Giles Goat Boy (101 page)

But while he prided himself on having achieved perfect reasonableness and self-control, he did not feel Commenced. Not because things were going wretchedly—he knew that Right was right and Wrong wrong regardless of consequences—but because his heart’s desires hid yet from the light of reason. That the Powerhouse threatened to explode from overproduction, while Great Mall flickered and WESCAC flagged for want of power; that West Campus was losing the Quiet Riot, and his administration its popularity; that people suspected him of kinship with Stoker since Stoker had ceased to oppose him; that Classmate X had just announced a new advance of the Nikolayan Power Line and Mrs. Rexford a new vacation, perhaps with a friend and perhaps permanent—all these he might accept as the price of Truth. But the truth was, when he saw Stoker lounging at the gate in a motorcycle-jacket he had the strongest wish to hear him taunt as in the old days, “Flunk you, Brother!” When he saw Anastasia, despite her recent coldness and his perfect restraint, he still tumesced; yet he loved his wife so, her disaffection notwithstanding, that the rumors of her infidelity smote him with jealous rage: gladly would he strike her down—and pick her up, and madly kiss away her bruises …

“But that’s lunacy, of course,” he finished dryly. “I’ll do nothing of the sort. If she and X won’t debate these things with me, reasonably and openly—that’s that. I’ll sit here and wait for the EAT-whistle.”

“Assuming there’s power enough to blow it,” I reminded him. “And somebody worried enough to pull the cord.”

He laughed a little sheepishly. “There’s plenty of power. The trick is to get it to Great Mall without dealing with Stoker. Nothing to lose our heads about, I suppose …”

“But it is!” I asserted. “All these things are, sir! Stoker
is
your brother! And I’m no Grand Tutor! I was completely wrong before!”

The Chancellor frowned and glanced towards the door. “Calm down, now …”

“No! That’s just what you
shouldn’t
do!” I strode about the office, gesturing with my stick. “There isn’t really any boundary between East and West Campuses: all students are classmates! This nonsense about Informationalism and Student-Unionism—”

“Look here, now, Mr. Giles; I insist you calm yourself.” Rexford fiddled nervously with a combination paperweight-flashlight on his desk, clicking the switch on and off. It didn’t light. “Maybe from the Founder’s viewpoint the Power Line is artificial and unreal, but we’re not the Founder. Remarks like those may be harmless in the classroom, but out on the campus things aren’t so simple.”

“Exactly!” I agreed. “That’s why it was a mistake to be absolutely reasonable, and the rest.”

“I admit it’s not easy. All the same—”

“That’s the Answer!” I cried. “
East
and
West, temperate
and
intemperate—
they’re all the same!”

“Mr. Giles,” the Chancellor protested, consulting his wristwatch. “I’m the chief executive of a busy college, and much as I’d like to reason these things out with you—”

“There isn’t
time
!” I finished for him. “And besides, you don’t
feel
like being reasonable! That’s splendid!”

He saw nothing very splendid about it, Rexford declared; but as he did not after all order me out, I explained to him briefly what I took to be the essence of my former error, and how I’d come to understand that East and West Campuses, goat and Grand Tutor, even Passage and Failure, were inseparable and ultimately indistinguishable.

“You talk like The Living Sakhyan,” the Chancellor scoffed. “Be reasonable, now: what do you propose?”

My first proposal, I told him, was to cease being reasonable—as if there
were a floodlit Boundary between Reason and Unreason! Did his stubborn insistence upon reason at any price not prove the fallacy of such distinctions?

“So we should surrender to the Nikolayans?”

“Not surrender,” I said,
“embrace.”

“Nonsense.”

“Right!” I cried again. “Embrace nonsense!
Be
immoderate when you feel like it!
Don’t
always be reasonable with your wife! Make the guards look down so they can see what thin air they’re standing on, just like Entelechus! Go hug your brother!”

“Hug my brother!” Rexford blushed hotly—but not, I thought, in anger.

“You know as well as I do that he is your brother. Go have a drink with him! And next time you see Anastasia—”

“He’s not actually my
brother
,” the Chancellor put in hastily. “Some kind of half-brother or foster-brother, I think …”

“What’s the difference? Embrace him!” It occurred to me that the difference, in Rexford’s mind, might be between adultery with a blood-brother’s wife and adultery with an adopted brother’s wife, and so I didn’t press the indistinction further. Nor did I itemize the ways in which I’d have him repudiate my former Tutelage and assert its contrary. He was, I saw, strongly tempted by Stoker’s presence just outside the gate, and by despair, which flooded in on him almost visibly once I’d got through his equilibrium. Therefore I contented myself with advising that the “Open Book” be shut forthwith, and that an amnesty be declared for everyone detained under its reforms.

It was the Chancellor now who strode about, shaking his head. “This is crazy!” He stopped and grinned; the famous forelock fell. “I know: it’s
supposed
to be crazy. All the same—” He laughed aloud at this additional irony, throwing back his head and flashing his fine teeth. “Wouldn’t that make them sit up, though, if I went out there and called Maury
Brother!
Or told X to bring his Line as close as he wants!”

Unsettled by the tempting outrageousness of that idea, he flung open the curtains of a double glass door leading from the office onto a terrace, and squinted and chuckled in the glare. Beyond the low wall of the terrace was the driveway-gate where Stoker lingered with some of his sooty crew and a few reporters.

“One thing at a time,” I cautioned. He caught me up brightly: who was being the prudent one now? But delighted as I was by his respiriting, I felt obliged to warn him that there were photographers about.

His blue eyes twinkled. “What difference does that make? Anyway their pictures haven’t been turning out lately. No flashgun batteries.” But he grew grave for just a moment at the terrace door. “You say you’re not the Grand Tutor, George; but I understand you really are the GILES.”

I shrugged. “That’s what WESCAC says.”

He smiled again. “I’m not as crazy as you might wish. But I take you seriously, and I think I see your point: it’s worth risking some kind of long-shot to change my luck and brighten up my image a little. It had better not fail, though.”

Before one could say “Failure is Passage” he stepped outside, topcoatless in the winter air, and vaulted lightly over the terrace wall. I saw the reporters rap one another’s arms as he strode up, brisk as a sophomore track-man, and Stoker scowl at the wrought-iron gate. Aides burst into the office, looked about in wonder, and thrust past me without a word. Then, shedding their topcoats and rumpling their hair, they vaulted after him. What the Chancellor said I couldn’t hear from the terrace, but he grabbed Stoker’s hand through the gate and pumped it vigorously. Once only he seemed to wince, when flashbulbs popped after all—the Powerhouse-Director had no doubt been horsetrading—then he grinned his grin, flung open the gate, and clapped an arm about Stoker’s leathern shoulder. Reporters and cameramen tumbled and called; microphones appeared; Stoker glowered and shook his fist at a Telerama-boom. But Lucky Rexford laughed, would not unhug him, and saying something into the microphones, pointed first to Stoker’s black forelock and then to his own sand-white one. His hand was sooty.

More than content, I went back into the entrance-hall; rather than disturb the reunion I would walk the few kilometers to the Infirmary, where I hoped to find Dr. Sear and perhaps Anastasia as well. There was a bustle on the wide central staircase: Mrs. Rexford, crisp and elegant, came down with a gaggle of scribbling ladies and a phalanx of suitcase-bearing young men. Coolly she moved in their van, a slim-legged, doe-eyed, soft-mouthed beauty, with the high-strung grace of careful breeding—truly a Hedda among lady girls (though deficient of udder). She regarded me and my detention-suit with brief disdain while one of her female companions informed her that her husband was at the front gate, and that the press wanted to photograph them together before she left on her vacation-trip. She glanced somewhat petulantly towards a fellow in her retinue, who, though dressed like a chancellor’s aide, had not gone with the others; I thought I saw him nod.

“All right,” she said, daintily vexed. I considered warning her of Mr.
Rexford’s changed attitude—but her cool and powdered elegance I found not approachable. I felt ungroomed, less washèd even than I was, a stinkish bill-buck; and though a moment later I put by that feeling with some annoy, I let her go uncautioned, a-whisper in the gray-suit fellow’s ear, and left the Light House by a different path. Crossing Great Mall I heard lady-shrieks and other commotion behind me, and was tempted to run with the others to the Light-House gate, to see what was happening. But already my faint shadow fell east of north; the hour was later than I’d supposed, and work remained to do.

Gimping hospitalwards, I scolded myself further for having let human upperclassness put me down. GILES, son of WESCAC, maternal grandson of Reginald Hector; laboratory eugenical specimen of the Grand-Tutorial ideal (no less rare even if false); protégé of Maximilian Spielman—and a goat, by George: a brawny-bearded bigballed buck! Stepkid of Mary Appenzeller; stallmate of Redfearn’s Tom; lover of Hedda of the Speckled Teats; familiar of that late legendary sire of sires, Brickett Ranunculus, the very dean of studs—
I
should deny my pedigree and heritage, my gait my garb my scent? Infirmity! My one infirmity, I saw now, was having thought such goatly gifts in need of cure, and that infirmity was overcome. Studentdom it was that limped: hobbled by false distinction, crippled by categories! I returned unflinchingly the stares of male and female undergraduates thronging the sidewalks, and reasoned one strong step further: my infirmity was that I
had
thought myself first goat, then wholly human boy, when in fact I was a goat-boy, both and neither: a walking refutation of such false conceits. If I chose, withal, to comport me goatly now awhile, it was not to deny my humanness (of what was the GILES decocted if not the seed of the whole student body?) but to correct it, in the spirit of my new advisings. To that end, as I drew near the Psychiatric Annex of the great Infirmary I goated it the more—“went to the bathroom” where no bathroom was, as in pasture days; bleated twice or thrice at the passersby’s dismay; and skipped up the marble entrance steps on all fours—the point being that I
wasn’t
just
Capra hircus
, any more than the white-coat pair of watchers at the top were simply
Homo sapiens
.

“A wise guy,” one of them said.

“I don’t know, Bill,” said the other.

“George Giles the Goat-Boy,” I announced, rising proudly to shake hands.

They exchanged glances. “Come off it, pal,” Bill said. “Let’s see your matric card.”

Pleased at the chance to demonstrate my point, I displayed the blank ID-card with a smile. “What difference does a name make, classmates? I
am
, that’s all.”

“What’d I tell you,” his colleague said to him. Bill grunted.

I was surprised and pleased. “You’ve thought of it before? That none of us really has a name?”

“Some stinks worse’n others, though,” Bill said. The two each took an elbow, and they led me inside. When I understood that the jacket they called for was for me, and strait, I protested I’d only come to visit Dr. Sear. Bill acknowledged again, grudgingly, that his companion’s guess had been correct. “I knew he treated lots of them animal ones,” he said in his own defense. “But I thought that there goat one was in Main Detention.”

“He
is
,” the other said, and explained patiently; “what there is, though, Bill, there’s some
thinks
they’re the ones that thinks they’re animals! It’s in their heads.”

“You reckon Sear treats them ones too?”

Proud of his knowledge, Bill’s companion pointed out that Dr. Sear was a diagnostician, not a therapist. “He just sees what bin they belong in, is all.”

The waistcoat was fetched—a cross-armed canvas thing—but they offered not to bind me in it if I’d come quietly to Dr. Sear’s office. I agreed, delighted to infer that the doctor had recovered from his dread affliction as well as from his suicide-attempt, and I endeavored to Tutor my gruff escorts no further.

Other orderlies waited with patients in Dr. Sear’s corridor. One of the latter growled and snapped at me as he and his keeper took our place in the lift; I lowered my head to butt, bleated a warning, and hoofed the terrazzo floor. The disturbance brought Anastasia hurrying from the Reception Room with dog-biscuits.

“George!” Her eyes widened at sight of the strait-jacket. Refusing to hear the orderlies’ story, she scolded them sharply for treating the Grand Tutor as a madman; they were flunkèd as her husband, she said, who’d detained me as a common felon. They grumbled apologies and unhanded me, cowed by her temper if not persuaded by her representation; still flushed with outrage, she nevertheless agreed not to report their misjudgment to Dr. Sear, and dismissed them.

“A regular nut-house,” Bill said disgustedly to his colleague.

Anastasia led me into the Reception Room (where I was surprised to see my mother, placidly knitting) and at once hugged me and made tears—not at all the chilly woman she had been being! “I’m so
glad
You’re out of Detention,” she exclaimed, and although she added, “everything’s so mixed up, I don’t know
what
to do!” I was pleased to believe her glad of my release apart from any aid she might require. And her recaptured warmth so gratified me that I kissed her mouth. Nibbled her even, ardently, whereupon she drew back with her usual wonder, but did not oppose my doing it again.