Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  Just then a voice I knew called, “George?” and my heart sprang up, for Max himself crossed the end of our aisle. He peered in, not recognizing me for an instant, and then hurried to us.

  “Yi Billy, what’s this now!”

  “He legs bunged up in that ol’ booklift!” George said indignantly. “A poor naked chile!”

  “Oh, Max!” Borne still by the great black George I clung to my dear keeper’s neck. “I killed Redfearn’s Tommy!”

  “Nah, you what!” Max pulled distressfully at his beard. “Put him there, George. What’s this with the legs hurt?”

  “Sure I got no business touchin’ no tapes,” George declared. “Ain’t nobody’s business stuffin’ no chile in the booklift, neither!” They laid me on a nearby wooden table; my eyes burned that no one understood my deed.

  “I hit Tommy with a crook!” I cried. “He’s dead!”

  Max clasped me to him then while I choked out my grievous tale. “Ach, Bill!” he groaned at each new disclosure: my resolve to be a human man, the attack on Lady Creamhair, and her curse … “Ach, Bill!” My resolve thereafter to be a goat-buck, the rape of Hedda, and Tom’s murder at my hands … “Ach, Bill!”

  “I shouldn’t have been born!” I lamented. Max had gently released me to examine my injuries. “Never mind my legs! They deserve to be broken!”

  With sudden pertinence, as he still addressed some distant scene the black man said, “Ain’t no bones broke. Little goat’s-milk, this here chile stand straight as the Clock-tower.” Then he was off again:

  “ ‘One mo’ river,’ say the Founder-Man Boss:

  ‘Y’all gone Graduate soon’s y’all cross.’ ”

  “Why does he talk like that?” I cried.

  For just a second George seemed as it were to come truly to himself. Half-laughing, yet something indignantly, he complained to my keeper: “How come you never learnt him to stand up straight?”

  Now Max seemed as distraught as I. “Ach, George, forgive! And Billy—forgive, forgive!”

  I was astonished to see misery where I’d looked for wrath. Max embraced the elderly black man, even went to his knees before him. “Love this man, Billy,” he commanded me. “This is what it is to be EATen alive—and he suffered it for your sake, to save your life once!”

  Oblivious to us now, George wandered back towards what I’d taken for a serpent, singing blithely as he went:

  “Well, Mister Tiger he roar, and Mister Lion he shout—

  But it’s WESCAC’ll EAT you if you don’t watch out.”

  “What’s it all about?” I fretted; then another rush of imperious grief swept curiosity away. “Max—I killed Tommy!”

  Nodding, Max rose from his knees. “Ja ja, that’s a bad thing, and him such a fine buck.” Still there was no anger in his voice; even the sorrow seemed not quite for my dead friend’s sake. “But I’ve done a worse thing. Wasn’t it Max Spielman killed poor Tommy, sure as if I’d hit him myself?”

  George by this time had turned on his machine and was dusting the tops of a bookrow with its nozzle. Max shook his head as if the sight grieved him, and after reassuring himself that my injuries had been more painful than serious (and were besides the lesser of my hurts), he bade me hear how the black man and I had come each to his present misfortunate pass.

  “George Herrold is a booksweep,” he began. “These stacks here are so small and used so little, we don’t really need them, but I told Chancellor Rexford when he asked me, ‘If you’re going to keep the goat-branch open for my sake, hire George Herrold for the janitor. He didn’t deserve what happened to him any more than I did.’

  “What it used to be, Billy, fifteen years ago he was Chief Booksweep in the Main Stacks of New Tammany. I knew George there in the last years of the Riot, when I was helping turn WESCAC into a weapon to EAT the Bonifacists with …”

  “What’s this WESCAC everybody talks about?” I demanded. “Some kind of troll, that eats everybody up?”

  Max nodded. “That’s just right, Bill. WESCAC is worse than anything in the storybooks: what would you think of a herd of goats that learned how to make a troll all by themselves, that could eat up the University in half an hour?”

  “Why would they do that?” I wanted to know.

  “Why is right: no goat was ever dumb enough to be that smart.” He sighed. “So, well. Anyhow, George was the only booksweep allowed in the basement of Tower Hall: that’s the building where the committees meet, and the Main Stacks are—and WESCAC’s there, what you might say the heart of it, and in one part of the basement is where they keep all the tapes they feed into it. Lots of these is big secrets, you know? And nobody goes down there without Top Clearance. That’s what I had, till they fired me; and that’s what George had, just to sweep the place out.”

  He left off his explanation to ask once more about my pain, wondering aloud whether he oughtn’t to fetch in a doctor. But for all the bruises purpling along my thighs I declared with some impatience that I had no need of Dr. Mankiewicz (who regularly ministered to the herd); my conscience, I said in effect, was the real source of my suffering, and my one concern, since nothing could bring back Redfearn’s Tommy, was to learn what I might about the monster who had killed him. The more I gave voice to my self-loathing the more distressèd Max became: it was a curious power, and in some queer way a balm to that same self-despise, which I confess I larded on. When I protested once more that I was neither fish nor fowl but some abomination of a kind with WESCAC, which the campus were well purged of, he pleaded, “Na, boy, please, here’s the truth now: who you are, nobody knows: not me, not George, not anybody. But what you are—that’s what you got to hear now. It’s the history you got to understand.”

  He resumed his narrative, shaking his head and fingering his beard ruefully as he spoke. Twenty years ago, he said, a cruel herd of men called Bonifacists, in Siegfrieder College, had attacked the neighboring quads. The Siegfrieders were joined by certain other institutions, and soon every college in the University was involved in the Second Campus Riot. Untold numbers perished on both sides; the populous Moishian community in Siegfried was destroyed. Max himself, born and educated in those famous halls where science, philosophy, and music had flowered in happier semesters, barely escaped with his life to New Tammany College, and though he was by temperament opposed to riot, he’d put his mathematical genius at the service of his new alma mater. He it was who first proposed, in a now-famous memorandum to Chancellor Hector, that WESCAC—which had already assumed control of important non-military operations in the West-Campus colleges—had a destructive potential unlike anything thitherto imagined.

  “Oy, Bill, this WESCAC!” he said now with much emotion. “What a creature it is! I didn’t make it; nobody did—it’s as old as the mind, and you just as well could say it made itself. Its power is the same that keeps the campus going—I don’t explain it now, but that’s what it is. And the force it gives out with—yi, Bill, it’s the first energy of the University: the Mind-force, that we couldn’t live a minute without! The thing that tells you there’s a you, that’s different from me, and separates the goats from the sheeps … Like the life-heat, that it means we aren’t dead, but our own house is the fuel of it, and we burn ourselves up to keep warm … Ay, ay, Bill!”

  So! Well! Max caught hold of his agitation and went on with the tale of WESCAC—which history, owing to my ignorance and my impatience to learn its relevance to myself, I but imperfectly grasped. The beast I gathered had existed as it were in spirit among men from the very founding of the University, especially in West Campus. Only in the last century or so had it acquired a body of the simplest sort—whether flesh and blood or other material I could not quite tell. It was put at first to the simplest tasks: doing sums and verifying certain types of answers. Thereafter, as studentdom’s confidence in it grew, so also did its size, complexity, and power; it underwent a series of metamorphoses, like an insect or growing fetus, demanding ever more nourishment and exerting more influen
ce, until in the years just prior to my own birth it cut the last cords to its progenitors and commenced a life of its own. It was not clear to me whether a number of little creatures had merged into one enormous one, for example, or whether like Brickett Ranunculus WESCAC one day had outgrown its docility, kicked over the traces, and turned on its keepers. Nothing about the beast seemed unambiguous; I could imagine it at all only by reference to my own equivocal nature, that had got beyond its own comprehension and injured where it meant to aid. The whole of New Tammany College, I took it, if not the entire campus, had gradually come under WESCAC’s hegemony, voluntarily or otherwise: it anticipated its own needs and saw to it they were satisfied; it set its own problems and solved them. It governed every phase of student life, deciding who should marry whom, how many children they should bear, and how they should be reared; itself it taught them, as it saw fit, graded their performance and assigned them lifeworks somewhere in its vast demesne. So wiser grew it than its masters, and more efficient at every task, they had ordered it at some fateful juncture thenceforth to order them, and the keepers became the kept. It was as if, Max said, the Founder Himself should appear to one and declare, “You are to do such-and-so”; one was free in theory to do otherwise, but in fact none but a madman would, in those circumstances. Even the question whether one did right to let WESCAC thus rule him, only WESCAC could reasonably be asked. It was at once the life and death of studentdom: its food was the entire wealth of the college, the whole larder of accumulated lore; in return it disgorged masses of new matter—more, alas, than its subjects ever could digest … and so these in turn, like the cud of a cow, became its further nourishment.

  As late as Campus Riot II, however, there remained a few men like Max for whom the creature was, if no longer their servant, at least not yet entirely their master, and upon whom it seemed to depend like a giant young brother for the completion of its growth. It was they, under Max’s directorship, who taught WESCAC how to EAT …

  “Imagine a big young buck,” Max said: “he’s got wonderful muscles, and he knows he could jump the fence and kill your enemies if he just knew how. Not only that: he knows who could teach him! So he finds his keeper and says he needs certain lessons. Then he can jump out of his pen to charge anybody he wants to, you see? Including his teacher …”

  WESCAC’s former handlers, it appeared, had already taught it considerable resourcefulness, and elements of the college military—the New Tammany ROTC—had long since instructed it to advise them how they might best defend it (and its bailiwick) against all adversaries. Under the pretext therefore of developing a more efficient means of communicating with its extremities, the creature disclosed one day to Max Spielman that a certain sort of energy given off during its normal activity—what Max called “brainwaves”—was theoretically capable of being intensified almost limitlessly, at the same amplitudes and frequencies as human “brainwaves,” like a searchlight over tremendous spaces. The military-science application was obvious: in great secret the brute and its handlers perfected a technique they called Electroencephalic Amplification and Transmission—“The better,” Professor-General Hector had warned the Bonifacists, “to EAT you with.”

  “It was an awful race we were in,” Max said unhappily. “The WESCAC doesn’t just live in NTC, you know: there’s some WESCAC in the head of every student that ever was. We had to work fast, and we made two grand mistakes right in the start; we taught it how to teach itself and get smarter without our help, and we showed it how to make its own policy out of its knowledge. After that the WESCAC went its own way, and it wasn’t till a while we realized a dreadful thing: not one of us could tell for sure any more that its interests were the same as ours!

  “So. We were winning the Riot by that time, but it was left yet to make kaput the Siegfrieders and their colleagues the Amaterasus, and we knew we’d lose thousands of students before we were done. Then we found out a thing we were already afraid of: that the Bonifacists were working on an EAT-project of their own. It was their only chance to win the Riot: if we didn’t end things in a hurry they’d be sure to EAT us, because all WESCAC wanted was to learn the trick, never mind who taught it or who got killed. We won the race …”

  I commenced to fidget. Intriguing though it was, Max’s account had no bearing that I could discern upon my pressing interests. But my keeper’s face now was altogether rapt with a pained excitement.

  “One morning just before daylight we pointed two of WESCAC’s antennas at a certain quadrangle in Amaterasu College. There was only a handful of us, in a basement room in Tower Hall. Maurice Stoker turned on the power—he’s the new chancellor’s half-brother, and I curse him to this day. Eblis Eierkopf set the wavelength: he was just a youngster then, a Siegfrieder himself, that didn’t care which side he worked for as long as he could have the best laboratories. I curse him. And I curse Chementinski, the Nikolayan that focused the signal. All was left was the worst thing of all: to turn on the amplifiers and press the EAT-button. Not a right-thinking mind in the whole wide campus but curses the hand that pushed that button!” Max’s eyes flashed tears; he spread before my face the thumb and three fingers of his right hand. “The Director’s hand, Billy; I curse it too! Max Spielman pushed that button!”

  Whereupon (he declared after a moment, with dry dispassion) thousands of Amaterasus—men, women, and children—had been instantly EATen alive: which was to say, they suffered “mental burn-out” in varying degrees, like overloaded fuses. For those at the center of the quad, instant death; for the next nearest, complete catalepsy. In the first rings of classrooms, disintegration of personality, loss of identity, and inability to choose, act, or move except on impulse. Throughout the several rings of dormitories beyond the classrooms, madness of various types: suicidal despair, hysteria, vertiginous self-consciousness. And about the periphery of the signal, impotency, nervous collapse, and more or less severe neuroses. All of the damage was functional and therefore “permanent”—terminable, that is, only by the death of the victim, which in thousands of cases followed soon after.

  “Think of a college suddenly filled with madmen!” Max cried. “Everybody busy at their work, but all gone mad in the same instant!” Bus-drivers, he declared, had smashed their vehicles into buildings and gibbering pedestrians; infirmary-surgeons had knifed their patients; construction-workers had walked casually off high scaffoldings. The murder and suicide rates shot up a thousand-fold, as did the incidence of accidental death. Untended boilers exploded; fires broke out everywhere, while student firemen sat paralyzed in their places or madly wandered the streets, and undergraduates thronged into blazing classrooms, shops, and theaters as if nothing were amiss. Few were capable of eating meals; even fewer of preparing them. Many lost control of bladder and bowels; most neglected common health measures entirely; the few who turned pathologically fastidious washed their faces day and night while perhaps urinating in their wash-water; none was competent to manage the apparatus of public health, minister to the sick, or bury the dead. In consequence, diseases soon raged terribly as the fire. Before rescue forces from other quadrangles brought the situation into hand, a third of the buildings in the target area were more or less destroyed (including an irreplaceable collection of seventeen hundred illustrated manuscripts from the pre-Kamakura period), half at least of the students and faculty were dead or dying, and all but a handful were fit only for custodial asylums. Within the week both Amaterasu and Siegfrieder Colleges had surrendered unconditionally, and the Second Campus Riot was ended.

  “But the damage!” Max said woefully. “The damage isn’t done yet. Five years ago was the last time I read a newspaper—that was ten years since I pushed the button. There was a story in it about one of the Amaterasus that survived, and everybody thought he was well, till one day he runs wild on his motorbike and kills four little schoolgirls. And the kids themselves, that was born from the survivors: two percent are idiots; one out of three is retarded, and they all got things like enuresis and nigh
tmares. How many generations it will go on, nobody knows.” He struck his forehead with his fist. “That’s what it means to be EATen, Billy! The goats, now: they’ll eat almost anything you feed them; but only us humans is smart enough to EAT one another!”

  Full of wonder, I shook my head. The idea of madness was not easy for me to appreciate: I had for examples only the booksweep himself and the character of Carpo the Fool from Tales of the Trustees, both of whom appeared more formidable than pathetic. I asked whether George the booksweep had been among the victims of this first attack. My motive was not primarily to learn more about the terrors of WESCAC, but if possible to lead Max discreetly towards the matter he’d first essayed; and I was so far successful, that he left off fisting his brow and wound up his history:

  “Yes, well, it wasn’t the Riot George was hurt in, but the peace.” He explained that terrible as the two Campus Riots had been, they were in one sense almost trifling, the result not of basic contradictions between the belligerents but of old-fashioned collegiate pride (what he called militant alma-materism) and unfavorable balances in the informational economy between Siegfried, for example, and its fellow West-Campus Colleges. All the while, however, as it were in the background of the two riots, a farther-reaching conflict had developed: a contradiction of first principles that cut across college boundaries and touched upon all the departments of campus life—not only economics and political science, but philosophy, literature, pedagogy; even agriculture and religion.

  “What I mean,” he said soberly, “is Student-Unionism versus Informationalism. You’ll learn about it as you go along: it’s the biggest varsity fact the campus has got to live with these days, and nobody can explain it all at once.” For the present I had to content myself with understanding that many semesters ago, in what history professors called the Rematriculation Period, the old West-Campus faith in such things as an all-powerful Founder and a Final Examination that sent one forever to Commencement Gate or the Dean o’ Flunks had declined (even as Chickie’s lover had declared in the pasture) from an intellectual force to a kind of decorous folk-belief. Students still crowded once a week into Founder’s Hall to petition an invisible “Examiner” for leniency; school-children still were taught the moral principles of Moishe’s Code and the Seminar-on-the-Hill; but in practice only the superstitious really felt any more that the beliefs they ran their lives by had any ultimate validity. The new evidence of the sciences was most disturbing: there had been, it appeared, no Foundation-Day: the University had always existed; men’s acts, which had been thought to be freely willed and thus responsible, seemed instead to spring in large measure from dark urgings, unreasoning and always guileful; moral principles were regarded by the Psychology Department as symptoms on the order of dreams, by the Anthropology Department as historical relics on the order of potsherds, by the Philosophy Department variously as cadavers for logical dissection or necessary absurdities. The result (especially for thoughtful students) was confusion, anxiety, frustration, despair, and a fitful search for something to fill the moral vacuum in their quads. Thus the proliferation of new religions, secular and otherwise, in the last half-dozen generations: the Pre-Schoolers, with their decadent primitivism and their morbid regard for emotion, dark fancy, and deep sleep; the Curricularists, with their pedagogic nostrums and naïve faith in “the infinite educability of studentdom”; the Evolutionaries; the quasi-mystical Ismists; the neo-Enochians with their tender-minded retreat to the old fraternities—emasculated, however, into aestheticism and intellectual myth-worship; the Bonifacists, fanatically sublimating their libidos to the administrative level and revering their Kanzler as if he were a founder; the Secular-Studentists (called by their detractors Mid-Percentile or Bourgeois-Liberal Baccalaureates) for whom Max himself declared affinity, with their dogged trust in the self-sufficiency of student reason; the Ethical Quadranglists, who subscribed to a doctrine of absolute relativity; the Sexual Programmatists, the Tragicists and New Quixotics, the “Angry Young Freshmen,” the “Beist Generation,” and all the rest.