Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  “You deny it?”

  He opened his robe with a kind of giggle, and Croaker tickled him at once. “Do I need to? Stop that, Croaker! So.” More seriously he said to me, “Let’s start there. You see how I’m made; I had early a kind of infantile paralysis; it left my legs and the rest as you observe. And young Mrs. Stoker does not call me her father.”

  I acknowledged that she did not.

  “Then one of two things is true,” Dr. Eierkopf reasoned lightly: “Max Spielman is Anastasia’s father—”

  “No!” I repeated indignantly what Max had told me about his accidental exposure to EAT-radiation, which had destroyed his fertility. Dr. Eierkopf smiled and nodded.

  “Is that so? Very amusing! Well then, if Spielman isn’t lying—by the way, Dr. Kennard Sear could verify that …”

  “Dr. Sear!”

  Expressing his agreeable surprise that I knew the man he spoke of, Dr. Eierkopf affirmed that certain classified files under Dr. Sear’s jurisdiction could attest the fertility and potency of any male in New Tammany College who had been of spermatogenic age twenty-odd years ago. At that time, as part of the culminating phase of the Cum Laude Project, semen-samples had been taken from all New Tammany males between puberty and senility. These had then been analyzed, classified, and culled under Dr. Sear’s supervision to the standards evolved by WESCAC for the Grand-tutorial Ideal: Laboratory Eugenical Specimen, and although then-Chancellor Reginald Hector had curtailed the whole project shortly afterwards, the donor-data files from “Operation Sheepskin” were still intact and under seal somewhere in the Infirmary’s research laboratories—as well, of course, as in WESCAC’s memory-banks.

  “So maybe Max is lying and maybe not,” he went on.

  “And maybe you are,” I interrupted—not unimpressed, however, by the information.

  Dr. Eierkopf made a high sound. “Very good! That’s very good. Indeed, I might be lying. But suppose everybody’s telling the truth; so your keeper is potent but sterile, and I’m fertile but impotent. Now what’s left? Maybe Virginia Hector’s telling the truth, how WESCAC was the father? How one night she goes into the Cum Laude Room to meet a boyfriend, and WESCAC grabs hold and fertilizes her with the GILES, yes?”

  I was up off my stool. “Is that true? Is that why the project was stopped?”

  Dr. Eierkopf raised the skin where eyebrows usually are. “So Miss Hector said. And ja, that’s what made her poppa so angry he stopped the Cum Laude Project. A very great pity, when we were so close to success. A greater pity than any of those dumbsticks in Tower Hall can understand.”

  I demanded to know whether Miss Hector had been telling the truth. Dr. Eierkopf’s tone suggested that he knew more than he cared to tell at the moment—and he openly acknowledged that many details of the Cum Laude Project were still secret, for various reasons—but certain facts, he maintained, were beyond doubt and could be spoken of: the GILES, he would stake his life on it, had been successfully developed, at least in prototypical form, and had been so to speak in WESCAC’s hands, awaiting the selection of a volunteer “mother” and permission from Tower Hall and the Enochist lobbies to proceed with an experimental insemination. Second, WESCAC had, in Operation Ramshorn and the much-maligned Überkatzen experiment, demonstrated its capacity to take initiative and implement its resolves; for just that reason the Cum Laude Room had been designated temporarily off-limits to female employees, to prevent untimely accidents. Third, the precious original GILES had undeniably disappeared on the night in question, and was never found. Finally, a secret obstetrical report, which Eierkopf had seen just prior to his demotion, affirmed that Miss Virginia R. Hector quite definitely had been impregnated.

  “So she’s telling the truth!” I cried. So wondrous a notion then occurred to me that I stood speechless: the entire mystery of myself seemed in an instant brought to light, in a way that confirmed my hopes beyond my dreams! Enormous moment—which Dr. Eierkopf, alas, soon dashed to campus.

  “Impossible,” he said. “I don’t say she’s lying, but her story can’t be correct.” The logic of the case, he insisted, was this: WESCAC had been programmed to inseminate solely with the GILES; but the GILES would by definition produce a male child, the future Grand Tutor. Inasmuch as Miss Hector’s baby had been female—the present Mrs. Maurice Stoker, among whose unquestionable attributes Grand-Tutorhood was surely not included—one of two things must be true: either WESCAC did in fact impregnate Virginia Hector, but ad libitum, on a self-programmed “malinoctial” impulse, and not with the GILES but with an ordinary semen-specimen acquired in some unknown wise; or else it was not WESCAC but some human male who clipped her in the Cum Laude Room. Assuming the latter, and further that both Max and he were speaking truthfully, then Miss Hector either had another lover or fell afoul of some unidentified rapist.

  “For me,” he concluded, “I happen to believe that she did have the great privilege of being chosen by WESCAC, just as she says. But then the computer must have decided not to honor her with the GILES, and either fertilized her with a different specimen or merely … enjoyed her, you know, without fertilizing her at all. For practice, ja? Or just for the malinoctial sport. And then later she happened to conceive by some ordinary lover.” He appeared to wink. “She was quite a fetching person in those days … I myself used to wish sometimes that I were fashioned like other men, for her sake … But bah! I never was one-tenth the fool that Spielman was, with his flunking Compassion, and his Honor, and his Dignity of Studentdom! Scratch a liberal Moishian, Goat-Boy; you’ll find a sentimentalist, every time.”

  Croaker made to refill my stein, leaving his vigil at the night-glass for the purpose. At first I declined, declaring to Dr. Eierkopf my resolve to go to Main Detention and do what I could towards Max’s release. But he assured me that nothing could be done that night in any case—even telephoned a Main-Detention office on my behalf to confirm the fact—and that despite Maurice Stoker’s unsavory reputation, the New Tammany judicial system was, in the main, fair.

  “If Max didn’t kill Hermann, they’re not likely to convict him,” he insisted. “If he did—as I suspect—there’ll be a great deal of sentiment in his favor anyhow.”

  I asked him what, if not general malevolence, led him to believe that Max was guilty.

  “You are a witty fellow,” he replied, and excused himself at Croaker’s summons to watch a co-ed undress in her darkened room a quarter-mile away. “But you are confusing malevolence with malificence.” He spoke from the side of his mouth. “I like watching people in the night-glass; that may be naughty-minded, but it doesn’t hurt anybody.” As for his affiliation with the Bonifacist riot-effort and his later work on EAT-weaponry and the Cum Laude Project, it was not the fault either of himself or of science that men used the fruits of his research for flunkèd purposes; he was but a toiler in the field, an explorer of nature’s possibilities; his sole allegiance was to his work; he had no interest in intercollege rivalries—petty, to his mind, even if they led to the destruction of the University. No, he declared, the evil on campus was done not by disengaged intelligences like his, which amused themselves between prodigious intellectual feats by spying on naked sophomore girls with an infra-red telescope; it was done by principled people like Max Spielman, who prided themselves on having hearts as well as brains; who committed themselves with a passion to high-minded middlebrow causes; in short, who claimed or aspired to membership in the human fraternity.

  “Especially these self-sacrificial ones!” he warned. “Watch out for that sort! Your Moishian liberal with his Student Rights and his Value of Suffering—he’ll take you down with him, and tell you it’s for your own good. Imagine, they used to say to me back in Siegfrieder I should jump into the fire along with them, as a protest!”

  What bearing this had on the question of Max’s guilt or innocence I never quite determined, unless it was that in Eierkopf’s view a man capable of any emotion at all was capable of any other, and not to be trusted. I was intrigued as
well as repelled by the hairless cripple—who remarked in passing that he never slept at all in the usual way, but merely “turned his mind off” at odd intervals in the day and night, between mental tasks, and in this manner rested, like a fish or a machine. There were matters I wished to take up with him, out of general curiosity or in hope of immediately practical information: tomorrow’s matriculation procedure, the problem of finding good counsel for Max, Anastasia’s parentage and my own, the nature of Graduation, the character of my apparent rival Harold Bray, the question of entering WESCAC’s Belly and changing its AIM (which for all I knew he might be better informed about than Max, having dealt more recently with the computer), and sundry others. Since in any case I had nowhere to go and nothing to do until four minutes after six in the morning, and sleep was impossible under the troublous circumstances, I lingered on in the Observatory and at length accepted Dr. Eierkopf’s invitation to talk through the night—fortified and stimulated by sips of the black liquor distilled under Founder’s Hill, of which Croaker located a flask. Chased by the cold pale beer it was a bracing drink; fatigue was put from me, and I found myself obliged to acknowledge that while abhorrent in general and repulsive in many particulars, my host was not devoid of attractive qualities—as Maurice Stoker himself had not in my eyes been. He was undeniably generous in his way, ingenious, efficient, and orderly, brilliantly logical and systematic, and his opinions were interesting if not always agreeable. His contempt for Max was milder than at first it appeared, and had to do not with my keeper’s intellectual and scientific accomplishment, which he quite respected, but with his concern for non-scientifical campus problems and his general secular-studentism—all which Eierkopf dismissed irritatedly as “beside the point.” Mildly too he admitted to a few inclinations of his own in the administrative-policy way: he rather thought, for example, that a rotating commission of experts from the various sciences could run the University more harmoniously and efficiently than could the law-school, political-science, and business-administration types who customarily inhabited Tower Hall. He seconded without abash the idea of “preventive riot”: it was EAT or be EATen, he placidly declared (confessing that the acronym nauseated him), and New Tammany would be well advised to EAT the Nikolayans at once, without warning, both to simplify the political situation and to protect herself from destruction at the hands of an enemy who surely would not scruple to attack by stealth. At the matter of the Moishian genocaust he merely shrugged his narrow shoulders: riot was riot; the Siegfrieders had been cut off from their normal fuel supply; a few good Moishian researchers like Chaim Schultz had gone up in smoke, but not many; the slaughter of whole student bodies was a tradition as old as riot itself—had not Laertides been called “Sacker of Cities”?—and the mere scale and efficiency of the Moishian extermination did not in his view make the Siegfrieders any more flunkèd than the classical Remusians, for instance, considering the proportionate increase in University population since ancient terms, and the improvement of homicidal technology.

  “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?”

&
nbsp; 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.