John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"That's okay!" Alexandrov cried, and shouted down the Nikolayans' protests in their own language. "I fail assignment, deserve Main Detention!"

A report came to the office that the opening of the Summit Symposium had been delayed and that Classmate X was on his way to join us; the New Tammany official invited the prisoner to wait, but Alexandrov — whose emotions changed frequently and dramatically — declared with tears in his eyes that he had once already disgraced his father, whom he revered, and could not bear to face him disgraced again. Briefly then, in elliptical exclamations, he told his story: Believed wholeheartedly in Classless Campus and similar Student-Unionist ideals. No masters, no pupils! Despised Ira Hector and other greedy Informationalists, but admired several individual New Tammanians: Professor-General Reginald Hector, liberator of Siegfrieder concentration campus where he'd been prisoner in Second Riot; Chancellor Rexford, lover of peace and man of goodwill; Mrs. Anastasia, who would be Graduate except Graduation was Informationalist lie, opiate of lower percentiles; myself, who had right respect for goats and other animals (Anastasia, it appeared, had spoken of me to him in not unflattering terms, on Randy-Thursday) — a virtue evidently outweighing in his eye my claim to Grand-Tutorhood. Which didn't believe in, et cetera. But of all men on campus, admired most his father, for perfect selflessness exemplified in renouncing even a name…

"Greatnesshood!" he shouted, pounding the chair-arm. "Splendidacy!"

But now his eye sparkled with frustration: he could not help loving these people, yet he disapproved of his love, which smacked of Informationalist idolatry. Nor was this his only failing as a Student-Unionist: he was subject, he confessed, to fits of impulsive insubordination and independent behavior, which no amount of subsequent remorse appeared to cure. As a young riot-engineer in C.R. II, for example, he had been captured by the Siegfrieders early in the conflict when he'd stolen behind their lines one night, without authorization, to untether a nannny-goat abandoned by a fleeing farmer. Thereafter, in the Bonifacist concentration campus, he'd turned his engineering skill to the arts of unlocking and releasing; ashamed to return to his own unit, he proved so competent at arranging the escape of others that the Nikolayan professor-generals soon were sending him lists, via deliberately captured recruits, of prisoners whose escape was to have priority — generally officers. But time and again his emotions had the better of his self-discipline, and he would free the recruits instead, out of admiration for their selflessness. After the Riot he'd risen to prominence as a computer-programmer, specializing in the untanglement of knotty mathematical problems; but his old proclivity now and then came to the fore — especially when, as sometimes happened, he would meet a comrade from former terms and drink too many toasts to their fallen classmates. After one such bout he had found himself in the Nikolayan Zoological Gardens and, smitten with sympathy for its internees, had commenced a wholesale uncaging. So spectacular was the consequent furor, and difficult the job of constraining him, he might have been shot along with sundry bears and tigers had not his father been fetched to the scene to command him, by loudspeaker through a cloud of monkeys, to surrender himself.

"Humiliationship!" he exclaimed, and pressed one fist of his brooding brow. His captors, he said, had despaired of holding him, though when he'd seen what carnage ensued from his generous intentions, he'd declared himself willing to be jailed for life: not only had several of the beasts necessarily been shot, but some had eaten others, and many of the more exotic were doomed to perish for want of their customary food and environment. A debate had followed on how best to punish him (a regular court-trial was out of the question because of his father's position); and seeing his superiors deadlocked, he generously volunteered them the means painfullest to himself — a cell lined with mirrors instead of bars. So strong was his aversion to any reflection — an antipathy he could not account for, at least in our language — that such a cell would need no lock at all to contain him: he would be frozen in its center with his eye shut.

I interrupted: "You have a thing about mirrors too! Isn't that curious! Did you know that Peter Greene, the man you fought with at Stoker's — "

Officials shushed me, lest the prisoner stop talking.

"Ha!" Alexandrov laughed. "A baby. But unselfish, Goat-Boy! And loves Mrs. Anastasia! But stupid! But okay, I like, and shouldn't fight with. A good man! But bah!"

This sentiment, though I think I shared it, was beside my point, but I let the coincidence of the two men's common aversion to mirrors go, as not worth the labor of articulating. Whatever the cause of Leonid Andreich's, it was at least as intense as Greene's, evidently, for after a day and night in the mirrored cell, which had been promptly constructed for him, he was seized by a kind of fit not unlike epilepsy, and, falling, struck with his head one of the hateful walls so forcefully that the glass shivered. He revived in a prison infirmary, minus his right eye and in such despair at ever becoming a credit to his college that when his father arranged him a position in the Founder's Hill Control Room he at first refused it as an undeserved honor. His eventual acceptance was in order not further to disoblige the man he most admired, and to carry out a scheme of atonement that had occurred to him: his own father, it seemed (one of our translators remarked that the Nikolayan word used occasionally by the prisoner actually meant "stepfather," and someone else explained that Classmate X had married Alexandrov's mother, a Riot-widow, only a dozen or so years previously, after Leonid Andreich's rematriculation), had been a computer-expert prior to his appearance on the diplomatic scene, and possibly had been involved at one time in counter-intelligence work as well —

"How's that?" cried the NTC official. "Have him say that again!" The consternation was equally great among the Nikolayans, who drowned out the prisoner's voice with protests and demanded that no more be said until they'd had time to consult their superiors. Angrily they denounced Alexandrov, who blushed and apologized for speaking thoughtlessly. He sprang up from his chair, shrugging off all hands; men hurried to block windows and doorways in case he meant to flee or destroy himself — but he was merely restless, and strode now vigorously about the room, waving his arms. He ignored his classmates' orders to say no more until their chief arrived; the New Tammanians delightedly scribbled notes.

"Forget I said about father," he laughed. "A stupidacy in my head!"

In any case, he said, he was aware how close and crucial was the race between Nikolay College and NTC to perfect the "dreadfulship" of their respective EATing capacities; realizing also that a man with his peculiar talent for "releaseness" would be in an advantageous position in the Control Room to aid the cause of his alma mater, he had resolved to slip through the electrified screen, kidnap some eminent computer-scientist from the West-Campus side, and by spiriting him over the Power Line put the Nikolayans ahead in the EAT-race, redeem his past failings, and become an honored and respected member of the Student Union like his father.

"But!" He gave a vast sly shrug. "I come here to say goodbye to father, I see instead Rexford — I admire! A forgetness; you catch me; I'm disgrace!" He seemed altogether pleased with himself. The New Tammany officials glanced at one another.

"You should be ashamed of yourself," I told him. One official frowned and asked another who the flunk I was anyhow; some reply was whispered into his ear. Leonid Andreich, as if reminded by my words that a man in disgrace did not ordinarily cross his arms and smile, quickly clutched his hair and agreed that Classmate X, himself so perfectly disciplined, would of course despise him for his "incompetencehood" in getting himself arrested. But for a man whose desire to please his father was as obviously sincere as was Leonid's, this profession of disgrace had a counterfeit ring. In any case his arrest was not what I'd been referring to, I told him, but his motive and intention. I conceded at the outset that Informationalism was based on a kind of flunking avarice, and that particular Informationalists like Ira Hector were to all appearances irredeemably greedy: Flunkèd are the selfish, it was written in the Founder's Scroll, and nowise might flunked mean passed.