The Ultimate Werewolf (34 page)

"Poetic. Hardly scientific data."

Kazak stopped his pacing and spoke in a quieter tone: "Give me some dignity. Give me clothing at least, for the times—the times when I look human."

The doctor raised his eyebrows. "You believe clothing lends dignity? My word, you are old-fashioned. Surely you know that in civilized places clothing has been optional for years and years. Why not, with the climate perfectly controlled and reproduction made scientific?" He gestured at his own neatly-shod feet, his white trousers, his white jacket. "This is properly a uniform and not clothing at all. It identifies me as a member of the guild of science. If it would make you comfortable, I could be as naked as you."

"No," Kazak said. "That wouldn't make me comfortable."

"Clothing," the scientist said. "Remarkable. Still, if you wish, it is possible. Lie on your bed. It has been listening, it knows."

Kazak reclined. The bed grew around him, sending a thin membrane over chest and arms, loins and legs. In a few moments he rose, dressed in white singlet and trousers, wearing soft white shoes. "Thank you," he said humbly.

"Not at all. I hope you feel more—" the thin lips stretched upward— "human now."

They gave him a "real" window, a hologram that showed a view of the great city they were in, a place of endless spiring structures and deep canyons of streets. When he was not being tested, Kazak watched the window hungrily, day after day, counting the intervals and dreading the coming of full moons.

Once he sat watching the eastern horizon through that window. He had kept careful count, and tonight was the full moon. True, he did not know which month it was, for the city was certainly "domesticated" and showed no more seasonal change than did the eternal face of the moon itself; but he knew the change was due, the sixth or eighth change since his capture.

The moon rose slowly, pale in the glare of that huge city. He shrank within as it climbed above the jagged horizon of spires and rooftops— but the change did not occur. He remained human.

Kazak shook with relief and with fear. When the moon had climbed quite high, so high that he could no longer see it through the window, the wall opened and Dr. Iglace came in. "Do you feel cured?" he asked.

"What have you done to me?" Kazak demanded.

"Perhaps a new drug. How do you feel? Do you miss the transformation?"

Kazak frowned. "I miss—" he said. "I miss—freedom."

Iglace shook his head. "Another outmoded concept."

"Please," Kazak said. "I never killed humans. I never injured anyone—"

"You injure science," Iglace replied. "By being an anomaly. By being an outrage. By being the last man-wolf. No, I am sorry." He glanced at the window. "Let him see the scene outside as it really is," he ordered.

The window brightened. The scene was not a midnight cityscape, but rather a sunset. Kazak frowned at it. "You fooled me?"

Iglace shrugged. "It was possible that the metamorphic trigger was purely psychological in nature, that you only believed the moon caused the change. Over the past month we have altered the day/night cycle of the room and have slightly speeded time for you, so that your perception is about nine hours ahead of real time. You saw an image of the full moon, not the moon itself. However, it will soon rise. Please concentrate, for my questions are not idle ones. Tell me, how did you feel when you thought you would not change?"

Kazak frowned. "I was afraid. And glad. And sorry. I wanted to be free, even if it meant I no longer heard the song of the blood."

"A lycanthrope and a poet. My friend, you are a living fossil on two counts. True sunset nears, Mr. Kazak. I must leave you now."

A door formed itself and then disappeared as Iglace stepped through it. The window winked out of existence, too, leaving just the four walls, the ceiling, the floor. Kazak paced, shaking in reaction.

The change took him in mid-stride. He felt the first grating shock, a sensation like the ends of broken bone rasping together in all his limbs, and he desperately tore away his clothing. He dropped to hands and knees, feeling his pulse race, his breath come sharp and hot. For an eternal instant he poised with all muscles locked and trembling, like a man on the brink of agony or orgasm.

The bones within him became plastic, re-formed themselves. His pelt grew, thickened, as his skull altered, as his teeth became fangs, his nails claws. Energy surged through his frame, shrinking the mass of his body as muscles altered, bones shifted, and his backbone extended into a tail.

The hateful room flowed in through his nose, aseptic smells, plastics, metals, synthetics, chemicals, nothing of the living world. In this form Kazak felt the imitation pulse of the room, sensed the throb of liquids passing through micropores, heard the hum of electricity keening like a knife kissing a whetstone ten kilometers away. The room knew him, and contained him, and was his enemy, and could not be killed, for it did not live.

He screamed, and the scream was a howl.

▼▼▼

In times past he had tried to hide from the moon, always without success, no matter how deeply he burrowed in caverns, no matter how completely he blinded himself beneath tons of earth and stone. Somehow she found him, Sister Moon, and always she called to his blood, to his urge to run and be free; and always, always, his wild blood answered the call.

He had lived a long time, a time beyond his counting, for his kind matured slowly, and their spans were longer than those of common men. His mother, whom he barely remembered, had spoken of such things years ago, in another century, perhaps: "You will live to a great age, and you will never be old or weak. And when the time comes for you to die, you will give yourself back to Brother Earth without pain, without fear."

Later, from his reading, he learned about the charm of silver against his kind. In a city on the Mediterranean he had once tested the charm, had visited an antique shop that specialized in old silver. No sooner had he stepped through the door into the cool, dim shop, smelling of garlic and dust, than he began to feel it, the pressure of the metal all around him, sharp as knives and eager for his blood. He felt decorative silver pins stir in their cases, trying to get at him, to pierce his skin, and he felt the malevolence of silver rings, trying to uncoil like snakes to strike at him.

Awareness of the hostile element had almost drowned him. The shopkeeper, fat and wearing an extravagant mustache, materialized from the depths of the shop, saying, "Silver,
signore?
Something nice in silver?"

He had fled without excuse or apology into the sunlight and the clamor of life, and eventually had retreated northward into the forests where he could live simply, could even get a position as a warden. The job demanded no advanced degree and even provided a little hermit- house in the shadow of the great trees.

His kitchen was furnished with aluminum, and all his knives and forks were steel. Silver never got its hooks into him, except for the silver moon, once a month, and that struck too deep for any surgeon to plumb.

▼▼▼

"Silver," said Dr. Iglace, "acts as a catalyst."

"I don't understand," Kazak said.

Dr. Iglace was pleased to explain. "It destabilizes at least two of your hormones. The silver is not itself affected by the reaction, but it does encourage the reaction. Normally your body repairs itself with astonishing speed, no matter what the damage. Look at your right forearm. Do you see the scar?"

Kazak stared at his arm, then raised his eyes to meet the icy blue gaze of Dr. Iglace. "What scar?"

The doctor smiled. "Precisely. We've repeatedly taken biopsy plugs from your forearm, and within hours the wounds have healed with no scarring. It might interest you to know that your body chemistry is proving useful medically. We may synthesize a serum from your blood that will accelerate healing in humans."

Kazak resumed his restless pacing, a caged animal. "But what about the silver?"

Dr. Iglace made a throw-away gesture. "It disrupts the healing process, reduces your ability to heal yourself to that of an ordinary person. So a silver knife, or a silver bullet, would kill you, because you could not counter the effects of the wound. An ordinary knife or bullet would not seriously harm you, even if it penetrated your heart. The muscle and tissue would reknit instantaneously, sealing the puncture, saving your life."

Kazak prowled the floor. "How long have I been here?"

"A lunar year tonight. Tonight is the full moon."

"I know." Kazak slumped into the other chair. "I suppose you have a theory about the moon as well."

Dr. Iglace's brown face twisted into a smile. "Of course. You are affected by radiation—a subtle form of radiation that sunlight triggers

when it falls on the lunar surface. The energy of the sunlight activates a process that results in certain subatomic particles being thrown off from the moon. Forgive me, this is not my field."

Kazak shook his head dumbly.

The doctor continued: "When the moon is a quarter full, or three- quarters full, the radiation is too weak to influence you. Only when the moon is completely full does the radiation reach Earth with sufficient intensity to trigger the transformation."

"Shielding?" Kazak asked.

"My dear fellow, we have tried shielding. We estimate that you would have to be shielded by material over a thousand kilometers thick before the effect would be blunted. I suppose it would be possible for you to fly around the Earth once a month, on a fast aircraft, keeping the Earth between you and the moon. Possible, but hardly practical." The doctor consulted his wrist, where luminous red numerals, like animated tatoos, showed the time. "I must go now. I worry about you, you know. You are losing weight, in both your manifestations."

Kazak tensed in his chair. The moment Iglace approached the wall, the instant the wall dilated into a doorway, he sprang. He struck the scientist between the shoulder blades, toppled forward with him, hearing the other man's outburst of breath. They tumbled, and Dr. Iglace lay still, though he breathed.

Kazak rose and found himself in a long white hallway, not made of the artificial living stuff of his cell, but ordinary laminate and metal. He ran.

He found a window, a real one, and looked out. The city sprawled far below, but only a few meters beneath the window a skypath led from the building he was in to one opposite. Kazak tried the window and it swiveled open, just enough for him to squeeze through.

The sun was low and red.

He dropped to the roof of the skypath—and nearly slipped off, barely avoiding a fall of another ninety meters to the streets far below. But he kept his grip, crept along the sizzling hot metal to the opposite building, and then managed to swing down and inside the skypath. Crowds walked the halls of the other building, most people clothed, some nude or seminude. No one looked at him twice as he found the elevators.

Outside the sun touched the horizon.

He dropped down to street level, his heart hammering, wondering if Iglace had planted something, some remote sensor, inside his body. Wondering if Iglace had recovered, if the hunters were already in pursuit.

The street was shadowed, for the buildings allowed no sunset light to the pavement. But almost as soon as Kazak stepped out, the building fronts themselves flared into cold artificial light, ejecting dusk from a broad street where crowds of people flowed in two directions. They parted ahead of him and closed behind as he ran, ran for his life.

For theirs.

Before he knew it he burst from the crowded buildings into a green place, a place of real grass and trees, though even here the sunset was invisible behind a high cliff of buildings on the other side. With the smell of grass sharp in his nose he cut into the park, and there he felt the first agony of change.

Bushes and rocks. He crept into a nestlike place, ripped away his clothing, felt his nails hardening and sharpening. In the cool of the park the air congealed into thin ground mist, tainted with the exhalations of the city.

The moon called to him.

His breathing rasped in his throat, and its sound told him he was no longer capable of human speech. He was free of the clothes at last, free, free.

Hungry.

The stone and earth felt good against his feet. He sniffed the thickening mist and nearly gagged at the stench of the city, at the dusty, nasty smell of humans and their works that clogged even his mouth. He ran.

Now they knew him, the people who crowded the walkways that meandered through the park. They shouted and pointed, and he charged them, scattering them.

Like sheep.

His belly screamed. He cut a young one from the herd, a female, and expertly maneuvered her until her back was against a fence and her eyes were as wide as her mouth and her mouth shrieked at him—

He smelled her, smelled the meat of her, the blood, the life of her, so strong, so sharp. He smelled her fear.

Such an easy kill. Such simple prey, such warm food.

He needed her badly.

But in the dark of his mind some faint thing stirred. The dream of a dream, he had called it. The faintly glimmering recollection of something he shared with his quarry.