The Ringworld Engineers

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-ski

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 to twelve inches across. A short stalk poked from the mirror’s center and ended in a dark-green bulb. The back of the blossom was stringy, laced with some vegetable analogue of muscle fibers. And all of the blossoms were throwing sunlight at Louis Wu; but there wasn’t enough sunlight to hurt him yet.

Louis wrapped his hands around a thick sunflower stalk and rocked it gently. There was no give; the roots were dug deep into the roof. He took off his shirt and held it between the blossom and the sun. The mirror-blossom wavered and rippled in indecision, then folded forward to enclose the green bulb.

Mindful of his audience, Wu climbed down with some attention to style. A white glare followed him as he went to join Chmeee.

The kzin said, “I spent part of this night talking to a guard.”

“Learn anything?”

“He has the utmost confidence in you, Louis. They’re gullible.”

“So were the carnivores. I wondered if it was just good ma

“I think not. The carnivores and the herbivores expect anything at all to walk in from the horizon at any moment. They know that there are people with strange shapes and godlike powers. They made me wonder what we may meet next. Uurrr, and the sentry knew that we are not of the race that built the Ringworld. Is this significant?”

“Maybe. What else?”

“There will be no problem with the other tribes. Cattle they may be, but with minds. Those who stay on the veldt will collect seeds for those who choose to invade sunflower territory. They will give women to the young adult men if they go. Perhaps a third of them will leave when you have worked your magic. The rest will have enough grass. They will not need to move toward the red people.”