Forty-Four
Adam and the Angels
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 wed been able to figure out exactly when the twilight of the gods had turned to darkness wed 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 the Adam and the 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 was an 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 Lowenthals, Mortimer Grays and Davida Berenike Columellas 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 todays 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?
Its 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. Its easy to get carried away when youve been locked in a VE for so long that youve begun to think of meatspace as one more fantasy in the infinite catalog but I wasnt 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 hadnt 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 microworlds 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.