My first reaction, on hearing the phrase “my own Adam” was to deny that I had one. My generation had taken a well-deserved pride in being the first of the Secular Era. If we’d been able to figure out exactly when the twilight of the gods had turned to darkness we’d probably have started the calendar over long before the AMIs blew up North America, but it was impossible to discover a suitable singular event. The great religions had faded away, not so much because of the challenges to dogma posed by scientific knowledge as because of the relentless opposition to intolerance put up by broadcast news.
If anyone had bothered to count self-proclaimed Believers they would undoubtedly have found hundreds of millions of them even in my day, especially within the most tenacious faiths — Buddhism and Islam — but the more significant fact was that among the thousands of millions who outnumbered that minority so vastly one would have been hard pressed to find a single voice to concede that the continued existence of religion actually mattered. Even so, we still had our Adams.
Those of us whose more recent ancestors had been Jews or Christians had kept theAdam andthe God who made him, not as items of faith but as characters in a story: participants in an allegory of creation and the human condition whose blatant inadequacies were as interesting, in their way, as their points of arguable pertinence. People of my time did not need to be as fascinated by the symbolism of names as I was to persist in finding a certain magic in the paraphernalia of their no-longer-twilit faiths.
The Secular Era had its Adam too, although he might not have attained such mythical status had he not been so auspiciously named. It was partly because he wasan Adam that Adam Zimmerman became The Man Who Stole the World. Everyone knew that he was one of a numerous robber band, and one of its junior members at that, but his forename had a certain talismanic significance that attracted an extra measure of glamour even before he sealed his own historical significance. He did that, of course, by having himself frozen down alive to await the advent of emortality, leaving himself to the care of his very own Ahasuerus Foundation. If Conrad Helier had been Adam Helier, and Eveline Hywood merely Eve, they too might have acquired a higher status in the creation myths of the Secular Era — and it would surely have seemed more significant that one of the key elements of gantzing apparatus came to be called shamirs, if Leon Gantz had only been named Solomon.
So there was, after all, a sense in which Adam Zimmerman was indeed “my own Adam,” or one of them. It was even more obvious that he was Michael Lowenthal’s, Mortimer Gray’s and Davida Berenike Columella’s Adam, given the contribution that the Ahasuerus Foundation had made to their posthumanity, although I supposed that Niamh Horne might reserve her reverence for some primal cyborg. Having realized that, I understood a little better why the AMIs might think that Adam Zimmerman was still an important element in the course of history. I also understood why the decision he had yet to make might carry a great deal of weight as a significant example, not so much now as in the future, when today’s events had become mere aspects of a creation myth.
“Is la Reine trying to manufacture an Edenic fantasy of her own?” I asked Rocambole, as we were set before a magic mirror — explicitly, this time, so that we could play the part of observers looking in through a one-way glass. “Are we supposed to be building a creation myth for a new world, in which machines and men will be partners in some kind of alchemical marriage?”
“It’s one way to look at it,” he agreed.
You will understand by now how attractive that way of looking at it might have been to a man like me. For exactly that reason, I decided to be cautious in availing myself of the opportunity. It’s easy to get carried away when you’ve been locked in a VE for so long that you’ve begun to think of meatspace as one more fantasy in the infinite catalog — but I wasn’t yet ready to go native. I still wanted my body back, as good as new or better. I still wanted to get out of Faerie if ever the opportunity should come along. If this was supposed to be Eden, I was ready and willing to fall out of it.
Like Niamh Horne, Adam Zimmerman was in conference. Out of deference to his twentieth-century roots, however, he hadn’t been reduced to a talking head floating in a VE. He was back in his customized armchair in the reception room on Excelsior. There was a side table to his right, on which stood a bottle of red wine and a glass and a bowl containing succulent but not very nourishing fruits from the microworld’s garden. He was facing the big window screen. A discreet array of three more armchairs, of various sizes, was set on his left. The figure seated in the smallest one was Davida Berenike Columella. Alice Fleury was in the mediumsized one. The largest was occupied by a woman — or perhaps a robot modeled on a woman — who was taller than Alice by approximately the same margin that Alice topped Davida.
The robot female had very pale skin textured like porcelain, and silver hair. I figured that this was my first clear sight of la Reine des Neiges, or one of her avatars. I figured, too, that this was why I seemed to be stuck in a queue awaiting her attention. No matter how ultrasmart she was, or how good she was at inattentive multitasking, she could only concentrate intently on one scenario at a time. For the present, she was devoting her best effort to this one.
I inferred that the three women would rise to their feet one by one, to make their presentations to the man who had made a present of the world to the Pharaohs of Capitalism, or had at least tied the pink bow on the fancy wrapping. What they were trying to sell him was emortality — not the versions of it that they already possessed, but the next versions due from their various production lines. I wasn’t sure why la Reine was bothering to put on this part of her show, but I had enough respect for her by now to assume that it wasn’t justa stalling tactic. She had a point to make — and would presumably make it herself
“If you want a better mythological parallel,” Rocambole whispered in my ear, “think of Paris.”
He didn’t mean the city. He meant the prince of Troy appointed as a judge in a beauty contest by three goddesses, each of whom had offered him a bribe. It seemed to me to be a singularly unfortunate — and hence rather subversive — analogy. That particular contest had been secretly provoked by Eris, the embodiment of Strife, and she had done a good job.
Like an idiot, Paris had gone for Aphrodite, who had promised him the most beautiful woman in the world, instead of Hera, who had promised to make him ruler of the world, or Athene, who had promised that he would always be victorious in battle. The result had been the Trojan War, which his side lost.
Personally, I’d have made a very different decision. I hadn’t yet had time to get to know Adam Zimmerman well, but I was fairly confident that he, like me, would have entered into negotiation with the goddesses in order to obtain the reward he wanted rather than any of those on offer. On the other hand, I was also fairly confident that he and I wouldn’t have been shopping for the same fate.
Davida went first, having drawn the shortest straw in a rigged ballot.
Davida explained that although the members of the sisterhood had all been born to their condition they now had the technology necessary to offer anyone else a makeover. They could reconstruct Adam Zimmerman’s body cell by cell, retaining all the neural connections in his brain to preserve the continuity of his personality. They could make him one of them: childlike and sexless, his internal anatomy carefully redesigned in the interests of nutritive efficiency and the emortalization of body and mind alike. They could offer him the widest spectrum of emotions available to any posthuman species, and the most effective processes of intellectual tuning — thus enabling him to establish a balance between the rational and emotional components of his being to suit every occasion.