Zima Blue 齐马蓝 26

"Zima Blue is the colour of the tiles," he corrected gently. "It just happened to be the shade that the young man used for his swimming pool tiles." 

"Then some part of you remembered." 

"This was where I began. A crude little machine with barely enough intelligence to steer itself around a swimming pool. But it was my world. It was all I knew; all I needed to know." 

"And now?" I asked, already fearing the answer. 

"Now I'm going home."

I was there when he did it. By then the stands were full of people who had arrived to watch the performance, and the sky over the island was a mosaic of tight-packed hovering ships. The distortion screen had been turned off, and the viewing platforms on the ships thronged with hundreds of thousands of distant witnesses. They could see the swimming pool by then, its water mirror-flat and gin-clear. They could see Zima standing at the edge, with the solar patches on his back glinting like snake scales. None of the viewers had any idea of what was about to happen, or its significance. They were expecting something—-the public unveiling of a work that would presumably trump everything Zima had created before then—but they could only stare in puzzled concern at the pool, wondering how it could possibly measure up to those atmosphere-piercing canvases, or those entire worlds wrapped in shrouds of blue. They kept thinking that the pool had to be a diversion. The real work of art- the piece that would herald his retirement —must be somewhere else, as yet unseen, waiting to be revealed in all its immensity. 

“其实齐玛蓝就是这些瓷砖的颜色。”他很有礼貌地更正道，“齐玛蓝就是当初年轻人家里的游泳池瓷砖的颜色。”  

“也是你记忆中最深刻的一部分。”  

“这就是我诞生的地方。我就是当年那个智力只够让自己绕着游泳池转的粗糙的小机器人。但这个游泳池才是我的世界。它是我知道的一切，也是我唯一要知道的一切。”  

“那么现在呢？”我问道。其实我很害怕这个问题的答案。

“现在我要回家。”  

他这么做的时候我就在场。那一天看台上座无虚席，大家都来看齐玛最后的表演。小岛的上空挤满了满了悬停的飞船。遮盖在小岛上的曲面屏幕已经关闭，连飞船上的看台都挤满了成千上万远道而来的目击者。他们站在飞船上就能看到游泳池，游泳池里的水像镜子一样平静、像杜松子酒一样清澈。他们看到齐玛站在游泳池的边缘，背上装满了像鳞片一样的太阳能电池板。没有人知道将会发生什么事，也没有人明白齐玛的举动究竟有什么意义。他们期待在这个揭幕式上，齐玛会展出他所有作品中的王牌；然而现在他们只能迷惑地盯着游泳池。跟齐玛的那些大气磅礴的巨幅画作、那些把整个星球都包裹起来的蓝色画卷相比，这个小小的游泳池根本就不合格。他们一直在想，这个游泳池肯定是个障眼法。真正的作品——真正预示他退休的作品——一定在其他什么地方，只是现在还看不见，马上这幅鸿篇巨作就会出现在世人的面前。