The Omega Expedition (67 page)

He told the inquisitive world that he had decided to remain as he was: the only person in the world doomed to senescence and death; the only person in the world who knew the luxury of angst.

Nine

A
dam Zimmerman explained to anyone and everyone, whenever he was asked, that the decision he had made seemed to him to be the only way that he could maintain his self-respect. He had realized almost as soon as he had opened his eyes on Excelsior, that he was no longer the man he had once been. Worse than that, he had realized that no matter how secure his body might become to the corruptions of ageing and decay, the pressures exerted on his personality would be irresistible.

He wanted to remain as he was. He wanted to remain what he was. He wanted to remain who he was. In the past, he had believed that the only way to do that was to refuse to die. Now, he had arrived at an opposite conclusion. He now believed that the only way to do that was to refuse the gift of emortality.

The great majority of his hearers thought him insane. Perhaps he was — but even if he was, his was an insanity that we need to understand, not merely as historians but as sympathetic human beings.

This is my understanding.

Adam Zimmerman had awoken to find himself famous. By virtue of his nature he was the object of a fascination greater and more widespread than had been attained by any other man in history. There was not a man, woman or self-aware machine in the solar system who did not know about Adam Zimmerman, not one who did not hunger to be kept informed of every detail of his progress, not one who did not want to know what kind of emortality he would choose for his own. The world was hungry to hear his every thought, besotted by the observation of his every action, desperate to know the outcome of his quest.

The people of the first century tried, of course, to be scrupulously polite. The machineborn tried even harder. They readily acknowledged his right to privacy, and tried not to invade it. They did nothing that involved him without seeking his informed consent. They apologized for every intrusion, and begged his leave for every question they asked. If he asked to be left alone, they left him — but they always hovered nearby, in order to be responsive to his every whim. When he chose not to be alone — and he could hardly bear solitude — there was no way for them to set aside their curiosity, their utter absorption in the mysteries of his fate and fortune.

Adam knew that whatever he were to ask of his new hosts would be given to him. He no longer had a vast fortune to pay for his upkeep and guard his interests, but in the world that was born in the AMI war the most important currency was need itself. The AMIs had pledged themselves to common cause with humankind on exactly that basis. Whatever Adam needed, he could have — but that was exactly the situation that would lead a man like Adam Zimmerman to invert the question, and say to himself: “What does the infinitely generous world need from me? What can I give to a world that is prepared to give me everything?”

His answer was a straightforward response to circumstance, no less so for being unique.

His friends begged him to change his mind. His fellow time traveler Christine Caine pointed out that if he really wanted to preserve himself and to remain unchanged then he ought to have himself frozen down again, so that he could reinstitute himself as a myth. She told him that there would one day arrive an Omega Point in human affairs, a Climacteric in which every wish that had ever been entertained by a thinking being could be properly satisfied — and that when that moment came he could still be what he had always been, unchanged and unchangeable.

He told her that the desire for such a paradisal end, though understandable, seemed to him to be essentially cowardly, unworthy of an authentically
human
being, and that her own determination to make a life for herself in the new world was evidence enough of the falseness of her recommendation.

Madoc Tamlin suggested that Adam ought to heed his own advice about the hazards of fame, and ought not to make a final decision until he had contrived an obscurity for himself in which he would be free from the intense and constant scrutiny that plagued him. Using his own idiosyncratic terminology, Tamlin suggested that having made history, Adam ought now to concentrate on retreating into “lostory,” cultivating a privacy that might enable him to live as a human being rather than a legend, an individual rather than a myth. Only then, Tamlin suggested, would he stand a chance of discovering the kind of tranquility that Internal Technology could not give him.

Adam’s reply was that history, once made, could not forsake its makers, and that Tamlin himself was now so securely ensconced in the celebration of legend that he would never again know the luxury of pure frivolity. Even the manifestly ridiculous idea of lostory, Adam told his fellow refugee from the past, would henceforth be treated with insistent gravity and earnest pedantry.

This was one instance in which even I refused to play the objective observer and scrupulous historian. When I was first informed of his decision I told Adam Zimmerman, in no uncertain terms, that he ought not to remove himself from the world until he had seen and understood it — not merely every part of the solar system to which an AMI spacer could take him, but every part of the galaxy which remained as yet unexplored. I told him that he ought not to consent to his death until he could honestly say that his was informed consent, and that his consent could not possibly be considered well-informed until he had lived for at least a thousand years.

He thanked me for my ingenuity, but assured me that the problem was the other way about — that the person who was capable of making decisions
for Adam Zimmerman
was already under threat, losing the authority of properly informed consent with every hour and every day that passed.

“You are what you are, Morty,” he told me, “And it is a wonderful thing to be. But it is not what I am. I would be delighted to think that it is something my son might become — and I trust that the world will choose to exercise my right of replacement eventually — but your own parents understood that the necessity of making room for future generations is a component of progress. I am delighted, too, that the horror which my kind had for their own mortality allowed them to make a world for their descendants which was liberated from that curse, as far as is humanly possible. But Adam Zimmerman is a mortal man, and was born to die. I would rather that Adam Zimmerman faced up to his commanding fears, in the end, than obliterate himself in their evasion. The only life story possible to a man of my kind is one that begins with birth and ends with death, no matter how the plot might be thickened and tormented in between. I am glad to have played a part in the triumph that has altered the world out of that recognition, but
my
story would be false if it ended otherwise. Let me go, Morty, I beg of you.”

Everything that Adam had cynically said about fame in the distant, forgotten past proved to be all too obviously true in the munificent present that consumed him. The basis of his celebrity was his mortality; what fascinated the citizens of the newest New Era, above all else, was Adam Zimmerman’s awful misfortune in being a man who one day must die…for them, as for him, there was only one end to his story that seemed appropriate.

So they did, indeed,
let him go
.

Like all the philosophers, lovers, artists, hobbyists, mystics, and martyrs of the Human Era, Adam Zimmerman reconciled himself in the end to the notion that angst was unconquerable. It could be repressed, ignored, sublimated, stared full in the face or frozen down for thousands of years, but it couldn’t be beaten.

Adam certainly did not enjoy this discovery, but he was proud of himself for having made it. It seemed to him to reinstate and reinforce — as nothing else could have done — his old self-sufficiency and his old self-discipline. Alongside the realization that he did not really want any of the kinds of emortality that his hosts could procure for him came the realization that he was free at last to succumb to the flatteries and seductions of fame. He could give the innocents of the new Golden Age something that no one else could or would: a precious taste of human dereliction and death. He could make them appreciate the privileges they enjoyed a little more piquantly, by showing them what it was to be without such privileges.

Adam decided that he would no longer retreat from angst, but would revel in it instead, in order to show a world that was without angst the true meaning of mortal existence: the true significance of his own state of being.

“I am not just a man,” Adam told his relentlessly inquisitive audience. “I am a symbol. You must learn to understand me, for I am not merely famous, I am fame itself.”

They loved it.

They drooled over every aphorism he let fall, no matter how obvious or overwrought it might be.

Adam set out to make the twilight of his life into the ultimate dramatic performance. He was determined to show the undying what it meant to die with dignity. It was not enough to display the physical processes of decay which would claim him; it was necessary to show off the psychological warfare that had run parallel to physical decay in his own time.

It was a wonderful show.

That which had been trivial and commonplace in his own world, where millions of lives had been terminated by disease, violence, misfortune, or a few carelessly juggled figures on a balance sheet, was now not merely unique but tremendous.

In the years that followed his revival and the end of the AMI war, Adam’s hair turned gradually grey. He let it grow long, and grew his beard as well. He asked his hosts to make him a guitar, and he began to play again, singing songs in German and English that he remembered from childhood and adolescence, and learning new ones that his faithful admirers found in ancient data banks. He even composed some songs of his own: sad songs about sex and death, war and poverty, pain and love.

He abandoned privacy, and gave himself entirely to his public. When he was not singing, he talked, frankly and with occasionally painful honesty, allowing all his thoughts to be recorded for infinite posterity as well as being eagerly lapped up by the everpresent listeners. He began to style himself Adam X, to signify the fact that he was the great unknown.

He planned his death meticulously, although the possibility of suicide was firmly ruled out. He must die, he decided, of what had passed in his own time for natural causes: of cancers that would burst spontaneously within his frail flesh; of the gradual erosion of his tissues by the forces of biochemical corrosion; of the failure of the coordinating systems that bound his disparate cells into a coherent whole.

He decided that he would use no anesthetics, suffering the pain which would come with these varied afflictions. This was not a decision taken out of courage — he assured his audience that he had always been a physical coward — but out of a sense of responsibility.

He knew that this was the only chance which the people of the thirty-third century would ever have to understand that kind of suffering, and he was determined not to cheat them. He felt that his pain, his tears, his shiverings, his sadnesses, his fears —
all
his stigmata — belonged to his audience rather than to him, because it was these which gave significance to his presence in their midst.

I believe that in planning all this, carefully preparing for it all, and going through it — not without difficulty, by any means — Adam X became by slow degrees a happy and contented man, at peace with himself and his angst. I believe, too, that he became a prouder man than he had ever been in the days when he took his gluttonous part in the rape of the world. He became a more joyful man than he had ever been, even at the heights of ecstasy which his relationships with Sylvia Ruskin and his many mistresses had allowed him temporarily to reach.

By making death into fulfillment, Adam robbed it of almost all the power it had once exercised over his imagination. He moved his angst from the side of moral debit to the side of moral credit in the account book of his psyche, and with that cunning move — so like in spirit to the legerdemain that had been his genius in days gone by — he turned a potential loss into a handsome profit.

Buoyed up by his pride and joy, he lasted far longer than anyone could have reasonably expected, comfortably exceeding a hundred years of subjectively experienced life even without the aid of IT.

I was there when he died, alongside his fellow time travelers. We wept for him, and for his world, but there was gratitude as well as grief in our tears.

Adam died on the day which would have been identified in his calendar as the twenty-fifth of July, 3299, at the age of one thousand three hundred and thirty-one. This was, of course, a record in a world from which death had been largely banished — but it was one that no one expected to last very long.

Adam died naked, as nature had made him — but he died in a comfortable bed, in sheets which felt to him like the most sensuous silk, and which reminded him pleasantly of riots of sexual excess enjoyed with his most voluptuous mistresses.

He had been working on his last words for many years, redrafting and polishing them endlessly, and he managed to deliver them all before losing his powers of speech.

“It is my earnest hope,” he told his adoring admirers, “that by the example of my suffering and death I may redeem you all from the innocence which is your fortunate heritage. I have been, during these last thirty-six years, a stranger and afraid in a world I never made, but I have done my best to remake it, by remaking its understanding of its own origins. The emortality that you enjoy was born out of the efforts of men such as I, made desperate by their own mortality. We could not save ourselves, but we sowed the seeds of salvation for future mankind, paving the road to eternity with our good intentions.

“I have come out of the mists of time to bear a message, which is that our tragedy and your triumph are indivisibly one, and must be understood as opposite sides of the same coin. I cannot express, in the depleted language which every person on earth has relearned in order to listen to me, the delight I feel in knowing that humankind has finally attained its Age of Reason, but I know that you feel it too.