Zima Blue and Other Stories

  'After painting entire planets, isn't this a bit of a let-down?' I asked.

  'Not for me,' Zima said. 'For me this is where the quest ends. This is what it was all leading up to.'

  'A shabby-looking swimming pool?'

  'It's not just any old swimming pool,' he said.

  He walked me around the island, as the sun slipped under the sea and the colours turned ashen.

  'The old murals came from the heart,' Zima said. 'I painted on a huge scale because that was what the subject matter seemed to demand.'

  'It was good work,' I said.

  'It was hack work. Huge, loud, demanding, popular, but ultimately soulless. Just because it came from the heart didn't make it good.'

  I said nothing. That was the way I'd always felt about his work as well: it was as vast and inhuman as its inspiration, and only Zima's cyborg modifications lent his art any kind of uniqueness. It was like praising a painting because it had been done by someone holding a brush between their teeth.

  'My work said nothing about the cosmos that the cosmos wasn't already capable of saying for itself. More importantly, it said nothing about me. So what if I walked in vacuum, or swam in seas of liquid nitrogen? So what if I could see ultraviolet photons, or taste electrical fields? The modifications I inflicted upon myself were gruesome and extreme. But they gave me nothing that a good telepresence drone couldn't offer any artist.'

  'I think you're being a little harsh on yourself,' I said.

  'Not at all. I can say this now because I know that I did eventually create something worthwhile. But when it happened it was completely unplanned.'

  'You mean the blue stuff?'

  'The blue stuff,' he said, nodding. 'It began by accident: a misapplication of colour on a nearly finished canvas. A smudge of pale aquamarine-blue against near-black. The effect was electric. It was as if I had achieved a short circuit to some intense, primal memory, a realm of experience where that colour was the most important thing in my world.'

  'What was that memory?'

  'I didn't know. All I knew was the way that colour spoke to me, as if I'd been waiting my whole life to find it, to set it free.' He thought for a moment. 'There's always been something about blue. A thousand years ago Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours. A man once spent his entire life searching for a particular shade of blue that he remembered encountering in childhood. He began to despair of ever finding it, thinking he must have imagined that precise shade, that it could not possibly exist in nature. Then one day he chanced upon it. It was the colour of a beetle in a museum of natural history. He wept for joy.'

  'What is Zima Blue?' I asked. 'Is it the colour of a beetle?'

  'No,' he said. 'It's not a beetle. But I had to know the answer, no matter where it took me. I had to know why that colour meant so much to me, and why it was taking over my art.'

  'You allowed it to take over,' I said.

  'I had no choice. As the blue became more intense, more dominant, I felt I was closer to an answer. I felt that if only I could immerse myself in that colour, then I would know everything I desired to know. I would understand myself as an artist.'

  'And? Did you?'

  'I understood myself,' Zima said. 'But it wasn't what I expected.'

  'What did you learn?'

  Zima was a long time answering me. We walked on slowly, me lagging slightly behind his prowling muscular form. It was getting cooler now and I began to wish I'd had the foresight to bring a coat. I thought of asking Zima if he could lend me one, but I was concerned not to derail his thoughts from wherever they were headed. Keeping my mouth shut had always been the toughest part of the job.

  'We talked about the fallibility of memory,' he said.

  'Yes.'

  'My own memory was incomplete. Since the implants were installed I remembered everything, but that only accounted for the last three hundred years of my life. I knew myself to be much older, but of my life before the implants I recalled only fragments; shattered pieces that I did not quite know how to reassemble.' He slowed and turned back to me, the dulling orange light on the horizon catching the side of his face. 'I knew I had to dig back into that past, if I was ever to understand the significance of Zima Blue.'

  'How far back did you get?'

  'It was like archaeology,' he said. 'I followed the trail of my memories back to the earliest reliable event, which occurred shortly after the installation of the implants. This took me to Kharkov Eight, a world in the Garlin Bight, about nineteen thousand light-years from here. All I remembered was the name of a man I had known there, called Cobargo.'

  Cobargo meant nothing to me, but even without the AM I knew something of the Garlin Bight. It was a region of the galaxy encompassing six hundred habitable systems, squeezed between three major economic powers. In the Garlin Bight normal interstellar law did not apply. It was fugitive territory.

  'Kharkov Eight specialised in a certain kind of product,' Zima said. 'The entire planet was geared up to provide medical services of a kind unavailable elsewhere. Illicit cybernetic modifications, that kind of thing.'

  'Is that where . . .' I left the sentence unfinished.

  'That is where I became what I am,' Zima said. 'Of course, I made further changes to myself after my time on Kharkov Eight - improving my tolerance to extreme environments, expanding my sensory capabilities - but the essence of what I am was laid down under the knife in Cobargo's clinic.'

  'So before you arrived on Kharkov Eight you were a normal man?' I asked.

  'This is where it gets difficult,' Zima said, picking his way carefully along the trail. 'Upon my return I naturally tried to locate Cobargo. With his help, I assumed I would be able to make sense of the memory fragments I carried in my head. But Cobargo was gone, vanished elsewhere into the Bight. The clinic remained, but now his grandson was running it.'

  'I bet he wasn't keen on talking.'

  'No; he took some persuading. Thankfully, I had means. A little bribery, a little coercion.' He smiled slightly at that. 'Eventually he agreed to open the clinic records and examine his grandfather's log of my visit.'

  We turned a corner. The sea and the sky were now the same inseparable grey, with no trace of blue remaining.

  'What happened?'

  'The records say that I was never a man,' Zima said. He paused a while before continuing, leaving no doubt as to what he had said. 'Zima never existed before my arrival in the clinic.'

  What I wouldn't have done for a recording drone, or - failing that - a plain old notebook and pen. I frowned, as if that might make my memory work just that little bit harder.

  'Then who were you?'

  'A machine,' he said. 'A complex robot: an autonomous artificial intelligence. I was already centuries old when I arrived on Kharkov Eight, with full legal independence.'

  'No,' I said, shaking my head. 'You're a man with machine parts, not a machine.'

  'The clinic records were very clear. I had arrived as a robot. An androform robot, certainly - but an obvious machine nonetheless. I was dismantled and my core cognitive functions were integrated into a vat-grown biological host body.' With one finger he tapped the pewter side of his skull. 'There's a lot of organic material in here, and a lot of cybernetic machinery. It's difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. Even harder to tell which is the master, and which is the slave.'

  I looked at the figure standing next to me, trying to make the mental leap needed to view him as a machine - albeit a machine with soft, cellular components - rather than a man. I couldn't - not yet.

  I stalled. 'The clinic could have lied to you.'

  'I don't think so. They would have been far happier had I not known.'

  'All right,' I said. 'Just for the sake of argument--'

  'Those were the facts. They were easily verified. I examined the customs records for Kharkov Eight and found that an autonomous robot entity had entered the planet's airspace a few months before the
medical procedure.'

  'Not necessarily you.'

  'No other robot entity had come near the world for decades. It had to be me. More than that, the records also showed the robot's port of origin.'

  'Which was?'

  'A world beyond the Bight. Lintan Three, in the Muara Archipelago.'

  The AM's absence was like a missing tooth. 'I don't know if I know it.'

  'You probably don't. It's no kind of world you'd ever visit by choice. The scheduled lightbreakers don't go there. My only purpose in visiting the place seemed to me--'

  'You went there?'

  'Twice. Once before the procedure on Kharkov Eight, and again recently, to establish where I'd been before Lintan Three. The evidence trail was beginning to get muddy, to say the least . . . but I asked the right kinds of questions, poked at the right kinds of databases, and eventually found out where I'd come from. But that still wasn't the final answer. There were many worlds, and the chain became fainter with each that I visited. But I had persistence on my side.'

  'And money.'

  'And money,' Zima said, acknowledging my remark with a polite little nod. 'That helped incalculably.'

  'So what did you find, in the end?'

  'I followed the trail back to the beginning. On Kharkov Eight I was a quick-thinking machine with human-level intelligence. But I hadn't always been that clever, that complex. I'd been augmented in steps, as time and circumstances allowed.'

  'By yourself?'

  'Eventually, yes. That was when I had autonomy, legal independence. But I had to reach a certain level of intelligence before I was allowed that freedom. Before that, I was a simpler machine . . . like an heirloom or a pet. I was passed from one owner to the next, between generations. They added things to me. They made me cleverer.'

  'How did you begin?'

  'As a project,' he said.

  Zima led me back to the swimming pool. Equatorial night had arrived quickly, and the pool was bathed now in artificial light from the many floods arrayed above the viewing stands. Since we had last seen the pool the robot had finished gluing the final tiles in place.

  'It's ready now,' Zima said. 'Tomorrow it will be sealed, and the day after it will be flooded with water. I'll cycle the water until it attains the necessary clarity.'

  'And then?'

  'I prepare myself for my performance.'

  On the way to the swimming pool he had told me as much as he knew about his origin. Zima had begun his existence on Earth, before I was even born. He had been assembled by a hobbyist, a talented young man with an interest in practical robotics. In those days, the man had been one of many groups and individuals groping towards the hard problem of artificial intelligence.

  Perception, navigation and autonomous problem-solving were the three things that most interested the young man. He had created many robots, tinkering them together from kits, broken toys and spare parts. Their minds - if they could be dignified with such a term - were cobbled from the innards of junked computers, with their simple programmes bulging at the limits of memory and processor speed.

  The young man filled his house with these simple machines, designing each for a particular task. One robot was a sticky-limbed spider that climbed around the walls of his house, dusting the frames of pictures. Another lay in wait for flies and cockroaches. It caught and digested them, using the energy from the chemical breakdown of their biomass to drive itself to another place in the house. Another robot busied itself by repainting the walls of the house over and over, so that the colours matched the changing of the seasons.

  Another robot lived in his swimming pool.

  It toiled endlessly up and down and along the ceramic sides of the pool, scrubbing them clean. The young man could have bought a cheap swimming pool cleaner from a mail-order company, but it amused him to design the robot from scratch, according to his own eccentric design principles. He gave the robot a full-colour vision system and a brain large enough to process the visual data into a model of its surroundings. He allowed the robot to make its own decisions about the best strategy for cleaning the pool. He allowed it to choose when it cleaned and when it surfaced to recharge its batteries via the solar panels grouped on its back. He imbued it with a primitive notion of reward.

  The little pool-cleaner taught the young man a great deal about the fundamentals of robotics design. Those lessons were incorporated into the other household robots, until one of them - a simple household cleaner - became sufficiently robust and autonomous that the young man began to offer it as a kit, via mail-order. The kit sold well, and a year later the young man offered it as a preassembled domestic robot. The robot was a runaway success, and the young man's firm soon became the market leader in domestic robots.

  Within ten years, the world swarmed with his bright, eager machines. He never forgot the little pool-cleaner. Time and again he used it as a test-bed for new hardware, new software. By stages it became the cleverest of all his creations, and the only one that he refused to strip down and cannibalise.

  When he died, the cleaner passed to his daughter. She continued the family tradition, adding cleverness to the little machine. When she died, she passed it to the young man's grandson, who happened to live on Mars.

  'This is the original pool,' Zima said. 'If you hadn't already guessed.'

  'After all this time?' I asked.

  'It's very old. But ceramics endure. The hardest part was finding it in the first place. I had to dig through two metres of topsoil. It was in a place they used to call Silicon Valley.'

  'These tiles are coloured Zima Blue,' I said.

  'Zima Blue is the colour of the tiles,' he gently corrected. '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 tightly 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 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.

  That was what they thought.

  But I knew the truth. I knew it as I watched Zima stand at the edge of the pool and surrender himself to the blue. He'd told me exactly how it would happen: the slow, methodical shutting-down of higher-brain functions. It hardly mattered that it was all irreversible: there wouldn't be enough of him left to regret what he had lost.

  But something would remain - a little kernel of being - enough of a mind to recognise its own existence. Enough of a mind to appreciate its surroundings, and to extract some trickle of pleasure and contentment from the execution of a task, no matter how purposeless. He wouldn't ever need to leave the pool. The solar patches would provide him with all the energy he needed. He would never age, never grow ill. Other machines would take care of his island, protecting the pool and its silent, slow swimmer from the ravages of weather and time.

  Centuries would pass.

  Thousands o
f years, and then millions.

  Beyond that, it was anyone's guess. But the one thing I knew was that Zima would never tire of his task. There was no capacity left in his mind for boredom. He had become pure experience. If he experienced any kind of joy in the swimming of the pool, it was the near-mindless euphoria of a pollinating insect. That was enough for him. It had been enough for him in that pool in California, and it was enough for him now, a thousand years later, in the same pool but on another world, around another sun, in a distant part of the same galaxy.