John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"Really, old man," Stoker complained. "My wife, you know. What's come over you?"

Intoned my mother: " A -plus!"

"I've been wrong about everything!" I declared happily. "Never mind! Is Leonid all right?" Before anyone could answer I kissed whimpering Anastasia again — she was quite glasseyed now and limp — and might even have mounted her, so full I was of yen and new plans for her passage. But her menses were on her, my buckly nose reported, and other business pressed, so I forwent lust for exposition. Leonid's drink, Stoker said, was a multipurpose eradicator used by spies in the falsification of credentials and the elimination of either their enemies or themselves, as the case should warrant. It had been pumped out of him in time, and except for a headache, and the delusion that Anastasia had kissed him back from death, he was quite recovered.

"Some nerve!" Stoker said. "I had to talk her into doing that mouth-to-mouth business, and then he says a thing like that."

Anastasia, dumb, now sat in her pissed dress beside my mother. I seized and kissed her hand, whereat she wept for very fuddlement.

"Leonid's right about you!" I told her warmly. "You were passèd before I Tutored you. You should love him!" She shook her head. "You should love everybody, even more than before! Never mind what they're after! Forget what I said last time!"

She shut her eyes and wailed.

"Open your legs again, like the old days!" I commanded her. "Let the whole student body in! I thought I saw through you before, but I've got to start from scratch!"

Stoker protested that I'd have to scratch someone else's wedded roommate, not his — unless of course Anastasia wanted to oblige me, in which case he must regretfully defer to her wishes.

"Stop that passèd talk!" I cried, and laughed and struck his arm. "That bad advice I gave you was the best on campus! Passage is failure, just as you told me — but Passèd are the flunked, too! Thinking they're different is what flunked me!" He was far from convinced, but I would say no more on the matter then. I asked whether Bray's offer to pardon me still stood.

"I should say not," Stoker answered. There had been, it seemed, two conditions attached to my release, one presumably impossible for me, the other repugnant to Stoker: all the signatures would need to be deleted from my ID-card, including those in indelible ink, and Anastasia would have not only to submit to the "Grand Tutor" (I used the imaginary quotation-marks uncynically now) but to bear a child by him. " 'A real little human kindergartener,' he said he wanted," Stoker said angrily. "I should've horsewhipped him!"

"You should have!" I cried joyfully. "And you would have, before I misled you. But listen — " I knelt and embraced My Ladyship once more, despite her wails and wet. "I was as wrong about Bray as I was about you. There is something special about him… In any case you must let him service you, no matter what his terms are — and everybody else, too! Take on the whole University!"

She may not have heard me above her bawling. Mother clapped her hands and cried " A -plus!" after each of my injunctions, rocking in a rhythm. Stoker fussed.

"Don't act so passèd!" I exhorted him. "Hit me, if you want to! Pimp for your wife! Set dogs on Mother!"

"A -plus!" that lady said, whom I would not for the campus have seen harmed.

"You're stir-crazy," Stoker grumbled, nonetheless plainly unsettled. "You talk as if True and False were different Answers."

"And they're not!" I cried. "That's the Answer! My whole mistake was to think they were different — so that's what you've got to think, if you really want to flunk!"

We spoke no more then, because Stoker, to my great satisfaction, lost his temper and collared me cellwards. "Pass All Fail All!" I cried to the tiers of flunks. "It's the same thing!"

Stoker took a billy from a passing guard and clubbed me dumb.

As if, in that timeless cave, time's lost track had doubled on itself, I woke again to the voices of Max and Leonid arguing:

"Would- not ship, Classmate, sir!"

"Na, my boy, you're mistaken…"

"But you think was wrong, that suicideness?"

"That's what George thought, Leonid. Why else should he stop you? And I agree: to kill yourself it's selfish."

"Flunkhoodship, then! I be a big selfish! I defection! Big spy for Informationalists, Ira Hector pays me! And bribe Lucky Rexford you don't get Shaft!"

"You see, my friend? Still being unselfish! And if I escaped I'd still be playing the Moishian martyr, like Georgie said."

"So bah!" Leonid cried. "So I be vain my own self; you defect, I get Shaft, my name in all Nikolayan historybooks! Hooray me!"

"By you it wouldn't be vanity, never mind how you say. By me it would, whether I take the Shaft or don't. I got Moishian motives either way. Ach, I hate this!"

"Me too."

I rubbed my head and sat up. "Never mind motives."

As before, they welcomed me back to the waking campus. Max especially was devoted thereafter, and respectful in a way I found unsettling as much as gratifying: as if, now I no longer thought myself Grand Tutor, he was finally able to imagine I was. My other Tutees, those I'd seen and heard of who had inclined to Bray and doubted me, appeared to have reversed their attitudes in view of the flunkèd state I'd led them to, or led them to see, and doubted now the one who'd called them passed. Their problem, as some saw and others didn't, was complex: if Bray's Certifications were false, how reconcile his Certifying me for having declared them so? And if I was true, how assimilate my self-flunkage and late defense of Bray? Only Max was untroubled by the conundrum: "All the better it don't make sense," he would say to Leonid, My chill Ladyship, or Peter Greene, who sometimes now visited. "So it's a mystery, you shouldn't analyze."

He was become my best apologist, if not my best Tutee. For though Anastasia wept and protested my new counsel, especially regarding her connection with Bray, it was not long before Stoker told me (with a wink, as in former times) that the two conditions of my release might soon be reduced to one: he'd observed his wife against the bars on another level, tearfully urging the foul-mouthed imates to have at her, and while they'd been too awed and suspicious to go to it, there could be no doubt but her attitude had changed. Whereas Max, who explained me better than I could myself, had trouble practicing the new preachment he so well glossed, Stoker I was pleased to see become once more a kind of Dunce's advocate; he came down frequently now to bait us and found in Max a willing fish, who however was by no means easy to land.

"They're both fakes," Stoker would declare of Bray and me.

"Falseness!" Leonid would reply. "WESCAC didn't EAT, yes?"

"They fooled it with masks."

"Masks can't fool it," Max would then point out, and review the possible explanations of my passage through the Belly with Bray: "It might be Georgie was spared because Bray was with him, or vice-versa. It might be they're both Grand Tutors, different kinds. Or it might be they both were EATen — but only crazy, not to death. Or it might be the Grand Tutor wasn't EATen and the other was, so one's crazy and the other not…"

"Or they're both fakes and WESCAC's on the fritz," Stoker taunted. "Or it changed its own mind about the Spielman Proviso and doesn't EAT anybody these days. Maybe it's in love with EASCAC and lost its appetite."

But Max would cheerfully agree instead of arguing, and point out moreover that either Harold Bray or the defector Chementinski might in some wise have altered WESCAC's AIM, recently or many terms ago, if the computer hadn't "noctically" reprogrammed itself. Nor could one query WESCAC on the matter, as it might have grown quite capable of lying to or misleading an interrogator.