"Alastair Reynolds - Zima Blue" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

Not everyone agreed, obviously, or else Zima wouldn't have sold as many works as he had. But I
couldn't help wondering how many people were buying the pictures because of what they knew about
the artist, rather than because of any intrinsic merit in the works themselves.

That was how things stood when I first paid attention to Zima. I filed him away as interesting but kitschy:
maybe worth a story if something else happened to either him or his art.
Something did, but it took a while for anyone тАФincluding me тАФto notice.

One dayтАФafter a longer than usual gestation periodтАФZima unveiled a mural that had something different
about it. It was a picture of a swirling, star-pocked nebula, from the vantage point of an airless rock.
Perched on the rim of a crater in the middle distance, blocking off part of the nebula, was a tiny blue
square. At first glance it looked as if the canvas had been washed blue and Zima had simply left a small
area unpainted. There was no solidity to the square; no detail or suggestion of how it related to the
landscape or the backdrop. It cast no shadow and had no tonal influence on the surrounding colours. But
the square was deliberate: close examination showed that it had indeed been overpainted over the rocky
lip of the crater. It meant something.

The square was just the beginning. Thereafter, every mural that Zima released to the outside world
contained a similar geometric shape: a square, triangle, oblong or some similar form embedded
somewhere in the composition. It was a long time before anyone noticed that the shade of blue was the
same from picture to picture.

It was Zima Blue: the same shade of blue as on the gold-lettered card.

Over the next decade or so, the abstract shapes became more dominant, squeezing out the other
elements of each composition. The cosmic vistas ended up as narrow borders, framing blank circles,
triangles, rectangles. Where his earlier work had been characterised by exuberant brushwork and thick
layers of paint, the blue forms were rendered with mirror-smoothness.

Intimidated by the intrusion of the abstract blue forms, casual buyers turned away from Zima. Before very
long Zima unveiled the first of his entirely blue murals. Large enough to cover the side of a
thousand-storey building, the mural was considered by many to be as far as Zima could take things.

They couldn't have been more wrong.

I felt the conveyor slowing as we neared a small island, the only feature in any direction.

"You're the first to see this," the robot said. "There's a distortion screen blocking the view from space."

The island was about a kilometre across: low and turtle-shaped, ringed by a narrow collar of pale sand.
Near the middle it rose to a shallow plateau, on which vegetation had been cleared in a roughly
rectangular area. I made out a small panel of reflective blue set flat against the ground, surrounded by
what appeared to be a set of tiered viewing stands.

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.