The Garden - Melissa Scott [58]
"They'd just be in the way."
"Oh." It was true, Kim supposed, but he couldn't help thinking there must have been an easier way to move them on. Harp started down the slope, her wings rising slightly to balance her weight, and Kim followed. "Tell me, the-gardeners, you called them. They've obviously been, well, modified." Harp gave
him another blank look, and Kim stumbled on. "Um, they have metal parts, that look almost like prosthe-ses, like replacements?"
"Oh, the adaptations." Harp's expression cleared, and she cocked her head. "What about them?"
Where to begin? Kim wondered. He said, "Well, for a start, why? Why do whatever it is you're doing if they're such a nuisance? And anyway, what are the parts for?"
"To keep them functioning properly," Harp answered. "One does what one can with the available materials."
"What do they do?" Kim asked.
Harp shrugged again, her wings shifting with a muted thump of air. "The cultivations are extensive, and it would be a waste of resources to send ones like me to manage them. These can be adapted, and they'd otherwise be useless, so it seemed the most efficient way to handle the situation."
They had reached the bottom of the hill and the graveled path that ran between the rows of trees. The air was very still, warm and heavy with the scent of the ripe fruit. Kim swallowed, and did his best to ignore the tantalizing smell. "So you mean the metal, the machine parts, are all there to make the animals act as caretakers in the fields? As gardeners?"
"Just so." Harp gave the stiff Kirse nod, and then stretched, reaching into the nearest tree, and brought down one of the pale, pink-skinned fruits. "Here, these should be of use to Voyager, and you seemed to enjoy them last night."
Kim gave her a sharp glance, but took the fruit. "You weren't at dinner."
"It's common knowledge."
To his horror, Kim felt himself blushing. He had known that he had eaten more than his share the
night before, but he hadn't thought he had behaved so badly that it would be the subject of Kirse gossip. Maybe they just kept track of our preferences so that they'd know what to sell us, he told himself, and trained his tricorder on the fruit in his hand. As he had expected, the readings were positive, some of the vitamin content off the standard scale, but he extracted the probe anyway, took a core sample for later analysis.
"You can go ahead and eat the rest," Harp said.
Kim hesitated, but the smell was too good to resist, especially after the weeks of Neelix's cooking on Voyager. They would have to make sure that Neelix didn't try to do top much with the Kirse food, it was just the sort of thing he would spoil with too much seasoning....
"A little farther on," Harp said, "there's a stand of-" She hesitated, groping for a word. "-Thilo calls it purple wheat, and you might find that useful. And then there is a sample-garden beyond that, it has a dozen or more plants from all over the planet. I expect you'll find something there that will be what you want."
"All right," Kim said, indistinctly, through the last mouthful of fruit. There was no pit, he realized abruptly, nothing that could serve as a seed, and he wondered how the tree reproduced itself. He had a good tissue sample that should answer that; better to save his questions for things that the samples couldn't resolve as easily, particularly since he had the distinct sense that Harp had deliberately changed the subject before.
"This way." Harp started down the wide path, turned back when he didn't follow at once. "It isn't far, just a hundred of your meters."
Kim ignored her for a moment longer, certain that
he'd seen something-one of the creatures?- watching from behind a thick-growing stand of bushes. Nothing moved there now, however, and he supposed he must have been mistaken. "Coming," he said, but couldn't quite shake the