Giles Goat Boy (106 page)

“Hmp,” Greene said.

“And I’ve mislaid my darned purse in the Treatment Room somewhere! Would you help me find it?”

Full of confusion I ushered Mother from the office; and the womanly chuckle I heard behind me, and Greene’s half-hearted complaint, as he shut the hall door, that he wasn’t
supposed
to shut any doors, it was against orders, smote me with an ireful doubt which—small comfort!—abetted our safe exit. For the first madman who loped up, unfortunately woofing, I butted with such force that he knocked a second down, and our way was clear to the lift. And in the lobby, where demented undergraduates and faculty of both sexes swung from light-fixtures, raced in wheelchairs, coupled on the carpet, shat in typewriters, or merely stood transfixed in curious attitudes, I laid about ruthlessly with my stick, cut an angry swath, and roughtly gimped through bedlam with my mother. I could not have explained my fury, or told why, when it occurred to me that Love and Hate must be in truth distinctions as false as True and False, that sagacious reflection nowise clarified my mind or calmed my spirit.

I hailed the only taxi at the Annex door and bade the driver take us to Tower Hall. Newsboys hawked in the fading afternoon:
Power Lines Moving Together: Fear Riot Near; Rexford Raps Mrs., Raises Roof
. The tidings brought me no pleasure. Through a small loudspeaker in our sidecar came further news: so-called “Moderate” elements were resigning from the Administration to protest the Chancellor’s recognition of extremists;
Ira Hector for example had been offered the post of Comptroller, and Rexford had not only acknowledged Maurice Stoker as his half-brother, but gone to spend the weekend with him at the Power Plant. “ ‘
It may be necessary to have these people around,’ complained one resigning official, ‘like spies and grafters—but one mustn’t officially
approve
of them
 …’ ” The new corrective headgear issued to Power-Line guards, the reporter went on to say, was intended to remedy the faults of the “heads-up” collar by fixing the wearer’s eyes down at his feet; but looking down from that height seemed to make the guards dizzy, and the drop-off rate was as high as before.

“What the heck anyhow,” I said, snapping off the speaker: “Failure is Passage.”

“A-plus,” said Mother.

Not until we drew in sight of the Library did I realize that I had no means to pay our fare. I glanced at the driver, hoping to gauge his charitableness, and saw what I’d been too disconcerted to observe before, why he was the only cabbie in the madhouse drive. His uniform was white, beltless and buttonless, his eyes were aglint, his grin was euphrasic. Alarmed, I commanded him to stop the motorcycle.

“Stop the cycle,” he squawked like a parrot. “Stop the cycle.” His grip on the handlebar was fixed now as his expression; the Mall-street fetched us straight over a curbstone, across Tower Hall Plaza, through clusters of alarmed undergraduates, and into a yew-hedge flanking the entrance, where we came to rest. The engine stalled. “Yes, well,” Mother remarked. The driver sat erect and beaming as ever, though yew-twigs pressed against his face, even into his mouth.

“Thtop the thycle,” he repeated. I helped Mother out and left him to iterate his message to the gathering crowd—the sight of which, understandably, caused a small shudder in me.

In the Library things were more calm; I composed my wits and reviewed the situation. That My Ladyship and I had exchanged roles in the Treatment Room—she the Tutor, I the Tutee—was not displeasing. But her final behavior mystified me, and behind the turmoil of my heart stood a stiller but impenetrabler mystery, that I had felt briefly in my arms: what was it that looked through the optics of that respiring female organism and said “I love you”? And to what did those voweled noises speak? To what refer?
I. Love. You
. The idea was as preposterous as it was dark! No, I’d not seen through My Ladyship, no more myself, and if that was my infirmity, it was yet to be overcome; indeed, it had overcome me. Very well (I reminded myself as we went up to the Cataloguing
Office, Mother pressing the lift-button out of habit), then I had failed that part of my Assignment, even on my own terms, and Failure is Passage. But elation was fled, even grim satisfaction; I began to feel desolate. If only Mother were not demented, I thought, and Max not detained (if indeed he still was, after the amnesty): how good it would be to discuss the problem with them!

We passed through the spoke-filed room, in whose hub the empty Scroll-case stood. It being Saturday afternoon and nearly dinnertime, only a few scholars were about. The door to Mother’s former office was locked, and bore a small sign that read CACAFILE
OUT OF ORDER
. It occurred to me that I had no clear reason for coming there anyhow: it was Bray I wanted; no, not even Bray: WESCAC. No, not even WESCAC: death. So far had my spirits, unaccountably, plunged! To Re-place the Founder’s Scroll, to Pass the Finals, to do single combat with WESCAC and what it represented—it was of no importance, I could not even think, my mind was on My obscure Ladyship. I had come from Infirmary to Library out of habit, like Mother, following the order of my spring-term Tutorship. Humming, she fetched from her knitting-bag a key—someone must have forgot to collect it from her—and unlocked the door. The faulty console in the corner began winking, as if roused from sleep.

“Would you care for something to read?” Mother asked automatically.

“No—no thank you, ma’am.”

She ignored the new nameplate on her desk and eased herself into the swivel-chair as though ready for work, though the office lights were out and she still had her coat on. “Well, you look around and let me know if you want anything, sonny. There’s nothing like a good book.”

My heart lifted not a little; I kissed her hair. Again, from her innocent darkness, she had illumined me!

“Listen carefully, Mom,” I said; “Can you call for the Founder’s Scroll? I want to put it back in its case.” Whatever fugitive notion I’d had earlier concerning this item of my Assignment gave way before a true inspiration: Had not Enos Enoch and a hundred other wayfaring dons of fact and fiction taught, by their own example, that the Way to Commencement Gate led through Nether Campus? Was not my answer,
Failure is Passage
, but an epigrammatic form of that same truth?
Replace the Founder’s Scroll
had seemed, in the spring, the simplest and clearest imperative of all, and yet the bafflingest, since the Scroll had not been lost; and my response to it had seemed, even at the time, the most specious of my Tutorhood—though to be sure they’d all been incorrect.
It was fitting, then—stirringly so!—that on this round, so to speak, when I’d “solved” the first five problems with a deliberate speciousness, the rule of inversion would hold equally for the sixth, and make my re-placement of the Scroll not only bonafide but profoundly significant. It had
not
been misplaced, that was the point; but it was now, for I had misplaced it last time around—and so could re-place it! Things had to be lost before they could be found, broken before they could be fixed, infirm before they could be well, opaque before they could be clear—in short, failed before they could be passed! True, I could not at once discern how this remarkable insight quite applied to Ending the Boundary Dispute, which I’d not begun; nor had I truly “fixed” the Clock I’d broken, for example, or seen to my satisfaction through My Ladyship—but these doubts were nothing, shadows cast by the very brilliance of my illumination; I ignored them. Failure
was
Passage! No past fiasco, no present triumph; the spring made possible the fall!

“Well, hum,” Mother said, going to the console. “Founder’s Scroll, is it? Is that the title?”

“Yes’m.
Founders Scroll
.”

Still flustered by my kiss, she fiddled with her hairpins and the switches of the CACAFILE. “…  
o-l-l
,” she murmured, pressing buttons. “Who did you say the author was, dear?”

I hesitated. “The Founder.”

She did not: “…  
n-d-e-r
. No first name?”

“Just one name, Mother.”

The CACAFILE seemed to purr at her touch. “Please step into the next room,” she said, still in her office voice. “The volume or volumes you called for will be delivered to the Circulation Desk in approximately one minute.”

As soon as I took her arm the manner vanished; she minced and colored like a shy schoolgirl. The CACAFILE-console gave a little snarl, then lapsed into its previous torpid blink.

“Let’s go to the Circulation Desk, Mother.”

“Oh. Well.”

But at the empty Scroll-case we were arrested by a double commotion: from the Circulation Desk, next door to the Catalogue Room, feminine squeals as alarmed as merry; from behind us, at the door we’d first entered through, an angry male voice: “
There
you are, flunk you!”

A half-dozen scholars in the spokes of the card-file raised their heads.

“Hello, Daddy,” Mother said placidly.

It was indeed Reginald Hector, but much changed: the fringe of hair
around his bald pate was grown shoulder-long; his body, that had been sleek, was brown and wiry, and wrapped in fleece of Angora; his feet were sandaled, and under his right arm (apparently hurt, for he clasped it with his left) was a goat-herd’s crook! This last he tried to raise with his better arm as he approached, and my surprise gave way to apprehension. I put the case between us.

“P.-G.!” A young dark-spectacled woman rushed in from the Circulation Room with a double handful of long white shreds. Behind her, from the desk-chute, more of the same blew forth, like paper streamers from a fan. “Thank the Founder you’re here, P.-G.! Look at this!”

I recognized her as Professor-General Hector’s receptionist, now out of uniform and evidently employed by the Library, perhaps in Mother’s former capacity. She showed no surprise at her previous employer’s costume, whether because she’d seen it before or because of her present agitation. The “P.-G.” paused and scowled, crook high. Mother clucked her tongue, nowise discomposed. The young woman held out the tangled skein and wailed: “It’s the Founder’s Scroll!”

The ex-Chancellor clutched his ailing arm. “The Dunce you say!”

“A-plus,” Mother affirmed.

“The CACAFILE’s gone crazy!” the young woman cried. “All these months the Scroll’s been lost in it somewhere, and now it’s spitting it out in ribbons!”

There was consternation among the scholars: one snatched a handful of the shreds, examined them, and groaned; others raced to the Cataloguing Office to pound on its locked door, and yet others to the Circulation Desk, where they clenched and hopped in vain to see the wisdom of the ages shredding forth.

“You
!” my grandfather roared, thrusting a fistful of tatters under my nose. I closed my eyes, nodded, and took a mouthful of the ruins.

“What’s he
doing?
” the receptionist shrieked.

Mother smiled benignly and said, as if interrogated by a library-clerk: “Just browsing, thanks.” At the same time a dim memory of our readings in the hemlock must have stirred in her, for she took it upon herself to feed me more of the Scroll. Though I’d had no lunch to speak of and was quite famished, the old vellum was bitter on my tongue, like dung dried in the sun of desert centuries—quite apart from the anguish I flavored it with, compounded of doubt and desolation. For either my insight of a few moments earlier was false, in which case I was as much in the dark as ever, or else it was true, in which case I was failing by my own terms. What was the use of restoring those shreds to the Scroll-case? I was not
blind to the possibility that failing all, on my own terms as well as WESCAC’s, might be the deeper sense of my answer; that is to say, that the failure truly equal to passage might be the failure to understand truly that Failure is Passage. Even as I chewed, that proposition flickered through my head as on a dim translux but did not console me. No, I was as snarled and wrecked as the Founder’s Scroll: never mind P.-G. Hector’s crook (now belaboring my shoulders) and the alarums of bystanders; never mind that the lights began to flicker again, as they had upon my spring-term disaster, bespeaking another crisis at the Power Lines; never mind that the College was in anarchy, that lunatics and flunkees ranged the quads—all I could think of, strangely enough, was My Ladyship. I envisioned her beneath—no, atop—Peter Greene, or Maurice Stoker, or Eblis Eierkopf, or Lucky Rexford, in some lubricious exhibition on the Living-Room dais. No, no, after all it was none of them; or having serviced them to exhaustion, now she stood, slack-mouthed with love; expelled their mingled seed with a tricky jerk, and stretched forth her arms to her fated, fateful lover, who rose up glitter-eyed upon the dais and enfolded her body in his hard black cloak. And I was no longer jealous, no, I was relieved; joyous, even, for her sake, when I heard the muffled cry of her delight and knew she was infused for good and all with the germ of Passage. I wanted to die.

“You can’t eat that!” a scholar shouted, clawing at the strips that hung like
pasta
from my jaws.

“He can shove it!” my grandfather snapped. “
Independence
, he calls it!” He grabbed at his wrapper. “Where’s my aides?” he demanded of his former receptionist. “Get this flunkèd hair-shirt off me!”

“Weren’t they with you at the barns, sir?” she said.

“Oh, the Dunce, I forgot I sent ’em out there.” Suddenly defensive, he glared at me and asked how the flunk a man could mix a batch of goat-dip by himself and keep his eye on a young buck like Triple-T at the same time. At mention of that name tears sprang to my eyes; I swallowed a great cud of Scroll; the rest fell to the floor and was scrabbled up by scholars. For a moment my despair gave place to a sweeter if no less painful emotion.

“Tommy’s Tommy’s Tom? Have you been with the herd, Grandpa?”

“Don’t Grandpa me, Dunce flunk you! If that buck hadn’t banged up my arm—”

He would crook me a harder one despite his infirmity; I lowered my head to take the blow and die like Redfearn’s Tom, grandsire of the buck
he spoke of. There were cries from receptionist and bystanders, quite a number of whom had been attracted by the disturbance.