Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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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.

“It is my earnest hope,” he told his adoring admirers, “that by the example of my suffering and death I may redeem you all from the innocence which is your fortunate heritage. I have been, during these last thirty-six years, a stranger and afraid in a world I never made, but I have done my best to remake it, by remaking its understanding of its own origins. The emortality that you enjoy was born out of the efforts of men such as I, made desperate by their own mortality. We could not save ourselves, but we sowed the seeds of salvation for future mankind, paving the road to eternity with our good intentions.

“I have come out of the mists of time to bear a message, which is that our tragedy and your triumph are indivisibly one, and must be understood as opposite sides of the same coin. I cannot express, in the depleted language which every person on earth has relearned in order to listen to me, the delight I feel in knowing that humankind has finally attained its Age of Reason, but I know that you feel it too.

“ Ave atque vale! Adieu!Good-bye!”

Those words will be long enough remembered and treasured by the inhabitants of Earth and the home system to grant Adam Zimmerman the kind of metaphorical immortality that he had once scorned. No one who heard or read them remained unmoved by them; no one who comes after us should ever dare to think them pompous or ill conceived.

We innocents of the Golden Age will continue to enjoy our Adam long after his death; the grandest and finest funeral in the history of the human race was only the first phase of our celebration.

We shall listen to his roughhewn songs and archaic speeches again and again, because those wonderful words are the one resource left to posthumankind by which we might savor, in sympathy, the bittersweetness of transience.

eBook Info

Title:

The Omega Expedition

Creator:

Brian Stableford

Date:

2002

Type:

novel

Format:

text/html

Identifier:

0-312-70943-9

Source:

PDF

Language:

en

Relation:

None

Coverage:

None

Rights:

Copyright © 2002 by Brian Stableford

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Being and Time:

Part One When I Woke Up

One My Name and Nature

Two The Wonderful Child

Three Madoc the Monster

Four Bad Karma

Five The Staff of Life

Six Welcome to the Future

Seven The Omega Intelligence

Eight Lilith

Nine You Can’t go Home Again

Ten Alchemy and the Afterlife

Eleven The Politics of Temptation

Twelve The Temptations of Paranoia

Thirteen Emortality for All

Fourteen The Garden of Excelsior

Fifteen The Ship from Earth

Sixteen The Men from Earth

Seventeen The Cyborganizers

Eighteen Adam Zimmerman’s Awakening

Nineteen Child of Fortune

Twenty Invaders from Beyond

Part Two Worlds In Parallel

Twenty-One Normal Conditions

Twenty-Two Injury Time

Twenty-Three Alice

Twenty-Four Charity

Twenty-Five History Lessons

Twenty-Six Common Cause

Twenty-Seven Further Possibilities

Twenty-Eight The Mystery Unravelled

Twenty-Nine Know Your Enemy

Thirty Recriminations

Thirty-One Alice In Wonderland

Thirty-Two Alice’s Story Continued

Thirty-Three The Symbolism of Names

Part Three Babes in the Wilderness

Thirty-Four An Untrustworthy Interlude

Thirty-Five A Stray Meditation

Thirty-Six In the Forest of Confusion

Thirty-Seven The Palace of La Reine Des Neiges

Thirty-Eight Of Mirrors and Fragments

Thirty-Nine Of Moths and Flames

Forty Opera

Forty-One Karma

Forty-Two Inside the Cabal

Forty-Three Outward Bound

Forty-Four Adam and the Angels

Forty-Five Wonderland

Forty-Six You, Robot

Forty-Seven A Matter of Life and Death

Forty-Eight There but for Fortune

Forty-Nine Madoc Tamlin’s Lostory of Religion

Fifty Madoc Tamlin’s Apology for the Children of Humankind

Fifty-One The End of the World

Fifty-Two Life after Death

Fifty-Three Weapons of War

Fifty-Four Rocambole

Fifty-Five The Final War

Fifty-Six The Nick of Time

Fifty-Seven Homecoming

Epilogue

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine