“Isn’t that a bit of an over-generalization?” I objected. “Not to mention blatantly sexist.”
“Trust me, Son,” he replied. “I may be old, but I know my birds and bees, and which is which, and I know the way the world works. Miss out on Pearl, and it might be quite some time before you get another chance. What’s worse, the harpies will start to figure you for easy meat. Marjorie’s all talk, but Alice…if she starts whispering in your ear about the advantages of making love to older women, make an excuse and leave.”
I didn’t believe him, of course, but the fact remained that Helena still wouldn’t return my calls, now that I’d got a brand new pay-as-you-go phone, or reply to any emails I sent from home. I’d let her know my new details as soon as I’d got the account set up, ostensibly just for politeness’ sake, but I’d also sent her a couple of other messages since then, tell her how much I missed her and asking her to get in touch. No joy so far.
He wasn’t wrong about Alice, either. She had already engaged me in one suggestive conversation on the subject of the afterliving putting our obsolete prejudices aside, and adapting to the fact that the clocks of our existence had been restarted. She was a couple of years older than Marjorie, but equally well-preserved and far more feminine. I wasn’t sure that I liked that, though. Alice didn’t seem likely every to be able to appreciate my sense of humor, no matter how much practice she put in.
As I’d told Methuselah, though, and took care to inform Alice, I already had a girl-friend.
Methuselah’s broad generalization did seem to have some truth in it, however; it wasn’t just my older peers who openly courted Pearl—with little or no response. She had picked up a living stalker, who was often to be seen hanging around the Center.
“Did you know him when you were alive?” I asked her, one evening when she was hesitating at the window of the Center before heading back to the hospital accommodation-block where she lived.
“No,” she said. “His mother’s an out-patient at the hospital. He drives her in from the west Berks wilderness for dialysis twice a week. It’s a sad case, actually—they’re both under a lot of stress. He’s quite harmless—embarrassing rather than dangerous.”
“I thought stem cell treatments had virtually put an end to the need for dialysis,” I said.
“Not entirely. Most defective kidneys can be repaired that way, but Timmy’s mother has the most awkward kind. Her kidneys are in the front line of a variety of lupus that’s gradually ruining all her organs. Stem cells can’t fight it because it’s an auto-immune disease, so the stem-cells come under attack as soon as they go to work.”
“What about alternative treatments?”
“The dialysis
is
the alternative, although it’s just a stopgap. Poor Timmy wanted us to transplant one of his kidneys, but we had to explain to him that, precisely because he’s a compatible match, the auto-immune disease would attack the transplanted kidney too. The worst of it is that she’s not a candidate for resurrection. Even SSCs can’t defeat this particular enemy. She’s relentlessly cheerful about it—she belongs to the County Set. You know the type: upper-middle class with aristocratic pretensions, takes the view that no miserable disease has any right to kill her. She puts on an act of being convinced that she only has to stay positive and she’ll pull through, but I doubt that she really believes it, and Timmy certainly knows that the fact that his father is a gentleman farmer with a second home in the Highlands doesn’t make a damn of difference to the fact that Mummy’s doomed. You can understand why he’s not quite himself, given that he’s the one who has to look after her while Daddy’s busy fighting the Depression. Getting fixated on me is just a displacement of his true feelings, and it really isn’t any inconvenience to me that he drives his silly little car all the way to Reading even when his mother doesn’t have an appointment, so he can follow me around.”
“I don’t know,” I said, dubiously. “People like that can sometimes seem harmless, and then suddenly explode….”
“Not Timmy,” she insisted. “I’m not afraid of him. There’s no need.”
“I’ll walk you home, Pearl,” Jim Peel was quick to volunteer, having overheard what she’d said and instantly taken the inference that she meant the opposite of what she’d said. “He won’t dare mess with me.”
I assumed that he was right about that; resurrection had restored every lumpen inch of his massive frame, and six months of rockmobility—of which he rarely survived more than half an hour at a time—had not yet made much of a dent on his brick-shithouse build.
“He wouldn’t dare mess with me, either,” Pearl retorted, sharply. “He’s just an embarrassment, okay? I’m more worried about him than me. If he gets tagged as a zombie-fancier, he’s more likely to get roughed up than I am.”
“And nobody’s likely to be intimidated by him, in spite of his name,” I couldn’t resist putting in. Nobody smiled.
“Even so,” Jim persisted, “you oughtn’t to walk back alone at this time of night. It’s midsummer, I know, but it’s still late—and once the nights start drawing in again, you’ll certainly need an escort.”
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “If we start going out in gangs, anticipating trouble, it won’t be long before we get it—and if you start using those football-sized fists, no matter what the provocation is, you’ll give the anti-resurrection brigade exactly what they’re gagging for: a violent zombie. It’s not your fault that you could pass for King Kong in a dim light, but it does mean that you have to be extra careful.”
“So your plan is to let any crazy demon-slayer or kinky rapist you come across just get on with it?” Jim countered.
“Sure. The cause needs victims, not aggressors—and I’ve already committed suicide once, remember.”
Jim had no answer to that, but he wasn’t happy about it. “I’m right, you know,” he said to me, when Pearl had left and we were about to go our own separate ways to our respective homes. “When the nights start drawing in again, things will get worse. Every year changes the balance, because there are more of us, and the novelty’s wearing off. The ED have other targets in their sights, so hating us is still a sideline for them, but they’re not the only crazy vigilantes in town. We need to prepare for the worst, my friend. It might not come this year, or next, but it will come.”
Personally, I thought he’d be much better off trying to find or found a zombie rugby club than planning civil defense strategies, but I didn’t dare say so while I was still the new boy. I went home instead, hoping to spent a quiet hour or two watching TV in that comfortable golden silence families develop when they’ve run out of things to say, or the need to say anything at all.
Alas, that was something else I’d lost along with life. Even Dad felt obliged to talk, simply because he was afraid of what silence might imply.
Is it inevitable that war will eventually break out between the living and the afterliving? Not many people of either kind think that it will happen soon—most think that it won’t happen in your lifetime, and maybe not in my afterlifetime—but there are plenty of people on both sides of the Great Existential Divide who are prepared to shrug their shoulders and contend that there will, ultimately, come a day….
To some, it’s a simple matter of statistics. If the zombie population continues to increase in proportion to the population of the living—as it surely will, unless the unfolding ecocatastrophe precipitates a scenario in which resurrection is prohibited or its supporting technics are lost—then the day will eventually come when the afterliving threaten to become a majority, capable by democratic authority or sheer brute force of taking the reins of regulation. Unwilling to surrender that power, the argument holds, the living will take every possible action to preserve it…up to and including warfare.
In a war of extermination, who would win? The general assumption is that it would be the living, because they currently hold the reins of power and possess all the guns. The afterliving are, in essence, only present in the world on their sufferance, under their license. Living people arguing along those lines almost invariably point out that, if the living really are bound to feel forced to exterminate the afterliving some day, then it might be as well to do it sooner rather than later, before too much power and too many guns leak away to the other side. Living people with a less bellicose turn of mind point out that if a war of extermination is inevitable, the simplest thing to do is to stop resurrecting people—a practise that is, at present, almost entirely under the control of the living—either right now or in the not-too-distant future.
The Utopians among us, of course, argue that the matter can be settled peacefully: that the only thing we rally have to fear is fear itself—which is to say, the possibility that, if the living allow themselves to become convinced that war is inevitable, then, and only then, it will become inevitable. If we can only conquer fear, the Utopians contend, then negotiation can and will permit the eventual establishment of a stable, artificially-maintained ratio of the living and afterliving, within a total human population that will, of necessity, have to be stabilized and artificially-maintained in any case. Within that context, the Utopians argue, the human rights of the living and the afterliving can and will be maintained to the benefit of both parties.
To which the dystopian opposition generally replies: “Good luck with that!” and nods in the direction of past history.
Even the Utopian argument tends to leave unsettled the question of what the ideal artificially-maintained ratio might be, as a matter for future negotiation. Would the numbers have to be equal to eliminate resentment? Would resentment be eliminated even if they were? How would it affect the issue of the longevity of the living were to be significantly increased by ever-smarter stem cells, perhaps to the point of emortality? Would that make ultimate war more or less likely?
What do I think? I have to confess that I really don’t know.
On the whole, and for the time being, I’m inclined to adopt a pragmatist stance. Even if war is inevitable, then let’s do everything humanly possible to postpone it for as long as we can. Let’s just try to keep the lid on, today, next week, next year…and for as long as we might live and afterlive. Isn’t that what we’re presently doing, in order to stave off the ecocatastrophe that will put an end of the present world economic system? And hasn’t it worked, at least thus far, and for considerably longer than anyone could have anticipated twenty years ago? The world economic system probably can’t last an afterlifetime, even if it contrives to increase its rate of evolution, but resurrection technics are still improving at an unsteady but relentless pace, so change isn’t likely to stop any time soon. And if change is inevitable, what can we do except take a pragmatic point of view, and try to ride the tidal wave as best we can?
At the end of the day, it’s the crucial but as-yet-undetermined data that will determine the limits of the possible and the politically practicable. We already know that the living and afterliving alike can be permanently destroyed, and we know that a second lease of afterlife is currently harder to obtain than the first, but nobody knows whether afterlifers really are potentially capable of afterliving forever, in the absence of violent destruction…and nobody knows, either, whether the living might acquire a similar prerogative tomorrow, next year or a hundred years hence.
While we don’t know things like that, wouldn’t we be criminally foolish to rush to any kind of Armageddon?
Even if it turns out that the afterliving aren’t as long-lived as we hope, and that the living won’t acquire the ability to cheat death for a long time yet, there remains one major factor on the Utopian side of the argument, and one major reason why the living would be imbeciles to ban resurrection any time soon, let alone start a war against the afterliving. Thus far, and until there’s a major breakthrough in living medicine, the best hope the living have of
any
kind of further existence, let alone of any real measure of longevity on a Methuselahesque scale, is to die in the right place, at the right time, in a judicious manner.
* * * * * * *
Dad wasn’t just intent on talking, he was also in a slightly cantankerous mood. “What do they think up at the Center about this Jarndyce business?” he wanted to know.
“I haven’t taken a poll,” I said, “and it’s not exactly a hot topic of observation either side of rockmobility, but I think the general consensus is that we’d rather he stayed dead.”
“Really?” he said, as if that were cause for surprise. “I thought your lot would be up in arms, protesting against the assumption that just because the living man’s a homicidal maniac preying on innocent children, his zombie version would have the same tendencies.”
“Not that I’ve noticed,” I told him, generously overlooking his use of the terms
your lot
and
zombie
. “On the whole, I think most of us tend to the opinion that we’d rather not take the risk.”
“In case he started murdering zombies—or whatever it is that a zombicidal maniac would be doing if we can’t call it murder?”
It didn’t seem diplomatic, or particularly relevant, to point out that an afterliving paedophile wouldn’t have any opportunity to manifest his predilections within his own community, as yet. “In case he were to resume killing
anyone
,” I actually replied, as mildly as I could. “I know it’s a touchy question, with all the sticky issues of human rights, social discrimination and all, but, at the end of the day, I think most people would rather not see resurrection employed to complicate and perpetuate problems that we still find intractable in life.”
“So zombies are in favor of selection—they want to be able to exercise control over who joins their ranks, on other grounds than medical feasibility?”
“Jesus, Dad,” I said. “I can’t speak for the afterliving any more than you can speak for the living—and the simple fact is that we don’t and can’t control the Burkers’ selection policies. That’s a matter for the law and their own Ethics Committees.”
Stupid name, Burkers,” was his reply to that. “Where does it come from, anyway?” Evidently, no one had told him about Burke and Hare, the archetypal Resurrection Men.
“It’s from Edmund Burke,” I told him, earnestly. “The man who wrote a classic essay on the aesthetics of the sublime. It’s because their work is essentially sublime and transcendent—a crucial enhancement of the human condition.”
I didn’t mention Burke’s contention that the sublime always had an element of horror in it, even though I knew about it. It was because I’d done English Lit at university that I’d ended up in the Civil Service rather than some line of work that might qualify as “wealth-creating,” and that was still a slightly sore point with Dad, who’d rather I’d gone into business, and would probably have settled for Burking in a pinch.
Except, of course, that I handed “ended up” in the Civil Service at all. I’d almost certainly have to change career, now that my application to rejoin the Great Bureaucratic Army had been rejected—or, as the letter from the OO had actually put it “held in suspension until a suitable appointment becomes available.” Nowadays, no one ever gets turned down; they merely get placed in a potentially-endless queue; it makes legal redress so much harder to obtain.
“That’s ridiculous,” Dad said, perceptively—but at least he took the hint and dropped the discussion…and didn’t pick it up the following day, being prepared for once in his life actually to let the Sabbath function as a day of rest.
On Monday, after rockmobility, I submitted meekly to my appointment to discuss my reconfigured career prospects with my employment counsellor, who visited the Center for that purpose. She was very sympathetic, of course; that was in her script. She was younger than me, so I knew that she wasn’t long out of training, and that the script would be fresh in her mind.
“I can understand why you want to maintain career continuity, Mr. Rosewell,” she assured me, “but the fact is that the Ombudman’s Office isn’t really in a position to recruit just now. The government is attempting to revise the whole system of handling grievances, and while you might eventually be able to obtain an appointment in whatever administrative structure replaces the OO, that’s not likely to happen for some time. Even if you hadn’t had your…accident, it might have been high time to think about retraining.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” I pointed out, mildly. “I was murdered. Cruelly slain while hurrying back to work after my lunch-break, in order to fulfil my duty to Crown and Country.”
“Unfortunately,” she continued, unfazed, “the five years of experience you accumulated in the OO aren’t really sufficient to place you in a competitive situation, at a time when there are a great many displaced civil servants jockeying for a relatively limited number of new situations, and your educational qualifications are rather devoid of
vocational components
. Nothing very
practical
, or even
mathematical
.”
“I did the scientific component of the bac,” I pointed out. “It’s compulsory.”
“For which reason, everyone else of a similar age has done it too,” she countered. “Your scores are good, admittedly, but not
that
good, considering the intense competitiveness of the current employment environment. Given your literacy levels, it might be better to think in terms of something along the lines of web content provision.”
“I thought all that sort of work had been subcontracted to India—which is, I guess, where the substitute for the Ombudsman’s Office is likely to end up.”
“It is the sort of field in which competition is effectively global,” she admitted, with a slight and presumably-unscripted sigh.
“It’s not as bad as all that, though,” I told her, blandly. “Think how much worse it would be if the Americans and Australians were functionally literate. As things stand, the British rank second only to the Dutch when it comes to competence in the English language, so if anyone can compete with the Indians, it’s us…though not, alas, on the cost of labor.”
She didn’t formulate the ghost of a laugh. It wasn’t surprising—the joke about the Dutch was
very
old, and I’d been very careful to maintain the earnestness of my facial expression. Not that she would have noticed, given the lengths to which she was going in order to avoid eye contact. Pink obviously wasn’t her favourite color.
“As it happens,” she told me, “there
is
a training program in web content provision for which I can sign you up. All home study, two months’ duration if you pass all the stages at the first attempt. There’s no guarantee of a job at the end of it, I’m afraid, but it will add an extra string to your bow.”
I already knew that several of the regulars at the Center, including Stan Blake, had gone through half a dozen such home-study programs already, and now had enough strings to their bow to call it a guitar and play
Smoke on the Water
—but no actual job. I also knew that I had to accept the offer, because participation in the program offered a small increase in my dole, and the threat of a cut if I refused.
“I’ll be happy to give it a try,” I assured her, knowing that there was a sequence of tick-boxes on her digipad where she had to pass judgment on my attitude. I’d had some fun with those tick-boxes in my time, and I’d cut it rather fine with the marginally flippant remarks I’d already made.
“That’s good,” she said. “I’ll email all the forms, and you can start tomorrow. Will you be using the workstations here?”
“No,” I said. “I’m one of the rare zombies who still has a home of sorts, in the bosom of his family.”
Mercifully, she didn’t say: “Good luck with that.”
As chance would have it, my “literacy skills” had already found a demand of sorts within the Center, where the workstations were in more-or-less continuous use, and not just for government-sponsored training schemes. At least three of the old guard, including Methuselah, were busy writing their autobiographies, and at least three of the intermediate generation were getting heavily into zombie rights e-forums. Once the rumor had got around that I was more reliable than mechanical spellcheckers and grammar-checkers, I’d been appointed the Center’s volunteer proofreader-in-chief.
“I know it’s rather boring,” Methuselah told me, when I’d looked over his latest chapter later that afternoon, “but it’s an important project nevertheless. The afterliving are, after all, the only people properly qualified to write autobiographies—not only because their lives are complete but because their point of view is, if not absolutely objective, at least definitively external.” He really did talk like that—you can imagine how he wrote, and why he was in need of a proofreader. On the other hand, I could see distinct similarities between his writing style and my own…which, I suppose, only increased my value as an editorial adviser.