"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 to ever understand the significance of Zima Blue." 

"How far back did you get?" 

"It was the 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 8, 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 8 specialized 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. 

“是的。”  

“我自己的记忆并不完整。从移植了人工记忆之后的每件事我都记得，但这段时间只是我人生中最近的三百年。我知道自己肯定不止三百岁，但是移植之前的人生，我只记得一些片段。我不知道如何才能把这些破碎的记忆重新组合起来。他慢慢地转过身来，地平线上的最后一缕橙色的余晖照在他的脸上。“我知道自己必须深入挖掘那段过去，才能真正理解齐玛蓝的特殊意义。”　

“那你挖掘到什么程度？”  

“就像是考古一样，”他说，“我必须从记忆中最早的可靠事件中找线索，就是在我植入了人工记忆之后的短暂时间内发生的事情。我的记忆回到了哈尔科夫 8 号星球，那是位于格尔林湾星区的一颗行星，距离这里有一万九千光年。那里我唯一记得是一个我认识的男人的名字——科巴哥。”  

科巴哥我是没听说过，但是格尔林湾我还是知道的，不用查询备忘录助手都知道。那是银河系里一片拥有六百个可居住行星系、由三大经济势力掌控的星域。在格尔林湾，正规的星际法律完全不适用。那里完全是亡命之徒的领地。

“哈尔科夫 8 号星球专门提供一种产品。”齐玛说。整个星球都在提供其他地方根本得不到的私人医疗服务。那就是非法神经机械改造。”  

“那里就是你……”我没敢继续说。

"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. 

“那你的齐玛蓝了？”我问，“也是甲壳虫的颜色？”  

“不，”他说，“不是甲壳虫的颜色。但是我必须要知道答案，不管付出什么样的代价。我必须要知道为什么这种蓝色对我有这么重要的意义，为什么它会控制了我的艺术创作。”  

“你允许它控制自己？”我说。

“我没有选择的余地。随着这种蓝色变得越来越强烈、越来越占优势，我感觉自己越来越接近答案了。我觉得只有把自己沉浸到这种颜色中，才能发现我渴望知道的所有事。作为一个艺术家，我必须真正理解我自己。”  

“那你理解了吗？”  

“我理解我自己。”齐玛说。“但却不是我预计的那样。”  

“你发现了什么？”  

等了很长一段时间，齐玛才慢慢回答。我们继续慢慢地向前走，我略微拖在他那肌肉发达的身体后面。天气开始变凉了，我真希望之前自己能有先见之明，带一件大衣。我考虑向齐玛借一件大衣，但我必须要专注，不能脱离齐玛的思路，不然都不知道是从哪儿开头的。闭上嘴永远都是工作中最艰难的部分。

“我们刚刚谈过记忆的易错性。”他说。

"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 l 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." 

“我的作品并不能告诉人们宇宙的某种讯息，因为宇宙本身并不会透露任何讯息。更重要的是，我的作品也不会透露任何关于我的情况。这些画跟我能在真空中走、在液氮海洋里游泳有什么关系？跟我能够看见紫外线、感知电磁场又有什么关系？在我身上实施的改造是极端残忍的。这些改造不能给我带来任何东西，就像是一个远程观测无人机并不能变成艺术家。  

“我觉得你对自己是不是有点太苛刻了。”我说。

“一点都不。我能这样说是因为我知道自己曾经创造出一些有价值的事物。但是它的发生是我完全预料不到的。”  

“你指的是齐玛蓝？”  

“齐玛蓝，”他点点头说。“它的出现是个意外：在一幅差不多完成的画布上用错了颜色。一块苍白的污点，颜色介于宝石蓝与墨绿色之间。然而这块污点似乎是带了电的，我感觉自己的大脑瞬间短路了，激起了某种强烈的、原始的记忆。我有一种感觉：这种颜色曾经是我生命中最重要的东西。”  

“那是一种什么样的记忆？”  

Zima led me to the edge. 

"A swimming pool," I said. "You weren't kidding. Is this what the stands are all about?" 

"This is where it will happen," Zima said. "The unveiling of my final work of art, and my retirement from public life." 

The pool wasn't quite finished. In the far comer, a small yellow robot glued ceramic tiles into place. The part near us was fully tiled, but I couldn't help noticing that the tiles were chipped and cracked in places. The afternoon light made it hard to be sure—we were in deep shadow now—but their colour looked to be very close to Zima Blue. 

"After painting entire planets, isn't this is a bit of a letdown?" 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 hard 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: that it was as vast and inhuman as its inspiration, and only Zima's cyborg modifications learnt 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. 

 齐玛领着我来到游泳池的边缘。  

“一个游泳池。”我说，“你不会开玩笑吧。建这么多看台就是为了这个游泳池？”  

“这就是揭幕式举办的地方。”齐玛说。“我将在这里揭开我的最后一件作品，然后从公共生活中退休。”  

游泳池还没有全部完成。在远处的角落里，一个小型的黄色机器人还在那里帖瓷砖。靠近我们这边的部分都已经贴好了瓷砖，但我还是发现有些地方的瓷砖有破损或者裂痕。夕阳的余晖有些暗淡，我也看不清自己是不是在阴影中，但是那些瓷砖的颜色看上去跟齐玛蓝非常接近。

“跟那些能占据整个星球的画作相比，这是不是有点档次太低了？”我问道。

“对我来说不是这样。”齐玛说。“对我来说，这里是探索结束的地方。这里也是一切开始的地方。”  

“一个寒碜的游泳池？”  

“这不仅仅是一个古老的游泳池。”他说。

他和我一起绕着小岛散步。太阳即将沉入大海，一切颜色都变得苍白。

“过去我的画作的灵感来源于心灵。”齐玛说。“我之所以画出那么大规模的画作，是因为那是主题的需要。”  

“画得非常棒。”我说。

"Fallible," I said. 

"But without fallibility there is no art. And without art there is no truth." 

"Fallibility leads to truth? That's a good one." 

"I mean truth in the higher, metaphoric sense. That golden afternoon? That was the truth. Remembering the fly wouldn't have added to it in any material sense. It would have detracted it from it." 

"There was no afternoon, there was no fly," I said. Finally, my patience had reached breaking point. 

"Look, I’m grateful to have been invited here. But I thought there might be a little more to this than a lecture about the way I choose to manage my own memories." 

"Actually," Zima said, "there was a point to this after all. And it is about me, but it's also about you." He put down the glass. "Shall we take a little walk? I‘d like to show you the swimming pool." 

"The sun hasn't gone down yet," I said. 

Zima smiled. "There'll always be another one." 

He took me on a different route through the house, leaving by a different door than the one we'd come in by. A meandering path climbed gradually between white stone walls, bathed now in gold from the lowering sun. Presently we reached the flat plateau I’d seen on my approach in the conveyor. The things I’d thought were viewing stands were exactly that: terraced structures about thirty metres high, with staircases at the back leading to the different levels. Zima led me into the darkening shadow under the nearest stand, then through a private door that led into the enclosed area. The blue panel I'd seen during the approach turned out to be a modest rectangular swimming pool, drained of water. 

“易错性。”我说，“但是没有易错性就没有艺术，没有艺术就没有事实。”齐玛继续说道。  

“易错性指引事实？这个说法真不错。”我感觉很意外。

“我所说的事实是指更高层次的、比喻意义上的事实。那个金色的下午？那确实是事实。你所记住的苍蝇不会附加任何物质上的意义。它会被提取出来从记忆中分离。”  

“没有下午就没有苍蝇。”我说。最终我的耐心已经到达了爆发的极限。“我很感激你能邀请我倒这儿来。但是我到这儿来不是来听你给我讲如何选择人工记忆的。我觉得总该谈点其他事情吧。”  

“实际上我要跟你谈的内容最终都会归结到这一点上。不仅关系到我，而且关系到你。”他放下玻璃杯。“我们去散散步，好吗？我要带你去看看游泳池。”  

“太阳已经下山了。”我说。

齐玛笑着说：“太阳总会升起的。”  

"It might not have had anything to do with my choice of wine," I said. 

"No," Zima agreed. "And the AM certainly wouldn't attach any significance to that one happy combination of circumstances. A single deviation wouldn't affect its predictive model to any significant degree. It would still say 'red wine' the next time you asked."

I felt an uncomfortable tingle of understanding. "But human memory wouldn't work that way." 

"No. It would latch onto that one exception and attach undue significance to it. It would amplify the attractive parts of the memory of that afternoon and suppress the less pleasant parts: the fly that kept buzzing in your face, your anxiety about catching the boat home, and the birthday present you knew you had to buy in the morning. All you'd remember was that golden glow of well-being. The next time, you might well choose white, and the time after. An entire pattern of behaviour would have been altered by one instance of deviation. The AM would never tolerate that. You'd have to go against its advice many, many times before it grudgingly updated its model and started suggesting white rather than red." 

"All right," I said, still wishing we could talk about Zima rather than me. "But what practical difference does it make whether the artificial memory is inside my head or outside?" 

"All the difference in the world," Zima said. "The memories stored in the AM are fixed for eternity. You can query it as often as you like, but it will never enhance or omit a single detail. But the implants work differently. They're designed to integrate seamlessly with biological memory, to the point where the recipient can't tell the difference. For that very reason they're necessarily plastic, malleable, subject to error and distortion." 

“这跟我选择什么酒没什么关系吧。”我说。  

“确实没有，”齐玛赞同道。“备忘录助手肯定不会把这样一个令人开心的阴差阳错当成是一种特例，应该把这个特例单独记录下来，供下次参考。这样一个小小的偏差并不会对它的预测模型产生任何重要的影响。下次，它还是会让你选择红酒。”  

我感觉内心突然一阵刺痛，非常不舒服。“但是人类的记忆并不是那样工作的。”  “没错，人类的记忆会牢记这个例外，并且标记上重要意义。它会放大今天下午记忆中吸引人的部分，抑制住不开心的部分：苍蝇一直在你脸周围嗡嗡叫、你在搭船回家时的焦虑心情、以及你知道今天早上不得不去买生日礼物。你所记住的是金色的光辉照耀下的安宁。下一次，你可以随便选择白葡萄酒还是红葡萄酒。以后都随你选。整个行为模式都会因为这个细小的偏差而改变。备忘录助手绝不会容忍那样的事发生。你只有违背它的建议很多次，它才会非常吝啬地更新它的数据模型，然后它才会开始建议你选择白葡萄。”  

“没错。”我说，但我还是希望齐玛能多谈谈他自己，而不是我。“但是移植的人工记忆与外部的人工记忆究竟有多少实际的区别？”  

“Where's the difference? I allow my experiences to be recorded by a machine that accompanies me everywhere I go. The machine misses nothing, and it's so efficient at anticipating my queries that I barely have to ask it anything.“

“The machine is vulnerable. “

“lt's backed up at regular intervals. And it's no more vulnerable than a cluster of implants inside my head. 

Sorry, but that just isn't a reasonable objection. “

“You're right, of course. But there's a deeper argument against the AM. It's too perfect. It doesn't know how to distort or forget. “

“lsn't that the point?”

“Not exactly. When you recall something—this conversation, perhaps, a hundred years from now-there will be things about it that you misremember. Yet those misremembered details will themselves become part of your memory, gaining solidity and texture with each instance of recall. A thousand years from now, your memory of this conversation might bear little resemblance with reality. Yet you'd swear your recollection was accurate. “

"But if the AM had accompanied me, I'd have a flawless record of how things really were." 

"You would," Zima said. "But that isn't living memory. It's photography; a mechanical recording process. It freezes out the imagination; leaves no scope for details to be selectively misremembered." He paused long enough to top up my glass. "Imagine that on nearly every occasion when you had cause to sit outside on an afternoon like this you had chosen red wine over white, and generally had no reason to regret that choice. But on one occasion, for one reason or another, you were persuaded to choose white —against  the judgement of the AM—and it was wonderful. Everything came together magically: the company, the conversation, the late afternoon ambience, the splendid view, the euphoric rush of being slightly drunk. A perfect afternoon turned into a perfect evening." 

“这两种又有什么区别了？我允许我的经历被一个无论到哪里都陪伴着我的机器记录。这台机器从来没有遗漏任何事情，而且它回复我的查询是如此的高效，以至于现在几乎每件事我都要问它。”  

“机器很容易损坏。”  

“它每隔一定时间就会备份数据。而且它总不会比我脑袋里的一大堆神经移植模块更容易损坏吧。对不起冒犯了你，但是机器容易损坏这个反对的理由实在不合理。”  

“当然你是对的。但是对于备忘录助手有更深层次的争论。它太完美了。它不知道如何失真或者遗忘。”“它不就应该这样吗？”  

“不对！当你在几百年后用自己的头脑回忆起我和你的这段对话，肯定有一些事情会记错了。而这些记错的部分也会变成你记忆中的一部分，记错的每个细节会逐渐强化成回忆。一千年之后了，你对这段对话的回忆可能跟真实情况就大相径庭了。然而那时你肯定会发誓，你的回忆是准确的。”  

“但是如果有备忘录助手陪在我的身边，我就能事无巨细地把事情的真相完整地记录下来。”  

“你会的，”齐玛说，“但那不是活生生的记忆。那只是摄影，一个机械记忆的过程。整个记忆里缺乏想象，没有给选择性的遗忘留下任何余地。”他又给我满上了一杯酒。“想象一下，像今天下午这样的场合，你因为某个原因坐在外面，你必须要决定是选择红葡萄酒还是白葡萄酒，还不能后悔自己的选择。但是就这么一次，不管是什么原因，你被人说服去选择白葡萄酒——正好违背了备忘录助手的判断——而且喝了之后你还感觉很好。每件事都被奇妙地组合在一起：这段谈话、夕阳西下的氛围、壮丽的风景、微醺的快感。一个完美的下午逐渐变成了完美的傍晚。”   

"And you follow that advice unquestioningly?" 

I sipped at the red. "Of course. Wouldn't it be a little childish to go against it just to make a point about free will? After all, I'm more likely to be satisfied with the choice it suggests."

"But unless you ignore that suggestion now and then, won't your whole life become a set of predictable responses?" 

"Maybe," I said. "But is that so very bad? If l'm happy, what do I care?" 

''I'm not criticizing you," Zima said. He smiled and leaned back in his seat, defusing some of the tension caused by his line of questioning. "Not many people have an AM these days, do they?" 

"I wouldn't know," I said. 

"Less than one percent of the entire Galactic population." Zima sniffed his wine and looked through the glass at the sky. “ Almost everyone else out there has accepted the inevitable.”

“lt takes machines to manage a thousand years of memory. So what?”

But a different order of machine, “Zima said. “Neural implants; fully integrated into the participant's sense of self. Indistinguishable from biological memory. You wouldn't need to query the AM about your choice of wine; you wouldn't need to wait for that confirmatory whisper. You'd just know it.”

“然后你会无条件地接受它的建议？”  

我啜了一口红酒。“当然。如果只是为了表明自己具有自由意志，而去违背它的建议，那么我是不是有点太孩子气了？不管怎么说，根据它的建议进行选择，更能让我感到满意。”  

“但是这样的话你的整个人生不就成了一系列可以预见的反馈吗？除非你忽略它的建议。”  

“也许是吧。”我说，“但也没那么糟糕吧？只要我开心，我才不管了。”  

“我不是有意为难你。”齐玛说。他微笑着把身体靠在椅背上。在质问了我一系列问题之后，他想舒缓一下紧张的气氛。“现在拥有备忘录助手的人也不是很多吧？”  

“我不知道。”我说，

“不超过整个银河系人口的百分之一吧。”齐玛又闻了闻他的葡萄酒，透过玻璃杯看着天空。“外面几乎每一个人都已经接受了备忘录助手，都认为这是不可避免的。”  

“让机器管理一千年的记忆，这有什么不可？“我反问道。

“但是另外一种机器，”齐玛说，“神经移植，完全整合进参与者的自我感觉。和生物性记忆融为一体，无法分辨。你不需要询问备忘录助手如何选择酒；你也不需要等待确认的提示。你肯定懂的。”   

Zima poured himself a glass of the red wine, but instead of drinking it he merely sniffed the bouquet. 

"Yes." 

"But there isn't anything natural about being alive a thousand years after I was born," I said. "My organic memory reached saturation point about seven hundred years ago. My head's like a house with too much furniture. Move something in, you have to move something out." 

"Let's go back to the wine for a moment," Zima said. "Normally, you'd have relied on the advice of the AM, wouldn't you?" 

I shrugged. "Yes." 

"Would the AM always suggest one of the two possibilities? Always red wine, or always white wine, for instance?" 

"It's not that simplistic," I said. "If I had a strong preference for one over the other, then, yes, the AM would always recommend one wine over the other. But I don't. I like red wine sometimes and white wine other times. Sometimes I don't want any kind of wine." I hoped my frustration wasn't obvious. But after the elaborate charade with the blue card, the robot and the conveyor, the last thing I wanted to be discussing with Zima was my own imperfect recall. 

"Then it's random?" he asked. "The AM would have been just as likely to say red as white?" 

"No, it's not like that either. The AM's been following me around for hundreds of years. It's seen me drink wine a few hundred thousand times, under a few hundred thousand different circumstances. It knows, with a high degree of reliability, what my best choice of wine would be given any set of parameters." 

齐玛给自己倒了一杯红酒，当然他不会喝的，只是闻了闻酒香。“是的。”  

“可是我已经活了一千年了，这本身就不自然啊。”我说，“我的机体觉记忆在七百年前就已经到了饱和点，我的脑袋就像一个放了太多家具的房子。想要搬进去一些东西，你就必须先把一些东西搬出来。”“我们还是先回到酒的问题上。”齐玛说。“通常情况下，你必须依赖备忘录助手的建议，对不对？”  

我耸耸肩说：“是的，”  

“备忘录助手是不是总是选择两种可能性中的特定一种？比如说总是选红葡萄酒，或者总是选白葡萄酒？”  

“不是这么简单化。”我说，“如果我对其中一种酒的偏好更强烈，那么备忘录助手肯定会一直推荐我这种酒。但是我对葡萄酒并没有偏好。有时我喜欢红葡萄酒，有时我又喜欢白葡萄酒。还有的时候，两种酒我都不想要。”我希望自己的挫败感不要那么明显。除了谈谈蓝色卡片、雇佣机器人以及运输机这一系列精心策划的谜语，我最不想和齐玛谈论的就是我自己并不完整的记忆。

“那么就是随机选择喽？”，他问道。“备忘录助手会不会就这么随便选择红葡萄酒或者白葡萄酒呢？”  

“不是，也不是这样的。备忘录助手已经跟了我几百年了。它已经看见我在成千上万种不同的场合，喝了成千上万次葡萄酒。它知道根据最高的可靠程度，给出一系列参数，然后计算出什么才是我最好的选择。”  

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. 

"It's just that this is a little strange for me." 

"It shouldn't be strange," he said. "This is the way you've lived your life for hundreds of years."

"The natural way, you mean?" 

所以我一直在等待，当然还有几百万个同行也一直在等待。所以一听说齐玛的最后一件作品将在穆尔耶克星球的威尼斯揭幕，我就马不停蹄地赶了过来。我并不期待能够采访到他，或者对他的作品有什么新的见解。我只是觉得自己必须要到场亲眼见证。  

我们走上楼梯，穿过滑动玻璃门，来到了阳台上。阳台上有一张白色的桌子，两边各放了一张朴素的椅子。桌上还放了几瓶酒和一盘水果。在这个没有栏杆的阳台上极目远眺，除了我所在的这块险峻的不毛之地，只能看到一望无边的大海，与天相接。海面上风平浪静，在夕阳余晖的照耀下，整个海面就像是一枚银币。

齐玛示意我坐下，他手里拿着两瓶葡萄酒，还在那儿晃悠。

“红葡萄酒还是白葡萄酒，凯莉？”  

我张开嘴想要回答，可是什么都说不出来。通常情况下，在别人提问后、我回答前的一瞬间，备忘录助手会默默地帮我做出选择。没有备忘录助手的提示，我感觉自己的思维停顿了。

“我猜是红酒，”齐玛。“除非你强烈反对。”  

“并不是我不能自己决定这些事情。”我说。

齐玛给我倒了一杯红酒，然后举起杯子对着天空，看看红酒的品质。“当然不是。”他说。

“我只是觉得有点奇怪。”我补充道。

“但是不应该有这样奇怪的感觉。”他说，“几百年前，我们的生活方式不就是这样的吗？”　

“你的意思是那种自然的方式。”