Giles Goat Boy (117 page)

The moment was at hand. As Max went waving to the peak I put the buckhorn to my lips and blew with all my strength.
Teruah! Teruah! Teruah!
My keeper, whose dear wise like this campus will not soon see again, combusted in a glorious flare—by the light whereof I saw Tommy’s Tommy’s Tom race unleashèd toward my semblance. His head was high; joyously he bleat! Bray buzzed and flapped; literally he shed my guise (stick and horn attached), and holding his nose, flung the limp shed at Triple-T. Underneath he was gleaming black, his face hid under a cowl; seeing it was not I, T.’s T.’s Tom lowered horns and charged. Dreadful the hum, horrid the foetor Bray now gave out! He bounded mewards from Tom’s creosoted horns; I drove him back with horn and odor of my own. Thus caught between us, he spread his cloak for half a second; more loud his hum than Stokerish engine! Then from under his tunic-front a thing shot forth, shortswordlike, as Tommy struck. The buck shrieked, fell kicking, lay still. I snatched the black vestment, slick as oilskin; Bray flapped it off, face and all (underneath was a blacker), and fled—nay, vanished—in the crowding dark. A glance told me there was no helping T.’s T.’s T.—his legs stuck out stiff, his eyes were filmed over, his belly swelled. I had at shadow, ground, and moat with my stick, lest Bray be camouflaged against them; waded through the icy pool (at great cost of goat-dip) and attacked the Shaft itself. The crowd had watched, dumbstruck; now as I thwacked the pillar they seemed to wake. A voice very like Peter Greene’s cried, “What’s that I hear a-flapping and a-flying, Leo?”

“Nothingcy!” a Nikolayan voice replied. “I don’t hear!”

“Look once by the Shaft-tip!” squealed Dr. Eierkopf.
“Der Grosslehrer ist jetzt ein Fliegender!”

I looked up. In the pall above my flaming keeper something large and obscure appeared to rise, rolling and spreading like the smoke itself. The crowd’s dismay turned into panic: people leaped from the stands, swarmed over the barricades in both directions, fell upon their knees and girlfriends, clouted neighbors, clutched loved ones. Bravely the band played
New Tammany’s anthem until overrun. Guards scrambled into the moat, either to arrest or to protect me; at their head grinned Stoker, cursing as he came. His wife I discerned high up in the bleachers, one hand upon her belly, watching with anxious love above the crowd; Mother knitted placidly beside her. And upon us all, gentle ashes—whose if not my gentler keeper’s?—commenced to fall. Another term, surely, they would be mine; not now, for though my youthful work was done, that of my manhood remained to do. What it was I clearly saw, and what it would come to. Nonetheless I smiled, leaned on my stick, and, no troubleder than Mom, gimped in to meet the guards halfway.

Today, at thirty-three and a third, I record indirectly into WESCAC’s storage the last of these tapes—at my protégée’s behest, as always, but not, this final time, in her presence. She awaits my coming daily in the Visitation Room, with a pair of youngsters who had far rather be out romping in the lovely spring than languishing in this cagèd, sunless place. Let her wait.

My self-wound watch runs fast; anyhow I have small time left, and so futile is this work now approaching its end, I am sore tempted to abandon it unfinished and go gambol in the April air myself.
She
thinks it done already, whose notion it was I render my tale during this my recentest and last detention. Her great nagging faith has alone sustained me, for better or worse, through the monstrous work—this “Revised New Syllabus,” as she calls it, which she is convinced will supersede the Founder’s Scroll. I smile at that idea, as at the olive lad she calls our son, and in whom I see as much of Stoker, of Croaker, indeed of Bray, as of myself. Supposing even that the Scroll
were
replaced by these endless tapes, one day to feed Him who will come after me, as I fed once on that old sheepskin—what then? Cycles on cycles, ever unwinding: like my watch; like the reels of this machine she got past her spouse; like the University itself.

Unwind, rewind, replay.

No matter. Futility and Purpose, like Pass and Fail, themselves have meaning only for her sort, and her son’s (in whose dark eyes I see already his mother’s single-mindedness). For me, Sense and Nonsense lost their meaning on a night twelve years four months ago, in WESCAC’s Belly—as did every such distinction, including that between Same and Different. Thus it is, and in no other wise, I have lingered on the campus these dozen years, in the humblest capacity, advising one at a time undergraduates to whom my words convey nothing. Thus it is I accept without much grumble their failings and my own: the abuse of my enemies, the lapses of my friends; the growing pains in both my legs, my goatly
seizures, my errors of fact and judgment, my failures of resolve—all these and more, the ineluctable shortcomings of mortal studenthood. And thus it is—empowered as it were by impotence, driven by want of motive—I record this posttape (which she will not know of), in order to speak of the interval between my “triumph” of twelve years back, just recounted, and my present pass. Perhaps too to speak to myself of what is to come: the end Max saw from the beginning; the “Commencement” I saw at the end.

To begin with, my original “Tutees”: of the two I Graduated out of hand—my mother “Lady Creamhair” and “My Ladyship” Anastasia—the latter I’ve spoken of already and will surely return to (as I will return to the Visitation Room where she waits, go out releasèd with her once again into New Tammany, and abide with her until that last release of all, whose imminence she little dreams); the former passed away not long after her grandson’s birth, the EAT-rays having got to her more sorely than at first appeared. She died smiling, I understand, with Reginald Hector, Anastasia, and the infant named Giles Stoker at her bedside—but then, she had lived smiling, too, since the day I shocked her out of sense, and, as the effect of her EATing spread, had lapsed unhappily into a more or less constant chuckle. Anastasia’s conviction, therefore, that Mother died happy in the knowledge of her “gift to studentdom,” I take in the spirit of her other convictions: that “Gilesianism” (her term, for her invention) will cure the student body’s ills, and that “our” son will establish “the New Curriculum” on every campus in the University. I long since ceased attempting to explain—never mind what. It is terms now since I raised an eyebrow or even sighed. Not impossibly dear Anastasia was a little EATen herself, that gorgeous night; not impossibly I was too, either in infancy or in one or more of my descents into the Belly. How would I know? Not impossibly (as Dr. Sear once speculated)
all
studentdom was EATen terms ago—by WESCAC, EASCAC, or both—and its fear of Campus Riot III is but one ironic detail of a mad collective dream.

No matter.

Sear himself is dead too, of course; was so, it turned out, even as I affirmed his Candidacy that afternoon on Founder’s Hill. It was his cancer killed him—but alas, not directly. Persuaded, in his clear delirium, that he had achieved not only fatherhood but total illumination, his old sympathy with Gynander became obsessive: blind already, he saw his generative organs as all that stood, as it were, between him and proph-profhood, removed them in the nurse’s absence with a shard of tumbler, and expired of massive hemorrhage. No doubt he would have smiled like Mother at the end, had he not lacked at the time a great part of his face.
Hedwig, too old and weakened by their past to bear children safely, did indeed prove to be impregnated (as did Anastasia: a circumstance I keep in mind when tempted to protest her extremer convictions); but the birth of her child—a fine strapping girl the hue of dark honey—ruined both her health and her brief lucidity. She and Mother died a week apart in the room they shared for their last term on campus, in the NTC Asylum. Stoker even has it they were sweethearts at the end—but that’s Stoker. One never knows. When he says with a grin, “What the flunk, George, love’s where you find it,” I neither agree nor disagree.

Of the others whose Candidacies I affirmed—or would affirm, or was held to have affirmed—three more are dead now also, not counting Max: Reginald Hector, Classmate X, and Leonid Alexandrov. Of Grandfather the fact was that I neither affirmed nor denied him: were it not for him I’d never have been born; on the other hand, had his will been done I’d have perished at birth—I regard both circumstances with mixed feelings, but in any mood they cancel each other. Reciprocally, as it were, he neither affirmed nor denied my Grand-Tutorship, for though his real preference, like most other people’s, was for Bray (insofar as he concerned himself at all with such questions), he never openly supported those who called for my expulsion on the grounds of Grand-Tutorcide. Family loyalty it was, I suppose, or the kind of affection sometimes displayed by old professor-generals for those they once tried and failed to kill. He passed away not long ago, after an extended invalidity, with his belief unshaken that he was beholden to none. His faithful receptionist—who for many years had written all his speeches, managed his affairs, and warmed his old flesh with her young—arranged a splendid funeral at the joint expense of the Military Science Department and the Philophilosophical Fund.

Leonid Alexandrov redefected immediately after Max’s Shafting, making his way by some unknown means, blind though he was, through the steel-mesh partition in the Control Room. I never saw him again, nor heard anything of his activities for some years after, during which the Boundary Dispute alternated (as indeed it does yet) between crisis and stalemate—each crisis a little more critical, each stalemate a quantum uneasier, than the last. Then one day two Nikolayans, one old and one not, were caught wrestling at midnight in the Control Room. How they’d managed to open the locked and electrified partition, no one knew. Their tussle gave the alarm; guards from both sides ran to the scene in time to see the younger man push the older through to the NTC side, intentionally or not, and electrocute himself in the process. The older man—who turned out to be Classmate X—might then have made good his
own defection, if that was his object, had he not attempted to reclose the door behind him. But the Nikolayan guards were at his heels, and Chementinski (as he called himself again thereafter), uncertain whether they meant to shoot him or defect themselves, kicked the mesh-gate shut, and was immediately shocked to the point of death. Summoning me to the Infirmary before he expired (I was working, between detentions, as a free-lance freshman advisor), he told me among other things that his stepson had helped dozens of undergraduates on each side of the Power Line to transfer illicitly to the other, risking his life in the two-way enterprise again and again without remuneration; in the end he had given his life to save that of a secret agent assigned to kill him, but who in fact so admired him that he’d resolved to kill himself instead. The agent, you will have guessed, was Classmate X, to whom Leonid had repeated a hundred times in vain my advice, as he understood it: that the special vanity of suicide was, in X’s case, permissible, even passèd, affirming as it did the self that destroyed itself—which self, being anyhow inescapable, had to be got beyond instead of suppressed. The nature of the conflict in the gate I never did get clear—who was trying to do what to whom, and why—but Chementinski seemed convinced of two things: that his stepson perished in his behalf, wrongheadedly or not; and that he himself, in closing the gate on guards from both sides who possibly meant to defect, had committed suicide twice over (because the act was impulsively selfish, and hence fatal to the selfless character called X; and because Chementinski, whose self was thus reaffirmed, was dying of the consequent shock—“by his own hand,” he vowed, not altogether consistently or accurately). His final word to me, as he expired, he declared had been Leonid’s to him, upon their recognizing each other and themselves on that fatal threshold: “Gratituditynesshoodshipcy!”

When I repeated this story to Stoker during my next term in Main Detention, he pointed out with a sneer that the dying man had been as delirious as Kennard Sear, and consequently that his account, whatever it signified, was probably mistaken. The young man in the mesh had been burned beyond recognition; his older classmate, also badly seared, was bandaged as a mummy. One had only his feverish word for both their identities, and Nikolayan administrators, for example, maintained that Classmate Alexandrov had never redefected in the first place, and that Classmate X had been executed many terms earlier for membership in a forbidden ID-cult.

“That’s all quite possible,” I agreed—but no longer with a smile, as I would have in terms gone by. Anastasia at once took up the cudgels in
behalf of Chementinski’s and Leonid’s Graduation, and so browbeat us both upon that head (her tongue grew wondrous sharper every year), I was as glad to leave the Visitation Room as was Stoker to fetch me to a cell.

My confinement on that occasion had to do with the tenth anniversary of Bray’s rout (others called it his Elevation), just as my present one, ending today, had to do with the twelfth of his initial appearance in the Amphitheater. Both times I had been sought out, in my obscurity, by journalism-majors with long memories, who asked whether I still maintained that I was the Grand Tutor; that I knew the “Way to Commencement Gate” (one could hear quotation-marks in their tone); and that Harold Bray, in whom hundreds and thousands believed as against the handful of my own Tutees, had been a flunked impostor. Patiently both times I had replied: yes, I was the Grand Tutor, for better or worse, there was no help for it; yes, I knew what studentdom was pleased to call “the Answer,” though that term—indeed the whole proposition—was as misleading as any other (and thus as satisfactory), since what I “knew” neither “I” nor anyone could “teach,” not even to my own Tutees. As for Bray, I had not called him flunkèd, I declared: his nature and origin were extraordinary and mysterious as my own; all that could be said was that he was my adversary, as necessary to me as Failure is to Passage. I.e., not only contrary and interdependent, but finally undifferentiable.