STAR TREK (VOY): First Born Son 2/2 PG
And here's the second half. Notes in the first half, which is here.
Q whipped around the moment he heard the voice. How had he not sensed his father reading through his privacy shield, let alone coming in? “I had a privacy shield up! You’re not supposed to be listening!” he yelled, rather more shrilly than he’d wanted to.
His father gave him a very patronizing, condescending look. “The next time you want some privacy from me, you might possibly want to consider not dragging yourself and your privacy screen into an area that I’m frequently watching? For example, one of my territories? Like, I don’t know, my second favorite human ever? Just maybe, you’d think, seeing a giant Q privacy screen suddenly block my ability to see one of my favorite mortals might possibly tip me off that there’s a Q there who doesn’t want me to see what they’re doing? Do you think?”
“You’re supposed to leave a privacy screen alone!”
“You’re also not supposed to intrude on another Q’s territory. Which meant that either the Q I couldn’t see was breaking the rules and quite possibly up to something nefarious that I would have to investigate to protect my interest in these mortals, or it was you, and you’re not supposed to hide what you’re doing from me.”
Janeway took a deep breath. “Q, I appreciate that you’re concerned for your son, and I’m glad you came to investigate to make sure we weren’t being attacked by any renegade Q, but you do have to give your children some space to seek advice from adults who aren’t you. If Junior had wanted to come to you with his problem, he would have.”
Q’s father rolled his eyes. “You’re thinking of mortal children and mortal needs, Kathy. The Q have no real expectation of privacy from one another. Junior’s been there for any number of things I’d have preferred to shelter him from.”
“Yeah, like all that weird stuff you did with the other-”
“That’s quite enough of that, thank you,” his father interrupted. Q smirked.
“Still, if he’d wanted to discuss the problem with you I doubt he’d be here. Why would a Q go to a human for advice if he felt he had any other options?”
“Because he doesn’t like his other options, which are to stop telling fantasy stories about himself, or itself, or Qself to be accurate, and quit pretending that he’s the oppressed last bastion of masculinity in the Q Continuum or something like that.” His father glared at him. “I should be impressed. I wouldn’t have thought you’d be able to come up with a way that would irritate me nearly so much without actually breaking any laws.”
“Because I’m totally doing this just to irritate you. My entire life is all about you, after all.”
“Well, why else would you be doing it? You can’t possibly be sincere. The Q don’t have gender.”
“None of you do?” Janeway asked. “You don’t feel the slightest preference for a male form? No Q has a preference for being one sex or the other?”
His father scowled. “I have a strong preference for a male form when dealing with humanoids, because the fact that your males are bigger, stronger and not burdened with childbearing, coupled with the fact that you are all primitive barbarians who think might makes right, means that in most humanoid species the males enslaved the females for millennia and even some of the ones that have warp technology haven’t fully gotten over it. I rather prefer that mortals’ first assessment of me is not generally based on how well I conform to their notion of the ideal servant and sex toy. But that’s not my problem, that’s your problem. As for Q with gender, all the ones who are rigidly attached to some notion of what sex they are were actually born mortal. We have five Q who were mortals given the power of the Q and inducted into our ranks, and one child who was born in a mortal body and naturally manifested her Q nature as an adolescent. It’s understandable, even forgiveable, in them that they can’t quite get past what they imprinted on in their early development. But Junior here was born a Q, in the Continuum. He has no excuse.”
“No human looks at women as ideal servants and sex toys anymore, Q. You’re going to have to do better than that if you’re trying to explain why you always appear male. And if the Q are capable of having a perception of gender… why couldn’t a Q be born with such a perception? Humans can be born with a sense of gender that doesn’t match their bodies, or a sense of having no gender, so why can’t a being that has no biological gender be born with a sense of one anyway?”
“Because the Q are vastly more evolved than you are. And I think you would have an entirely different opinion of humans if you could read minds.”
“I’ve met plenty of Betazoid women who don’t seem to think that humans all consider women to be inferior. And wasn’t the entire point of fighting your war to introduce new things, new ideas to the Continuum? Didn’t you have a child to bring change and transformation? So now he’s brought a change, a sense of having a gender, and you don’t like it. Well, tough, Q, no one ever said change would always be changes you like.”
“This is not a change the Continuum needs!” his father shouted. “I wanted a child so we could stop de-evolving into primitives like we did with the war, not so we could find new and different ways to regress to your level!”
“Q, neither your son nor I asked you to come here, and if you’re going to stand in my office screaming at me the least you could do is restrain yourself out of consideration for your son’s feelings!”
Q had to interject there. “Yeah, Dad, wasn’t arguing with Mom in front of me about whose fault it was I’m such a screwup good enough for you? You gotta do the same thing with my godmother too?”
Q’s father actually winced, and his aura flashed a momentary spike of guilt and pain before he closed himself off again. “Fine.” He turned on Q. “Go. Get. The grownups are talking here.”
“I was here first!”
“And as you clearly expressed that you don’t want to listen to me arguing with someone about you, again, I’ll spare your oh-so-sensitive feelings. Go.”
“It’s all right, Q,” Janeway said gently, this time to him and not his father. “Your father’s right; if we’re going to have this conversation it should be privately. And since he insists on having this conversation, it would be better if you left.”
“Fine,” Q said, ostentatiously rolling his eyes. “It wasn’t like I wanted to listen to the two of you blathering anyway.”
He left, and his father put up a privacy screen. But, of course, he did want to listen to the two of them blathering. He was a Q - he couldn’t willingly blind himself to information. So he turned on the recording function of the cameras and other scanning devices in Janeway’s office, and re-routed the feed directly to his mind; Starfleet had a full complement of recorders in every room in their facilities that wasn’t a bathroom or sleeping area. It was generally standard Q protocol to disable the recorders to prevent from being interrupted by random security grunts who somehow thought their phasers would do something against a Q, so Q had turned off the feed when he arrived, and the fact that he’d been the one to turn it off meant that he could easily turn it back on surreptitiously without his father noticing.
Getting nothing but sound and visual, nothing of what they were really thinking except what he could guess from their words and body language, was irritating, but not as irritating as being shut out completely would have been, and they’d be more honest if they thought he wasn’t watching. His father and mother fighting about him when he’d been a little kid had hurt - still hurt, to be truthful - but he was a big Q now and he had defenses. He could handle the truth.
Janeway was saying, “…so adamant that this is a step backwards? Honestly, I don’t see what impact it could possibly have. So he feels like he’s male… why is this even an issue?”
“You can’t possibly grasp the nature of the challenges we face as Q.”
“Maybe not, but you and Quinn managed to explain to me the nature of the challenge of immortality. How hard can the challenge of gender be to explain?”
His father paced. “All Q are equal. It’s the fundamental underpinning of our society. We’re all the same, deep down. There isn’t supposed to be any hierarchy, any class system… admittedly honored more in the breach than in the fact, but that’s why we had a war, and I don’t want to see another one start. It’s vitally important that all Q be able to fully and completely empathize with every other Q, or we will suffer discontinuity - interruptions in the Continuum, breakage points that allow us to develop enough hate and mistrust of our fellows that we can actually bring ourselves to take up arms. And now that the arms have been invented and actually used, it’s even more critical that we avoid anything which could create artificial distinctions between Q.”
“I’m with you so far.”
“Well, that’s the crux of it. Gender is a totally meaningless distinction that every mortal species which has one makes an enormous production out of, and nine times out of ten a caste system results where one gender dominates the other. A mere four hundred years ago, Kathy, you would not be an admiral, or a ship captain, unless you had disguised yourself as a man and your disguise was so perfect that it had lasted for years. You think you have problems with isolation in your romantic life now, imagine never being able to express love for anyone because it might give you away.”
“Yes, but humanity isn’t like that now.”
“No?” His father looked at Janeway hard. “Tell me, Admiral, what percentage of starship captains in the Fleet are female?”
“22%. It used to be a little higher, but I was promoted out of the captain’s chair and Captain Riker was promoted to it, so the numbers have shifted a bit.”
“And how many cadets at the Academy are female? Percentage-wise.”
“53%, but not all of them enter command track. And not all of them are human.”
“What percentage of the human cadets are female?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never seen that statistic.”
“56%. A number of the alien species have serious imbalances in favor of male cadets. What percentage of officers are female?”
“I think it’s very close to 50%.”
“Yes. 51% of Starfleet officers are female. But 22% are captains. What’s that tell you?”
“That no one thinks a pregnant human should be out there risking herself in the captain’s chair, so when captains decide they want to start a family they are promoted to admiral or made commanders of starbases and stations. We don’t have a shortage of women in the captain’s rank, Q, we have a shortage of women who are actually captaining starships, and that’s just biology.”
“Really? I was unaware that being pregnant was so strenuous for your species. I suppose that’s why Commander Troi just got exiled to Betazed to have her baby. Oh, wait, no she didn’t. She’s still serving aboard the Titan with her hairy beast of a husband as her captain.. And I clearly recall how you told Samantha Wildman that she should stay behind on Deep Space Nine because her medical record showed that she’d just become pregnant. Oh, wait, I’m sorry, that didn’t happen either. In fact I think she took a total of four weeks off her job, and this was after she’d suffered the trauma of watching her baby die in front of her, so regardless of acquiring an alternate universe replacement baby right away you’d think she would have had a bit of psychological dysfunction to work through before being able to return to work. But no, she picked up the reins and went back to her job right away.”
“Yes, but it’s different when you’re the captain.”
“Given that the captain is supposed, according to regulations, to stay safe aboard the ship while the first officer takes all the risks, why? A starbase isn’t any safer than a starship for a person who never goes down to a planet to get shot at by aliens with bumpy foreheads.”
“Q, starbases are much safer. That’s why we allow children and families aboard starbases, and not aboard starships generally.”
“And that’s why starship captains who are fathers all drop out to command starbases.” Q’s father smacked himself in the forehead. “Wait, I’m sorry, they don’t! They continue to run gallivanting around the universe and let the mother of the child raise the kid back on that safe starbase. Unless the mother is dead, and then they take that lateral almost-demotion to a starbase. So would you like to tell me why the rules are different for mothers versus fathers, and how it ends up that the proportion of men to women changes from one-half to almost four-fifths by the time you get from Ensign to starship captain, and yet human beings don’t distinguish between their sexes at all?”
“I-“
“Or how about your name? Isn’t it sweet how when Gretchen Conway married Edward Janeway, they gave you his name and your little sister Phoebe her name? Oh no, I’m wrong about that too, aren’t I? It’s Phoebe Janeway. For that matter it’s Gretchen Janeway. Because despite the fact that Gretchen Conway’s parents did all the work of raising her, the fact that she was marrying a fellow was more important than marking her ancestry, even though supposedly that’s what you have those extra names for. And despite the fact that she did all the work of pregnancy and donated her mitochondrial DNA to you and did most of the work in raising you… you have your father’s ancestral name. But human men and women are exactly equal!”
“Fine,” Janeway said, her tone clipped and sharp. “Perhaps humans have some way to go before we achieve full equality between the sexes. But there must be some species that manage it. What about the Vulcans?”
Q’s father laughed. “That has to be the worst example you could have thought of, Kathy. Just because they hide the ways that they keep half their race enslaved to the biological needs of the other half doesn’t mean they don’t do it. Were you aware that by Vulcan law, a married woman can’t leave the planet without permission from her husband? Oh, they get permission all the time, but on principle a Vulcan man could trap his wife on their homeworld. Or how about the fact that a Vulcan man or his family can call off a marriage before it happens, but if the woman doesn’t want to marry the fellow she’s betrothed to, she more or less has to get a boyfriend to go kill him? And she’ll end up the property of whoever wins that fight, with no acknowledged rights as a person?”
“That can’t be true.”
“Oh, but it is. Ask Tuvok. He’ll probably tell you they don’t talk about it to outsiders, but ask him anyway. But why am I only picking on males? The Hamalki have such advanced physics, they’ve been known to create proto-universes, but they can’t be bothered to figure out a way to avoid having their females eat their fully sentient male partners during mating. Who knows how far they could have advanced, if half the species didn’t have a fraction of the lifespan of the other half due to being eaten by the other half? And then there’s the Beryllians, who agree with most humanoids that males should be the warriors, but derive from this the notion that the females should run everything because they think if warriors are in charge all you’ll get is war, and men are expected to go fight and die on the orders of mothers and sisters who will never personally risk themselves in combat. And if they think this is a bad idea, they’re strongly encouraged to castrate themselves, wear women’s clothes and declare themselves female, whether they ‘feel’ like women or not.”
“All right, fine, there are a lot of species with gender that do some degree of segregation or oppression based on it. But there are some that don’t. Why do you assume the Q Continuum would fall into a pattern of segregation that you don’t already have? For that matter, why do you assume that just because your son feels like he has a gender, it means that any other Q would? If this isn’t a trend, if it’s just how he feels, then what difference could it possibly make?”
On the video screen, Q saw his father sit down heavily in the chair he himself had created. “Because if this is real, and not some elaborate joke on me he’s invented solely to embarrass me in front of the Continuum… the only way it could be real is if there is in fact a natural tendency for Q to have gender, a tendency the Continuum has been suppressing as it creates us. Which would mean that if our species starts reproducing by procreation as I have been arguing for… we’re going to develop genders. And if we do that it’s only a matter of time before one of the genders starts trying to oppress the other.” He shook his head. “And that means that my opponents are right, and my strategy for bringing change and growth to the Continuum really will destroy us.”
“It’s just one Q. Couldn’t it be a natural variation?”
“That comes up the absolute first time anyone tries to procreate? He’s the only Q created by procreation within the Continuum.”
“Well, procreation does tend to involve gender. Maybe your species has some means of reverting back to a gendered nature if you start using sexual reproduction to produce children instead of… whatever it was you used to do.”
“I can’t see why procreation needs to involve gender. I mean, yes, for mortals making sex cells it makes sense to have one cell mobile and one cell stationary, or they’d tend to miss each other completely, but the Q don’t do it like that. Why would we need to specialize roles when we’re quite capable of reproducing without having inherent gender?” Q’s father looked up. “And it’s a clever trick, kiddo, but I know you’re watching. You may as well come in.”
Q teleported in, trying not to look sheepish. “Hey, I’m not the one who bugged her office. If the mortals in the security office can look in, why can’t I?”
“Because I told you not to, but that’s beside the point.” His father glared at Q. “Just explain something to me. What exactly does it mean that you feel like you’re male? You are aware that biologically you have no determinate gender, right?”
“Duh, dad. That would be kind of hard to miss.” He struggled to come up with a way to explain to a being who had no idea what it was like to feel fundamentally male or female what that would mean, and came up with a blank. “I can’t describe it, okay? Either you get it or you don’t. I’m just… the same way you know you’re a Q, I know I’m a male Q.”
“Except there’s a slight problem with that. Biologically, you are a Q, and so am I. Biologically, you are not a male Q.”
“Yeah, but when I was human I was still a Q. For that matter when I was an amoeba I was still a Q. The Continuum made you human once, didn’t you feel that way? Like it was wrong to be so, so small and limited?”
“Well, of course it’s wrong. Who would want to give up power and immortality?”
“Riker did, dude.”
His father’s aura flashed embarrassment. “That was different. Jean-Luc talked him out of it. Jean-Luc could talk anyone out of anything. I’m rather surprised he wasn’t able to talk the Borg Queen out of attacking Earth.”
“I don’t think it is different. Riker didn’t want to be a Q because he wasn’t a Q. Amanda decided to be a Q because she was a Q even though she’d never known she was a Q before. You and I want to be Q because we are Q… yeah, and because it’s infinitely cooler than being a mortal, but like I said, Riker didn’t think so. So if you are something, and it’s what you feel like you are, and then you turn into something different, it doesn’t feel right.”
“But no one turned you into a genderless being. You were born that way.”
“Yeah, and Amanda was born a human, but even after you spilled the beans on the Continuum killing her parents she decided to be a Q because she was a Q, even though she thought she was a human. Right?”
“I didn’t tell her about her parents, Picard did.”
“That’s not my point!”
“Your point?” Now his father was angry. “Your point is that you have any number of elaborate rationalizations but when it comes down to it, you can’t explain why you feel ‘male’ or in fact what ‘feeling male’ entails, and since you’re as Q as I am I have to conclude that your inability to explain yourself to me means there’s no there there. You can’t explain what doesn’t exist. You’re making all of this up solely to embarrass me. And your mother, I suppose, although she’s beyond being embarrassed by you. And I can tolerate the ridiculous stunts, I can tolerate the general havoc and chaos you like to cause, I can even tolerate your playing with the Borg even though I must have told you twenty thousand times not to touch them, but if you’re going out of your way to publicly humiliate me in front of the Continuum I will not tolerate it!”
“You know, the whole universe doesn’t revolve around you, Dad. It’s all about I’m publicly humiliating you, I’m going out of my way to annoy you. Why would I even do that?” Q started out calmly enough, but as he went on, his human voice got louder and more agitated, and his aura projected more and more of his anger and hurt. “In case you didn’t notice, you’re like the only being in the entire universe that cares about me at all! You’re definitely the only Q who gives a damn whether I exist or not, so why would I even want to go out of my way to humiliate you? You think I don’t want what you want for the Continuum? You think I wouldn’t love it if some other Q would hurry up and have kids so I wouldn’t be such a freak, being the only one? You seriously think I’d do anything on purpose to prevent that?”
He was furious enough that he used his human avatar to grab his father’s body’s upper arms and yell directly in his face, though he knew better than to use any Q-specific means to express his extreme displeasure, since his father could still beat him in a powers fight. “Look, you stupid excuse for a parental unit, I know you’re the only Q in the Continuum that loves me! You think I wanted to disappoint you? Make it hard for you? You are such an asshole! It’s not all about you, dad, sometimes my life is about me! Did you ever think that maybe sometimes my life is about me?”
The human body was tearing up, eyes watering and chest getting tight. With a thought, he controlled it, but he couldn’t stop broadcasting his distress in his Q aura. “This is real. I’m not making it up. I wouldn’t, not something like this. I don’t want to be a bigger freak than I already am, but I’m not gonna spend eternity lying about what I am either. And I thought you taught me to be honest about who and what I am and not be a big hypocrite. Were you the hypocrite all along? Did you want me to try to lie to the Continuum about what I am? Or just to you?”
“I can’t deal with this,” his father muttered, and vanished.
Q stared for several seconds at the space where his father had been, not really seeing anything, trying to bring up his shields and block off his emotions so the whole Continuum wouldn’t know how upset he was.
Janeway put her hand on his shoulder. It was a measure of his distress that he hadn’t actually noticed her coming up behind him. “He’ll come around,” she said soothingly. “I’m sure this is hard for him to deal with, but he really does love you.”
“Yeah, so did my mom. Didn’t stop her from disowning me for being a fuckup,” Q said bitterly, and teleported away. He didn’t need a human mouthing platitudes at him about how everything would be okay. He knew better.
For a long time he floated in nowhere, not doing anything in particular, just watching the universe go by. Someplace there had to be something interesting to do, something going on worth watching, something that would distract him from the vast emptiness he felt. He should have known it was only a matter of time, after all. Probably the whole Continuum was laughing at him for letting himself be hurt by something that could have been predicted from the moment of his birth. When one of the most selfish members of a fundamentally selfish species is the only person who loves you, you should know that it’s conditional and it won’t last forever. His father had been willing to put up with him for exactly as long as it took Q to find something that upset or embarrassed him too much to endure his son’s company anymore, and it wasn’t like it would matter to a Q that it wasn’t Q’s fault.
Someone was behind him then, but it wasn’t his dad (or his mother, as if there was any chance of that happening), so he didn’t care. “Go away.”
“That was fast. Don’t you want to know why I’m coming to see you?”
It was an older Q, one of his dad’s faction. “Honestly? Not really.”
“Yeah? How come?”
Q sighed. Ignoring older Q never actually got them to go away, but he lived in hope. He focused his attention on the older one. “Aren’t you the guy who got my dad kicked out of the Continuum?”
“Sure, for about a day. Only took him that long to decide to kill himself.” The older Q grinned. “I gotta hand it to you, kid, you totally beat your dad out in that department. You stuck it out a week, with a lot less whining and complaining, and you even managed to make yourself a real friend. Pretty impressive considering that your dad folded like a wet paper napkin.”
Part of Q warmed at the praise. Another part squirmed at the embarrassing description of his father. Regardless of his father’s opinion of him right now, the entity was still his dad, and he didn’t like to think of his dad’s faults and failures except as they directly impacted him. On the other hand, the reason he’d done so much better than his father was that his mother enjoyed wargaming in mortal forms and had taken him on several of her campaigns when he was little, so he actually had experience going without his powers, experience his father had never had because his father had never voluntarily gone without power. But if he actually mentioned that, he would be acknowledging that his mother had ever done anything good for him whatsoever, and he wasn’t willing to do that. So he shrugged elaborately. “You buttering me up for something? ‘Cause if you’re hitting on me, I’m totally not interested.”
The other Q laughed. “Hitting on you, kid? Trust me, as weird as you think the idea of joining with one of us oldsters is, it’s nothing compared to how weird it would be to think about doing it with someone you saw making himself out of a seed.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “’Course, that must make it rough on you. Seeing as how you’re the only Q of your generation, and the only one who even comes close used to be your babysitter. It’s gonna really suck to be you if no one ever has another kid.”
It already really sucks to be me, Q thought morosely, but didn’t let the emotion out into his aura. “You got a point here, or are you just rubbing it in?”
“I’m doing an assessment,” the other Q said. “You said some pretty interesting things today.”
“Fine. I’m sure the whole Continuum is laughing about my little delusion, right?”
“What, that you’re male? Naah, most of the Continuum really couldn’t care less. No, the part I thought was interesting was the part where you think that your father’s the only Q who cares about you. I guess I never thought about how it looked to you.”
“How what looked to me?”
“Oh, kid.” The other’s aura was warm with emotions one almost never saw from a Q - tenderness, affection, all the things he hadn’t gotten from anyone since his mom walked out and his dad had decided he was too old to actually see any direct affection from any other Q and he needed to learn to read between the lines like all the other Q in the Continuum did. “You’re the most interesting thing in the Continuum in a billion years! Well, the most interesting thing that isn’t killing us all, like the war did, anyway. Most of the freedom faction and half the uncommitteds have been practically in love with you since you were born. We’re all interested in how you’re doing, we’re all practically in awe that you even exist. But in case you didn’t notice? Your dad is kind of a jealous ass. After he managed to push Q away from you so he could have you all to himself, and she was actually your mother, we all figured none of us would have a chance to develop any kind of relationship with you until your father backed off.”
If Q had been in human form, he would have blinked. This… was not what he’d expected to hear. “So how come the Continuum almost kicked me out for good?”
The other Q shrugged. “You know we don’t have the numbers, and the order faction really does hate your guts, you’re not wrong about that. It’s not about who you are but what you are… although frankly who you are doesn’t help. But did you ever check up on the stunt your father pulled to get you reinstated?”
“He said he threatened to quit the Continuum.”
“Like that would have worked all on its own? No, he went to us, and we rallied behind you. We all threatened to quit… or, more precisely, create our own Continuum, which would pretty definitively have started the war up again.” He grinned. “You’re not exactly the savior of the Continuum anyone was expecting, but you’ve never been boring, and for that alone you’ve probably held the Continuum together your entire life. None of us want to start the war back up if there’s any chance that would mean we don’t get to see you grow up.”
Q was totally confused. His entire life, it had been an openly known fact within the Continuum that no one wanted to babysit him because he was a brat and too much work. The idea that no one had wanted to babysit him because, as much as his father begged other Q for help with him, they all knew that if he showed any sign of being personally attached to them his father would take it out on them, was completely new. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Just this,” the older one said. “He’s the only father you’ve got, but he’s not the only Q who gives a damn about you. And he knows it, even if you don’t. I don’t care how freaked out he is by your supposed grand revelation there, but most of us aren’t nearly as invested in trying to believe you’re perfect; we know you’re weird. You’re the first child we’ve ever had; you couldn’t help being weird. I’m gonna admit, the idea of a Q who thinks he’s male is pretty freaky, but that was kind of the point to Q making you; you were supposed to bring new things to the Continuum and teach us stuff about ourselves we didn’t already know, and no one ever promised anyone it’d all be stuff we’d be happy to learn. So none of us care nearly as much as he does about you being a bit odd. If he doesn’t figure out how to accept you for what you are… he’s gonna lose you to us, the way Q lost you to him, and he’s never gonna put up with that.”
The idea that there were other Q who would fight his father for his attention if given the opportunity was actually sufficiently appealing that he was having a hard time believing in it. “So if I, say, went up to one of you guys and wanted to tag along with what you were doing, you’d be okay with that?”
“Sure, long as you remember that if you’re the tagalong, then the senior Q’s got authority over the project and can tell you what to do if you want to participate.”
Q grinned, then lost it. “Even if it’s true, my dad isn’t going to believe it. He acts like he thinks you all hate me.”
The older Q smiled broadly. “Oh, he’s gonna believe it. No worries on that score.”
“How do you know that?”
The other’s smile got bigger, almost malicious, though the malice wasn’t directed at Q himself. “Because I’m transmitting this entire conversation directly to him.”
His grin became more focused on Q himself. “So if I were you, I’d be expecting a visit from your dad very shortly. If you don’t get one… I’m building a planet out of an asteroid belt over in the Andromeda galaxy. Feel free to come help out if you want.”
He vanished.
It was, by mortal standards, an hour later when Q’s father showed up, which by Q standards was virtually instantaneous. “Has Q been trying to seduce you into his planet-creating project? I have to warn you, the whole thing’s hideously dull.”
It did sound hideously dull, actually - why bother to make a planet out of an asteroid belt, when you could just snap your fingers and make the planet out of nothing? - but Q wasn’t going to say so. “I don’t know, it could be cool.”
“I think you’d appreciate my idea a lot more,” Q’s father said. “I need someone to pose as the son of the incarnation of ultimate evil on the planet Kadysta, and I’m already being ultimate evil so it’d be a lot less entertaining to play against myself.”
“What’s on Kadysta?”
“They’ve got a repressive theocracy trying to stifle space travel, population control, and anti-pollution measures. We’re going to insert ourselves into it and then reveal that we’re behind it. Completely discredit the theocracy, support the dissident religions, drop some hints to the atheists that actually we’re evil aliens and not really demons at all, save the planet and have lots of fun tormenting people while we’re doing it. Sound like fun? I saved the antimessiah role for you because I know you like to actually get down and dirty with the mortals.”
It was tempting to take the offer - not the explicit offer, he was obviously going to take that since his father was right, it sounded like a lot of fun - but the implied offer that they would just sweep the entire conversation under the rug and pretend it hadn’t happened. But that wouldn’t exactly be honest, and after his whole speech to his father about not being a hypocrite, he wasn’t going to knuckle under and pretend to be something he wasn’t just to make his father more comfortable. So he looked askance at his dad. “Are we just pretending we didn’t have that conversation earlier today, or did you actually want to retroactively alter the timeline?”
His father sighed. “Would either one change anything about you?”
“Uh, let me think. Hmm. No.”
“Well, then what good would it do?”
“It’d make you feel better. Apparently.”
“Look.” His father did the Q equivalent of throwing up his hands, half peace gesture, half exasperation. “I’ve had it pointed out to me that if this is a joke, I’m falling for it; if it’s a phase you’re going through, you’ll grow out of it; and if it’s real… well, if it’s real it’s not as if I can exactly change it, now can I? So my choices aren’t, have a son or have an appropriately ungendered child; my choices are, have a son, or have a son that hates me and wants nothing to do with me. If I am absolutely stuck with having a son… well, I’ve already dealt with the fact that your basic pattern is heavily modeled on me, and I’m convinced that somehow the Continuum planned it that way as revenge, so I would be forced to raise myself. Next to that, I suppose the gender thing is objectively fairly trivial.”
“If it’s objectively fairly trivial, it’s funny how you acted like it was going to destroy the entire Continuum.”
His father looked at him intently. “The faction for order thought that allowing a Q to choose death would destroy the entire Continuum, and we’re all still here. I’ll be keeping an eye on you, mind, and if others choose to procreate and the children end up gendered, I suppose we’ll have to do our best, as the adults in the situation, to prevent you all from deciding to oppress each other. I’m not happy about this development. But-” he shrugged. “You’re right. Your life is about you, not about whether I’m happy or not. And if I can’t change you by disapproving of what you are, then there’s really not much point to me doing it, is there? It’s not as if you can change it just by wanting to, or you would have by now.”
Q wasn’t honestly entirely certain of that. The Q considered it a horrific taboo to change another Q by force, or even with consent, and it was axiomatic that a Q couldn’t change their own fundamental nature, but if he were suddenly granted the power to change himself into someone else just to please his father, he wasn’t at all sure he would take it. What upset him was not that he was what he was, but that his father and possibly a large number of the Q in the Continuum would have a hard time accepting what he was, and he’d rather they changed their attitudes than that he changed his nature. But since as it happened no Q actually did have the power to change their own nature or consent to be changed, the issue was moot, so he didn’t point it out. “You think everyone’s going to be so shocked and bothered by it that they won’t want to have kids?”
His father smiled sardonically. “I’m hoping to spin it in such a way that it inspires them to try to have children to prove that they’re better breeding stock than me, or something.”
“Didn’t work the last time you tried that.”
“Last time I tried that, the problem was that you were a brat. The thing about your little gender issue is that, since there’s nothing I can do to affect it, it doesn’t actually require any extra work out of me. Whereas you being a brat made everyone think about all the work they’d have to do.”
Q grinned. “I’m still a brat, you know. Just because I’m a boy brat doesn’t change any of the rest of it.”
“I’m well aware of that, believe me.” His father made a face. “But you’re my brat. Which means that when I’m looking for someone to help me out and participate in one of my little games, you’ve got a better than average chance of being interested in it. So?”
“I always wanted to be an antimessiah. Can I call myself the Prince of Darkness?”
“Once we do the big reveal, absolutely.”
“And I don’t have to play a woman at any point in this game?”
“These people’ve got that oppression by gender thing going full blast. They’d never believe in a female antimessiah, or a female of any high rank in the theocracy anyway.”
“Well, then, count me in. Do I get to start any wars?”
“No nuclear ones, or any using weapons that would devastate the biosphere. Otherwise, the more the merrier. I mean, they’re supposed to believe when we’re done that their theocracy serves their personification of evil. It’s rather hard to be a servant of the personification of evil if you won’t start any wars.”
Q’s grin got broader, and he had to restrain himself from practically bouncing with excitement. “This sounds like it’s going to be awesome.” Maybe it was true that his father was falling all over himself to make peace only because he was jealous, and afraid that Q would find other Q to spend his time with, but he wouldn’t be jealous if he didn’t care, right? His mother had never tried to make peace with him or mend fences. If his dad was reaching out, obviously the being male thing wasn’t the dealbreaker for his dad that being a total brat had been for his mom.
“Let’s go, then,” his father said, and they both vanished.
Q whipped around the moment he heard the voice. How had he not sensed his father reading through his privacy shield, let alone coming in? “I had a privacy shield up! You’re not supposed to be listening!” he yelled, rather more shrilly than he’d wanted to.
His father gave him a very patronizing, condescending look. “The next time you want some privacy from me, you might possibly want to consider not dragging yourself and your privacy screen into an area that I’m frequently watching? For example, one of my territories? Like, I don’t know, my second favorite human ever? Just maybe, you’d think, seeing a giant Q privacy screen suddenly block my ability to see one of my favorite mortals might possibly tip me off that there’s a Q there who doesn’t want me to see what they’re doing? Do you think?”
“You’re supposed to leave a privacy screen alone!”
“You’re also not supposed to intrude on another Q’s territory. Which meant that either the Q I couldn’t see was breaking the rules and quite possibly up to something nefarious that I would have to investigate to protect my interest in these mortals, or it was you, and you’re not supposed to hide what you’re doing from me.”
Janeway took a deep breath. “Q, I appreciate that you’re concerned for your son, and I’m glad you came to investigate to make sure we weren’t being attacked by any renegade Q, but you do have to give your children some space to seek advice from adults who aren’t you. If Junior had wanted to come to you with his problem, he would have.”
Q’s father rolled his eyes. “You’re thinking of mortal children and mortal needs, Kathy. The Q have no real expectation of privacy from one another. Junior’s been there for any number of things I’d have preferred to shelter him from.”
“Yeah, like all that weird stuff you did with the other-”
“That’s quite enough of that, thank you,” his father interrupted. Q smirked.
“Still, if he’d wanted to discuss the problem with you I doubt he’d be here. Why would a Q go to a human for advice if he felt he had any other options?”
“Because he doesn’t like his other options, which are to stop telling fantasy stories about himself, or itself, or Qself to be accurate, and quit pretending that he’s the oppressed last bastion of masculinity in the Q Continuum or something like that.” His father glared at him. “I should be impressed. I wouldn’t have thought you’d be able to come up with a way that would irritate me nearly so much without actually breaking any laws.”
“Because I’m totally doing this just to irritate you. My entire life is all about you, after all.”
“Well, why else would you be doing it? You can’t possibly be sincere. The Q don’t have gender.”
“None of you do?” Janeway asked. “You don’t feel the slightest preference for a male form? No Q has a preference for being one sex or the other?”
His father scowled. “I have a strong preference for a male form when dealing with humanoids, because the fact that your males are bigger, stronger and not burdened with childbearing, coupled with the fact that you are all primitive barbarians who think might makes right, means that in most humanoid species the males enslaved the females for millennia and even some of the ones that have warp technology haven’t fully gotten over it. I rather prefer that mortals’ first assessment of me is not generally based on how well I conform to their notion of the ideal servant and sex toy. But that’s not my problem, that’s your problem. As for Q with gender, all the ones who are rigidly attached to some notion of what sex they are were actually born mortal. We have five Q who were mortals given the power of the Q and inducted into our ranks, and one child who was born in a mortal body and naturally manifested her Q nature as an adolescent. It’s understandable, even forgiveable, in them that they can’t quite get past what they imprinted on in their early development. But Junior here was born a Q, in the Continuum. He has no excuse.”
“No human looks at women as ideal servants and sex toys anymore, Q. You’re going to have to do better than that if you’re trying to explain why you always appear male. And if the Q are capable of having a perception of gender… why couldn’t a Q be born with such a perception? Humans can be born with a sense of gender that doesn’t match their bodies, or a sense of having no gender, so why can’t a being that has no biological gender be born with a sense of one anyway?”
“Because the Q are vastly more evolved than you are. And I think you would have an entirely different opinion of humans if you could read minds.”
“I’ve met plenty of Betazoid women who don’t seem to think that humans all consider women to be inferior. And wasn’t the entire point of fighting your war to introduce new things, new ideas to the Continuum? Didn’t you have a child to bring change and transformation? So now he’s brought a change, a sense of having a gender, and you don’t like it. Well, tough, Q, no one ever said change would always be changes you like.”
“This is not a change the Continuum needs!” his father shouted. “I wanted a child so we could stop de-evolving into primitives like we did with the war, not so we could find new and different ways to regress to your level!”
“Q, neither your son nor I asked you to come here, and if you’re going to stand in my office screaming at me the least you could do is restrain yourself out of consideration for your son’s feelings!”
Q had to interject there. “Yeah, Dad, wasn’t arguing with Mom in front of me about whose fault it was I’m such a screwup good enough for you? You gotta do the same thing with my godmother too?”
Q’s father actually winced, and his aura flashed a momentary spike of guilt and pain before he closed himself off again. “Fine.” He turned on Q. “Go. Get. The grownups are talking here.”
“I was here first!”
“And as you clearly expressed that you don’t want to listen to me arguing with someone about you, again, I’ll spare your oh-so-sensitive feelings. Go.”
“It’s all right, Q,” Janeway said gently, this time to him and not his father. “Your father’s right; if we’re going to have this conversation it should be privately. And since he insists on having this conversation, it would be better if you left.”
“Fine,” Q said, ostentatiously rolling his eyes. “It wasn’t like I wanted to listen to the two of you blathering anyway.”
He left, and his father put up a privacy screen. But, of course, he did want to listen to the two of them blathering. He was a Q - he couldn’t willingly blind himself to information. So he turned on the recording function of the cameras and other scanning devices in Janeway’s office, and re-routed the feed directly to his mind; Starfleet had a full complement of recorders in every room in their facilities that wasn’t a bathroom or sleeping area. It was generally standard Q protocol to disable the recorders to prevent from being interrupted by random security grunts who somehow thought their phasers would do something against a Q, so Q had turned off the feed when he arrived, and the fact that he’d been the one to turn it off meant that he could easily turn it back on surreptitiously without his father noticing.
Getting nothing but sound and visual, nothing of what they were really thinking except what he could guess from their words and body language, was irritating, but not as irritating as being shut out completely would have been, and they’d be more honest if they thought he wasn’t watching. His father and mother fighting about him when he’d been a little kid had hurt - still hurt, to be truthful - but he was a big Q now and he had defenses. He could handle the truth.
Janeway was saying, “…so adamant that this is a step backwards? Honestly, I don’t see what impact it could possibly have. So he feels like he’s male… why is this even an issue?”
“You can’t possibly grasp the nature of the challenges we face as Q.”
“Maybe not, but you and Quinn managed to explain to me the nature of the challenge of immortality. How hard can the challenge of gender be to explain?”
His father paced. “All Q are equal. It’s the fundamental underpinning of our society. We’re all the same, deep down. There isn’t supposed to be any hierarchy, any class system… admittedly honored more in the breach than in the fact, but that’s why we had a war, and I don’t want to see another one start. It’s vitally important that all Q be able to fully and completely empathize with every other Q, or we will suffer discontinuity - interruptions in the Continuum, breakage points that allow us to develop enough hate and mistrust of our fellows that we can actually bring ourselves to take up arms. And now that the arms have been invented and actually used, it’s even more critical that we avoid anything which could create artificial distinctions between Q.”
“I’m with you so far.”
“Well, that’s the crux of it. Gender is a totally meaningless distinction that every mortal species which has one makes an enormous production out of, and nine times out of ten a caste system results where one gender dominates the other. A mere four hundred years ago, Kathy, you would not be an admiral, or a ship captain, unless you had disguised yourself as a man and your disguise was so perfect that it had lasted for years. You think you have problems with isolation in your romantic life now, imagine never being able to express love for anyone because it might give you away.”
“Yes, but humanity isn’t like that now.”
“No?” His father looked at Janeway hard. “Tell me, Admiral, what percentage of starship captains in the Fleet are female?”
“22%. It used to be a little higher, but I was promoted out of the captain’s chair and Captain Riker was promoted to it, so the numbers have shifted a bit.”
“And how many cadets at the Academy are female? Percentage-wise.”
“53%, but not all of them enter command track. And not all of them are human.”
“What percentage of the human cadets are female?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never seen that statistic.”
“56%. A number of the alien species have serious imbalances in favor of male cadets. What percentage of officers are female?”
“I think it’s very close to 50%.”
“Yes. 51% of Starfleet officers are female. But 22% are captains. What’s that tell you?”
“That no one thinks a pregnant human should be out there risking herself in the captain’s chair, so when captains decide they want to start a family they are promoted to admiral or made commanders of starbases and stations. We don’t have a shortage of women in the captain’s rank, Q, we have a shortage of women who are actually captaining starships, and that’s just biology.”
“Really? I was unaware that being pregnant was so strenuous for your species. I suppose that’s why Commander Troi just got exiled to Betazed to have her baby. Oh, wait, no she didn’t. She’s still serving aboard the Titan with her hairy beast of a husband as her captain.. And I clearly recall how you told Samantha Wildman that she should stay behind on Deep Space Nine because her medical record showed that she’d just become pregnant. Oh, wait, I’m sorry, that didn’t happen either. In fact I think she took a total of four weeks off her job, and this was after she’d suffered the trauma of watching her baby die in front of her, so regardless of acquiring an alternate universe replacement baby right away you’d think she would have had a bit of psychological dysfunction to work through before being able to return to work. But no, she picked up the reins and went back to her job right away.”
“Yes, but it’s different when you’re the captain.”
“Given that the captain is supposed, according to regulations, to stay safe aboard the ship while the first officer takes all the risks, why? A starbase isn’t any safer than a starship for a person who never goes down to a planet to get shot at by aliens with bumpy foreheads.”
“Q, starbases are much safer. That’s why we allow children and families aboard starbases, and not aboard starships generally.”
“And that’s why starship captains who are fathers all drop out to command starbases.” Q’s father smacked himself in the forehead. “Wait, I’m sorry, they don’t! They continue to run gallivanting around the universe and let the mother of the child raise the kid back on that safe starbase. Unless the mother is dead, and then they take that lateral almost-demotion to a starbase. So would you like to tell me why the rules are different for mothers versus fathers, and how it ends up that the proportion of men to women changes from one-half to almost four-fifths by the time you get from Ensign to starship captain, and yet human beings don’t distinguish between their sexes at all?”
“I-“
“Or how about your name? Isn’t it sweet how when Gretchen Conway married Edward Janeway, they gave you his name and your little sister Phoebe her name? Oh no, I’m wrong about that too, aren’t I? It’s Phoebe Janeway. For that matter it’s Gretchen Janeway. Because despite the fact that Gretchen Conway’s parents did all the work of raising her, the fact that she was marrying a fellow was more important than marking her ancestry, even though supposedly that’s what you have those extra names for. And despite the fact that she did all the work of pregnancy and donated her mitochondrial DNA to you and did most of the work in raising you… you have your father’s ancestral name. But human men and women are exactly equal!”
“Fine,” Janeway said, her tone clipped and sharp. “Perhaps humans have some way to go before we achieve full equality between the sexes. But there must be some species that manage it. What about the Vulcans?”
Q’s father laughed. “That has to be the worst example you could have thought of, Kathy. Just because they hide the ways that they keep half their race enslaved to the biological needs of the other half doesn’t mean they don’t do it. Were you aware that by Vulcan law, a married woman can’t leave the planet without permission from her husband? Oh, they get permission all the time, but on principle a Vulcan man could trap his wife on their homeworld. Or how about the fact that a Vulcan man or his family can call off a marriage before it happens, but if the woman doesn’t want to marry the fellow she’s betrothed to, she more or less has to get a boyfriend to go kill him? And she’ll end up the property of whoever wins that fight, with no acknowledged rights as a person?”
“That can’t be true.”
“Oh, but it is. Ask Tuvok. He’ll probably tell you they don’t talk about it to outsiders, but ask him anyway. But why am I only picking on males? The Hamalki have such advanced physics, they’ve been known to create proto-universes, but they can’t be bothered to figure out a way to avoid having their females eat their fully sentient male partners during mating. Who knows how far they could have advanced, if half the species didn’t have a fraction of the lifespan of the other half due to being eaten by the other half? And then there’s the Beryllians, who agree with most humanoids that males should be the warriors, but derive from this the notion that the females should run everything because they think if warriors are in charge all you’ll get is war, and men are expected to go fight and die on the orders of mothers and sisters who will never personally risk themselves in combat. And if they think this is a bad idea, they’re strongly encouraged to castrate themselves, wear women’s clothes and declare themselves female, whether they ‘feel’ like women or not.”
“All right, fine, there are a lot of species with gender that do some degree of segregation or oppression based on it. But there are some that don’t. Why do you assume the Q Continuum would fall into a pattern of segregation that you don’t already have? For that matter, why do you assume that just because your son feels like he has a gender, it means that any other Q would? If this isn’t a trend, if it’s just how he feels, then what difference could it possibly make?”
On the video screen, Q saw his father sit down heavily in the chair he himself had created. “Because if this is real, and not some elaborate joke on me he’s invented solely to embarrass me in front of the Continuum… the only way it could be real is if there is in fact a natural tendency for Q to have gender, a tendency the Continuum has been suppressing as it creates us. Which would mean that if our species starts reproducing by procreation as I have been arguing for… we’re going to develop genders. And if we do that it’s only a matter of time before one of the genders starts trying to oppress the other.” He shook his head. “And that means that my opponents are right, and my strategy for bringing change and growth to the Continuum really will destroy us.”
“It’s just one Q. Couldn’t it be a natural variation?”
“That comes up the absolute first time anyone tries to procreate? He’s the only Q created by procreation within the Continuum.”
“Well, procreation does tend to involve gender. Maybe your species has some means of reverting back to a gendered nature if you start using sexual reproduction to produce children instead of… whatever it was you used to do.”
“I can’t see why procreation needs to involve gender. I mean, yes, for mortals making sex cells it makes sense to have one cell mobile and one cell stationary, or they’d tend to miss each other completely, but the Q don’t do it like that. Why would we need to specialize roles when we’re quite capable of reproducing without having inherent gender?” Q’s father looked up. “And it’s a clever trick, kiddo, but I know you’re watching. You may as well come in.”
Q teleported in, trying not to look sheepish. “Hey, I’m not the one who bugged her office. If the mortals in the security office can look in, why can’t I?”
“Because I told you not to, but that’s beside the point.” His father glared at Q. “Just explain something to me. What exactly does it mean that you feel like you’re male? You are aware that biologically you have no determinate gender, right?”
“Duh, dad. That would be kind of hard to miss.” He struggled to come up with a way to explain to a being who had no idea what it was like to feel fundamentally male or female what that would mean, and came up with a blank. “I can’t describe it, okay? Either you get it or you don’t. I’m just… the same way you know you’re a Q, I know I’m a male Q.”
“Except there’s a slight problem with that. Biologically, you are a Q, and so am I. Biologically, you are not a male Q.”
“Yeah, but when I was human I was still a Q. For that matter when I was an amoeba I was still a Q. The Continuum made you human once, didn’t you feel that way? Like it was wrong to be so, so small and limited?”
“Well, of course it’s wrong. Who would want to give up power and immortality?”
“Riker did, dude.”
His father’s aura flashed embarrassment. “That was different. Jean-Luc talked him out of it. Jean-Luc could talk anyone out of anything. I’m rather surprised he wasn’t able to talk the Borg Queen out of attacking Earth.”
“I don’t think it is different. Riker didn’t want to be a Q because he wasn’t a Q. Amanda decided to be a Q because she was a Q even though she’d never known she was a Q before. You and I want to be Q because we are Q… yeah, and because it’s infinitely cooler than being a mortal, but like I said, Riker didn’t think so. So if you are something, and it’s what you feel like you are, and then you turn into something different, it doesn’t feel right.”
“But no one turned you into a genderless being. You were born that way.”
“Yeah, and Amanda was born a human, but even after you spilled the beans on the Continuum killing her parents she decided to be a Q because she was a Q, even though she thought she was a human. Right?”
“I didn’t tell her about her parents, Picard did.”
“That’s not my point!”
“Your point?” Now his father was angry. “Your point is that you have any number of elaborate rationalizations but when it comes down to it, you can’t explain why you feel ‘male’ or in fact what ‘feeling male’ entails, and since you’re as Q as I am I have to conclude that your inability to explain yourself to me means there’s no there there. You can’t explain what doesn’t exist. You’re making all of this up solely to embarrass me. And your mother, I suppose, although she’s beyond being embarrassed by you. And I can tolerate the ridiculous stunts, I can tolerate the general havoc and chaos you like to cause, I can even tolerate your playing with the Borg even though I must have told you twenty thousand times not to touch them, but if you’re going out of your way to publicly humiliate me in front of the Continuum I will not tolerate it!”
“You know, the whole universe doesn’t revolve around you, Dad. It’s all about I’m publicly humiliating you, I’m going out of my way to annoy you. Why would I even do that?” Q started out calmly enough, but as he went on, his human voice got louder and more agitated, and his aura projected more and more of his anger and hurt. “In case you didn’t notice, you’re like the only being in the entire universe that cares about me at all! You’re definitely the only Q who gives a damn whether I exist or not, so why would I even want to go out of my way to humiliate you? You think I don’t want what you want for the Continuum? You think I wouldn’t love it if some other Q would hurry up and have kids so I wouldn’t be such a freak, being the only one? You seriously think I’d do anything on purpose to prevent that?”
He was furious enough that he used his human avatar to grab his father’s body’s upper arms and yell directly in his face, though he knew better than to use any Q-specific means to express his extreme displeasure, since his father could still beat him in a powers fight. “Look, you stupid excuse for a parental unit, I know you’re the only Q in the Continuum that loves me! You think I wanted to disappoint you? Make it hard for you? You are such an asshole! It’s not all about you, dad, sometimes my life is about me! Did you ever think that maybe sometimes my life is about me?”
The human body was tearing up, eyes watering and chest getting tight. With a thought, he controlled it, but he couldn’t stop broadcasting his distress in his Q aura. “This is real. I’m not making it up. I wouldn’t, not something like this. I don’t want to be a bigger freak than I already am, but I’m not gonna spend eternity lying about what I am either. And I thought you taught me to be honest about who and what I am and not be a big hypocrite. Were you the hypocrite all along? Did you want me to try to lie to the Continuum about what I am? Or just to you?”
“I can’t deal with this,” his father muttered, and vanished.
Q stared for several seconds at the space where his father had been, not really seeing anything, trying to bring up his shields and block off his emotions so the whole Continuum wouldn’t know how upset he was.
Janeway put her hand on his shoulder. It was a measure of his distress that he hadn’t actually noticed her coming up behind him. “He’ll come around,” she said soothingly. “I’m sure this is hard for him to deal with, but he really does love you.”
“Yeah, so did my mom. Didn’t stop her from disowning me for being a fuckup,” Q said bitterly, and teleported away. He didn’t need a human mouthing platitudes at him about how everything would be okay. He knew better.
For a long time he floated in nowhere, not doing anything in particular, just watching the universe go by. Someplace there had to be something interesting to do, something going on worth watching, something that would distract him from the vast emptiness he felt. He should have known it was only a matter of time, after all. Probably the whole Continuum was laughing at him for letting himself be hurt by something that could have been predicted from the moment of his birth. When one of the most selfish members of a fundamentally selfish species is the only person who loves you, you should know that it’s conditional and it won’t last forever. His father had been willing to put up with him for exactly as long as it took Q to find something that upset or embarrassed him too much to endure his son’s company anymore, and it wasn’t like it would matter to a Q that it wasn’t Q’s fault.
Someone was behind him then, but it wasn’t his dad (or his mother, as if there was any chance of that happening), so he didn’t care. “Go away.”
“That was fast. Don’t you want to know why I’m coming to see you?”
It was an older Q, one of his dad’s faction. “Honestly? Not really.”
“Yeah? How come?”
Q sighed. Ignoring older Q never actually got them to go away, but he lived in hope. He focused his attention on the older one. “Aren’t you the guy who got my dad kicked out of the Continuum?”
“Sure, for about a day. Only took him that long to decide to kill himself.” The older Q grinned. “I gotta hand it to you, kid, you totally beat your dad out in that department. You stuck it out a week, with a lot less whining and complaining, and you even managed to make yourself a real friend. Pretty impressive considering that your dad folded like a wet paper napkin.”
Part of Q warmed at the praise. Another part squirmed at the embarrassing description of his father. Regardless of his father’s opinion of him right now, the entity was still his dad, and he didn’t like to think of his dad’s faults and failures except as they directly impacted him. On the other hand, the reason he’d done so much better than his father was that his mother enjoyed wargaming in mortal forms and had taken him on several of her campaigns when he was little, so he actually had experience going without his powers, experience his father had never had because his father had never voluntarily gone without power. But if he actually mentioned that, he would be acknowledging that his mother had ever done anything good for him whatsoever, and he wasn’t willing to do that. So he shrugged elaborately. “You buttering me up for something? ‘Cause if you’re hitting on me, I’m totally not interested.”
The other Q laughed. “Hitting on you, kid? Trust me, as weird as you think the idea of joining with one of us oldsters is, it’s nothing compared to how weird it would be to think about doing it with someone you saw making himself out of a seed.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “’Course, that must make it rough on you. Seeing as how you’re the only Q of your generation, and the only one who even comes close used to be your babysitter. It’s gonna really suck to be you if no one ever has another kid.”
It already really sucks to be me, Q thought morosely, but didn’t let the emotion out into his aura. “You got a point here, or are you just rubbing it in?”
“I’m doing an assessment,” the other Q said. “You said some pretty interesting things today.”
“Fine. I’m sure the whole Continuum is laughing about my little delusion, right?”
“What, that you’re male? Naah, most of the Continuum really couldn’t care less. No, the part I thought was interesting was the part where you think that your father’s the only Q who cares about you. I guess I never thought about how it looked to you.”
“How what looked to me?”
“Oh, kid.” The other’s aura was warm with emotions one almost never saw from a Q - tenderness, affection, all the things he hadn’t gotten from anyone since his mom walked out and his dad had decided he was too old to actually see any direct affection from any other Q and he needed to learn to read between the lines like all the other Q in the Continuum did. “You’re the most interesting thing in the Continuum in a billion years! Well, the most interesting thing that isn’t killing us all, like the war did, anyway. Most of the freedom faction and half the uncommitteds have been practically in love with you since you were born. We’re all interested in how you’re doing, we’re all practically in awe that you even exist. But in case you didn’t notice? Your dad is kind of a jealous ass. After he managed to push Q away from you so he could have you all to himself, and she was actually your mother, we all figured none of us would have a chance to develop any kind of relationship with you until your father backed off.”
If Q had been in human form, he would have blinked. This… was not what he’d expected to hear. “So how come the Continuum almost kicked me out for good?”
The other Q shrugged. “You know we don’t have the numbers, and the order faction really does hate your guts, you’re not wrong about that. It’s not about who you are but what you are… although frankly who you are doesn’t help. But did you ever check up on the stunt your father pulled to get you reinstated?”
“He said he threatened to quit the Continuum.”
“Like that would have worked all on its own? No, he went to us, and we rallied behind you. We all threatened to quit… or, more precisely, create our own Continuum, which would pretty definitively have started the war up again.” He grinned. “You’re not exactly the savior of the Continuum anyone was expecting, but you’ve never been boring, and for that alone you’ve probably held the Continuum together your entire life. None of us want to start the war back up if there’s any chance that would mean we don’t get to see you grow up.”
Q was totally confused. His entire life, it had been an openly known fact within the Continuum that no one wanted to babysit him because he was a brat and too much work. The idea that no one had wanted to babysit him because, as much as his father begged other Q for help with him, they all knew that if he showed any sign of being personally attached to them his father would take it out on them, was completely new. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Just this,” the older one said. “He’s the only father you’ve got, but he’s not the only Q who gives a damn about you. And he knows it, even if you don’t. I don’t care how freaked out he is by your supposed grand revelation there, but most of us aren’t nearly as invested in trying to believe you’re perfect; we know you’re weird. You’re the first child we’ve ever had; you couldn’t help being weird. I’m gonna admit, the idea of a Q who thinks he’s male is pretty freaky, but that was kind of the point to Q making you; you were supposed to bring new things to the Continuum and teach us stuff about ourselves we didn’t already know, and no one ever promised anyone it’d all be stuff we’d be happy to learn. So none of us care nearly as much as he does about you being a bit odd. If he doesn’t figure out how to accept you for what you are… he’s gonna lose you to us, the way Q lost you to him, and he’s never gonna put up with that.”
The idea that there were other Q who would fight his father for his attention if given the opportunity was actually sufficiently appealing that he was having a hard time believing in it. “So if I, say, went up to one of you guys and wanted to tag along with what you were doing, you’d be okay with that?”
“Sure, long as you remember that if you’re the tagalong, then the senior Q’s got authority over the project and can tell you what to do if you want to participate.”
Q grinned, then lost it. “Even if it’s true, my dad isn’t going to believe it. He acts like he thinks you all hate me.”
The older Q smiled broadly. “Oh, he’s gonna believe it. No worries on that score.”
“How do you know that?”
The other’s smile got bigger, almost malicious, though the malice wasn’t directed at Q himself. “Because I’m transmitting this entire conversation directly to him.”
His grin became more focused on Q himself. “So if I were you, I’d be expecting a visit from your dad very shortly. If you don’t get one… I’m building a planet out of an asteroid belt over in the Andromeda galaxy. Feel free to come help out if you want.”
He vanished.
It was, by mortal standards, an hour later when Q’s father showed up, which by Q standards was virtually instantaneous. “Has Q been trying to seduce you into his planet-creating project? I have to warn you, the whole thing’s hideously dull.”
It did sound hideously dull, actually - why bother to make a planet out of an asteroid belt, when you could just snap your fingers and make the planet out of nothing? - but Q wasn’t going to say so. “I don’t know, it could be cool.”
“I think you’d appreciate my idea a lot more,” Q’s father said. “I need someone to pose as the son of the incarnation of ultimate evil on the planet Kadysta, and I’m already being ultimate evil so it’d be a lot less entertaining to play against myself.”
“What’s on Kadysta?”
“They’ve got a repressive theocracy trying to stifle space travel, population control, and anti-pollution measures. We’re going to insert ourselves into it and then reveal that we’re behind it. Completely discredit the theocracy, support the dissident religions, drop some hints to the atheists that actually we’re evil aliens and not really demons at all, save the planet and have lots of fun tormenting people while we’re doing it. Sound like fun? I saved the antimessiah role for you because I know you like to actually get down and dirty with the mortals.”
It was tempting to take the offer - not the explicit offer, he was obviously going to take that since his father was right, it sounded like a lot of fun - but the implied offer that they would just sweep the entire conversation under the rug and pretend it hadn’t happened. But that wouldn’t exactly be honest, and after his whole speech to his father about not being a hypocrite, he wasn’t going to knuckle under and pretend to be something he wasn’t just to make his father more comfortable. So he looked askance at his dad. “Are we just pretending we didn’t have that conversation earlier today, or did you actually want to retroactively alter the timeline?”
His father sighed. “Would either one change anything about you?”
“Uh, let me think. Hmm. No.”
“Well, then what good would it do?”
“It’d make you feel better. Apparently.”
“Look.” His father did the Q equivalent of throwing up his hands, half peace gesture, half exasperation. “I’ve had it pointed out to me that if this is a joke, I’m falling for it; if it’s a phase you’re going through, you’ll grow out of it; and if it’s real… well, if it’s real it’s not as if I can exactly change it, now can I? So my choices aren’t, have a son or have an appropriately ungendered child; my choices are, have a son, or have a son that hates me and wants nothing to do with me. If I am absolutely stuck with having a son… well, I’ve already dealt with the fact that your basic pattern is heavily modeled on me, and I’m convinced that somehow the Continuum planned it that way as revenge, so I would be forced to raise myself. Next to that, I suppose the gender thing is objectively fairly trivial.”
“If it’s objectively fairly trivial, it’s funny how you acted like it was going to destroy the entire Continuum.”
His father looked at him intently. “The faction for order thought that allowing a Q to choose death would destroy the entire Continuum, and we’re all still here. I’ll be keeping an eye on you, mind, and if others choose to procreate and the children end up gendered, I suppose we’ll have to do our best, as the adults in the situation, to prevent you all from deciding to oppress each other. I’m not happy about this development. But-” he shrugged. “You’re right. Your life is about you, not about whether I’m happy or not. And if I can’t change you by disapproving of what you are, then there’s really not much point to me doing it, is there? It’s not as if you can change it just by wanting to, or you would have by now.”
Q wasn’t honestly entirely certain of that. The Q considered it a horrific taboo to change another Q by force, or even with consent, and it was axiomatic that a Q couldn’t change their own fundamental nature, but if he were suddenly granted the power to change himself into someone else just to please his father, he wasn’t at all sure he would take it. What upset him was not that he was what he was, but that his father and possibly a large number of the Q in the Continuum would have a hard time accepting what he was, and he’d rather they changed their attitudes than that he changed his nature. But since as it happened no Q actually did have the power to change their own nature or consent to be changed, the issue was moot, so he didn’t point it out. “You think everyone’s going to be so shocked and bothered by it that they won’t want to have kids?”
His father smiled sardonically. “I’m hoping to spin it in such a way that it inspires them to try to have children to prove that they’re better breeding stock than me, or something.”
“Didn’t work the last time you tried that.”
“Last time I tried that, the problem was that you were a brat. The thing about your little gender issue is that, since there’s nothing I can do to affect it, it doesn’t actually require any extra work out of me. Whereas you being a brat made everyone think about all the work they’d have to do.”
Q grinned. “I’m still a brat, you know. Just because I’m a boy brat doesn’t change any of the rest of it.”
“I’m well aware of that, believe me.” His father made a face. “But you’re my brat. Which means that when I’m looking for someone to help me out and participate in one of my little games, you’ve got a better than average chance of being interested in it. So?”
“I always wanted to be an antimessiah. Can I call myself the Prince of Darkness?”
“Once we do the big reveal, absolutely.”
“And I don’t have to play a woman at any point in this game?”
“These people’ve got that oppression by gender thing going full blast. They’d never believe in a female antimessiah, or a female of any high rank in the theocracy anyway.”
“Well, then, count me in. Do I get to start any wars?”
“No nuclear ones, or any using weapons that would devastate the biosphere. Otherwise, the more the merrier. I mean, they’re supposed to believe when we’re done that their theocracy serves their personification of evil. It’s rather hard to be a servant of the personification of evil if you won’t start any wars.”
Q’s grin got broader, and he had to restrain himself from practically bouncing with excitement. “This sounds like it’s going to be awesome.” Maybe it was true that his father was falling all over himself to make peace only because he was jealous, and afraid that Q would find other Q to spend his time with, but he wouldn’t be jealous if he didn’t care, right? His mother had never tried to make peace with him or mend fences. If his dad was reaching out, obviously the being male thing wasn’t the dealbreaker for his dad that being a total brat had been for his mom.
“Let’s go, then,” his father said, and they both vanished.