Q & A - Keith R. A. DeCandido [81]
Naturally, he spied on Jean-Luc and the good doctor one last time. He couldn’t resist. Human sexual practices had always held a bizarre fascination for him—the same way humans loved to gaze upon traffic accidents. The Q reproduced in a much more orderly manner.
Q was, as Jean-Luc had so eloquently put it, “next of kin to chaos.” Where was the fun in order?
However, the Continuum liked order. They liked a living universe even more, but they weren’t about to let him gloat, even if he had been right.
At the very least, he had to gloat to the family. After all, Q had been right there with everyone else, doubting him, making fun of him. Worse, she abandoned him and their child, poor little innocent q. Well, all right, he wasn’t that innocent—he was a holy terror until Kathy managed to calm him down (another point for the humans).
Q was contrite, though she didn’t put up with his gloating for very long. As for q, he was growing into a full-blown Q. He’d be guiding lesser life-forms in no time.
At one point, q asked him, “Dad, will I ever get to save the universe?”
“Anything’s possible, son. The universe, you see, is like a giant tapestry.” He smirked, even as the universe suddenly appeared before him and Q and q, in the form of a tapestry, woven out of stars and space and gases and nebulae—”starstuff,” as one of the brighter specimens of humanity had called it. “And there are so many threads that we still haven’t pulled on yet.”
Grinning, q reached out with one hand. “How about this one?”
AFTERWORD
I WAS IN MY SOPHOMORE YEAR AT FORDHAM UNIVERSITY in New York when Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted two decades ago with the two-hour episode “Encounter at Farpoint.” My friends and I—who had watched the show in reruns since we were kids, who had seen all four (at the time) movies the day they opened, who had been playing FASA’s Star Trek role-playing game for years, who regularly traded Star Trek novels and comic books—awaited the release with bated breath.
It was the Nine O’Clock Movie on WPIX, Channel 11, in New York, the same station on which we’d seen those reruns of the original series. I sat, riveted, curious about the new crew, the new ship, and the cast of virtual unknowns. I knew LeVar Burton, of course, from Roots and Reading Rainbow and One in a Million: The Ron LeFlore Story, and I had a vague recollection of Patrick Stewart as one of the few bright spots in an otherwise-dismal adaptation of Dune, but that was it. I found myself intrigued by the new characters, and impressed with the actors, new and old—in particular Brent Spiner (who I only later realized was Bob Wheeler on Night Court).
However, the person who made the greatest impression on me on that historic night in the fall of 1987 was John de Lancie as Q.
God knows, Star Trek had its fair share of higher beings who toyed with humanity, from the Metrons in “Arena” to the Organians in “Errand of Mercy” to the swirly thing in “Day of the Dove” to the Excalbians in “The Savage Curtain,” but none of them were as much fun as de Lancie’s Q. The smarminess, the snideness, the impishness, the humor were all incredibly appealing. Rather than the pompous, ethereal posturing or silent manipulation of the higher beings from the original series, Q was fun.
Q kept coming back, of course, as all the entertaining characters do, and even showed up on TNG’s two twenty-fourth-century successors, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, as well as in several novels and comic books. And, just as he was there for TNG’s beginning on the small screen, he was there for its end, in 1994’s “All Good Things…”
Over the last few years, it’s been my privilege to write all across the Star Trek map. I’ve penned stories involving all five of the TV shows, as well as several of the prose-only series that have sprung up over the past decade: New Frontier, Corps of Engineers, I. K. S. Gorkon, The Lost Era, etc. But one character I hadn’t written was Q.
That changed when I walked into Pocket Books Executive Editor Margaret Clark’s office one afternoon, she handed me the outline