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.
齐玛实在是太出名了，就连对艺术毫无兴趣的人都知道他的名字。他是那个创造巨型蓝色建筑物的古怪半机械人，那个从来不声明或者暗示自己艺术作品内涵的画家。
但那已经是几百年前的事了，齐玛越来越能折腾，后来连行星都无法容纳这么笨重的巨型画作了。齐玛干脆搬到星际空间里，锻造出了方圆几万公里的蓝色画卷。这些画卷可以在太空中自由漂浮。而且他不再用画笔和颜料了，而是雇佣了采矿机器人舰队，把小行星炸碎，把碎片作为原料来作画。赞助商的财力已经远远不够了，而是各个恒星系经济体来争夺齐玛作品的展览权。
也就是这个时候，我重新对齐玛有了兴趣。我出席了他的一个“月亮包裹”项目的新闻发布会，项目计划在整个星球周围建造外壳，形成一个有盖子的蓝色容器，就像是一顶帽子放进盒子里。两个月之后，他在行星的整个赤道带释放了大量的蓝色气体，当时我也在场。六个月后，他在一颗掠日彗星的表面增加了某种蓝色的化学物质，如此一来这颗彗星就能拖着齐玛蓝的尾巴跨越整个太阳系。但我觉得这些新闻并不值得做文章。我一次次地邀请他接受采访，但是一次次地被回绝。我所知道的就是齐玛对蓝色的痴迷已经超过了艺术创作本身。但是如果不能彻底地理解他的这种痴迷，就不能写出真正有意义的报道，顶多是奇闻异事。
我从来不写奇闻异事。
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