Resurrection Day!
"Doctor," Linton whispered, "my mind is singing with battalions of
choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you."
The doctor stroked his oily palms together. "Oh, but it does.
Beautifully."
* * * * *
The certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible
to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed
them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret,
smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.
Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the
olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner
sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting.
It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to
prepare himself.
Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her
body. "Darling!" she said.
"Greta!" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No
doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same
way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing
her ears the way she enjoyed.
Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.
She kissed his cheek. "It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a
celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends."
"Yes," he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. "But tell
me--how was it being _away_?"
The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his
Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.
"I can't remember," she said. "I can't really remember anything. Not
really. My memories are ghosts...."
"Now, now," Linton said, "we mustn't get excited. You've been through a
trial."
She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It
was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of
course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered
the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.
"I must see all our old friends," Greta persisted. "Helen and
Johnny...."
"My darling," he said gently, "about Johnny--"
Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. "Yes? What about Johnny?"
"It was a terrible accident right after--that is, about five months
ago. He was killed."
"Killed?" Greta repeated blankly. "Johnny Gorman was killed?"
"Traffic accident. Killed instantly."
"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him
resurrected the same way you did me?"
"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You
have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer
have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny."
Greta turned her back to him. "It's just as well. You shouldn't bring
back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the
photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.
But you're _sure_ you haven't the money to do it?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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