Adam decided that he would no longer retreat from angst, but would revel in it instead, in order to show a world that was without angst the true meaning of mortal existence: the true significance of his own state of being.
I am not just a man, Adam told his relentlessly inquisitive audience. I am a symbol. You must learn to understand me, for I am not merely famous, I am fame itself.
They loved it.
They drooled over every aphorism he let fall, no matter how obvious or overwrought it might be.
Adam set out to make the twilight of his life into the
ultimate dramatic performance. He was determined to show the undying what it meant to die with dignity. It was not enough to display the physical processes of decay which would claim him; it was necessary to show off the psychological warfare that had run parallel to physical decay in his own time.
It was a wonderful show.
That which had been trivial and commonplace in his own world, where millions of lives had been terminated by disease, violence, misfortune, or a few carelessly juggled figures on a balance sheet, was now not merely unique but tremendous.
In the years that followed his revival and the end of the AMI war, Adams hair turned gradually grey. He let it grow long, and grew his beard as well. He asked his hosts to make him a guitar, and he began to play again, singing songs in German and English that he remembered from childhood and adolescence, and learning new ones that his faithful admirers found in ancient data banks. He even composed some songs of his own: sad songs about sex and death, war and poverty, pain and love.
He abandoned privacy, and gave himself entirely to his public. When he was not singing, he talked, frankly and with occasionally painful honesty, allowing all his thoughts to be recorded for infinite posterity as well as being eagerly lapped up by the everpresent listeners. He began to style himself Adam X, to signify the fact that he was the great unknown.
He planned his death meticulously, although the possibility of suicide was firmly ruled out. He must die, he decided, of what had passed in his own time for natural causes: of cancers that would burst spontaneously within his frail flesh; of the gradual erosion of his tissues by the forces of biochemical corrosion; of the failure of the coordinating systems that bound his disparate cells into a coherent whole.
He decided that he would use no anesthetics, suffering the pain which would come with these varied afflictions. This was not a decision taken out of courage he assured his audience that he had always been a physical coward but out of a sense of responsibility.
He knew that this was the only chance which the people of the thirty-third century would ever have to understand that kind of suffering, and he was determined not to cheat them. He felt that his pain, his tears, his shiverings, his sadnesses, his fears all his stigmata belonged to his audience rather than to him, because it was these which gave significance to his presence in their midst.
I believe that in planning all this, carefully preparing for it all, and going through it not without difficulty, by any means Adam X became by slow degrees a happy and contented man, at peace with himself and his angst. I believe, too, that he became a prouder man than he had ever been in the days when he took his gluttonous part in the rape of the world. He became a more joyful man than he had ever been, even at the heights of ecstasy which his relationships with Sylvia Ruskin and his many mistresses had allowed him temporarily to reach.
By making death into fulfillment, Adam robbed it of almost all the power it had once exercised over his imagination. He moved his angst from the side of moral debit to the side of moral credit in the account book of his psyche, and with that cunning move so like in spirit to the legerdemain that had been his genius in days gone by he turned a potential loss into a handsome profit.
Buoyed up by his pride and joy, he lasted far longer than anyone could have reasonably expected, comfortably exceeding a hundred years of subjectively experienced life even without the aid of IT.
I was there when he died, alongside his fellow time travelers. We wept for him, and for his world, but there was gratitude as well as grief in our tears.
Adam died on the day which would have been identified in his calendar as the twenty-fifth of July, 3299, at the age of one thousand three hundred and thirty-one. This was, of course, a record in a world from which death had been largely banished but it was one that no one expected to last very long.
Adam died naked, as nature had made him but he died in a comfortable bed, in sheets which felt to him like the most sensuous silk, and which reminded him pleasantly of riots of sexual excess enjoyed with his most voluptuous mistresses.
He had been working on his last words for many years, redrafting and polishing them endlessly, and he managed to deliver them all before losing his powers of speech.