Zombies Don't Cry by Brian Stableford

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