The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [6]
Prologue
The Last Adam: A Myth for
the Children of Humankind
by Mortimer Gray
Part One
One
This is the way it must have happened.
In September 1983, shortly after returning from his honeymoon in the Dominican Republic, Adam Zimmerman began to read Sein und Zeit by Martin Heidegger. He had decided to improve his German, and he did not want to practice by reading novels in that language because he considered all fiction to be a waste of time. He wanted to read something that was serious, difficult, and important, so that he would obtain the maximum reward for the effort he put in.
That was the kind of man he was, in those days. He could not have regarded himself, at the age of twenty-five years and four months, as a complete man, but he had put away all childish things with stern determination. He hated to let time go to waste, and he required full recompense from every passing moment.
It is tempting to wonder whether the history of the next thousand years might have been somewhat different if Adam had chosen to read, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra or Arthur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, but there was no danger of that. Both those books had been published in the nineteenth century, and Adam was very much a twentieth-century man. We, of course, have grown used to thinking of him as the twentieth century man, but while he was actually living in that era he was far from typical. He must have been considerably more earnest than the average, although he would probably have gone no further on his own behalf than to judge himself “serious.”
Although he was a native of New York in the United States of America, Adam had always been conscious of his European ancestry. He was the grandson of Austrian Jews who had fled Vienna in 1933, when his father Sigmund was still a babe in arms. Sigmund Zimmerman’s only sibling — a sister — was born in New York, and he had not a single cousin in the world to lose, but the war of 1939–45 contrived nevertheless to inscribe a deep scar upon his soul. Sigmund frequently declared himself to be a “child of the Holocaust,” and sometimes applied the same description to his own son, even though Adam was not born until 13 February 1958.
Neither Sigmund nor Adam ever visited Israel, but Sigmund certainly considered himself a Zionist fellow traveler, and that conviction could not help but color the idealistic spectrum of Adam’s adolescent rebellion against the ideas and ideals of his parents. Although that rebellious phase was in the past by the time of his marriage to Sylvia Ruskin (a gentile), its legacy must have played some small part in Adam’s decision to try to perfect his German with the aid of a philosopher of whom his father would definitely not have approved.
Perhaps that same awareness assisted, if it did not actually provoke, Adam’s powerful reaction to Heidegger’s argument. On the other hand, it might have been the fact that he set out to wrestle with the text purely as an exercise in linguistics that left him psychologically naked to its deeper implications. Then again, it does not seem to have been at all unusual for males of his era and cultural background to hold themselves sternly aloof from schmaltz while being extravagantly self-indulgent in the matter of angst.
For whatever reason, Adam was ready-made for the strange sanctification of self-pity that was the primitive existentialist’s red badge of courage. While he read Heidegger, a couple of chapters at a time, on those nights when he elected not to claim