The Garden - Melissa Scott [30]
"I don't see anything," Paris said.
"It's gone," Kim answered, and Janeway looked around.
"Anything on sensors, anyone?" There was no answer, and she sighed. "Keep an eye out, all of you. Let's move on."
The trees looked no better as they got closer. They weren't completely leafless, as they'd first appeared, but the leaves, tiny dark-green lobes the size of Kim's fingernail, clung so close to the limbs that they looked almost like a coat of coarse fur. There were fruits as well, dark red, cupped in hemispherical caps at the end of the most twisted branches, and Kim trained his tricorder on them uncertainly. They weren't edible, he saw to his relief-in fact, they weren't really fruits at all, but thick-skinned, hollow blossoms. Hollow, he amended, watching the numbers change on the tricorder's screen, but not empty. There seemed to be a fine particulate suspended in the shells, pollen, perhaps, or very fine seed. He frowned at the reading, trying to determine what it might mean, and there was a tremendous ratcheting sound from the trees ahead of him. He looked up just in time to see one of the twisted limbs whip forward, unwind-
ing so fast that it was little more than a gray blur. The dark red flower-sphere snapped out of the cup and shattered on the roadway a few meters ahead of Renehan, releasing a pale cloud. Renehan leaped backward, covering her mouth and nose, and Kim trained his tricorder on the rapidly fading cloud.
"Another soporific," he said. "Similar to the grass pollen, but probably longer-lasting."
"Masks," Janeway ordered, and the Voyager team reached hastily for the protective gear. "What the hell set it off?"
There was a little silence, and then Paris, his voice only slightly muffled by the mask, said, "Um, I think it was me."
Janeway turned to face him, both eyebrows rising in mute but pointed question, and Paris made a face. "In the grass there, beside the road. You see those things that look like roots? I was trying to get a better look at the flower on it, and I think I touched it. Then the tree-went off."
Kim moved closer, peering past the taller man's shoulder at the gray-brown spike that protruded from the rich dirt. It looked like a miniature version of the trees, the same warty, crinkled bark, but there was no flower, nothing at all, in fact, to set it off from the ground around it. "I don't see any flower."
"There was one." Paris's voice trailed off, and he swung from side to side, scanning the ground beside the road. "There, like that one."
He pointed to a bright blue flower, long and narrow, with a deep gold throat, and Kim crouched to examine it more closely, careful to keep well away from its surface. It grew from a root-spike like the one Paris had indicated before, but it seemed oddly fuzzy, as though it was more furred than a flower should be. Kim frowned, and leveled the tricorder at it, already
suspecting what he would find. Sure enough, at high magnification, the fuzziness resolved itself into a cloud of fine hairs extending almost seven centimeters from the surface of the plant. "Captain! I think Tom's right, these-things-are the trigger mechanism."
Janeway took the tricorder he held out to her, and scanned the readings herself. "So if you touch those hairs at all, the tree flings one of those pods at you."
"That's what it looks like," Kim answered, and Janeway nodded, handing him back the tricorder.
"And there seem to be quite a lot of those flowers around here."
Kim straightened, still careful to keep his distance from the plant, and realized that there were indeed dozens, maybe hundreds, of the bright blue flowers in the grass around them. "Should we test it?" he asked, and Janeway nodded.
"Move back, everyone. Give us at least a ten-meter clearance."
Kim blinked at that-he hadn't expected Janeway to do it herself-and Paris frowned.
"Captain-?"
"That's an