Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  “Sheep!” Stoker’s face now was red and scowling—the first time I’d ever seen him grinless—and his voice was rough. “She’s a sheep, and Spielman’s another! ‘Baa, baa, take me to the slaughterhouse!’ With their great silly lamb’s eyes! ‘Do what you want to us, we won’t bite.’ Made to be persecuted! Why don’t they fight?”

  The elevator stopped; its door opened noiselessly onto a narrow passageway. Stoker glared at me; the others stood expressionless. I was as much roused as shaken by the outburst, and having abandoned Max, now rose to his defense.

  “Max has his faults, Mr. Stoker, but he’s no coward.”

  “He’s a sheep!” The voice echoed down the corridor. No one moved to leave the elevator. “A Moishian sheep! ‘Please cut my throat, sir!’ ”

  “No. He’s a great goatherd and a great scientist. And the best advisor any hero ever had.”

  Stoker glowered still, but his temper seemed regained. “I notice you don’t take his advice, though. Mustn’t confuse the sheep with the goats, eh?” His laugh now was easier—and still we lingered in the lift! “Advice or no advice, we bucks need our bit of nanny now and then, don’t we!”

  “You’re not part goat too, are you, sir? You don’t look like a goat.”

  “See here, George—” He stepped with me just into the hall and pointed to a closed door at its blind left end. “My wife’s bedroom is right at the end there. She’s waiting for you. Run along, now.”

  Much as the notion stirred me, I shook my head. “That’s not why I stayed here. Besides, she’s angry with me for some reason.”

  “Go on! That’s because you said you didn’t love her any more than you loved the other girls! Very tactless remark for a Grand Tutor! No, no, don’t apologize—” I had only been going to protest. “I know you didn’t mean to hurt the girl’s feelings. But she’s sensitive, you know? Among us human people, when a chap bites a girl in the belly he’s supposed to follow through. Go down there now and tell her you’re sorry, and give her an extra-good service to make up. That’s what she’s waiting for.”

  I smiled. “You don’t understand …”

  “I do! It’s you that doesn’t understand. The girl’s in heat, for pity’s sake!”

  I considered his face seriously to guess whether he was joking. Human females, as I understood, had no particular rutting-season, and of course no tails to wag in the rousing manner of an amorous doe; I frankly hadn’t realized there might be other signs and sessions, as unmistakable in studentdom as was a fine-flushed vulva in our herd between the autumnal and vernal equinoxes. The notion that Anastasia was in heat threw considerable light upon the psychology of her behavior, I had to admit, however obscure its morality remained. Nay, more, it seemed to me to render pointless both Stoker’s charge of willful concupiscence on her part and Anastasia’s pleas of self-sacrifice with charitable intent, neither of which had impressed me as quite adequate to the case. I knew myself a kid in the tangled thicket of human morals; doubtless there were complications of which I was unaware; nevertheless I’d have very much liked to ask Max just then why the phenomenon of rutting (by its nature indiscriminate) was regarded as a neutral fact, even a merit, in the stock-barns, and a likely cause of flunkage in the campus proper. Granted even that eugenical considerations (or social ones, whereof I was but dimly aware) took moral form in studentdom, so that for some intricate reason it was undesirable for a woman to bear children by any sire except her husband: on what ground did the Founder object to “coveting thy classmate’s wife” if one took the contraceptive precautions I had read of? Or to mating with desirable members of a different species (as Max with the goats and Anastasia with the watchdogs), or with partners of one’s own sex, in any of which cases reproduction was precluded? I supposed there was more to the matter—my dream of Mary V. Appenzeller came to mind, with a flash of its mysterious, unreasonable shame—but what the More was, I could by no means see.

  In any case, Stoker had said earlier that Anastasia never went into heat. Recalling this, I understood he was baiting me again, and resolved to give as good as I had got.

  “Isn’t a husband supposed to service his own wife?” I asked politely. “You claim you’re not a gelding; are you impotent, the way Brickett Ranunculus was at the end?”

  His face, always high-colored, darkened by a number of shades; his eyes turned fierce. “Impotent? Impotent?” I really thought he might assault me, and so clenched my stick to parry. But again his anger turned to heated mirth. “Oh my! Do you know who I am? Do you know where you are? Oh, my sakes!” He snatched up my arm and drew me back into the lift. “Impotent!” He pushed another button and burst into merry laughter. Moreover, as the lift began to rise he farted loudly, perhaps by way of preliminary demonstration of his potency. I helped myself to another sip of liquor and grinned, pleased to have got such a rise out of him, but I was ready enough to quit that compartment when the door reopened.

  The room we now stepped into (our stone-faced companions remaining for some reason in the elevator) was low-ceilinged, brilliantly lit, and quiet. The walls were smooth and gleaming white, undecorated but for one large photograph of a smiling, handsome young man not familiar to me. The floor was laid with heavy carpeting. A dozen or more men, clean-shaved and sootless, stood intent before great dialed and buttoned consoles, upon which flickered sundry-colored lights; their uniforms, I noted, were immaculate and truly uniform, unlike the motley of the guards downstairs. One wall was a grating of heavy steel mesh, through which I saw a second room quite like ours, the only noticeable difference being in the cut and color of the attendants’ garb: rhododendron-green on our side, rust-red on theirs. Other than a muffled click of switches and the whirr of tape-spools from a row of glass-front cabinets, the place was still. So much so, and so absorbed the dial-watchers, I was hushed upon entering—but Stoker belched as it were defiantly. And in vain, for no one so much as glanced his way.

  “This is Founder’s Hill you’re inside of, you know!” His voice was cross and deliberately loud, as jarring as the dirty prints our shoes left on the carpet. “Talk about power: all the power on this campus comes from here! The same power that runs the University! This is the Control Room.”

  He seemed not at ease, and annoyed when I asked whether these attendants were under his command.

  “What would I want with people like these? They don’t talk my language.” He hastened to add, however, seeing my insinuation, that although the dial-watchers were responsible only to the Chancellor, I should not make the mistake of thinking his, Stoker’s, potency thereby diminished. The power was merely controlled and directed from this room; it originated “down below,” in Stoker’s bailiwick. Moreover, the so-called controllers had no real authority: they only attended the dials and switches whose actual instructions came not even from the Chancellor, but from that bank of tapes—in short, from WESCAC.

  “WESCAC!” I frowned at the pulsing spools and tingled as if ambushed. “I thought WESCAC was in Tower Hall!”

  “Oh well, this is just one arm of the thing, you know. Not even that: a finger. It programs the power needs for West Campus, itself included.” As we strolled among the consoles (Stoker thrusting out his tongue at various attendants), he charged me not to forget that last fact: WESCAC, people rightly held, was the seat and instrument of West-Campus power—brain-power, military power, and thus political and economic power as well, indirectly. But it was essentially no more than a tool and manager, dependent absolutely on the power supplied to it, at its own governance, from the realm “down below.” In short, the power that ultimately controlled the Power Plant originated in the Power Plant, necessarily and exclusively—and the Power Plant was his, Stoker’s, domain.

  “If you don’t mind my asking: how did you get to be in charge of it?”

  He grinned. “WESCAC appointed me.”

  While I assimilated this fresh paradox he led me to the steel-screen partition, on which I saw now signs of warning in several languages. “T
his screen is on the border between East and West Campus,” he said. “The line runs right through Founder’s Hill. Don’t touch it, by the way, or you’ll cook—it’s a high-voltage thing like the Main Power Line you saw outside, that marks the boundary.”

  I was familiar enough with electric pasture-fences to understand; from a respectful distance I scrutinized with interest the men on the other side.

  “Are those real Nikolayan what-you-call-’ems?” The term for their administrative system had slipped my mind, perhaps aided by the dark liquor.

  “Absolutely! Enemies of private education! Classmates in the classless college! Founderless Student-Unionists! You see how different their way of life is from ours.” His tone was sarcastic, and indeed, but for the style of dress and the fact that their consoles and attendants faced away from ours (whereas ours faced away from theirs), I could see little difference between the two rooms. Their machinery perhaps was larger; ours I thought had more colorful lights. A small door, also of steel mesh, was built into the screen. Stoker approached it and set up a shout in what seemed to be no particular language, merely an abusive clamor accompanied by grimaces, foot-stampings, and waving of the arms.

  “Awah! Nyet! Da! Open sesame! Borscht borscht!”

  At once a man near us turned a series of knobs on his dial-panel, and on the Nikolayan side a stocky young fellow with a black eye-patch did the same. On both sides impassive guards with rifles appeared—they had been standing at such rigid attention in the corners that I hadn’t noticed them—clicked their bolts, and held their weapons ready. The door swung open of itself.

  “Don’t you move,” Stoker warned. But he himself swaggered through the doorway, made a deep bow to the Nikolayan riflemen (saluting them too with a cracking fart), and returned to pay the same compliment to the guards on our side. The dials were turned back, the door swung shut and latched itself, the guards marched precisely to their corners. Except for myself, who caught my breath with astonishment, and the young Nikolayan with the eye-patch, who grinned and shook his head, no one appeared even to notice the performance, much less protest it.

  “Nobody else is allowed through there,” Stoker said. “Me they have to put up with, like it or not, and neither side likes it. But they’ve got to have power if they’re going to be enemies.”

  I had wondered whether he had a counterpart on the Nikolayan side of the screen; evidently he had not. So I asked why, since a single source powered both WESCAC and EASCAC, and he controlled that source, he could not singlehandedly remove the danger of a third campus riot by turning off the power, or threatening to.

  “That’s a Max-Spielman question,” he said, with some contempt. “You don’t understand what power is! The furnace doesn’t turn off the thermostat! You want the heart to decide to kill the brain, but it can’t do it! The heart might kill the brain, but it can’t decide to; only the brain can decide. Don’t forget, though: it gets its deciding-power from the heart!” He waved his hand impatiently. “Flunk this! Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Before leaving, however, he took the trouble to obstruct the view of the nearest attendant by standing nose-to-nose with him and making a grotesque face, which the man ignored as if Stoker were invisible. And I observed that when the same attendant reached for a flashing button on the panel, Stoker pretended for mischief’s sake to catch at his hand, but never actually touched him, and even made way slightly, though cursing all the while. Then, not to confine his scorn exclusively to West-Campus controllers, he spit over his shoulder toward the Nikolayans: the drops struck the mesh with a puff and sizzled into curls of steam.

  “I hate this place,” he growled.

  We returned to the elevator, pushed the bottom button, and descended a considerable distance farther than we’d come up. Stoker’s face brightened as we dropped; the guards too seemed more at ease with every passing level. I myself was somewhat dizzied by the falling sensation—and by the liquor as well, no doubt—but it was a feeling more curious than disagreeable, and I chose not to surrender the flask on its account.

  A monstrous din rose around us as we stopped, and doubled its volume with a crash when the door slid back—a roar like an endless thunderclap, shocking the heart.

  “Furnace Room!” Stoker shouted in my ear; I could scarcely hear him. At first, owing to the darkness, I could see only that we had stepped onto a long balcony, beyond and below which were considerable steaming spaces lit by intermittent fires. The air was hot, with the reek of the fumigating-candles we sometimes used in the barns, and from near and far the din assailed us: grindings, shrieks, cracks, roars, hisses, crashes, shouts! When my eyes accommodated I went to the railing with Stoker and saw how truly whelming was the place: the floor was a barn’s-height below us, the ceiling lost in dark vapors above; a fair-sized herd could scatter in the space between the walls—rough-hewn from the mountain’s bowels, black as coal, and warm to the touch. Vats or caldrons huge as silos rose before us, interlaced with catwalks, pipes, and cables; the red glow came from under them, where great fires seemed to rage beneath the floor. The steam issued everywhere: from joints in the caldron-plates, from valves big as wagon-wheels, from the steel trucks full of ash or stone that rolled on rails down every aisle, from fissures in the very walls and floor. Troops of grimed and burly laborers, a few women among them, ran hither and thither, toiling, cursing. Stripped to the waist or covered in sweat-soaked denim, black rags about their heads, they wrestled with valvestems and winch-gears, plied wrenches big as crowbars to great bolt-heads, and stoked the awful fires with battering-rams. Whistles screeched; orders were bawled from above and below; everyone seemed in everyone else’s way. Steam-valves were opened without warning, and those standing near had to spring for their lives; rail-trucks were sent careering heedless through crowded aisles, sometimes colliding with one another and spilling half their cargo onto the tracks; empty buckets were knocked off catwalks; toes were trod upon, shins barked, fingers mashed; fights broke out on the least occasion between work-gangs whose paths happened to cross—rail-truck crews and furnace-men, for example—or between members of the same gang, for no apparent reason and as often in sport as in anger. Finally, there seemed to prevail a continuing state of emergency: furnace-doors blew open of their own accord; rail switches were thrown in the nick of time; winches jammed; cables broke; steam-pipes burst. Repairmen dashed from a partly-plugged leak to cut an arcing cable that bid fair to roast a stoking-gang beneath; breaking the circuit, however, released for some reason the trap-door on a hopper of fly-ash suspended overhead from a traveling crane, and both crews were half-buried in an avalanche of grime. Fists flew instantly, along with spanners and winch-handles; one man fell smitten into the dust, whether dead or stunned I could not tell, and others surely must have joined him had not everyone’s attention been diverted by a shriek from the leaky pipe abandoned earlier. Some scalding liquid now sprayed from it upon an illuminated boiler-gauge, big as a window, across whose face I saw a large black pointer climbing steadily towards an area marked in red. A number of brawling repairmen rushed to the pipe; as many ran the other way. Two of the furnace-gang dragged off their fallen comrade, a third hopped in the ashes and tore, weeping, at his hair, while a fourth flung back his head and laughed at the whole spectacle—until all alike were obliged to leap clear when an empty train-car charged like a mad buck down their aisle and plowed into the fly-ash.

  To gather one’s wits was out of the question; I was seized up, as were Stoker and the guards, into the general alarum. Inquiry, explanation were impossible. “Here’s where your power is!” Stoker shouted at me. Grinning he thumped his chest with one hand and extended the other towards the bedlam beneath us. “Volcano with a cap on it!”

  He dashed away at once down the balcony and out onto the catwalk that ran beside the boiler-gauge. The guards ran with him, and I followed after as quickly as I could, towards the group that milled and tussled now around the leaky pipe. We all were wide-eyed and shouting, myself included; it
was unthinkable not to widen the eyes and shout, though what our words were, if they were words at all, I have no idea. Stoker bellowed above us all—“Ho, there! Hallo! Hey!”—and pitched into the melee of laughing, swearing laborers, swinging at the men, pinching the massive women, and glancing from time to time (as did we all) at the meter-long needle on the gauge, still climbing slowly. No matter what the numbers signified: that the lower ones were black and the higher red was significance enough, given the general consternation and the horrid rumbling that began now under the boiler. Stoker pried and clubbed his way to the center of the gang with the aid of a long steel bar—a sort of mammoth box-end wrench, at least a meter in the shank—which he’d wrested from a black chap in the mob. His objective was a valve-stem just up-pipe from the whistling leak; two slams he gave it with the giant tool, heedlessly crippling a brace of repairmen with his backswing, and then fit the wrench-end on it like a capstan-bar.

  “Hoya!” he roared, and shoved his neighbor to the bar, who laid hold and strained back on it with all his force. “Ho to, there!” he bawled at another; “put your arse in it!” And the second locked arms about the waist of the first, but the two together couldn’t budge the valve. Now the rest fell to with a will, Stoker collaring and kicking them into line. But while a number locked together in a sweaty chain to pull the bar this way, the others strove as gruntly to pull it that. “No, blast!” would yell Stoker; “Flunk-ay!” they would curse back; and some on both sides seeing what was amiss, each changed to pushing instead of pulling, with the same result. One team had fewer members, but all male; the other had more men but three brawny women as well, by whose presence less was gained in horsepower than was lost in horseplay. After two reversals of direction, moreover, the rhythm broke entirely; every man pulled, pushed, or stood fast as he listed, braying imprecations on the rest in any case—and the bar stood still, but not the gauge-needle. Suddenly a man near the end of the longer line let go and fled—or would have, had I not thrust out my stick with an oath and brought him crashing down.