"Robert Reed - Camouflage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Robert)

name, and everybody knew it. He had a biography, thorough and easily observed in the public records.
But there were at least a dozen alternate versions of his past and left-behind troubles. He was a failed
poet, or a dangerously successful poet, or a refugee who had escaped some political mess тАФunless he
was some species of criminal, of course. One certainty was his financial security; but where his money
came from was a subject of considerable debate. Inherited, some claimed. Others voted for gambling
winnings or lucrative investments on now-distant colony worlds. Whatever the story, the man had the
luxury of filling his days doing very little, and during his years on this obscure avenue, he had helped his
neighbors with unsolicited gifts of money and sometimes more impressive flavors of aid.

Thirty-two years was not a long time. Not for the creatures that routinely traveled between the stars.
Most of the ship's passengers and all of its crew were ageless souls, durable and disease-free, with
enhanced minds possessing a stability and depth of memory ready to endure a million years of
comfortable existence. Which was why three decades was little different than an afternoon, and why for
another century or twenty, locals would still refer to their neighbor as the newcomer.

Such was life onboard the Great Ship.

There were millions of avenues like this one. Some were short enough to walk in a day, while others
stretched for thousands of uninterrupted kilometers. Many avenues remained empty, dark and cold as
when humans first discovered the Great Ship. But some had been awakened, made habitable to human
owners or the oddest alien passengers. Whoever built the shipтАФpresumably an ancient, long-extinct
species тАФ it had been designed to serve as home for a wide array of organisms. That much was obvious.
And there was no other starship like the Great Ship: larger than most worlds and durable enough to
survive eons between the galaxies, and to almost every eye, lovely.

The wealthiest citizens from thousands of worlds had surrendered fortunes for the pleasure of riding
inside this fabulous machine, embarking on a half-million-year voyage to circumnavigate the galaxy.
Even the poorest passenger living in the tiniest of quarters looked on the majesty of his grand home and
felt singularly blessed.

This particular avenue was almost a hundred kilometers long and barely two hundred meters across. And
it was tilted. Wastewater made a shallow river that sang its way across a floor of sugar-and-pepper
granite. For fifty thousand years, the river had flowed without interruption, etching out a shallow
channel. Locals had built bridges at the likely places, and along the banks they erected tubs and pots
filled with soils that mimicked countless worlds, giving roots and sessile feet happy places to stand. A
large pot rested outside the man's front doorтАФa vessel made of ceramic foam trimmed with polished
brass and covering nearly a tenth of a hectare. When the man first arrived, he poisoned the old jungle
and planted another. But he wasn't much of a gardener, apparently. The new foliage hadn't prospered,
weed species and odd volunteers emerging from the ruins.

Along the pot's edge stood a ragged patch of llano vibra тАФ an alien flower famous for its wild haunting


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 Reed, Robert - Camouflage

songs. "I should cut that weed out of there," he would tell neighbors. "I pretty much hate the racket it's
making." Yet he didn't kill them or tear out the little voice boxes. And after a decade or two of hearing
his complaints, his neighbors began to understand that he secretly enjoyed their complicated, utterly
alien melodies.