John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"Mind you, we agree on what each version means," the young man said briskly. "What we call the A reading means that one ought to desire to fail, since the desire to pass is vain and vanity's flunkèd — not to mention the famous tradition that Passage is to be found only in the knowledge of Failure, et cetera et cetera ."

The older man adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. "Well, now…"

"The B reading," his protégé continued quickly, "is a way of saying that while to desire passage is to fail, to desire failure on that account is also to fail, since it equals desiring to pass. But despite the fact that Passage and Failure aren't different, they're not the same either; and for that reason if one wants to pass one should desire neither Failure nor Passage — yet one shouldn't desire neither because one wants to pass, obviously…"

"Obviously," several of his colleagues agreed, and even his mentor nodded with a slight cock of the head, as if to say that while details of the young man's gloss were not unexceptionable, as a rough-and-ready formulation it would do.

"But we can't agree whether A or B is correct," he concluded, "and so we're collecting expert opinions, weighting them appropriately, and programming WESCAC to arbitrate the whole question." He winked and chuckled. "You may be interested to know that your colleague Dr. Bray has already obliged us with his judgment — though you understand I'm not at liberty to confide it, or what his weighting is on our little scale."

They waited for me to speak. "Gentlemen," I said, "your problem is most interesting in itself. What's more it's of the first practical importance, clearly. Now, if you'll excuse me…"

But they blocked my way.

"A or B?" the young scholar demanded. "If you can't remember what you ate, boy, tell us what you think, and we'll let you go." His superior tut-tutted at this show of coerciveness, but my inquisitor frankly declared that accuracy and thoroughness in scholarly matters were his only values in this flunkèd University, and that as a truly revolutionary researcher he would not hesitate to resort to terrorism if necessary to gain his ends. He didn't give a flunk, he said, whether A or B was "true" in the philosophical sense — all such mystical formulations, in fact, he regarded as superstitious mumbo-jumbo: their authors knaves, their Tutees fools — but upon their like was constructed the whole mad edifice of campus history, for a clear understanding whereof it was absolutely essential to have accurate texts, "believe" them or not.

"Do you have an opinion?" he asked me wryly.

I smiled, as I had done through the whole episode. "Yes."

"Then let's have it." He clacked the shears grimly. "We'll let WESCAC decide what it's worth."

Reluctant for some reason to use the library-scientist's term, I asked, "where is this famous 'pit'?"

The young man smiled and carefully indicated with the point of his shears a ragged hole near the center of the assembled shards. I opened a lens on my stick-end and leaned close over.

"Why magnify it if you don't know the script?" he asked unpleasantly. "That just makes a big riddle out of a little one."

But I was not inspecting the lacuna, nor was my lens a magnifier, but Dr. Sear's mirror, with the aid of which I observed that the Committee had forsaken the aisle to gather close about.

"What's your answer?" one of them demanded.

I huffed a great puff, sending vellum flinders in all directions, and with a sweep of my stick scattered fragments, chemicals, note-cards, shears, and scholars. Before they could recover themselves enough to decide whether stopping me or re-retrieving the smithered eens was of immediater importance, I had dashed into the Circulation Room and was gimping it headlong for the lobby. Halfway down a flickering corridor it occurred to me that if two riot-troopers were guarding the Catalogue Room, whole platoons must be on duty in the main lobby, especially at the lifts that serviced Belfry and Belly. Somewhere overhead the clock once again struck the three-quarter-hour; unless it was in error, there was no time to waste debating with a phalanx of bayonets. I retraced my steps to the Circulation Room (no one seemed to be pursuing me) and having noticed from a corner of my eye a few moments earlier its single occupant — a longhaired pallid girl, un-cosmeticked and — washed, reading behind a desk marked INFORMATION — I took a long hazard.

"Excuse me, miss: is there any way up besides the lift?"

Next door the scholars fussed and clamored, scrambling after fragments on all fours like awkward kids, but the Circulation Room was still. The pimpled maid, thin and udderless as Mrs. Rexford but infinitely less prepossessing, looked over her spectacles from the large novel she was involved in and said with careful clarity — as if that question, from a fleeced goat-boy at just that moment, were exactly what she'd expected — "Yes. A stairway goes up to the Clockworks from this floor. You may enter it through the little door behind me."

All the while she marked with her finger her place in the book, to which she returned at once upon delivering her line. Mild, undistinguished creature, never seen before or since, whose homely face I forgot in two seconds; whose name, if she bore one, I never knew; whose history and fate, if any she had, must be lacunae till the end of terms in my life's story — Passage be yours, for that in your moment of my time you did enounce, clearly as from a written text, your modest information! Simple answer to a simple question, but lacking which this tale were truncate as the Scroll, an endless fragment!

"— less fragment," I thought I heard her murmur as I stooped through the little door she'd pointed out. I paused and frowned; but though her lips moved on, as did her finger across the page, her words were drowned now by the bells of Tower Clock.

In jerky leaps I sticked up stairs, around and around the shaft in which the mighty pendulum swung. Four nights there were, which I ascended as the bells phrased out their tune, and then a vertical ladder from the topmost landing up to a square trap-door in the Belfry floor. This ladder had ten rungs, I happen to know, for as I hiked myself up to each, the bells tolled an hour and over my head Anastasia screeched — a little higher each time, the three of us. Upon the eighth, bane of Dr. Eierkopf's head, my own was through the trap-door, and in the reflected glare of plaza searchlights I saw My Ladyship a-humped upon the floor. On hands and knees she was, face slack, shift high; standing behind her, black cape spread and face a-glint, Harold Bray — quite older-visaged than thitherto, also hairier. Though his tup was hid (the pair were facing me) it must needs have been brutish long and sore applied: he was not mounted, only standing with bent knees aft of her 'scutcheon, and his cassock was raised in front no higher than his shin-tops; moreover he did not thrust like any buck but only stood connected, opening and closing his eyes and cape; yet on each peal (high — re and — mi were the two I witnessed) Anastasia shrieked as if impaled, and on fa — - which last stroke fetched me through the trap-door altogether — she collapsed upon the bird-limed floor, among broken eggshells and pigeon-straw. I was obliged to leap over her, the way being strait between Eierkopf's work-tables and the busy gears of the clock; my stick-stroke, consequently, fell short of Bray's head and but thwacked his cape, raising a silky dust that made me sneeze. He sprang behind the pendulum-shaft into the lift, and so escaped — but I had meant anyhow only to drive him off My Ladyship just then. To her, sitting up now fucked in the strew, I turned.