Gateways 07_ What Lay Beyond - Diane Carey [66]
On a lovely oak table in front of her was a delicious-looking spread of finger sandwiches and pastries.
Q, dressed in what Janeway guessed to be formal Edwardian, poured. “Would you like cream or sugar with your Earl Grey?” Suddenly he snapped his fingers. “Whoops, that’s dear old Jean-Luc. You like coffee, don’t you?”
And so quickly it was dizzying, Janeway was in a cozy nook at a coffee bar of the late twentieth century. She was now sitting on a wooden stool in front of a small, battered table. Soft jazz played in the background and in front of her was a large cup of coffee as black as night and smelling as rich as heaven.
She wanted to toss the steaming contents onto Q’s smirking face, but restrained herself.
“All right,” she said with an effort. “I think I know what happened, what you did, but you’re telling me I’m wrong. So explain to me what really happened. I’m listening.”
Q, dressed in black denim pants and a black turtleneck sweater, and sporting an earring in his left ear, took a sip of his own coffee. “Ah, delicious. I can see why you like it so much. Well, it’s a very long story.”
“My attention span is not,” Janeway warned.
He pursed his lips, made a tsk-tsk sound, and then sighed. “What do you want to hear about first?”
“The gateways.”
“Very well.” Suddenly they were in a child’s nursery. To her consternation, Janeway found herself to be a small child, wearing a frilly pinafore that horrified her. Her mind was the same, but trapped in a six-year-old’s body. Q loomed over her, an enormous book in his hands. Its cover was of tooled leather and bore the title The History of This Universe.
Despite herself, Janeway would have given a lot to have been able to get her hands on that book. “Once upon a time,” said Q in a singsong voice, “there was a wonderful, remarkable, intelligent, benevolent, superior, humorous, witty, handsome”
“Q,” said Janeway, her high-pitched six-year-old’s voice nonetheless managing to fully convey the depth of her impatience.
Q sighed. “Now, now, little Kathy, mustn’t interrupt your bedtime story or you’ll not get the answers you want.” He glared at her over the enormous book propped up in his lap. Angrily, Janeway folded her small arms over her chest and sank back into the nursery chair. Q was a nearly omnipotent being. If he didn’t want to tell her something, he wouldn’t. In a very real sense, she was entirely at his mercy. She’d have to let this “story” unfold the way he wanted it to.
“Much better.” A plate full of chocolate-chip cookies and a large glass of milk materialized on the table beside Janeway’s chair. She didn’t touch either.
“As I was saying,” said Q, “once upon a time there was a race known as the Q Continuum. Now, of course, being such omnipotent and benevolent beings, they turned their attention some five hundred thousand years ago toward assisting other races in attaining culture and technology.”
“You’re lying again. That’s a direct violation of what you’ve told us before,” said Janeway. “It was my understanding that in the case of Amanda Rogers, for example, she had to either join the Continuum or forsake her powers.”
“That’s quite true. You may have a cookie.”
One appeared in her hand. Irritated, Janeway tossed it back onto the plate. Warm chocolate clung to her fingers.
“However,” Q continued, “that was a few short, human years ago. And the reason we have adopted this new, improved policy toward inferior species was because things had gone wrong earlier. You’re vaguely able to grasp the wisdom of such strategies yourselves, you Federation types, with your own Prime Directive.”
Janeway nodded. She was starting to get some answers, and she felt herself calming a little. She wiped her chocolate-stained fingers on the pinafore. “So, there was a very pleasant and promising race called the Iconians.”
“Iconians! The gateways… of course,” breathed Janeway. It all made sense now. She had thought the strange portals had looked familiar, but she hadn’t been thinking in terms of ancient, vanished technology. Therefore, she hadn