The Garden - Melissa Scott [27]
belt pack. Kim took his gratefully, fitting the cool plastic over his nose and mouth, and took a cautious breath. It was mostly imagination, he knew, but he felt more levelheaded already.
"Captain," Torres said, her clear voice only slightly muffled by the mask. "Do you suppose this is deliberate action?"
"A defense mechanism of some kind?" Janeway asked. Kim stiffened at the thought. It would make sense, explaining the increased power use Chakotay had regist ered from orbit, and why a plant would possess a soporific pollen- He stopped then, shook his head, annoyed at his own assumptions. The pollen hadn't necessarily evolved to be soporific; it was probably a side effect of something else, an unpredictable interaction with human metabolism. Besides, it would be all but impossible to control the release of the pollen, and equally easy to defeat. The captain shook her head then, echoing his thoughts. "It's possible, B'Elanna, but it seems, well, rather- subtle-for a defensive tactic. What good is a defense that you can circumvent with something as simple as these masks?"
"It still seems like a coincidence," Torres muttered, and shook her head. "But at least the masks work."
The wind died down even before they reached the end of the grass field, and the last sprinkles of pollen drifted slowly across the road, slick as powder underfoot. Another line of trees marked the end of the field, their dark gray trunks, each easily as thick as Kim's upper arm, winding around each other like vines to form a solid barrier. Only the road was clear, the vine-trees lifting into a delicate arch above the stone ribbon. Beyond it, the ground dropped suddenly away into a wide, steep-sided ravine, and Kim could hear
water running somewhere nearby. Steps led down to the road's continuation, a wider path with a water-filled channel carving running along its center. It ran straight across the ravine, supported presumably on invisible pylons, and Kim, squinting, thought he could just make out a second set of steps leading up to another vine arch on the far side.
Torres pointed her tricorder at the bridge, and Renehan copied her, her own free hand never far from her tricorder. "The structure seems sturdy enough," Renehan said, after a moment, and Torres nodded.
"It's like a classic aqueduct. It'll hold double its own weight, easily." She frowned at her readings again. "That channel is the continuation of the pipeline we've been following."
"Any sign of booby traps?" Janeway asked. "Or any security devices?"
"Nothing," Torres answered. "And I'm not getting any of the power readings Chakotay mentioned."
"Right." Janeway glanced at the knotted vines to either side of the road. "Well, we don't seem to have much choice, in any case. Let's go."
The sound of water grew louder as they came down the stairs and onto the bridge, louder than seemed reasonable from the channel alone. Kim moved cautiously toward the edge of the road-there were no railings, just a low stone lip-and peered over, to see a river a dozen meters below at the bottom of the ravine. The water frothed white in patches, boiling over rocks, and spray rose from a short waterfall just above the bridge. It was a beautiful sight, strangely Earthlike, and Kim was suddenly overcome by the realization of just how far they were from home. Seventy-five years of travel, most of a human being's lifetime, and even then they would barely be in range of home.... He shook himself, hard, forced away
the memories, and followed the others along the bridge.
"It's interesting," Torres said, abruptly, her tricorder pointing at the river. "This seems to be the first really natural feature we've seen, but there still aren't any native life-forms in it. At least there's nothing that the tricorder recognizes as unambiguously organic."
"Is there something ambiguously organic?" Paris asked, and Torres shook her head.
"Not even that."
Janeway paused, and Kim heard her sigh. "I am very much looking forward to meeting the Kirse," she said, to no one in particular, and