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

across the concentric web of the drone network, skipping junctions, skimming
profits. Isaah would recognize that the discovery of a mineable asteroid here
might affect the heavy element market there, and jump straight between the two
points, beating the faster but fastidious drones by a few precious hours. A
successful scoop knew the markets on many planets, had acquaintance with
aggressive investors and unprincipled speculators. Sometimes, the scooped news
of a celebrity's death, surprise marriage, or arrest could be sold for its
entertainment value. And some scoops were information pirates. Isaah had
himself published numerous novels by Seth-mare Viin, his favorite author,
machine-translated en route by the starship AI. In some systems, Isaah's
version had been available weeks before the authorized edition.
The peripatetic life of a scoop had taken Isaah and Rathere throughout the
Expansion, but he always returned to Petraveil. His refined instincts for a
good scoop told him something was happening here. The fantastically slow
natives must be doing something. He would spend a few weeks, sometimes a few
months watching the stone creatures, wondering what they were up to. Isaah
didn't know what it might be, but he felt that one day they would somehow come
to life.
And that would be a scoop.
"How long do the lithomorphs live?"
"No one knows."
"What do they eat?"
"They don't really eat at all. They—"
"What's that one doing?"
The minder accessed the planetary library, plumbing decades of research on the
creatures. But not quickly enough to answer before-
"What do they think about us?" Rathere asked. "Can they see us?"
To that, it had no answer.
Perhaps the lithos had noticed the whirring creatures around them, or more
likely had spotted the semi-permanent buildings around the square. But the
lithomorphs' reaction to the sudden human invasion produced only a vague,
cosmic worry, like knowing one's star will collapse in a few billion years.
For Rathere, though, the lives of the lithomorphs were far more immediate.
Like the AI minder, they were mentors, imaginary friends.
Their immobility had taught her to watch for the slightest of movements: the
sweep of an analog clock's minute hand, the transformation of a high cirrus
cloud, the slow descent of the planet's old red sun behind the northern
mountains. Their silence taught her to read lips, to make messages in the
rippled skirts of stone and metal that flowed in their wakes. She found a
patient irony in their stances. They were wise, but it wasn't the wisdom of an
ancient tree or river; rather, they seemed to possess the reserve of a
watchfully silent guest at a party.
Rathere told stories about them to the starship's AI. Tales of their fierce,
glacial battles, of betrayal on the mating trail, of the creatures' slow
intrigues against the human colonists of Petraveil, millennia-long plots of
which every chapter lasted centuries.
At first, the AI gently interrupted her to explain the facts: the limits of
scientific understanding. The lithomorphs were removed through too many orders
of magnitude in time, too distant on that single axis ever to be comprehended.
The four decades they'd been studied were mere seconds of their history. But