Most of the creatures' bodies were hidden underground, their secrets teased out with deep radar and gravitic density imaging. The visible portion was a kind of eye-stalk, cutting the surface like the dorsal fin of a dolphin breaking into the air.
Isaah was here to steal their stories. He was a scoop.
"How long until we leave here?" Rathere asked.
"That's for your father to decide," the AI answered.
"But when will he decide?"
"When the right scoop comes."
"When will that come?"
This sort of mildly recursive loop had once frustrated the AI's conversational packages. Rathere's speech patterns were those of a child younger than her years, the result of traveling among obscure, Outward worlds with only her taciturn father and the AI for company. Rathere never formulated what she wanted to know succinctly, she reeled off questions from every direction, attacking an issue like a host of small predators taking down a larger animal. Her AI companion could only fend her off with answers until (often unexpectedly) Rathere was satisfied.
"When there is a good story here, your father will decide to go."
"Like what story?"
"He doesn't know yet."
She nodded her head. From her galvanic skin response, her pupils, the gradual slowing of her heart, the AI saw that it had satisfied her. But still another question came.
"Why didn't you just say so?"
In the Expansion, information traveled no faster than transportation, and scoops like Isaah enriched themselves by being first with news. The standard transmission network employed small, fast drone craft that moved among the stars on a fixed schedule. The drones promulgated news throughout the Expansion with a predictable and neutral efficiency, gathering information to centralized nodes, dispersing it by timetable. Scoops like Isaah, on the other hand, were inefficient, unpredictable, and, most importantly, unfair. They cut 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 Rathere ignored the machine. She named the creatures, inventing secret missions for them that unfolded while the human population slept, like statues springing to life when no one was watching.
Ultimately, the AI was won over by Rathere's stories, her insistence that the creatures were knowable. Her words painted expressions, names, and passions upon them; she made them live by fiat. The AI's pedagological software did not object to storytelling, so it began to participate in Rathere's fantasies. It nurtured her invisibly slow world, kept order and consistency, remembering names, plots, places. And eventually it began to give the stories credence, suspending disbelief. Finally, the stories' truth was as integral to the AI as the harm-prevention protocols or logical axioms deepwired in its code.
For Isaah, however, there was no scoop here on Petraveil. The lithomorphs continued their immortal dance in silence. Again they had failed to come to life for him. And elections were approaching in a nearby system, a situation that always created sudden, unexpected cargos of information. Isaah instructed the AI to set a course there, reluctantly abandoning the stone figures' wisdom for the unsettling contingencies of politics.
The night that Rathere and Isaah left Petraveil, the AI hushed her crying with tales of how her invented narratives had unfolded, as if the statues had sprung to human-speed life once left behind. As it navigated her father's small ship, the AI offered this vision to Rathere: she had been a visitor to a frozen moment, but the story continued.