Giles Goat Boy (57 page)

“Despite the Moishiocaust and deaths from all causes on both sides during C. R. Two,” he pointed out, “there were more people on campus at the end of the Riot than at the beginning. So?” And blandly he turned up his palms.

But less egregious, and to me more interesting, were his opinions of Harold Bray, Grand-Tutorhood in general, and Graduation—all which matters, like ethics and politics, he first declared with a smile to be “out of his line”—suitable enough for small talk, but not worth serious attention.

“I myself am a Graduate, you know,” he said.

“You!”

“That amuses you. Nevertheless, I am. Even your friend Bray agrees—not that that matters. And I verified it on WESCAC before I was demoted: there’s the
real
Grand Tutor, of course.”

I coughed on my beer. “WESCAC?”

“Certainly.” He was sorry, he said coolly, that he could not second my own claim to that distinction—how he knew of it I couldn’t imagine. He granted that in many respects my history paralleled that of the Grand-Tutorial Ideal as abstracted by WESCAC, and if I had happened to be Virginia Hector’s son by the GILES, there could be little doubt of my authenticity. But seeing I was not, the best he could say for Max was that my keeper—in his isolation, bitterness, and advancing years—had gone soft-headed and groomed me for some preposterous scheme of redress. Max being in his opinion incapable of sustained deception—other than self-deception—Eierkopf concluded that in all likelihood Max really believed me to be a Grand Tutor, and would even more so if he knew of the GILES incident.

“But don’t forget,” he said, “you have only Spielman’s word for it that you came from the Tower Hall tapelift, for example. I remember hearing stories about a crazy
Schwarzer
finding a baby, but Max could have made up those stories—so could the
Schwarzer
have—or you might not be the same child.” He smiled. “Or you might have been EATen yourself,
ja?
”

“I’ve thought of that.”

“So. But anyhow you aren’t Virginia Hector’s child. And all this AIM business! Nobody knows how WESCAC’s programmed itself since those days, or whether the criteria it reads out for Grand-Tutorhood are actually the ones it would go by if somebody tried to enter the Belly—it might be fooling us! Or talking a different language.”

I began to feel dizzy, melancholy, and yet stubborn, as always when the uncertainty of my position was analyzed.

“Who says it’s the Grand Tutor’s job to straighten out the Quiet Riot anyhow?” Eierkopf went on cheerfully. “Only Spielman, he’s such a big Moishian pacifist! Did Enos Enoch worry about varsity politics?
Unto the Chancellor that which is the Chancellor’s; unto the Founder that which is the Founder’s
. And Scapulas says old Maios fought in the front lines in the Lykeionian riots, a regular alma-matriot.”

Uneasily I declared, “I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to do. Max is my advisor, but he’s not my keeper any more. I’m pleased to hear you don’t believe in this Bray fellow, at least.”

“Bray? Bah! We’ll see what happens when he goes into WESCAC’s Belly. Want to see what he’s up to now?”

He threw a number of switches on a nearby panel. Around the upper margin of the walls, just under the dome-edge, was a row of slightly convex glass screens, each half a meter square, which now glowed bluish-white in the manner of the Powerhouse Telerama. Scenes appeared on them, mostly unfamiliar: streets, buildings, interiors, for the most part dark and deserted. On one screen, however—which Eierkopf selected, shutting off the rest—a considerable crowd was represented, around a single column that marked the scene as Founder’s Hill. A white figure stood near the pediment alternately haranguing the throng and bending to touch and speak to individuals who knelt before him. To certain of them, it appeared, he gave something cylindrical and white, like a rolled paper.

“He’s Certifying Candidates already,” Eierkopf snorted. It was indeed Bray, I saw now in a closer view. “You’d better get busy, there won’t be anybody left to Commence.”

“Is he really Certified by WESCAC? He claimed to be.” I wondered too how the man had contrived to appear from the air, like a great stork, and who he was anyhow, and whether the NTC Chancellor’s office would not take measures to investigate and suppress the imposture. Even as I inquired I thought I saw Peter Greene in the floodlit throng, pressing close to the monument; and there in the background, less surprisingly, was the swart stock form of Maurice Stoker, one hand on his hip, the other in his
beard, grinning and shouting orders to the patrolmen who contended with the crowd. Then consternation fetched me to my feet, for as Eierkopf by turning a dial magnified and closed in on the scene, I saw a slender young woman, in a shift white and simple as Bray’s own vestment, come forth under uniformed escort and embrace the pretender’s knees.

“Get up from there!” I cried.

“
Ja
, by George, it’s Anastasia,” Eierkopf laughed. “Remarkable creature, isn’t she? Pretty as her mother, and never says no. You want to watch?”

Sick at heart I declined, and he turned the device off. Croaker approached with an odd-shaped white-enameled vessel, into the neck of which he put his master’s little penis, and Eierkopf urinated.

“You’re jealous a little,” he said. “It was fun last night in the Living Room,
ja?
I saw it on the monitor.”

Since the Cum Laude scandal, I learned, he had been removed from his official directorship of WESCAC research—the machine had grown so self-directing that his post had all but lost its significance in any case—and demoted to the office of Clockwatcher. The job was actually quite sensitive, involving responsibility not only for the measurement of NTC time but for the “ticking heart” of WESCAC itself, “the very pulse of West Campus”: as best I could conceive it, a metronomic apparatus (or was it merely a principle?) which both set and was itself the pace of WESCAC’s operations; which in some manner beyond my fathom both drove and derived from the Tower Hall clockworks, currently under repair. In this capacity his talents, too valuable to do without, were available to the administration, which yet avoided the embarrassment of having a notable ex-Bonifacist in charge of New Tammany’s military research programs. Moreover, at Maurice Stoker’s urging, the Clockwatch had recently extended its operations to assist Main Detention in what was called Safety Surveillance; a genius with lenses, microphones, and such, Eierkopf was developing and integrating into WESCAC an elaborate system of monitoring devices, designed to improve the effectiveness of NTC law-enforcement groups in preventing rule-infractions before they occurred and protecting the College from espionage. When perfected, S.S. would feed into WESCAC whatever its ubiquitous eyes and ears picked up; the computer would scan and assess the data, cull from it by its own program any evidence of infractions-in-the-making, and either take or recommend appropriate action. At present the system consisted merely of a few hundred cameras and listening-devices scattered about the campus and monitored by an experimental automatic scanner there in Eierkopf’s Observatory—thus his surprising knowledge of my recent adventures.

“You and Bray and this Living Sakhyan fellow—we’re watching all of you, naturally, as much as we can. A Grand Tutor’s always a potential threat, as you’re no doubt aware: that was even a criterion in the GILES program.”

I was too much stricken by Anastasia’s defection—how else interpret her behavior?—to be properly appalled by these disclosures. So passionately she had affirmed me in the Living Room, only to embrace the first impostor to come along! Eblis Eierkopf of course was merely amused; he offered the suggestion that she might accept Certification from Bray in order to reinforce his own authenticity, if she felt he needed the support-had she not done the same for me, and half a dozen others?

“The things she used to do for me with Croaker!” he exclaimed. “She knew it helped me to watch her through the night-glass, especially when the gossips said she might be my daughter. Remarkable girl!”

He would have documented in more detail, but I waved away the offer. In an effort then to raise my spirits he had Croaker refill my stein and recounted what he knew of Harold Bray.

“A crazy-man. A fake. A mountebank,” he insisted. “Don’t believe him for a minute; he doesn’t even have the qualifications you have.” But, he allowed, Bray
was
an extraordinary fellow, if a gross impostor, and had acquired a diverse notoriety on the campus before ever the “Grand-Tutor craze” began. It was generally agreed that he’d first appeared in NTC about eight years previously—though no one could say for sure when and whence he’d come, and it was merely a hypothesis, albeit a likely one, that the several roles attributed to him under different names and appearances had been played by a single man. “Sometimes I think he’s a species instead of one man,” Eierkopf declared. “At least he must be quintuplets.”

In brief, within a few months of his appearance in NTC he seemed to know the names, histories, achievements, and involvements of nearly everyone on campus—including their friendships, enmities, and privatest lives, as if he had an S.S. system of his own. Basically squat and dark-haired, and in years somewhere between young manhood and early middle age, he nonetheless contrived to change his appearance substantially overnight from time to time, and his vocation as well. First he’d been an avant-garde poet—bearded, booted, long-locked, and malodorous—the darling of eccentric undergraduates, an
enfant terrible
in exotic garb who’d boasted of his sexual prowess, dropped famous names like birdlime all over Great Mall, spread slanderous gossip (always with a grain of substance in it) that set the members of the Poetry Department at one another’s
throats, and published scores of poems, some of which could not be proved to have been plagiarized. Subsequently—perhaps even simultaneously, it was far from certain—he had been a psychotherapist—bald, cleanshaven, dapper, washed, and fat—cashiered from the Psych Clinic when his glowing reference-letters proved to be forgeries, but not before he’d achieved a fair percentage of apparently successful cures. Again, under a third name, with a crew haircut and a stocky-muscled build, he’d been a field entomologist, explorer, and survival expert, able to flourish indefinitely in the wilderness without so much as a pocketknife or canteen of water-but the Departments of Cartography and Entomology, satisfied as they were with his abilities and indifferent of his credentials, had reluctantly to fire him when he refused to disclose his methods. He had no ID-card; rather, he had such a variety of forged and stolen ones that no one could say what his actual, original name was. No one had ever seen him eat, sleep, or relieve himself; no one knew where he lived; he spent all his hours in taverns and other people’s offices and dwelling-places, talking endlessly and knowledgeably on any subject whatever—he was either a pathological liar or a widely traveled polymath, everyone agreed. Neither had anyone seen him at work; yet books and monographs in a dozen languages and a score of fields (survival techniques excepted) appeared under his
noms-de-plume
and sundry aliases; they were always challenged, but seldom wholly discredited. In time he had become the chief topic of conversation at New Tammany committee-meetings and cocktail parties. He was laughed at and over, reviled, contemned, cashiered, threatened with lawsuits—and yet stood in awe of, especially by students. His most hostile critics agreed that the man was a gifted impostor—so much so that in some instances the question of his fraudulence became more metaphysical than legal or ethical. If a man utterly without experience and knowledge of painting resolves to pose as an artist, Eierkopf hypothesized, and purely as part of the mimicry comes up with a painting that at least a few respectable critics deem a work of art, is the painter a fraud? If to prevent its being discovered that his surgical knowledge is only feigned, a man successfully removes an appendix, is he a hoax? Many people thought not, and the celebrated impostor had in time become a bonafide celebrity, an institution, a kind of college mascot whose deceptions often delighted the deceived. New Tammanians waited with approving curiosity to see where Bray would turn up next, and in what capacity; his poems, paintings, and scholarly articles became collector’s items; everyone agreed that he was in his counterfeit way as considerable a genius as the encyclopedic
giants of the Rematriculation, and in some quadrangles it was fashionable to claim for his productions a legitimate intrinsic value.

“So if anybody can mimic a Grand Tutor, it’s Bray,” Dr. Eierkopf concluded. “No telling what he’s got up his sleeve; the curious thing is that he’s posing without disguise. He’s using one of the names he’s known by instead of making up a new one, and the face is the same face he used as a psychotherapist.” In consequence, it was already being suggested by some news commentators that this time he wasn’t posing at all; that his former impostures had been in the nature of preparatory omens, or deliberate challenges to faith, as who should say, “I dare you to believe in me!” That thousands were ready to accept the challenge was evident: what Eierkopf was interested in seeing was how many actual Passages Bray could effect; how he would comport himself as an accepted Grand Tutor, especially in the matter of descending into WESCAC; how WESCAC itself would appraise him—as inevitably it must, if it had not already; and what would occur when the time came for him to meet that end described in the GILES profile as the fate of all Grand Tutors …

“The Enochists say that a man can teach the Syllabi effectively even though he’s flunkèd himself,” he declared. “If everybody believes Bray’s the Grand Tutor, and he goes into WESCAC’s Belly and Commences the student body, does it make any difference whether he’s the real thing?”

“Absolutely!” I cried. “All the difference on campus!
I’m
the Grand Tutor, whether anybody believes it or not!” Even as I protested, my throat smarted at the thought of Peter Greene’s apostasy, and Dr. Sear’s (though I knew they’d only been being agreeable from the beginning), and particularly Anastasia’s, since I’d come to regard her as my first protégée. Croaker himself had forsaken me, to squat by the night-glass against his master’s further orders.