The Ultimate Werewolf (33 page)

▼▼▼

He had been free once, some time before, in a place that formerly had been known by a name that marked it as a part of Central Europe. Kazak waited naked beneath an ash tree, waited for Sister Moon to rise and change him.

Parkland around him: rolling hills, trees evenly spaced, no people.

Below him, in the valley, sheep.

Sunset. Reds and golds in the west. Violet in the east.

Dark.

Darker.

Darkest.

The molten brass sphere of moonrise shone full in his face, reflected in his eyes, and led to the brief agony of change. He felt ancient forest- nurtured earth beneath his pads, springy, deep. The world had gone black and white and shades of gray, seen through new eyes. A universe rolled in through his nostrils, oh! leaf-mould and anthill, human-scent from picnickers, cold metal and
other
of their vehicles, and mutton warm, wool-clothed, bloodfull.

He felt the spring of taut muscle rippling beneath his coat, the stretch and crackle of joints, the dilating gape of a yawn. Driven by ancient instinct, he paused to lift his leg against the tree, to mark this place as his, though he had never met any others of his kind and never expected to meet any.

Then he was off, running down the slope, silent, and the moon- silvered forest glided by on either side. Scent of water wafted from farther ahead. A welcome breeze brought sheep smell, food smell. Drool pooled hot in his mouth.

His feet knew how to place themselves, to drive his body forward with only the minimum of effort, to steer him right and left around trees, around stones. They made no more noise than a patter of raindrops on the deep mould of the forest floor.

Below him drifted the sheep, stodgy, earthbound clouds. He caught the dry rotten-grass smell of dung, and in his ears rang the quavering anxious sounds of their bleats. Closer now, hidden by brush, singling one from the flock without pausing to consider—

Then bursting out, hearing the cries rise in pitch, feeling them scatter, guessing rightly that the
one
will move
this
way, the quick and merciful snap of jaws—

Kazak fed well that time. The last time.

He dreamed about it often in this place, this coldness of a laboratory. His jaws champed in sleep, his dreaming tongue tasted the sweet hot gush of blood, the life of the flesh.

But he always awakened to disappointment, to tests, to the room that obscenely seemed to live, to the dry cheerless benevolence of Dr. Iglace.

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"Though you are under-educated, you are not unintelligent," Dr. Iglace said to Kazak one morning after some tests, a morning between full moons. The interview took place in Kazak's cell. The floor had grown furnishings, a table, chairs, even an ersatz window looking out into a holographic representation of a country morning. None of it made the least difference to Kazak.

When he remained silent, the doctor, seated comfortably in one freshly-grown chair, continued imperturbably: "I think you can grasp your importance to us, and your position."

Kazak paced hopelessly. "Let me go. I have rights."

A silent chuckle made Dr. Iglace bounce slightly in his place. "You have no rights. The Planetary Constitution guarantees rights to humans, and you are a lycanthrope, something rather different.
Homo sapiens
ferox,
perhaps."

"I'm a man. At all times except the nights of the full moon, I am a man."

"To outward appearances. And yet you are not, really. Shall I go through the list, Mr. Kazak? Shall I enumerate the differences in DNA and RNA, in hormonal balances, in bodily systems? No? They are informative, I assure you. Do you know that lycanthropy is genetic, Mr. Kazak?"

Kazak nodded. "My family," he muttered. "Cursed. Cursed for four hundred years, since a werewolf bit my ancestor—"

"Yes," the doctor murmured. "Your family is a special case, rather."

The false window shimmered and changed, now representing sunrise over a placid ocean. Kazak gave it one disgusted glance. "I can't stay here. I can't stand being confined. You're killing me."

"Nonsense. We're caring for you very well. Where was I?"

"The condition is genetic," the voice of the room said in its childish soprano.

"Yes, to be sure. But it is also contagious. Lycanthropes are actually genetic variants of basic human stock. The genes that make you a werewolf are scattered throughout the human species. Not everyone has them, of course—fewer than one in thirty thousand these days, according to computer analyses."

"And I happen to be one of the lucky ones."

"Mm. Different, anyway, for in your family the genes have proved dominant. In all other surviving cases, the genes are recessive, dormant. Did you know, Mr. Kazak, that the bite of a lycanthrope in lupine form carries with it a secretion of the salivary glands that alters DNA? Changes it subtly but crucially in people with that recessive lycanthrope gene? That's what makes lycanthropy communicable, though the odds of your finding and biting someone with the gene are very small indeed."

"I've never hurt a living person."

"Why not?"

Kazak looked away. "Perhaps I was never hungry enough."

"And when you were hungry, you dined on humbler fare. Sheep and forest animals." Dr. Iglace sighed. "Show us the Szamos Park," he said.

Obligingly the window expanded and elongated until it filled an entire wall of the room. The scene shifted, became the wild landscape where Kazak had roamed. Where he had been trapped.

Kazak knew that it was only holography. Yet his nostrils twitched

and he had to restrain himself from flight, from a futile attempt to run into that scene. "You recognize it, I see," Dr. Iglace said. "What do you think it is?"

"My home," Kazak said. "The wilderness."

Dr. Iglace bobbed again with his silent chuckle. "Don't be absurd. The wilderness died four hundred years ago. That is a park, and the animals are either domestic or genetically reconstructed ones, bio-engineered to be harmless to humans."

"I was free in the wild."

"You never lived in the wild. There is no wilderness left, Mr. Kazak. Oh, the government claims that the Inner Planet colonies are settlements in the wilderness, but that's a lie, a recruiting tool. Mars and Venus are only half-domesticated frontier worlds, but they have no indigenous 'wilderness,' indeed no life of their own, only such genetically engineered plants and creatures as we have provided."

The doctor leaned close, so that even in his human form Kazak could smell his delicate odor, a faint sweetness. "Would you claim those animals as wild creatures, Mr. Kazak? They are spawn of test-tube and genetic manipulators, not beasts of the wild. In fact, Mr. Kazak, 'nature' has not existed for centuries, not anywhere in the settled solar system. Least of all here."

The scene became a view from space, with the globe of the Earth hanging against the velvet black, cold stars pricking the darkness. "Earth is completely tamed, Mr. Kazak, and fully occupied already by humans. You have no right to exist on it."

"Then kill me," Kazak said. "It only takes a silver bullet."

But the scientists had something worse in mind for Kazak than killing him.

They studied him.

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They caught him again in dreams.

He was lupine and running, running beneath a full cold moon, sandpaper-crusted snow burning the pads of his paws, frosty air keen in his nostrils. They flew behind him in small craft a few meters above the tallest tree branches. He could not smell or hear them, could glimpse them only brokenly and momentarily, but he sensed pursuit.

The silvery eggs flashed moonlight at him, spears thrust through the black canopy of tree branch and needle. His reserves were great, his energies all but boundless, and he needed every ounce of power. To cease running, to go to ground, would doom him. Yet the pursuit was relentless.

As a wolf he did not count, but more flying things than he had legs pursued him. Time after time he broke for deeper cover, headed for darker forest, only to see ahead the telltale flash of light as a different hunter circled to forestall his flight. Even his iron will and sinew at last began to fail him. The breath seared in and out of his lungs, and his knees began to tremble with weariness. Once or twice he crossed a clearing, stood challenging them, a lone wolf waiting a chance to strike. They refused the challenge, merely came to rest in a ring around him, as high as the trees, hovering silently.

He ran again at such times, seeking forest cover and shelter. Part of him knew with despair that the chase was hopeless, that all the humans had to do was outwait him. When he lost the moon, he lost any hope of escape.

The end came swiftly. He found himself cornered, literally, in a niche of rock, part of a lofty, nearly vertical cliff. He could not climb the cliff face, and when he whirled to run he discovered that the vehicles had settled to earth. Already men had climbed out of two of them and were advancing toward him slowly, weapons shouldered and ready.

Desperate gladness rose in his heart, for men he could fight. With a snarl that rattled his throat, he leapt forward, bounding to attack the nearest one, to rend him—

A cry went up from another of the hunters, and the weapons hummed. The wolf met an invisible wall of force, impalpable but real. He felt as though he had leaped into a thick, tangling brush, as though he were struggling in nightmare to put one slow foot in front of the other.

More weapons hummed at him, and the feeling became a physical lethargy so complete that he could not move. He fell to the snow and lay on his side, his lungs working like a bellows, his heart thudding terribly fast, rage and fear racing through his veins. Still he could not move, could not stir one voluntary muscle.

The abominable stench of the men filled his nose. One, holding no weapon, approached and knelt. He felt the touch of that one's hand on his pelt, stroking his neck. "Very good," that one had said—it was Kazak's first meeting with Dr. Iglace, in fact—"very good indeed. Load him."

Now that the wolf was down it took only one weapon's hum to keep him immobilized. Four of the others lifted him, carried him to one of the silvery eggs, waited while its side opened, slipped him into a cramped compartment. The one with the weapon shut it off, almost too soon. The second its hum died, the wolf hurled himself out of confinement—

But the hole in the vehicle's side closed, and he merely collided with a solid wall. He snarled and growled, but he was a prisoner. He did not cease trying to escape the dark compartment for hours, not until the change came over him. Then, unfed, weakened, maddened, he lapsed into unconsciousness.

Now when he waked from dreams, he was always in human form, naked, confined in the cell that somehow lived, that met his needs and yet kept him prisoner. No matter how often the dream recurred, on waking Kazak always believed, for a moment, that he was freshly captured. Then recollection came; and with recollection, hot tears of anger and grief.

▼▼▼

The change came and went, then again, and again. Kazak lost count. The wolf hours were the worst, for the boundaries of the room held him as cruelly as the steel teeth of a trap on the leg, or on the heart. After his first metamorphosis in captivity, they fed him during the change, gave him fresh meat. He ate, ravenously, because instinct drove him to eat.

Dr. Iglace explained to him later why the instinct was important. "It takes a great deal of energy, the transformation," the doctor said. "You lose biomass in changing from a man to a wolf. Some goes to the creation of your pelt, more to the rearrangement of skeleton and musculature. You must eat at least a third of your normal human weight to make the transition from man to wolf to man successfully—that is, with no ill effects."

"Live meat would be better," Kazak said.

Dr. Iglace looked distressed. "Mr. Kazak, we are stretching a point even to give you such flesh as we allow you: the carcasses of domestic park animals, dead of natural causes. Surely you must know that no human eats meat. The life-rights lobby would ruin our work if they thought you human. As it is, they view you as a carnivore, and so we have obtained a certain license from them to meet your, ah, special dietary needs." With a half-smile, the scientist added, "I suppose it's pointless to ask the question again—"

"I can't tell you how it feels to be a werewolf," Kazak insisted.

"Then you have no memory of your wolf form?"

Kazak paced. He never sat in the presence of the doctor unless specifically ordered to do so. "I have memory. I lack the words. It—it's a matter of knowing, of sensing with my entire body, of being awareness rather than intellect—" He held out his empty hands. "How would you describe a painting to a blind person, or a symphony to a deaf one? There are no words."

"And when you are a wolf? Do you then have memory of your manlike form?"

"Yes. Faint, thin, like a dream of a dream, like the morning haze in that instant when you realize that in another moment the sun will burn it off, and by the time you've thought the thought, it is gone."