Giles Goat Boy (93 page)

But it is also true, alas, that both the issue of capital punishment itself and the question of Moishiocausticide had been being hotly argued in New Tammany just prior to the Hermann killing: the former on account of the then-rising crime-rate, which some attributed to “coddling the flunks”; the latter because two other former Bonifacists had been mysteriously kidnaped and killed since the expiration of Siegfrieder College’s statute of limitations for the trial of “crimes against studentdom.” Chancellor Rexford himself had formerly been inclined against the ancient practice of Shafting condemned men, but since initiating his Open Book reforms he’d ceased to press for repeal of that penalty. Conservative opinion, slow to condemn the Moishiocausts themselves and skeptical of the
post-facto
law forbidding “crimes against studentdom,” was quick to condemn the Moishiocausticides. The liberals—pro-Moishian and anti-Bonifacist—were deeply divided, for though they abhorred capital punishment generally and lynching in particular, they could not bear that the legal safeguards they themselves had struggled for over the terms should make it possible for Moishiocausts to escape retribution for their awful crimes. Much as they revered Max from terms gone by, they deplored his deed, and the manner of his “defense” even more; the whole matter anguished and embarrassed them; they fell out among themselves, husband and wife, teacher and pupil; in the end they stood by painfully, rather hoping Max would be acquitted, or at least not Shafted, but unable to come to his defense when he would not defend himself.

At the trial’s end everyone expected a verdict of guilty and the minimum sentence, in view of the defendant’s age and fame: a few terms’ detention followed by parole. Before the summation Max’s lawyer once again begged him to plead insanity and was of course refused. The jury retired, deliberated only a minute or two, and returned the expected verdict. Max stroked his beard, nodding assent; his lawyer, long out of patience with so uncooperative a client, clicked and clicked his ball-point pen. We looked Judgewards and were horrified to see him raise the black cowl, emblematic of capital sentence. Mildly, as if making a procedural point or recessing for lunch, he said to Max: “It is the sentence of this Court that you be taken from here to Main Detention and thence to Founder’s Hill, and the life Shafted out of you. Founder have mercy on your mind.”

Most were surprised; a few shocked. But who (Leonid excluded) could protest, when the defendant himself had asked for that sentence?

“Beside-the-pointcy!” Leonid shouted at me, back in our cells. “He wants Shaft like Mrs. Anastasia wants rapeness! Inside-outhood! Passitude!”

Before my own failure I would have agreed, and wept Leonidlike with frustrate love. But I could no longer judge anyone—except myself—or hold opinions on any head, or feel strongly any emotion but a dumb acknowledgment that I’d Failed All. “I don’t know what to say,” I said.

“Selfish,
pfui!
” Leonid cried at Max, in the idiom learned from him. “I
take
you to Classmate X! Old friend of you; him you listen!
I
take Shaft! Exchangeness!”

Max shook his head, adding that he’d never met Leonid’s stepfather.

“Don’t say!” the Nikolayan bellowed, grinning hugely, and commenced to flap his arms and pound us all upon the back. Was saving, he declared, for big surprisehood or last resortity, as the case should warrant: his stepfather was no native Nikolayan (Had we thought? Ha ha on us!), but a New Tammany Moishian whose parents had transferred out of Nikolay in the bad old days before Student-Unionism. What his original name was, no one knew except the Department of Intelligence, but as best Leonid could infer, he had worked with automatic computers in their infancy, during Campus Riot II; and subsequently, when New Tammany refused to share its electroencephalic secrets with its colleagues, he had defected to Nikolay College, liquidated his former self, and designed a counter-computer to preserve studentdom’s peace of mind from aggressive Informationalism.

Max’s face clouded as he listened, and my skin tingled; recalling now Classmate X’s curious emotion in the U.C. building at mention of my keeper’s name, I realized who he must be.

“Your old friend What’s-his-name!” I exclaimed to Max. “The one that helped you EAT the Amaterasus and then defected …”

“Chementinski?” Max frowned and plucked angrily at his beard. “Ach, impossible! Chementinski had no head for politics: a smart scientist, but a silly man.”

“Not silly!” Leonid shouted, and plunged to his knees before the bunk where Max lay resting.

“Silly and flunkèd, Leonid,” Max insisted quietly. “If he
is
your stepfather, and he sent you here to take my place, so I should defect like him—
pfui
, that proves it!”

“Untruthery!” Leonid’s protest was more distressèd than indignant. That Classmate X was indeed Max’s former colleague seemed beyond dispute: no one else in East Campus had had the practical knowledge required for EASCAC’s development, which Leonid knew his stepfather had directed.
His later forsaking of mathematical for political science, and his formidable success in that department, was to be explained by the utter eradication of his earlier self (which might indeed have been silly and flunkèd); the successful replacement of his personal, fallible will with the Will of the Student Body, impersonal and infallible. So Leonid explained it, roaring earnestly; that one of his idols should dislike the other clearly anguished him as much as the capital sentence had, and I was surprised at the sternness with which Max refused to soften his opinion.

“What does Chementinski want me
for?
” he demanded. “He knows I’ve been out of Tower Hall all these years. I got no secrets any more; he knows that too. Why do you think he told you to get me instead of somebody useful, like Eblis Eierkopf?”

Tears streamed from Leonid’s eyes. “Loveship, sir! He loves, like me! Like George! Never mind Eierkopf!”

Max shook his head. “It’s not love.” More gently then, but uncompromisingly, he declared that the principal difference between himself and Chementinski was that the latter, while professing to love studentdom, had always been more or less repelled by individual students; whereas Max, devoted as he was to individual people, had always regarded studentdom in general as more stupid, brutal, and vulgar than otherwise—or else a meaningless abstraction. The weakness of Max’s position, as he readily admitted, was that, since EATing the Amaterasus, he was unable to sacrifice
anybody
to the Common Good, in which he could no longer believe; thus he was unfit for administration. “But your Chementinski, this Classmate X: he could sacrifice
everybody
, himself too!”

“Not!” Leonid objected; but I confirmed Max’s opinion with Classmate X’s own statement to that effect, made to me in the U.C. building.

“How else could he sacrifice you?” Max demanded. “A son he should kill his own self for!”

“Good of the Union! My idea! Make-up test, for past!”

Max put a hand on Leonid’s shoulder and once more shook his head. Chementinski, he said sorrowfully, had ever been a most unstable fellow, driven by a succession of ideals in which he’d passionately wished to believe, and never satisfied with the genuineness of his commitment. His whole attitude during the EAT-project, Max remembered, had been a fierce self-justification: It
was
EAT or be EATen, wasn’t it? Better a few thousand Amaterasus in ten minutes than another two years of riot! It
was
for the sake of peace, freedom, and culture, wasn’t it? Not to mention pure science, and the deterrent against future campus riots … The effect of this constant questioning was that he’d talked himself out of his beliefs,
come to regret his contribution to WESCAC (as had Max, for other reasons), and decided that only by arming both schools of thought with ultimate weaponry could peace of mind now be preserved. Hence his defection.

“What happened since, I don’t know,” Max concluded. “But he knew I didn’t believe what he did, and it always upset him when I thought he was wrong. If Chementinski thinks we got to EAT the Amaterasus once, he can’t stand it anybody smart should disagree; if he defects to East Campus, we
all
got to defect, so he shouldn’t wonder was it flunked or passed. That’s why he wants me there, Leonid; he can’t convince himself he did right.”

“Unselfnessness!” Leonid bawled. “He’s most unvainestest there is!” He glared imploringly at me. “Talk once, George!”

“I think Max is right,” I said. I told him then what I’d learned from Classmate X himself: that he had deliberately led his stepson to believe that he was not forgiven for the zoo-escapade, and could redeem himself in his stepfather’s eyes only by expending himself to capture Max. I expected angry denials—would scarce have dared the information had we not been in separate cells, and was prepared, in self-defense, to force his agreement, if necessary, by reminding him that it would be vain to claim the inspiration himself. But Leonid came to the bars, cheeks wet, and asked merely: “Is it true, Goat-Boy? He didn’t hate? Ever since?”

“I swear it. He only pretended. He knew you’d do anything to please him …”

“His own son!” Max snorted. “To prove his selflessness! Ach, that Chementinski!”

But Leonid cried, “Passèdhoodness!” and, indifferent to his gulling, danced a wild step about the cell, so relieved was he that his stepfather had not been angry with him after all. It was some time before Max could declare his conviction that any man who sacrificed his own son thus calculatingly, for whatever cause, was incapable not only of anger but of any emotion whatever, especially love. I might have agreed, with some reservations (for while Classmate X had revealed himself to me as far from cold-blooded with regard to his stepson, the deliberate sacrifice of him in the name of Selflessness seemed to me therefore all the more monstrously vain)—but Leonid was seized at this point with a new violent emotion.

“I love!” he shouted tearfully. “Full of selfity, me!” His problem, from what I could make of his exclamations, was that despite his best efforts he was yet a million
versts
from the impersonality he aspired to, and of
which Classmate X was the faultless exemplar. He loved his stepfather, Max, Anastasia, me—he loved everyone he’d ever met, except a few whom he hated, and thus despaired of ever earning Classmate X’s love—which of course it was but further selfishness for him to crave!

“Hopelesshood!” From the pocket of his prison-trousers he suddenly snatched a little bottle, not unlike the container of disappeared ink bestowed on me by Sakhyan’s colleagues. But this was full of a realer fluid, some of which he swallowed and began at once to strangle triumphantly upon.

“Hooray! Eradicationness! Goodbye me!”

Max made feeble haste to stay him as soon as we realized what he was doing, but Leonid worked his skill upon the doorlock and deftly slipped out into the aisle, where once again he tipped the bottle to his lips. His face purpled.

“No more me!” he croaked. “Tell Mrs. Anastasia I love!” Max and other prisoners shouted for a guard; as was sometimes the case, none was about. Leonid fell; yet even curling on the floor he made to drink again that deadly draught, to insure his end.

“Verboten!”
Max pleaded, hopping like a cagèd dwarf. “Stop him once, George, he shouldn’t swallow!”

Leonid, supine, had decided to wave one arm and sing as he expired.
“Releasedom! Freehood! Death to Selfity!”
He put the bottle to his mouth.

Distressed as I was to see him perish, I would I fear have only watched, and that not merely because I was locked in. But something in his words, more than the emergency itself, got through the torpor I had dwelt in since my noosing. My head cleared miraculously; I saw not just Leonid’s plight but his
error—
and more! In no time at all I was beside him in the aisle; had seized the bottle and was forcing air into his mouth—for he had ceased to breathe. Then, thinking better, I released Max for that work and went to fetch help, running four-footed for speed and letting myself without hesitation through half a dozen barred doors on the way. No guards were on duty; so lax was their warden’s discipline, and so many the obstacles to our freedom, they often loitered in the exercise-yard or gathered in the cells of wanton lady girls. The first official I encountered was Stoker himself, and that not until I’d climbed to the highest tier of cells, at ground-level: those reserved theoretically for apathetic C-students and professors too open-minded to have opinions. At sight of me Stoker smiled, stepped aside, and indicated with his arm the final gate, which
opened into the Visitation Room and thence to the offices and freedom, as if inviting me to continue on my way.

“It’s you I was looking for,” I said.

“How droll. I was just coming for
you
. You have visitors.”

I explained the emergency. Amused, Stoker sniffed the deadly bottle, now only half full, and returned it to me.

“Ink eradicator,” he scoffed. “How’d you ever get past all those locks, George?”

I dashed impatiently to the barred door of the Visitation Room, resolved to find a doctor myself if Stoker would not send one. Inside I saw my mother, accompanied as always by Anastasia. But whether because this last lock was different from the others or because Stoker’s question made me realize that I had no idea how I’d got where I was, I found myself unable to pass through.

“Help me, man!” I demanded. “Were those other doors unlocked?”

Stoker winked and replied lightly, “No door’s locked if you’ve got the key.” He found the correct one on his ring. “Stop fidgeting: my wife knows what to do until the doctor comes.”

I had forgot My Ladyship was a nurse. Gravely she greeted me, coolly Stoker, who reported the news and solicited her aid in a manner so full of
dears
and
pleases
that I thought he mocked her. But her reply was frosty and overbearing—“Don’t just stand there while the fool dies; get him up here!”—and Stoker hastened so to oblige her, I could only conclude that their relations really had changed character. She took charge of the situation, ordering Stoker to bring Leonid to the prison infirmary while she prepared an emetic and summoned a physician. I was told to stay with “Mother” (as Anastasia still called Lady Creamhair, out of habit) and reluctantly consented: someone had to be with her, her mind had failed so, and Anastasia was grown very cross indeed when opposed, especially by a male. Besides which, I was the only one of us not necessary to Leonid’s rescue—a sore consideration, as I had got him into his bind and felt on the verge now of understanding how he might be set free of it. Off went the pair of them on their errands, Anastasia scolding her husband out of earshot. The barred partitions of the Visitation Room were left open; I might have exited from Main Detention even without that gift of Leonid’s which momentarily I’d seemed to possess, or Bray’s proffered amnesty. But though my new clarity persisted, like a light in an empty room where something is about to appear, and my intellectual coma happily showed no signs of returning, I did not leave, not just then, but sighed and turned to Mother, whom I knew I would find watching me
with reverent joy. Crossleggèd on the floor, black-shawled and -dressed, the New Syllabus on her lap as always, she flapped at me her thrice-weekly peanut-butter sandwich and crooned, “Come, Billy! Come, love! Come!”