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.
Adam never had to endure a serious illness. He survived two major road traffic accidents and three assassination attempts without accumulating a single scar. Even so, he considered it prudent not to use up the entirety of the extension of his first Earthly existence that he had generously given himself should he continue in good health.
On 1 April 2035 Adam Zimmerman became the one hundredth human to be frozen down while still in the full bloom of health, using the most sophisticated SusAn technique then available. No one now knows what happened to his ninety-nine predecessors, although we may assume that those who were not revived long before him must have met with accidents of one kind or another. The people of our own day have every reason to be grateful for the combination of good fortune and tender care which brought him safely across the ages, even if the circumstances surrounding his revival did not develop as anyone had planned, or as anyone Adam least of all could ever have anticipated.
Being and Time:
A Cautionary Tale for
the Children of Humankind
by Madoc Tamlin
Part One
When I Woke Up
One
My Name and Nature
My name is Madoc Tamlin.
Like many a man born in 2163, I know nothing at all of my biological ancestry. The six foster parents who raised me refused to make any enquiry as to the ultimate origins of the sperm and egg that were extracted from a donor bank in Los Angeles, California, then combined in vitro to
produce the egg which they caused to be implanted in a Helier womb.
How, then did they come by my name?
Because they never offered me any other account, I can only suppose that they simply liked the sound of it. My admittedly vague memories of them suggest that it is highly unlikely that any of them had ever heard of either of the legendary antecedents described herein, and I am quite sure that they were not trying to influence my destiny in any way by attaching the names to me. Perhaps that is as well, given that they failed to influence my destiny in all the ways that they did try.
I was a disappointment to my parents, of course, as they were to one another; they belonged to the very first generation of aggregate households, and they made more than their fair share of the mistakes of inexperience to which all pioneers are inevitably prone as did I.
What follows, then, is a record of hazard, whimsy, and coincidence but in the absence of a biological heritage, it is the only ancestry I have and the only one I have ever needed. Names fascinated me in my youth and they fascinate me now. The significance of their back-stories may be accidental and artificial, but is no less powerful for that. I understand the crucial role that coincidence plays in attaching those back-stories to people and other creatures, like the tails of ragged cloth that are pinned to ill-drawn donkeys in the traditional childrens game, but I also understand that coincidence plays a crucial role in everything; it is the true master of our destiny.
Madoc, it seems, was a fictitious Welsh prince of the twelfth century, the youngest son of Owen Gwyneth. His claim to enduring fame was that he was said to have crossed the Atlantic and discovered the continent that later became the Americas in 1170 or thereabouts. He was the subject of a poem penned in 1805 by Robert Southey, who subsequently became the British poet laureate. The poem describes the settlement that Madoc founded in Aztlan and tells the history of his long war against the Aztecas. At a crucial juncture, Madoc is ambushed and taken prisoner, then chained by the foot to the stone of human sacrifice. He is supposed to fight six Azteca champions in turn, but only has to face two before being rescued by his friend Cadwallon. His war is finally won, partly by virtue of assistance lent by Coatel, the daughter of the Azteca prince Aculhua, who meets a tragic end in consequence.
First names are, however, less important than surnames.
Tamlin, more usually rendered Tam Lin or Tamlane, was the central character of a ballad so old that it cannot be accurately dated, in which he first appears as an elfin knight who haunts the Scottish district of Carterhaugh. After impregnating Janet, heiress to the earthly component of that estate, he reveals that he was a changeling stolen long ago and kept eternally young by the Queen of the Fays. He fears that he will be selected as the tithe that the Land of Faerie must pay to Hell every seven years, but Janet claims him instead, in spite of a series of inconvenient metamorphoses forced upon him by the Queen of the Fays. He recovers his humanityand with it, his mortality.