“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:
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