Jim Baen's Universe

Science Fiction Stories

The Necromancer in Love

Written by Wil McCarthy

Illustrated by Karl Nordman

The young necromancer is a blight on the social landscape, because when his sweetheart meets with an untimely interruption of service (don't they all? don't they always?), he's bound to do something the rest of us regret.

Class, listen. This is important. Put down your pencils, close your laptops, shut off your recorders and listen; we'll get back to histopathology later. The information in this class can be misused, and we need to talk about that.

The necromancer is a person much like yourselves. Naive, desperate, he clutches at emotional straws while he sobs on his girlfriend's blouse. She isn't dead, he thinks, and there's more than just denial in this thought. It's the mitochondria, right? The power plants of the cell, these little bastards are obligate aerobes; a few minutes without oxygen will unravel them permanently.

All right, there are tissue-specific differences. Some tissues can be totally ischemic for hours and recover on reperfusion. Sadly, the brain and heart are not among these tissues, and when the power plants go belly up they also spill proteins that can trigger apoptosis, or cellular suicide. But executing that program also takes energy which, under the circumstances, the cell doesn't have. The influx of sodium and calcium ions, coupled with the efflux of potassium ions, has also caused neurons to swell but not burst. It's a bit of a mess.

But aside from these niggling problems the cell—every cell—is intact! The nucleus, the cytoskeletal transport networks, the endoplasmic reticulum dripping with ribosomal protein factories . . . That stuff won't rot for at least a day, even at room temperature. It isn't dead at all, any more than a city in the grip of a power failure is dead. Mitochondria take in oxygen, glucose, and a low-energy phosphate molecule called ADP. You've all had Biochem 210, right? You know mitochondria exhale CO₂ and a high-energy phosphate called ATP, which is fuel for everything else. If you don't know that, I suggest you start making alternate career plans.

Anyway. Everything else in the body is idled, sleeping, waiting for the kiss of energy to return it to life. And it will, vows the young man. By all he's ever held dear, it will.

Young, naive, he begins with the basics: a bath of the fuel itself in a saturated solution of lactated ringers. Smelling like gatorade and beef bullion, it flows over that beautiful face, that beloved body now stripped of its tattered clothing. When she floats, as of course she must, he ties her down with weights.

And nothing happens. Hear that? Nothing happens; this thin, slimy broth doesn't penetrate her openings, doesn't pierce her skin and flow through. How could it? Reluctant, torn with anguish, the young man violates her with tubes, forcing the stuff inside her. And still nothing happens, because the osmotic potential of the ATP is insufficient to drive it across a trillion cell membranes.

Finally, he begins to really think about the problem. He pressurizes the tank to three atmospheres, then backs it off slightly when its groaning and creaking start to freak him out. Gut-shot with a popped rivet, he'll be of no use to her, right? Next he switches on an ultrasonic cleaner, hoping the combination of vibration and pressure might force the ATP across some membranes.

Again nothing happens, but it's a different sort of nothing. Are there subtle changes in her pallor, her rigor, her elan vital? Does she look perhaps a bit less like a doll, more like a living creature in some deep, deep coma? Through the murky white fluid it's hard to say, and even in his raging grief he knows better than to trust his own judgment. He knows that much, yes.

But he's encouraged, and from where the rest of us are standing, that's a problem. No leash can hold him now.

For an hour he lets the potion work its way into her, and then he pops the tank seals and lifts her out. Apologizing, he hangs her from chains. First upside down, to drain the fluid from her lungs and stomach, and then in even less dignified ways, believing he must be thorough. There are so many places these chemicals don't belong!

When it's done he hoses her down with cold water and straps her to a table. The final touch: an electrical shock to kick-start the excitable membranes of the heart and nervous system. It's not a gentle thing—two hundred joules, minimum, probably a lot more—and it leaves visible burns on her chest and forehead.

Does he really expect this to work? If you asked him, he'd certainly say so. "God, it has to. It ought to, yes. I'm not aware of any reason why it wouldn't."

Why, then, does he shriek and pull away when she opens her eyes? Maybe it's just the look on her face—of shock, of bewildered agony and mute, animal fear. Has every pain nerve lit up? Has he created some unthinkable biohell inside that mortal shell? Her own scream is silent, and though she gasps in a single breath, the muscles of her face soon slacken, their fuel supply . . . depleted. She only absorbed a few seconds' worth. Not even long enough to lay down a memory of what's happened here.

"Holy crap," says the young necromancer, his heart thumping so hard he can hear it clicking wetly in his throat. He's seen her sad, excited, sleepy, bursting with pride and elation. He's seen her drunk and asleep and even dead, but until this moment he's never seen her in pain.

He takes her cold hand, presses his cheek against it earnestly. Gasping, sobbing, his eyes spilling over with tears. "I'm sorry, babe. I'm so . . . I'm sorry."

This is going to be harder than he thought.

****

In every case, this much is certain: the necromancer has medical training, like all of you, and unquestioned access to certain materials. He's known well enough by his peers that he can move around without drawing attention, but not so popular that people randomly poke their noses into his business.

Maybe he's flunked out of his residency for cutting too many corners, for doing too many things his own way. Some of you should be paying attention to this! If he were truly brilliant his teachers might have cut him more slack, but he's a creature of passion whose intellect runs hot and cold, or flickers like an old neon sign. Determination can only take him so far, and when he falls in love—really falls, for the first time in his life—something has to give. Spilled dreams pile up at his feet; he can't bear any further loss, or believes he can't. Won't try, at any rate, and that's the problem.

Maybe he works nights as a coroner's assistant and days at a biotechnology company. He really does live alone in a big house, or else in one of those spacious, unfinished lofts you don't see much anymore. The kind that actually are converted industrial space, not mahogany fakes custom built for urban yuppies.

His hobbies include sculpture and metalwork, and usually some kind of hands-on electrical thing. Could be ham radio, could be Tivo hacking, could be some exotic breed of digital photography. Thermal IR, Kirilian auras, something like that. Everyone has neighbors, everyone is seen, but this man's neighbors are accustomed to strange comings and goings, to loud noises and flashes of light.

"Oh, that guy," they say. "Yeah, he's always doing stuff like that."

Truthfully, whatever unease they feel about it is tempered with admiration and even envy, because the young necromancer is exactly the sort of rugged, handy, easy individualist every American is supposed to be, but few actually are. Sometimes he makes even his teachers feel inadequate, which is part of his problem. Eccentric and smug—not a good combination. Again, yes, some of you out there should be paying particular attention!

Computer people would call him a hacker. Scholars would call him a dilettante. To soldiers he'd be "goofball" or "yardbird" or "wiseass," and in politics or business he'd be a wildcard, a loose cannon. Not insulting terms, per se, but not trusting ones either.

Still. "He's got a real pretty girlfriend," the neighbors will tell you. "Must be doing something right."

Yes, the girl is always pretty, always charming, always possessed of that peculiar mix of innocence and sexual precocity that no man can resist. Human nature, right? If she were dumpy and timid he'd get over it, but this one is the one; he'll never do better, and he knows it.

Tragedies are always born of love.

****

It must feel strange to go out and leave her alone. His best girl naked, strapped to a table, not breathing! But he needs supplies, needs access to high-end equipment. Needs to show his face at work to avoid raising suspicion.

He's cool about it, too, or he wouldn't get far, and we wouldn't still be talking about him. He nods to his colleagues, says a few words to them here and there, maybe not smiling but certainly not catatonic with grief. He passes muster; nobody spares him a second glance, even when he pulls a bacterial sample vial out of cryostorage, thaws it, throws a few bugs under the microscope and starts jabbing them with micropipettes, injecting God knows what.

Satisfied after a bit of chemical testing, he puts the engineered bacteria in a petri dish filled not with nutrient agar, but with a growth medium composed of living cells. You're familiar? Yes? He tapes it shut, pulls it out through the glovebox airlock and slips it in his pocket, warm as any incubator. Rifling through cabinets, he pilfers drugs, needles, electronically operated valves, all sorts of things. He stuffs it all in a red nylon lunchbox and then, telling his disinterested coworkers he's not feeling well, leaves early.

Before he goes home, though, he stops off at a medical supply store to pick up a few more items, things they don't have at work or that he can't just smuggle out under his jacket. A respirator, for example. A few liters of polyheme blood substitute tagged For Veterinary Use Only. An automated chest compressor we used to call the Pumper. Have you worked with those at all? Like a seat belt threaded through an electric laundry wringer. We see a lot less of them than we used to—part of the growing disillusionment with chest compression. Anyway, he gets more than he needs, much more than his revised plans actually call for. He's partly impulse shopping, partly just making sure he's ready for anything. He wasn't a Boy Scout, but he does admire the ethic.

When he gets back home, his girlfriend looks exactly the same as when he left: cold, livid, extinguished. Shouldn't she?

Grimly, he begins his work: harvesting the bacterial colonies, dissolving them in saline, injecting her with them. Crudely restarting her heart, her lungs, forcing the blood to circulate, to spread the pathogens around.

What are mitochondria, after all? Aerobic bacteria, swallowed by some larger cell a billion years ago and somehow, randomly, put to work rather than digested. And from there sprang all the plants and animals of the world, eh? All the amoebas and slime molds, all the fungi and protozoa.

Maybe we swallowed the wrong bug. Silly, fragile little things, they die without oxygen, but there are similar bacteria still alive in the world that don't: the rickettsia, which burrow right into eukaryotic cells—living or dead—and set up shop. What if scrub typhus or Rocky Mountain spotted fever had its ATP production genes replicated ten times over? What if it found traction in a viable corpse? What if growth factors helped it multiply, spreading through all the cells of the body? Or most of the cells, or even some?

Only one way to find out,