enough. But we must be far away by dawn! The plants can find us miles away, and they burn anything that moves! They all turn at once, they turn the glare of the sun on us, and we burn!”
“But you can eat them when the sun isn’t shining.”
“Yes.”
“How do the winds blow in this region?”
“Winds?… In these parts they blow to spinward. For great distances around, they blow only into the realm of fire plants.”
“Because the plants heat the air?”
“Am I a god, to know that?”
After all, the sunflowers only got a certain amount of sunlight. The way they worked, they’d heat the air around and above them, but the sunlight would never pass the silver blossoms to reach the roots. Dew would condense on the cool soil. The plants would get their moisture that way. And rising hot air would bring a steady wind from the borders of the sunflower patch.
And the plants burned anything that moved, to turn plant-eating beasts and birds into fertilizer.
He could do it. He could.
“You will do most of the work yourself,” Louis said. “The tribe is yours and you will save them. Afterward, you and they will turn toward the dying fire plants. Eat them, or plow them under and plant whatever you like to eat.” Louis grinned at Chmeee’s bewilderment, and continued, “You will never disturb my worshippers, the red people.”
The armored giant was gloriously happy. “All of this is most welcome news. Our worship is yours. We must seal the covenant by rishathra.”
“You’re kidding.”
“What? No, I spoke of this earlier, but Chmeee did not understand. Bargains must be sealed by rishathra, even between men and gods. Chmeee, this is no problem. You are even of proper size for my women.”
“I am stranger than you think,” Chmeee said.
From Louis’s ceiling viewpoint it looked like Chmeee was exposing himself to the giant. Certainly something had caused the giant’s startled expression. Louis couldn’t have cared less. Tanj dammit! he thought. I actually thought of an answer! And now this. What do I have to do to—
Yah. “I will make for you a servant,” Louis said. “Because I am hurried, he will be dwarf, and mute in your language. Call him Wu. Chmeee, we must confer.”
Chapter 11 — The Grass Giants
The lander touched down in a malevolent glare of white light. The glare from the longhouse persisted for a minute after the lander stopped moving, then died. Presently the ramp descended. The king giant, fully armored, let it carry him to the ground. He raised his head and bellowed. The sound must have carried for many miles.
Giants began jogging toward the lander.
Chmeee descended, then Wu. Wu was small, partly hairless, and harmless-looking. He smiled a lot; he looked about him with charming enthusiasm, as if seeing the world for the first time…
The longhouse was a fair distance away. It was mud and grass, reinforced with vertical members. The row of sunflowers planted on the roof shifted restlessly, now turning their concave mirror faces and green photosynthetic nodes to the sun, now flashing at the giants converging from all directions.
Chmeee was asking, “What if an enemy attacked in the daytime? How can you reach the longhouse? Or do you store your weapons elsewhere?”
The giant considered before giving away secrets of defense. But Chmeee served Louis, and it was well not to offend him… ”See you the pile of brush to antispinward of the longhouse? If danger threatens, a man must approach from behind that pile and wave a sheet. The sunflowers fire the damp wood. Under cover of smoke we may then enter and take weapons.” He glanced at the lander and added, “An enemy fast enough to reach us before we can reach weapons is too strong for us anyway. Perhaps the sunflowers would surprise him.”
“May Wu choose his own mate?”
“Does he have that much volition? I had thought to lend him my wife Reeth, who has practiced Rishathra before. She is small, and the Machine People are not so different from Wu.”
“Acceptable,” Chmeee said without a glance at Wu.
A hundred of the giants surrounded them now. No more seemed to be coming. The kzin asked, “Are these all?”
“These and my warriors are all of my tribe. There are twenty-six tribes on the veldt. We stay together when we can, but none speaks for all,” the king giant said.
Of the hundred or so, eight were males, and all of the eight were markedly scarred; three were actual cripples. None but the king giant showed the wrinkles and whitening hair of age.
The rest were females… rather, they were women. They stood six and a half to seven feet tall, small next to their men: brown-skinned, dignified, naked. Their hair was golden and spilled in wealth down their backs; it was generally a mass of tangles. None bore any kind of decoration. Their legs were thick, their feet large and hard. A few of the women were white-haired. Their heavy breasts gave a good indication of their relative ages. They examined their guests with pleasure and wonder while the armored giant told what he knew of them.
And Chmeee, with his translator off, spoke low. “If you prefer one or another female, I must say so now.”
“No, they’re all about equally… attractive.”
“We can still end this situation. You must be mad to make such a promise!”
“I can do it. Hey, don’t you want revenge for your burnt pelt?”
“Revenge on a plant? You are mad. Our time is precious, and in just over a year they will all be dead — sunflowers, giants, little red carnivores, and all!”
“Yah… ”
“Your help is no help at all, if they knew it. How long will your project take? A day? A month? You hurt our own project.”
“Maybe I am mad. Chmeee, I have to carry this through. In all the time since I left the Ringworld I haven’t had reason to be proud of myself. I have to prove—”
The king giant was saying, “Louis himself will tell you that the threat of the fire plants is over for us. He will tell us our part—”
Wu, self-effacing, as was his nature, stepped behind the great kzin; and none of the giants particularly noticed that he was talking to his hand. Half a minute later the time-delayed Voice of Louis boomed from the lander, saying, “Hear me, for your day has come to make the places of the fire plants clean for all the breeds of men. My work will go before you as a cloud. You must gather the seeds of what you wish to grow where fire plants grow now… ”
In the first light of dawn, when the sun shone overhead as a mere splinter of light at the edge of a shadow square, the giants were up and moving.
They liked to sleep touching each other. The king giant was the center of a circle of women, with Wu at its edge, his small, half-bald head pillowed on a woman’s shoulder, his legs hooked over a man’s long bony legs. The dirt floor was covered in flesh and hair.
Waking, they moved in order, those nearest the door untangling themselves and picking up bags and sickle-swords and moving out, then those farther in. Wu moved out with them.
Outside the distant lander, a one-armed giant with a marred face said a quick farewell to Chmeee and came jogging toward the longhouse. Last night’s guards would be sleeping inside during the day, and some older women had stayed too.
The giants turned and stared openly when Wu began climbing the wall.
The grass and mud surface was crumbly, but the roof was only twelve feet high. Louis pulled himself up between two sunflowers.
The plants stood a foot tall on knobbly green stalks. Each had a single oval blossom, mirror-surfaced, nine
