THE FLARE WEED

by Larry Niven

Evolution takes advantage of whatever it can.... The Qarasht surveyor hefted a bark-brown teardrop that looked to me like the pod off a branch of seaweed, but much bigger. She set it on the table, using eight-fingered hands that looked like clustered chicken feet. Her sense cluster was extruded; she clearly wanted to talk. “Truly, this was not even the interesting part,” she said.

* * * *

“Tell us a story,” I said, “for a drink on the house.” I could afford it. She was drinking beef broth with vodka, nothing exotic.

The Draco Tavern wasn’t crowded tonight. We were all clustered round the big table. The Qarasht spoke for me and half a dozen customers of varied species, so that her translator chattered in many competing voices. Noisy, but the sound suppressors were working.

“The sun was about to flare,” she said. “Not a supernova, you understand, but the kind of flare a star puts out when it’s going to be a red giant. You get great visuals. Wild and wonderful explosion shells expand around the star at almost lightspeed. We set up to make a documentary.

“This sun had a water world. We looked it over for inhabitants. Oxygen atmosphere. The seas were alive with oxygen and sulphur users, but with no sapience. There wasn’t much land and there wasn’t much on it, but some Tee Tee Sine Torus Gleesh had evolved far enough to have astronomers. So we explained what was going on, and offered the Gleesh a shield—the law says we must—and they took the deal and paid with artwork and historical records. Nothing really valuable.”

I used my phone to boot up Wiki Search. “Tee tee sine torus gleesh would be like otters? With better hands?”

“Mph? Sure. Little, but with big heads and four limbs. Now, the flare was coming, but we got the force dome up in time. Then I left the rest of the crew behind and went out with my gear to watch the flare. I didn’t want to be under the dome.”

“You’d need a lot of protection yourself.”

“Oh yes, armor and a place to dump the heat. I set up on a raft over deep ocean. I like to be alone when I run a documentary, and besides, my crew was mixed species. It would have been a babble. Come to that—” She stopped. Her sense cluster retracted.

A Chirp asked, “Are you in health, honored—”

The sense cluster popped out. “I’m well. It now dawns on me that that was the only reason I had a translator box with me. I would have missed half of what was going on.

“Here came the flare. A shell peeled off the sun over several hours, and my gear caught it all even if I couldn’t see it. The sea started simmering at the surface. There’s a limit to how hot that can get, so I could still pump heat into it as long as the water lasted. It was all going pretty much as expected. Then a stalk rose out of the water, almost under my raft. It blocked the sun, so it was all shadow, but it looked like a tall tree. It grew like a tree, but fast, and then it put out a great fuzzy black flower.

“I was moving, trying to get the raft out of range, not just to save the raft from being knocked spinning, but also to get my cameras back on the sun.

“My translator said, ‘Awesome!’”

“I hadn’t been expecting company. I asked, ‘Who speaks?’”

“I am I. What are you?”

“We wrestled with that. I was talking to the plant, of course. It’s a form of intelligence I’m not familiar with. I’ve talked to some Chirpsithra since, and they don’t know of it either. We’re calling it a Flare Weed.

“Now, I managed to keep it talking while I recorded. That wasn’t easy. After all, its time was limited, and it was just learning about the world around itself. I told it some of what it had missed. I put us in contact with the Gleesh under their dome, and the Flare Weed chatted with them for a while.

“When resources are poor, the Flare Weed lives very slowly. It anchors itself to an ocean bottom and hardly grows at all. Sometimes seabottom becomes dry land, and then it’s static. When the sun goes active, it blossoms. An early sun, a T Tauri type, is just what it needs, or a late sun, expanding and throwing off flare shells. It lives fast then, in a flood of energy. It can support intelligence. It doesn’t notice all the time that passes while the sun is quiet. It lives its life in climaxes.”

I asked, “How does it breed?”

“It makes solar sails. It builds a blowpipe that can put sailseeds into the solar wind. A few of those seeds reach other stars. It was growing its blowpipe all the time we were talking.”

I said, “That’s wonderful. How did it evolve?”

“Not known to me. Not known to it.”

“How old is it?”

“Billions of years, I think, my years or yours, but it hasn’t seen much of that time. In terms of life experience it does not do much better than—” She hesitated, then said, “—you.”

They’re longer lived than we are, the Qarasht. I broke an awkward moment by going to the bar and came back with two Bull Shots in beer mugs, one for me. I said, “You all survived the flare, I take it.”

“Sure, even the Gleesh, until next time. The flare is over and the Flare Weed is back on the seabottom, the sea moderately depleted. The thing is, I made a deal. It wants its seed planted.”

“Ah. And you got copyright?”

“Yes. Getting me to carry it to another planet is a more efficient way to spread itself than using its natural solar sail. I wondered if anyone would mind my planting it here, in the ocean—”

“We’ve already got some alien life here,” I said. Immigrant sea life was running the fishing industry in the equatorial Pacific, and Folk were still touring Africa. “The United Nations might object. You should check.” Or just dump the damn thing, I thought, and don’t get caught. “How many seeds are you carrying?”

“Eight.”

“And it’ll be a long time before it blooms.”

“The Flare Weed doesn’t mind.”

“It wouldn’t bother us any,” I surmised.

“Plausible,” she said.

* * * *

I don’t normally dream, which I suppose is odd given my occupation, but a nightmare came that night. Light glared from a brilliant sky. Fire ran across the land. The ocean boiled. I woke with a scream locked in my throat.

It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder, until then, why a Quarasht would want to plant a Flare Weed on Earth.

It doesn’t matter, I told myself. A Flare Weed must be patient. It could wait four or five billion years until Sol expands.

And I haven’t had that dream since.