The Garden - Melissa Scott [24]
She started off without waiting for an answer. The others followed, but Kim paused to point his tricorder at the low-growing foliage beside the path. The spots of red that he'd though were fruit seemed to be tiny, spherical flowers, but the thick, almost-black leaves were rich in calcium, and seemed otherwise edible. He shook his head, amazed again at the fertility of the land, and Paris passed him, whistling a seven-note phrase.
"Come on, Harry," he called, over his shoulder, and Kim filed the tricorder reading for later study. Paris's whistling floated back to him, teasingly familiar, and he frowned, trying to remember the words that went with the tune. A children's film, he thought,
and a very old one, but he couldn't remember any more. He shook the memory away, and lengthened his stride to catch up.
The stone road ran under an arch that seemed to grow from a pair of living trees, and then curved gently down a slope covered with more of the dark-green leaves. At the bottom of the slope, the ground was divided by low-growing hedges, none of them taller than Kim's knee, into a complicated pattern that seemed to be based on hexagons. Each of the sections was filled with a different plant, and in the center of the pattern a tree rose from a carpet of vivid blue flowers and spread into an almost flat canopy of bright yellow leaves. Or were they flowers? Kim wondered, and then caught his breath as something moved at the base of the tree. He trained his tricorder on it instinctively, and saw a phaser appear in Rene-han's hand as if by magic.
"What is it?" Paris said, and Kim shook his head, watching the readings shift and change on the tricorder screen.
"I can't tell-"
Even as he spoke, the figure straightened to its two hind legs, reaching up to paw at the golden canopy overhead. It looked more humanoid in that position, definitely bipedal, despite the bowed legs and awkward, almost anthropoid stand. From this distance, it was hard to see if the dull gray was skin or scales or even short fur, though the color seemed to darken on the limbs, deepening almost to black in the clumsy, two-fingered hands. Kim glanced at his tricorder again, unable to make the readings match what he thought he was seeing. The tricorder called it a machine, or at least claimed there were machine parts in it, but at the same time, the system gave a weak life-form reading. The creature shook the tree, hard, and
sent a shower of gold over itself. Something larger fell with the leaves, and the creature squatted to retrieve it, glanci ng over its shoulder as it did so. It saw the Voyager party, and started to its feet, dropping the fruit it had gathered half-eaten.
"Damn," Janeway said under her breath, and the creature leaped gracelessly over the nearest of the little hedges and bolted for the shelter of a distant stand of trees.
Torres shook her head in frustration. "The readings are still inconclusive, Captain. But it didn't look like a machine."
"I got the same results," Kim said. "A weak life-form reading, but also machine parts."
Janeway shook her head, staring at the trees where the creature had vanished. "Well, let's at least take a look at what it was eating-if it was eating."
Luckily, the road brought them to within two fields of the tree. Even at that distance, Kim could smell the odor that spilled from the tree. It was sweet but not sickly, a delicate perfume that promised the taste of nectar and made his stomach growl in response. He stepped carefully through the fields, and ducked under the low-growing canopy. The smell was even stronger there, and it was all he could do not to pull a fruit from the tree and taste it then and there. He pointed his tricorder at it instead, and was not surprised to find that it was well within the required parameters. A breeze stirred his hair, bathing him in a sudden gust of scent-like peaches and pears, he thought, or honeysuckles-and he swallowed hard as his mouth filled with saliva.
"They've