Giles Goat Boy (68 page)

“Rot!”

“And all those unwed co-eds! I think you pity
everybody
, and you’re ashamed to say so!”

Now his eyes gleamed. “I pity you, you nincompoop!”

“I bet you did business with Bray for the same reason Anastasia did,” I said. “Out of charity! You taught her to be the way she is!”

“Charity be flunked!” Ira hollered. “Every man for himself!”

It occurred to me to argue, then, more out of spite than out of conviction, that even his vaunted miserliness might be passèd, and its opposite flunked. Enos Enoch, it was true, bade men give all their wealth of information to poor students and become as unlettered kindergarteners, if they would Pass; but it seemed to me that this was to pass at the expense of others, those to whom one’s wealth was given, for nowhere did the Founder’s Scroll say “Passèd are the wealthy.” What nobler martyrdom, then, than to keep from men that which it would flunk them to possess, and hoarding it to oneself, flunk like a scapegoat in their stead?

“You’re demented,” Ira said. “You think I’m going to pay you for claptrap like that?”

“I’m not Harold Bray,” I replied. “I can’t be bought.” And seeing I would not get from him what I needed, I walked off.

“Nobody
has
to buy you!” Ira cackled after me. “You give yourself away for free! Like Anastasia!”

His taunt relieved me, giving as it did the lie to his talk of prices and commissions. I walked on. Students were beginning to throng Great Mall now, en route I presently learned to first-period classes, having eaten their breakfast.

“You got nothing from me!” Ira called again. “I got all you had to offer!” His voice was triumphant, but when I turned to him his old face was fiercely anxious.

“Then maybe you’ve helped me to pass,” I said, “and yourself to flunk. Thanks.”

The Living Sakhyan, I observed, smiled as ever from the foot of His elm. I might have upbraided Him for failing me once again (indeed, His condition, reputedly a kind of Commencement, seemed to me little different from Eierkopf’s infantile paralysis. The one was unhelpful, the other helpless; for those in need of help it came to the same thing, and Eierkopf’s at least was not wholly voluntary, though he affirmed it in his relationship with Croaker and his unconcern for the welfare of studentdom); but before I could speak I was hailed by several of the unshaven botherers who’d precipitated the whole encounter. Their attitude was friendly: though indigent, they were not ordinary beggars, I was to understand, but vagabond scholars—“Beists,” in fact, who accepted tuition from Rexford’s grant-in-aid program but contemned the whole academic establishment as mid-percentile and conformist, committed to the intercollegiate power struggle, hostile to art, sex, and the human spirit, and generally, in their vernacular, a drag. They inferred from my appearance that I was of their fraternity; were frankly envious, in fact, of my garment, stick, and bagful of tokens; and while their position, as I understood it, struck me as something wanting in consistency, they were clearly earnest, and I was grateful for their goodwill. However, there was no clarity between us. They knew who I was, but would not accept it that I had truly only one name, for example, and was literally half goat by training. “We dig those symbols,” they assured me. And when I confessed that I couldn’t make out their argot, they thanked me for reminding them that the Answer lay in wordless Being rather than in verbal formulas. Yet their own inclination was plainly towards the latter.

“How do you go about doing
your
Assignments?” I asked them. “Mine says
Complete at once
 …” Some homely practical advice was what I sought, as one undergraduate to another; but they responded with disputation as passionate and abstruse as if I’d posed Dean Taliped’s riddle.

“What is studentdom’s Assignment, when all’s said and done?” they demanded of one another; one asserted that there
was
none, as there was no Assigner; another, that each student was his own sole Tutor and Examiner; and so forth.

“Please,” I said. “What I mean is, didn’t WESCAC give you an Assignment? It gave me one.”

“What He means is the analytical, conceptualizing consciousness,” said one of my new classmates, as if speaking of someone not present.

“The flunk He does!” another objected. “He’s putting us on, to remind us to be like Sakhyan.”

“No, man!” insisted the first. “It’s the Form-is-the-Void thing. Like the categories aren’t real, but there they are, and we’re in them even though there’s really no
us
.”

A third intently scratched his crotch. “But does WESCAC symbolize Differentiated Reality or the Differentiating Principle?”

“Neither!” Number Two said contemptuously. “WESCAC symbolizes
Symbolization
. What He means—”

“Please,” I said. At once they were respectfully silent. “The Assignment I’m talking about is a list of things I have to do to Pass …”

“See?” One said delightedly.

“I’m supposed to Fix the Clock, for example, and End the Boundary Dispute …”

“I’m with you!” Two muttered: “Space/Time thing!”

“And I’m supposed to Overcome My Infirmity and See Through My Ladyship, whatever all
that
means …” “The Transcendence bit!” Three whispered.

But they could not decide whether I was exhorting them to attack their Assignment (whatever it happened to be) on its own terms, or the terms of the Assignment, or the very concepts of Assigner and Assignee. And did my aphorisms signify that the “Wheel of Passage and Failure”—their term—was to be affirmed, denied, ignored, or transcended? Specifically, for example, should they go to class and take respectful notes, go to class and quarrel with their professors, or cut class altogether? I left them contending beard to beard so heatedly that they took no notice of my departure. For though their debate was incomprehensible to me, and I despaired of getting usable advice from them, their illustration had suggested
something to me for the first time: as young Enos Enoch had enrolled in the manual-training course taught by His mother’s humble husband, so would I audit some ordinary professor, the first I came to, in hopes of learning something germane to my task. I would go to class!

Great numbers of students were hurrying into a large hall not far distant. I joined them—rather, they made way for me, some mocking, others amused, most of them indifferent—in a vast low-ceilinged room divided into stalls by chest-high partitions. Each stall contained one chair and a console of sorts, far simpler-appearing than the ones in the Control Room and the Grateway. I saw no professor, humble or otherwise, but a number of young men in slope-shouldered worsteds and horn-rimmed spectacles were directing students into the stalls and explaining how to operate the consoles.

“Who’s hazing you, frosh?” one asked me good-naturedly. I found the question meaningless, but identified myself with the aid of my new used card and asked whether I might sit in on the lecture, if there was to be one. The instructor leafed doubtfully through a roster of names on his clipboard, warning me that the class-rolls had just been read out on WESCAC’s printers and might be incomplete, especially in the case of special or irregular students.

“George your first or last name?” His confidence was not bolstered by my reply; but as it happened there I was, under
G
:
George
. “I guess it’s you,” he said. “How the flunk can I tell? Not even a matric-number!” There was, however, a notation after my name to the effect that I was authorized by the Chancellor’s Office to audit any courses offered in the College, though not for credit. The man addressed me more respectfully:

“Exchange-student, are you? Visiting this campus?”

I supposed he might put it thus, and he kindly showed me into a stall. The machines were teaching-machines, he explained, one of many varieties in the College, all wired to WESCAC’s Central Instructional Facility. As a rule one addressed the device with one’s “matric-number” and was then instructed individually, the subject-matter, pace, and method being determined by WESCAC’s analysis of the student’s record and current performance, as well as his academic objective. The machines in this particular hall, however, were designed for the orientation of new registrants; the morning’s program consisted of a lecture recorded by the new Grand Tutor for that purpose. Doubtless noting some change of my expression, the instructor acknowledged rather sharply that attendance was voluntary: but he certainly thought it prudent for any new undergraduate to avail himself of the Grand Tutor’s wisdom before commencing his regular
course-work and assignments, especially as it was Dr. Bray’s first formal lecture to the public. I had only to address the console (he did it for me, in fact, using the number on my ID-card, before I could decide to leave), don the earphones ready to hand, and press the
Lecture
-button to begin the recording. Should I desire elaboration of any particular point I was to press a button marked
Hold
, which stopped the lecture-tape, and another marked
Gloss
, which provided footnotes, as it were, to the text. Having explained this, he left the stall, a bit ruffled still at the idea that anyone could be uninterested in what after all was a historic event (he was himself a new instructor in the History Department), and went to give instruction to respectfuller students. But for all my disdain I pushed the Lecture-button, curious to hear what my rival conceived to be Grand Tutoring, and wondering too how he’d found time to put together a recorded lecture while partying at the Powerhouse and allegedly going into WESCAC’s Belly.
I
hadn’t managed yet even to visit Max in Main Detention! Through my headset came the clicking voice I knew—speaking, however, in a somewhat archaic style reminiscent of Enochist harangues:

“My text today, Classmates,”
Bray began,
“is the First Principle of Life in the University, which you must clasp to your hearts during Freshman Orientation and never lose sight of after, not for an eyeblink of time, how clamorous or brave soever the voices that deny it …”

I tossed my head impatiently, considered throwing down the earphones and leaving—but decided to hear what false principle the rascal had sharked up, what platitude or half-truth, the more substantially to contemn him.

“On all sides,”
he was saying, “you
will hear platitudes and half-truths—as that the unexamined life is not worth living; that the truth shall make you free; that understanding is its own reward
. Cum laude
diplomates, even full professors, are not above urging you to greater efforts with such slogans, wherefor I conclude that either like all
virtuosi—
artists, athletes, yea Croaker himself—they ill understand the secret of their own greatness, or else they find it practical pedagogy to dissemble with you, as a child may best be lured from the cliff-edge by promise of sweets, when in fact his rescuers are candyless and want only to save his life …
”

I endeavored to sneer at the simile, but found it alas rather apt, if elaborate.

“For whatever the case in Academies of fancy, one thing alone matters in the real University: to avoid the torture of remedial programs, and the irrevocable disgrace of flunking out! In short, to Pass!”

Obviously.

“Except this, what has importance? Very well to preach the therapy of swimming for injured legs, or its intrinsic pleasure: thrown overboard, one cares only to reach the shore, whether by sidestroke or astride a dolphin!”

Which didn’t mean one
ought
to care for nothing but self-preservation, I thought to myself—but knew I was simply being captious, and recognized besides, not comfortably, a point like one I’d made to Ira Hector. Yet wasn’t Bray as much as inviting dishonesty?

“To be sure,”
he went on, “
the Examiners are above corruption and intimidation; no Candidate ever bribed or threatened his way to glory; to attain it he must know the Answers, nothing else will serve. There is the sole and sufficient ground for prizing knowledge: all other preachments are, if not mere sentimentality, hollow consolation for the failed—who are
ipso facto
inconsolable …
”

I considered demanding a Gloss on
ipso facto
, a term of whose meaning I was not entirely sure; but my hand was stayed by both the brazenness of Bray’s piety (who had himself made deals with Ira Hector, Lucius Rexford, and Founder knew who else!) and the force of his next remark:

“Get the Answers, by any means at all: that
is
the undergraduate’s one imperative! Don’t speak to me of cheating—”
The word, I confess, was on my tongue.
“To cheat can only mean to Pass in ignorance of the Answers, which is impossible. Otherwise the term is empty …”

Experimentally, and also as a kind of impudence, I pushed the
Hold
and
Gloss
buttons. Instantly a matter-of-fact female voice said,
“The term is otherwise empty inasmuch as the end of Passing, on the Grand Tutor’s view, determines all morality: what tends thereto is good, all else evil or indifferent. This Gloss was prepared by your Department of Logic and Philosophical Semantics. Remember: ‘The mind that can philosophize, never ossifies.’
 ”

Automatically the two buttons popped out again at her last word, and Bray’s voice resumed: “
As you see, then, nothing could be simpler in theory than the ethics of
Studentensieben …”

I let the term go.

“But I don’t suggest that the practice is without its difficulties! In the first place none of you knows for sure what you’ll be asked, or whether your Answers will be acceptable. No two Candidates are quite alike, however similarly trained, and no Graduate, should you find one to consult, can say more than that he himself was asked so-and-so, to which on that occasion and such-and-such reply proved acceptable …”

The point had not occurred to me, and reluctantly I granted its validity, even its value. And despite my hostility I found myself attending Bray’s next remarks closely.