Only Human
Part IV: Ketaya
+1/12+1: Afterword

What can I say?  This chapter, despite having been planned since 1993, took me over seven years to write; I fell out of Star Trek fandom for a while after "The Q and the Grey", and then I had kids, and for long, long periods of time I wrote nothing on this story.  And then for some reason I decided to finish the damn thing and completed something like 60 K of words in a month and a half. 

Firstly, I want to say that I deeply regret that I didn't finish this chapter in time for Jeanita Danzik and Atara Stein to read it.  Jeanita passed away in 2005, Atara in 2008; both gave me a great deal of feedback and constructive criticism in the early days of writing this novel, and I owe a debt to them both.

I must also specifically credit various people with things that appeared in this story:

The Tatarians come from "Of Kings and Men" by Queriana, another DQ spinoff which borrowed some of my characters, so I returned the favor. :-)

I can't remember whether Mercutio or I came up with the Beryllians, which appear in "InseQurity", the OH spinoff we collaborated on.  However, Mercutio did create Jason Hartfeil, giving a name and identity to my vague reference to "a man a century dead" who Q took the template of his body from. 

In "The Best of All Possible Worlds" by Jeanita Danzik, she has an offhand reference in which Picard says that Q has never been raped and Q says "In fact I have," and never explains. I asked her in private email what she meant by this, and while I've lost the email so I'll have to paraphrase, she said that she was imagining that metaphorically, Q had essentially been the bratty, stuck-up, self-assured girl who gets taken out behind the barn by her older brothers' friends and gang-raped to teach her her place. Obviously it didn't work. :-) In the past few years I remembered that reference and put some thought into how, exactly, the Q would go about raping each other, and why, and this is where Q's story of being assaulted fifty thousand years ago by five other Q who wanted to make him into someone else comes from.

I would also like to add, for the record, that my fellow fans of Q -- particularly Atara, Jeanita, and Ruth Gifford -- taught me too much about BDSM for me to want people to think that I meant Yalit to be a domme because she's the bad guy. In fact, Yalit is a domme because she grew up in a viciously misogynist patriarchy where all women literally sell sex, and she found a taboo form of sex to offer men who normally can get anything they want so she could exploit a niche market and later blackmail people.  If she's learned to enjoy hurting men, it's out of a desire for revenge for a life of being slighted.  She is *not* by any means intended to imply that people who like to give pain to willing, consenting partners are evil. Although if you got the idea that I think that women who survive and thrive in a patriarchy by betraying other women and who prioritize the men they love's desire for sex over other women's right not to be raped are evil... you got that right.