The Omega Expedition (6 page)

That observation was Adam Zimmerman’s obituary for the world he left behind, and his summation of himself. He was, in his own eyes, a man capable of enduring a great deal of trouble. He could read
Sein und Zeit
, see its implications clearly, and react sanely. That was all there was to him. His six billion contemporaries were out of step with him because they could not make themselves constructively different from one another. They lacked self-sufficiency and self-discipline.

It was widely assumed by his contemporaries that Adam was an unhappy man. The story got round among those who knew him that his life had been blighted when his one great love, Sylvia Ruskin, had deserted and divorced him. It was sometimes said, before and after 2035, that his relentless moneymaking was a pathetic compensation for his failure in the one aspect of his existence which really meant something to him: that his obsession with emortality was a substitute for love. The people most heavily committed to this theory were, of course, his mistresses. This would not have been the case had he chosen mistresses who were generally believed to be beautiful, or even mistresses who genuinely but mistakenly believed themselves to be beautiful, but he invested instead in women who tended to save their self-esteem with theories of inner beauty and psychological compensation. They were women of a kind fated to consider themselves substitutes, because they were unable to think of themselves as truly lovable.

Adam understood this. He used his mistresses, of course — but while he used them, he knew as well as they did that he was using them better than anyone else would have done — and although they did not understand him, they understood that he understood them, and were duly grateful.

“One day,” one of them said to him, on one occasion, while she was in the grip of post-coital
triste
, “you’ll meet your true love. Maybe you won’t be able to find her in this world, but when you get to where you’re going, you’ll find her there. You’ll find your Eve, even if you have to sleep for a thousand years.”

“I hope not,” he replied, indulging in a rare joke. “Whatever Adam may have achieved through Eve was blighted by the birth of Cain. I would not want to put a second such stain on the heritage of humankind.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” she countered. “Murderous impulses won’t need to be reinvented, even if you do sleep for a thousand years.”

Never one to surrender the last word, he became serious again, and said: “Whether it takes a thousand years or a million, there will come a time when the mark of Cain is erased from human nature. The advent of emortality will see to that.”

None of his mistresses was ever called Eve — or, for that matter, Sylvia. No one he encountered dared to suggest in all seriousness that he might have to sleep for a thousand years in order to obtain what he wanted; his own expectation, in 2035, was that he might have to sleep for a hundred, or two hundred at the most. For once, though, the romantic assumption was correct, at least insofar as the thousand years was concerned.

When he discarded his mistresses, as he did at intervals of between three and seven years, they always wept, but such was their incapacity to think themselves lovable that they were never excessively resentful. None of them ever attempted to exact any violent revenge, although one or two hazarded a few bitter words.

More than one of his discarded lovers, despairing of making him feel guilty on their behalf, demanded that he feel sorry for all the people in the world who were wretched and starving because he and others like him were appropriating all the wealth which, in a saner era, might have made them comfortable. It was a hopeless demand.

“The thing we have to remember,” he would say in response, out of earnest concern for their education and mental equilibrium, “is that we are
all
dying, with every moment that passes. We begin to die even before we are born; the moment an ovum is fertilized it begins to age. The embryo is aging even while it grows and the period when the forces of growth can successfully outweigh the forces of decay is brief indeed.

“We think that we are still possessed of the bloom of youth at twenty, but this is an illusion. Death begins to win the battle against life when we are barely nine years old. After that, although we continue to increase the size and number of our cells, the rot of mortality is well and truly set in. The moment of equilibrium has passed, and the new cells we produce already show the signs of senescence in the copying errors that have accumulated in the nucleic acids, and in the cross-linkages that disable functional proteins.

“What we call maturation is the seal set upon us by the Grim Reaper, and until science finds a way to reverse these processes, correcting the nucleic acid errors and obliterating the stultifying cross-linkages, there is no hope for
any
of us, whether we sleep in silken sheets or starve in arid waste-lands. We are all equal before the horror of it, whether we have the best of care or none at all. In such circumstances, there is no honor in conscience, no shame in selfishness. In an evil world, we are free to be evil — but anyone who wishes to be good has only one option before him, and that is to oppose the dread empire of Death.

“Death has no greater opponent in all the world than me, and everything I do is directed to the overthrow of that tyrant. Never ask for my pity on behalf of the impoverished, the propertyless, the starving, the destitute or the dying. I am fighting their fight, while they cannot, just as I am fighting your fight, while you cannot.”

His ex-mistresses undoubtedly understood these arguments, because he could not abide unintelligent companions, but they found it impossible to agree with him. Without exception, they concluded that he was lonely, bitter, and neurotic, and condescended to pity him as much as they had once adored him. He broke their hearts, but he broke them in a good cause. He was a careful man, and never fathered a child. He was not so arrogant as to take it for granted that all the future generations of emortal humankind would be children of his endeavor, and he their one true Adam, but there remains a sense in which his childlessness reflected that potential.

Adam never had to endure a serious illness. He survived two major road traffic accidents and three assassination attempts without accumulating a single scar. Even so, he considered it prudent not to use up the entirety of the extension of his first Earthly existence that he had generously given himself should he continue in good health.

On 1 April 2035 Adam Zimmerman became the one hundredth human to be frozen down while still in the full bloom of health, using the most sophisticated SusAn technique then available. No one now knows what happened to his ninety-nine predecessors, although we may assume that those who were not revived long before him must have met with accidents of one kind or another. The people of our own day have every reason to be grateful for the combination of good fortune and tender care which brought him safely across the ages, even if the circumstances surrounding his revival did not develop as anyone had planned, or as anyone — Adam least of all — could ever have anticipated.

Being and Time:

A Cautionary Tale for
the Children of Humankind

by Madoc Tamlin

Part One

When I Woke Up

One

My Name and Nature

M
y name is Madoc Tamlin.

Like many a man born in 2163, I know nothing at all of my biological ancestry. The six foster parents who raised me refused to make any enquiry as to the ultimate origins of the sperm and egg that were extracted from a donor bank in Los Angeles, California, then combined
in vitro
to produce the egg which they caused to be implanted in a Helier womb.

How, then did they come by my name?

Because they never offered me any other account, I can only suppose that they simply liked the sound of it. My admittedly vague memories of them suggest that it is highly unlikely that any of them had ever heard of either of the legendary antecedents described herein, and I am quite sure that they were not trying to influence my destiny in any way by attaching the names to me. Perhaps that is as well, given that they failed to influence my destiny in all the ways that they did try.

I was a disappointment to my parents, of course, as they were to one another; they belonged to the very first generation of aggregate households, and they made more than their fair share of the mistakes of inexperience to which all pioneers are inevitably prone — as did I.

What follows, then, is a record of hazard, whimsy, and coincidence — but in the absence of a biological heritage, it is the only ancestry I have and the only one I have ever needed. Names fascinated me in my youth and they fascinate me now. The significance of their back-stories may be accidental and artificial, but is no less powerful for that. I understand the crucial role that coincidence plays in attaching those back-stories to people and other creatures, like the tails of ragged cloth that are pinned to ill-drawn donkeys in the traditional children’s game, but I also understand that coincidence plays a crucial role in everything; it is the true master of our destiny.

Madoc, it seems, was a fictitious Welsh prince of the twelfth century, the youngest son of Owen Gwyneth. His claim to enduring fame was that he was said to have crossed the Atlantic and discovered the continent that later became the Americas in 1170 or thereabouts. He was the subject of a poem penned in 1805 by Robert Southey, who subsequently became the British poet laureate. The poem describes the settlement that Madoc founded in Aztlan and tells the history of his long war against the Aztecas. At a crucial juncture, Madoc is ambushed and taken prisoner, then chained by the foot to the stone of human sacrifice. He is supposed to fight six Azteca champions in turn, but only has to face two before being rescued by his friend Cadwallon. His war is finally won, partly by virtue of assistance lent by Coatel, the daughter of the Azteca prince Aculhua, who meets a tragic end in consequence.

First names are, however, less important than surnames.

Tamlin, more usually rendered Tam Lin or Tamlane, was the central character of a ballad so old that it cannot be accurately dated, in which he first appears as an elfin knight who haunts the Scottish district of Carterhaugh. After impregnating Janet, heiress to the earthly component of that estate, he reveals that he was a changeling stolen long ago and kept eternally young by the Queen of the Fays. He fears that he will be selected as the tithe that the Land of Faerie must pay to Hell every seven years, but Janet claims him instead, in spite of a series of inconvenient metamorphoses forced upon him by the Queen of the Fays. He recovers his humanity…and with it, his mortality.

The idea that human children might be stolen by the fairies, and taken to a land where time passes far more slowly than it does on earth, was a common one in superstitious days. The idea was compounded, rather paradoxically, out of hope and fear: the hope of immortality and eternal youth; the fear of becoming alien and inhuman.

The time into which I was born was, by contrast, an era of antisuperstition and exotic manufacture, in which all children were told that they had every chance of becoming emortal, returning to the full flower of young adulthood again and again and again. We had not entirely given up our anxieties, because we knew about the Miller Effect and had conceived the idea of “robotization,” but we were bold pioneers and we put our fears aside.

Even so, my world bore certain significant similarities to the world of medieval legend, which helped pave the way for new Tam Lins.

I could have changed the name my foster parents gave me, but I never wanted to. I accepted it as my own, and something precious. I know now that I was right to do so.

The Faerie of my first youth was the world of PicoCon and OmicronA, pioneers and manufacturers of nanotechnology. These friendly rivals sold to my peers the successive generations of Internal Technology that were supposed to constitute the escalator to emortality. That Faerie had no queen, but it did have a dictator of sorts: a shadowy committee known only by a rich assortment of nicknames, including the Inner Circle, the Secret Masters, the Dominant Shareholders, and the Hardinist Cabal. Even a man forewarned by his name could never have guessed that he might become a changeling by virtue of
their
endeavors, but I never knew how fortunate my name was until I became a helpless traveler in time, in dire need of redemption. It was, of course, a fluke of chance; those responsible for my plight took no account whatsoever of my name. But when I woke up, everything I felt and did thereafter was colored by my consciousness of my name. My surname helped to define the quality of the experience, and to control the way I navigated myself through it.

It helped, too, that I arrived in a world where all names were chosen, some more carefully than others. Those chosen names imprinted their back-stories on the pattern of events with a force and irony that could only be appreciated by someone as fascinated by names as I was — or so I believe. That is why I am telling you this story. The people who have asked me to do it have asked for a history, but it is not that. It has always seemed to me that stories which pass themselves off as histories ought to be conscientiously “hi” — lofty, distant, and imperious — while my character and profile have always been obstinately “lo,” working from beneath rather than above, craftily rather than authoritatively.

I am, therefore, happy to leave the history of our adventure to the expert pen of my good friend Mortimer Gray; my own account is nothing but a lostory, more comedy than drama, more cautionary tale than epic. Others will doubtless offer their own accounts of the events of the Last of the Final Wars, many of whom were fortunate enough — or unfortunate enough — to be far closer to the action than I was, but I dare to hope that my poor lostory might cut more deeply than its rivals to the bone and marrow of the tale.