Ah. *Adoptive* parents. I
see."
    "Yes. I was adopted by a human couple."
    "Why?"
    This story was harmless enough, and if she could keep him at
the table a while longer, perhaps he would finish his food.
T'Laren turned to the replicator, called up rolls and dessert
pastries, and put them on the table, hoping that Q would take one
to snack on. She then leaned back and began the story.
    "My natural mother, T'Lal, was a Starfleet officer. At the
appointed time, she took leave on Vulcan--"
    "The appointed time?" Q interrupted, picking up a cheese
pastry.
    "The time of marriage. Most Vulcans are bonded to their
mates in childhood, and at the appointed time, they come together
on Vulcan. She went to Vulcan and married my biological father,
but... something happened, and he died during their first week
together."
    Q interrupted again with his mouth full. "By hedging about
and saying 'something happened', do you mean you don't want to
tell me what happened or you don't know?"
    "I don't know. My parents didn't know, because T'Lal never
told them, and my Vulcan family wouldn't talk about it. It was
undoubtedly something too shameful to discuss with a child or
with outsiders. This sort of thing occasionally happens in Vulcan
marriages; there are a number of possible causes. In any case,
she returned to her ship, pregnant with me. At that time, it was
Starfleet policy to allow children under five, if the Starfleet
parent was custodial or if both parents were in Starfleet.
Civilian adult spouses were permitted aboard only if they could
perform some useful function, for instance scientists. T'Lal had
a close platonic friendship with my father, the chief engineer,
and with his wife, a civilian geologist. Starfleet required-- and
still does-- that custodial Starfleet parents declare a guardian
for their child in the event of their death. Since my natural
mother's family was scattered throughout space, and she had no
contact with the family of her mate, she asked my father to be my
guardian, and he agreed.
    "When I was four years old, T'Lal died on an away mission.
The Dorsets took me in, and when I turned five my adoptive mother
moved to Earth with me, back to the family's estate in Texas.
When I was eight, my father was promoted to an administrative job
on Earth, supervising the design of new starships. So they raised
me together until I was sixteen, at which point my natural
father's family tracked me down. They asked for custody of me, on
the grounds that I could not possibly be fully exposed to my
Vulcan heritage if raised on Earth by human parents, and my
parents saw... the logic in that. So I went to Vulcan."
    Q frowned. "Wait a minute. You were sixteen? I admit to
knowing little about human childhoods, or Vulcan for that matter,
but I would think the damage would have been done by that time."
*It was*, T'Laren thought, but didn't say. Q continued, "Did you
have any say in this? Did they just hand you over, just like
that?"
    "No. I..." Emotions rose to the surface, emotions she'd long
thought she'd eliminated. "You cannot understand what it's like
to grow up an alien. To be raised surrounded by people who on a
very fundamental level are not like you. I loved my adoptive
parents, and I had friends on Earth, and I was happy there.
But... Vulcan was my homeworld. I had dreamed about it all my
life. I wanted desperately to be a proper Vulcan, to learn the
disciplines fully, to be like I imagined my dead mother to be.
When my father's cousin Sepat came to claim me, I went with him
quite willingly."
    "You sound as if you think it was a bad idea."
    T'Laren hesitated, studying her hands. "Perhaps it was."
    Q leaned forward. "I asked Sekal about the Vulcan
disciplines once. He told me that while humans can't learn the
disciplines at all, even Vulcans need to start very young, or the
attempt to control their emotions leads to instability and
insanity." He met her eyes and held them. "Is that what happened
to you?"
    After a moment T'Laren dropped her gaze again. "I don't
know." She looked up. "I wasn't completely undisciplined when I
went to Vulcan. Since I was five, I'd been going to a Vulcan
tutor every week. He lived in Dallas, about half an hour by
maglev from my home, and he taught me the fundamentals. But...
Vulcan discipline isn't something you can pick up in two-hour
lessons once a week. It's something you have to live. It's
reinforced by everyone around you. And in my case, it wasn't."
    She picked up one of the rolls and bit into it, continuing
as she ate. "My parents wanted to be very supportive. They paid
for my lessons, they told me that if I wanted to be Vulcan they
were happy with my choice, they got me books on Vulcan and even
took me on a few vacations there. But on Vulcan, if a little girl
spontaneously throws her arms around her father and hugs him, she
is gently reproved for her emotionality. When I did it, my father
smiled indulgently and hugged me back. Intellectually they
understood that I should achieve emotional control, but... they
were only human. When I was properly controlled, they perceived
me as being cold to them, and it hurt them. And my friends were
far worse. They didn't even make an attempt to make allowances
for my being Vulcan-- if I wanted to play with them, I had to act
like a human being. So I studied the disciplines, but I didn't
use them to master my emotions. I couldn't. There was too much
pressure on me to be emotional. Instead, I learned how to hide my
emotions if I chose, and how to project different emotions than
what I felt. I studied human behavior constantly, obsessively,
and I learned to pretend and to lie, to wear a thousand different
masks. That isn't Vulcan behavior."
    "And trying to imitate real Vulcan behavior drove you nuts?"
    "It wasn't that simple."
    "T'Laren-- if it was that hard for you to be a Vulcan, why
did you even bother? Why didn't you just quit trying?"
    That approached territory she definitely did not want to
discuss or talk about. "I was under... pressures that you cannot
possibly understand. I had to be Vulcan. It was immensely
important to me." She thought of how it had been, stretched so
thin between Soram's demands that she be a proper Vulcan and her
own desperate emotional needs. Her Vulcan act had always been
flawed, because it was emotion that drove her to such an act, an
emotion so violent and consuming that it had snapped her in the
end. If not for Lhoviri, it would have destroyed her.
    Actually, it *had* destroyed her. When Lhoviri had found
her, she had been dead.
    "T'Laren? Are you all right?"
    She came back to the present. "Fine. Just... remembering."
She shook her head. "I would really rather discuss something
else, Q."
    "I think... I can understand how you felt," he said. "Which
would be a first, I admit. I don't normally understand anything
anyone feels. But... I do know a little bit about what that's
like."
    "Do you?" she asked. "Did you grow up an alien? Do you know
what it's like to finally be part of your own kind, and discover
that they are more alien to you than the aliens you were raised
among?"
    "I didn't grow up an alien," he said. "I grew up as part of
something that later decided I was inferior, unsuitable, and
threw me out to live among aliens. The situation's not identical,
I know. But I can sympathize." He smiled ironically. "In terms of
the Q lifespan and our stages of development, I am approximately
at the same stage you were when you went to Vulcan. You, at
least, chose to go."
    "You're sixteen? Approximately?"
    Q shrugged. "There's no exact analogy. We measure
development by maturity itself, not an artificial indicator like
chronological age. And those at my stage of development are
considered adults, in the sense that our children don't
participate in the Continuum overmind and I do. Did. But as I
understand it, the closest human equivalent to my stage of
development would be the stage of adolescence, yes. The stage in
which one makes the transition from child to mature adult,
attempts to find one's place in one's society... and runs the
greatest risk of self-destructing, one way or another. That's
adolescence, right?"
    "Yes."
    "Then that's me." He looked down. "I should say, 'was me'. I
don't know what I am in human terms, but what I am in Q society,
right now, is a failure, an outcast, a lesser being. The great
experiment that was me failed. Back to the drawing board."
    "The great experiment? Were you-- in some sense designed
differently than your fellows?"
    "Oh, no, no, no. That's not what I meant." He leaned
forward. "Every infant Q created is an experiment. We don't
reproduce to replace ourselves-- only our adolescents can
possibly die, and that only if the rest of the Q weeds them out.
We produce new Q to provide different points of view, new
perspectives, to add to the range that the Continuum covers. And
if a particular perspective turns out to be not worth the trouble
it causes, it gets weeded out in adolescence. Failed experiments,
time and effort down the drain. Either a flawed design, or
something in the errant entity's life experience, has caused it
to become useless or dangerous to the Continuum. So we kill it,
or reabsorb it..." He stared down at the table. "Or make it
mortal and let it die of natural causes. I'm not the first this
has happened to." His voice had a wavering edge to it, and a
heavy dose of bitter pain.
    "Have any of the others ever been taken back?" T'Laren asked
gently.
    Q looked up at her, eyes bright with unshed tears. "Not that
I can remember," he said, his voice beginning to break.
    Then he pushed away from the table and stood, shaking his
head violently. "This is stupid. I'm obviously overtired. Can I
have my sedative now?"
    T'Laren shook her head. "You do look exhausted," she said.
"But if you're that tired, you shouldn't need a sedative."
    "It doesn't matter how tired I am, I can't sleep without a
sedative. Could you just give me one, and save the argument for
tomorrow?"
    "I don't like you constantly taking sedatives. Your health
is poor as it is. It sounds as if you've grown dangerously
dependent on them." She stood up. "I think it would be best if we
got you off them as soon as possible. I don't want you taking
sedatives when you're this weak."
    Q stared at her in disbelief. "You're not going to give me a
sedative."
    "Correct."
    "But I *need* it." He sat down heavily and swallowed. "Do I
have to beg?" he asked harshly.
    "Explain to me why you need a sedative. What symptoms do you
experience that prevent you from sleeping?"
    "Well, to begin with, I'm in constant pain." His voice was
sharp and challenging. "I told you already, I'm constantly
plagued with aches and pains. My neck, my back, my head, my
stomach, all hurt all the time. I can ignore them when I'm awake
to a small extent, but they take over when I'm trying to sleep.
If you won't let me have a sedative, can I have a painkiller?"
    "I don't want you dependent on them, either." T'Laren walked
around behind him and reached toward his shoulder. Q flinched.
    "What are you doing?" he demanded, sounding frightened.
    "Checking something." She took his shoulders in each hand
and felt for tension with thumbs and fingers. His neck and back
were rigid, his muscles like duranium cables. "Try to relax."
    "But what are you *doing*?"
    "A large part of your pain seems to be coming from tension.
Q, I'm not going to hurt you or do anything you'd find
unpleasant. Please relax."
    He relaxed slightly. She could see it in the set of his
shoulders, hear it in the soft release of held breath. But she
could barely feel the relaxation at all-- his back muscles were
still rigid. His spine was badly out of alignment, the muscles in
his back having gradually tugged it into an unnatural
configuration.
    T'Laren released him and stepped back. "All right. I believe
I know how to fix the problem."
    "Really." His voice was flat and disbelieving.
    "Come with me." She left the kitchen. Q stood up and
followed.
    "Are we going to sickbay? I don't need an adjustment. I just
need a painkiller. Or a sedative. Either would do."
    "We're not going to sickbay," she said, and palmed open his
suite's door.
    "Why are we going to my room?" he asked nervously, following
her inside.
    "Lie down."
    "I-- no." He backed away from her toward the exit. "Tell me
what you're going to do."
    "I'm going to fix your back so you can sleep. Now lie down."
    Q scrutinized her suspiciously. "This doesn't have anything
to do with sex, does it?"
    T'Laren blinked in surprise before she could control the
reaction. Where had he gotten that from? "No. It has nothing to
do with sex, I assure you. I'm just going to fix your back."
    That seemed to lessen his nervousness, but not eliminate it
entirely. He sat down on the bed, but made no move to lie down.
"Do I have to take off my shirt?"
    The answer, T'Laren suspected, had to be 'no' or he would
balk again. "It isn't necessary. It would make things easier, but
I can work with your shirt on. And no, you do not need to remove
any other articles of clothing either, though I suspect you would
be more comfortable with your shipboots off."
    Q lay down on his back, making no move to take his boots
off. T'Laren wondered why he was so incredibly nervous. Medellin
and his file had both said that he was celibate by choice, and
that he claimed this was because he considered sex disgusting and
beneath him. He had never demonstrated any problem with the
relief of pain, however, and there was nothing in his files to
indicate a phobia of being touched. Perhaps he'd been reading too
many books where a massage led to seduction-- though even then,
this wasn't disgust. This was fear.  It occurred to T'Laren to
wonder if someone had molested him somehow in the past three
years-- surely sexuality would not carry sufficient value to
members of the Q Continuum that he should be terrified of the
possibility.
    "You have to turn over," T'Laren said. "I can't reach your
back."
    He did so. "Are you sure this has nothing to do with sex?"
he asked, his voice somewhat muffled against the bed.
    "Positive. Backrubs can be used as a form of foreplay or
seduction, but by themselves they are completely platonic. I
assure you, there is nothing sexual in this. Now relax."
    She reached down and found the nexii of tension under the
shoulderblades with her fingertips, digging in slowly. Q made a
sharp noise, jerked and turned his head with an expression of
outrage that quickly faded to puzzlement. "That felt good," he
said, surprised.
    "It's supposed to. Lie still and let me finish."
    He lay his head back down on the bed, pillowing it on his
arms. "I've gone to sickbay to have my back fixed in several
extreme cases. The remedy usually was almost worse than the
problem."
    "This is a massage, not a chiropractic adjustment-- although
I think you need that, too. Once I've relaxed the muscles, we'll
adjust your spine. It only hurt you before because you were too
tense." She probed the area around his shoulderblades with
slender fingers, varying the pressure as she located the worst
points. The tension in the muscles slowly started to ease under
her fingers. Q sighed.
    "Mm. I thought the only kind of massage that was supposed to
feel good was the sexual kind. The other kind was supposed to be
painful, or it wasn't a good massage."
    "You're talking about rolfing. That's only one school of
thought. Most people acknowledge that a therapeutic massage
should feel good." She moved up from the shoulderblades to the
collar and neck area.
    "Ohh. This really feels quite astonishingly good. Where did
you learn to *do* this?"
    T'Laren herself relaxed slightly. She enjoyed making people
feel good, and it was considerably more pleasant when they
acknowledged that it was working, instead of challenging and
resisting her. "Part of Vulcan training. In order to properly
control our bodies, which is necessary for mastering our
emotions, we need a thorough knowledge of our own neuroanatomy.
As it happens, Vulcan spinal neuroanatomy is virtually identical
to nearly every other humanoid race's. That's why the nerve pinch
works; it is actually just a side effect of our training. Only
Vulcans in Starfleet and in security positions are really good at
it, since we're the only ones who practice it a lot. The same
goes for backrubs; while any Vulcan would know the techniques in
theory, few have practiced it. Vulcans use self-relaxation
techniques instead. I, however, lived among humans, so I ended up
practicing a great deal, first on my parents and then my
classmates at the Academy."
    "Well, you're very good. If you ever decide to quit the
psychology business, you have a brilliant future as a
chiropractor. Or a masseuse. I'll personally write you a letter
of recommendation. Ohh. This is *astonishing*."
    He sounded almost dazed, as if he couldn't believe he could
possibly feel good. T'Laren wondered how much pain he'd actually
been in, and if that could have anything to do with his
depression. If he really had been suffering physically for some
time, that could well be a component of his desire to escape his
life. "I'm glad you find it pleasant," she said, and moved up to
the bare skin on the back of his neck. Here she could feel the
tension more powerfully than through his clothes, with the
distant currents of his mind tantalizing the edge of her
consciousness, a faint shadowy wash of pain receding to pleasure.
With a small effort, she shielded her mind.
    Q suddenly tensed, his head moving up. "You people are
touch-telepaths, aren't you."
    "We are, but I've shielded my mind against you," she said,
wondering why he brought that up now. He couldn't have sensed the
brief almost-contact; she had been passively receiving, making no
active attempt to link, and Q's ESP rating was no better than
human average. He would have had to have been reading her mind to
know that she could have opened a link to his, and that was
beyond his capabilities now. "Also, unshielded physical contact
itself doesn't form a link; an active effort of concentration is
needed to open a telepathic channel, preferably at one of the
meld points. And if I tried to form a meld, you'd know it. My
touching your skin alone doesn't permit me to read your mind, Q."
She wasn't going to mention that the back of the neck was a meld
point. What he didn't know wouldn't needlessly frighten him.
    "Oh." He relaxed. Probably he hadn't noticed anything at
all; he was just paranoid about having his mind read. T'Laren
imagined she would be in his position, too. To be so immensely
powerful on a telepathic scale that others' minds were an open
book, and yet they could only sense you at all if you chose; and
then to be suddenly stripped of that power, one's mind naked and
psionically defenseless... that *would* be somewhat horrifying.
    The brief moment of fear had caused a mild tensing-up all
throughout his back again. She moved down from his neck-- he
could probably use a temple massage, too, but things like that
would have to wait until he was more secure with her telepathy--
and down his back again, finding the muscle clusters and rubbing
them into submission. Probably he could use her ministrations on
his buttocks and the backs of his legs as well, but that again
would have to wait until he was more secure.
    "I think I'll teach you some elementary biofeedback and
relaxation techniques," she said. "There's no reason you should
have to be in such pain."
    "Could I learn that?" he asked.
    "I don't see why not. Humans have developed relaxation and
meditative techniques themselves, so I know there's no biological
reason you can't do it. You'd never be able to achieve a Vulcan
level of control, but I think you would feel much better about
your life if you had any modicum of control over your own body,
however small."
    "I agree. Ohh. Yes. Right there." He moaned as she pressed
her fingers into the small of his back, on either side of his
spine. "This is unbelievable. Why don't Starfleet medics learn
how to do this?"
    "Most of them do, but it's something done for friends, not
as a treatment. Starfleet personnel are all trained in some sort
of personal relaxation technique, so they don't need this sort of
thing as badly as you apparently do, and most of them have
friends."
    "Really. It never occurred to me that having friends
provided any sort of physical benefit. I'd always thought the
advantage was mostly emotional."
    "Body and mind are linked. You should know that by now."
    "Mine aren't."
    That was such an outrageous thing to say that T'Laren had to
assume he meant it as a joke, though he'd spoken in a perfectly
serious tone of voice. She didn't reply directly. "Humans have a
deep psychological need for physical contact with their fellows.
It's one of the major differences between humans and Vulcans.
Vulcans have a deep psychological need for telepathic contact
with their fellows, but if that requirement is fulfilled we have
no real need to touch each other. Humans, having no telepathy,
need physical contact."
    "And what if they don't get it?"
    "They generally become very unhappy, which has a profound
physical effect. Unhappiness can cause tension, stomachaches,
headaches and muscle spasms. Over time, it can cause drastic
weight loss, accelerate hair loss, and increase the apparent
speed of aging."
    "Oh, very funny," Q muttered. He turned his head to look up
at her. "Are you trying to say that I'm unhappy because I lack
physical contact with human beings?"
    "Not at all. You are unhappy for multiple and complex
reasons, primary among which is the fact that you have been
deprived of most of your abilities and exiled to a life you are
unsuited for. No one would deny that. But your lack of positive
social contact is another of the reasons, exacerbating the
problem, and the lack of physical contact is merely a small
aspect of the lack of social contact. I doubt having friends
could make you happy, but it could make your life bearable enough
that you could continue to hold on in hope of reinstatement. And
if your life were more bearable, you wouldn't be under so much
stress, and so you wouldn't be in so much pain. Doesn't that make
sense to you?"
    He sighed. "I'd like to argue with you. I hate the idea that
I could be so dependent on other people. Bad enough I need them
to protect me, I have to have them like me too? But it's far too
obvious that-- ohh-- you've just demonstrated that-- put it this
way. I have obviously been missing out on something. And if any
of this positive social contact nonsense could make me feel half
as good as you are doing now, it's definitely something I want to
look into. Ohhh. Why didn't anyone ever *tell* me this was
possible?"
    T'Laren raised an eyebrow. Medellin had been trying to get
the idea that he should try to make friends through his head for
three years. Apparently all it would have taken was a skilled
backrub. She would have to call Medellin and suggest the
technique for future reference. "People told you several times it
was possible for you to feel good. You ignored them or dismissed
their suggestions as disgusting, unnecessary or impossible."
    "You're right," he murmured. "I'm an idiot, T'Laren. But I'm
so used to hurting now that if something comes along that sounds
like it might be pleasant, I think there has to be a catch
somewhere. Or I think about what it's going to end up costing me
in the long run. Ohhh. I never thought-- I could get so used to
pain-- that its relief would seem so exquisite. I really can't
get over how good this feels. I'm trying to remember if I ever
felt this kind of pleasure when I was omnipotent, and you know, I
must have, but I can't remember a single incident. This is just
*unbelievable*."
    T'Laren frowned slightly. Backrubs were pleasant, but not
*that* much so. She wondered if Q overreacted to pleasure to the
same extent that he did to pain, or if it was because he had been
desperately starved for humanoid contact. Or possibly both. He
was reacting more like a virgin who had just discovered sex than
a man receiving his first massage. On the other hand, if it could
get him to freely admit that she was right and he was an idiot,
perhaps she should not complain of his overreaction.
    She had worked her way back up to his neck by this time, and
now slowly started to rub his scalp, running her fingers through
his hair as she gradually worked over to his temples. She wanted
to see if he was ready to trust her yet. He had to know that the
temples were some of the primary meld points; Vulcan mindmelds
were featured often enough in fiction and holofilms that she
didn't think anyone who read as voraciously as he did could avoid
knowing it. But when she reached to rub his temples, cautiously,
he didn't jerk or flinch or do anything except lie bonelessly
under her hands. At least for now, he seemed to trust her not to
invade his mind.
    She lifted her hands away from his temples. "I'm going to
straighten your spine now," she told him. "It won't hurt, but it
will feel a little bit unusual. I don't want you to become afraid
or tense up."
    "If you wanted to break my neck right now, I'd let you," Q
murmured. "Do what you will with me."
    T'Laren pressed one hand against the small of his back, held
his left shoulder with the other, and pulled. Q released his
breath explosively, but made no attempt to resist as she pressed
the heels of her palms against his spine, pushing the vertebra
into place. She repeated this several times, moving up his back,
then took his head in her hands and twisted it hard,
straightening the spine in the back of the neck. Then she
released him and stroked his back lightly, soothing any residual
tension as she checked her work. "You need to increase muscle
tone in your back, and to learn some relaxation exercises, for
this to be permanent. But for the next day or two, I think your
back won't give you any trouble."
    "Mmm." He turned his head to face her, a lazy, happy smile
on his face. "Thank you. That does feel much better."
    T'Laren walked over to the replicator and ordered a cup of
hot cocoa for him. "Here. Drink this."
    Q sat up, leaning back against pillows that he'd propped
against the wall behind his bed, and took the drink. "Not that
I'm complaining, but why?"
    "Warm drinks have a natural sedative effect. Especially warm
drinks with high trypsin levels. This is essentially heated
chocolate milk. Humans have used it as a natural sleep aid for
centuries."
    "What's the difference between a 'natural' sedative and a
hypo with a sleep drug in it? It seems like you're somewhat
inconsistent. If one kind of sedative is bad, why is another
good?"
    "Comparative levels and strength. Warm cocoa can't put you
to sleep against your will. If you're already relaxed and
prepared to go to sleep, however, it can help speed the process.
A hypo with a sleep drug in it imposes sleep on you; a warm drink
helps your body do the job itself. Besides, it'll help settle
your stomach."
    "All right." He sipped at the drink. "T'Laren-- thank you.
Really. It's amazing how much better I feel now. I don't even
have stomach pains, and you didn't do anything to my stomach."
    "Everything's interrelated."
    Q nodded. He seemed unusually open and suggestible, almost a
normal human being in comparison to his usual reflexive
stubbornness. "I suppose it must be. I-- thank you. I think maybe
I will be able to go to sleep now."
    "I'm glad." She turned and walked over to the door, which
opened to release her. "Good night, Q."
    "Aren't you going to tuck me in?" Q asked.
    T'Laren turned back, startled. Q smiled winningly. He really
could look boyishly charming if he tried. "After all, I'm onwy
fwee."
    "I thought you were sixteen."
    "That, too."
    "If you have your heart set on being tucked in," T'Laren
said, one eyebrow raised, "I can arrange to oblige."
    Q laughed. "No, no. You've babied me far too much already
tonight. I'll get spoiled," he said. He put down the cocoa mug,
his expression sobering. "I owe you, T'Laren."
    "You don't owe me," T'Laren said. "This is my job. If you
prefer, you can consider that Lhoviri has pre-paid your debt in
full."
    "Then I'd owe *him*, and I'd rather not." He shook his head.
"Not that I can avoid it, since all of this is through his doing,
but still. I'll find a way to pay you back personally. I
promise."
    "Try your best to cooperate with me in healing you, and that
will be payment enough."
    He nodded. "All right. Good night, T'Laren."
    "Good night."

    There were monitors in her room, hidden behind paneling,
from where she could observe every room of the ship. They had not
been part of the original equipment; she had suggested that they
would be helpful to have in dealing with a suicide risk who was
frequently attacked by various beings, and so Lhoviri had
provided them. She was glad, now, that she'd set them up to be
hidden unless she asked for them to be displayed; after the story
Anderson had told about Q's hunger strike, T'Laren knew that she
couldn't under any circumstances let Q know the monitors were
there.
    She checked the setup. She had programmed the computer to
recognize human emotional states to some extent by monitoring the
biosensor readings, listening to what people said-- such as
"Help" or "Stop", indicating possible need or distress-- and
comparing non-verbal vocalizations to a list of parameters to see
if particular sounds might be cries of pain, or of fear, or
expressions of happiness. The system was not perfect-- she had
done extensive testing of similar monitor systems when she was
still a ship's counselor, and found that the computer had a
fairly high error rate, especially with people as theatrical in
their ordinary behavior as Q was. But she wanted to invade his
privacy as little as possible, and at the same time needed a
system to alert her if he was in trouble or in pain. The computer
was programmed to contact her through a stud in her ear, on a
frequency inaudible to humans, if it determined that Q was in any
sort of distress, and it would automatically display the monitors
if she was in her rooms and he wasn't with her.
    Everything was working. T'Laren thought of testing the
system, and decided against it-- Q might be dressing for bed or
something, and while she had no personal taboos against that sort
of thing she didn't yet know what might disturb Q. There was
conflicting evidence as to whether he had developed a sense of
modesty or not. If Q ever did find out she'd been monitoring him,
she wanted to be on unshakable moral high ground. So she shut the
monitors down and prepared for her nightly meditation.
    It was more difficult to achieve trance state than it had
been since she'd relearned the disciplines. Insistent thoughts,
observations she'd made in the course of the day, plans she had,
all intruded and disturbed her concentration. She considered
sleeping instead, but rejected the possibility almost out of
hand. T'Laren had not experienced uncontrolled sleep since... had
it been two years already? Two years since she and Soram had
returned to Vulcan, and she had... well, of course she hadn't
dreamed since then. Until she'd met Lhoviri, she'd been in no
position to dream. And in the time since Lhoviri had come to her-
- she thought it'd been about eight months, but time did strange
things around Lhoviri-- she had been too busy fighting her way
back to a precarious self-control to allow the luxury of dreams.
Dreams were entirely too dangerous, their function to bring to
the surface things that T'Laren had to repress. The thought
intruded that that was a kind of cowardice, but she pushed that
thought away too. Few Vulcans allowed uncontrolled dreaming.
Meditation was the Vulcan way. She was Vulcan, therefore she
would meditate, and there was nothing dishonorable or cowardly
about it. So she concentrated on the disciplines, focusing down
until all external disturbances vanished and there was nothing
but utter peace.
    When her internal clock wakened her, five hours later, she
felt relaxed, refreshed and completely free of intrusive
feelings. She lay on top of her bed, reflecting. It was times
like this that made her believe she had, indeed, chosen the
correct path in deciding to be Vulcan. She was at such peace that
she could not understand why anyone would choose the path of
emotions, if given a choice.
    Q would still be asleep; most humans slept eight hours or
more, and Q had been exhausted. T'Laren dressed and went out to
the bridge, where she checked that everything was running
smoothly-- of course, the computers would tell her if there was
anything wrong, but she felt it illogical to rely on computers
too much. Upon determining that there were no problems, she went
out onto the observation deck and sat down on the balcony, gazing
out at the stars. Soon enough Q would wake up, and she would be
plunged back into the stresses of her work. Right now, though,
she wished to maintain the peace of her meditation for as long as
she could.
    A tiny chime in her ear woke her out of her meditation.
T'Laren stood up. According to the monitor system, Q was
apparently in some distress. She didn't waste time detouring to
her room to see what the problem was; instead, she jumped off the
balcony and down into the pit, reaching Deck 3 as fast as Earth-
normal gravity could carry her, and went directly to Q's
quarters.
    As she entered his suite, she heard a faint whimper from the
bedroom, behind a closed door. There were a number of relatively
harmless possibilities-- he could be asleep and having a bad
dream, for instance-- but for someone who regularly came under
attack by various species with unknown capabilities, there were
also a number of genuinely threatening possibilities. T'Laren
palmed open the door and went directly in.
    The light was on. Q was lying in bed, in black and blue
pajamas, curled up tightly and facing the door. He raised his
head as she came in, with an expression of outrage and red,
swollen eyes. Shiny tracks glittered on his cheeks. "I thought
you Vulcans were big on privacy," he snarled. "Don't you
*knock*?"
    "I'm sorry," T'Laren said, and meant it-- she wouldn't have
intruded if she'd thought she had a choice. But she made no move
to leave. "I heard you cry out, and I thought you might be under
attack of some sort. I would have asked your permission to enter
otherwise."
    He levered himself up on one elbow, outrage giving way to a
horrified disbelief. "You *heard* that? Through *two doors*?"
    "Vulcan hearing is much superior to human," she said. "A
human would have heard nothing, I'm sure." She took a step
forward. "Q, what's wrong?"
    "I'm *fine*," he snapped, but his voice broke, undermining
the statement. He sat up, yanking the blankets around him like a
kind of cloak. "Fine," he repeated sharply, keeping his voice
under slightly better control this time. "It was just a dream."
    "It must have been very bad," T'Laren said softly, walking
over to a chair by his bed.
    Q laughed bitterly. "Oh, no. I'm used to the bad ones. I can
handle them by now. It's the good dreams that are killing me." He
looked down for a moment, then raised his gaze and glared at her.
"It's all your fault. I *told* you I needed a sedative. I always
have dreams unless I take a sedative."
    "I don't understand," T'Laren said, sitting down in the
chair. "How are the good dreams killing you, Q?"
    Q's face twisted with sudden pain. He turned his head away
from T'Laren with a sharp shaking gesture and made a sound
halfway between an exasperated sigh and a cry of pain. For a
moment he seemed to be struggling with his words, or perhaps with
his voice. When he finally spoke, it was with the harsh tone of a
person using anger to fight off pain. "Every so often I dream
that I'm back in the Q Continuum," he said. "It varies, how.
Sometimes I dream that my people have taken me back, I'm
forgiven, all debts paid. Sometimes I never left at all. All this
has been a cruel practical joke a few of my fellows have played
on me, and at first I'm outraged, but then I laugh about it with
them. Sometimes it turns out that I inflicted this on myself, for
some obscure reason that makes perfect sense in the dream, but
that my limited mortal mind can no longer comprehend when I wake
up. Once, I dreamed that Lhoviri gave me my powers back directly
after I tried to sacrifice myself to the Calamarain-- time off
for good behavior, I suppose. Whatever, I'm back. I'm myself
again." He looked back at her. The anger had faded from his tone,
replaced by a desperate longing. "My brothers and sisters have
taken me back. I'm immortal again, omnipotent again. All my
worries and troubles are gone. My family cares about me. My life
is wonderful."
    The pain came back to his face as his voice started to
crack. "And then I wake up, and it's not true. It's not true. And
the disappointment is so incredible that I want to *die*."
    "Q--"
    She reached for him, but he threw her off. "Don't you
understand? It's *never* going to get any better! They'll never
take me back, and I can't bear living like this..." His voice
broke completely. "I want to die, T'Laren, I can't stand this
anymore. I can't!"
    "I thought you were going to try to give this a chance,"
T'Laren said, still gentle. "I thought you wanted to try to hang
on long enough to see if your life would become bearable--"
    "It never will!" Q shouted. "I could hold on a year, maybe
two, I don't know how many, if I knew they would take me back,
but they won't! I'm never going to be part of them again,
never..." His breath caught, and he doubled over, unbreathing,
for several seconds. When the air finally came out, it was as an
agonized sob. He drew his knees up and pressed his face against
them. "I can't bear this anymore," he said again, choking it out
between strangled sobs. "Please. Help me die..."
    T'Laren moved to the bed and put her arm around him. "Q.
Listen to me. There's no reason to believe they won't take you
back--"
    "There's no reason to believe they will, either!" he
screamed, his voice raw with hysteria. "If they *cared* about me,
they wouldn't let me suffer like this!"
    "You were doing so well before. You were so calm when you
went to bed. What happened? Was it just the dream?"
    "I was stupid before," Q snarled, lifting his head to look
at her. Now his entire face was puffy and tear-stained. "I
actually believed you could help me. Stupid, gullible, pathetic
*fool!* Damn Medellin, damn Li, why did they have to save me? Why
couldn't they have let me die?"
    T'Laren raised an eyebrow. She was beginning to get
seriously alarmed. Unless it was normal for Q to go from being
upset over a dream to full-blown hysterical despair, there was
something very wrong. "Q, we discussed this, remember? There's no
reason to think your people won't take you back. It'll just take
time. Don't you remember?"
    "Oh, I remember. I remember you browbeat me into believing
you because I wanted to believe it so much." He turned away from
her and put his face against his knees again, muffling his sobs.
"Thus proving I'm as pathetically gullible as any other mortal
creature, and all my years of experience and wisdom don't mean a
damn thing. Biology is destiny, and my destiny is to be worm
food. And I'm never going to have anything good in my life again.
That business about learning about humanity is crap-- the Q know
everything they need to about humanity, they don't need any input
from me. There's never been any reason for them to take me back.
My people hate me. They want me dead and so do I."
    T'Laren was somewhat at a loss. Under similar circumstances
with any other patient, she would reassure them that their loved
ones cared for them, or that they had great potential in their
future. All of Q's potential was behind him in his own view, and
he had no loved ones. The closest he came to friends were an
android who had no emotions and would probably dislike Q if he
did, and a scientist who might or might not have a crush on him
and whose name Q barely remembered. Lhoviri had gotten through to
her under similar circumstances by pointing out that she could
still help people, and thus atone for her own guilt. Q didn't
care about such things, though, and appeared to feel less guilty
than self-pitying. The only thing she could think of to do at the
moment was to put both arms around him and hold him as the spasms
of grief racked his body. "Your people don't want you dead," she
said softly. "They saved your life. Didn't you realize?"
    He looked up at her again. "They did that?"
    "Lhoviri made sure you didn't die of your injuries. I think
he also sent Counselor Medellin a premonition that you were in
trouble."
    It seemed to be the wrong thing to say. Q's face twisted up
with grief again. "No *wonder* I couldn't kill myself right!" he
screamed. "They won't let me die, will they? They want me to stay
alive, and suffer, and suffer..." Abruptly he stood up, tearing
free of her, and screamed at the ceiling. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry
about Azi, I'm sorry about the Kakkadim, I'm sorry about all of
it! Please, stop torturing me like this... take me back or let me
go, please, if I can't be with you I want to die..." He folded up
and crumpled onto the floor, sobbing hysterically.
    His loved ones. Of course. The problem wasn't that Q had no
loved ones, it was that the ones he had had rejected him.
Immediately T'Laren knew what she had to say. She knelt down on
the floor next to him and put her arm around him again. "Q,
listen to me. Please. I think there's something you don't
understand."
    "What?" he asked, a strangled snarl.
    "You think your people hate you because they condemned you
to this. That they saved your life solely to see you suffer. But
don't you realize that they're above that? Why would they let
Lhoviri torment you like this?"
    "They let me torment Azi," he choked. "If they let me get
away with *that*, they'll let anyone do anything to me."
    Sometime later, when he was calm, she had to ask him who Azi
was. "They did not let you get away with it. Is this letting you
get away with it? Isn't that part of what they're punishing you
for?"
    A complete shot in the dark-- she had no idea if whatever he
did to this Azi had anything to do with his punishment. But he
stilled slightly under her arm and did not contradict her. "You
have done things your people consider wrong, yes," she said. "But
you told me before that they could have killed or reabsorbed you-
-" --and what did it mean to be reabsorbed, anyway?-- " instead
of making you mortal. What advantage does it give them to make
you mortal, rather than killing you?"
    "It gives them more time to watch me suffer."
    "It gives you time to change. Mortality is a death sentence,
yes. In Q terms, what's left of your human lifespan is probably
only a fraction of an instant. But you live on our terms now, and
on our terms you have many long years left. Time in which you can
grow and change. Didn't you just say you don't believe they sent
you here to learn about humanity?"
    "Of course they didn't! They've had three or four of us do
it already. They don't need me. They never needed me."
    "They do need you," she said softly. "You're part of them.
But they need you to change. To grow up. Have you ever heard of
the concept 'tough love'?"
    "What does some antiquated Earth notion have to do with
anything?" he snapped through tears.
    "It isn't antiquated. The idea is that if a child-- an
adolescent-- is delinquent, or disobedient, and gentler methods
of discipline have not worked, it's time for extreme measures.
Because if the parent doesn't go to extremes, doesn't hurt the
child terribly in order to make him change, the child won't. And
he'll grow up to be a delinquent adult, useless to society.
Sometimes really stubborn teenagers need to suffer tremendously
before they can be salvaged as worthwhile citizens." She leaned
down, trying to see his face. "Don't you see the analogy, Q?"
    "No."
    He was being stubborn-- T'Laren was sure he could see it.
"Lhoviri doesn't want you to die, Q," she said. "He saved your
life, twice. He hired me to help you-- and I assure you, I don't
care how omnipotent he is, he went to a lot of trouble to get me
into any kind of shape where I *could* help you. There are any
number of psychologists who could play games with your head to
build you back up so he could crush you, as you once accused.
Lhoviri wouldn't have needed to trouble himself at all to acquire
one. Instead, he put a lot of effort into helping me, so that I
could help you. An entity that merely wanted to torment you would
not have bothered."
    "So what are you saying?" Q asked harshly.
    "He *wants* to take you back. He does care about you.
Perhaps he got you kicked out of the Continuum because he thought
that was your only hope. Because if you kept going the way you'd
been going, you would have reached the point where no change
would be possible, and the Continuum would have been forced to
kill you. By condemning you to mortality, he's given you one last
opportunity to learn, and to mature at a faster rate than you
could have otherwise. You're right that the Continuum probably
doesn't need to learn what it means to be human, but you do. A
large part of what they punished you for seems to be your
complete disregard for the lives and rights of mortal beings. If
you can learn how to function in a mortal society, they could
trust you to be responsible with your powers again, and they
could take you back."
    "I can't believe that," he whispered.
    "Why not?"
    "Because I want it to be true, and I never get what I want."
    "That's pure irrationality and you know it. I know how much
it hurts to trust, Q, but you have to. Lhoviri is not about to
let you kill yourself, no matter how much you want to. Your only
alternative is to try to do what he sent you here to do, because
otherwise you're going to be hopelessly miserable and have no way
to escape your misery."
    "I can't believe you," Q said desperately. "I *can't*..."
    T'Laren had made her point. She said nothing more; simply
held him as he wept hysterically. After a minute or two,  she got
him to ease from the tight, inward-drawn ball he'd curled into
and cling to her instead. T'Laren stroked his hair and murmured
soothing words, until finally the sobs faded out.
    Eventually Q let go of her and turned away, embarrassed. "I-
- didn't mean to do that," he said. "That was incredibly idiotic.
I apologize."
    "What was?"
    "Having-- hysterics, like that." He shook his head.
"Everything you said was perfectly rational and sensible, and I
was reduced to saying 'did not's' and bawling like an infant.
Maybe I *am* a three-year-old at that; I certainly acted like
one."
    T'Laren disengaged and stood up. "I can certainly understand
why your loss of control shames you," she said. "But please keep
in mind that I'm used to people doing irrational things that
later embarrass them. I would, however, like to figure out why
you lost control so quickly and completely. Do you think you can
talk about it?"
    "Let me wash my face and put some clothes on. I feel
ridiculous."
    "Very well." T'Laren went out into the living room of the
suite and ordered cups of hot chocolate for both of them.
    Q came out about ten minutes later, wearing a red jacket
over a black jumpsuit that was belted at the waist, and boots
with red piping. "More natural sedatives?" he asked. "Or is this
part of your insidious plot to fatten me up?"
    His tone was actually fairly light-hearted. T'Laren studied
his face. It was a bit difficult to tell in this lighting--
Vulcan eyes were not well-adapted to dim yellow lights-- but it
looked like he had made himself up to obliterate all traces that
he'd been crying, and done so successfully. Since she had first
met him lying in a hospital bed, she hadn't seen him wearing
makeup before, but it looked skillfully applied-- which meant he
wore it fairly often. Possibly for this reason? Men in Starfleet
occasionally used basic foundation makeup to make their skin look
better, but rarely took it farther than that. Q had gotten rid of
the circles under his eyes, the puffiness and red eyes from
crying, and had subtracted half a dozen years from his apparent
age. That took more skill than most men had. In fact, in this
lighting and with her Vulcan eyes, she could only tell he was
wearing makeup from the fact that no one who had just been crying
hysterically for the past half hour or so could possibly look
that good without it.
    "It's part of an insidious plot, of course," T'Laren said.
"This one simple drink has more calories than you could possibly
imagine."
    "Than *I* could possibly imagine?" he asked skeptically.
    "Well, your imagination tends toward the grandiose, it's
true. Perhaps not." She handed him the cup. "Now. Why don't you
sit down, and we'll talk about it?"
    "Talk about what?" Q asked, sipping his drink. He wasn't
being obviously coy; the question was asked in a sincere tone of
voice. T'Laren thought it beyond the realm of possibility that it
was a sincere question, but perhaps Q was trying to make her
think so.
    "Pretending that nothing happened isn't going to change the
facts, Q," she said. "I would like to talk about the fact that
you broke down seemingly because of no more than a bad dream,
despite the fact that you put a high value on remaining in
emotional control. Has this happened to you before?"
    He frowned at his drink. "Occasionally," he said. "I *am*
sorry-- I really don't know what happened to me. I was-- I was
fine when I went to bed, more or less. Actually, after that
backrub, I was in better condition than I've been for a long
while. Then I had that dream, which woke me up, and I felt like
crying. I had it somewhat under control until you came in;
somehow then I fell apart. I'm not sure why."
    "When has this happened before?"
    "Oh... once when I was talking to Sekal. Several times when
I wake up in the middle of the night, or when I'm trying to get
to sleep. It happened to me almost every night when I thought
Security wanted to kill me, but the only person I broke down
around then was Lieutenant T'Meth. She's a Vulcan security
officer, Sekal's wife--"
    "I know. Sekal told me."
    "All right. It happened my first night aboard the Enterprise
and my first two or three nights aboard Starbase 56, so I'm
really not too surprised it's happened now." Q drained his drink
and began to study his now-empty mug. "For someone who's spent
the past several thousand years as an avatar of change, I seem to
handle instability in my mortal existence very badly."
    "What exactly happens? Is the intensity of emotion you're
experiencing greater than normal, or is it just that you are less
able to control the expression of that emotion?"
    "I... don't know." He shrugged, playing with the mug. "Maybe
both. It happens a lot at night, like I said. Data once told me
that human beings are predisposed to getting depressed in the wee
hours. Maybe that's part of it. What time is it now?"
    "0300 hours. And we're still synchronized to Starbase 56's
time, so that's 0300 hours for your cycle as well as mine. That
could be part of the explanation, I suppose..."
    Q put down the mug. "You sound like you think you know what
it is."
    "I may know a factor. Or I may be drawing a false analogy.
But that sort of sudden and total breakdown over a thing that
seems objectively trivial... used to happen to me all the time.
It is a symptom of faulty repression. When a person is incapable
of actually controlling their emotions, as Vulcans do, but is
trying to keep from showing those emotions most if not all of the
time, it creates a terrible conflict. This happens to humans who
repress their feelings quite a great deal. All it takes is a tiny
crack, and the facade breaks completely."
    "I know. Vulcans do that when you finally get them mad."
    She decided that for the moment she didn't want to know how
much Q knew about getting Vulcans mad, or where and when he
learned it. "Does that seem to you as if it could be part of your
problem?"
    "It doesn't much sound like it," Q said. "I don't repress my
feelings. You want the entire range of humanity's least pleasant
emotions-- anger, fear, despair, pain-- I've got it all. I've
never made any attempt to hide what I'm feeling."
    "No, not in the usual sense," T'Laren admitted. "But in
another sense, you do. There are emotions you dislike
acknowledging. You rarely express guilt, or even admit to being
wrong. You rarely express a desire for social contact, despite
the fact that you obviously need it. In fact, you rarely display
any of the social emotions at all. Most of what you show is a
reaction to internal circumstances, or a pose adopted to get a
reaction from someone else. Would you ever admit that you were
lonely and wanted to be with someone?"
    "Of course not," Q said. "I'm allergic to getting laughed
at."
    T'Laren nodded. "In trying to protect yourself from
humiliation, you do hide certain emotions. You'd freely admit you
were angry-- but not if you were angry at someone for hurting
your feelings. Then you would hide your anger with a pose, or
give it some rationalization. You admit to fear because you can't
help yourself-- if you could keep from showing it, you would. I
suspect, in fact, that you would hide as many of your real
emotions as possible, and replace them with calculated poses
designed to get planned reactions out of people. I suspect that
that *is* what you did for the three years or so of your contact
with humanity when you were still omnipotent, and that the only
reason you don't still do it is that your situation has
overwhelmed you."
    Q shrugged. "That could be. I never thought about it in
those terms, but... yes, I suppose I do do that. I feel safer
when no one knows what I'm thinking."
    Fortunately, he also seemed to enjoy talking about himself,
or she would never get him to admit anything. She wondered if she
should ask him why he would tell her such things if that were
true, and decided against calling his attention to it. "And
that's where the repression is coming in. The idea behind
emotional expression is to express oneself, not to hide behind a
manufactured facade. The more one represses oneself, the more
pressure is placed on that facade. You do express yourself
frequently-- under normal circumstances, that would be enough to
keep the pressure you place on yourself bearable. But these are
not normal circumstances for you and will never be as long as you
are mortal. The fact that you are suffering constant painful
emotions, and to one extent or another hiding most of them, is
putting a great deal of pressure on your facade. Every so often
it needs to crack."
    "It seems as if you're making this unnecessarily
complicated," he said, picking up the mug again and holding it in
his lap as he looked at her. "There's a much simpler explanation,
one that doesn't involve the invocation of all sorts of
hypothetical repressed emotions."
    "And that is?"
    "I'm just depressed." He put down the mug again and leaned
forward. "T'Laren, I really think you're making a big deal over
nothing. I'm very unhappy. Humans cry when they're unhappy. I am
human. You're a Vulcan, you can do logic-- that one's nice and
simple, enough for even a Klingon to understand. The fact that I
am not crying constantly involves the suppression of emotion, I
assume, but one hardly needs to invoke that to explain why I
crack."
    Actually, he had a point. T'Laren wondered if she was
projecting again. "It seemed rather... extreme. Rather sudden."
    "It's always sudden. If I can feel it coming on, I can
control it usually."
    "Why is it important to you to be able to control it?"
    Q looked at her as if he had never heard a stupider question
in his life. "A Vulcan needs to ask me this?"
    "I know where my own desire for emotional control stems
from. I am asking about yours."
    "Because it's bad enough that I spend all my time whining
and complaining, that I'm a complete coward who'll throw dignity
to the wind and grovel if threatened, that I spend my entire life
worrying about how to avoid pain-- I don't want to be constantly
bawling, too. Humans give me little enough respect as it is. And
shouting angrily at people or eviscerating them with clever wit
are much more acceptable methods of dealing with one's emotions,
among humans, than crying is. And I don't know why we're still
discussing this; this conversation has to be the most trivial
pursuit I've engaged in in quite some time." He stood up. She
could almost see his defenses rebuilding themselves, from
embarrassment to forced equilibrium and now to anger. "I'm going
back to bed. Are you going to continue to refuse me a sedative?"
    "Yes."
    "Then do me a favor. Don't come in my room unless I actually
call for help. I'll come out and get breakfast when I wake up."
He turned and walked to the door of the bedroom. "And for future
reference, unless you're positive I'm dying, knock first."
    "Very well." T'Laren stood, placing the cocoa mug into the
disposal beneath the replicator. "I hope your sleep is
undisturbed this time."
    As she left, she realized, suddenly, why it had happened.
Q's explanation, like most of his explanations, had not
completely satisfied her-- he had given a reason, but not all the
reasons. Now she thought she understood. His defensiveness and
his antisocial behavior were all part of the same thing. Earlier
tonight, she had gotten him to lower his defenses against her--
leaving him unable to protect himself from his own emotions. In
the process of rebuilding his safeguards, Q had started to become
defensive and accusatory, and then had withdrawn contact
completely by ending the conversation.
    He wasn't simply obnoxious because he didn't know any
better. It was a defense. She'd known that already, but had not
quite realized the obvious corollary-- the more she chipped away
at it, the more vulnerable he would become. If he ever realized
that, she would never be able to get him to trust her-- he would
shut her out completely, perceiving her as a threat. And in a
certain sense, she would be.
    Perhaps this was going to be more difficult than she'd
initially thought.
    Q seriously considered going without breakfast long enough
to take apart the replicator and bypass the security control
T'Laren had put on it. His head hurt and his eyes were sore, and
after his disgraceful behavior last night he would really rather
not face a cheerful Vulcan, the way they all seemed to be in the
morning. On the other hand, he also didn't feel like doing all
the work necessary to bypass the control, and while he wasn't
particularly hungry he did require coffee, as quickly as
possible. So much for T'Laren's theory that he drank coffee to
counteract the effects of his sedatives; he was exhausted, having
woken several times in the night with unpleasant dreams. Tonight
he was getting his sedative, and he didn't care what he had to do
to get it.
    After a sonic shower-- Ketayawas equipped with water
plumbing, since most humans preferred the less efficient water
showers, but Q wasn't most humans-- and other morning ablutions,
including a reapplication of makeup to hide the effects of last
night's crying jag, he felt marginally capable of facing a fellow
sentient. He walked to the kitchen and strode over to the
replicator, ignoring T'Laren. "Coffee."
    "Decaffeinated," T'Laren piped up before the replicator
could start materializing the cup.
    He turned on her. As he'd expected, she seemed obscenely
cool and wakeful. "What is the point to decaffeinated coffee? Do
you think I drink coffee for the taste?"
    "It's possible," she said. "Decaf doesn't taste any
different, you know."
    "I know. I just don't care. What gives you the right to
dictate what I drink?"
    "I am responsible for your health." She stood up. She was
wearing a yellow pantsuit, a crime against fashion if there ever
was one-- how could anyone raised on Earth have so little sense
of aesthetics as to wear yellow over Vulcan skin? "Breakfast
platter," she said to the second replicator, and withdrew a plate
full of various foods.
    Q raised eyebrows at it. "I always thought overeating was
some kind of sin for Vulcans. Or at the very least illogical."
    "This isn't mine," she said, and set it down at the table
across from her place. "This is for you. I want you to finish all
of it."
    "You're not serious." Her steady gaze indicated that she
was, in fact, perfectly serious. "I can't eat all that! I could
maybe manage *half* that, on a good day. But I'm not anywhere
near hungry enough--"
    "Sit down and eat," T'Laren interrupted, with no more than
her usual calm in her voice. "If you truly cannot finish, we'll
simply dispose of the remainder. But I want you to eat as much of
it as you can."
    Q sat down, not entirely sure why he was bothering. The
foods before him were all foods he'd liked, back when he still
got any modicum of pleasure whatsoever out of eating. That itself
made him less willing to eat. How much information was in his
files, anyway? Had Medellin or someone been recording what he got
out of the replicators and the frequency of individual foods? "I
don't want any of this."
    "That's unfortunate," T'Laren said, standing at his
shoulder. "It is sad when one must do something one doesn't wish
to do."
    Or in other words, he still had to eat it. "Can't I get
something else?"
    "I've analyzed your nutritional requirements and created a
program to devise meals that satisfy them. If you ask for
something else, the replicator will produce it, but it will also
generate complements for it to make a balanced meal, and you'll
have to eat them. You might be better off just eating this."
    With bad grace, Q took a forkful, wondering in some part of
his mind why he wasn't fighting harder. Weakness, perhaps. He was
putting up less resistance than he had to Anderson's constant
demands, and T'Laren had put much less pressure on him than
Anderson ever had. Maybe he was just too tired to fight anyone.
    "I'm worried about this power trip of yours, T'Laren," he
said. "Forcing me to eat what you want me to eat sounds to me
like you're overcontrolling. I got enough of that from Anderson;
I'm not putting up with it from you. And I want my sedatives
back. I slept miserably last night."
    "I can tell," T'Laren said.
    Was that a pointed reference to his hysterics last night? Q
flushed angrily, and snapped, "A good portion of which was your
fault. If you hadn't barged in when you did, I'd have gotten back
to sleep without-- oh." T'Laren's fingers pressed into his back
just under the collarbone, probing for and loosening painful
knots there. It was difficult to maintain his train of thought.
"Without... I'd have gotten back to sleep normally and...
whatever."
    "Maintaining all that anger must be a difficult job,"
T'Laren said. "You've made yourself tense again. Is it really
worth it?"
    He really should not allow this. Q remembered how he'd
behaved last night-- not the crying jag, but his almost obscene
pliability and defenselessness under T'Laren's ministrations. She
could have done anything to him, anything at all, and he wouldn't
have been able to muster up resistance until it was too late.
Obviously he was as vulnerable to pleasure as he was to pain, and
he should avoid it for the same reason. He could too easily
succumb to this and make as big a fool of himself as he had last
night-- he must have looked so incredibly naive and idiotic,
going on and on about a backrub as if it were the most
pleasurable thing in existence. Far too dangerous. He had to tell
her to stop.
    In a few minutes.
    "I'm not sure I understand you, Q," she said. "You increase
your own pain, you know. You fight battles with the wrong people
over trivial things, depleting your resources for the important
battles. You project anger and disdain at the universe, almost
constantly-- don't you realize that that weakens you? You devote
so much of your strength to holding up your defenses that every
so often your strength runs out and you crumble. If you were more
discriminating about what you defended yourself against, you
would lose your defenses completely less often."
    She didn't understand. Which was good-- she shouldn't
understand, she already understood far too much for Q's liking.
For a moment, her words reawakened the anger, strengthening him
against her. But it was impossible to retain anger or even
annoyance at her as her fingers so expertly forced relaxation on
him. Q could feel the anger seeping away, stolen away from him by
slim fingers, leaving him defenseless.
    He jerked away from her. "Don't do that," he said harshly.
    "Do what?"
    Q turned to face her. T'Laren looked genuinely puzzled.
"Don't touch me. Not without asking permission first."
    "I-- very well. Forgive me. It was an invasion of your
privacy, and I should have known better." She sat down. "Why did
you wait so long to tell me to stop, if I was making you
uncomfortable?"
    That was exactly the sort of question he never wanted to
have to answer. What was he supposed to say, "Oh, I liked it too
much to make myself ask you to stop?" That certainly lent
credibility to his refusal. Humans took statements like that as
an excuse to try to persuade one against one's better judgement.
He imagined Vulcans-- normal Vulcans, at least-- would take his
refusal at face value, and not press further. He had no idea what
this one would do. "Drop the subject," he said.
    It was one of the weakest attempts to avoid a topic he'd
ever produced, and it didn't work. "I can't," she said. "It's
important that I know. I cannot simply drop subjects that make
you uncomfortable if I'm to help you."
    Q sighed. "If you must know, it took me a few minutes to
recover from the shock of being touched without permission at
all. I'd thought you were more professional than that, T'Laren.
You made me very anxious."
    T'Laren's expression didn't change. From a Vulcan, he had to
take that as a good sign. If he hadn't hurt her, she wouldn't
have bothered to keep her face so controlled, and she would have
shown some reaction. "You have not previously struck me as
someone who freezes in unpleasant situations."
    An old bitterness welled to the surface. "No, didn't you
hear? I got someone killed by freezing up once. It made me
infamous. Well, more infamous than I already was."
    "I see," she said, nodding. "You found the situation so
unpleasant that you froze. The fact that you relaxed completely
and leaned into my touch was an unfortunate side effect of my
advanced techniques of Vulcan mind control, which were also
responsible for the happiness you experienced last night, the
acute depressive attack you experienced later last night, and in
fact were responsible for your suicide attempt in the first
place."
    All of this was said in the same calm, reasonable tone of
voice. If Q hadn't listened to the words, he would never have
recognized the statement as sarcasm. "Aren't you laying it on a
bit thick?" he asked. "The Vulcan mind control line was enough, I
think. The rest of it was a bit over the top."
    "I *am* sorry I invaded your privacy without asking,"
T'Laren said. "I perceived that you were tense, and moved to
correct the situation. It had not occurred to me that you have
such a desperate need for your anger and tension-- and pain--
that you would be upset with me for easing them for you."
    "Need?" Q frowned. "Why would I *need* pain? I've told you,
I'm no masochist. I don't like pain. I also don't like being
touched casually. That's all."
    "Your files show no sign of such an aversion," T'Laren said.
    That was the last straw. Q pushed out of his chair and stood
with such force that the chair fell over. "What, do you have
*everything* on record about me?" he demanded. "What I eat and
when, who I eat with, what I talk about with them, what I say
about them when their back is turned? Do you have monitors
running when I go to the bathroom, too? Insights into the psyche
obtained by stool inspection? Do you watch me at night and count
my dreams from REM movements?"
    "The hyperbole is unnecessary," she said, "and will not
distract me from the point. We were discussing why you felt the
need to reject something you obviously derived enjoyment from,
not what is or is not in your files."
    "Maybe that's what *you're* discussing. I'm more concerned
about those files. This meal--" He lifted the plate. "All of
these are foods I used to like before I stopped liking anything.
Do you have that on record too? How much privacy do I have
*left?*"
    "Your favorite foods are not on any record I ever saw. Foods
you are allergic to or dislike strongly are listed in your file,
where known-- anything Medellin saw you have an extreme negative
reaction to, meaning that the list probably covers only a
fraction of the total. I selected common human breakfast foods,
such as eggs and fruit, for your meals, and excluded what I know
you don't like. If these happen to be foods you particularly
like, it's by coincidence only. And I'd advise you to sit down
and finish eating them."
    Q put the plate down. "I'm not hungry," he muttered.
    T'Laren studied him. "Very well. In that case, come with
me." She stood up and walked toward the kitchen door.
    "Why?" T'Laren had an annoying habit of making demands
without explaining her reasons, and Q decided he was going to
break her of it. He stood where he was.
    T'Laren turned again to face him. "Since your appetite is
low, now would be an ideal time to begin a physical training
regimen. You have a great deal of tension and hostility that
might be more profitably channeled into physical activity, and
such activity would increase your appetite."
    He wasn't hearing this. He couldn't be. Q looked down at his
hands, the only part of his body he could see that he hadn't
concealed under clothes designed to tell flattering lies. The
fingers were bony skeleton appendages, more like a Mestavan than
a human, and the knuckles stood out like a Klingon's forehead
ridges. Underneath the gracefully lying fabric he'd hidden
himself in, the rest of his body was just as bad-- he had taken
pains not to look at himself naked in a mirror for months now,
and his condition had gotten considerably worse since his failed
suicide attempt. Incredulously he looked up at T'Laren. "You
can't seriously want me to exercise in my condition."
    "I believe we discussed this last night, Q. Did you believe
I'd forgotten?"
    Actually, Q himself had forgotten. Now that she'd reminded
him, he did remember that she'd threatened to make him exercise.
It was as unbelievable now as it had been then. "I thought maybe
you'd have come to your senses."
    "I don't plan to make you run a marathon," T'Laren said.
"For now we'll start with simple stretching exercises. If you can
walk, you can do that much."
    He supposed that was probably correct, though the idea of
doing any kind of exercise whatsoever made him feel immensely
put-upon. Sulkily he followed T'Laren to the gym, wondering why
he was bothering. "Look, I really don't think I'm up to this.
Can't we wait a week or so, until I'm a little stronger?"
    "How do you expect to get stronger when you don't eat?"
T'Laren went over to the clothing replicator. "Exercise suits."
    "All right!" Q threw up his hands. "I'll finish the damned
breakfast. Will that make you happy? Are you satisfied?"
    T'Laren handed him an exercise suit. "Change into this. You
can use the change room over there if you would rather do so
privately."
    "I already said I'd finish breakfast. What more do you
want?"
    "You misunderstand," she said. She had gone completely
Vulcan; he couldn't read her at all. "I am not Anderson,
attempting to coerce you through threatened punishments. This is
not a punishment, Q. You are going to exercise. It would be very
nice if you would eat as well, but it will not change anything.
Now change your clothes-- what you are wearing is too confining
for exercise."
    "You said it was just stretching."
    "It is difficult to stretch when one's clothes will not
stretch with you."
    "And what if I refuse?" he asked belligerently, folding his
arms and glaring at her. "What will you do to me if I walk back
to my room right now?"
    "Please don't," T'Laren said calmly. "I would not wish to
resort to threats."
    "Oh, so you *are* like Anderson. What threats are you not
wishing to resort to? Take away my replicator privileges? Oh,
wait, it's been done before. Why don't you cut off my computer
access? *That* would be truly original."
    "That would be unnecessary," T'Laren said, moving around him
to stand in front of the door. She placed her exercise suit in a
neat bundle on the floor. "There is only one exit from here, Q.
You have three choices: you may stay here in the gymnasium and do
nothing, you may attempt to force your way past me, or you may do
as I have asked. If you attempt to force your way past me, you
will fail. I am a Vulcan, Starfleet-trained, and in perfect
health. You would then be left with the previous two choices, and
undoubtedly some bruises. So I might suggest limiting your
consideration to those two, keeping in mind that I am far more
patient than you."
    Q stared at her. "You're actually threatening me with
physical violence."
    "Not at all. I am threatening to turn any attempts of yours
at physical violence back at you. I threaten no violence myself."
    "Semantics," Q muttered. Had he really thought it would be
any different? Wherever he went, people would try to dominate
him, to control him, and as long as he had such a glaring
weakness as his inability to tolerate boredom, they would
succeed.
    With extremely bad grace, he took the exercise suit from her
and undressed, quite deliberately doing so in front of her.
Normally he would have sought privacy to undress-- he had no
sense of modesty in the usual sense, but he was ashamed of how
thin he was right now, and usually tried to avoid letting anyone
see him without clothes to hide the damage. Right now, though, he
wanted to flaunt his weakness. Let her see how truly pathetic he
looked, and she would realize that he couldn't possibly indulge
in any physical exercise now. Out of the corner of his eye, he
glanced over to see what her reaction was-- but she, too, was
changing, paying no attention to him. Q quickly looked away.
Experience had taught him that it was dangerous for him to look
at nude attractive humanoids, and while he thought he was
probably too ill for it to be a problem right now, there was no
sense taking chances. He didn't need to risk humiliation and
discomfort right now; he was already uncomfortable enough.
    By the time he was done changing, T'Laren was dressed and
waiting with arms folded, her stillness conveying the patience of
stone. He faced her sullenly. "Now what?"
    "Touch your toes without bending your knees."
    This felt immensely stupid. Half-heartedly, Q attempted to
touch his toes, came to the conclusion that if he couldn't bend
his knees his toes might as well be in another solar system, and
straightened up. "I can't."
    "Try."
    He made a few more half-hearted attempts, feeling self-
conscious and idiotic. His body simply would not bend that way.
It was painful to make the attempt. "Fine, I tried. Happy now?"
    "You aren't trying."
    "I am too!"
    "We will do this until you do it properly. Again."
    Q sat down on the floor, arms folded. "I can't do it."
    T'Laren looked down at him for several seconds. Q stared
back at her, challenging her to do something. Without breaking
the stare, T'Laren said, "Q. It is necessary that you learn how
to defend yourself physically. I am Starfleet trained, but I am
only one person-- I may not always be able to save you. What
would you do if your life depended on your ability to hold off
some assassin a few moments until I could arrive?"
    Q shrugged. "I suppose I'd die," he said blandly. "Which
frankly, at the moment, doesn't strike me as an overly unpleasant
prospect."
    T'Laren continued to stare at him. Q, still unwilling to
back down, stared back, studiedly expressionless. Finally T'Laren
stepped away from the door, ceasing to block his path out. "Get
up and come with me."
    He stood up. "What now?"
    "I have something to show you."
    Q made an exasperated noise. "Like *what?* I'm getting very
tired of these vague directives of yours, T'Laren."
    "It would be meaningless if I told you what in advance," she
said. "I believe it will be something of interest to you."
    "I doubt it," Q muttered, but went with her. Curiosity had
always been one of his greatest weaknesses.
    They walked a short distance down the hall to the lift.
"Deck 4," T'Laren said, and they descended.
    "What's on Deck 4?"
    "Airlocks, maintenance and supply."
    "Oh, you've got a present for me, hidden in the supply
closet. How nice. T'Laren, you shouldn't have." No response. Not
even a "Shut up, Q." This was beginning to frighten him. It was
fine to offend people, but not to the point where they stopped
talking to him.
    "Is it bigger than a breadbox?" Q persisted, as they stepped
off the turbolift. "Or perhaps you're going to show me the
skeletons in your closet. Are there dead bodies down here?
Victims of some arcane Vulcan rite?" Still no response. Q was not
used to being ignored, not when there was no one else to talk to,
and it was making him desperate. What did he have to do to get a
reaction out of her again?
    T'Laren palmed the door to the main airlock, and it lifted.
Now Q was getting extremely nervous. "T'Laren?" he asked, backing
away. "Why are you opening the airlock?"
    "I have some knowledge of death by vacuum," she said calmly.
"It is a quick death and a merciful one. There are a few brief
moments of pain, but the cold quickly robs one of consciousness.
I imagine it is far less painful than drinking etching solution."
    She was completely insane. Q's blood went cold with fear. "I
imagine so," he said weakly, and then turned to bolt desperately
for the lift.
    He never even got close. The moment his back was turned, the
moment he began to run, T'Laren's arm grabbed his and snagged him
back. He stumbled, windmilling with his free arm, trying to pull
free, but it was useless. T'Laren reeled him in to her and turned
him toward the airlock, pushing. Q dug in his heels, not that
that did much good with shipboots on an uncarpeted ship's
corridor floor. "No-- don't-- please don't--"
    "Why are you resisting? This is what you want," T'Laren
said. She lifted him slightly, so he could no longer brace
himself against the floor, and shoved, releasing him. Q
staggered, falling forward into the airlock. As he caught himself
against the far wall, he heard the hum of the door lowering
behind him.
    "*No!*" He turned and lunged at the airlock door, too late.
It shut with a clang that sounded unpleasantly like a death
knell. The top half of the door was transparasteel-- Q could see
T'Laren outside the lock, standing by the release button with the
same lack of expression she'd shown before. Terrified, he pounded
on the transparasteel. "Let me out! Please! *Please!*"
    T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "I do not understand what you are
afraid of," she said. "Not five minutes ago, you expressed
complete unconcern at the possibility of your own death. I no
longer wished to torment you by forcing you to remain alive
against your will."
    He had known she was mentally unstable, and he had gone with
her anyway. Stupid *fool!* There was no one here to save him-- he
was trapped alone in an airlock with a mad Vulcan on the other
side and no one else around for light-years. Q sank to his knees,
terrified, hands and face pressed firmly against the
transparasteel. "Please. Please, let me out. Don't kill me.
Please."
    "You do not, in fact, wish to die."
    "No. No. I don't. Please, don't kill me, *please*..."
    "But you do understand that this would be a far kinder death
than you could expect from some assailant. That *is* clear to
you, I hope."
    She was going to kill him. It was obvious that she'd made up
her mind. His life was moments away from ending, and he couldn't
think of what to say, what to do to make her let him go. He had
expected to be killed by some revenge-craving member of a highly
advanced species unknown to humanity, not an insane citizen of
the Federation to whom he'd done nothing personally. "Yes, yes, I
know, I still don't want to die! T'Laren, *please!* Let me out!"
    "It is your decision," she said. "Consider it carefully."
Her hand hovered near the airlock release. "If you live, you will
continue to be plagued by aches and pains, at risk for a worse
death, lonely and crippled. Death will end your suffering, you
understand. Simply tell me your decision, and I will carry it out
for you."
    It was hopeless. She wasn't listening to him. Q sagged, his
head sinking below the level of the transparasteel, where he
could no longer see his tormenter. He began to sob helplessly,
despairingly. "T'Laren, don't kill me, please don't kill me,
please..."
    "Very well," her voice came, echoing in the airlock. A
moment later the door he was leaning against moved upward.
    Q crawled out of the airlock as soon as the opening was big
enough for him to fit through, away from T'Laren, and sat up
against the far wall of the corridor, hugging his knees as he
tried to control his breathing. He still didn't feel safe. He
didn't know what he'd said that had finally gotten through to
her, and he didn't know what he'd said that had precipitated the
attempt in the first place, and so he had no way of knowing that
it would not happen again or that she wouldn't carry through her
threat next time.
    Footsteps approached. He glanced up, saw T'Laren coming over
toward him, and flinched, curling inward more tightly. "Q," she
said gently.
    "Changed your mind?" he asked raggedly. "Going to finish me
off anyway?"
    "Q, I wasn't actually trying to kill you."
    That statement was too outrageous for him to devise a
suitable reply. He looked up and glared at her. "No?" he finally
said, a wealth of disgust and disbelief in the one word.
    "The airlocks have safety interlocks on them. They can't be
opened to vacuum if there's a life form inside, not unless one
bypasses the interlocks-- and I'm not an engineer. I'd have no
idea how to go about bypassing the safety features. I couldn't
have spaced you if I'd wanted to."
    The words sank in slowly. She hadn't been trying to kill
him. She had been trying to make it look as if she would, to
humiliate and terrify him, to make a complete fool out of him.
Terror began to transmute to rage. "How dare you?" Q asked,
getting to his feet. Rage built up uncontrollably, hazing his
vision. "How *dare* you!"
    Fury overpowered him completely, and he lunged at T'Laren,
pinning her back against the wall. Had he the power, he would
have thrown her into the heart of a sun, dismembered her cell by
quivering cell, cast her into a hellish pocket dimension to
suffer eternities of agony. He couldn't do any of those things
anymore, so he locked his fingers around her slim neck and
squeezed with all the strength of his rage, lifting her off her
feet and slamming her into the wall. "How *dare* you humiliate me
like this! Who-- do you-- think-- you-- *are?*" he screamed,
punctuating the question by repeatedly smashing her head back
into the bulkhead.
    Even the power of his rage, however, was not quite enough to
match a Vulcan's strength. Perhaps it would have if his body had
been stronger. As it was, though, T'Laren's fingers wrapped
around his and pried him loose from her throat. She pushed him
back and sank to the floor, gasping. Q staggered backward, the
aftermath of the sudden adrenaline rush catching up with him.
Weakness overwhelmed him, the counterpoint of the rush of
strength a minute ago, and he too had to sit down on the floor.
    He had never been so angry. Not in his entire mortal life
had he felt such fury at someone that he had attacked them
physically. In his entire existence, he could remember only one
other time that his rage had so overpowered his reason, and that
had been a cold, slow rage, burning for years. That had been with
Azi... and Azi had betrayed the friendship of millennia, had been
far more to him than T'Laren could ever be. But the way he felt
now, the weak helpless fury, the betrayal... was as close an
approximation to how he'd felt when Azi had attacked and nearly
destroyed him as he thought he could get in mortal form. T'Laren
should be afraid, he thought. T'Laren should be very afraid. No
one hurt him like that without suffering for it.
    "Impressive," T'Laren said hoarsely, struggling to her feet.
"I'd been informed you have no natural instinct for physical
violence. Somebody was mistaken, it seems."
    "If I weren't so weak, I would kill you," Q said, getting up
off the floor himself.
    "If you weren't so weak, it would have been far harder for
someone to threaten your life in such fashion. Q, my point here
has not been to needlessly humiliate you."
    The look he gave her could have fused hydrogen into helium.
"No?" he asked, not loudly, but with white-hot rage behind it.
"Clarify for me. What *was* your point here?"
    "You essentially said you didn't care if someone killed you.
I believed you were lying, if not to me then to yourself, and
decided to prove my theory. Obviously you do not, in fact, wish
to die."
    "I do, in fact, wish to kill *you*."
    "Irrelevant," she said sharply. "We aren't discussing your
views on my continued existence, but on your own. My original
point was that, if you do not learn to defend yourself, you are
likely to be killed. You told me you didn't care. I believe we
have just proven that that is untrue."
    "Oh, no," Q snapped. He stepped closer to T'Laren, and she
took a half-step backward. "If you only wanted to prove that I
didn't want to die, you *could* have let me go the first time I
asked you to. But no. You waited until I was completely broken,
on my knees begging and sobbing, before you relented. That was
unnecessary by anyone's standards. No, you got angry at me and
decided to humiliate me. Admit it."
    "I'm above that," T'Laren said frostily.
    "Oh? Are you, now. How intriguing. The Vulcan whose
emotional control is so incompetent that she got thrown out of
Starfleet and ended up trying to kill herself is above getting
angry. Really. What a fascinating notion."
    T'Laren moved sideways, putting space between herself and Q.
"I am not above getting angry," she said. "I am, however, above
humiliating a patient because I am angry. I would advise you not
to judge the entire universe by what you yourself would do."
    He raised his eyebrows. "Obviously you're not above taking
cheap shots," he said. "Really, T'Laren. References to my past
history? You can do better than *that*, I'm sure."
    "This isn't a contest."
    "No, you're quite right. This isn't a contest. This is much
more serious." Q imposed on her space again, backing her into the
wall. "This is a question of trust, and I'm very much afraid you
just lost mine."
    "I explained that I had no intention of killing you. You may
examine the safety interlock if you choose."
    "Oh, I believe you. I know you didn't plan to kill me. What
you planned-- and what you *did*-- was to play games with my
head."
    "As if you have never done such a thing yourself."
    "Of course I have, that's not the point! *I* am not a
psychologist! You abused the power I gave you--"
    "I did no such thing!" T'Laren twisted away from him again
and took a position half a meter away. "You are obstructionist,
defeatist and a liar, both to yourself and to others. I perceived
that you needed to be made aware of the vulnerability of your
position--"
    "No, no, and *no!*" Q could shout over anyone when he tried.
He grabbed T'Laren's arm and loomed over her again, getting in
her face. "I offended you, hurt your feelings or whatever you
have that passes for them, and *you* decided to get even.
Frightening me was probably intended to teach me a lesson, yes,
I'm sure you had good and noble reasons when you first got the
idea. But you dragged it out far too long for that to have been
all it was. No, T'Laren, I know revenge when I see it."
    She yanked her arm out of his grasp. "I acted as a healer,
in the best interests of my patient. I do not care what delusions
you choose to believe, but that is the truth."
    Q laughed unpleasantly. "Oh, don't try to *lie* to me,
T'Laren," he said. "I have uncounted millennia of experience with
deception. I know a lie when I see one, too."
    "It is obvious to me why you would choose to believe your
own version of events," T'Laren said in a voice like liquid
nitrogen. "What is less obvious is why you would find that
version so offensive. You endeavored so forcefully, so
skillfully, to offend me and to cause me to react against you
that it would undoubtedly be very disappointing to you to believe
that it did not work. You would far prefer to believe yourself
successful. I understand this. I fail to understand, however, why
you insist on the pretense that *your* feelings are hurt, that
*you* are offended, by your belief that I took revenge against
you. Why would you be so displeased at an effect you worked so
hard to achieve?"
    "Then you admit it was revenge."
    "I admit that you believe it was, and that I am bewildered
at your reaction to your own belief. The actual facts are as I
have previously stated them."
    Q stared at her. "You're worse than me," he finally said.
"When I get caught out, I generally admit it. You refuse to
acknowledge that I'm right."
    "It is irrelevant whether or not you are right. What is
relevant is that you are making a great show of being disturbed
by your belief that I attacked you for revenge. I do not
understand why."
    "Because I trusted you!" Q shouted at her. "And you
humiliated me! I thought you were going to *kill* me, T'Laren.
Have you any *idea* how frightened I was?"
    T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "Why would you have so feared
death?" she asked. "Death is what you thought you wanted, isn't
it?"
    "In *my* time, on *my* terms, at *my* hands, yes! Maybe! But
I don't care *what* you say about how quick it is and whatnot, I
don't want someone else throwing me out an airlock!" The effort
of shouting was making him dizzy. He took a deep breath. "And
that's beside the point, anyway. The point is that I trusted you
and you humiliated me, for your own personal satisfaction, and I
don't want to be trapped on a starship depending on someone who
does that kind of thing."
    "Indeed. Your solution, then?"
    "Turn this ship around. I want to go back to Starbase 56."
    She nodded and turned away, walking toward the lift. "Very
well. If that is what you wish."
    He had expected more of an argument about it. "You're just
going to take me back?"
    T'Laren stopped, but did not face him. "This excursion was
intended to benefit you. If you intend to derive no benefit from
it, there is no point. I will return you to your old life on
Starbase 56." Now she turned to face him. Her face had gone
through cold and expressionless out the other side. The wintry
devil's mask she wore bore little resemblance to a humanoid face.
It was like a legendary beast's, or a demon's, a rage that burned
as cold as frozen oxygen. "And when you die, when you take your
own life out of boredom and despair, you will be unmourned. Your
people will have written you off as a failure, for refusing to
grasp at your only chance; those who know you will consider
themselves well rid of you; the Federation will regret the loss
of a resource, but no more than that. I will grieve for my
failure. No one else will think of you at all."
    The words were a knife in his heart. Q smiled cruelly,
hiding his pain. "I don't think you'll be grieving," he said
softly. "I don't think you'll do anything at all. Lhoviri gave
you his 'gifts' as payment for something it seems you're not
going to do, now. And the Q don't tolerate failures. Lhoviri will
almost certainly take his gifts back." He let the smile broaden,
as he studied her face for any sign of pain or fear or anything
at all. "Didn't you say he gave you your life and your sanity? If
he's very merciful, he may let you keep *one*."
    The utter lack of reaction told Q everything he needed to
know. He stood there wearing a smiling mask, as an expressionless
T'Laren turned from him and went back up the lift. He took the
lift himself as soon as it came back down, still wearing the
mask, and went into his room. Only then, safely unobserved, did
the mask break. Q collapsed onto his bed, feeling despair
encroaching again. T'Laren had been absolutely right. He would
die unmourned, forgotten, his existence rendered irrelevant to
everyone he had ever cared about. Alive, there was nothing left
to him but hopelessness. Dead, there would be nothing left of him
at all.
    He stared at the ceiling, breathing deeply, trying to
control himself. Anger and self-pity and encroaching despair
roiled around inside, fighting for domination. It was in his best
interests to make sure anger won-- despair led to tears or
suicide attempts, while anger gave him strength. So he focused
his attention on being angry at T'Laren.
    *This*, he thought furiously, was why he hadn't wanted to
trust her in the first place, why he hadn't wanted to believe she
could help him or hope for anything at all. There was nothing
more painful than shattered hope. And he knew he had begun to
hope-- the depth of his terror when he'd thought T'Laren would
kill him told him that. It wasn't as if he'd lied to her-- no, he
didn't want to be killed by someone else, and no, he didn't want
to die by going out an airlock. Two weeks ago, however, both
alternatives would have been completely acceptable. She was right
that death by vacuum was easier than death by drinking acid. He'd
observed mortals dying in vacuum often enough to know that shock
drove them unconscious very quickly, and the pain they suffered
before that time was simply not in the same league as the pain of
having etching solution devouring one's guts.
    That was odd, actually. Two weeks ago, he had been willing
to put himself through excruciating torment. The agony he'd
suffered, while brief, had been more intense than any pain he'd
been through yet, and it had been something he'd done to himself.
He would have jumped at the chance to go out an airlock, then;
would have been overjoyed to find a method of dying as sure as
the acid and less painful, and he wouldn't have *cared* who did
it to him. Part of the reason he'd provoked the Klingons, aside
from the fact that it was fun to provoke Klingons, had been a
secret, half-hearted hope that they'd bash his skull in for him.
He had been entirely willing to be killed, as long as the method
involved less pain and humiliation than he'd planned for himself.
    Yet not half an hour ago, he had been broken, groveling,
sobbing with terror because he'd thought he would be killed. That
went far beyond not wanting to be murdered. He had genuinely not
wanted to die.
    Somewhere along the way, without his noticing it, he must
have decided he wanted to live. He must have succumbed to hope,
and begun to actually believe T'Laren would help him. And that
brought him around in a circle to the utter cruelty of her
betrayal. If she hadn't made him hope, it could not possibly hurt
so much to see that hope destroyed. If she hadn't come into his
life--
    --he would still be on Starbase 56, where he was headed back
to now. And nothing would be any different from what it was
before.
    "Damn you, Lhoviri," Q whispered. He'd seen the trap, had
walked into it with his eyes wide open, and now he was caught.
"*Damn* you."
    In a month, or maybe less, things would get unbearable
again, and he would find a way to kill himself. It would have to
be even more sure than the acid was, something that could not
fail barring a flagrant violation of the laws of physics, which
Lhoviri would be loath to do. Probably it would end up being even
more painful as well. And after he was dead, no one would mourn
him. The Continuum would write him off as a failure. Someone who
rejected his last chance for survival didn't deserve to live.
Humanity hated him and would be glad to be rid of him. Everyone
else in the universe hated him worse and would be even more glad.
    He would not get another chance. If he rejected T'Laren,
Lhoviri wouldn't send anyone else. This was it, his last
opportunity. After what she had done he could not possibly trust
her-- but if he didn't, at least to the extent of staying aboard
Ketayawith her, he would have no hope at all.
    But she couldn't possibly *actually* turn the ship around
and return to the starbase, he thought. She knew what was at
stake-- he had warned her. If she let him step off this ship and
go back to the place where he'd die, without any argument, any
attempt to stop him or persuade him, she would have failed. And
Lhoviri was not forgiving. He disliked interfering with things.
If he had saved T'Laren's life and T'Laren didn't hold up her end
of the bargain, it would make perfect sense to Lhoviri to erase
the effects of his own interference and eliminate T'Laren, let
the death that should have claimed her get her two years late.
T'Laren knew that; Q had warned her. She would have to come back
in here to apologize, to beg him to give all this a second
chance. Then he would magnanimously forgive her.
    If that was the plan, one presumed they were traveling back
to the starbase at some ungodly slow speed, warp three perhaps,
to give her plenty of time to talk him out of it. "Computer," he
said, "what's our ETA to Starbase 56?"
    "ETA three hours," the computer said.
    *Three hours!* Q jerked to a sitting position. That
*couldn't* be right. "What speed are we traveling at?"
    "Warp nine."
    That made no sense. Why would they travel *back* to Starbase
56 three orders of magnitude as quickly as they'd left it, when
T'Laren's survival depended on them not actually returning at
all? Why would she take them so quickly? Did she *want* Lhoviri
to kill her? Or maybe, like so many other mortals Q had known,
she wouldn't quite understand the depth of the Continuum's
ruthlessness until it was too late. Maybe, for all her
protestations otherwise, she really did trust Lhoviri.
    Trusting *fool!* Q knew better than anyone how trustworthy
the Q were, or were not, especially Lhoviri, who in many respects
was an older version of himself. He had to make her understand
the danger she was in. Q got up and strode out of the room,
heading for the lift to the bridge.

    He strode out onto the bridge. "Why are we traveling at warp
9?" he demanded.
    T'Laren didn't look up at him. "One would not wish to waste
time," she said.
    Q walked over to her seat and leaned over the back of it,
speaking to the top of T'Laren's head. "You do realize that your
life ends the moment we get back to the starbase. I told you,
Lhoviri won't be forgiving."
    "You told me that, yes."
    "Well?" He glared down at her. "Aren't you going to try to
talk me out of wanting to go back?"
    "Why?"
    "Because!" Exasperated, he circled her chair and faced her,
since she was refusing to look up at him. "If we actually return
to Starbase 56, you'll die! Don't you want to live?"
    "In the first place, I have only your word for it that I
will die. You may be mistaken, or lying. And secondly, I do not
consider it a worthwhile idea to beg you to do something that
would primarily benefit yourself. You have a hard enough time as
it is comprehending that actions have consequences."
    "The consequences of this particular action would be your
death. Or at the very least you'll go insane again. It seems to
me like *you're* the one who's ignoring the consequences of your
actions."
    T'Laren finally looked up at him. "I will not coddle you,"
she said. "You are well aware that your life will be desperately
unhappy on Starbase 56, and that you will undoubtedly end up
attempting suicide again. You may well succeed this next time;
after refusing the help the Continuum sent you, I doubt they will
be eager to help you again. Yet it is your desire to return to
that. I cannot argue with such profound irrationality."
    "You don't understand. Lhoviri will *kill* you." Q snapped
his fingers. "Like that, out like a light. You're nothing to him.
He'll just get rid of you to keep things tidy."
    "*You* do not understand. That is irrelevant."
    "Well... not to me." Q turned away. If she refused to beg
him to stay with her, there were still ways to accomplish the
objective and save face. "Right now, I'm still furious at you, I
still think you humiliated me needlessly, and I still don't trust
you. But you don't deserve to die for any of that." He turned
back to her. "Turn the ship back, T'Laren, we'll go to the
conference. I don't need your death on my head."
    "It would be on Lhoviri's head, not yours."
    "Still."
    "Q, if you do not trust me there is no point to our
continuing with an empty charade. We would accomplish nothing, I
would still have failed, and Lhoviri presumably would still kill
me. I would prefer to get it over with."
    "All right!" he snapped. "I don't have a choice, do I? It
doesn't matter how many times you betray me, I have to trust you
because you're the only game in town. So turn the ship around.
We're going to the conference." He turned back toward the lift.
"I wouldn't want to miss a chance to harass so many scientists at
the same time anyway."
    Behind him, he heard her sigh. "That's not a very
constructive reason to want to go someplace."
    Q grinned. He had her. She was back now.
    He wiped the grin off his face and turned back. "Probably
not. But I'm not well-known for my constructive reasoning."
    T'Laren studied him for a moment or two without speaking.
"If you have decided to trust me, on whatever provisional basis,
will you also trust that I have your best interests in mind when
I require that you eat? And exercise? And learn some modicum of
self-defense?"
    Q thought about it. She *was* right. He knew that, even as
his mind rebelled against the knowledge. It was simply that he
couldn't stand being told what to do. "Give me back replicator
access and some amount of veto power over *what* I eat, and
you're on."
    Her face, in the slow process of thawing, went stone again.
"Bargains?"
    "Whatever works," Q said. He leaned forward, propping
himself on the railing. "T'Laren, if you're such a control freak
that you can't allow me *any* power over my own life, then this
won't work and we may as well go back. I will try my best to be
reasonable-- I just don't like being told what to do. It makes me
very, uh..."
    "Stubborn?" The stone cracked with the arch of an eyebrow.
"Unreasonable? Obnoxious?"
    Q shrugged, grinning in mock abashment. Abruptly T'Laren's
face relaxed, and he was once more dealing with a living sentient
being, not a statue of one. "All right, Q. As long as you can be
reasonable about it, I'll let you control what you eat. I
downloaded the list of replicator restrictions from Starbase 56,
so you can have access to the replicators immediately, under the
same restrictions as you had before. But I'd still like you to
eat with me, and we still have to go do those exercises."
    He sighed, sitting down abruptly. "It's so hard, T'Laren.
I'm tired, and I'm weak, and I feel like an idiot when I try to
do anything with my body. I just won't stretch that way."
    T'Laren stood up, walking over to him. "There are two
solutions I can see. One is that we try water exercises instead.
Your weakness and lack of flexibility won't matter as much in
water, the pool won't let you drown, and you need to learn how to
swim as well. The other is that you let me massage the tension
out before we start the stretching, so that you'll be able to
stretch with a minimum of pain."
    Q put his chin on his hand and made a great show of thinking
about it. "Hmm. Let's consider... a difficult question, this. On
the one hand, I could get cold and wet, inhale large quantities
of water through my nose, wear a bathing costume of some sort
that shows off my skeletal limbs to maximum boniness, and make a
fool of myself splashing about through a medium that this body is
most certainly not evolved for. On the other hand, you could give
me a massage. Let me ponder." He looked up at her with a
perfectly deadpan expression. "Could I have a few hours to think
about it?"
    For a brief second, almost too quickly for him to notice it,
T'Laren smiled. Then the expression was gone, but left in its
wake a considerably friendlier face. "I take it you're leaning
toward the massage?"
    "I think I favor that alternative, yes."
    She helped him to his feet. "Let's go to the gym," she said.
"If bribery is what it takes to get you to exercise, I have no
moral problems with bribing you."
    "How wonderful. I have no moral problems with being bribed,
so this will work out fine. Lead the way, dear doctor." They
stepped onto the lift. "If I'm going to go through all the pain
of being forced to exercise, after all, I should get *something*
pleasant in exchange..."

    To T'Laren's amazement, Q was actually capable of being
somewhat reasonable. He complained all the way through the
exercise session, but at least he did what he was told. And
afterward, when she requested their lunches from the replicator,
he ate his without complaint and even with some enthusiasm. He
seemed to have completely forgotten about the incidents this
morning, leading her to wonder just how long he held grudges.
There was evidence that as an omnipotent being, he'd been capable
of holding a grudge for centuries, but from what she had seen and
heard from him and the people she'd interviewed, he seemed far
quicker to forgive than anybody gave him credit for. She doubted
she'd get a straight answer out of him if she asked-- but then,
sometimes his obfuscations were revealing in themselves.
    "How well do you hold grudges, Q?" she asked.
    He looked up from the raisin bagel he'd been intent on.
"What brought that on?"
    "Curiosity," she said, with a slight tilt of the head. "I
will undoubtedly ask questions out of nowhere fairly often, so
perhaps you should get used to it. Feel free to do the same."
    "All right," he said, straight-faced. "What's the exchange
rate for latinum to Andorian sessis?"
    "Relevant questions," T'Laren clarified, as Q grinned. "And
I don't want my question to be dismissed. Do you generally hold
grudges?"
    "That's... complicated." He took another bite of the bagel
and said with his mouth full, "What kind of grudges? Against
who?"
    "Anyone."
    "Well, that narrows the field considerably, thanks." Q put
the bagel down. "Do I have replicator access now?"
    "Yes."
    "Good." He turned to the replicator. "Another steak
sandwich, this time *without* all the lettuce."
    "Is this a terribly sensitive question for you, that you're
ignoring me?"
    "Not at all. I'm hungry. What is this fetish you Vulcans
have for lettuce, anyway? If I have to eat a vegetable, can't it
be something that doesn't taste like crispy water?"
    "I find it interesting that you suddenly became hungry after
I asked you a question."
    Q sighed in exasperation. "I'm not avoiding the question,
T'Laren. I'm eating my lunch. I'll answer your question in a
second, all right?"
    T'Laren sipped at her cassava juice, watching him. He took a
bite of the sandwich, put it down hurriedly, opened it and
applied various condiments, taking small bites after each
application to check the flavor. "You realize," she said, "you
could have gotten it out of the replicator in exactly the
condition you wanted it in."
    "I didn't know what condition I wanted it in. This is trial
and error." Finally satisfied, he gestured at her with the
sandwich-holding hand. "All right, your question. I have been
known to forgive people transgressions that other Q would have
obliterated them for. I have also been known to enact hideous and
lengthy revenges for offenses other Q would have found trivial.
Can you give me a context for your question? Grudges for what?"
    "Since you became mortal, have you held grudges against
people who have humiliated you?"
    "Oh!" He nodded with dramatic comprehension. "You want to
know if I'm holding a grudge against *you*."
    She would have thought that would have been immediately
obvious to him. Perhaps he was being deliberately dense. "In
part, yes. But it is also a general question."
    "Well, then no." He took another bite of the sandwich. "It
is amazing how much hungrier I feel. I don't think I've had this
much appetite in months."
    "It's the physical activity," T'Laren said. "By no, you mean
you don't hold grudges against people for humiliating you?"
    "No, I mean I don't hold a grudge against *you*."
    "That wasn't what I was asking."
    Q sighed. "You're annoying, you know that?"
    "I believe that's an excellent example of the pot calling
the stainless steel serving fork black."
    Q blinked at her. "That isn't how it goes."
    "You aren't the only one permitted to paraphrase old Earth
sayings. Why am I annoying?"
    "I don't hold grudges against people I need," Q said. "For
instance, while I've far from forgotten all of Commodore
Anderson's attempts to blackmail and coerce me into doing her
will, I've more or less forgiven her for them. Actually, in some
respects I'm very quick to forgive. One can't spend all one's
time standing on one's dignity when one's role in life is that of
a provocateur. Occasionally the provoked will come up with some
creative method of striking back, and one can hardly destroy them
for doing exactly what one pushed them into doing."
    "Weren't we discussing your mortal life?"
    "I'm explaining why I tolerate minor insults to my dignity,
in the context of my entire existence. You see..." He took a
drink of grape juice. "For example. This one's in my records, so
it's hardly anything you don't know. Five years ago or so-- well,
more or less five years, I haven't been keeping close track-- I
attempted to persuade Riker to join the Continuum, for... what
seemed like good reasons at the time. It was in part a genuine
attempt. It was also a game, a test, a challenge and a number of
other things. Picard offered a bet with me that Riker would
defeat the challenge I'd set him. I, of course, knew that no
human could *possibly* resist the temptation of godlike power, so
I cheerfully accepted."
    "I take it things did not work out as planned."
    "They did not. Riker refused-- how, I still don't know.
Picard then indulged in a little bit of personal gloating over
the fact that he'd won the bet, and therefore I had to leave. At
that moment I was quite enraged with him. I mean, think about it.
This little insect, making demands of *me*, a god! I might have
destroyed him if... circumstances had been different."
    He lifted his grape juice glass. "In the long run, however,
I'm not that petty. I go around challenging mortals to beat the
tests I set for them-- I really don't let it get to me when they
succeed. In fact, the ones that succeed, that actually defeat my
tests, fascinate me. It was the reason I came back to humanity
after they beat my Farpoint test, and the reason I chose to warn
Picard about the Borg, and the reason I kept studying the race.
On the other hand, yes, I am capable of holding grudges. The
worst thing I ever did in my entire existence was for revenge on
someone." He drank.
    "What was that?"
    Q put down his glass hard and leaned forward. "T'Laren, you
*know* my history. If *I* say that something is the worst thing
I've ever done, something I was ashamed of even when I was still
all-powerful, one can imagine roughly how bad it had to have
been. Now what makes you think that I would for any reason
whatsoever want to *tell* someone about it?"
    "Why would you have brought it up if you didn't?"
    "As a relevant example. You don't need to know the details."
    "I wouldn't judge you, Q. That's not my place."
    "No, it's not your place, but yes, you would. No sentient
could avoid it. I don't care how objective and logical you think
you are, if you knew the whole sordid story you would judge me.
Harshly."
    "What was the general nature of it? Did you destroy a
sentient species?"
    "Nothing like that," Q snapped impatiently. "Actually, I
*have* destroyed sentient species, but never without reason. This
was..." He sighed. "You're not going to stop hounding me until I
toss you a bone, are you?"
    "I *am* curious," T'Laren admitted.
    "Suffice it to say that someone I cared for very much hurt
me very badly, both physically and emotionally-- which is a neat
trick when you consider that I was invulnerable-- and in
retaliation I did... something heinous even by *my* standards."
He stared into nothing. "I became ashamed of it even when I had
the power to correct my mistake... but not ashamed enough, it
seems. Pride wouldn't let me. And now I have a much better idea
of exactly what I did to her."
    T'Laren had to admit to being desperately curious. What
*would* a being who shrugged off genocide consider a heinous act?
She risked a wild guess. "Was it Guinan?"
    "*No!*" Q looked simultaneously astonished and disgusted.
"What *ever* gave you that idea?"
    "I spoke to Guinan, when I was on the Enterprise--"
    "When were you on the Enterprise?"
    "About-- three or four months ago. I'm not entirely sure--
time passed strangely when I was with Lhoviri on a frequent
basis. I was interviewing people who remembered you, in
preparation for taking you as my patient."
    "Well, I'm glad to hear that some preparation went into it.
What *did* Guinan say? I can't imagine she told you much; she's
too addicted to her woman-of-mystery act."
    "Very little. Only that you had had dealings with one
another two centuries ago, and that she approved of my mission to
humanize you."
    "What? No vitriol about how the irresponsible Continuum lets
its irresponsible children run amok in the universe? No choice
comments about what a pathetic human being I am? Didn't she even
wish you luck?"
    "She did wish me luck, in fact." T'Laren leaned forward.
"What happened between you?"
    Q leaned back in his chair. "Oh, I had a little
misunderstanding with Guinan. I understood that she was not a
danger to me, not gratuitously cruel, and not a treacherous
bitch. Obviously, I fell a bit short of omniscient there."
    T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "That sounds rather one-sided."
    "It is. It's my side. If you want Guinan's side, why don't
you ask her? You being such pals with her and all."
    "I received the distinct impression that what little she
told me was all she planned to. What did you do to her?"
    "Hardly anything at all. Not in comparison to what she did
to me."
    "Then what *did* she do to you?"
    Q raised a hand and ticked off on his fingers. "She lied to
me. Tricked me. Betrayed me. Lied to me. Defied me. Threatened my
existence. Did I mention she lied?"
    T'Laren had to work to maintain control. She should not be
amused by this, she knew. "You sound like a man speaking of an
ex-lover."
    "Guinan was *not* my lover!" Q snapped. "I have better taste
than that."
    "But she could hardly have betrayed you had you not trusted
her to some degree in the first place."
    "Well, she wasn't my lover. That would have been bestiality.
For a Q to actually fall in love with a mortal, even a long-lived
one... it happens, I'll admit, but not to me, not in all the
millions of years I lived. I would never have lowered myself that
way."
    "But the one we mentioned before-- the one you said you
cared about--"
    "Azi was a Q. She had been my best friend for... I don't
want to talk about this." He stood up, tossing the remains of the
steak sandwich next to the remains of the bagel. "Why do I let
you do this to me?"
    "What?"
    "Don't play innocent, T'Laren! You know perfectly well what
you're doing!"
    "Yes, I know what I'm doing... but not how you perceive what
I'm doing. I ask again, what?"
    "I told you I didn't want to discuss it. Not Azi, not
Guinan, not anything like that. Yet somehow I find myself telling
you secrets that I would have sworn a tractor beam couldn't have
gotten out of me. As a professional provocateur, I would dearly
love to know how you're doing it. It amazes me that in ten
thousand years of doing this sort of thing, there could be *any*
tricks I'd missed."
    T'Laren shook her head. "It's not a trick. I'm not
manipulating you, Q. If you're telling me things, it's because
you want to."
    "But I don't want to!" he shouted. "You're... I don't know
what you're doing, but you're making me tell you things."
    She merely looked at him for several seconds. Q reddened,
but held his ground. "It's true," he insisted.
    "I'm trying to help you, and you know it," she said gently.
"That's why you're telling me things. You know you have no hope
if I can't help you, and you know that I can't help you if you
don't answer my questions."
    "I really don't see how me telling you about Azi is supposed
to help you help me."
    "It gives me some insight into you," T'Laren said. "Normally
I prefer to learn about my patients' backgrounds in as much
detail as possible. You are in many ways the most alien being
I've ever treated. If you had anything analogous to a childhood,
it's doubtful you could express it in terms I could understand
without oversimplifying to the point of uselessness. You
obviously have what you've analogized as family conflicts, but
with you the family appears to include your entire species. So
anything you *can* tell me, anything I can understand, gives me a
point of reference to understanding you. I know now that the Q
are capable of love--"
    "Azi wasn't my lover, either. The Q don't have sex."
    "I didn't say she was your lover. I said you loved her. You
may have loved her as a sister, or a best friend, or a mother for
all I know. And she did something to you that hurt you badly, and
in response you did something so horrible to her that you feel
Lhoviri would be justified in tormenting you in turn."
    "I never said--"
    "You did. Vulcans are good at logic, Q. I can put two and
two together at least as well as you." She stood up. "Knowing
this really does help. I know now that the sensations of guilt
and betrayal had not been alien to you, the way that... for
example, that physical pain had been. You had experienced such
emotional hurts before losing your powers. And no, you're right--
I probably don't need to know the details. Which is undoubtedly
why you didn't tell me them."
    "Don't credit me with great insights," Q said tiredly. He
walked away from her and perched himself on the counter. "I am
quite positive I have no subconscious insight into what you
require for your profession. I said whatever I did... presumably
because for a brief psychotic moment I actually wanted you to
know. You really don't know what I'm capable of, T'Laren." He
looked down at the floor, kicking his legs listlessly against the
cabinets under the counter like an overgrown child. "You really
don't. You may have heard a few choice bits from Lhoviri, you've
read my files, but... you *really* don't know me. And... it's
odd, part of me actually *wants* you to know. I suppose on the
somewhat perverse principle of a trickster's form of honesty. But
I'm not that masochistic. I really hope you do never find out."
    She walked over to him and stood next to where he sat,
leaning very slightly against the counter. "Q... I won't pry into
anything you really don't want to discuss. But it's part of my
job to try to get you to admit to unpleasant truths about
yourself."
    "Oh, I've been doing plenty of that. I think sometimes
that's all I've done, these past three years." He slid off the
counter. "That was a bad idea."
    "What was?"
    "Sitting up there. My back is killing me. Massage or no
massage, I am not made for exercise, stretching or otherwise."
    T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "You just want a backrub."
    Q turned to look at her, a grin of mock embarrassment
spreading across his face. "You see right through me."
    "Sit down where I can reach you." Q obeyed with alacrity. "I
really am going to have to teach you self-relaxation exercises."
    "And how to swim. And how to behave in company. And how not
to have nightmares."
    "Yes. All of that."
    He sighed, leaning back into her touch. "You want to know
what you can about my background? About what it was like, to be
part of the Continuum? That is more or less what you were fishing
for before, with all that about you needing to know whatnot,
isn't it?"
    He was actually volunteering information. T'Laren raised
both eyebrows, startled. "I... would like to know anything you're
willing to tell me, yes."
    "This will probably help you understand, then." Q turned his
head slightly to look up at her. "Refresh my memory. Vulcans are
telepaths, but it's activated only by touch, right? Normally
you're linked with only one other person at most?"
    "Yes."
    "But when you're linked-- it's a melding? Not just mind-
reading, but mind-combining?"
    "When a link is formed, it's through a meld. We don't have
to meld. We can project through any solid matter, with sufficient
concentration, and read emotions through touch, if we aren't
shielded. But... yes, initiating a link requires a meld."
    "Humans aren't telepaths," Q said, relaxing his head again
so she could no longer see his face. "They lead very lonely
existences, each locked inside his own skull. Most of them never
know anything else. They confuse physical closeness, emotional
closeness, with mental closeness. And because they are forced to
be individuals by their biology, what they seek is unity.
Submergence into a mob mind, emotional closeness with a partner,
identification with something greater than themselves. Most
humans spend their lives eagerly trying to subsume their
individuality into some sort of collective."
    "I wouldn't say most humans..."
    "I speak historically as well as based on the present day.
Humans are far from perfect now, but even I have to admit they've
come light-millenia from what they were even six measly centuries
ago. My point, however, is not to gratuitously insult humans. You
see, the Q have the exact opposite problem."
    T'Laren released him. "Is that better?"
    "Not really, but I don't think it's going to get better. You
may as well not bother."
    She walked around him and sat down again where she could
watch his expression. "The opposite problem in what sense?"
    "From the time we actually enter the Continuum-- which most
of us don't do until we're fairly well developed already-- we are
constantly in contact with the others. Our minds aren't really
our own. We are-- I don't know how to describe it. You could call
us interconnected nodes in a network, each node capable of
independent thought, but the network forming the primary unit of
experience. Or you could think of us... as diffuse semi-solids in
a liquid solution. At our cores we are mostly one thing, but out
at the boundaries... we are mostly others. I really don't know
how to describe it."
    "Can you describe the effect? Without resorting to
analogies?"
    "I can try... We're individuals. But our individuality is
not our default, the way it is with humanity. We are first and
foremost members of the Continuum, the overmind, the unity of all
the Q... and secondarily we're ourselves. We *are* part of
something larger than ourselves, by definition. We can't escape
it. And so what we seek is individuality. Separation from the
others. Our... social connections, for lack of a better word, are
conducted for different reasons than humans do. We don't *need*
reassurance that we're loved, that we're part of a larger whole,
that we're important to others. All that we can take as a given.
Most of our communication with one another-- all right, I'm
talking about the adolescents. I can't speak for the older ones.
They're as far above me-- as far above what I was as I was above
you. But I'm speaking about the younger ones, like me, the ones
that still bother to interact with the matter-based universe at
all. And we communicate with each other to separate ourselves,
not to draw ourselves closer." He leaned forward. "Do you see
what I'm saying?"
    "I do. Yes."
    "Of course, we can send communications on multiple levels at
once. We can simultaneously affirm our individuality, our
dominance over another, our respect and love for that other, and
our need for separation from that other with one thought. All our
communication with one another is multi-layered, and only the
most superficial level translates into human speech. And in that
mode we're usually antagonistic toward one another. We have to
be. A Q who doesn't have an overweening ego and an unshakably
stubborn personality will be absorbed by the Continuum, diffused
among all of us until he no longer exists as a separate entity.
That's the only thing we have to fear. We can't die-- well, not
unless the Continuum throws us out-- but we can cease to exist as
individuals, which is more or less the same thing."
    "But you call them your family."
    "They *are* my family. They were extensions of myself."
    "Families are associated with closeness--"
    "Forced closeness, T'Laren. Closeness that's taken for
granted, until it becomes stultifying. You never had any
siblings, did you?"
    "No..."
    "Sibling rivalry. Look it up sometime. It's the closest
thing humans have to the relationship the younger Q have with one
another." He sighed. "The trouble with analogies is that they
oversimplify, of course. There's a lot I'm leaving out here,
since I have no real words to express it. But I think you
understand the basic idea."
    T'Laren nodded slowly. "That's very helpful, actually. Thank
you."
    Q got up. "I think I need to rest for a while. I'm going to
my room. You can call me for dinner whenever."

    Q's strength slowly came back to him over the next several
days, at least to the point where he wasn't getting winded by
walking around. T'Laren, as promised, had continued to allow him
some degree of control over his own activities, as long as he was
reasonable about it. He was therefore trying to be reasonable. It
was difficult-- he was well aware that he was being manipulated
into behavior that suited T'Laren, and every instinct he had
shrieked at him to refuse to be manipulated, whatever the cost to
himself might be. But the cost would be far too high, in this
case. He knew that, even if every so often he had to remind
himself-- or, more usually, T'Laren had to remind him.
    So he ate when she told him he had to-- which was getting
easier; his appetite was improving, a good sign according to
T'Laren-- and exercised when she told him to, despite the fact
that any kind of physical activity embarrassed him and hurt like
hell. He protested when he could. The damnable thing about
Vulcans, though, was that they always had logical reasons why you
had to do what they said.
    For instance, when T'Laren demanded that Q let her teach him
how to swim, he'd thought he had her. "What possible use could I
have for learning to swim?" he'd asked, smugly sure there
couldn't be any.
    "It's valuable exercise. And it'll be less painful for you
than calisthenics or other forms of physical activity."
    "Less painful in your opinion. I'm not terribly fond of
getting cold, or wet, or of breathing some medium other than an
oxygen/nitrogen mixture."
    "It may also be useful in a dangerous situation."
    Now he had her. "I spend most of my time in space. And if I
did go to the surface of a planet, rest assured I'd stay far away
from the water. How could I possibly be in a situation where I
would need to swim?"
    "Suppose you were being chased by an assassin. You have no
communicator and no vehicle--"
    "Why am I on a planetary surface?"
    "Say we were forced to make an emergency landing. I am
nowhere around. Maybe I'm dead, maybe I'm injured. There's a
Federation settlement on the other side of a river, and the
assassin's slower than you are-- you could easily outrun it and
reach the Federation colony if there weren't a river in your way.
What are you going to do? Sit on the bank and whimper until the
assassin catches up to you? Or try to swim the river?"
    She was far too good at using logic against him. It just
wasn't fair.
    To make matters worse, she kept providing him with things
that felt pleasant. After he complained about the swimming pool
being cold, for instance, she had a small, shallow portion of it
partitioned off and made into a hot bath. Li had prescribed hot
baths for tension two and a half years ago, when Q had acquired
his antique bathtub. Then Anderson had taken away the bathtub a
year ago when he'd tried to kill himself in it. He hadn't been
willing to admit quite how much he'd missed hot baths since. Now
T'Laren could hold out the promise of a long warm soak if he
cooperated with her and let her teach him swimming. It was
classical carrot-and-stick training, and he should have been far
too sophisticated for it to work. But it did, dammit. Even though
he knew perfectly well what she was doing, he couldn't help
responding to it.
    Despite himself, he was actually beginning to trust her.
    If he had thought that she was brainwashing him, or
undermining his ability to take care of himself, he would have
been able to resist. Q had spent millions of years fighting off
attempts to undermine his identity or his self-will. That, he was
sure he could resist. Short of euphoric drugs, no pleasure any
mortal could give him could make him completely yield control of
himself to someone else. But he had to admit that what she was
doing was strengthening him. Though he ached from her exercise
sessions, he did know that they were designed to help him protect
himself, and that made the pain fractionally more bearable.
    She was also training him in meditative techniques. To both
of their surprise, Q took to meditation right away. It was less
surprising in hindsight-- though a human with his personality
would be utterly unsuited to meditative disciplines, the sort of
intense inward concentration that humans used in meditation was
analogous to a frequent state among the Q, and so in a certain
respect it was something he was already an expert on doing. He
just hadn't known he could apply his experience to his new state.
And to a certain extent, of course, he could not. He could use a
trance state to overcome boredom or mild discomfort, such as
tense muscles; real pain, however, disrupted his concentration
completely. T'Laren said it would be something he'd need to
practice. "Your experience as an energy being doesn't apply when
pain enters the picture. Don't be spoiled by how quickly you
learned the techniques-- you'd never have managed it if you
hadn't been learning something you already knew from your past
life."
    "So I might as well forget about learning to overcome pain."
    "If you set your mind to it, you can probably eventually
develop the ability to overcome most pain. Never all, but then,
not even Vulcans can overcome all pain. It'll take you a long
time, though."
    "A long time" was meaningless to Q. He could look ahead a
year, maybe two; beyond that, he truly didn't expect to live.
Either he would be omnipotent again, in which case pain would be
irrelevant, or he would be dead. His mind flinched away from
exploring the possibilities of anything longer-range; a strange
attitude, for a being who had once made plans in terms of
millenia, but the idea of living eighty or ninety more years in
this body frightened him almost as much as-- and sometimes more
than-- the notion that he wouldn't. As far as he was concerned,
then, if it would take what a Vulcan considered a long time, it
was outside the realm of what he could hope for.
    But even the little he could do was a vast improvement. When
he started to feel paranoid again, to feel as if T'Laren was
undermining his identity, he reminded himself of what she had
given him. She had helped him to free himself from the tyranny of
boredom; for that alone, he should fall at her feet and worship
her. Someone who was trying to break him to her will wouldn't
give him such a powerful tool of resistance.
    Even still, he wouldn't be himself if he bent completely to
another's will, and losing his identity had been his only real
fear for far too long for him to put it aside now, even as a
mortal with so many more relevant things to fear. There were
still some areas where T'Laren was unyielding, such as the
question of his sedatives. He had pleaded with her on several
occasions, to no avail. It was T'Laren's opinion that he wouldn't
have nightmares if he wasn't constantly trying to circumvent them
with drugs.
    "Explain then why I've had nightmares every night since I
came aboard your starship," he challenged. They were sitting at
dinner; in an hour or two, Q would probably go to bed, and he'd
wanted to make one last try at getting his sedatives before he
did. "Or why I had them every night that I didn't take sedatives
back when I was stockpiling them."
    T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "Why were you stockpiling
sedatives?"
    "I thought that Anderson would use them as some more
ammunition to hold over my head."
    "Is there a particular reason why you thought so?"
    Q sighed theatrically. T'Laren seemed constitutionally
incapable of giving a straight answer. Everything he asked her
was an excuse for her to ask him questions. "She used everything
else as ammunition; why not that?"
    "Yes, but you must have perceived the danger as greater than
usual, or you wouldn't have bothered. If your medical records are
correct, you were permitted to replicate one sedative dose per
night, is that right?"
    "More or less."
    "So in order to stockpile sedatives, you would have had to
go without. Faced with a choice between certainly going without
at the moment and possibly going without in the future, you would
ordinarily have chosen the second alternative. The only reason
you might have chosen a certainty over a possibility is if you
considered that possibility almost a certainty itself. You must
have been very sure that Anderson would do such a thing."
    Put that way, it did seem like an unlikely thing for him to
have done-- planning ahead hadn't been Q's strong point since he
became mortal. "I first started it after Li said I couldn't have
painkillers anymore except in an emergency. I was afraid he'd cut
my prescription. Then I tried to get Anderson to get Li to give
me the painkillers back-- I told her I couldn't concentrate on my
work if I was in pain. She said she wasn't going to override the
chief medical officer's decision on a medical matter, and maybe I
should learn to overcome minor discomforts. When I said I
couldn't, she said I'd have to learn to overcome boredom, then.
She was always trying to blackmail me into doing things."
    "Into doing your job, was my understanding," T'Laren said.
    "I made an agreement with Starfleet," Q snapped. "They would
protect me, and I'd teach anyone they sent to me. Well, they fell
down on their side of it a good number of times, too. Did
Anderson tell you about the time that Security tried to kill me?
Or about the six or seven times that various assassins got
through the base's security and nearly finished me off? Did she
by any chance mention the time that a telepath simply walked up
to me and stabbed me in the gut, when there was an entire
security escort around me-- after I'd *warned* her to use
telepathic security to protect me? She claimed that she couldn't
get hold of psis on short notice, that we would have to make do
with a handful of Vulcans and a human 'sensitive'. Sensitive as a
rock! *He* didn't do me any good."
    T'Laren's eyes widened slightly. "No, she didn't tell me
anything of the sort," she said. "What happened?"
    "Well... you've seen mention of the Maierlen assassin in my
records."
    She nodded, sipping at fruit juice. "The one who tried to
kill you with a swarm of insects."
    Q had been asleep, deep under the influence of his nightly
drug, when a sudden pain had started to rouse him. Since he'd
been sedated, it took two or three more of the sharp, stinging
pains before he could come fully awake. There was an unpleasant
crawling sensation on his skin, vaguely similar to what he'd felt
when the Calamarain was attacking him. He had commanded the
lights on, and seen three or four Maierlen waspoids, thick-bodied
stinging insects that looked like a cross between Earth
cockroaches and Earth wasps, crawling on him. There were several
more of the bugs crawling on the sheets, making their way to him,
and one or two flying at him. Since a starbase was normally a
sanitary, vermin-free place, he had immediately known something
was terribly wrong. He'd looked up at the air vent-- and seen a
swarm of the creatures boiling out, the air churning and black
with them.
    He had screamed for help the moment he saw the swarm; even
still, by the time Security reached him he was more than half-
dead, covered with stings and with insects crawling over every
centimeter of his skin. Before that time, Q had had none of the
normal human revulsion toward insects-- they were simply another
form of life, no more repulsive than humans themselves. Since
then, he had developed a powerful phobia of bugs and buglike
things, as if the atavistic repulsion had been lurking in his
human genes, waiting for circumstance to activate it.
    "Right," he said, trying to dispel the memory. "Natives of
the planet Maierle are powerful telepaths, who generally exist in
symbiosis with some animal partner-- a familiar, to use terms
from Earth mythos. Normally Maierlen familiars are mammalian, and
single animals; however, Maierlen assassins frequently employ
entire swarms of insectoid or aquatic lifeforms as their
familiars. I knew it was a Maierlen that was after me the moment
I saw the insects; I also knew that he had to have used his
telepathy to get himself and his bugs aboard, as the automatic
defenses would've caught him if he tried to beam aboard secretly.
He had to have walked in the front door, and just made everyone
think that he wasn't smuggling a crate full of poisonous insects
aboard."
    "And so you told Anderson...?"
    "I told her there was a dangerous telepath at large who
wanted me dead and who could convince anyone without telepathic
defenses-- which covered 99% of the starbase's personnel,
including me-- that he wasn't there. She seemed to think the
threat was negligible after we killed his bugs. I begged her to
call in telepaths-- send to Betazed or Vulcan, there'd be tons.
Instead, she figured we'd make do with six or seven Vulcans and
the 'sensitive', Agajanian." Q shook his head. "The assassin took
out Agajanian-- apparently his 'sensitivity' wasn't quite up to
snuff-- and made everyone think he *was* Agajanian. Even Sekal
was fooled. T'Meth might not have been-- Sekal says she's a
better telepath than he is-- but she and the other Vulcans were
off combing the base for the guy. And in the middle of a security
escort, the assassin walked up to me and cut me open, because no
one could see him for what he was until he attacked me."
    "I see."
    The memory of the incident-- his helpless fury when Anderson
refused to take his advice, thus dooming him; his terror in the
split-second before the knife went in, as the Maierlen dropped
his illusion and let Q see what was about to happen to him--
reawakened rage at Anderson. Q stood up and began to pace. "You
see what I was up against, all the time. Anderson had promised
Starfleet she'd protect me, and failed miserably. She wasn't
imcompetent; she'd never have gotten to where she was if she was,
so what does that leave me to believe? If Anderson wanted me
dead, if she couldn't be bothered keeping up her end of things,
why should I whore for her? Why should I waste my time, which I
now have precious little of, trying to teach the morons Starfleet
would send me, putting on a vaudeville show to catch their
microscopic attention spans and get the simplest concepts across
to them, when Anderson couldn't be bothered to keep me from
getting eviscerated in public?"
    T'Laren studied him for a few moments. "I see your point,"
she finally said. "In Anderson's defense, I think she did the
best she could, for the most part; there may have been some
reason she couldn't get more telepaths on short notice. She may
have become entangled with some petty bureaucratic nonsense at
Starfleet Command, and then presented their decision to you as
her own out of loyalty to them. But certainly, with solely the
information you've given me, it seems reasonable to believe that
Anderson wasn't doing her job properly."
    "So if she didn't do her job, why should I do mine? Only it
didn't work that way, you see, because she had the power and I
didn't. Anything I depended on, Anderson would take great glee in
cutting me off from if I did the slightest thing she didn't like.
I wanted to have my own supply of sedatives so if she *did* cut
me off, I could laugh in her face without worrying about the
nightmares I'd have. And then we were working against the Borg,
and I wasn't sleeping, most nights. And the nights I did, I
couldn't afford to take a sedative. So whenever I thought of it,
I'd get the computer to give me a sedative and then I'd stockpile
it. They had about a three-month life span; I had something like
thirty of them that were still good the night I took them all."
He was growing more and more angry, as he remembered the
increasingly severe restrictions that he'd been living under for
over two years. "And then they did cut me off. I had to go to
sickbay every night to get the damn things; do you think I
enjoyed that? Especially after Security attacked me and I wasn't
allowed to go anywhere without an escort? And explain to me the
logic of *that*-- Security tried to kill Q, so let's not let him
go anywhere without Security. Oh, that certainly makes sense. I
didn't take the sedatives when I thought Security was going to
kill me, since I didn't want to be asleep if they came for me,
and I had utterly horrific nightmares constantly throughout that
period. It just never fails. I always have nightmares unless I
take the sedatives."
    T'Laren shook her head. "Q, it seems to me that every time
you haven't taken the sedatives, you've been under some unusually
severe emotional stress. Right now, you've left behind a place
where you were reasonably secure and embarked into the unknown,
certainly a stressful situation. The other occasions you
describe-- fearing you would be blackmailed, fearing you would be
killed, fearing the Borg... I know of few humans that wouldn't
suffer nightmares under such circumstances. My point is that, if
you learn to cope with the nightmares, rather than drugging
yourself to avoid them, they will lessen in severity and
eventually drop to a bearable level. Even human beings in
conditions of chronic stress rarely suffer nightmares as
consistently as you do; I think that's because you don't actually
suffer nightmares as consistently as you claim."
    Q turned on T'Laren, startled. "You think I'm lying to you?"
    "No, no. You must realize that you dream every night, even
under sedation. It's simply that when you are sedated, you sleep
through the dreams, and don't remember them in the morning. You
understand that, correct?"
    "Uh-- yes, I suppose so..."
    "In the first place, you have conditioned yourself to fear
sleep. When you sleep without a sedative, you expect to have a
nightmare, and so you have one. The fact that you are usually
under stress when you go without sedatives intensifies the
conditioning. In fact, you probably have nightmares rarely--
mostly only when you're not sedated. The dreams you normally
have, the ones you don't remember, are ordinary dreams, without
significant negative emotional content. If you stop taking the
sedatives completely, your body will gradually become accustomed
to the absence of sedative, and the conditioning will wear off."
    It sounded unlikely at best to Q, but T'Laren was adamant.
So he had stopped trying to persuade her, and was approaching the
problem from a different direction. Ketayas computer system was
considerably less sophisticated than Starbase 56's. Actually,
less sophisticated wasn't precisely accurate; many of its AI-
style functions were far more sophisticated, since it was
designed to be able to run the entire ship itself with only
minimal humanoid input, if need be. But its security was
laughable in comparison to the starbase's. Around the ninth day
of their journey, Q managed to get the computer to recognize him
as an authorized ship pilot, with all the same rights and
privileges that T'Laren had. Using that status, he rewrote the
restrictions list on his replicator so he could get anything he
really wanted, including sedatives. He had written in a
protection subroutine so that T'Laren would be notified if he got
an overdose out of the replicators-- she had had a point, that he
needed to be protected from himself to some degree-- but he
figured he could take his nightly doses without her ever finding
out.
    It gave him a small sense of triumph, to have pulled one
over on her like that. He had begun to genuinely like T'Laren--
no big surprise there; as long as he wasn't gratitutiously
obnoxious to her, she was consistently good to him, without being
sappy or overemotional like Medellin had been. She would match
wits with him when he threw down a challenge, and seemed to
understand the difference between verbal sparring for pleasure
and serious combat, something few people had ever grasped before.
Her intentions were to help him, and he'd come to realize that
she was reasonably competent at her job-- unlike Medellin, who
hadn't understood him at all, she could perhaps carry through her
intentions. But Q was incapable of letting anyone else dominate
him. As much as he'd begun to trust her, he needed to have
something over her, and the fact that he now had as much access
to her computer as she did would do nicely.
    He also spent a great deal of time exploring the ship. There
were crawlspaces and hatchways, ventilation systems and access
corridors, running under the surface of the decks and behind the
bulkheads. On Starbase 56, he had once grown sufficiently bored
with the restricted area he was allowed to travel freely in that
he had climbed into the accessways and explored them thoroughly.
That knowledge had saved his life once. It stood to reason that
it might again, so he wanted to be sure he knew Ketayathoroughly.
He was not particularly well-suited to crawlspaces at his size,
but he considered it important to do it. T'Laren didn't know
about his explorations, and while he doubted that she would
forbid them, or that she could come up with a sufficiently
logical reason for forbidding him that he would listen to her, he
preferred not to tell her. Q needed secrets, and he was spending
far too much time revealing his to T'Laren. He had to make new
secrets, to replace the ones he'd lost.
    Unfortunately, T'Laren had a habit of getting secrets out of
him, one way or another.

    Q was not normally in the habit of oversleeping, if only
because he preferred to be fully dressed and alert by the time
T'Laren showed up to wake him. It was the tenth day of their
journey, long enough that they'd fallen into a somewhat regular
pattern. When it was half an hour later than his usual time for
coming to breakfast, and still there was no sign of him, T'Laren
began to get worried. She touched her combadge. "Q?"
    There was no answer. "Computer, Q's status."
    "Q is asleep in his quarters."
    T'Laren frowned slightly. The computer would have told her
if it had detected anything unusual about that sleep. Perhaps he
was simply overtired. On the other hand, there were a potentially
infinite number of reasons why the computer might not be able to
detect some sort of attack on him. She decided to check.
    When he didn't respond to the door chime, she palmed the
door open and went in. He didn't respond to a knock at his
bedroom door, either. Now T'Laren was starting to become alarmed.
She went into the bedroom and walked quickly to the bed.
    There appeared to be nothing wrong with Q, except for the
fact that he was asleep. He had told her he was a light sleeper,
and indeed he had always responded directly to her calls before,
even when the call had just woken him up. Yet here he was, asleep
still after several calls, a door chime, a knock at the door and
with an intruder in his room. If T'Laren had been an assassin
that had managed to slip in, he wouldn't have had a chance.
    It was something of a cliche that humans looked vulnerable
when they slept, and there Q was no exception. The force of his
personality minimized his physical frailty when he was awake;
asleep, he looked terribly fragile, as if the slightest burden on
him would snap his thin frame. It was also a cliche that sleeping
humans looked peaceful, however, and that one Q did not live up
to. He was curled up in a semi-fetal position, arms and legs
positioned to protect as much of his body as possible. Even in
sleep he seemed somehow tense, frightened, as if he knew how
vulnerable he was. T'Laren raised an eyebrow. If Q was this tense
when he slept, no wonder he had nightmares.
    Of course, if he was this tense, he should be a phenomenally
light sleeper, once more begging the question of why he was still
asleep. She knelt by the side of the bed. "Q? Can you hear me?"
    "Mmm."
    That was an improvement. T'Laren took out her tricorder and
ran it over him, wondering if illness could explain his lethargy.
    The results were unmistakable, but she ran the scan twice
more anyway, just to be sure. She was no medical doctor, but as a
counselor she was thoroughly familiar with the effects of all
sorts of drugs on the human body. Q wasn't waking up because he
was heavily sedated. Genuinely annoyed, she reached out and shook
him roughly. "Q!"
    He blinked his eyes open groggily and scowled at her.
"...wha...?"
    "You are tremendously fortunate that I'm not an assassin,"
T'Laren said sharply. "I called you several times, and you didn't
respond. I could have stumbled over every piece of furniture you
own and still you wouldn't have awakened. How did you bypass your
replicator restrictions?"
    Q blinked at her several more times. He then rolled over on
his stomach, pulling the blankets over his head. "Go 'way," he
mumbled.
    T'Laren yanked the blankets off him and off the bed. She
then unceremoniously removed the pillow and dropped it on the
floor. By now Q was glaring at her. "Wake up and answer me," she
snapped.
    "Coffee," he muttered. "Serious coffee."
    "No coffee. How did you bypass the replicator restrictions?"
    "Get me a coffee and I'll consider answering you."
    "Answer me and I'll consider letting you have coffee."
    Q sat up slowly, rubbing his eyes. "Replicator, coffee."
    "Override, replicator."
    "Computer, code byzantium. Vulcans should be seen and not
heard. And make me a coffee."
    The replicator produced a coffee. T'Laren retrieved it
before Q could grab it. "What do you mean, 'code byzantium'? What
have you done to my computers, Q?"
    "Locked you out of them. Give me my coffee and I'll let you
back in."
    T'Laren fought to master a stab of genuine fear. Ketayawas
completely dependent on its computers, and T'Laren was no
computer expert. If Q had locked her out of the computer system,
she was completely at his mercy. "Computer, give me current
system status."
    There was no answer. Q crossed his arms and smiled smugly.
"Now are you going to let me have my coffee?"
    The immediate reaction to an attempted power game, according
to the teachings of Surak, should be to refuse to play. For a
moment, T'Laren retreated within herself, quickly weighing her
options. She had mishandled this-- her refusal to let Q have his
coffee had been born of anger, not reason. Stupid of her. She
could never let Q get her angry, because when she was angry she
tended to behave autocratically, and any sort of coercion brought
out Q's stubbornness in full flower. Doubly foolish, because it
had never occurred to her that Q could get himself in a position
of power over her. She should have asked Lhoviri for computers
with Starfleet-level security on them, should have made sure
there was no way Q could get the upper hand. She ran through her
memories of Q's files, of the sort of behavior he'd indulged in
when he had power. It was not encouraging.
    Silently she placed the coffee on a shelf, neither holding
onto it nor handing it to him. Demanding that he restore her
computer access would only worsen the problem. She retreated deep
into a Vulcan shell and waited to see what he would do.
    Q got up and took the coffee, then sat back down again and
sipped at it. "Really, T'Laren. How long did you think you could
keep me helpless? This is hardly a starbase. Cracking Ketayas
security codes was child's play."
    So far he had not threatened. She would therefore give him
the benefit of the doubt, and behave as if nothing had changed.
"How long did it take you?"
    "About a week to get into the system. I finished getting
around those silly restrictions last night. If you refused to let
me have a sedative, I thought I had better take matters into my
own hands."
    "I have explained my reasons. This incident provides
additional reason. You slept far too deeply. If an assassin had
gotten in here, you would have had no opportunity to call for
help."
    Q shrugged. "I miscalculated the dosage. I forgot that I've
been off them for over a week. It won't happen again."
    "I would have thought that you of all people, with your fear
of being dominated, would avoid a drug dependence as much as
possible."
    Q shook his head, sipping his coffee. "I'm not addicted,
T'Laren. I am perfectly capable of getting to sleep without
sedatives; I'm simply utterly miserable when I do so. If it's
important enough-- as it was during the preparation for the Borg
invasion, for instance-- I can voluntarily choose not to take
them."
    "Victims of drug addiction always say they can quit at any
time."
    "No, no. I didn't say I could quit at any time. I said I
*have* quit, when it was important enough, for periods of over
two months at a time. This is proven, recorded fact. I don't want
sedatives because I'm addicted to them; I want them because I
sleep terribly without them." He smiled again, nastily. "I think
you're just upset because I got around your attempt to dominate
me."
    "I have never tried to dominate you."
    "Perhaps that isn't what you call it. Perhaps you call it
'maintaining a proper patient-therapist relationship', or some
such. But I assure you, T'Laren, I am an expert on hierarchical
dominance patterns among mortals, and you have been trying to
dominate me. All the while telling yourself it was for my own
good, I'm sure. In fact, I'm positive that you *believe*
everything you do is for my own good. But occasionally, you are
wrong. And since you insist on trying to dominate me, you force
me to measures like this to convince you that you're wrong."
    "In order to prevent me from dominating you, you are forced
to try to dominate me?"
    Q ignored the sarcasm, his smile broadening. "And you don't
like it, do you? You don't like having someone else in control of
your life."
    That was definitely a threat. T'Laren shook her head. "You
are not in control of my life."
    "No? You know what Ketayas defenses are capable of, and you
know that they're controlled entirely through the computers.
There are quick-acting gaseous drugs that act on Vulcans only,
you know. There's any number of things I could do to you."
    "You could," T'Laren said calmly.
    "And that doesn't make you afraid? You don't fear what I
might do?"
    He studied her face, openly looking for signs of weakness.
T'Laren showed him none. "Your fate is inextricably bound to
mine," she said. "As we have discussed on previous occasions. If
you are short-sighted enough to hurt me, and thus destroy your
only hope, I cannot stop you."
    Q stared at her for a second or so, and then smiled wryly,
shaking his head. "I should have known better," he said.
"Computer! Be kind to your pointy-eared friends. Authorization
Unlimited Ducks."
    T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "What now?"
    "I've restored your access." The wry smile returned. "I was
always willing to be an equal partner with you, T'Laren. I just
don't want you dominating *me*."
    She tested it. "Computer, travel status."
    "We are traveling warp six toward the Abister system.
Rendezvous with the Yamato will take place nine days from now."
    T'Laren nodded once, slowly, acknowledging her victory.
    "You're very good at this, you know," Q said. He got up and
walked over to the replicator. "Another coffee, this one with
more sweetener than I can possibly stand."
    "Clarify, please," the replicator said. "How much sweetener
can you stand?"
    T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "You've done more than rewrite
the access list. You've altered some of the programming, too."
    "Some," Q admitted. "I could stand about two lumps of sugar,
I suppose. Make it two and a half."
    "I would have thought you would have indeed known better by
now," T'Laren said. "What did you hope to accomplish?"
    "By rewriting the programming?"
    T'Laren merely looked at him. Q made a "you-can't-blame-me-
for-trying" shrug, smiling somewhat embarrassedly. "All right,
then. Not much, to be honest. I wanted you to know what it was
like, to be at someone else's mercy like that."
    "What makes you think I didn't already know?"
    Abruptly his expression turned serious. "And I wanted you to
stop acting like I'm some sort of child, that I'm too ignorant to
make decisions on my own welfare. Essentially I want you to stop
trying to control me."
    "I have not been trying to control you, Q. I've been trying
to help you. And if your solution to being treated as a child is
to engage in childish behavior, then you *are* a child, and
deserve to be treated as one."
    "You really believe that? That you haven't been trying to
control me?" He sipped at the second coffee, his eyes hooded.
    It wasn't true, strictly speaking. She *had* been trying to
control him, to some extent, for good reasons. T'Laren considered
whether or not he was rational enough at the moment to speak to
sensibly.
    "The difficulty is the word 'control'," she said. "You have
a pronounced allergy to anyone attempting to impose their will on
you. I understand this. But at the moment, Q, you are your own
greatest enemy. You are astonishingly short-sighted, seeking
instant gratification at the expense of long-range happiness. You
are subconsciously self-destructive. I understand that it's
difficult for you to let another person guide you-- all your life
experience counsels against it-- but your self-guidance is
obviously not working properly. Right now, you can trust me
better than you can trust yourself."
    "In other words, yes. You have been trying to control me.
Admit it."
    She did not quite sigh. "You're being irrational."
    "I'm being very rational. You're jumping to conclusions." He
put down the coffee cup and began to pace. "I feel like the boy
who cried wolf. Yes, I've tried to kill myself, fairly recently.
Yes, I've done a lot of things that, if one were observing the
situation objectively, one could say were probably self-
destructive or short-sighted. But I'm not being self-destructive
now, and as for being short-sighted... it's a common failing of
tightrope walkers. I need to focus all my attention on what's
right under my feet; if I try to look forward too far, I'll lose
my balance, and fall. T'Laren, I'm not going to be alive long
enough to *worry* about the long run."
    "You don't know that."
    "It's almost a statistical certainty." He faced her. "In the
past three years, my life has been threatened some twenty-odd
times. That makes about once every six weeks or so. My body is
physiologically in its 30's, and humans who die of old age do so
nowadays around 120, so I can expect about 90 more years of this.
If I faced death twenty times in three years, I will have done so
six hundred times in 90 years. About a third of those times will
involve grievous bodily harm, if the extrapolation holds up. Do
you truly think anyone can survive two hundred beatings,
stabbings, poisonings and stranglings?" Q shook his head. "I've
been lucky so far, T'Laren. I'm not going to stay that lucky. I
expect I'll last another two years or so, at most."
    "The statistical extrapolation is not necessarily an
accurate one; I would imagine that most of the beings with
sufficient power to determine that you'd been made mortal, and to
find you, would do so very quickly. If you live for ten more
years, by that time perhaps everyone who remembers you and cares
sufficiently to hunt you down would have tried already."
    "At which point maybe they'll repeat. Already the Mirou have
attacked twice."
    "Even still, it is not necessarily valid to assume that
events will continue for 90 years in the same fashion that they
have done in the past three. And even if they do... all the more
reason why you must learn to defend yourself, and not leave
yourself a vulnerability like an addiction to sedatives."
    "I'm *not--*" He caught himself before he started shouting,
and took an ostentatious deep breath. "T'Laren, I just woke up. I
am still parading around in my pajamas, I haven't had breakfast
yet, and I look terrible. Why don't we continue this discussion
in half an hour or so, after I've had a chance to turn myself
into some semblance of a social being?"
    T'Laren considered a second. Though the request sounded
superficially like a stalling mechanism or a strategic retreat,
she didn't think it was-- Q wasn't close enough to beaten to be
stalling. She nodded. "That's reasonable."

    It was important to remain calm. If he started shouting at
her, he'd undermine his own argument. He would also have to try
to hold back from clever twists of wordplay. Being reasonable was
the key. T'Laren was a Vulcan-- she had to respond to reason.
    She was waiting for him in the kitchen, calmly sitting in a
chair with hands folded in her lap, watching him. Q ignored her
for a minute or two as he got himself breakfast. It was
undignified to argue while one was eating, and he wanted to be as
calm and dignified as possible, so he rushed through the meal,
aware of T'Laren's eyes on him.
    "You don't have to eat so quickly," she said. "I'm willing
to wait."
    He scowled at her, annoyed that she would call attention to
what he was doing. "Don't worry about it. I'm almost done."
    When he'd finished, he was still mildly hungry, but his own
patience wouldn't hold out. There was a debate to be gotten to,
and that took priority. He straightened up, made his expression
as calm as possible, and faced T'Laren.
    "The point I wished to make, before we got sidetracked onto
a discussion of my probable lifespan, is this. I am capable of
being short-sighted and self-destructive, yes. But I'm also
capable of being reasonable, and I have been trying, very hard,
to be reasonable. I've let you direct me into all sorts of things
that I didn't want to do, because you gave me a convincing
logical argument why the benefits I'd get would outweigh what I'd
have to put up with to get them. So far, you haven't given me a
sufficiently convincing argument regarding the sedatives, and I
am no longer willing to let you have the kind of power over me
where you can just say something and I have to do it."
    She studied him for several seconds. "Was an attempt to
humiliate me a necessary component of your claim on this power?"
    Q sighed. "I wasn't *actually* going to do anything to you."
    "Your past record would have implied otherwise."
    "You're saying you don't think I've changed? That I'd go out
of my way to humiliate you just because I had the power to do
it?"
    "Your statements earlier, when you believed you had the
upper hand, implied that you would."
    "I was trying to scare you," he snapped, exasperated, and
then forced himself to calm down. Reasonable. Be very reasonable.
"T'Laren, I knew perfectly well I couldn't actually have done a
damn thing to you. If I'd pushed you far enough, you could easily
have overpowered me physically. We don't have any Vulcan-only
knockout gases that could act before you could have strangled me.
I wanted you to admit that you were afraid of what I might do-- I
was trading on my reputation there a bit, I'll admit-- and then I
would have given you your access back. You didn't make me see
reason-- you called my bluff."
    "Why was it important to you that I be afraid of you?"
    He shrugged. "I didn't say I'd changed *that* much."
    "Ah."
    "But that's not the point." Q leaned forward. "Look, I'm
sorry about that, all right? I wanted to frighten you to get you
back for throwing me in the airlock two weeks ago. Not the
loveliest of motives, I admit, but I swear I had no intention of
actually hurting you. I mean, I wouldn't have actually hurt you
even if I hadn't known you could have physically disabled me. I
didn't even *want* to hurt you. I just..." He felt as if he was
babbling, but she was staring at him. He had to say something to
make her stop staring like that. "I'm just so tired of always
being the one that has to be afraid."
    "If you wish me to treat you as a reasonable being, it would
be best if you would refrain from the petty little revenge ploys
in the future."
    He nodded. "All right. That's fair. I just... T'Laren, I
want to be an equal partner in this. I've been living under
conditions of increasing restriction for three years now. You got
me out here by promising to give me control over my own life. If
you weren't going to do that, I might as well be on Starbase 56.
So..."
    "So you took matters into your own hands."
    "I have the abilities. I might as well use them. It took me
a lot of work to achieve my current level of expertise with
computers, and it's something I feel I have the right to be
genuinely proud of. Technology was never a major interest of mine
when I was still omniscient-- all I could really carry over was a
knowledge of the physical laws technology is based on. What I've
done, I've done the long, boring, human way, and I've done it
successfully. So why shouldn't I use what I've learned?"
    T'Laren's expression softened, very slightly. "Q. You don't
need to be so defensive, really," she said, the first gentleness
entering her voice since the conversation began. She unfolded
from her aloofly watching pose and leaned across the table
slightly, placing her hands on the surface. "I was not
criticizing you for giving yourself access to the computers-- I
can certainly understand why you did it. But you realize that it
creates problems. You are not always capable of determining what
is best for you."
    "So explain to me. I told you, I can be reasonable. If you
can give me a rational logical reason why I need to do something-
-"
    "You still won't necessarily do it. I have been explaining
to you repeatedly why you shouldn't take sedatives. Yet that was
the first thing that you did."
    "Because you don't know what you're talking about." He
barely kept from snapping at her. "You keep insisting that I'm
addicted to sedatives. I'm caught in a Catch-22 here-- my telling
you that I'm not addicted is apparently being used as evidence
that I am.  If I ask you if you're addicted to sedatives, and you
say no, that's hardly evidence that you are."
    "What a person who is addicted to drugs says about the state
of their addiction is irrelevant."
    "But I'm *not* addicted!" This had to be one of the most
frustrating arguments he'd had in some time. T'Laren was refusing
to see reason. He took a deep breath, marshalling the next plan
of attack. The story of the iolera was deeply embarrassing, not
anything he'd have chosen to share with her if he felt he'd had a
choice, but right now he judged it his only hope. "Let me tell
you a little story, T'Laren, so you know I know what I'm talking
about. All right?"
    "By all means." T'Laren leaned back and folded her hands in
her lap expectantly.
    He stood up and began to pace around the room, trying to
pick a place to start that would show him in the best possible
light. "This was, I don't know, maybe a year and a half ago or
so. It was after we defeated the Borg, and after they put me on
medical restriction. And on this particular occasion, I really
did not feel well. I was supposed to be talking to a group of
scientists, and with the exception of an Andorian named Thelkas
they were all potato heads. My head was killing me, I was in no
mood to deal with these morons, and wonderful Dr. Li refused to
let me have a painkiller. He said the problem was tension and I
should exercise. Well, that's all very nice for the long run, but
in the short run that would have made the problem worse, and I
needed something for my headache right then."
    "Perhaps you should have taken up the exercise some time
previously. If you had thought ahead..."
    "Right, right. But I didn't. As I've said before, it's
difficult to think ahead when one has a hard time imagining
surviving to the end of the week. So I was... um... not on my
best behavior."
    "I can imagine."
    "And most of the laughingly so-called 'physicists' I was
talking to... There's a difficulty with the fact that my
reputation precedes me. I'm sure it never entered their tuber-
like minds that I didn't feel well. When one goes to question the
oracle, does it ever occur to one that the oracle could be having
a bad day? They seemed to treat me as if I were some legendary
hazard of space, that if they successfully braved the Scylla and
Charybdis of Starbase 56 they could return to their homes with
the booty of knowledge. It's an occupational hazard of being a
valuable resource-- people treat me as if I'm nothing but a
resource, as if I don't have any feelings of my own." He was
getting more and more upset, remembering. "Anyway, when Thelkas--
who was considerably less of a vegetable brain than the others
anyway-- showed me some personal consideration, I may have blown
it a trifle out of proportion."
    "In what way?"
    She had to ask that. "Um... Well, he asked me if I was all
right, that I didn't seem to feel well. And I... entertained him
with a lengthy description of the foibles of humanity, Dr. Li in
particular, the follies of Thelkas' fellow scientists, and the
difficulty of holding a coherent conversation when there are high
explosives going off behind one's eyes every so often. So he
offered to see if he could do anything for me. I expected him to
try to intercede with Anderson or something."
    "I take it he did something else."
    "Oh yes." Q's expression became grim as he remembered. He
had trusted Thelkas, naive and desperate in his pain. "You've
read about this in my files?"
    "So far none of this story is ringing a bell. I don't recall
a Thelkas mentioned in your file."
    "All right, then. Thelkas came to me the next day, offering
to give me an Andorian herbal painkiller that, according to him,
was nontoxic and highly effective on humans. He claimed that he
carried the stuff on him, that it was a traditional Andorian
remedy for practically everything, and that he would have given
it to me yesterday but he'd wanted to check his computer for its
effects on humans first." Q leaned against the wall and put a
hand to his head, half-covering his face. This was the
embarrassing part. "You have to understand-- I wasn't thinking
clearly, my head hurt terribly, and everyone else was treating me
like a walking database. Thelkas was the only person who seemed
to be paying any attention to my feelings. Sometimes... I can be
very vulnerable to that."
    "It was poisonous?"
    "Depends on how you look at it. It *was* a highly effective
painkiller. Ever hear of iolera root?"
    Both T'Laren's eyebrows went up. "Yes."
    Iolera root-- Q had found out later, after what had
happened-- was in fact a traditional Andorian remedy for
practically everything. On Andorians, it acted as a mild
painkiller and muscle relaxant, producing a feeling of calm and
well-being. On humans, it was something else entirely. "You
probably know that you can't get iolera aboard a Starfleet vessel
unless you're medical personnel. But Thelkas came on an Andorian
vessel, a small science ship, and aboard an Andorian vessel you
can get iolera about as easily as you can get synthehol in
Starfleet. So he got the stuff on his ship and gave it to me...
and, in an unparelleled fit of idiocy, I took it without checking
its effects for myself."
    T'Laren's eyes were wide. "What happened?"
    "What you might expect." Q sat down. "Or maybe not--
actually, the story's a bit more complicated than what you might
expect. As one can imagine, I became quite deliriously happy as
soon as that stuff hit my system. Thelkas suggested that I go to
his ship with him, where he would give me another dose, and I
thought that sounded like a marvelous idea. He came very close to
walking out with me under Security's noses-- Thelkas, like most
of the scientists who came to see me, was a respected scholar and
had been through a number of security checks. There was no
connection between him and anyone who might want me dead. Also,
we were checking for shapeshifters by then, after the incident
with the Ceulan shapechanger back in my fifth month on the base
or so. There was no reason for anyone to believe he presented a
danger to me, so he wasn't watched as heavily as, say, the
Klingons were."
    "Oh." T'Laren nodded. "The incident *is* in your files; I
recall it now. The record simply states that a scientist drugged
and attempted to kidnap you; it didn't give his race or name. Or
that the drug was iolera. I'd been thinking it was a sleep drug
or a paralytic of some sort."
    "No. It was considerably worse." He shivered slightly,
remembering. "I had no will at all. I would have done anything
Thelkas told me to-- after all, he was such a wonderful person
who'd given me such happiness. Actually, not even that. I would
have done anything *anyone* told me to. I was madly in love with
the entire universe, and if someone had suggested that it might
be fun for me to walk out an airlock, I would probably have
cheerfully done so. Which was why I cooperated, when Security
rescued me and took me to sickbay-- it didn't enter my mind that
they were going to take the happiness away. I couldn't entertain
any sort of frightening thought-- it was as if I was suddenly
living in a universe where bad things didn't happen anymore. Not
even that I was invulnerable again-- *everyone* was invulnerable,
because nothing bad could happen."
    The memories disturbed and frightened him, but he could no
longer let them go. "And then they gave me the antidote... and I
became a raving madman, screaming at them to let me go. All I
wanted was to run back to Thelkas and get him to give me another
dose. It was all I could think about-- for *three days*. I
*wanted* to be enslaved again. I fought for it, I begged for it.
They had to put me in a restraining field, because I kept trying
to get free to go back to Thelkas, and they were afraid I'd hurt
myself." He broke his inward focus and looked at T'Laren, leaning
forward slightly. "Do you know what that's like? For someone like
me, who's fought to preserve the integrity of his own will for
*millions* of *years*, to be broken like that? I would have done
anything for the privilege of being made a slave again. Can you
*imagine* how it feels to know I'm that weak?"
    "Did they ever learn why Thelkas did it?"
    "Oh, that was easy. After they caught him, he tried to
protest that he hadn't known the drug would have that effect on
me, that he was trying to get me to his ship for treatment so no
one would find out his mistake... but Thelkas wasn't a very good
liar. They eventually got the real story out of him." He smiled
bitterly. "It's almost funny, really. Thelkas was one of these
people who worships knowledge. He'd been looking forward to
getting to talk to me for months, and he was angry at the fact
that I was being 'wasted'-- that unworthy people were allowed to
take up my time, that I wasn't being handled properly. He wanted
to hide me away where he and people he deemed intelligent enough
to be worthy would have unlimited access to me, and he planned to
use considerably stronger methods than the Federation used to
make sure I did what I was told. Doses of iolera as rewards,
direct neural stimulation of the pain centers as punishment...
the man who I thought was the only one who treated me as a
sentient being perceived me as a commodity far more than anyone
else." Q shuddered, looking down. "I don't have much pain
resistance, but I like to think I have a strong will for a human
being... I always thought it would be difficult to really break
me. I could be forced to talk out of fear easily enough, but to
be broken to the point where I'd voluntarily aid my captors,
where I'd seek their approval... I never thought that could be
done. And then they told me what Thelkas had been planning to do
to me, what I'd wanted so much to run back to. He could have
broken me completely inside two weeks." He closed his eyes, his
hands clenching almost unconsciously.
    "And there was no indication in Thelkas' record that he was
capable of such a thing? People willing to kidnap and enslave
other sentient beings do not usually have normal psychological
profiles."
    Q laughed bitterly. "Oh, there was nothing wrong with
Thelkas' morals. He wouldn't have dreamed of doing such a thing
to a real human being. No, it was a matter of definition. Thelkas
had some convoluted argument about why I didn't deserve the same
rights as other sentients-- I think it was something based on
reciprocity, that my species denied the rights of other sentients
and therefore forfeited any rights of our own. He'd had no
dealings with anyone who knew me when, I'd never done a thing to
him personally-- he was simply arguing from philosophy." He shook
his head. "In a way that made it even more horrible. I'd placed
my trust in someone who considered me to have fewer inalienable
rights than an animal."
    "That must have been horrible," T'Laren said gently.
    He nodded emphatically. "Why do you think I didn't want to
tell you the story?" The embarrassment of his own stupidity
overwhelmed him, and he had to fight the urge to shudder again.
"It was bad enough to know I could be broken like that, but...
much as I despise the fact, I've learned that my body does have
an impact on my mind. It's horrifying, that a drug could rob me
of my will that way, but it's a hazard of being mortal that I
simply have to live with. I could have dealt with that alone.
But... how could I have been idiotic enough to trust Thelkas?
Someone has only to be nice to me for a few hours to have me
eating out of their hand? What was *wrong* with me? I know better
than that!"
    T'Laren's voice was very quiet, and somehow sad. "Are you
trying to tell me that you feel you cannot afford to trust me?
That you fear I might turn out to be another Thelkas?"
    Q blinked in surprise. It had never occurred to him that she
might put that interpretation on things, though now that she'd
said it he could see why she thought so. "No-- no. That isn't it
at all. T'Laren, I assure you, I'd never have gone with you if I
thought for a moment you might turn out to be like Thelkas. No,
that isn't the point of this story at all."
    "Then perhaps I'm missing something?"
    "The point is that I know what it's like to be addicted,
T'Laren. When I tell you that I'm not addicted to sedatives, it's
with full knowledge of what addiction is. I was lucky that I
couldn't get access to iolera root-- even after the first day or
so was over, and I stopped behaving like such a lunatic, I would
have done anything to get another dose. I require sedatives as
medication for a chronic condition of insomnia, not as a fix I
need. I can go without when I have to; I've done so for periods
of up to two months, as I've said. Can't you see the difference
between this and an addiction?"
    For a few moments T'Laren was silent. Q studied her, trying
to see what she was thinking, if she was showing any sign of
relenting. Of course, now he was in a position where it didn't
matter that much what T'Laren thought-- he could override any
restrictions she put on him-- but he didn't want to do it that
way. He wanted her to agree with him.
    "I think you misunderstand," she finally said. "I am willing
to concede your point that you may not be physically addicted to
sedatives. You are, however, dependent on them. They're a
chemical crutch that you don't need. Your problem is
psychological, not even psychophysiological but purely a function
of mind. And it is a bad idea to treat psychological problems
chemically. We should be attacking the cause, not the symptom."
    He stared at her in disbelief. "And how are we supposed to
do that?" he asked harshly. "I have nightmares because I'm
unhappy. Even if you're capable of helping me out of my
depression, which I doubt, it's going to take an awfully long
time. Am I supposed to go without sleep that whole time?" Q shook
his head. "I'm sorry, T'Laren. I'd like your approval, but I
don't need it anymore."
    "I thought you were going to be reasonable."
    "I've been reasonable! You're not being reasonable! Why
should I be reasonable when you aren't?"
    "Perhaps you should hear me out before assuming I'm going to
be unreasonable?"
    Q sighed in infuriated exasperation. "All right then! I'm
listening, do you have anything reasonable to say?"
    "'Unreasonable' is not a synonym for opinions you don't
agree with, Q."
    He stood up with such force that his chair fell over
backwards. "I don't have to listen to this."
    She nodded. "You don't. You don't ever have to listen to me.
One wonders, however, what you're doing out here if you don't
intend to listen to me."
    "You never listen to me! Why should I listen to you?
    "Because I am your psychologist, not vice versa. And I think
even you should be able to understand why a psychologist would
have a legitimate concern about your drug use."
    "For the last time, *I am not addicted to*--"
    "I'm not saying you're addicted!" T'Laren interrupted, her
voice raised and sharp. "Will you hear me out, or will you go in
your room and sulk?"
    Q sat down on the table, arms folded. "I listen raptly."
    "Let's approach this from a different angle," she said. "I
have conceded your point that you are not addicted. You refuse to
concede mine that you are still leaning on a crutch. So let me
present another side of the argument." Her eyes bored into his.
"This morning, had it been an assassin entering your room and not
me, you would now be dead. You may argue that you miscalculated
the dosage-- I accept that. However, I believe I have evidence in
your files of an incident where you very nearly died-- and where
a scientist recently assigned to Starbase 56 *did* die-- because
you were sedated and didn't detect the entrance of an assassin.
Perhaps you remember the incident with the Ceulan assassin?"
    "It's 'see-lan', not 'soo-lan'," he said automatically, an
instinctive stalling mechanism. "You Texans are barbaric." He
remembered, of course. One didn't forget things like that.
    "I had never heard it pronounced. And don't evade the
question."
    "I'm not evading it. I remember the incident."
    It had been about the fifth month or so that he'd been on
the starbase. They were just beginning the work against the Borg,
and several top-notch scientists were being assigned to Starbase
56 for the duration of the invasion preparations. One of the
scientists had been n'Vala, a Timoxi whose job it was to bridge
the gap between Q's vast knowledge of physics and complete
ignorance of Starfleet technology. Another had been Evan Wagner,
a big, quiet xenopsychologist who was ostensibly there to learn
what Q knew about the psychology of the Borg.
    In fact, the person they all believed was Wagner had
actually been a Ceulan-- a shapechanger with numerous unusual
abilities, including the ability to detach parts of its body and
continue to control them from some distance. Q had awakened
groggily from drugged sleep to find Wagner leaning over him,
pinning his hands back over his head, against the sides of the
mattress. Before he could draw breath to scream, a third arm came
out of Wagner's chest and clamped over Q's mouth. When Wagner
backed away, detaching the three hands and leaving them behind to
hold Q's wrists and mouth, Q had known he was faced with a
Ceulan. He'd remembered far more than he wanted to about Ceulan
ritual executions, and had struggled desperately, adrenaline
chasing away the effects of the sedative. It had done him no
good.
    The shapechanger had been quite thorough. Using Q's own form
and voice, it had the computer play music loudly from Q's
personal library, to drown out any sounds Q could make through
the gag. It had used two more hands to bind his legs, and then
began a recitation of the so-called atrocities Q had committed
against the Ceuli people. Ceuli had ritual executions designed
for many life forms; for humanoid criminals, the ritual involved
cutting through their breastbones, forcing open their ribcages,
and removing their hearts. There wasn't even any way Q could
plead his case or beg for mercy, let alone scream for help. He
could do nothing but moan with terror as the Ceulan formed one
appendage into a dense, sharp bone knife, sliced off his shirt,
and began to cut through the flesh above his breastbone.
    What saved him was n'Vala's lack of concern for human social
mores. Timoxi tended to be sociable to the point of pushiness,
and couldn't understand the human need for privacy. In theory,
none of the scientists were supposed to disturb Q after his
scheduled hours. N'Vala had always cheerfully ignored the
prohibition, and came by whenever he felt like it, with Q
perfectly free to boot him out whenever he felt like it. By
throwing things at him, Q had managed to teach n'Vala what Picard
had taught him a few months ago-- one did not disturb a sleeping
human. But n'Vala must have assumed that Q couldn't be asleep
tonight, not with the music playing so loudly, and with his usual
insouciance he walked right into the suite.
    This ended up being the last mistake he made. Though the
shapechanger, impersonating Q, tried to keep him out of the
bedroom, n'Vala, for reasons that would now always remain unknown
but that Q suspected simply involved reciprocating the
shapechanger's obnoxiousness, had pushed his way into the
bedroom. There he saw the real Q about to be killed, and for that
the shapechanger smashed in his skull. Timoxi, however, were
notoriously hard-headed. N'Vala managed to live through the
shapechanger's attacks long enough to get back into the hall,
where the commotion of his death attracted security. Q heard them
arriving, heard them shoot down the Ceulan with phasers on
maximum stun.
    He had thought security's arrival would mean the end of the
ordeal. He hadn't realized that maximum stun only paralyzed the
Ceulan, that it could still consciously direct the parts of its
body holding him. The moment the stun hit, the fleshy vises that
gripped Q's wrists and ankles began to tighten, snapping the
bones, while the protoplasmic thing gagging him crawled down his
throat and began to tear its way through his esophagus, reaching
for his windpipe and crushing it from inside. The sensation was
by far one of the most horrible he'd suffered. It wasn't fair. He
hadn't even done anything all that bad to the Ceuli, certainly
nothing deserving of this much pain and horror.
    Through pain-blurred eyes, he saw Security clustered around
his bed, at a loss for what to do. They couldn't shoot the thing
in his throat-- maximum stun, at point-blank range against a
human head, would kill the human in question. He knew that Ceuli
were vulnerable to sonics, that they could save him if they only
knew-- but they didn't seem to know, and he had no way of telling
them. He was going to die from the ignorance of the protectors
he'd chosen. The roaring in his ears drowned out their words. In
despair, he had fallen to the darkness, expecting it to be death.
    Later he'd awakened in sickbay-- someone had thought of the
sonics after all, it seemed. But he hadn't felt safe. The fact
that he had almost been killed so hideously in what should have
been his private sanctum had left him terrified of sleeping. He
had spent most of his nights in public places like the lounge,
nursing a dozen cups of coffee until he finally fell over from
exhaustion, and would usually get one or two hours of sleep in a
chair with his head pillowed on a table before Security would
come along and shoo him back to his room. It had been a week
before he felt secure enough to take his sedatives again.
    T'Laren said, "According to your files, you didn't hear the
assassin enter because you were sedated. You're supposed to be a
light sleeper. If you hadn't been drugged, you might well have
woken up in time to call for help-- which would not only have
spared you injury and a great deal of fear, but would have saved
Dr. n'Vala's life as well. You were unbelievably lucky, Q. You
may not be so fortunate another time."
    Q shook his head, trying to think of an argument to use
against that. In fact, for a little while after the attack he
himself had feared sedatives. He had had to convince himself into
taking them again, because sleep was a biological requirement of
his existence and he couldn't sleep without them, especially not
after that attack. "I doubt I'd have woken up in time anyway.
It's not as if the Ceulan forced the door-- it probably came in
through the vents. For all I know it could have been in my room
already, impersonating a piece of furniture or something, lying
in wait for me. The important consideration was that I was
asleep, not that I was sedated."
    "That's debatable. And whether or not it is true, it is all
too easy to imagine a situation in which an assassin's intrusion
*would* wake you, were you not sedated. My point stands
regardless."
    "So does mine! What alternative can you give me? I don't
like having to drug myself into insensibility to get to sleep,
no, but what choice do I have?" He got off the table and stood
up. "Since we started this trip I've slept miserably. I've woken
up three or four times a night-- you know about some of that,
because you keep calling to confirm if I'm all right. I feel
tired all the time. Last night was the first time in over a week
that I got a decent night's sleep, and you want me to give that
up without offering me anything in exchange?"
    "I'm offering increased safety, for one thing. And there are
ways we can deal with the problem of the nightmares. Had you
considered using the meditative techniques you've learned to help
you, for instance?"
    "I could use them for that?"
    T'Laren nodded. "The problem isn't simply that you're under
stress. You haven't yet developed proper adaptations for dealing
with stress. It's very easy to take comfort in drugs, just as
it's very easy to remain in a deep depressive state and make no
effort to pull yourself out. Both are counterproductive. If we
work on it together, we can help you to overcome the problem at
the source, without simply putting bandages on the symptoms."
    The idea of being free of the nightmares, without the thick
grogginess of the sedatives, was powerfully seductive. She was
doing it to him again, he realized-- carrot and stick training
again, even when he had as powerful a buttress as his computer
control. But then, yielding to carrot and stick training got him
lots of carrots. "Is there some technique for doing it? So that I
don't have to dream, or don't remember my dreams, or can control
them, or something?"
    "It's not as clear-cut as that," she said. "I can't teach
you a five-minute breathing exercise that can keep you from
dreaming. But for one thing, your dreams will become easier to
deal with as your health improves-- poor physical condition can
reflect itself in your mind. Exercise can help-- not only is
exercise relaxing, but it will make you sleep more deeply.
Meditation can do the same thing-- you can use meditation as a
tool for self-hypnosis. You may find that using self-hypnotic
techniques before you go to sleep, and telling yourself that you
will not have nightmares, or that you will retain some conscious
control over your dreams, may do most of the work for you. At the
same time, we can approach the problem from the opposite
direction. You're aware of the various theories regarding the
purpose of dreams?"
    "Which ones?"
    "Dreams tend to provide insights into one's mental state. We
might try examining your dreams and trying to analyze what they
mean to you."
    "Didn't dream interpretation go out with Freud?"
    T'Laren shook her head. "Freud's interpretation of dreams
went out with Freud. No one believes anymore that dreams are
primarily concerned with sex, for instance--"
    "That's a relief."
    She ignored the interruption. "But the basic idea that
dreams bear some relationship to the personality and current
mental state of the dreamer... that's held up for several hundred
years. Let me ask you something. What sort of dreams do you have?
What form do they take? You've told me you have constant
nightmares, but what kind of nightmares are they?"
    Q sighed theatrically. "Name a nightmare, any nightmare. I'm
sure I've had it."
    "The kind where you're at an important meeting and you
suddenly realize you have no clothes on?"
    "Okay, maybe there's one I haven't had." He straightened up
the chair he'd knocked over before and sat in it. "There's the
kind I mentioned a week ago where I have my powers back. That's
not a nightmare, strictly speaking, but it's in the same
ballpark. Then there's the kind where I lose my powers."
    "You relive the incident?"
    "No, it happens differently every time. I think I have my
powers and then I don't, or someone takes them away, or
something. Or sometimes I have my powers, but they don't work.
One time it turned out that I was a simulacrum created by the
real me to find out how he'd behave if he lost his powers. He was
*very* disappointed... There's something peculiarly horrifying
about being afraid of oneself. Actually, that's a theme that
turns up every so often, that the me in the dream-- the me that I
am, my point of view-- is human, and I meet a me that's still a
Q, and he tries to kill me. Or he does kill me. Or something else
reasonably horrible happens. Sometimes I have that kind of dream
from the other point of view as well, but that kind falls in the
category of dreams where I have my powers back, not dreams where
I lose them."
    T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "That's very interesting. Why
does the omnipotent side of you try to kill the mortal you?"
    Q shrugged. "Different reasons. He's disappointed in me, or
disgusted with me, or angry with me for destroying his life..."
It occurred to him that he had just handed T'Laren wonderful
ammunition for her theory that he hated himself. "In the ones
where I'm the omnipotent one, I'm embarrassed by the human me.
Here's this lowly, disgusting creature with bowel movements and
bodily secretions, who thinks he's *me*. I mean, consider the
arrogance of that."
    "I think that's worthy of a great deal of further
discussion, but let's not get sidetracked. Are there any other
kinds?"
    "Tons." He put a hand to his head and leaned on it, elbow
against the table. "Let's see, there's the kind where something
or other is chasing me. I have been chased all over the universe-
- most often through Starbase 56, but Starbase 56 generally ends
up turning into a planet, or an asteroid belt, or an nth-
dimensional plane, or something. Frequently I end up in places
where human beings can't survive, but that doesn't seem to matter
in the dream. Then there's the kind that rewrite history. For
instance-- I get versions of this one a lot-- dreams where I end
up getting handed over to the Borg, and they're going to
assimilate me... That one's very bad. Or dreams where the
Enterprise didn't beam me back when I tried to throw myself to
the Calamarain, or where various assassins who didn't actually
get me do, or where security tries to lynch me like I thought
they would do a year ago... You get the idea."
    "I think I do, yes. Do you have any pleasant dreams?"
    "The ones where I have my powers back are pleasant enough,
while they last," he said with a bitter half-smile. "There are
several kinds of dreams like that-- that are pleasant when I'm in
them, but upsetting or disturbing after I wake up." For instance,
the entire category of erotic dreams, though Q would have rather
had all his teeth yanked from his head than mention them.
    "Any genuinely pleasant ones? Or even nondescript dreams?"
    He shrugged. "Occasionally I have dreams that aren't
nightmares-- not particularly pleasant, but not really unpleasant
either. But not very often-- and I don't remember that kind as
well as the others."
    "Hm. I think perhaps it would help you if, from now on, when
you have particularly bad dreams, you tell me about them. We can
go over them and try to help you deal with whatever fears they
may represent. Obviously, this isn't mandatory. Anything you feel
should remain private, keep private. But it might help as a
catharsis to talk about some of the dreams after you have them."
    Q wasn't very comfortable with the notion of giving someone
that much insight into his mental processes. On the other hand,
he had already determined that his only chance of survival was to
trust T'Laren, and another part of him enjoyed telling her about
himself. There did seem to be some kind of cathartic value in
sharing his fears with her. And if it helped to overcome the
nightmares, he would put up with the invasion of privacy, as long
as he could control the degree of the invasion. "I... all right,
if you really think that might help."
    "And I think that you should relinquish control of your
computer access."
    "Excuse me?"
    T'Laren steepled her hands on the table. "As matters stand
now, you can override me any time you desire."
    "I gave you back your access."
    "You did. And I'm grateful. But you can take that access
away any time I do something you don't like. Q, we've established
fairly well that I get very poor results when I try to coerce you
into something. It would be illogical for me to use that
technique unless you force me to it. But if it does become
necessary to force you to do something, because you are being
shortsighted or unreasonable again, I need to have the power to
do that. In a doctor-patient relationship, it must be the doctor
who has the power. If you've studied hierarchies among mortals
for as long as you say, you should know that."
    "I told you, I'm being reasonable. As long as *you* treat me
with some respect and don't act like you think you're my mother,
I'm not going to be unreasonable."
    "You can't guarantee that."
    "Why not?" This was an upsetting development. "You don't
trust me?"
    "It's not a question of trust. I trust you to do what you
are capable of... but I don't think you are invariably capable of
being rational. You may suffer a spasm of depression or paranoia,
you may feel unwell and take it into your head to be ornery about
it... there are any number of potential reasons you might behave
irrationally. You cannot entirely trust yourself, Q; how can you
ask me to?"
    "But I wouldn't *do* anything. I just want to be able to
keep you from forcing me to do things."
    "In the end, the only weapon I can hold over your head is
the fact that you need me," she said. "And that applies as much
if you have control of the computers as if you don't."
    "Well, what do you want me to do? I'm better with computers
than you are-- you can't take that away, it isn't possible. How
am I supposed to relinquish my access?"
    She hesitated. "I'm sure this must be possible-- couldn't
you write some sort of security program and have it authorized to
my voiceprint?"
    Q stared at her for a second, then laughed. "You want *me*
to create an override program for *you*."
    T'Laren tilted her head slightly in a Vulcan shrug. "I have
access to no other computer experts."
    "Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? You really
expect me to write a program that locks me out of the computers?"
    "I would like you to, yes."
    "And you would trust me to do this?"
    "Q, I cannot do my job if you can threaten me. You perceive
your ability to lock me out of the computers as defensive; to me,
however, it's a threat, and it's impossible for me to guide
someone who can do that. I'm not asking you to cut yourself off
from the computers entirely; I just need the ability to override
any of your commands if necessary. And I would not abuse such
power or use it arbitrarily. I think you know me that well by
now. So yes-- keeping all that in mind, I believe that if you
agree to do this for me at all that I can trust you to do it
properly. I believe you can understand the need for this."
    "T'Laren, I told you. I want to be an equal partner in this.
I don't want to go around dominating you-- I just want to be
equal."
    "You can't afford to be," she said gently. "Not yet. You're
not well enough."
    He wanted, very badly, to reject her request out of hand, to
dismiss her fears as paranoid or as a misunderstanding of him. He
*wouldn't* abuse his power. He'd promised. But... she was right,
and he knew it. Doctor-patient relationships couldn't work if the
two were on an equal footing, especially not psychiatric
relationships. He knew that objectively, from his studies of
thousands of species... he'd just been hoping it didn't apply to
him.
    He sighed. "All right then. Get me something to eat and I'll
write you a program."

    It took about an hour to write a security override for
T'Laren. He sat at a terminal, using keyboard input rather than
programming through voice commands because the deep code levels
couldn't handle voice input well, munching on various snacks that
T'Laren brought him. She spent the rest of her time looking over
his shoulder, as if staring at the screen would enlighten her any
better as to what he was doing. Q finally turned in exasperation.
"Could you please not do that? I can't work with you watching me
like that."
    "Of course. Forgive me."
    He was getting more and more depressed. Voluntarily giving
up his own power to someone else was not in his nature, and it
was upsetting him deeply that T'Laren had managed to talk him
into this. To hell with logic-- logic was T'Laren's field, not
his. He should never have started this, should never have
offered-- but if he turned around intending to quit, there was
T'Laren, expectantly waiting for him to finish. Trusting him.
    On the other hand, he had never asked T'Laren to trust him--
not on this subject, at least. *Caveat emptor, my Vulcan friend*.
As he worked, he wrote himself in a back door, so that in a
genuine emergency he could always override T'Laren's override and
get back into the system. He then finished setting up the
program, cycled it and spun around in his chair. "It's all yours.
Put in a password and tell it to run."
    "Thank you." T'Laren bent over the keyboard as Q moved
aside, ostentatiously not looking at her.
    "Password accepted," the computer said. "Activating security
screen."
    That was it. Q felt a curious sense of deflation. He could
now no longer create a program that affected system operations
without T'Laren's authorization, not unless he used his back door
and if he ever did that, its usefulness as a trump card was gone.
Eventually, he thought, perhaps a few months from now, he'd tell
T'Laren he had it and that he'd never used it, a graphic
demonstration that he was more trustworthy than she'd thought.
And then maybe she'd let him have equal authorization access
anyway, after he'd proven he could refrain from abusing power.
Maybe that would win brownie points with Lhoviri too-- part of
the reason they'd thrown him out was the abuse of power.
    T'Laren turned to him and smiled, a genuine brilliant smile.
"Thank you, Q," she said, with feeling. "I know how difficult
that was for you."
    More difficult than she knew, apparently, since in the end
he hadn't gone through with it. The smile made him feel vaguely
guilty-- he had left himself a back door, after all. He hadn't
actually done what she wanted. But he steeled himself against the
guilt, reminding himself that T'Laren had been foolish to trust
him so far, that he'd warned her, and that her decision to show
him a smile had to be manipulation. T'Laren might have emotions,
but she was as adept at hiding them as any Vulcan. If she smiled,
it was because she consciously decided to. That made him feel a
bit better.
    "What, writing the program? That wasn't difficult," he said,
pretending to misunderstand. "I'm no computer genius, T'Laren,
but that was child's play."
    She shook her head slightly. "The program itself was easy,
I'm sure. Agreeing to create it was difficult for you, though--
especially since it would have been so easy for you to subvert
the purpose somehow, to create a program that doesn't work or
that you can override. I'm very glad that you resisted the
temptation."
    Which went to show how well she could read *him*, since he
hadn't-- and then he realized that it *did* show how well she
could read him. She knew. She had to know.
    The realization must have shown on his face, but she said
nothing about it. "Do you feel up to our daily workout?"
    If she wasn't going to mention it, he was going to
diligently pretend that nothing was wrong. "When do I ever feel
up to a workout?"
    "Do you feel less up to it than usual, then?"
    "I suppose not," he grumbled. He stood up. "Perhaps some
exercise will either wake me up or give me a legitimate excuse to
take a nap."

    By now, they had progressed from stretching exercises to
simple-- very, very simple-- self-defense techniques. Q wasn't
really in the mood for self-defense; since writing T'Laren's
program, he had been gripped by a vague melancholy. Maybe it was
just exhaustion. After the fifth clumsy mistake, T'Laren relented
and took him to the pool room, where she let him soak in the hot
portion as she swam laps. He lay back in the warmth, all but his
head hidden under the opaquely bubbling water, and watched her.
T'Laren wore a green bathing costume that streamlined her upper
body, making hips and torso blend into one smooth line, while
leaving strong slim arms and legs free to cut through the water
with power and grace. She was really surprisingly aesthetic as
she swam. Q had always thought the notion of humanoids swimming
was about as silly as cetaceans walking about on land, but he had
to admit she could make it look good.
    Finally, T'Laren came out of the swimming section, shivering
violently, and dumped herself into the bath, across from him.
"You really should do some swimming," she said. "It would be good
for you."
    "She says, as she clenches her teeth to keep them from
chattering. Have you considered increasing the pool temperature?"
    "It's not that cold."
    "Then why are your lips such an unlovely shade of-- whatever
they are. Bluish-green or something. They're not normal, in any
case. And you have goosebumps and you're shivering."
    "Vulcans aren't well-adapted to cold, especially not cold
water. The water is actually warm by human standards. And I don't
keep it warmer because I don't want to lose my edge; I used to
swim in water much colder than that back home." She sprawled out,
ducking her hair back into the warm water.
    "I don't care about your edge. I care about my near-complete
lack of normal human insulation. I'm not going swimming in water
that can make you shiver."
    "We can warm it up for you if you like." T'Laren ducked her
whole body under the water level for several seconds, turning
into an indistinct tan and green blur. She came up, shook her
head violently, and sighed. "I think it's more pleasant to go
from a somewhat chilly swim into a warm bath, myself."
    "Where did you find cold water to swim in in Texas?"
    "I didn't. We used to go to a beach house in Oregon, every
summer... I had no trouble with Texan heat, obviously, and my
father had grown up there, but my mother was Scandinavian and
preferred a cooler temperature." She leaned back and gazed up at
the ceiling, her eyes slightly unfocused as she remembered. "The
first time I went, I was seven, and I'd never seen an ocean
before. I'd spent most of my life in space, the rest of it
inland-- the most water I'd ever seen in one place was a smallish
lake, and here was water that went on forever. I had a sort of
horrified fascination with tides and the concept of the undertow-
- Earth's ocean seemed to me some kind of hungry thing, that
wanted to suck me in and drown me. And I've never had any
patience with being afraid-- I learned to swim so I could show
the ocean that I wasn't afraid of it, that I could go into its
mouth and come back out safely."
    Q looked at T'Laren askance. "Mortal children have very
strange notions."
    T'Laren glanced at him. "I suppose you were born
omniscient."
    "No... but I was born with considerably more sense than
that."
    "You never had a silly notion? A childish fear? A method of
perceiving the universe that you later realized to be wrong?"
    Q shook his head. "I did, but it wouldn't make any sense to
describe it to you. My 'childhood' wasn't analogous to anything
you would understand."
    She nodded, and leaned back again. "After I'd been there a
while, I felt... The ocean was a symbol of Earth, a banner of my
alienness. Did you know, I can drink seawater? My mother was
horrified to find me sitting by the beach one day, sipping
seawater from cupped hands-- she'd studied medical texts on
Vulcans and the care of Vulcan children, but nothing had ever
bothered to mention that Vulcans can drink saline solution in
Terran ocean concentrations. And when she told me that humans
couldn't do that, that it would make them thirstier and
eventually kill them, I felt it as a badge of my alien nature, a
sign that I didn't belong. Oceans are alien to my kind-- I
belonged on a hot, dry desert. I didn't belong here." She shook
her head slightly. "And when I first set foot on Vulcan... I
found it unbearably hot and dry, and the gravity dragged at me
and made me exhausted. Biology, it seems, is not destiny."
    "If the ocean made you feel alien, why do you enjoy swimming
so much?"
    "Perversity. It's in my nature, that if I do not belong
somewhere I force my way in. I make the alien accept me, I make
it my home. I did the same thing when I went undercover in the
Romulan Empire-- I have been more human than humans, more Vulcan
than Vulcans, more Romulan than the Romulans."
    "I didn't know you went undercover in the Romulan Empire."
    "You didn't study a detail of my file-- what you called up
were the highlights. But yes, I was a Romulan for a year. It
was... a fascinating experience. Not one I would ever want to
repeat, but very revealing."
    Abruptly she climbed out of the hot tub. "Get out of there,
you're starting to look far too flushed. I don't want you getting
heat stroke."
    "No chance of that," Q said. He stretched his limbs out
under the water. "Computer, reset hot tub temperature for 34 C."
He looked up at T'Laren. "There. It's four degrees below my body
temperature. You have to be happy with that."
    "That's acceptable," she said. She pulled one of the foam
pool chaises over to the side of the tub and lay down on it.
    "Going undercover sounds like a far more interesting career
than being a counselor. If you were more Romulan than the
Romulans, why did you quit?"
    "I didn't quit. My mission was over, so I came home.
Besides... I'm far too social a being to bear undercover work
very well. I missed my friends, and the Federation, and the
freedom to be myself. I was a very lonely Romulan." She lay back
again, closing her eyes. "I only did it in the first place
because the number of Vulcans who can effectively impersonate
Romulans is very few. Most Federation spies in the Romulan Empire
are human, or Betazoid, or some other near-human race, despite
the fact that such spies can be given away by a paper cut,
because they can act and most Vulcans can't. I was offered a
career in Intelligence if I wanted it. But the same factors that
gave me the ability to impersonate a Romulan made me far more
miserable doing so than a typical Vulcan would have been."
    Q frowned, studying her for a few seconds. "If you're such a
social being and whatnot... how can you stand being locked up on
a space yacht with only me for company?"
    T'Laren's eyes snapped open and she sat up quickly, swinging
her legs off the chaise and onto the floor so she could face him.
"Q, I didn't say I was dissatisfied with our current
arrangement."
    "No, you didn't. But you said you're a social being and you
missed your friends. Don't you still miss them? I'm..." He
considered how best to phrase this-- he didn't want to sound
whiny or self-pitying. "I'm undoubtedly not the most charming of
companions. Don't you-- doesn't that create problems for you?"
    "It doesn't, and it wouldn't matter it did," she said. "I
have a job to do, and that's the most important consideration.
But it was very considerate of you to ask. Thank you."
    He was not very accustomed to praise-- it seemed as if he'd
spent most of the last three years being criticized and
condemned, and so he had few defenses against kind words. A warm
flush of slightly embarrassed pleasure spread through him. He
hadn't even been trying to make her think he was being
considerate-- it was simply a question that had seemed important
for him to ask. Q smiled almost without volition. "Was it
really?"
    "Yes. It was."
    Q gazed out at the pool, still smiling. "Hmm. Maybe I'm not
completely hopeless after all." He glanced over to T'Laren to
gauge her reaction. "Don't you think?"
    "I never thought you were completely hopeless."
    "Would you have taken the case if you thought I was?"
    "I had to take the case," she said. "I owed Lhoviri. But I
suspect he wouldn't have asked me if you were completely
hopeless." She got up and padded over to the swimming pool. "Are
you sure you don't want a swim?"
    "Positive."
    "What if I warm up the pool?"
    "Maybe later," he said to get her off his back. T'Laren
seemed to think that every minute he didn't spend exercising or
eating was a waste.
    He had to admit some appreciation for her methods, now. He
had gained back most of the weight that the suicide attempt had
lost him, so that he now merely looked thin again and no longer
like a study aid for medical students. Q had a sneaking suspicion
that T'Laren had been dosing him with an appetite enhancer, as he
was hungrier lately, and taking more pleasure in food, than he'd
been in nearly a year. He hadn't yet mentioned it, because he
didn't want to look stupid if he was wrong-- and besides, he
really didn't mind all that much. He had been able to tolerate
his own horrible appearance only because of some perverse notion
that his looks should reflect his mental state-- in some ways, it
would have been unbearable to look good when he was so miserable
inside. Now that he was starting to feel a bit better, it seemed
entirely appropriate that he should start looking better too.
    T'Laren returned, cold once again, and climbed into the pool
with him. "I really think you ought to do some swimming," she
said. "We cut your training session short so you wouldn't get
hurt, but you still need your daily exercise."
    If this went on, he was going to end up being forced to
swim, and he still despised swimming. "I have a question I've
been meaning to ask you, actually," he said, conjuring up an
offering to appease her.
    "Go ahead."
    "I was thinking about what we discussed before, about
dreams. And I was thinking about a particular dream I had a few
weeks ago that's been bothering me for some time." If anything
could get T'Laren off the topic of exercise, he figured, a dream
would do it. And while he was pretty sure he could guess what
this one had meant, he *was* actually interested in seeing what
T'Laren made of it.
    T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "If I didn't know better, I would
guess that you were trying to avoid swimming."
    "Would I do a thing like that?"
    "Most certainly you would."
    Q grinned and leaned back. "Maybe just a little," he said.
"But it really has been bothering me. I thought of it before when
we were discussing dreams, but I got sidetracked."
    "Very well," T'Laren said with the good-natured resignation
of someone defeated at her own game. "Tell me about it."
    "I don't know if you remember-- or if you ever knew. This
happened the night before I met you, the first night I was
conscious after I tried to kill myself. And you remember, I'm
sure, how Li went out of his way to torment me by refusing me
access to the computers, or the ability to talk, or anything at
all to occupy my time."
    "I remember that," she said, nodding. "Though I think
phrasing it as 'Li went out of his way to torment you' is perhaps
a slight exaggeration."
    "Oh, no. I exaggerate not at all," Q said. He sat up and
leaned forward slightly. "Shortly after Li refused me computer
access, I tried to ask a nurse for it back. In response, she put
my hand in a restraint so I couldn't reach the call button, and
left me that way. She claimed she was going to come back in an
hour and let my hand free again, but I'm positive several must
have passed before it occurred to anyone that I might have a
genuine emergency and it would be nice if I could call for help,
wouldn't it? Now if that isn't maliciously tormenting a sick man,
I'd like to know what is."
    "Putting itching powder in a sick man's bed would qualify as
malicious torment a bit better, I think," T'Laren said. "As would
refusing him medical care, adjusting the temperature of his
bedroom to be uncomfortable, dumping cold water on him--"
    "I get the idea. You're a laugh riot, T'Laren. Remind me not
to get sick around you. My point is that I was miserably bored. I
was trying not to go to sleep, because I was afraid I'd have
nightmares... but I was also exhausted, and ill, and bored out of
my mind, so one can imagine how successful I was. And I had a
very vivid nightmare... actually, I'm not sure whether to
classify it as a nightmare or not. It was definitely nightmarish
in plot, but the emotional content it evoked was completely
inappropriate. In any case, it was very vivid-- I might even have
thought it actually happened, except that if it had, I wouldn't
be here."
    "Go on."
    "I dreamed that I woke up-- you know how you can have those
dreams where everything starts out being exactly as it is in
reality? I was in sickbay, my hand was still in the restraint,
and it was dim in the room, so I couldn't see very clearly. And
there was a person standing next to my bed. It was a large
humanoid, probably male, although it could have been a big woman
like Anderson-- I couldn't really tell, he was in shadow. Since I
couldn't talk, I couldn't ask him to come closer where I could
see him properly. I had just started to wonder if he was there to
turn on my speaker or something when he put a pillow over my
head.
    "At first I was terrified. I tried to struggle, but I was in
the same physical position in the dream as I was in real life,
and you remember what that was. I had one hand free, but I was
too weak to lift it as far as my head, and reaching the call
button with it was out of the question. Then I remembered that I
wanted to die, that this person was giving me something I'd tried
and failed to obtain for myself, and I relaxed.
    "After that it was very... pleasant." Q frowned,
remembering. "I felt an overwhelming sense of happiness, that I
was finally getting to die. I even felt gratitude. I would have
thanked my murderer if I could talk. It seemed as if he had come
as a benefactor, that he had come to put me out of my misery as a
mercy. I realized at one point that I wasn't breathing anymore,
but it didn't feel at all unpleasant-- I've suffocated in reality
before, and it's quite horrible. This was nothing like that. I
felt no urge to breathe at all. I was overwhelmed with a sort of
euphoric dizziness-- it felt as if I were spinning out of my
body, like a butterfly trapped in a cocoon, squirming its way
free. Or as if I were being tugged out of a whirlpool that had
been dragging me down, or flying free of a planetary gravity
well. And I felt an enormous sense of gratitude that I was being
allowed such a pleasant death. My own attempt had been truly
horrific. This was... wonderful."
    He shook his head, trying to dispel the vague and disturbing
yearning he felt toward the memory. "Then I woke up, which
startled me quite a bit. I'd been utterly convinced it was
actually happening. My head hurt terribly, my hand was still in
the restraint, and I was still terribly bored. And I felt an
awful sense of disappointment that it had been a dream. I peered
into the darkness for some time-- you have to understand, I was
barely awake, and I wasn't thinking very straight-- hoping it
would turn out to be true after all, that there was a mercy
killer lurking in the shadows. Which, of course, there wasn't."
    Q looked up at T'Laren, intending to gauge her reaction. It
was far more than he had expected. She seemed to have gone very
still, retreating into one of her Vulcan silences. "T'Laren?"
    "Did you by any chance tell security about this?" she asked.
    "About a dream? Don't be ridiculous." He stared at her.
"T'Laren, what's wrong?"
    "That... was not a dream, Q."
    Not a dream? He blinked. "How could it have actually
happened? T'Laren, I *died* in it. Unless our current adventures
are a dream themselves, and these are really the last few
nanoseconds of my existence, it had to have been a dream."
    "You didn't die. You lost consciousness. For that matter,
even if you had had a clear near-death experience, life support
might have brought you back."
    "How do you *know* it was a dream? Were you the killer?"
    She ignored that. "Do you have any reason, aside from your
difficulty in explaining your survival, to believe that it was a
dream?"
    "It happened when I was asleep."
    "It happened when you were half-asleep. And predisposed to
believe that anything happening to you might have been a dream."
    "All right then, if it wasn't a dream why aren't I dead?"
    T'Laren folded her hands in front of her. She looked as if
she were cold, despite the warmth of the bath. "You were on
respiratory life-support. Your trachea and lungs were too badly
damaged to risk letting them handle the entire burden of your
respiration; most of your oxygen was being supplied directly into
your bloodstream. Cutting off the supply to your lungs would only
produce mild anoxia; and such anoxia can produce a euphoric high,
much like what you describe."
    "Oh." Q considered that. "That would mean... hmm. I wonder
who it was."
    "You seem remarkably unconcerned."
    "I'm not on Starbase 56 any more; whoever he was, I'll
probably never see him again. Probably some security guard who
saw me helpless and couldn't resist the temptation any longer.
The trail would be quite cold by now."
    "I think we should call Starbase 56. Perhaps they have
security camera images still on file."
    "If you want to. I really don't care all that much. Whoever
he was, whatever his motives, I was quite happy with his actions
at the time."
    "You were also quite happy with Thelkas's actions."
    "You have a point." Q shrugged. "Okay, go ahead. Call
Starbase 56 if you want." He leaned back. "Euphoric high from
anoxia, hmm? If I ever get around to trying it again, I'll have
to remember that one."
    "Don't say that." Under the veneer of Vulcan control,
T'Laren seemed truly agitated.
    "T'Laren." Q moved forward, walking on his knees the short
distance across the bathtub. He put his hands on her shoulders.
"What are you getting so upset about? It was a joke. As for the
other thing... it didn't happen, all right? What, were you afraid
I'd die before you could pay off your debt to Lhoviri?"
    "Jokes are commonly defined as statements which are funny,"
she said, but there was a hollowness in the retort. "And I am
very concerned for you. You are enough at risk for suicide
without deciding you have a taste for self-strangulation."
    "It was a *joke*, T'Laren. Perhaps not a funny one, but a
joke nonetheless. Do you seriously think I would find some
entertainment value in strangling myself?"
    "Yes."
    "*Why?* Who would be sick enough to *enjoy* something like
that?"
    "Many human beings would. Have you never heard of autoerotic
fatalities?"
    Q released T'Laren and backed away, sitting back down in the
water. "Do I really want to hear this?"
    "Mild anoxia is pleasurable for many humans. Throughout
history, many so-called suicides have been accidents, as people
who discovered the pleasures of being breathless miscalculated,
and lost their breath for all time. I thought you were an expert
on the dark side of humanity, Q."
    "I must have missed that one." Q stared at T'Laren. "That is
utterly disgusting. Do you think for a second I would kill
myself-- or even risk my life-- for *sexual* reasons? Oh, that is
*repulsive*. I'm ashamed of you."
    "Ashamed of me? You are the one who found pleasure in being
suffocated."
    "It wasn't erotic pleasure, I *assure* you."
    "Would you know erotic pleasure from any other kind?"
    That was definitely not a question Q wanted to answer. A
truthful answer would be hideously embarrassing and a false one
would lose him the argument. "It was a sensation of peace,
T'Laren. The euphoria of freedom. It wasn't the first time,
either. I felt similarly the second time I tried to kill myself,
and that had nothing to do with strangulation at all. Or are you
going to tell me that another human sexual perversion involves
slitting one's own wrists for thrills?"
    "No. Not to my knowledge." She climbed out of the bath and
knelt by the side. "I find this very disturbing, Q. Will you tell
me about this? I have never heard of people finding pleasure in
cutting their wrists. Perhaps it will make sense in context."
    "The context might take quite some time to explain."
    "Then I think you should get out of the bathtub. Shall we go
to the kitchen to discuss this?"
    That struck him as a very good idea. As soon as T'Laren had
mentioned sex, he had started to feel very uncomfortable being
around her with both of them in a near-nude state. If he was
going to tell her about the circumstances of his second suicide
attempt, he wanted to be wearing his armor again.

    In the end, they ended up on Deck 2, the observation lounge-
-  the kitchen was too small to pace in, and Q couldn't sit down.
A nervous energy coursed through him, forcing him to pace circles
around the table where T'Laren sat. She had gotten herself better
composed now, sitting in expectant quietude. It occurred to Q
that what he had seen a few minutes ago had to have been a
genuine lapse in control-- normally he could tell when T'Laren
was feeling emotion because her surface became totally
emotionless. He had never before seen her badly shaken enough
that she actually showed a bit of it. What had frightened her so
badly? Surely it wasn't *that* strange that a man who'd recently
attempted suicide might find relief in his own murder. He didn't
feel that way anymore-- was she afraid he was going to go back to
his room and strangle himself or something?
    "I asked you once why you tried to kill yourself the first
two times, and you tossed the question back at me. You and I have
discussed a bit of the reason for your first attempt-- that it
was very much a spur of the moment thing, that it was born from a
sudden surge of despair late at night-- I feel I understand your
motives, at least a bit. But I've always meant to ask you about
the second attempt again, because it doesn't seem to fit. It
seems very much like a gesture, and yet I don't think you
intended it as such." She stopped following him with her eyes.
"Q, please stop pacing in circles. It makes it difficult to talk
to you."
    He stopped, standing in T'Laren's line of sight. "So you're
asking me why I did it."
    "Do you actually know?"
    "Of course I know, I've always known. I tried to kill myself
because I was afraid of being killed."
    "On the surface of it that makes little sense. Can you
explain?"
    "I intend to." He resumed pacing, this time keeping inside
T'Laren's line of sight. "Undoubtedly in the course of all your
interviews you've heard many versions of this story. It all began
with the death of Lieutenant Commander Masaru Ohmura. You've
heard about this, no doubt?"
    "Other people's versions of the story, yes."
    "Ah, but other people aren't me. And I really do believe I
know a good bit more about what happened than anyone else does.
So let me begin from the top, all right? With me? Good."
    Q faced her. "You've undoubtedly heard that Ohmura was a
good man, the salt of the earth, a marvelous checkers player and
a wonderful security chief, all that nonsense. And I'm not going
to contradict any of it. Ohmura was actually rather good to me,
all things considered, and saved me from some truly crushing
humiliations in my early months on the base. But he made a fatal
mistake in letting the antiques dealer aboard-- a mistake he
couldn't have known he was making, a mistake that wasn't his
fault, but a mistake nonetheless. It killed him, and very nearly
killed me."
    He started to pace again. "The man's name was Tom Lindon,
and he claimed to be an antiques dealer. Since at the time I was
staving off the crushing boredom of my existence by the pointless
acquisition of material goods, and since Starbase 56 had a fairly
large budget devoted to keeping me, if not happy, at least
functional, his motive for coming here was utterly transparent--
the lure of money. It was so obvious, any other motive might have
seemed unthinkable. And in fact, for Ohmura and anyone else who
listened to Lindon's little statement of purpose, any other
motive *was* unthinkable. Ohmura let Lindon aboard with a cargo
of twentieth-century guns, one of which was loaded."
    "Anderson said it was loaded later."
    "Anderson wasn't there. I was. Ohmura started to examine
each weapon; then Lindon said something like, 'They're all
unloaded-- surely everyone can see that', and that, it seems, was
enough for our doughty security chief. Now, Ohmura was a good
security chief. He made mistakes-- thinking the Ceulan
shapechanger was Dr. Wagner, for one, but who knew how to
calibrate the sensors to detect a shapechanger? And a mistake
like simply taking someone's word for it that weapons were
unloaded was not in his repertoire. But I was there, and that was
what he did." Q picked up a salt shaker to fidget with, peering
intently at it. He glanced back at T'Laren. "And do you know
what? It didn't strike me as strange at all at the time. It
seemed quite self-evident that the weapons were, in fact,
unloaded. And I don't make mistakes like that, either. Not after
two years of paranoia and several million of watching the evil
that men do."
    "Are you implying some outside force was involved?"
    "I'll get to it. Patience, my dear doctor, is a virtue.
Didn't they teach you that in Texas?" He put down the salt shaker
and sat down on the table, putting a napkin ring around his
finger and twirling it around. "In any case. Some time later,
Commander Ohmura, Commodore Anderson, a whole gaggle of spear-
carriers, and I were all in one of the conference lounges,
examining Lindon's wares. Lindon had gone across the room to get
a new toy for me, or so he claimed. He then pulled out a pistol
and announced-- and I remember his exact words quite clearly--
'Q, I'm going to kill you.'"
    Q slid off the table and put the napkin rings down. It was
an effort to remain nonchalant, an effort to keep calm,
remembering the horrible injustice that had been done him.
"Undoubtedly you've heard the next part. I froze up, in either an
unparalleled act of cowardice or a malicious attempt to get
Ohmura killed, depending on who you talk to. And on cue, Ohmura
died to save me, an act generally considered to be phenomenally
wasteful on his part and a cruel joke played by the Universe on
the denizens of Starbase 56. Right?"
    "The story I heard was a bit less biased than that, but the
facts were fairly similar," T'Laren said.
    "Well, here's an interesting fact for you. I don't freeze
when I'm frightened. I don't necessarily do something
constructive, mind you. I shriek, or run away, or curl up on the
ground with my arms over my head and grovel. But I have never, in
my entire mortal existence, frozen out of fear. Never. Which,
being the remarkable psychologist and armchair sleuth that you
are, should lead you to the conclusion that I froze for some
other reason. And we'll get to that. But there's another point I
want to make.
    "Consider. An antiques dealer, a trader, who'd never done
anything more morally strenuous than undercut a competitor or
purchase possibly stolen goods, throws his career and his freedom
away and gets sent to a rehab colony because he decided to kill a
complete stranger on another complete stranger's say-so. Now let
us factor in that his client was a woman of the Physm, a species
of surpassing ugliness by human standards. Even given that humans
are famous for screwing anything, it would take a human perverse
to the point of mental illness to find a Physm attractive-- they
have faces like weeping sores. Let us further consider that this
woman, who has just engineered the death of a popular officer,
needs only to tell a sob story to the denizens of Starbase 56,
and everyone is firmly convinced that all the blame belongs on
*me*, for victimizing her twenty years ago. And never mind the
fact that the Federation determined that I couldn't be held
responsible now for what I did as a Q, and never mind the fact
that all of them were well aware that I did not exactly spread
peace and love throughout the universe. I mean, what *did* they
think all those beings wanted to kill me for? Did they think I
owed them money? What?"
    "It was explained to me that no one had been directly
confronted with the knowledge of your crimes, except those you
committed against humanity."
    "Whoever told you that is a liar, or else has a memory like
a sieve. The Mirou announced what they wanted me for, quite
clearly. A few others accused me in front of witnesses.
Admittedly, the crime Melex accused me of was considerably worse
by standards of human morality than what I did to the Mirou or
any of the others that accused me. So let's give our Starfleet
friends the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they really
were shocked and horrified at my actions. And we can factor out
the ugliness because Starfleet members are so tolerant and
xenophilic and wonderful. But why would a man with no particular
history of violence throw his future away to kill a man he didn't
even know on the request of a hideous alien whom he had no reason
to trust?"
    "I'm not sure I see your point."
    "I haven't made my point yet. There's one vital fact you
need to know to make sense of this picture, a fact I myself had
forgotten until a week or so after the attack. And that is: the
Physm use psionic devices. You may know something of these kinds
of things, since the ancient Vulcans also developed psionic
devices-- amplifiers that could enable non-psis to do what psis
can do." He put a hand on her table, standing over her. "Now do
you see the pattern?"
    "You believe some sort of... mind control was involved?"
    Q nodded. "Melex probably had some sort of subtle persuader-
- not mind control, per se, but something to influence people
into agreeing with her. To increase their sympathy for her.
Lindon, however, had obviously been given a direct mind control
device, something that operated on spoken cues. When he said,
'The guns are unloaded,' it became so self-evident that they were
in fact unloaded that an experienced security guard didn't think
to check. And when he said that he was going to kill me... well,
you see the progression."
    T'Laren nodded slowly. "I do indeed."
    "It was as if I'd heard it straight from God. He was going
to kill me. It was utterly obvious and completely unavoidable.
Have you ever experienced the sense of... convergence? That a
certain event is destined, inevitable?"
    "No, I don't believe so."
    "I have, frequently. I think humans experience this in
hindsight mostly. Because the Q can see so many more of the
variables involved, we can see something inevitable ahead of
time-- without actually looking into the future, which is a
complicated and annoying process and I very rarely did it. We
almost never see convergence with ourselves-- we don't generally
have enough objectivity. This time, though, I experienced a sense
of convergence as a human, regarding myself. It seemed that it
was my destiny to be killed this way, that my entire mortal
existence and possibly my entire existence as a Q had been
leading up to it. I heard Anderson shout at me to get down,
but... there didn't seem to be any point. It was inevitable,
after all. And I wasn't afraid, not at all. I was about to
fulfill my destiny."
    His expression darkened, an inward focusing. "And then
Ohmura threw himself in the way, and there was a gunshot... and I
was lying on the floor with Ohmura on top of me, both of us
covered with his blood. And the spell broke. I realized how close
I had come to being the one whose brains were decorating the rug,
and it terrified me. I couldn't understand what had happened--
why I hadn't resisted, why I had been so stupid as to simply
stand there. When Anderson screamed at me that I'd disobeyed a
direct order and as a result a good man was dead, I couldn't
defend myself-- I remembered that I'd done it, but I could no
longer comprehend why." He shook his head. "I *didn't* want to
see Ohmura dead. I owed a lot to him. And... I've seen mortals
die before, hordes of them, but never in my arms, when I was
mortal too, when the fatal blow had been aimed at me. I think I
was in shock. My stupidity had gotten someone I respected killed,
and I knew it. My memory isn't what it used to be; I didn't make
the connection with the Physm's psi devices until a week or so
after Melex's confession, far too late for it to do me any good."
    "When was Melex captured?"
    "Later that day. She was oh, so contrite. She'd been in a
little ship just out of range of our sensors, waiting for Lindon
to come back with the metaphorical equivalent of my head on a
platter. Apparently it had never occurred to her that something
could go wrong and an innocent man could die. The Physm are very
intelligent, but they have no common sense whatsoever."
    "Did you do what she accused you of?"
    "Yes." He refused to justify his actions-- he was tired of
explaining everything he'd done out of the moral context he'd
done it in. "But I'm not entirely sure that would have been
enough, if not for some sort of persuader device. I could see
people deciding that I'd done something really rotten and they
despised me for it-- but they did more than despise me. They
blamed me personally for Ohmura's death, and they turned on me.
    "A few days after the attack, I decided I wanted to get away
from everyone, and so I went for a walk. I was doing this
frequently around that time-- I knew perfectly well that everyone
hated me then, and I wanted to put some distance between them and
me. But I was responding to a vague, rather amorphous threat, and
so I did exactly the wrong thing-- by putting distance between me
and most people, I ensured that anyone who really wanted my blood
could have perfect privacy to draw it in. And since my path was
fairly regular-- there just weren't that many places on the base
that I was authorized to go that wouldn't involve walking through
population centers-- it was easy for someone to ambush me. I came
around a corner and there were two men with masks on, and at that
moment I knew I was almost certainly going to die."
    "Why?"
    "Well, the masks, for one thing. Human beings are not one of
the deadliest species in the galaxy; they're moderate, average, a
boring little species for the most part. They're far less
passionate, or dangerous, than the Klingons, or the ancient
Vulcans-- which is of course why your people had to go so hyper-
rational and humans didn't, that biologically you're far more
irrational than humans. But there are times when they rival the
most dangerous races in their class for sheer scariness. When
humans aggregate into a mob, they are among the most frightening
of entities on their evolutionary level in this quadrant of the
galaxy. And when they put on masks, especially civilized, highly
moral humans, it's an indication that they plan to do something
absolutely heinous, something they would be ashamed of if they
were not hiding their faces. So when you meet two masked male
humans in a dark hallway far from centers of population, and they
grab you, shove you up against the wall, and rip off your
combadge, you know it's time to be terrified out of your mind.
You know that they've waited in ambush for you, that they're
planning to do something hideously awful to you, and that they're
not going to let you call for help."
    "Did you try to fight back?"
    "I *couldn't!* I made a few feeble attempts to resist, yes,
but these two were experienced with violence. They wouldn't give
me a moment to think, to defend myself-- they just kept hitting
me. I discovered some time ago that begging helps get one out of
that sort of situation-- under normal circumstances, someone
who's beating you just wants acknowledgment that they've defeated
you, and if you beg for mercy it serves the purpose. I tried
begging this time, and they told me to shut up and then kicked me
in the head... I was positive I was going to die. I don't think I
have ever before or since been so afraid. All the other times
I've been attacked, I've known that humans were around somewhere,
willing to rescue me-- even at times when I wasn't sure they knew
*how* to rescue me, as with the Ceulan, I knew they would at
least try. But this time... it was my protectors themselves who
were attacking me, and what kind of a chance did I have against
that? It was obvious that they had planned this so that Security
wouldn't interfere-- in fact, I was sure they *were* Security,
from the way they moved and the fact that they said they were
doing this for Ohmura. So if Security wanted me dead, there was
no chance whatsoever that someone would rescue me  my only hope
was if they decided to be merciful, and after they kicked me in
the head for begging them to stop there didn't seem to be much
chance of that."
    He shook his head. "Something else about humans, they're
remarkably inefficient killers. Not when they decide to be
rational, of course. When humans set their minds to cold-blooded
murder, they're awfully good at it. But when they become a mob,
when they sink to the level of instinctive violence, they aren't
efficient about it at all. Which you would think would be a good
thing, but it's not. A human trying to beat you to death will
take twice as long and inflict twice as much damage on you as a
Klingon would, with the result that you hurt four times as much.
I've suffered injuries that were far more painful or damaging in
and of themselves-- actually, when I drank the acid I inflicted
such an injury on myself. But when one factors together quantity,
quality and duration of pain, I'd have to say that that beating
was the most agonizing experience I've ever suffered through,
exacerbated considerably by the fact that I never completely lost
consciousness. Mostly they left my head alone and concentrated on
the rest of my body, which can generate just as much pain as
being hit in the head if not more, but is less likely to kill you
and also less likely to knock you out. I wouldn't say I was lucid
through most of it, but I was definitely aware."
    Q began to pace again. "When they left me, I couldn't quite
believe it. I knew they knew I was alive--" he had still been
whimpering, so they must have known-- "and I was still sure they
wanted to kill me, which left the idea that they were toying with
me. I could see my combadge, about a meter away from where I lay.
It might as well have been a light-year. I lay there on the
floor, paralyzed with indecision and terror-- if I stayed where I
was, without medical attention, I'd die. But if I tried to reach
my combadge, I was sure they'd step out of the shadows and kick
it out of my hand as soon as I was about to grasp it, and then
finish what they'd started. Or that I'd call for help, and
whoever I called would be in on it-- or even not in on it, simply
a part of the mob mentality-- and would kill me or hand me back
over to my tormentors."
    "What did you do?"
    "Well, in the end, I went for the combadge. And that was a
seriously unpleasant experience. It must have taken me a half
hour or more to crawl that meter-- I think objectively it
probably took a half hour, but it felt like a geological epoch.
And when I finally managed to call sickbay, and Li showed up, I
kept begging him not to kill me, and he kept telling me that he
was Li, the doctor. I knew he was a doctor. But he was human, and
I was frightened of all humans right then. When they put me under
sedation, I tried to resist it, because I really didn't expect
they'd let me wake up.
    "After I did wake up, I told Anderson I was sure it was
Security, and she had a fit. She refused to even entertain the
possibility. That was when I knew she was part of it too, that I
couldn't trust her any more than I could trust any human, which,
right then, was only as far as I needed to."
    "Sekal said you believed there was some sort of conspiracy
against you?"
    "Sekal said that?" Q frowned. "He didn't understand, then. I
never thought it was a conspiracy-- if there had been an
organized conspiracy to kill me aboard Starbase 56, I would be
dead. No, what I thought I was dealing with was a mob. Not an
organized, rational, conscious decision to kill me-- simply a
general consensus separately held by each individual on the base
that I was responsible for Ohmura's death and thus deserved to
die. Though, come to think of it, if T'Meth thought I thought it
was a conspiracy it would explain a lot."
    "You asked her to protect you, I know."
    "Yes. I figured that a Vulcan would be able to resist the
pressure of the mob mentality-- T'Meth might not like me very
much, but she would do her duty. And I was convinced that the
rest of Security was going to kill me sooner or later. The two
men who attacked me were still at large, at first; even after
they were caught and court-martialed, it was obvious that public
sympathies were on their side. Now, not only had I gotten Ohmura
killed but I'd provoked two officers into ruining their careers.
At first, I had T'Meth watching over me, and while I didn't feel
safe, exactly, I felt considerably safer than I would without
her. After the court-martial, though, T'Meth said I was being
paranoid, and no one else in Security would break their Starfleet
oaths that way. T'Meth couldn't see that Security had become a
mob-- she wasn't their target, and they were her friends, and she
was too rational to fully understand how irrational human beings
can get. If she thought I thought it was a conspiracy, I can see
her point-- that *would* be being paranoid. But no, I expected a
lynching party.
    "I doubt you can imagine what it felt like, to spend every
moment in mortal terror. I was convinced Security was going to
get me-- it was just a matter of time. I stopped taking
sedatives-- I was afraid to sleep, I kept thinking they would
come for me at night and I wanted to be awake for it, though what
I thought I could do if I was awake I don't know. I couldn't eat,
I lost weight. I was sick with fear-- my head and stomach hurt
constantly, I couldn't keep food down when I managed to eat it at
all, and I lived in a constant haze of exhaustion, punctuated by
spikes of pure terror. I tried to tell Anderson what was going
on-- how they would stare at me, telling me with their entire
body language that they were going to kill me soon-- but how do
you explain a thing like that? She couldn't see that they were
conveying murderous intent-- she probably had too much murderous
intent of her own to see it. Anderson wanted me dead too, she was
just too disciplined to do it herself. Medellin couldn't see it,
T'Meth, Sekal, no one could see it but me, either because they
didn't want to or they weren't familiar enough with murderous
humans. I was afraid of everyone, but I didn't dare be alone,
because they could come for me when I was alone. But crowds
didn't offer any safety, either-- crowds could become lynching
mobs. Except when I was working, and sometimes even then, I was
constantly wondering if this was the last moment, if it was about
to happen now. My work suffered-- well, you can imagine. I felt
like anything I said, anything I did, could be the spark that
ignited the firestorm.
    "And even if they didn't kill me, even if T'Meth was right,
I depended on these people for my life! They didn't actually need
to touch me. All they needed to do was wait a few weeks until the
next aliens with grudges showed up, come a little bit late to my
rescue, and I'd be dead. 'I'm sorry, Commodore, there's been a
terrible accident. Q's combadge was apparently malfunctioning--
we didn't even realize he was in trouble until the Miblians had
finished eating him. But hey, he was an asshole, so no big loss,
right?' With that factored into the equation, I effectively had
no chance at all of surviving more than a few more weeks.
    "I was waiting for security to come escort me to a meeting
in a few hours, in a state of terror as usual, when I realized
that fact-- when I fully understood that I had no chance of
survival-- and it made me understand what my options really were.
I could continue the way I was, waiting to be murdered in some
hideous fashion, spending my last few days of existence in a
state of constant terror. Or I could take my death into my own
hands, and make sure that my passing was as pleasant as possible.
After I put it to myself that way, it became obvious that my best
alternative was suicide.
    "Once I had made the decision, I felt an enormous sense of
relief. I had to work quickly, so they wouldn't interrupt me and
take my death away from me, but aside from that urgency I felt no
pressure at all anymore. They used to let me have a topical
anesthetic spray back then-- it wasn't poisonous and it wasn't
ingestible, so they couldn't figure out how I could kill myself
with it. I sprayed my wrists until they were quite numb, and ran
a bath as hot as I could stand it. Then I lay back in the tub and
relaxed, and when I felt I was ready I took a ceramic mug-- there
wasn't any breakable glass in my room, for the same reason there
were no sharp edges, but I did have ceramics-- smashed it, and
cut my wrists with the edge, as deeply as I could before it
started to hurt.
    "Bleeding to death's not a bad way to go, as long as the
injury that's killing you isn't causing you much pain-- the loss
of blood itself makes you dizzy and cold, but if you're not
resisting it and you have some source of warmth other than your
own body heat it's actually very nice. And the relief-- it was
incredible. After all that time of being terrified, to be finally
free of fear... words fail me at how wonderful it was. It wasn't
actually that I was glad to be dying so much as that I was
overjoyed to be free of the fear that I'd be killed. In some
ways, it wasn't as nice as the incident with the pillow-- I
didn't feel euphoria, and I certainly didn't feel gratitude. But
the release of tension was almost an ecstasy. I was so tired, and
it felt so good to finally be able to yield to it." He smiled
ironically. "I suppose you could say I'd have died to get a good
night's sleep."
    "But you didn't die."
    "No. I found out later I did it all wrong. I didn't cut
deeply enough or over enough area to bleed to death before they
found me. Apparently you're supposed to cut along the wrist, not
across it, and you're supposed to cut deeper than that. Of
course, I didn't have any really sharp edges, and I was trying to
avoid pain as much as possible-- after I got below the level
where the anesthetic had taken effect, I couldn't keep cutting.
And I didn't allow enough time-- security came for me in an hour
or so, and apparently I was still alive then." An old bitterness
welled up. "Li kept insisting that I'd done it to get attention,
that I'd done it too poorly if I'd genuinely wanted to die.
Anderson thought it was some kind of grandiose melodramatic
gesture, taken straight out of fiction. I don't suppose it ever
occurred to either of them that I *got* it out of fiction, that
human methods of ending their own pathetic existences had never
interested me enough when I had my powers that I remembered any
practical ways of doing it. I didn't have access to drugs or
sharp edges or large bodies of water-- what did they expect I was
going to do? Hold my breath? In fiction, people cut their wrists
in bathtubs. I thought there might be some reason why it would be
more pleasant to do it that way-- perhaps the hot water numbs the
pain somewhat, or maybe it's the relaxing qualities, or maybe you
get waterlogged and that somehow makes it easier-- *I* didn't
know. And I don't know why they expected me to know. I didn't do
it to get attention-- why would I want attention from people I
thought wanted me dead? I wanted to get away from them, not to
get sympathy."
    "Did you tell them so?"
    "They wouldn't have listened," Q muttered angrily. "They'd
already made up their minds. I could live with Li being stupid
and wrong-headed-- at least he didn't try to confine me to bed
without computer access like he did this time. But Anderson
decided to punish me for trying to escape. She took away most of
everything I owned and then tried to take my privacy away too.
Anyway, I *did* tell them. I had no intention of trying it again,
not right then-- for one thing, Medellin reminded me of why I was
bothering to stay alive at all, and for another, things got
easier after that. It was security that saved my life, after all.
It felt like the crisis had passed."
    T'Laren nodded slowly. "Now I understand. I had been
wondering for some time-- as I said, that attempt had always
seemed like some sort of gesture to me. But it was a test, wasn't
it?"
    "A test?"
    "You believed that security was out to kill you. If that
were so, you would be better off dead at your own hands-- but you
didn't truly wish to die. So you attempted suicide in such a
fashion that security would almost certainly find you before your
death. If they saved you, it would prove that you'd been wrong,
they weren't out to kill you, and therefore you could afford to
live. If they didn't... then you were right, and you would rather
be dead." She nodded again. "Logical, actually-- surprisingly so.
Were you consciously aware of what you were doing?"
    "I... don't think so." Q tried to remember if he'd ever
reasoned along the lines she described. "I'm not entirely sure
that that *is* what I did, T'Laren. I mean, I would like to
believe it was-- it's always gratifying to think I had a good
reason for doing something that everyone thought was stupid-- and
the testing aspect certainly sounds like me. If anyone would put
his life on the line to test someone else, it would be me. But I
don't actually remember thinking things out the way you describe.
I just wanted an end to the fear. I didn't really understand that
I wouldn't die quickly enough to avoid being rescued."
    "But you didn't actually want to die. You wanted to be able
to relax, and you were willing to die for it if you had to, but
you didn't genuinely want death."
    "That's true, yes."
    "I imagine your subconscious mind is as capable of setting
up a test as your conscious, considering how long you've been
testing people. I believe you that you didn't reason things out,
but you had been mortal for two years by that time-- two years in
which you suffered a tremendous amount of damage. Even if you
weren't consciously aware of how much damage it would take to
kill you, or how quickly you'd die of a given injury, I suspect
your subconscious mind has a much better idea than you think it
does. I think on some level you *did* know you wouldn't die
quickly, and you were counting on that." She frowned. "Which then
leaves the question, when did you become genuinely suicidal?"
    "I could have told you that I wasn't really suicidal when I
cut my wrists. Not in the sense I was this last time. But when it
changed... I really have no idea. I think it went back and forth
for several months, and finally settled down on 'die' about two
weeks before I actually did it."
    "Why the time lag, then?"
    "Mustering up the nerve." He grinned sardonically. "And
trying to find some method that was just as sure as drinking acid
and a lot less painful. I really didn't want to go through that
much pain; I just couldn't find any other options."
    "You described a feeling of tremendous relief when you tried
to kill yourself the second time. Did you also experience any
relief this last time?"
    Q considered that. "Not really. I was in too much pain. I
was relieved when I realized I was losing consciousness, but
before that... I just kept thinking over and over, 'This will
pass soon. It'll be over soon.'"
    "Did you regret it, then? After you'd already taken the
acid, and the pain began, did you have second thoughts?"
    "Not about killing myself, no. I do recall thinking that
there had to have been an easier way than this... but I wasn't
actually thinking anything very coherent right then, if you want
to know the truth."
    "Yes. I can imagine." T'Laren stood up. "This sounds strange
to say about one whom I am treating for a suicide attempt,
especially one as extreme as yours, but I've come to the
conclusion that you actually have a much stronger will to live
than anyone, yourself included, gives you credit for." She
turned. "You've told both Medellin and myself, at length, exactly
what reasons you have to feel suicidal, and I must admit they're
potent ones. I can imagine few sentient beings who, when faced
with being 'crippled, maimed and exiled' to live among aliens
they are socially incompatible with, condemned to a fraction of
their natural lifespan and to suffer pain far greater than they'd
ever known, would not contemplate suicide as a viable option. In
the past three years, you've made three attempts... and yet, when
one analyzes those attempts closely, you did not become genuinely
and deeply suicidal until shortly before this past time. The
first time was a sudden overwhelming depression, probably brought
on in part by backlash from the battle with the Borg; the second
time was an attempt to escape what you believed would be a far
worse death in the very near future... It took you three years of
what you describe as utter misery before you became entirely
convinced you wanted to die, and less than three weeks after the
attempt the thought of being killed terrified you."
    "Oh. Well, the thought of dying *always* terrified me, when
I wasn't actively seeking it out."
    "You sound as if you're ashamed of that."
    "Should I be proud of being a sniveling coward? Be
realistic, T'Laren."
    "Define 'sniveling coward'."
    "Me. Someone who's constantly terrified, who whines and begs
because he's afraid he's going to die."
    "Most people are afraid to die, Q. It's perfectly normal to
be frightened of death, especially for someone who's had so
little time to come to terms with it. I think you're comparing
yourself to Starfleet personnel-- who are disciplined and trained
to deal with the possibility of their own deaths, and who have
voluntarily placed themselves on the line. You didn't volunteer
to be endangered. And with all that, you know, you have
occasionally transcended your fears-- it was not the act of a
coward to try to give yourself up to the Calamarain, back when
you first became human, you know."
    "Oh, I know that... but that was different." He sat down,
weary of pacing; his legs were beginning to ache. "The first time
the Calamarain attacked me was the first time I'd been truly
faced with the possibility of my own death. I'd come close, once
or twice in the past-- someone once threatened to neutralize me
in such a fashion that I might as well have been dead, and then
there was the time Azi tried to tear me apart... but no, this was
really the first time I'd been faced with death. At first I
didn't quite understand that I was in mortal danger. It felt
like... like pins and needles all throughout my body, with
occasional electric shocks, or like insects crawling all over me-
- I kept thinking I could brush it off, get it off me, but of
course it was energy. It wouldn't go until the Enterprise
adjusted its shields. And then... I felt violently dizzy, and I
couldn't stay on my feet. I fell on the floor, drowning in waves
of dizziness and nausea, and I realized for the first time that I
might actually be dying. And it... that thought, the fear, was
more painful than the attack itself. When Crusher showed up, I
kept asking her if I was dying, begging her not to let me die.
I'm sure she thought I was an idiot." He considered. "I take that
back. I *know* she thought I was an idiot. There's never been any
love lost between Dr. Crusher and me.
    "I managed to get myself under control before I had to face
Picard again... mostly. I was trying very hard not to think about
the future, narrowing my focus on getting through the next few
minutes. Because if I thought about the fact that I could now
die, that chances were not poor that I *would* die, very shortly,
it would overwhelm me. But after it attacked me the second time,
and Data was injured in saving me... I couldn't stop thinking
about it. The fact of my own mortality had imprinted itself, and
I couldn't get it out of my head. I'd come awfully close to
dying... and the Enterprise couldn't save me and the planet they
were trying to rescue at the same time, which effectively meant
everyone was going to be killed... That would be stupid.
Sacrificing everyone else so that I could live a few years might
have been a viable option, but sacrificing everyone so that I
could live another half day wasn't. I realized that I'd
miscalculated, and that because of it I'd put myself in a
situation where I couldn't survive. And if I had to die anyway, I
might as well do so without taking a large number of irrelevant
mortals with me." He shook his head. "Plus, while I didn't want
to *die*, I most certainly wasn't thrilled with the notion of
being alive right then. I was sure I would never adjust to being
mortal and that I was setting myself up for a life of misery and
agony by remaining alive. If I'd felt better about my life, I
might never have been able to do it."
    "That doesn't change the fact that it was not the act of a
coward."
    "No, maybe not. But..." He made an exasperated sigh. "How do
you mortals *do* it? If I think about the fact that-- barring my
reinstatement, which I really don't think will happen-- I'm
inevitably going to die, it overwhelms me. It makes my current
state of existence seem pointless. How do you handle knowing that
you're going to die?"
    "Most humans don't. They deny it, or they don't think about
it."
    "I suppose Vulcans are perfectly well adjusted to the
concept of death."
    "Most adult Vulcans have come to terms with their own
mortality, yes." She sat down. "For one thing, the discipline of
logic requires self-knowledge, and facing facts. Ideally, Vulcans
are not supposed to deny truths to themselves. In practice, of
course, many do. But all Vulcan adults have faced the *Kahs-wan*-
- a rite of passage that can be fatal-- in childhood, and were
thus forced to face their own mortality very young. And besides,
Vulcans cheat."
    "By blocking their emotions?"
    "No, I mean we cheat at death. A dying Vulcan can-- and
will, if he or she has the opportunity to do so-- transfer his or
her consciousness, memories-- soul, if you will-- into another
receptacle, either another sentient being or a recording media we
developed for the purpose ten thousand years ago. This is called
the *katra*. Normally, aged Vulcans who sense that it is time to
die transfer their *katra* into a specially trained healer, who
then goes to the Hall of Ancient Thought and transfers the
*katra* to a recording receptacle. Telepaths can commune with
such receptacles. Thus, over three-quarters of all dying Vulcans
do not entirely die." She looked away, staring into space. "I
think sometimes that makes it harder for Vulcans to accept the
notion of violent, sudden death. It is as if a devout Christian
were to die in a fashion that he believed would destroy his
immortal soul-- it negates the concept of the afterlife.
Sometimes I think the Vulcans that enter Starfleet, where the
odds are overwhelmingly high that their *katras* will be lost if
they die, are the bravest of all the species."
    "Such modesty."
    "I'm not speaking of myself. I came to terms with my own
mortality long before I ever heard of a *katra*, or had any idea
that some Vulcans can cheat death." She looked back at him. "My
mother died when I was four, before I had any notion what death
was. My Aunt Helene and Uncle Mike took me in and told me they
would have to be my mom and dad now, because my mother had died,
but I didn't understand. I asked when she was coming back, where
she had gone. They told me she'd gone to Heaven, a wonderful
place, and she wasn't coming back. But I loved my mother deeply,
and despite the fact that Vulcans don't talk about such things, I
knew she loved me. I knew if she had gone to a wonderful place
she would come back to get me and bring me there to join her. So
I continued to ask when she was coming back until I finally
sensed that it disturbed the adults, and stopped. But I still was
secretly convinced that she would. When we went to Earth, I was
very apprehensive-- Earth was a much bigger place than the
starship, I knew, and I wondered if my mother would be able to
find me there.
    "In the first year or so on Earth, we lived in New York, not
Texas. There are a vast quantity of squirrels in New York, and I
found them fascinating. Animals had always been rare and exotic
things for me, the sight of them a special treat, and the fact
that I had small animals in my back yard thrilled me. I used to
try to entice them to my hand by bringing them nuts-- and cheese;
somehow I'd gotten it into my head that squirrels liked cheese. I
think I was mixing them up with mice." Her expression came close
to a wry smile.
    "One day I found a squirrel that wasn't moving. It was
curled up on its side, its lips drawn back and its teeth
protruding. I thought it looked sick. Perhaps it was sleeping, I
thought, and I poked it to wake it up, but it wouldn't wake. So I
carried it to my 'mom'-- I called Helene Dorset 'mom', but to me
it didn't mean mother, because I still knew my own mother would
come back for me-- and asked her what was wrong with it. She told
me it was dead. Its soul had gone to squirrel heaven, but its
body would never move again.
    "That was when I realized what had happened to my mother. I
could see her in my imagination, as lifeless and unmoving as this
squirrel, all the essence of her gone away forever. She was never
coming back. That was what death was.
    "And even though I knew that Vulcans weren't supposed to, I
cried hysterically as I finally understood that I would never see
her again."
    "How old were you?" Q asked.
    "Five. In Earth years. Vulcan children grow up a bit more
slowly than human children in many respects, so in human terms I
was probably the equivalent of a four-year-old." She folded her
hands in her lap. "I went about for months after that asking
questions about death. When I realized that someday I, too, would
be dead like my mother, I found the concept overwhelming and
morbidly fascinating. My poor foster parents must have thought I
was seriously disturbed. That was around the time we moved to
Texas. I started seeing my Vulcan tutor then, and he helped me
come to terms with the notion of death. He told me nothing about
*katras*. By the time I learned that, as a Vulcan, I could escape
the death of my mind when my body died, I was already quite
comfortable with the notion of my own mortality. I assumed that I
would die away from other Vulcans, and as inflicting a *katra* on
a non-telepath can damage the host's sanity, I had decided that I
would not do the transference unless there was a Vulcan to
transfer to. So the preservation of the *katra* didn't apply to
me, and I ignored it as a consideration. But it amazes me still
that Vulcans who grow up with that security can find the courage
to enter Starfleet, and risk their lives far away from other
Vulcans."
    "I can imagine. It amazes me, too. Especially since I have
some personal experience with what it's like to face death after
growing up immune." Q grew pensive. "I became somewhat morbidly
obsessed myself when I first turned mortal, though I like to
think I was a bit better controlled about it than you describe
yourself at five. I still am, actually-- I think about death
constantly. That I could stop *being*, that there could be an end
and then there would be no more me-- it's difficult to grasp
that. I have a much better idea than most mortals what death
entails, and I still can't quite grasp it. It's so... big. And
I'm used to dealing with big concepts... but this one floors me."
    "Why do you have a better idea what death entails?"
    "Well, I used to know exactly what mortal death entailed,
and how various species varied in their forms of death, where the
dead go and what they do-- I was practically omniscient, after
all. Concepts as vast as death were easy for me to comprehend,
once. But I can't quite remember... I know there is a form of
existence for most life forms after death. That there is
something analogous to what humans call a soul, and that it
survives the destruction of the body. But the manner of that
existence is nothing a human mind can comprehend. That which we
think of as ourselves, our personalities, our memories, our
identities-- that doesn't survive, most of the time. And I don't
remember what *does*. I can't *grasp* it any more." An old
frustration welled up. "It's like a dream that you forgot.
Occasionally there's a flash of something, reminding you, and for
just a moment you hold the memory in your mind... but you can't
attach it to words, and it's gone. It's terribly ironic, really--
I understood death back when I had no need to, when it had
nothing to do with me, and now that it's a vitally important
topic to me I don't remember what death is."
    "At least you know there is some form of afterlife. That's
more than most mortals do."
    "But it doesn't help. If my personality doesn't survive,
then is that me? I can't answer that anymore. As far as I know,
death could still be the obliteration of everything I am. And
that is an almost incomprehensible concept. How could I stop
existing? I can remember the beginning of the *universe*-- how
can the universe go on without *me*?"
    "You were around when the universe began?"
    "No. And actually, I don't remember the beginning of the
universe-- that was something I knew through the Continuum, so
I've lost it now. But I remember that I used to remember." He
shook his head. "At least you mortals can point to a time when
you hadn't existed yet, and analogize a time when you no longer
exist from that. I don't even really know how old I am. I can't
remember my own creation anymore, though I remember that I used
to. I think I can safely say that I wasn't around when most of
the solar systems around us formed, but I can't remember for
sure. I cannot positively identify a time before I existed, so
how can I comprehend a time when I will no longer be?"
    "I don't know." T'Laren clasped her hands on the table. "But
few mortals can. We can intellectually comprehend ceasing to
exist, but we can't truly understand it."
    "And then there's method." Q got up and began to pace again.
"Death might not bother me so much if it weren't for the fact
that dying is so unpleasant. I think about dying even more than I
think about death. See, dying I can comprehend. I have a lot of
experience with dying. It's actually being dead that I can't
handle. But the fact that I understand dying and have experience
with it doesn't mean I like the idea of doing it, and someday I'm
going to have to. I waste my time making up lists of what
qualities I most want my death to have-- as if I'm going to be
given any choice in the matter."
    "You might," T'Laren said. "Often one can have some control
over the manner of one's death. It depends on the circumstances."
She steepled her hands and rested her chin on them. "What sort of
qualities do you mean?"
    "Well." This was a decidedly morbid conversation, and Q
found himself wondering exactly how they'd gotten onto this
topic. It did give him a certain kind of perverse satisfaction to
be discussing it-- as he'd told T'Laren, death was something he
thought about an inordinate amount, but he rarely got a chance to
talk to anyone seriously about it. "My ideal death would be
completely painless and fairly short, but not instantaneous. I
would like to know what's happening, to have a chance to observe-
- it is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, after all." He smiled
sardonically. "A chance to say my goodbyes, assuming there's
anyone there to say them to-- and I would prefer not to be alone
when I die-- to make my peace with my existence, that sort of
thing. Ideally, somewhere between fifteen minutes and a few
hours-- longer than that and I'd get bored.
    "If there's pain involved, of any sort, then I'd like it to
be quick. Obviously, the more pain there is, the shorter I'd like
it to last. Dying of a stab wound, for instance, I think I could
stand about fifteen minutes of. If I'd lasted fifteen minutes
after I drank the acid, I wouldn't have been sane after Li
rescued me-- something like that has to be *very* short.
    "And if it has to be painful and long, I would like it to be
meaningful." He stopped and stared out at the stars through the
transparent wall. "If I *had* died when I offered myself up to
the Calamarain, it wouldn't have been pleasant, but at least it
would have accomplished a purpose. I'm not eager to become a
martyr, and I'm far too selfish to try to be a hero, but I think
it would be nice to know that I wasn't dying in vain. That
someone else would live or thrive, someone better suited to the
life they're living than I am to this."
    "Those are fairly understandable preferences," T'Laren said.
    "But it's not going to happen that way." Q circled around
the table and sat down again, arms folded in against himself. "I
can't fool myself, as much as I might want to. I'm going to die
horribly, all dignity gone, screaming and probably begging, for
no better reason than someone's fixation on vengeance. If I'm
very lucky, they'll finish me off quickly, but I probably won't
be."
    "You can't know that."
    "You're right. I don't *know* how I'm going to die. But when
I extrapolate from all the times I've almost died in the past
three years, it becomes obvious that the overwhelming statistical
trend is toward really unpleasant deaths. About the only way to
give myself good odds at a reasonably acceptable method of
shuffling off this mortal coil is to shuffle it off myself."
Maybe it had been a bad idea to discuss this. He felt the despair
encroaching on him again. "It just seems so hopeless. Even when I
don't want to die, it's so obvious that a suicide death is
probably the best I can hope for. It makes an early check-out
seem very attractive sometimes."
    "You can't spend your life dwelling on the inevitability of
death, Q."
    "I told you I was a coward."
    T'Laren frowned. "You have a habit of putting the most
negative connotations possible on any given circumstance."
    "If I've learned one thing in my millions of years, it's
that pessimists are rarely disappointed."
    "They are also rarely happy."
    "I'd rather be unhappy and wise than a gleeful fool."
    "Pessimism is hardly wisdom. If you spend your entire life
dwelling on the horror of your own death, you will not evade it--
as you've said, your death is probably out of your control. You
will merely make yourself miserable."
    "How am I supposed to turn it off? I'm not a Vulcan, I can't
just stop thinking about things that bother me."
    "You can. If thoughts that disturb you intrude, think about
something else. And take matters into your own control as much as
you can. If you learn self-defense, for instance, you may be able
to save yourself from being killed-- or at the least force your
attacker to finish you quickly. You probably can't make peace
with most of the beings that want you dead, but you can increase
the odds that you'll be defended successfully by learning not to
antagonize your protectors. You were very clever in turning to
Starfleet for protection, but even members of Starfleet can be
pushed too far-- as you've learned. If you'd been able to manage
social relations properly, Security would not have attacked you
for Ohmura's death, you wouldn't have suffered for two weeks in
fear, you would not have been compelled to attempt your own life,
and you would not have been punished for the attempt if you had.
All of that because you handle people badly. Learn better
techniques for dealing with your allies, and you will be-- and
feel-- much safer."
    As usual, her argument made perfect logical sense. As usual,
Q didn't believe her, though he couldn't put his finger on
exactly why not. It seemed impossible that he would ever be able
to make himself likable. "I doubt it."
    "You doubt everything, Q. It's your nature." T'Laren stood
up. "You must, at least, concede that learning self-defense would
increase your probable life-span, and decrease the probability of
death by torture?"
    It was hard to argue with that one. "If I *can* learn, then
yes, I suppose it would."
    "You can learn," she told him confidently. "If you truly
wish to learn, you will."
    He sighed. "Sometimes... I don't know why. This sounds
utterly foolish, especially given how I've been whining about how
afraid I am for the past few hours... but sometimes it seems like
it's easier to be afraid than to hope anything could get better,
or work to fix anything."
    "I'm sure it is easier. Less effort. What you need to decide
for yourself, Q, is what your priorities are. Do you truly want
to get well? Do you want to stop being afraid? And do you want
those things badly enough to work for them?"
    If someone killed him in the next few months, and he thought
there was any chance T'Laren's training could have saved him if
he'd paid attention, Q would feel very stupid. "I think so," he
said. "At least, right now." He stood up. "I skipped most of my
lessons today. Any chance you might be willing to finish them?"
    T'Laren raised an eyebrow and stood herself. She seemed
unable or unwilling to keep her surprise off her face-- Q smiled
sardonically at her expression-- but all she said was
"Certainly."

    That night, despite attempts to meditate, he awakened four
times with bad dreams. The fourth time, he woke up drenched with
sweat, the blankets thrown off his upper body and hopelessly
tangled around his legs.
    "This," Q said to no one in particular, "is positively
ridiculous."
    He kicked free of the blankets furiously, the fear of the
dream transmuting to anger. So much for T'Laren's insistence that
all he needed to do was relax. He'd been perfectly relaxed before
he went to sleep-- actually, he'd been exhausted. He'd tried her
method, had done the meditative exercises she suggested, and it
hadn't worked. Without bothering to do anything about his rumpled
appearance, he stormed out of the bedroom and headed for Deck 1,
where T'Laren's quarters were. It was 0500; by all rights, she
should be asleep by now. Well, good. He'd wake her up. If he
couldn't sleep, why should she?
    T'Laren's quarters were unlocked. They were also empty. The
hard mattress she slept on-- or at least he presumed she slept on
it-- was made up as a militarily precise bunk, with no sign that
someone had ever slept there, or even leaned on it. "Computer,
where's T'Laren?"
    "T'Laren is in the gymnasium."
    In the gymnasium at 0500. *Why am I not surprised?* He
headed back down to Deck 3, his fury cooling slightly with time.
The ridiculousness of his actions, storming around Ketayain his
pajamas because he had a bad dream, started to reach him.
Resolutely he forced himself to concentrate on anger, to ignore
the growing sense of embarrassment and focus on finding T'Laren.
    As he stepped into the gymnasium, he staggered and nearly
fell. It was like walking off a staircase without realizing there
was a final step to descend. A sudden weight settled over his
entire body, making it hard to breathe, and an intense heat
brought beads of sweat to his face in the first few seconds--
beads that evaporated quickly in the dry air. It wasn't hard to
deduce that T'Laren had set the interior to a Vulcan environment,
heavy gravity, heat and all. Didn't she know it was a bad idea to
have differential gravities aboard a ship in warp? He leaned a
hand against the wall to regain his balance, breathing deeply,
and stepped forward from the antechamber into the gym proper.
    T'Laren was working out on a complex jungle gym of parallel
bars, wearing a blue-grey gym suit that wasn't much larger than
the swimsuit she'd worn before. Her skin was flushed a dark
green, under a sheen of sweat. As Q watched, she wrapped her legs
around one of the bars, swung around it, and tried to do a
handstand onto the bars below. Her wrist twisted as her weight
came on it, and she fell with a startled yelp, crashing on her
hands and knees to the mats below.
    Q clapped slowly and sarcastically. "Bra-*vo*!"
    T'Laren got up from the mat slowly, turning to face him. "I
didn't hear you come in."
    "No, you seemed rather occupied with finding new and
exciting ways to maim yourself."
    "Are you here for a reason? It's very early." She stood up,
wiping sweat off her face.
    "I thought I'd take in a sauna," he said, glancing around.
"Why exactly are you exercising in Vulcan gravity at five in the
morning?"
    "Why exactly are you asking?" T'Laren went over to the
replicator. "A tall glass of water. And a wet cloth." She was
limping slightly, favoring her left knee.
    "I do believe I asked first."
    She drank most of the glass of water in one draught. "I
always exercise around this time. Normally you're asleep at this
time. Another glass of water, please."
    "Where's the logic in being polite to a replicator?"
    "What are you doing here?"
    Q leaned back against the wall. The gravity was very tiring.
"I just woke up for the fourth time tonight with another
nightmare, and I want to know what you plan to do about it."
    "Ah." T'Laren set her second glass of water down and wiped
off her face with the wet cloth, both times using the wrist that
hadn't betrayed her. "We could discuss it, if you'd like."
    "T'Laren, I'm *tired*. I don't want to discuss it, I *want*
to get back to sleep."
    "Did you try meditation?"
    He gave her a disgusted look. "No, I thought I'd try banging
my head on the wall instead."
    "What kind of nightmare was it?"
    "It doesn't *matter* what kind of nightmare it was! You told
me that if I was properly relaxed I wouldn't have nightmares.
Well, I did the relaxation exercises before I went to bed and it
didn't do me any good at all. I even tried them again after the
first nightmare. I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that you,
dear doctor, are a quack. Why don't you give me a sedative? We
*know* that works."
    "I could also use a nerve pinch on you," T'Laren said
coolly. "That would work, too."
    "You're not taking me seriously!" Q snapped.
    T'Laren pressed a hand to her head. "Forgive me. I'm angry
and frustrated at the moment-- it has nothing to do with you,
although your behavior is not improving matters."
    "*My* behavior isn't improving matters. I see. You're the
one who's supposed to be helping me, and I'm the one who's
suffering, but you don't feel good. Oh. Poor baby."
    "You are the only one permitted to be angry?" T'Laren asked.
"You're the only one permitted to have any sort of feelings?"
    "You're a Vulcan! And anyway, you're my doctor. You're
supposed to be able to put personal problems aside."
    "Ideally, yes. Here's some news for you, though: this isn't
an ideal universe."
    Q scowled. "I know that. Don't try to tell *me* about the
shortcomings of the universe, T'Laren."
    "Then you know that it isn't always possible to live up to
ideals." T'Laren leaned back against the wall and closed her
eyes. "Give me a moment."
    She took a deep breath. Q watched, fascinated despite
himself. Her tension had not been all that obvious, not to a
person used to reading human beings, but the change as it drained
out of her was dramatic. When she opened her eyes, she seemed
entirely composed, her face and voice free of the edge of
impatience that had been there before. "There."
    "I've never seen a Vulcan do that before."
    "Aside from me, you probably never will again. Most have
mastery internalized far better than I do-- it would take
something of truly stunning proportions to make them show
emotion, or the struggle for control."
    "Vulcans don't usually admit that they even *have*
emotions."
    "I know. It's a matter of shame. I've always felt that
there's no point to it myself; denying my feelings exist will not
help me to master them. Vulcan discipline doesn't work by
pretending emotions aren't there and hoping they go away, though
many humans seem to think that's how we do it."
    "What were you exercising in a Vulcan gravity for, anyway?"
    "You're the physics expert, Q. What do you think?"
    "I think having a differential gravity field inside our warp
field is asking for trouble, actually."
    "Oh." T'Laren frowned slightly. "Why?"
    "It's unstable. If you've got multiple gravitational fields
inside a single warp envelope, it unbalances the warp field, puts
a strain on the engines and drains the dilithium crystals.
Admittedly, dilithium can be recharged, but if we ever do plan to
use the transwarp engines we'll want crystals at maximum
capacity, so they don't blow out on us."
    "We used higher-than-Earth-gee fields for gymnasium programs
aboard some of the starships I was on, and no one ever said it
was dangerous."
    "Starships have more sheer power to play with. Our engines
are designed for speed, not luxury. Also more space-- the
proportionate size of the differential gravity field makes a big
difference. And I still don't know what you'd want such a program
for."
    "I was born aboard a starship under Earth gee, and raised on
Earth. Earth's gravity is considerably lighter than Vulcan's."
She requested a medical tricorder from the replicator and ran it
over her wrist. "You think of me as strong, because I'm a Vulcan
and I'm stronger than you. In point of fact, though, at your size
you would be stronger than me if you were in reasonable shape."
    "Really." Q's eyebrows went up.
    "I've always been weaker than other Vulcans. For most of my
life, I struggled to compensate, with exercise regimens like the
one you just saw. Since I *am* genetically Vulcan, and Earth's
gravity isn't that much lower, I can come very close to a normal
Vulcan level of strength for a woman my size if I train hard
enough. But toward the end... I let things slide, and I'm paying
for it now." She put the tricorder down. "It's twisted, not
sprained. I'll have to do something about it later, and the knee
too. Right now, though... let me take a shower, and I'll try to
deal with your problem. I should only be a few minutes."
    "I'll wait outside."
    After the heat in the gymnasium (and why did she have it set
to a complete Vulcan environment if all she wanted was the
heavier gravity, anyway?), the coolness of the ship's corridors
was a soothing balm. Q leaned against the wall, growing more and
more conscious of his rumpled appearance. What had possessed him
to come out here in *pajamas?* What was *wrong* with him? His
hair was a wreck, he had been drenched with sweat before he'd
gone in the gymnasium and he probably reeked by now-- really, he
must look a disaster. He thought of going back to his room to get
changed before she got out-- T'Laren probably didn't care what he
looked like, but he did.
    She came out then, wearing a dull beige shipsuit, her hair
still slightly damp. Personally, Q couldn't see why anyone would
dump water all over themselves when they could be cleaned with
intangible, efficient sound waves instead, but he was willing to
admit that was a personal bias. "I've been considering," she said
as they walked toward his room. "I still think the problem is
tension-- especially since yesterday morning. You look as if
you're tense and frightened when you sleep, even under sedation--
I imagine you must be extremely tense when you don't take
sedatives. You say you've tried meditation, and that didn't work.
We tried massage, and that didn't work very well. I still
disapprove of sedatives-- I could give you a muscle relaxant, but
over the long run that has the same problem as the sedatives."
    "None of this helps, you know." Q palmed open the door to
his room.
    "All of it helps. Knowing what does not work is certainly
useful in tracking down what does." T'Laren stepped inside and
sat down in the chair, folding her hands in her lap, as Q sat
down on the bed and leaned back against his pillows. "We haven't
yet tried combining techniques. Perhaps you're too tense to place
yourself in a deep enough trance to do youself good. I could
massage the tension out while you make the attempt..."
    "I'm certainly not going to turn down a gratuitous backrub,
but I don't really think that will work. For one thing, I doubt I
could concentrate enough to try meditating with you rubbing my
back."
    "You might be surprised. Actually, anything that relaxes the
body increases suggestibility, and that improves the odds for
self-hypnosis-- which is, essentially, what I've been trying to
teach you to do."
    "I'm not too happy with the idea of being suggestible, quite
frankly."
    "I know. Some time ago I considered the idea of using
hypnosis with you, but I think you're far too resistant for it to
work. You refuse to yield your will to someone else. However,
keep in mind that it's your subconscious mind that's affected by
increased suggestibility. We have been trying to find a way to
make your subconscious-- which seems to be as stubborn as the
rest of you-- take orders from your conscious mind. I'm sure the
idea of you yourself giving suggestions to your subconscious
doesn't disturb you."
    "Of course not. That's not what bothers me..." But he
couldn't quite articulate what bothered him, other than the usual
problem-- he simply didn't want to take the risk of letting
another person manipulate him, and in these circumstances that
was a foolish fear to have. Right now he would use any method at
all. He shook his head. "I'm too tired to have this argument. I
suppose it would be foolish of me not to try it."
    "Yes."
    By now he had become somewhat more accustomed to backrubs--
he enjoyed them still, but no longer overreacted the way he had
the first time. Which was just as well, as if he'd kept
overreacting like that he would have had to refuse them entirely.
He lay down on the bed, on his stomach with his head turned
sideways on the pillow and his arms under the pillow, supporting
his head. For a moment, he was uncomfortably aware of the fact
that he was in a pair of light, rumpled pajamas, with his feet
bare, and that he was in his bedroom with T'Laren. The fact that
she was fully dressed helped ease the self-consciousness some,
though, and when she began on his back it felt too good to
particularly care about what he was wearing or how vulnerable he
was.
    It was, however, far too distracting for him to put himself
in a trance. In an environment of boredom, it was very easy for Q
to put himself into a trance-- when he was too physically weary
to do anything and didn't want to sleep, he could use meditation
as a method of simply shutting his brain off for a while. Using
it for something constructive, however, like trying to persuade
himself to not have nightmares, was much more difficult. He
simply couldn't do it here. For one thing, with T'Laren pressing
down on his back he couldn't breathe deeply or regularly. "This
isn't going to work," he said, rolling over.
    "What's wrong?"
    "It's too distracting. And I can't breathe properly."
    "Mm." T'Laren nodded. "All right. Roll over again and I'll
finish with your back. Then there's something else we could try."
    "What?"
    "An adaptation of this. If you lay on your back, I can still
reach most of your head and neck. As long as your back is relaxed
already, that might  be enough."
    That sounded rather attractive, he had to admit. "Fine."
    After she had finished with his back, she had him move down
on the bed, far enough for her to kneel at the head of the bed
just above his head, and lie down on his back with his head
supported on a pillow, leaving a space free that she could reach
his neck. His exhaustion was catching up with him. "I want you to
take deep breaths," T'Laren said. "Try to relax. Since ideally
you should go directly to sleep when we finish here, would you
like me to turn off the lights?"
    The idea of being in a completely dark room with T'Laren
bothered him more than he was willing to admit. Besides, he
didn't sleep in complete darkness anyway. "Computer, sleep
lights."
    The room dimmed, the regular lights going off and the three
blue panels at the base of the room's walls lighting up, filling
the room with a dim, diffuse illumination. "I didn't know there
were moon lights on Ketaya," T'Laren said.
    "Is that what they're called? Moon lights?"
    "Either that or nightlights."
    "I hate the term nightlight. Children who're frightened of
the dark use nightlights. I just prefer to be able to see if
something wakes me up."
    "Reasonable, given your circumstances." She reached under
his neck and pressed fingertips into the muscles there. "Close
your eyes."
    Q did so, sighing. It was a good bit easier to breathe
deeply, now that he wasn't being pressed down into the bed. It
was strange, how his neck and head could be so tense, and yet he
didn't even notice he was in pain until something happened to
take the pain away. He hated being that used to pain that it
dropped into the background-- though maybe it was preferable to
the way it had been in the early days, when he couldn't stop
noticing pain, and a twinge he would now consider negligible
would have him all but crippled.
    As T'Laren's fingertips moved up to his temples, massaging
the barely-noticed headache away, he could hear her murmuring
almost inaudibly, soothingly, telling him to relax. Sleep was a
warm, dark tide, lapping at him and washing away the strains of
the day. He was tired enough that the sensation of falling asleep
was in itself extremely pleasurable, something it very rarely
was-- normally he fought sleep, resisting the onslaught of
unconsciousness with all his strength, but he had no strength
right now and it felt wonderful to yield for once.
    His breathing changed, becoming more regular. Quite
unconsciously he smiled as the dark tide took him and washed
everything away but peace.

    T'Laren waited with her fingers pressed gently to his
temples, sensing and guiding the ebb of consciousness, until she
knew that he was deeply and peacefully asleep. Though it was
difficult to imagine a mind more resistant to suggestion than
his, she thought that perhaps he had been receptive enough to her
telepathic suggestion to act on it. If this worked, he would
sleep deeply and with no emotionally charged dreams. She drew
back her hands and cautiously removed herself from the bed,
prepared to soothe Q back to sleep if he showed any signs of
being woken by her movements. He showed none.
    For a few moments she stood by the bed, looking down at him
in the dim bluish light. With the tension gone from his sleeping
form, his lips turned in an unconscious smile, he actually looked
healthier than he had this morning, when he'd slept so tensely.
He was still thin and fragile-looking, still vulnerable, but it
was a far more innocent vulnerability than the knowing fear she'd
seen in him this morning, and it inspired a kind of tender
protectiveness-- even in her, with her extensive knowledge of
what exactly he was. If he ever managed to look this way when
awake, he'd have a much easier time of it getting people to be
sympathetic to him.
    She left the room, heading for sickbay. It had, perhaps,
been a bad idea to give Q a massage after twisting her wrist. Her
priorities were strange ones, she thought. Few doctors were ever
quite so obsessed with their patients as she was-- and she had to
admit that an objective observer would probably call it
obsession. For three or four months, ever since Lhoviri and she
had decided she was sane enough to work again, she had spent most
of her waking hours thinking about and preparing for her
treatment of Q. She had interviewed people who knew him, studied
his records extensively, done everything she could to increase
her understanding of him. T'Laren had never been that focused on
one patient before in her life, nor had she ever known a doctor
who was-- except in cases of countertransference, where the
psychologist fell in love with her patient.
    *Small danger of that here*, she thought dryly. As far as
he'd come in the past two weeks, Q was still far from lovable.
She was obsessed with him because he was the symbol of her debt
to Lhoviri, the service she must discharge for the profound gift
of having reality rewritten to correct her mistakes. That was
all.
    That being said, however, she had to admit that that in
itself could be a problem. Until Q was reasonably well-adjusted
to being human, until she had completed the task Lhoviri had
given her, T'Laren could not entirely forgive herself for the
things she had done, the things Lhoviri had saved her from doing.
There was nothing she could do about that-- emotional mastery
only went so far, and besides, Lhoviri had altered reality in
order to pay for a psychologist who would obsess herself with his
younger brother. That was part of the deal. But it meant she
would have to watch herself carefully-- despite what she'd told Q
today, the lack of other people around was a problem, though not
for the reason he thought. It was not that Q was not the most
charming of companions-- he wasn't, but that wasn't the point. If
the only social connections T'Laren could make were with the
patient that she was obsessed with anyway, she became dangerously
vulnerable to countertransference. Probably his unlovability and
obnoxiousness were all that had saved her thus far. As she shaped
Q into a closer approximation of a socially viable and likable
human, she ran the risk of becoming Pygmalion, and falling for
her creation. She would have to be constantly on guard for that.
    It would be better once they were on Yamato, she thought.
Once there were other people around to diffuse her focus.

    She let Q sleep this time-- it was probably the first night
in years that he'd gotten a decent night's sleep without the aid
of sedatives. As a result, it was close to 0930 hours before he
finally came onto the bridge, fully dressed and with defenses
firmly in place. "I want to talk to you," he said abruptly.
    T'Laren stood. "Did you sleep well?"
    "Marvelously. I haven't slept this well without sedatives
since the night we defeated the Borg. I didn't even wake up
groggy. And that is what I want to talk to you about." He strode
over and perched himself on the railing nearest her. "What did
you do to me?"
    Her heart sank at his phrasing. She had used telepathic
suggestion on him because it was the most effective way to get
him to sleep, it was a lot less dangerous than sedatives and she
didn't think there was any way he would figure it out. Q had an
irrationally powerful phobia of telepathy-- if she had suggested
that she use her telepathy to help him sleep, they would have
been in an argument for another three hours, since Q was
especially incapable of listening to reason when he was tired. If
somehow he had figured it out, though, they were going to have
the three-hour argument now.
    She could lie to him, she thought. For a Vulcan, she was
remarkably good at lying-- in fact, for a human she was
remarkably good at lying, though she hated to do it. But if
somehow he saw through the lie, he might never trust her again.
There would be an argument if she admitted the truth, and he
would probably claim he couldn't trust her anymore, but that, at
least, she could salvage. If she outright lied to him, and he
found out, she might never recover.
    "I gave you a massage," she said calmly. "And I gave you a
telepathic suggestion to help you sleep."
    Q stared at her, hard. "I'm surprised you're willing to
admit it."
    "Why shouldn't I admit it? You wanted desperately to sleep."
    "And you took advantage of that to get access to my mind,
didn't you."
    "That has to be one of the most outrageously paranoid things
I've ever heard you say. I did not 'get access' to your mind, Q.
I admit I used my telepathy to suggest that you sleep. If you
hadn't been exhausted and very much desirous of sleep, however,
the suggestion would have had no effect whatsoever. I can't make
you do anything against your will, and while I *can* read your
mind, I would have had to meld with you to do so. The most I can
sense without forming a mindmeld is general emotional state."
    "My, aren't we defensive."
    "Of course I'm defensive. You just accused me of one of the
greatest crimes a Vulcan can commit. I believe I have the right
to be defensive."
    Q shook his head. "To be quite honest, I believe you. But
that doesn't change the fact that you invaded my mind without my
permission--"
    "You *gave* me permission, Q. You were desperate for
anything that would help you get to sleep."
    "And is a telepathic suggestion that great an improvement
over a sedative? That's what *I* wanted."
    "You told me you awoke without grogginess. Sedatives depress
your system even after you wake. Besides, as I've pointed out,
sedatives are addictive. With a telepathic suggestion, your brain
can't distinguish between the suggestion and its own impulses.
Your brain develops the habit of falling asleep on what it
believes to be its own--"
    "Then why did I imagine I heard your voice?"
    "You heard my voice?"
    "When I came down here, actually, I thought you'd hypnotized
me or something. I distinctly remember you murmuring at me over
and over to relax, to go to sleep. Did you do that?"
    "Not aloud."
    "Then how do you explain how I heard it?"
    "I don't know." That troubled her somewhat. Q was not a psi-
sensitive; he shouldn't have been able to distinguish her
suggestions from his own mental processes. "That doesn't normally
happen. It could be that you have so much experience with psi, or
something analogous to it. I've heard of non-psis, such as
humans, learning to develop shields through close contact with
telepaths. The fact that you used to be a psi within a psionic
society--"
    "The Q Continuum is a bit more than a psionic society,
T'Laren."
    "Yes, but the analogy holds."
    "All of this is off the point," Q said. "You claimed I gave
you permission. I gave you no such thing. You didn't warn me you
were going to touch my mind, and you didn't ask my permission.
What you told me, in fact, was that you intended for me to put
myself to sleep, which for obvious reasons I have a lot fewer
problems with than having you do it."
    T'Laren allowed herself to sigh. "What was I supposed to do,
Q? You wanted to go to sleep right then. You didn't want to
discuss your nightmares, or meditate, or do anything
constructive. You wanted to be asleep right then. The only thing
I could think of to do was a telepathic suggestion."
    "Then why didn't you *ask* me?"
    "Because you'd have felt compelled to argue against it for
three hours."
    To her surprise, Q grinned. "Probably. But I'd have lost in
the end. I always lose arguments like that."
    "You weren't in any mood for a three-hour argument, and
frankly, neither was I."
    "*Au contraire, chere docteur.* I'm always in the mood for a
three-hour argument."
    Belatedly she realized that Q was actually not that angry.
He seemed to be arguing mostly for the sake of argument. "Q, does
any of this really bother you or are you just being difficult?"
    "Why, T'Laren, you wound me. Haven't I progressed beyond
being difficult for the sake of being difficult?"
    "No."
    Q blinked in apparent surprise. "Oh. Well, I thought I had."
    "You were obviously mistaken."
    "I'm not just-- All right. You want me to be serious? I'll
be deadly serious." His voice lost all joking tone. "I don't like
having you touch my mind, T'Laren. Ever. You did it for my
benefit; fine, I believe you. But you didn't ask my permission
and you didn't warn me. I think I have the right to feel just a
little bit betrayed over that. Especially since you knew I don't
like you being inside my head."
    "I can understand why you wouldn't want your mind read, Q. I
can even understand why you wouldn't want me giving you
suggestions all the time. And I can understand why you feel that
I should have warned you. But try to look at it from my
perspective. You are irrational on the subject of telepathy, and
also irrational on the subject of sleep, and predisposed to be at
your most stubborn and unreasonable when you're tired. I could
have told you what I planned, we would have argued in circles for
hours, and in the end either I would have won the argument, or
you would have slept badly and demanded sedatives again today.
I've told you before, you cannot entirely be trusted to know what
your own best interests are."
    "And so you treat me like a child? Lie to me, to make me do
what you want? 'This won't hurt a bit, Q.' Is that it?"
    "When you behave irrationally as a child, I have no choice--
"
    "T'Laren," he interrupted, "I trust you about as much as
it's possible for me to trust another sentient being, I suspect.
But that trust does *not* extend to letting you make free with my
mind. What is irrational about not wanting a telepath in my head?
You say this was for my benefit. What if I'm depressed, and you
feel it's for my benefit that you artificially alter my mood?
What if I'm grieving over what I've lost again, and you think it
would help me if you conditioned me not to think of my loss at
all? I could have been a non-sentient animal, you know. I could
have led a happy, stupid animal life, in blissful ignorance of
what I used to be. That isn't what I chose. And no one else has
the right to choose that for me."
    T'Laren stared at him. "Q, I would *never* do such a thing--
you're entirely right. No one has the right to choose that for
you. I would never dream of trying. That would be-- tantamount to
putting you on drugs, or sending you to a rehab colony. To
deprive a person of their free will by telepathically altering
their mind is one of the worst things any Vulcan can imagine
doing. You know that Vulcans die if sent to rehab colonies? We
can't bear having our minds forcibly altered any more than you
can. I-- no."
    "You've never used your telepathy that way. Never altered a
person's mind against their will."
    Against her will, T'Laren remembered Melor. "Once," she said
softly. "To save my life. And I have never stopped regretting
it."
    "Really. What happened?"
    T'Laren shook her head. "It was when I was undercover in the
Romulan Empire. I was forced to remove a man's memories of
discovering that I was Vulcan." She had no intention of telling Q
precisely how she'd accomplished that, or why Melor had believed
her enough to make himself vulnerable. Not only was it a story
that shamed her, it was an aspect of her character that Q of all
people should never find out.
    "All right." Q nodded. "That sounds like a legitimate reason
to do such a thing. I just--" He took a deep breath. "I know I
can be irrational on this topic. There's nothing I can do about
that. It isn't even the idea of having my mind read-- I'm sure my
own people read my mind frequently. I'm primarily afraid of
having my mind influenced."
    "Why?" Immediately T'Laren realized that was poor phrasing.
"I don't mean why-- I can easily understand why you fear having
your mind influenced. I would, too. But why is it such a priority
in your mind? You seem to fear this worse than... many more
immediate fears. You've told me that the thing you most had to
fear as a Q was having your mind influenced by the other Q. But
you're human now. You're a solitary being, not part of an
overmind. Having your mind influenced is not going to happen very
often; I would think it would be a low-priority fear."
    "Let me tell you a little story, T'Laren. Maybe this will
help you understand." He got up and began to pace about,
illustrating his story with hand gestures. "You're familiar with
Earth mythology, fairy tales and whatnot? Good. Let's say you're
the prince of a small kingdom. This is in some indeterminate
once-upon-a-time era. And when you were born, an old gypsy woman
made a prophecy that you could only be killed by a bear.
    "Bears used to be a protected species, but no longer! Your
father the king declares open season on bears. Bear hunters make
fortunes selling bearskin rugs, bear meat, bear coats, all that.
So by the time you grow to adulthood, bears are pretty rare. Now,
you live with the fear that you might run into one one day, but
it seems pretty remote. You've never actually seen a bear. And
you have utter confidence that nothing else can kill you.
    "You become a renowned warrior, unstoppable in battle. You
take risks no one else would dare, but then, you've no reason to
be afraid-- after all, your opponents aren't bears. And you do
good works. You save babies from burning buildings, swim out to
sea to save drowning men, all that. You're known far and wide for
your bravery. Of course, it isn't bravery-- you *know* that
anything that isn't a bear presents you about as much threat as a
cream puff. Less. People have choked on cream puffs.
    "Then one day you make a startling discovery. That old gypsy
woman was a complete charlatan! She had as much psychic ability
as a lima bean. See, her husband was a bear hunter. She's filthy
rich now from dead bears, and she's run to another kingdom, and
you hear that she confessed that she made the prophecy up.
Actually, anything can kill you.
    "Overnight, you turn into a sniveling coward. You spent your
life fearing nothing but bears. Now you fear *everything*,
because you never learned how to handle fear. Now you know that
fire can kill you, and drowning can kill you, and warriors-- oh,
yes, they can certainly kill you. You're terrified of the entire
world.
    "But-- even now-- especially of bears."
    T'Laren raised an eyebrow. "Did you make that up, or is that
a myth somewhere?"
    "I made it up. Although it could very well be a myth I
learned somewhere, and I just don't remember it."
    "It's a good analogy," she said. "I suspect it
oversimplifies a bit--"
    "All analogies do that."
    "--but it does help to explain how you feel. However. What
if for some reason you needed to rely on a bear to save your
life?"
    Q considered. "I'm phobic, not stupid," he said. "If you
needed to mindmeld with me to save my life-- I'd agree. I
wouldn't like it, but I'd agree."
    "I'm glad to hear that," she said. "You may find this
reassuring, Q. Or perhaps not-- but knowing you, I suspect you
will. Do you understand what a mindmeld entails?"
    "It's telepathy. More than that. It's a merging of minds,
isn't it?"
    "Yes. It's also a learned skill-- while all Vulcans are born
with the ability, and all can form simple links with other
willing Vulcans, it takes a great deal of skill and training to
meld with an alien, or an unwilling or frightened subject. This
is primarily because the mindmeld involves merging minds,
becoming the other. A Vulcan needs an unshakable sense of self, a
willingness to accept the unknown, or a great deal of training,
to prevent her mind being submerged in her meld partner's, her
own personality subsumed. I've trained in that for over 30 years-
- I'm a very good telepath, with a great deal of experience at
melding with aliens. And I wouldn't risk melding with you unless
it was an emergency, because I suspect your personality would
overwhelm mine."
    "Really."
    "Yes. You've trained in overwhelming others' minds for the
past few million years. I suspect your force of personality is
such that others would be easily absorbed into you, or destroyed
by you as a defense."
    "But you're a psi. I'm not."
    "That only says who can initiate a meld, not who has the
more powerful personality. You may be as vulnerable to having
your mind read by distance telepaths as any human-- but I think
any Vulcan who tried to meld with you would be risking their
sanity."
    "You're right. I do find that reassuring."
    "And that's the basic nature of the problem, isn't it? You
fear intimacy, and feel reassured by the fact that you would
probably take over any mind that joined with yours. In the
society you grew up in, that was a survival skill. Intimacy meant
danger, in a society where it was the default. But now that
you've been deprived of it, you do need it, as much as humans
need independence. In fact, having taken it for granted all your
life, you may in some ways need it more. And yet you haven't been
able to adjust your behavior to compensate yet. You're now a
member of a species whose social defaults are the opposite of
what you spent millions of years learning-- and so you resist
mental intimacy, you resist all but the most superficial of
emotional connections, because you have not yet realized that
emotional closeness is no longer dangerous to you. You're still
afraid of bears."
    "Yes, I know. What's your point?"
    "Do you understand that it's a problem?"
    "Of course I understand that it's a problem. Haven't we
spent the last three weeks hashing out how it's a problem?"
    "You didn't understand that it was a problem when we began
this trip," T'Laren said. "You agreed to come with me because you
couldn't think of anything else that might help, not because you
truly understood what needed to be fixed."
    Q frowned slightly, evidently thinking about it. "Maybe so."
    "That's an achievement, at least." She leaned forward. "And
something else you should realize. I can't make you do anything
against your will. I cannot telepathically compel you to fall
asleep if you don't really want to. If I tried, I would have to
form a meld, and I've just explained why I wouldn't dare do that
outside of emergencies. I'm not a bear, Q. You have no reason to
fear me."
    He sighed. "Ask my permission first, at least."
    "Would you have granted it?" T'Laren asked. "Would you grant
it now, if the same situation arose?"
    "If I was desperate, yes."
    "It takes desperation for you to realize what you need,
doesn't it."
    "I wouldn't have come with you in the first place if I
wasn't desperate."
    And so he would only admit to a need if he were desperate?
And then only if offered a solution? Q had, in the past,
occasionally tried to find constructive solutions to his problems
by reaching out to others for information or aid-- such as asking
Sekal about the Vulcan disciplines-- but for the most part he
tried to solve everything himself, or else assumed it couldn't be
solved and resigned himself to it. She wasn't sure he had come
far enough to admit needs even to her unless she dragged the
admission out of him. Which meant she would have to be diligent
about dragging admissions out of him, and that brought her in
roundabout fashion to a topic she'd been meaning to discuss with
him for weeks, and which he'd diligently avoided.
    "There is something I've been meaning to talk about with you
for some time."
    "About why I came with you? Or desperation?"
    "Neither, actually." How to broach this. T'Laren studied
him, trying to decide the best approach, and finally decided to
be reasonably blunt. "I've studied Counselor Medellin's reports
on your discussions of sexuality, but I've not discussed the
subject with you myself."
    "For which I was grateful."
    "It's far too important a topic to ignore, Q."
    "I was quite happy ignoring it, actually." He turned away
from her, heading for the lift. "I haven't had breakfast yet
anyway. I have no intention of getting into another marathon
discussion before I get some food."
    "I'll come with you."
    "I also don't particularly feel like having a marathon
discussion while eating."
    "I'm sure you don't feel like having this discussion at all,
but it's necessary."
    "Why?"
    She stepped onto the lift with him, and they descended to
the kitchen level. There should be a lounge, T'Laren thought--
not the huge and ostentatious observation lounge, but something
small and cozy, bigger than the kitchen-- a neutral ground of
sorts. They spent all their time having discussions in the
kitchen because there really weren't many other places on the
ship to talk. "Sexuality is an important part of the human
psyche, and for you to reject it as completely as you do is
unhealthy. I need to understand why you choose to reject it--"
    "Because it's *repulsive*." The lift reached Deck 3, and
they both stepped off. "You said you read Medellin's reports. You
must know what I told her."
    "I do-- but there are a good number of things you told
Counselor Medellin that you later contradicted when talking to
me."
    "Like what? Name one."
    "I'm not going to be sidetracked, Q. Why do you consider sex
so repulsive?"
    "Because it is. You humanoids use your genitalia for
*excretory* functions. Have you any *idea* how utterly grotesque
that is?" He shuddered dramatically. "I'm going to eat now. I
would appreciate it if we could stop talking about this, so I
might have some chance of keeping my breakfast down."
    She waited until he'd ordered his breakfast-- eggs, bacon,
and, in typical Q perversity, a chocolate sundae. "That's the
sort of objection a pre-pubescent child might bring up," she said
as he ate. "When I was in third grade, we had our first sex
education class. My friend Stewart was of the opinion that this
was the most incredibly disgusting thing he'd ever heard of, for
more or less the same reason you just gave. After his hormones
activated, Stewart spent most of his waking hours--" --and
probably most of his sleeping ones as well, T'Laren thought--
"plotting how to commit the same act that had repulsed him six
years ago."
    "So you're saying I'm an eight-year-old child."
    "Not at all. I'm saying that if a reason sufficient only for
an eight-year-old child is sufficient for you, there's something
seriously wrong with you. You are an adult human male, and while
your health is poor now, you were in perfect condition three
years ago. Your physical drives should be enough to overcome a
repulsion of that nature; if not, it would imply that your body
is somehow defective. I find it hard to imagine that the Q
Continuum would have given you a defective body, especially one
deficient in such an important aspect of human existence, given
that they seemed to want you to become as human as possible. Is
there some factor I'm not aware of?"
    "It's..." Q reddened, and looked down off the edge of the
table at his boots. "...not a defective body."
    T'Laren had rather suspected not. "So you are capable of
physical desire."
    "My body is, yes." He looked up. "But that's irrelevant," he
said sharply. "What my body may want has no bearing on what *I*
want. And *I* consider sex repulsive."
    "That may be true. But your body is exquisitely evolved to
override any sort of mental opposition to sex, especially one as
fundamentally baseless as disgust. I strongly suspect you must
have better reasons for your inhibitions than simply thinking sex
is dirty."
    "I am really not comfortable discussing this," Q said. He
pushed his plate away. "Why are you so interested, anyway? Do I
detect a bit of prurient curiosity in your obsession with my sex
life?"
    "When uncomfortable, attack?" T'Laren sat down. "I know
you're not comfortable with this, Q. You weren't very comfortable
talking about most of the things we've discussed."
    "This is different."
    "Why is it different?"
    "Why do you care?" he snapped. "I really have to wonder
about this, T'Laren. You have this obsession with physical
fitness-- which, coincidentally, usually seems to require you to
wear significantly fewer clothes than usual. You've persuaded me
to allow you to touch me. Now you insist that I *must* have
sexual desires. This is a very disturbing pattern."
    T'Laren wondered if she should respond to the allegation--
it was typical behavior for him to make something up to get
outraged over, but he sounded genuinely upset. "If you thought
about it, I think you'd realize how paranoid you sound."
    "That's right, T'Laren. Belittle me, make me sound like a
fool, but by no means respond. If you answered the question, you
might have to lie, and we all know how much you hate to lie."
    That settled it. "If you're seriously worried, and not
simply trying to escape an uncomfortable topic by attacking me, I
will answer the question. Why does this disturb you? Are you
afraid I might molest you? Or use my position to take advantage
of you? Or do you simply fear that my motives aren't pure?"
    "Any of it."
    "Well, we can take care of the first two possibilities
easily enough. In the first place, I am your therapist, and a
highly ethical one at that." *When I'm not seducing Romulans, or
betraying my husband, or worse.* The thought came unbidden,
unwanted  she forced it away before it could show on her face and
undermine her argument. "It would be morally wrong for me to
abuse your trust in such fashion. And as a Vulcan, I am very good
at resisting temptation. If-- for the sake of argument-- I found
myself tempted to do such a thing, I could easily refrain from
doing so."
    "Your control's not that good."
    "My control is iron, for a human. If I were as controlled as
a normal Vulcan, I would be incapable of feeling tempted. Being
what I am, I admit that under certain circumstances I have found
myself attracted to men I should not become involved with, but I
am Vulcan enough to resist temptation." *Sometimes.* "And to
answer your third point, and make the previous question moot-- Q,
why exactly do you think I might be attracted to you? You
yourself have pointed out that your personality is not
particularly lovable. Your health is poor, your appearance is not
the best-- and you would make a very unpleasant meld partner. My
sexuality is inextricably tied to my telepathy-- I am better off
with my own imagination than with a man I can't meld with." *It
would have been nice if I'd felt that way four years ago,
wouldn't it. I might not need to be here now.*
    Q blinked. "That's... rather blunt."
    "Would you prefer I spared your feelings and left you
fearful of my motives?"
    "Not as a general rule."
    "Then we're back to the original question. Do you have any
other reasons for your fear of sex?"
    "I wouldn't call it *fear*, T'Laren."
    "We already determined that it cannot solely be disgust--"
    "Can't it?" he snapped. "You tell me sex is a basic human
drive. I agree. It's also responsible for more idiocy, and more
humiliations, than probably any other basic human drive. And it's
not a biological requirement for the individual-- merely the
species. I'm a hostage to this body, T'Laren. I have to feed it
when it's hungry, rest it when it's tired, alter *my* behavior
because it doesn't feel well-- and I'm not strong enough to
resist it. I don't want to die-- not most of the time, anyway--
so I can't afford to put my foot down about any of its demands
that it actually requires. It does not, however, need sex. I can
in perfect safety hold out on that one."
    "Why do you want to hold out?"
    "Because I'm sick of being a hostage! I *hate* having a
mortal body-- its constant demands, the way it can affect my mind
when it's improperly cared for or just being ornery. I can refuse
to give it sexual gratification. And it makes me feel... like I
still have some modicum of control over my own life that I can
resist my body's demands, even over a small thing like that."
    "Yes, but why sex? Why not resist your body's desire to eat
chocolate, and have vegetables instead? Why not resist your
body's reluctance to exercise?"
    "I do. Every day."
    "You never did before I convinced you to. It must have been
obvious to you that your body would last longer with regular
exercise, and you were told several times that it would make you
feel better in the long run. But you didn't try to resist your
body's reluctance on that one. Why sex?"
    "Maybe I just don't have a very high libido."
    "Any libido at all would make it a strange choice. Your life
is very unpleasant-- at least, so you've told me at length. Why
have you gone to such lengths to resist a source of potential
pleasure?"
    "What are you saying, T'Laren, that I should run out and
sleep with a total stranger at the first opportunity?"
    "No. Of course not." She marshaled her argument carefully.
"At this stage in your social development, it's entirely
appropriate that you don't have sex. You have no friends, and few
skills at making connections with people. Sexuality is only a
small part of sociality, and you've mastered very little of that
thus far. But you are at least willing to admit that you should
work toward making social connections with others. You are trying
to improve that aspect of your life. What concerns me about your
sexuality is that you deny it. You won't try to change something
about yourself unless you're desperate, and if you refuse to
admit that sex is something you need, you will never admit that
you're desperate. You'll channel the need into something else. Q,
you were there for the Inquisition, the Puritan witch-hunts, the
Victorian age-- you *know*, probably better than I do, what
happens when humans repress their sexuality."
    "You're talking about entire societies of humans, whose
cultures repressed them. My culture isn't repressing me-- I don't
*have* a culture. I choose to repress myself."
    "Yes, but I still don't understand why. If it were a mere
exercise in control--"
    "A *mere* exercise in control?" He stood up, shoving his
chair backward. "T'Laren, how can you possibly be so dense?" He
faced her. "You said it yourself. I'm unattractive both socially
and physically. If by some miracle someone *did* want me, what
could I possibly give them? I'm terrible at cooperative social
endeavors, and sex certainly qualifies. I'm selfish, and socially
inept, and not terribly dextrous. And do you know what humans
*do* to those who accept sexual gratification without being able
to reciprocate? I would be a laughingstock. In exchange for a few
fleeting moments of purely physical enjoyment, I would make
myself unnecessarily vulnerable-- physically as well as
emotionally; it would be just my luck that the first person who
actually wanted me would turn out to be an assassin-- and then,
assuming that my partner was *not* an assassin, they would
probably talk about me behind my back in less than glowing terms
about what an inept lover I turned out to be. I need this?" He
shook his head. "No, I can't imagine *anything* being pleasurable
enough to be worth that." He paced around the table. "The drives
may be hardwired in, but they're sadly misplaced here. I couldn't
participate in perpetuating this miserable little species even if
I were mad enough to want to. And I'm not fond of being at the
mercy of a completely useless biological drive, when the
consequences of giving in to it involve so much potential for
humiliation and misery."
    T'Laren frowned slightly. "What did you mean about
perpetuating the species?"
    "I mean I'm sterile. Completely. Which, all things
considered, is just as well."
    "Your choice?"
    Q shook his head. "I didn't think about it one way or
another. I didn't design the body that way, if that's what you're
asking. I found out at my first detailed physical, so I assume
the Continuum was responsible-- especially since the method they
chose is pretty abnormal. My cells simply do not undergo meiosis,
for reasons that baffle Federation medical technology. I can't
produce sperm cells. And, as I've said, it's probably just as
well."
    "You sound as if you're trying to convince yourself of
that."
    "Convince myself that I don't want to have to worry about
making sure I have contraceptive shots on a regular basis, even
though I have no intention of needing them, just on the off
chance that I might--? I hardly need to convince myself of that."
    "I would think... progeny are the mortal route to
immortality, after all. I thought it might have occurred to you
that that might be the only kind of immortality you could have
now."
    Q snorted. "That's not immortality. Mortals convince
themselves that it is because otherwise they have to face the
fact that they are completely ephemeral, and few mortals can face
that. If the so-called 'immortality' of reproduction comes from
creating something that will outlast you... I've created entire
species, T'Laren. I hardly need to create one measly human. And
if it comes from genetics, creating something that is
fundamentally like you... my genetics have nothing whatsoever to
do with who I am. If I were capable of fathering a human child,
and foolish enough to do so, it wouldn't be *mine*-- it would be
the child of the man whose body I copied. Besides, I can't stand
the young of my own species-- I certainly can't tolerate children
of this one. And, leaving aside the fact that I would be a
horrible father anyway, what kind of legacy would it be to give a
child of *any* species, to have for a parent someone that
practically everyone in the galaxy wants dead?"
    "You still sound as if you're trying to convince yourself."
    "I'm *not*--" He put a hand to his head. "I am. All right.
Not about the children-- I don't want children, the whole idea's
ridiculous-- but they didn't *tell* me. They made this decision
about my life, they altered the body I chose for myself, without
even warning me they were going to do it, let alone consulting
me. And that's stupid of me. I would have made the same decision
myself-- and they *knew* that. They're omniscient. Why bother to
ask me when they already know my answer? Simpler just to do it. I
*know* that."
    "But you still resent them for making the decision for you."
    "It's stupid of me. I know that."
    "Human emotions are under no constraints to be logical. Q,
you have every right to resent your fellows. Whether or not the
punishment was justified, they did exile you to a harsh and
painful existence. You wouldn't be a normal human if you didn't
resent them. And on top of that, they alter the body you chose
for yourself, making major decisions about your life for you. It
would have been common courtesy to consult with you. It wasn't
necessary, but it wouldn't have been an effort for them, either,
would it have?"
    "No," he said quietly. "It wouldn't have."
    "As for your earlier statements... do you truly believe that
there's no potential for anything but humiliation in sexuality?"
    Q sat down, folding his hands on the table and staring at
them. "I've... occasionally tried to figure that out.
Cost/benefit analysis and all that." He looked up, half-smiling.
"The answer ends up being very annoying."
    "What is the answer?"
    "If I were to... indulge such base physical desires, it
would... have to be with someone I could trust completely.
Presumably, then, someone who actually cares about me to some
extent, who wouldn't want to humiliate me and would be willing
to... overlook, or accept, my probable ineptitude. It would... it
would have to be for something more... what's the word, powerful?
Meaningful, that's it. Something more meaningful than the mere
gratification of lust."
    "And why does that annoy you?"
    "Because it makes me sound like a romantic." Q rolled his
eyes. "'It would have to be an act of *love*,'" he crooned in an
overblown parody of romanticism. "Please. Don't make me gag."
    "I think everyone who knows you is well aware that you're
not a romantic, Q," T'Laren said dryly. "Given that you wish to
avoid humiliation-- and potential assassins-- your preference is
actually quite understandable in practical terms."
    "Well, that's good to hear."
    "But this still doesn't seem to completely explain your
behavior." T'Laren leaned forward slightly. "You've explained why
you find it practical to make yourself find sex disgusting. When
I first offered to rub your back, though, and you thought I might
be trying to seduce you, you seemed positively terrified of the
possibility."
    "I wasn't *terrified*, T'Laren."
    "You seemed to be. Or at least, far more nervous and
uncomfortable than a person who merely has no interest in sex
would be. If sex only disgusted you, I would have thought you
would have accepted a backrub, and then if you felt it was
somehow becoming sexual, informing me that you had no interest--
probably in your typical inimitable fashion." He smiled at that.
"But you seemed very close to panic. I remember at the time I
wondered if perhaps you had been molested somehow, as it seemed--
" She broke off as she saw his expression change. "Q? *Did*
someone molest you?"
    "It wasn't anything," he said, sharply and far too quickly.
    "What happened?" She leaned further forward, placing a hand
on the table, near him. "Q, please tell me what happened?"
    "I just told you nothing happened!" he snapped, but his face
was flushed. "And I don't want to talk about it."
    T'Laren pulled back slightly. "You don't want to talk about
the fact that nothing happened?" she asked with just a tiny
twinge of dryness.
    "I'm tired of telling you about everything. Can't I keep a
few things to myself?"
    "You certainly can if you really want to. But if you've been
sexually molested somehow-- don't you see how that would have to
change my approach? You gave me a good, rational reason for
avoiding sex, but if that's not your real reason-- if your real
reason is that you were abused-- then we still have to work on
the problem."
    "I wasn't abused!" Q snapped. "Not exactly. And I don't want
to talk about it."
    "Are you sure?"
    "Look, T'Laren, it's not that important. You seem to have
some kind of overblown sordid story in your head. It wasn't what
you're probably thinking."
    "Then what was it?"
    "I don't want to talk about it! It's embarrassing."
    Sometimes T'Laren wondered if Q ever meant it when he said
he didn't want to discuss something. He seemed to spend a lot of
time dropping vague hints and then trying to refuse to talk about
what they meant. "Of course it's embarrassing," T'Laren said
gently. "But you were willing to tell me about other incidents
that embarrassed you, weren't you?"
    "Humans think this one's funny. You might as well be a human
for all intents and purposes. You'll laugh."
    "I assure you, I won't laugh."
    "Oh, of *course* you won't *show* it, T'Laren. You'll keep
your Vulcan mask in place. You might even pretend concern. Inside
your Vulcan skull, though, you'll be having hysterics. I *know*
it."
    "Q, I don't see how I could consider someone being sexually
molested to be funny--"
    "Because it isn't what you think! And I want to know the
answer to that one, too. Somehow humans-- well, Ohmura, anyway--
thought this was a laugh riot. I don't see how." He sounded hurt
and angry.
    "Perhaps I might understand why. If you told me what
happened, I could explain why humans would find it funny."
    "And what if you think it's funny, too?"
    "I won't think it's funny. I don't think things that cause
people pain or distress are funny. And if you truly didn't want
to tell me, Q, why would you have tried to evade the topic so
ineptly? You're better at misdirection than that."
    His face twisted into a bitterly wry half-smile. "Touche,"
he murmured.
    Q's hand closed around his drink glass. He twisted it,
swirling the drink inside around, and stared down into it. "I've
told you everything else, more or less. I suppose I should tell
you this one, too. If for no other reason than that I suspect
you've got a completely wrong notion of what happened." He looked
up at her. "This was in the early days. I'd been on the station
two, three months. We hadn't really gotten going on the work
against the Borg yet, and I hadn't yet worked out who everyone
was and what their positions were. I knew ranks, because they
were obvious, but I was vague on names and functions.
    "I'd managed to throw out my back yet again-- I suspect it
was actually less dysfunctional than my back generally is today,
but I was also much less used to pain in those days, so it felt
quite horrible. I could still walk, so I was on my way to Sickbay
to get it fixed-- not an event I was looking forward to; Li had
no conception of how to be gentle with things like that. And on
my way, I ran into a young woman, a lieutenant in blues. I dimly
recalled having seen her around the sickbay labs, so I assumed
she was medical.
    "She asked me what was wrong, and I told her. So she offered
to fix my back for me. As I recalled her having been one of the
few people on the base who treated me with anything resembling
kindness, I saw no reason not to let her, as she assured me what
she had in mind would be... considerably less unpleasant than
Li's torture devices." Q glanced down in apparent embarrassment
on the last part. As if he were ashamed of his own embarrassment,
he quickly looked up again. "You have to understand, I was much
more naive then. I was spending so much time in just trying to
adjust to what had happened to me, I didn't notice a lot of the
more subtle nuances of human interaction. It didn't enter my mind
that it might be a bad idea to go back to my room with her."
    T'Laren had a sneaking suspicion she knew where this was
going. "I understand."
    "I should have realized, you know." He looked pensive. "Of
course, I had nothing to compare it to. But when she started on
my back... it was completely different from the way you did it.
It was a lot more... um, a lot less... what's the word I'm
looking for? Less... not impersonal..."
    "Clinical?"
    "Yes, exactly. Much less clinical. More... um. In any case,
I had nothing to compare it to, as I said, so I didn't realize
this wasn't entirely aimed at fixing my back until... well,
eventually it became quite obvious. I may have been naive, but
never *that* naive."
    T'Laren could just imagine. "Was the woman Lieutenant Amy
Frasier, by any chance?"
    Q looked stricken. "Did she *tell* you--?"
    "No-- but when I interviewed you she seemed to be unusually
vitriolic about you. Then Lieutenant Roth explained why, in his
belief, Frasier particularly hated you--"
    "*He* told you? He *knows* what happened?" Q was quite
agitated. "Good God-- if Roth knew, it must have gotten all over
the station--"
    "Roth didn't know what happened, exactly. He deduced that
you probably rejected Frasier sexually, from the fact that her
interest in you seemed to turn very quickly into hatred, but he
knew none of the details."
    "Oh." Q calmed down. "That's different."
    "What did you do, when she made it obvious that she was
trying to seduce you?" *And how did she make it obvious,
exactly?* T'Laren had to admit to an overwhelming curiosity about
the extent of Q's self-proclaimed naivete. How much, exactly, had
it taken for him to catch on? He was badly embarrassed enough by
talking about this at all, though; T'Laren was sure that if she
asked him, not only wouldn't she get an answer but he'd balk at
telling the rest of the story.
    "Well, I-- I confess, I was mostly very confused. I wasn't
sure why she was doing this. Why me? I knew even then that my
personality was... not exactly the most endearing. So... I asked
her that. Why me?" He began playing with his napkin, watching his
own fidgeting hands instead of looking at T'Laren. "I think...
had I gotten a different answer... I might have gone along with
her at that point. I would have... I'd even have accepted mere
physical attraction. After all, I *was* good-looking then. And
I'm capable of vanity. Actually, I think I have more right to be
vain about my appearance than most humans. I chose this form,
after all. If someone likes the way I look, that's a positive
reflection on my taste as well as my appearance. In fact, I'm
almost sure I would have accepted that. At... that particular
point... there probably weren't that many reasons... I wouldn't
have accepted."
    "I take it she picked one."
    "She said-- well, she made it clear that she was interested
in me solely because she'd never had a several-million-year-old
former god before. And that was quite unacceptable. Quite aside
from the fact that I find it insulting and offensive to be, to be
merely a *novelty* item-- part of her collection of unusual
aliens she's bedded-- that wasn't the worst. I could just picture
her telling her co-workers, 'And you'll never guess what I did
over the weekend. I did a former god!' 'Really? Was he any good?'
'No, actually he was terrible. One of the worst I've had.' It
didn't strike me that Amy Frasier would be the type to... forgive
any clumsiness on my part. I could just imagine what she'd say
about me afterward. Probably to the entire starbase. So I said
no."
    "Abrasively, I take it."
    "Um... no. I couldn't seem to... I didn't have a lot of
breath for talking, if you really must know. But I did say no.
And she wouldn't take no for an answer. She kept right on with
what she was doing."
    And then he tore her apart, most likely. "What did you do
then?"
    "I called Security."
    T'Laren blinked, the closest she would allow herself to
letting her jaw drop. No, she *hadn't* known where this was
going, apparently. "You... didn't."
    "I *did*," Q said indignantly. "I said no, after all. And
she wouldn't stop. So I called Security and told them I wanted to
press charges of attempted rape."
    A call for Security couldn't be countermanded. And Security
was never very far from Q's quarters... T'Laren had a sudden
mental image of the hapless lieutenant trying desperately to
clothe herself before Security showed, probably failing, Q's
righteous indignation, probably in a state of undress himself...
oh, she could see why Ohmura would have thought it was funny. She
herself thought it more tragic than anything else. How could
*anyone* have so little common sense? No wonder Frasier hated
him. Had anyone done that to T'Laren, he would have found out the
truth behind the rumors of the Vulcan death grip. "What... was
Security's reaction?"
    "I told you, Ohmura thought it was funny. T'Meth probably
didn't, but she was looking at me like this was the most trivial
complaint she'd ever heard, and I was a worm for wasting her
time. I don't know why! I told Frasier to stop, she wouldn't
stop. If our sexes had been reversed, there wouldn't have been
any question that it was attempted rape. No one would have
thought it was funny."
    "Q..." How to put this. "Were you... physically aroused at
that point?" *And did you make any attempt to hide it from
Security?*
    "I don't see what that has to do with anything. I said no."
    "Were you?"
    "What my body may or may not want is irrelevant. *I* didn't
want this!"
    "Most men do not draw such a sharp distinction between
themselves and their bodies."
    "I'm not most men."
    *I know*. "Ohmura wouldn't take the charges, then?"
    "He told me-- after he stopped trying to keep from laughing-
- I had no idea he thought an attempted rape was so hysterically
amusing-- he told me that the charges wouldn't stick, that there
was no chance the case would even go to court, and that if I
pressed charges I would be the laughingstock of the base. He
assured me that neither he nor T'Meth would mention the incident
to anyone else if I would drop the charges. And... I couldn't
understand why they were being so unjust, but I do know that
humans are capable of gross acts of injustice. After seeing his
reaction, I believed him that I'd get no human court to treat me
fairly. That everyone would find it horrendously entertaining.
So... I agreed."
    "Probably the most sensible thing you did that evening."
    "You're laughing at me!"
    "I assure you, I'm not laughing," T'Laren said, deadly
serious. "Q, that was *not* an attempted rape."
    "No? What would you call it?"
    "A seduction that went seriously wrong." T'Laren found
herself feeling sorry for Lieutenant Frasier. Her motives may
have been shallow, but she'd hardly deserved this.
    "T'Laren, I told her to stop. She refused."
    "Did she even *hear* you?"
    "Of course she heard me! She said something to the effect
of, 'you don't really want me to stop.' You know, 'your lips say
no, no, no, but your heart says yes, yes, yes' kind of thing. I
felt like I was in a bad gothic romance."
    "Q, Amy Frasier is half your size! If you felt threatened by
her, why didn't you push her away?"
    "I panicked, all right?"
    She could see that. After all, Q had a history of screaming
for help rather than defending himself physically. He could
conceivably have been too panicked to realize he could just
remove the problem from his person. "Anyway," he added, "I
couldn't seem to... to make myself move."
    "I thought you didn't freeze when you panic."
    "I don't. It wasn't... I wasn't frozen." He stared at the
floor in a misery of embarrassment. Abruptly T'Laren understood.
She tried to find a tactful way to phrase her understanding.
    "You felt yourself at war with your own body? You found it
physically pleasurable, but feared the consequences too much to
let it go on?"
    "Yes. Exactly."
    "And so you said no. And she ignored you."
    "Yes! It was *my* understanding that that constitutes rape,
or at least attempted rape. What was so incredibly humorous about
the situation?"
    How to phrase this. "You're not a disembodied mind, Q. When
you told Frasier no, your body language may have betrayed you.
You may have said it in a fashion that implied that you didn't
really mean it."
    "What's that supposed to mean? No means no."
    "Not always. Humans are more complex than that." She sighed.
"Several things were working against you. For one thing, you're
male. Since males can't hide physical arousal, and in most cases
physical arousal implies desire, it's difficult for some humans
to take a man's refusal seriously. There would have to be some
reason why he would not want to fulfill his body's obvious
desires."
    "Perhaps most human men take their orders from an
insignificant piece of flesh between their legs. I, however,
would prefer to make decisions with something more capable of
high-order logic."
    "As you said, you're not most men. Plus, the dichotomy
between body and mind isn't as simple as you think, Q. What
confuses you is the fact that you didn't used to have a body. Now
that you have one, though, you are your body. You're not a ball
of energy trapped inside a fleshy shell. You *are* your body.
What it wants, you cannot help but want. The conflict was not
between your body and your mind, but between the desire for
pleasure and the desire to avoid humiliation. In you, in this
circumstance, the desire to avoid humiliation was stronger. In
most men, it goes the other way around. And Lieutenant Frasier's
experience was with other men, not you. She didn't know you.
Also, you were physically stronger than her. With her Starfleet
training, she could conceivably have overpowered you-- but she
wasn't trying to. She would have assumed that if you really
didn't want her there, you would push her away, or move away from
her."
    "But I said no."
    "No doesn't always mean 'no, stop this right now and go
away.' It can mean 'no, I need a bit more persuasion before I'll
go through with this.' Obviously Frasier interpreted it as the
second. I suspect her comment about you not really meaning it was
intended as something of a flirtatious joke. If you *had* really
meant it, in her mind, you would have repeated yourself more
firmly, with some move to physically distance yourself from her.
Rape involves coercion. What Frasier was trying was seduction,
not coercion."
    "I consider attempts to make my body overpower my personal
judgment a form of coercion. How is attempting to control my
behavior with pleasure different from trying to control my
behavior with pain?"
    "That's like saying that a person who offers you something
pleasant to eat is trying to coerce you into eating. A drug such
as iolera, that completely overwhelms your judgment-- yes, that's
coercion. But offering a person pleasure in order to get them to
do what you want is considered seduction by definition. Most
people-- you included-- have stronger defenses against pleasure
than against pain. The idea behind seduction is to make the other
person want to do what you want them to do, whereas coercion by
pain is intended to make them fear the consequences of
noncompliance. It's a completely different act." His face was
closed and hostile; if she was going to get through to him at
all, she would have to show some sympathy. "Mind you, you could
have pressed charges against Frasier; Ohmura wasn't telling you
the whole truth. You couldn't have made charges of rape hold up
in court, but you could have charged her with violating the
Starfleet guidelines on relations with aliens."
    "Starfleet has *guidelines* on that?"
    "Starfleet has guidelines on all forms of contact with non-
humans, including sexual. The guidelines state that one should
never assume that a person not of one's own culture-- especially
aliens, but including members of one's own species if they are of
a different culture-- shares one's own sexual mores and customs.
While sexual relations with aliens aren't forbidden-- Starfleet
would have a near-impossible time enforcing *that*-- people
engaged in sexual relations with aliens are supposed to proceed
with caution, and to make their intentions unmistakably clear.
Frasier was obviously in violation of the guidelines, and you
could have charged her with causing you emotional harm through
such violation."
    His eyes narrowed. "And would that have worked?"
    T'Laren shook her head. "Difficult to say. I can tell you
that you would have found the trial humiliating, however. You
would be forced to explain in court, in detail, exactly what she
did to you and why it disturbed you. And Ohmura was right-- you
would have become a laughingstock."
    "*Why?*" he snapped. "This sexual double standard humans
hold to--"
    "Not because you're male. If the same thing had happened,
and you'd been female, with the same personality you have now,
you'd still have been laughed at. You're arrogant, Q. We both
know this. And you behave as if you know more than everyone else.
You are, in reality, naive about many aspects of human culture--
but you're also incredibly knowledgeable, and you also pretend to
be more knowledgeable than you actually are. The humor would be
in the fact that an arrogant know-it-all would turn out to be so
tremendously ignorant about such an important aspect of human
existence. Humans consider other people's embarrassing sexual
misadventures to be funny anyway-- Ohmura was probably laughing
at Frasier as much as he was laughing at you. But if you had
friends, if you didn't behave as if you thought yourself superior
to everyone else, there would be sympathy in their amusement, as
there was for Frasier. You, however-- as long as you behave the
way you do, humans will find your humiliations to be funny."
    "Do you think it was funny?"
    "I told you, I don't find things like that funny. I feel
sorry for Frasier; she should have been more sensitive, she
should have followed the guidelines, she would have completely
deserved for you to tear her apart verbally... but she didn't
deserve *that* much humiliation. I also feel sorry for you. You
could not entirely help your own ignorance." She shook her head
slightly. "So that's why you were afraid when I first offered you
a backrub?"
    He didn't answer, staring at the floor. "Q?"
    He looked up. "It's true, isn't it. They've been laughing
all along."
    T'Laren could not quite follow the leap. "Who have?"
    "Everyone." Q lifted his empty coffee cup and twirled it
around his finger by the handle. "My humiliations have been a
source of vast amusement, haven't they. Anderson, Medellin, Li...
or we can go back even further, to Picard, Riker, Crusher and
LaForge... all immensely amused by me. Watch a being known for
godlike omniscience stumble around in ignorance and terror,
making a complete idiot of himself!" Abruptly he flung the coffee
cup at the floor. It bounced across the floor with a clatter,
unharmed. "I would have *died* for this miserable species! I
risked my own existence, the displeasure of my people, to save
them from the Borg-- how *dare* they be amused by my pain!"
    "Q, you're overreacting. No one thinks it's funny that
beings are trying to kill you, or that you're miserably unhappy.
No one thought your suicide attempts were funny. If you had,
through ignorance, actually ended up getting raped, no one would
have thought that funny. What amuses humans about your situation
is your fear of things that seem perfectly natural and pleasant,
or at least not unpleasant, to them. You behave as if you're
still all-knowing, and so when you're ignorant of something that
seems obvious to humans, that's what seems funny. Not the fact
that you're suffering."
    "How do you know? You're not human. You can pretend, you can
mimic humans reasonably well, but can you really get inside their
heads? Can you know for certain what humans think and feel?"
    "As certainly as anyone can know what any other being thinks
and feels. I've mindmelded with humans, I was raised by them, and
with them. There are undoubtedly humans who would find your
suffering humorous, or worse. Those are sick people. Most of the
humans you will encounter will not be amused."
    He continued to stare at the floor. She could see an
unfocused rage roiling within him, and knew he was going to find
some excuse to hang it on, something irrational he could explode
against. It looked very much as if they were about to get into a
pointless argument. *Well, Counselor, counsel. You're the
psychologist-- defuse the situation.* "I'm sorry if I upset you,"
she said gently. "Can you tell me why you're so angry?"
    Q looked up and glared at her. "You sympathized with *her*.
You'd have taken her side if you'd been there. You as much as
admitted that she was wrong, she was violating Starfleet
guidelines, she had no business behaving that way toward me, and
you *still* feel sorry for her!"
    "You brought your own mortality down on yourself, and I can
still feel sorry for you," T'Laren said. "Just because a person
has some complicity in an unpleasant event that happens to them
doesn't make sympathy for them an invalid response. You're quite
right, Q. She was wrong. But she didn't intend to hurt you, and
you didn't really make your own position clear enough before
bringing out the heavy guns. If you are going to accuse someone
of attempted rape, you should at least make sure that you made
your unwillingness adequately clear to them. I don't think you
did."
    "Fine. The next time someone tries that, I'll punch her in
the face. Would that be better?"
    "Ordering her to leave your room immediately would work a
bit better, I think. As would sitting or standing up and pushing
her away. And then there's the entire universe of tactful
rejections, which I suspect I or someone will have to teach you
at some point. If all else fails, lie and say you can't because
your people have forbidden it. Or, if the person doesn't know
your circumstances, claim religious reasons. Anyone in Starfleet
would back off at that point."
    "It doesn't matter," Q muttered. "It's not going to happen
again anyway."
    "Do you mean that it won't happen because you're less naive,
and won't let matters progress that far? Or do you mean it won't
happen because no one will make the offer again?"
    "Either."
    "I wouldn't count on the second one if I were you. When your
health improves, people will start finding you at least
physically attractive again-- and since one of our purposes here
is to make you more socially attractive, even people who know you
reasonably well might consider you worth pursuing. I think you're
reasonably correct on the first, though-- but I still think
having a few tactful rejections in your repertoire couldn't
hurt."
    "Whatever you say." He stood up abruptly. "When are we
reaching the conference?"
    "In five days."
    "I'm bored. Let's speed things up."
    "Do you think you're well enough?"
    "I'm not going to get any better by being bored out of my
skull, now am I?"
    "You'll get better by eating right and exercising."
    "Which I've been doing. I can handle the conference,
T'Laren. And we can safely speed up to warp 8 without straining
the crystals."
    T'Laren considered. She suspected strongly that Q was saying
this because he was tired of her persuading him to talk about
things he would have preferred to keep secret. It was possible
that that technique was reaching the point of diminishing
returns, though, and it was time to see him interacting with
other people, see how far he had indeed come. "I'll notify the
Yamato of the change in plans."
    "Fine. I'll be in my quarters."

    He was not, however, in his quarters when she came to tell
him of Yamato's confirmation. She found him on Deck 4, doing
something incomprehensible to the airlocks with a toolkit. "Q?"
    Q looked up at her almost cheerfully. "And the verdict is?"
    "We'll be rendezvousing with Yamato in three days instead of
five. What are you doing?"
    "Fixing the airlock."
    "I didn't know it was broken."
    Q returned to what he was doing. "It wasn't, exactly. I'm
really not fond of that damned security interlock."
    A chill went down T'Laren's spine. "Were you planning on
spacing any living beings?" she asked coolly.
    "You never know," Q said absently.
    She knelt next to him and put her hand on his shoulder,
tugging him to face her gently. He turned. "What *is* it,
T'Laren? I'm busy."
    "I can see that. I want to know why."
    "Because. The idea that we can't use the airlocks to space
something that might be trying to kill me bothers me just a
little bit. Like many 'safety' features, I consider this one to
be particularly unsafe. So I'm disabling it."
    "If you disable the safety interlock, it would be far easier
for you to space yourself, should you decide to kill yourself,"
T'Laren said softly.
    Q put down his tools. "I know that. Why do you think I
waited until now to do it?"
    T'Laren nodded slowly.  She thought she knew what he meant,
but she wanted confirmation.  "Can you explain that?"
    "I've decided not to kill myself." He picked up the tools
again. "I mean, I decided I wasn't going to kill myself right
away when I came on this trip. But I thought about it-- I've been
thinking about it, for the past few days-- and I've come to the
conclusion that I don't *want* to kill myself. That, except with
a few bouts with nightmares, I haven't really wanted to since I
came aboard Ketaya. I feel much better about my life-- I'm far
from happy, but I think I can stick this out for a few more
years." Q turned back to his work. "So I've decided that I'm off
suicide watch, and I can afford to have something like a live
airlock within reach again. I've felt insecure about not being
able to use this airlock for some time."
    "But you felt that you couldn't trust yourself? And now you
can?"
    "Now I can," he agreed.
    She believed him. His very casualness about the decision
made her certain he was sincere. Deliberately T'Laren allowed the
smile she felt to show on her face. "I'm very glad."
    Q glanced at her quickly, and turned back to his work with a
small grin spreading across his face. "And I'm glad you're glad.
Now can we adjourn the meeting of the mutual admiration society
and let me get back to my work?"
    "Don't tire yourself out. We still have to do your self-
defense lessons."
    "Yes, yes. Go away, T'Laren."
    She turned away, toward the lift. "I'll see you at lunch."

    Three days later they docked with Yamato.