“It seems to have been surprisingly easy for people of your era to persuade themselves that they did not want to live forever,” I observed. He had not yet had the opportunity to read The History of Death, and did not know the extent of my own speculations or the nature of my own conclusions in regard to that matter.
“Not at all,” he said, decisively. “If they had had to persuade themselves, they would have been quite unable to do it. The point was that they did not have to persuade themselves because they had already made up their minds to ignore the question, never raising it except in jest. They dismissed the prospect of emortality as an absurdity unworthy of their contemplation, and laughed at anyone who challenged them. When I was young, I thought them fools, and cowardly fools too — but as I grew older, I became more tolerant of their willful blindness, and even tried to help them see the truth.
“They were not really fools, or cowards; they were merely victims of a kind of mental illness, an existential malaise. Even those who understood that aging was merely one more disease — awaiting nothing but a full understanding of its nature to be treatable, and ultimately curable — mostly fell victim to the mental symptoms of their sickness. They lived in a world saturated with death, and could not find the strength of mind to make themselves exceptions to such a universal rule.”
“But you were brave enough to be different,” I observed.
“I wouldn’t call it brave,” he told me. “Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t take courage merely to be different. Most people who are different attain that condition by simple failure. It does, however, require unusual dedication to be constructivelydifferent. Most men are handicapped by difference, hobbled by alienation from the company and concerns of their fellow men. To be empowered by difference requires ruthless self-sufficiency and self-discipline. Any man of my era could have done what I did had he taken the trouble, but men are few who can endure much trouble.”
Men are few who can endure much trouble.
That observation was Adam Zimmerman’s obituary for the world he left behind, and his summation of himself. He was, in his own eyes, a man capable of enduring a great deal of trouble. He could read Sein und Zeit, see its implications clearly, and react sanely. That was all there was to him. His six billion contemporaries were out of step with him because they could not make themselves constructively different from one another. They lacked self-sufficiency and self-discipline.
It was widely assumed by his contemporaries that Adam was an unhappy man. The story got round among those who knew him that his life had been blighted when his one great love, Sylvia Ruskin, had deserted and divorced him. It was sometimes said, before and after 2035, that his relentless moneymaking was a pathetic compensation for his failure in the one aspect of his existence which really meant something to him: that his obsession with emortality was a substitute for love. The people most heavily committed to this theory were, of course, his mistresses. This would not have been the case had he chosen mistresses who were generally believed to be beautiful, or even mistresses who genuinely but mistakenly believed themselves to be beautiful, but he invested instead in women who tended to save their self-esteem with theories of inner beauty and psychological compensation. They were women of a kind fated to consider themselves substitutes, because they were unable to think of themselves as truly lovable.
Adam understood this. He used his mistresses, of course — but while he used them, he knew as well as they did that he was using them better than anyone else would have done — and although they did not understand him, they understood that he understood them, and were duly grateful.
“One day,” one of them said to him, on one occasion, while she was in the grip of post-coital triste, “you’ll meet your true love. Maybe you won’t be able to find her in this world, but when you get to where you’re going, you’ll find her there. You’ll find your Eve, even if you have to sleep for a thousand years.”
“I hope not,” he replied, indulging in a rare joke. “Whatever Adam may have achieved through Eve was blighted by the birth of Cain. I would not want to put a second such stain on the heritage of humankind.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” she countered. “Murderous impulses won’t need to be reinvented, even if you do sleep for a thousand years.”
Never one to surrender the last word, he became serious again, and said: “Whether it takes a thousand years or a million, there will come a time when the mark of Cain is erased from human nature. The advent of emortality will see to that.”
None of his mistresses was ever called Eve — or, for that matter, Sylvia. No one he encountered dared to suggest in all seriousness that he might have to sleep for a thousand years in order to obtain what he wanted; his own expectation, in 2035, was that he might have to sleep for a hundred, or two hundred at the most. For once, though, the romantic assumption was correct, at least insofar as the thousand years was concerned.
When he discarded his mistresses, as he did at intervals of between three and seven years, they always wept, but such was their incapacity to think themselves lovable that they were never excessively resentful. None of them ever attempted to exact any violent revenge, although one or two hazarded a few bitter words.
More than one of his discarded lovers, despairing of making him feel guilty on their behalf, demanded that he feel sorry for all the people in the world who were wretched and starving because he and others like him were appropriating all the wealth which, in a saner era, might have made them comfortable. It was a hopeless demand.
“The thing we have to remember,” he would say in response, out of earnest concern for their education and mental equilibrium, “is that we are alldying, with every moment that passes. We begin to die even before we are born; the moment an ovum is fertilized it begins to age. The embryo is aging even while it grows and the period when the forces of growth can successfully outweigh the forces of decay is brief indeed.
“We think that we are still possessed of the bloom of youth at twenty, but this is an illusion. Death begins to win the battle against life when we are barely nine years old. After that, although we continue to increase the size and number of our cells, the rot of mortality is well and truly set in. The moment of equilibrium has passed, and the new cells we produce already show the signs of senescence in the copying errors that have accumulated in the nucleic acids, and in the cross-linkages that disable functional proteins.
“What we call maturation is the seal set upon us by the Grim Reaper, and until science finds a way to reverse these processes, correcting the nucleic acid errors and obliterating the stultifying cross-linkages, there is no hope for anyof us, whether we sleep in silken sheets or starve in arid waste-lands. We are all equal before the horror of it, whether we have the best of care or none at all. In such circumstances, there is no honor in conscience, no shame in selfishness. In an evil world, we are free to be evil — but anyone who wishes to be good has only one option before him, and that is to oppose the dread empire of Death.
“Death has no greater opponent in all the world than me, and everything I do is directed to the overthrow of that tyrant. Never ask for my pity on behalf of the impoverished, the propertyless, the starving, the destitute or the dying. I am fighting their fight, while they cannot, just as I am fighting your fight, while you cannot.”
His ex-mistresses undoubtedly understood these arguments, because he could not abide unintelligent companions, but they found it impossible to agree with him. Without exception, they concluded that he was lonely, bitter, and neurotic, and condescended to pity him as much as they had once adored him. He broke their hearts, but he broke them in a good cause. He was a careful man, and never fathered a child. He was not so arrogant as to take it for granted that all the future generations of emortal humankind would be children of his endeavor, and he their one true Adam, but there remains a sense in which his childlessness reflected that potential.