The conveyor shed altitude and speed, bobbing down until it stopped just outside the area enclosed by the viewing stands. It came to rest next to a low white pebble-dash chalet I hadn’t noticed during our approach.
The robot stepped out and helped me from the conveyor.
“Zima will be here in a moment,” it said, before returning to the conveyor and vanishing back into the sky.
Suddenly I felt very alone and very vulnerable. A breeze came in from the sea, blowing sand into my eyes. The sun was creeping down toward the horizon and soon it would be getting chilly. Just when I was beginning to feel the itch of panic, a man emerged from the chalet, rubbing his hands briskly. He walked toward me, following a path of paved stones.
“Glad you could make it, Carrie.”
It was Zima, of course, and in a flash I felt foolish for doubting that he would show his face.
“Hi,” I said lamely.
Zima offered his hand. I shook it, feeling the slightly plastic texture of his artificial skin. Today it was a dull pewter-grey.
“Let’s go and sit on the balcony. It’s nice to watch the sunset, isn’t it?”
“Nice,” I agreed.
He turned his back to me and set off in the direction of the chalet. As he walked, his muscles flexed and bulged beneath the pewter flesh. There were scale-like glints in the skin on his back, as if it had been set with a mosaic of reflective chips. He was beautiful like a statue, muscular like a panther. He was a handsome man, even after all his transformations, but I had never heard of him taking a lover, or having any kind of a private life at all. His art was everything.
I followed him, feeling awkward and tongue-tied. Zima led me into the chalet, through an old-fashioned kitchen and an old-fashioned lounge, full of thousand-year-old furniture and ornaments.
“How was the flight?”
“Fine.”
He stopped suddenly and turned to face me. “I forgot to check… did the robot insist that you leave behind your Aide Memoire?”
“Yes.”
“Good. It was you I wanted to talk to, Carrie, not some surrogate recording device.”
“Me?”
The pewter mask of his face formed a quizzical expression. “Do you do multisyllables, or are you still working up to that?”
“Er…”
“Relax,” he said. “I’m not here to test you, or humiliate you, or anything like that. This isn’t a trap, and you’re not in any danger. You’ll be back in Venice by midnight.”
“I’m okay,” I managed. “Just a bit starstruck.”
“Well, you shouldn’t be. I’m hardly the first celebrity you’ve met, am I?”
“Well, no, but…”
“People find me intimidating,” he said. “They get over it eventually, and then wonder what all the fuss was about.”
“Why me?”
“Because you kept asking nicely,” Zima said.
“Be serious.”
“All right. There’s a bit more to it than that, although you did ask nicely. I’ve enjoyed much of your work over the years. People have often trusted you to set the record straight: especially near the ends of their lives.”
“You talked about retiring, not dying.”
“Either way, it would still be a withdrawal from public life. Your work has always seemed truthful to me, Carrie. I’m not aware of anyone claiming misrepresentation through your writing.”
“It happens now and then,” I said. “That’s why I always make sure there’s an AM on hand so no one can dispute what was said.”
“That won’t matter with my story,” Zima said.
I looked at him shrewdly. “There’s something else, isn’t there? Some other reason you pulled my name out of the hat.”
“I’d like to help you,” he said.
When most people speak about his Blue Period they mean the era of the truly huge murals. By huge I do mean huge. Soon they had become large enough to dwarf buildings and civic spaces; large enough to be visible from orbit. Across the Galaxy twenty-kilometre-high sheets of blue towered over private islands or rose from storm-wracked seas. Expense was never a problem, since Zima had many rival sponsors who competed to host his latest and biggest creation. The panels kept on growing, until they required complex, Sloth-tech machinery to hold them aloft against gravity and weather. They pierced the tops of planetary atmospheres, jutting into space. They glowed with their own soft light. They curved around in arcs and fans, so that the viewer’s entire visual field was saturated with blue.
By now Zima was hugely famous, even to people who had no particular interest in art. He was the weird cyborg celebrity who made huge blue structures; the man who never gave interviews or hinted at the private significance of his art.
But that was a hundred years ago. Zima wasn’t even remotely done.
Eventually the structures became too unwieldy to be hosted on planets. Blithely Zima moved into interplanetary space, forging vast free-floating sheets of blue ten thousand kilometres across. Now he worked not with brushes and paint, but with fleets of mining robots, tearing apart asteroids to make the raw material for his creations. Now it was entire stellar economies that competed with each other to host Zima’s work.
That was about the time that I renewed my interest in Zima. I attended one of his “moonwrappings”: the enclosure of an entire celestial body in a lidded blue container, like a hat going into a box. Two months later he stained the entire equatorial belt of a gas giant blue, and I had a ringside seat for that as well. Six months later he altered the surface chemistry of a sun-grazing comet so that it daubed a Zima Blue tail across an entire solar system. But I was no closer to a story. I kept asking for an interview and kept being turned down. All I knew was that there had to be more to Zima’s obsession with blue than a mere artistic whim. Without an understanding of that obsession, there was no story: just anecdote.
I didn’t do anecdote.
So I waited, and waited. And then—like millions of others —I heard about Zima’s final work of art, and made my way to the fake Venice on Murjek. I wasn’t expecting an interview, or any new insights. I just had to be there.
We stepped through sliding glass doors out onto the balcony. Two simple white chairs sat either side of a white table. The table was set with drinks and a bowl of fruit. Beyond the unfenced balcony, arid land sloped steeply away, offering an uninterrupted view of the sea. The water was calm and inviting, with the lowering sun reflected like a silver coin.
Zima indicated that I should take one of the seats. His hand dithered over two bottles of wine.
“Red or white, Carrie?”
I opened my mouth as if to answer him, but nothing came. Normally, in that instant between the question and the response, the AM would have silently directed my choice to one of the two options. Not having the AM’s prompt felt like a mental stall in my thoughts.
“Red, I think,” Zima said. “Unless you have strong objections.”
“It’s not that I can’t decide these things for myself,” I said.
Zima poured me a glass of red, then held it up to the sky to inspect its clarity. “Of course not,” he said.