John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"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 child 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 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 distressed 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 populus 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 influence, 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.