"Scott Westerfeld - Evolution's Darling" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westerfeld Scott)

noted. Indicators of her simple awe: that a distance could be so small, a
creature so slow.
"About half that, actually," said the voice in her head.
"Well," Rathere murmured, leaning back into the cool hem of shade along the
stone wall, "I knew I saw it move."
She eyed the stone creature again, a look of triumph on her face.
Woven into her white tresses were black threads, filaments that moved through
her hair in a slow deliberate dance, like the tendrils of some predator on an
ocean floor. This restless skein was always seeking the best position to
capture Rathere's subvocalized words, the movements of her eyes, the telltale
secretions of her skin. Composed of exotic alloys and complex configurations
of carbon, the tendrils housed a native intellect that handled their motility
and self-maintenance. But a microwave link connected them to their real
intelligence: the AI core aboard Rathere's star-ship home.
Two of the black filaments wound their way into her ears, where they curled in
intimate contact with her tympanic membranes.
"The statues are always moving," the voice said to her. "But very slowly."
Then it reminded her to stick on another sunblock patch.
She was a very pale girl.
Even here on Petraveil, Rathere's father insisted that she wear the minder
when she explored alone. The city was safe enough, populated mostly by
academics here to study the glacially slow indigenous lifeforms. The
lithomorphs themselves were incapable of posing a threat, unless one stood
still for a hundred years or so. And Rathere was, as she put it, almost
fifteen, near majority age back in the Home Cluster. Despite harnessing the
processing power of the starship's AI, the minder was still only a glorified
babysitter. The voice in her ears cautioned her incessantly about sunburn and
strictly forbade several classes of recreational drugs.
But all in all it wasn't bad company. It certainly knew a lot.
"How long would it take, creeping forward in micrometers?" Rathere asked.
"How long would what take?" Even with their intimate connection, the AI could
not read her mind. It was still working on that.
"To get all the way to the northern range. Probably a million years?" she
ventured.
The starship, for whom a single second was a 16-teraflop reverie, spent
endless minutes of every day accessing the planetary library. Rathere's
questions came in packs, herds, stampedes.
No one knew how the lithomorphs reproduced, but it was guessed that they bred
in the abysmal caves of the northern range.
"At least a hundred thousand years," the AI said.
"Such a long journey .... What would it look like?"
The AI delved into its package of pedagogical visualization software, applied
its tremendous processing power (sufficient for the occult mathematics of
astrogation), and rendered the spectacle of that long, slow trip. Across
Rathere's vision it accelerated passing days and wheeling stars until they
were invisible flickers. It hummed the subliminal pulse of seasonal change and
painted the sprightly jitter of rivers changing course, the slow but visible
dance of mountainous cousins.
"Yes," Rathere said softly, her voice turned breathy. The AI savored the
dilation of her pupils, the spiderwebs of red blossoming on her cheeks. Then