Giles Goat Boy (75 page)

“Didn’t I tell you, Goat-Boy? It’s the
Schwarzer
-work that flunks me, not the brainwork.” His oölogical researches, of which I’d seen other evidence in the Observatory, were, like his clock-work, designed to restore him to favor in the administrative and general-student eye: having been told many terms ago by WESCAC, in the course of his ill-fated eugenical investigations, that “Commencement commences
ab ovo
,” he had launched into a grand historico-chemico-mathematico-biologico-mythophysical treatise upon the egg in all its aspects (excepting the culinary,
which he dismissed in a long footnote to the title as intellectually unpalatable); its fourteen volumes were complete, as well as their prefaces, plates, paste-ins, fold-outs, glossaries, indices, appendices, bibliographies, celebratory sonnets, statistical supplements, epistles dedicatory, tape-recorded musical accompaniment, and jacket-copy; all that stood in the way of its publication (and proof of the author’s own Commencement, if any was required) was a single little exercise in comparative oömetry which he’d planned to include as a footnote to
zygote
, the final index-entry. But so clumsy had been Croaker’s measurement of long and short oöic axes, and so irrepressible his appetite for the subject of their researches, they’d already missed the Spring-Carnival target-date for publication, selected by the press for its obvious promotional tie-ins.

“Same with my Infinite Divisor,” he lamented. “The blueprints are drawn, the computations are computed, but Croaker keeps dropping the pieces! What good’s a right-hand man that’s all thumbs?” And in a sudden access of dejection, as once before in the Observatory, he wondered aloud whether brutes like his roommate, altogether free of reason and discernment, were not after all the truly passèd.

“I’m not sure about that yet,” I replied, assuming he’d put the question to me. “But even if Bray’s citations for both of you are right—and like yourself I don’t see how they could
both
be—it doesn’t seem to me that either one of you has qualified for Candidacy yet on the grounds he cited.”

Dr. Eierkopf was turning a fresh egg sadly in his fingers. “If I told him once about high
sol
, I told him twenty times.” Now he brightened and tittered. “Did you know your friend Anastasia can break these with her
levator ani?
I had her do a dozen Grade-A Large with a stress-gauge on, for Volume Nine. I show you the readings …”

“Right there, sir,” I said, shaking my head at the invitation; “that kind of thing, and the night-glass and all …” My point, which I tried to make tactfully, was that if he believed passèdness to be the sort of rationality that WESCAC (at least in pre-“noctic” terms) exemplified, then he was by no means a Graduate, or even a Candidate, so long as he indulged even vicariously such Croakerish appetites as I had seen signs of. Nor could Croaker, on the other hand, be said to be passed by the standards of
his
Certification, it seemed to me: what beast of the woods would so obligingly fetch and carry, not to mention taking scientific measurements?

“He always gets them wrong,” Dr. Eierkopf said hopefully.

“But he
gets
them. And he cleans up messes—”

“His own.”

“What beast of the woods does that? Not even a goat can cook pablum, or chew designs on a stick, or focus lenses …”

Eierkopf sniffed. “He busts as many as he focuses.”

The point was, I insisted, that neither of them met strictly the terms of their Certifications, any more than Peter Greene or Max, in my estimation, met the terms of theirs; contrary as the roommates clearly were, there was still a flunking measure of Eierkopfishness in Croaker, and of Croakeriety in Eierkopf, which came no doubt from their close and constant association. And this was the more pointed failing in Dr. Eierkopf (I tried to suggest), because it went against his life’s activity and principle: the differentiation of
this
from
that
. Let him but perfect and add a mirror to his high-resolution lenses; apply to himself as it were his Infinite Divisor (of which I heartily approved): he would see how far he stood from Commencement Gate.

“You want me to turn loose Croaker, like before? You got a screw loose, Goat-Boy?”

I reminded him politely that I had no clear conviction that Graduation
was
what he believed it to be; only that if it was, it behooved him to discern and repudiate everything about him to the contrary. Not to seem disrespectful of his age and genius (but also to drive my point home), I declared myself in his debt for this position of mine: surely the blurring of distinctions, especially between contraries, was flunking—hence Maurice Stoker’s devotion to that activity. And just as the first step to Commencement Gate must be the differentiation of Passage and Failure, so (it seemed increasingly to me) the several steps thereafter—in the completion of my Assignment, for example—must depend upon corollary distinctions.

“I’ll need the lenses you gave me for my next chore,” I concluded as agreeably as possible; “I wish I could borrow your Divisor too.”

Dr. Eierkopf seemed neither angered, as I had feared, nor chastened, as I had hoped, by my advice. “You still believe you’re the Grand Tutor!” he marveled, and pensively gave Croaker instructions about the mounting of another egg. Then he repeated what he’d said the night before: “I half wish you were, to prove I was right about the GILES.”

I smiled. “If I have to be the GILES to be the Grand Tutor, then I must be the GILES, somehow: it’s a simple syllogism.” However, I added, I couldn’t very well be Virginia Hector’s child, inasmuch as I had it from Ira Hector’s own lips that Anastasia was.

Eierkopf turned up his palms. “Then you aren’t the Grand Tutor, any more than Bray. Look once, I prove it on WESCAC.” He gave a further string of undecipherable instructions to Croaker, who turned several
switches on one of those consoles that seemed to be everywhere in the College. I watched with sharp attention.

“The child born from the GILES would be a Grand Tutor,” he declared. Croaker punched certain buttons. “Miss Anastasia Hector isn’t a Grand Tutor, we agree.” More buttons. “But no woman except Virginia Hector could have got in where WESCAC had the GILES. Since Anastasia is the one that got born, it couldn’t have been the GILES that Virginia got fertilized by, and you couldn’t be the Grand Tutor. Now WESCAC reads it out.” Croaker had pressed buttons after each of these propositions; he pulled a long lever now on the side of the console, things dinged and whirred, and from an opening down in the front a strip of paper began clicking out, which Dr. Eierkopf perused with satisfied nods and peeps. I would have objected that his initial premise, even if granted, seemed to me inadequate to the case—it was no GILES that had engendered Enos Enoch, or the original Sakhyan, nor need one have engendered me: if the GILES could be shown to have come to naught, that fact cost me nothing but a handy proof of my authenticity, which however was contingent on no such proofs. But Dr. Eierkopf, having said, “
Ja … ja
 … just so … that’s that …” at points along the paper tape, suddenly pushed his eyeglasses up on his nose and whipped out the lens that bore his name.

“Unless!”
he cried. He grinned at me slyly and winked his left eye. “Maybe you and Anastasia are twins, hey?”

Owing to the liberal circumstances of my kidship I was more interested in the relevance of this possibility to my claim of Grand-Tutorhood than appalled by its retroactive implications about the G. Herrold Memorial Service. But I was not ignorant of studentdom’s attitude towards incest; I chided Dr. Eierkopf for salivating at the idea that I’d serviced my sister, and firmly declined his offer to rerun the tape he’d made two nights before on the Safety Surveillance monitor.

“That’s just what I meant a while ago,” I said. “You’ve got more of Croaker in you than you’ll admit.”

“When I find out you’re Stacey’s twin brother, I take your advice,” he promised merrily.

A little cross, I bade him goodbye and called the lift. My first chore, so far as I could see, was accomplished by forfeit, and I must get on with the second, at the same time foraging some lunch if I could; if Dr. Eierkopf would not heed my suggestions, it was his own flunkage.

“Don’t fuss,
Zickelchen
,” he said; “I just tease you a little.”

“It’s yourself you’re teasing, sir; I don’t care either way.” What I
did
care about, I declared, was Bray’s false Certifications, and I urged him to consider, for his own and Croaker’s sake, my suggestion. He promised to do so; and further to placate me (for I had no great faith in his pledge) he offered to run a similar logical-possibility test for me on my other chores.

“To me, for instance, there’s just three ways to end the Boundary Dispute,” he said. “We EAT them; they EAT us; or we all link arms and sing
Wir wollen unsern alten Dekan Siegfried wiederhaben
. But WESCAC maybe knows another way …”

“So do I,” I replied. The lift came. I assured Dr. Eierkopf I wasn’t angry, requested him at least to relay to Croaker, if possible, my sentiments and advice about Bray’s Certification, and thanked him for teaching me, intentionally or otherwise, the relevance to my Assignment of his lens-principle, which I’d already been applying unawares in my criticisms of Max, Peter Greene, himself, and even Maurice Stoker.

He waggled his head. “You’re a wonder, Goat-Boy! Maybe WESCAC tells me what to make of you. You don’t want me to ask it anything?”

I replied that while I no longer regarded WESCAC as essentially Trollish (on the contrary, I rather respected it now as the embodiment of Differentiation, which I’d come to think the very principle of Passage), nevertheless I trusted myself to find my own Answers. I wished him success with his great oölogical treatise, promised to consult it on the day of its appearance to find out whether chicken or egg had paleoontological priority, and pressed the
Down
-button.

My plan for dealing with the Boundary Dispute was necessarily tentative, more a principle than a program; but its wisdom seemed to me confirmed by my luncheon-briefing in the history of the problem. Leaving Tower Hall I had crossed Great Mall to the Chancellor’s Mansion (“Lucky’s Light House,” wags had dubbed it, because of Mr. Rexford’s installation of floodlights all about the grounds and his custom of leaving the interior-lights burning all night in virtually every room), where, on the strength of my special Candidacy, I was admitted—not directly to Lucius Rexford, as I had hoped, but to the office of one of his advisors, a gentleman whose skin was the rich fawn color of Redfearn’s Tom’s coat, and whose knowledgeable, crisp analysis belied my assumption that all Frumentians were either brutes like Croaker or gentle servitors like G. Herrold. His dress was impeccable, his mind and tongue were quick, and though he could not affect the Rexfordian forelock, his accent was closer to the Chancellor’s than to Peter Greene’s, for example. An elegant meal was sent in, of which I ate the salad- and vegetable-courses while it was explained to me that the Chancellor was about to depart for a Summit Symposium at the University Council that afternoon, where he was expected to censure the Nikolayans for breaking the “Provisional Fast” agreement and provoking fresh incidents at the Power Line.

“Originally that boundary was defined jointly by EASCAC and WESCAC,” the advisor said; “our only experiment so far in cooperative
computation. The principal sightings were made just after Campus Riot Two from the Tower Clock fulcrum on our end and a similar reference-point in the Nikolayan Control Room in Founder’s Hill, and the main power-cables for East and West Campuses were laid side by side along most of the boundary.” For many terms, he said, students and staff from the westernmost East-Campus colleges had “transferred” freely in large numbers, without authorization, across the line to West Campus. More recently, however, EASCAC had read out that any further unauthorized transferees would be EATen at the line—and only the sick or feebleminded were ever authorized. WESCAC’s reply had been a threat to EAT Nikolay College automatically the instant any Nikolayan EAT-wave crossed the west side of the Power Line, and EASCAC had read out an identical counter-threat. There the dangerous situation stood: a few determined East-Campusers still managed to slip across; a few more were EATen in the attempt by “short-order” waves designed to fade out just a hairsbreadth from NTC’s line. A few border-guards on each side—those intrepid fellows who walked the great cables like armed acrobats—had fallen to their deaths in the no-man’s land between East and West or been shot from their perches by unidentified snipers. Any such incident, both sides feared, might touch off Campus Riot III, the end of the University. Yet it was contended in New Tammany that the Nikolayans were covertly advancing their line towards NTC’s to exploit an ambiguous clause in the original read-out (“The Boundary shall be midway between the East and West Power Lines”); the Western position was that this clause was intended to locate the cables with reference to the Boundary, not vice-versa, and they demanded a resurvey from Tower Hall and Founder’s Hill. But the Nikolayans refused to admit outside surveyors, even from “neutral” colleges, to enter their Control Room, calling the proposal a mere pretext for cribbing secrets, and argued besides (though not officially) that it was the Power Lines that determined the location of the Boundary. Thus the dispute, which had been being debated continuously in the University Council for at least six terms, and had come to involve the equally thorny question of “fasting” (the popular term for abstention from EAT-tests): on the one side, pacifists like Max advocated unilateral fasting; on the other, “preventive rioters” like Eblis Eierkopf taunted, “He who fasts first fasts last,” and counseled, “He who fasts last, lasts.” In between was every shade of military- and political-science opinion: Chancellor Rexford’s own, as affirmed in the Assembly-Before-the-Grate, was that the debate must continue, however meager its yield or exasperating the harassments, inasmuch as the hope of effective compromise,
though slim, was in his judgment the only hope of studentdom.