In attaining his goal, Adam Zimmerman lost it. In becoming attainable, that goal had become worthless.

This, you must remember, was a mortal man. He had dreamed of emortality, but in himself — body, mind, and spirit alike — he was mortal. It was mortality that made him what he was: a fever burning against extinction; a passion to deny the inevitable. The angst which drove him to achievement was no mere matter of biochemistry burdened in the genome; it was far more deep-seated than that. Had the problem been a matter of biochemistry it could have been countered by biotechnology, but it was not that kind of problem, and it had to be tackled in a different way. It was a historical problem, of maladjustment to the moment; it had to be worked out on the stage of history, by means of a readjustment to the moment.

Adam Zimmerman believed that there was only one way in which a creature of his kind and a product of his world could overcome the soul-sickness born of the fear of death. In that, he was correct. He believed that the way was to become emortal, by removing himself to a world and time whose citizens were all emortal. In that, alas, he was mistaken.

Mortals can be made emortal; this we know. Mortals like Madoc Tamlin or Christine Caine could accept emortality gratefully, because they had always believed themselves capable of it, while never valuing it so highly that it became the be-all and end-all of their existence.

But Adam Zimmerman was not that kind of mortal.

He was different. In the final analysis, and in the fullness of time, it was the fact of that difference rather than its precise configuration which determined his fate.

Eight

The enormity of Adam Zimmerman’s achievement as a time traveler did not become clear to him immediately. Confused by his conscription into the AMI war, he learned only by degrees what sort of a world it was to which he had come. His learning process was made far more difficult by the upheavals surrounding him, and it is not at all surprising that once the reign of peace was restored and he was safely returned to Earth he slipped by slow degrees into a deep depression.

By the time Adam arrived on Earth he was equipped with the very best Internal Technology to alleviate his moods, but his troubles were no mere matters of chemical imbalance. It was his confrontation with circumstance that harassed him, and would not let him accept the gift of tranquility. He visited Manhattan, which he had once considered to be his home, and found it alien. He visited the crater where once had stood the old city of Jerusalem, which he had once considered to be his spiritual home, and found it far less alien than he had hoped.

Adam’s dissatisfaction with the world and with himself was by no means uniform. It was continually alleviated by the companionship of his various fellow travelers, and frequently overturned by intoxicating intervals in which he was simply too astonished by the wonders of the world to entertain the shadow of despair. But the predatory darkness always crept back when he was alone and at peace. Every interval of his new existence, whether the pause was forced upon him or entirely voluntary, was an existential crevice in which doubt, impuissance, anxiety and a gnawing sensation of the unheimlichestablished a secure base.

This was not the angst of old. Adam no longer had to fear extinction in any obvious or commonplace sense — but that did not mean that he did not need to fear extinction. It was not the statistical margin by which emortality fell short of immortality that troubled him — it had always been the necessityof extinction as the natural terminus of a fixed period of life that had designed and defined his fear — but something else. It was almost as if that seat within his soul which angst had vacated could not tolerate a void, and ached to be filled again.

Such risks are borne by every man who commits himself absolutely to a goal, so that it becomes the sole shaping factor of his existence. The more relentlessly we pursue one particular end, forsaking all others, the more likely it is that once it is achieved, its absence will be intolerable. If it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, then the happier man is the traveler who always approaches his destination, but never actually attains it.

Adam Zimmerman was the rarest kind of mortal man. No mortal finds mortality tolerable, unless he is capable of a ruthless repression of the imaginative faculty. On the other hand, no mortal can afford to find mortality utterly intolerable, because even mortals must live. Adam Zimmerman had to live, and he had to live with his own mortality. No matter how hard he worked to lay down the foundations of a future emortality, he had to live with his mortality. It was not only a fact of life but, in his case, thefact of life. Death was his arch enemy, the source and focus of all his heroism. Without it, what would he have been?

The question is unanswerable save for one undeniable contention: whatever he would have been, he would not have been “Adam Zimmerman.” He would have been another man entirely.

The facts of Adam Zimmerman’s situation in the hundredth year of the new calendar were straightforward. He had come into a world where no one died, unless by freakish accident, act of war, or choice. He arrived at a moment when freakish accidents and acts of war briefly ran riot, but he came through that moment to its peaceful aftermath. By the time he reached Earth, the war was over.

Adam found himself then in a world in which violence and aggression no longer figured in the repertoire of human behavior. All humankind had been shaped to various ideals of physical perfection by genetic engineers and Cyborganizers. Everything was beautiful as well as good — and as soon as the AMIs were friends to one another as well as to humankind, a whole new spectrum of ambition and possibility was opened up. Progress had quickened in its paces yet again.

What a joyful world for a man to inhabit! Unless, of course, that that man was a creation and incarnation of the twentieth century, who had carried every vestige of its woe through thirteen centuries.

Perhaps Adam should have persevered a little longer in his exploration of our world. Perhaps he should have sought more help in coming to terms with it. Time might have healed his existential wounds, and efficient therapy certainly would have done — but he saw a cost in procrastination, and a cost in assisted rehabilitation. He came to feel that the price he would have to pay for peace of mind was his identity.

The extinction which Adam had come to fear in place of the vulgar extinction of death was the extinction of his essential self. The new angst which sprang up to occupy the seat of his soul like an avid usurper crying “The king is dead! Long live the king!” was the anxiety that any transformation of his flesh would abolish Adam Zimmerman as thoroughly as any bullet or bomb. Indeed, it was the fearful conviction that he was already in the process of dissolution, because every environmental prop and cue that had formerly assisted in the maintenance of his sense of self had vanished.

Adam Zimmerman was not a fool; he knew that he could become another person — given time, a thousand other persons. He knew that he could obtain whatever he lacked: joy, ambition, zest, happiness, all the rewards of new and unexpected emotional spectra… everything. But he feared that if he did so, he would be surrendering the very things that had made him what he was and had defined who he was: his self-sufficiency and his self-discipline.

Perhaps he would have fared better had he not been so famous, but the drama contrived by la Reine des Neiges succeeded — albeit belatedly, in seizing the imagination of AMIs and posthumans alike.