His answer was a straightforward response to circumstance, no less so for being unique.
His friends begged him to change his mind. His fellow time traveler Christine Caine pointed out that if he really wanted to preserve himself and to remain unchanged then he ought to have himself frozen down again, so that he could reinstitute himself as a myth. She told him that there would one day arrive an Omega Point in human affairs, a Climacteric in which every wish that had ever been entertained by a thinking being could be properly satisfied and that when that moment came he could still be what he had always been, unchanged and unchangeable.
He told her that the desire for such a paradisal end, though understandable, seemed to him to be essentially cowardly, unworthy of an authentically human being, and that her own determination to make a life for herself in the new world was evidence enough of the falseness of her recommendation.
Madoc Tamlin suggested that Adam ought to heed his own advice about the hazards of fame, and ought not to make a final decision until he had contrived an obscurity for himself in which he would be free from the intense and constant scrutiny that plagued him. Using his own idiosyncratic terminology, Tamlin suggested that having made history, Adam ought now to concentrate on retreating into lostory, cultivating a privacy that might enable him
to live as a human being rather than a legend, an individual rather than a myth. Only then, Tamlin suggested, would he stand a chance of discovering the kind of tranquility that Internal Technology could not give him.
Adams reply was that history, once made, could not forsake its makers, and that Tamlin himself was now so securely ensconced in the celebration of legend that he would never again know the luxury of pure frivolity. Even the manifestly ridiculous idea of lostory, Adam told his fellow refugee from the past, would henceforth be treated with insistent gravity and earnest pedantry.
This was one instance in which even I refused to play the objective observer and scrupulous historian. When I was first informed of his decision I told Adam Zimmerman, in no uncertain terms, that he ought not to remove himself from the world until he had seen and understood it not merely every part of the solar system to which an AMI spacer could take him, but every part of the galaxy which remained as yet unexplored. I told him that he ought not to consent to his death until he could honestly say that his was informed consent, and that his consent could not possibly be considered well-informed until he had lived for at least a thousand years.
He thanked me for my ingenuity, but assured me that the problem was the other way about that the person who was capable of making decisions for Adam Zimmerman was already under threat, losing the authority of properly informed consent with every hour and every day that passed.
You are what you are, Morty, he told me, And it is a wonderful thing to be. But it is not what I am. I would be delighted to think that it is something my son might become and I trust that the world will choose to exercise my right of replacement eventually but your own parents understood that the necessity of making room for future generations is a component of progress. I am delighted, too, that the horror which my kind had for their own mortality allowed them to make a world for their descendants which was liberated from that curse, as far as is humanly possible. But Adam Zimmerman is a mortal man, and was born to die. I would rather that Adam Zimmerman faced up to his commanding fears, in the end, than obliterate himself in their evasion. The only life story possible to a man of my kind is one that begins with birth and ends with death, no matter how the plot might be thickened and tormented in between. I am glad to have played a part in the triumph that has altered the world out of that recognition, but my story would be false if it ended otherwise. Let me go, Morty, I beg of you.
Everything that Adam had cynically said about fame in the distant, forgotten past proved to be all too obviously true in the munificent present that consumed him. The basis of his celebrity was his mortality; what fascinated the citizens of the newest New Era, above all else, was Adam Zimmermans awful misfortune in being a man who one day must diefor them, as for him, there was only one end to his story that seemed appropriate.
So they did, indeed, let him go .
Like all the philosophers, lovers, artists, hobbyists, mystics, and martyrs of the Human Era, Adam Zimmerman reconciled himself in the end to the notion that angst was unconquerable. It could be repressed, ignored, sublimated, stared full in the face or frozen down for thousands of years, but it couldnt be beaten.
Adam certainly did not enjoy this discovery, but he was proud of himself for having made it. It seemed to him to reinstate and reinforce as nothing else could have done his old self-sufficiency and his old self-discipline. Alongside the realization that he did not really want any of the kinds of emortality that his hosts could procure for him came the realization that he was free at last to succumb to the flatteries and seductions of fame. He could give the innocents of the new Golden Age something that no one else could or would: a precious taste of human dereliction and death. He could make them appreciate the privileges they enjoyed a little more piquantly, by showing them what it was to be without such privileges.