Adam: Fixed Stars, Paradiso 26   The soul of Adam, the first man created, joins the three apostles--including the first pope (Peter)--surrounding Dante and Beatrice in the sphere of the fixed stars: specifically, in the constellation of Gemini, Dante's birth stars. Adam's creation and life in the earthly paradise (Eden) are recounted in Genesis (2:7 to 5:5): he is made of the "slime of the earth" and endowed with a living soul, and then given free reign in the "paradise of pleasure" with the warning not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; Adam names the creatures of the earth and is given a female companion (fashioned by God from Adam's rib); deceived by the serpent, Eve eats the forbidden fruit, as does Adam, for which they lose their innocence and are cast out of paradise to live out their days. Adam articulates the four questions on Dante's mind (26.109-14): 1) when Adam was created (and placed in Eden), that is, how old he is; 2) how long he was allowed to enjoy Eden; 3) the reason for God's anger; 4) the specific language Adam made and used.   Adam quickly, and vaguely, dispatches with the third question: in terms similar to those used by Ulysses in hell, he says that his fault was not that he ate from the forbidden tree but that he was wrong "only for passing beyond the sign" (26.117; see Inf. 26.106-9). He next provides the numbers required to answer the first question, his current "age": having spent 930 years on earth and 4,302 years in Limbo, Adam has passed another 1266 years in heaven (Christ "freed" him from Limbo in the year 34 and the current year is 1300). Adam is therefore 6,498 years old. In his long response to the fourth question, Adam emphasizes the mutability and variability of language: his original tongue was already extinct by the time Nimrod attempted the presumptuous task of constructing a tower to heaven (Genesis 11:1-9), a view in direct contradiction with Dante's earlier theory that humankind shared a single, original language until the construction of the tower of Babel (De vulgari eloquentia 1.6.4-7). The brevity of Adam's final response, to the question of the length of his stay in Eden, is shockingly appropriate: he and Eve lived in paradise for somewhere between six and seven hours. Here, from among the various theological opinions available (one as long as 34 years), Dante chooses the shortest possible time frame for Adam and Eve's fall from innocence.