The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [232]
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