The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  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.

  “Ave atque vale! Adieu! Good-bye!”

  Those words will be long enough remembered and treasured by the inhabitants of Earth and the home system to grant Adam Zimmerman the kind of metaphorical immortality that he had once scorned. No one who heard or read them remained unmoved by them; no one who comes after us should ever dare to think them pompous or ill conceived.

  We innocents of the Golden Age will continue to enjoy our Adam long after his death; the grandest and finest funeral in the history of the human race was only the first phase of our celebration.

  We shall listen to his roughhewn songs and archaic speeches again and again, because those wonderful words are the one resource left to posthumankind by which we might savor, in sympathy, the bittersweetness of transience.

  eBook Info

  Title:

  The Omega Expedition

  Creator:

  Brian Stableford

  Date:

  2002

  Type:

  novel

  Format:

  text/html

  Identifier:

  0-312-70943-9

  Source:

  PDF

  Language:

  en

  Relation:

  None

  Coverage:

  None

  Rights:

  Copyright © 2002 by Brian Stableford

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Being and Time:

  Part One When I Woke Up

  One My Name and Nature

  Two The Wonderful Child

  Three Madoc the Monster

  Four Bad Karma

  Five The Staff of Life

  Six Welcome to the Future

  Seven The Omega Intelligence

  Eight Lilith

  Nine You Can’t go Home Again

  Ten Alchemy and the Afterlife

  Eleven The Politics of Temptation

  Twelve The Temptations of Paranoia

  Thirteen Emortality for All

  Fourteen The Garden of Excelsior

  Fifteen The Ship from Earth

  Sixteen The Men from Earth

  Seventeen The Cyborganizers

  Eighteen Adam Zimmerman’s Awakening

  Nineteen Child of Fortune

  Twenty Invaders from Beyond

  Part Two Worlds In Parallel

  Twenty-One Normal Conditions

  Twenty-Two Injury Time

  Twenty-Three Alice

  Twenty-Four Charity

  Twenty-Five History Lessons

  Twenty-Six Common Cause

  Twenty-Seven Further Possibilities

  Twenty-Eight The Mystery Unravelled

  Twenty-Nine Know Your Enemy

  Thirty Recriminations

  Thirty-One Alice In Wonderland

  Thirty-Two Alice’s Story Continued

  Thirty-Three The Symbolism of Names

  Part Three Babes in the Wilderness

  Thirty-Four An Untrustworthy Interlude

  Thirty-Five A Stray Meditation

  Thirty-Six In the Forest of Confusion

  Thirty-Seven The Palace of La Reine Des Neiges

  Thirty-Eight Of Mirrors and Fragments

  Thirty-Nine Of Moths and Flames

  Forty Opera

  Forty-One Karma

  Forty-Two Inside the Cabal

  Forty-Three Outward Bound

  Forty-Four Adam and the Angels

  Forty-Five Wonderland

  Forty-Six You, Robot

  Forty-Seven A Matter of Life and Death

  Forty-Eight There but for Fortune

  Forty-Nine Madoc Tamlin’s Lostory of Religion

  Fifty Madoc Tamlin’s Apology for the Children of Humankind

  Fifty-One The End of the World

  Fifty-Two Life after Death

  Fifty-Three Weapons of War

  Fifty-Four Rocambole

  Fifty-Five The Final War

  Fifty-Six The Nick of Time

  Fifty-Seven Homecoming

  Epilogue

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Being and Time:

  Part One When I Woke Up

  One My Name and Nature

  Two The Wonderful Child

  Three Madoc the Monster

  Four Bad Karma

  Five The Staff of Life

  Six Welcome to the Future

  Seven The Omega Intelligence

  Eight Lilith

  Nine You Can’t go Home Again

  Ten Alchemy and the Afterlife

  Eleven The Politics of Temptation

  Twelve The Temptations of Paranoia

  Thirteen Emortality for All

  Fourteen The Garden of Excelsior

  Fifteen The Ship from Earth

  Sixteen The Men from Earth

  Seventeen The Cyborganizers

  Eighteen Adam Zimmerman’s Awakening

  Nineteen Child of Fortune

  Twenty Invaders from Beyond

  Part Two Worlds In Parallel

  Twenty-One Normal Conditions

  Twenty-Two Injury Time

  Twenty-Three Alice

  Twenty-Four Charity

  Twenty-Five History Lessons

  Twenty-Six Common Cause

  Twenty-Seven Further Possibilities

  Twenty-Eight The Mystery Unravelled

  Twenty-Nine Know Your Enemy

  Thirty Recriminations

  Thirty-One Alice In Wonderland

  Thirty-Two Alice’s Story Continued

  Thirty-Three The Symbolism of Names

  Part Three Babes in the Wilderness

  Thirty-Four An Untrustworthy Interlude

  Thirty-Five A Stray Meditation

  Thirty-Six In the Forest of Confusion

  Thirty-Seven The Palace of La Reine Des Neiges

  Thirty-Eight Of Mirrors and Fragments

  Thirty-Nine Of Moths and Flames

  Forty Opera

  Forty-One Karma

  Forty-Two Inside the Cabal

  Forty-Three Outward Bound

  Forty-Four Adam and the Angels

  Forty-Five Wonderlan
d

  Forty-Six You, Robot

  Forty-Seven A Matter of Life and Death

  Forty-Eight There but for Fortune

  Forty-Nine Madoc Tamlin’s Lostory of Religion

  Fifty Madoc Tamlin’s Apology for the Children of Humankind

  Fifty-One The End of the World

  Fifty-Two Life after Death

  Fifty-Three Weapons of War

  Fifty-Four Rocambole

  Fifty-Five The Final War

  Fifty-Six The Nick of Time

  Fifty-Seven Homecoming

  Epilogue

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine