“He didn’t!” Anastasia cried. Then her appall gave way to confusion: “How is it I
wasn’t
EATen, then, if you sent me down into the Belly?”
It took some while for Virginia Hector to comprehend the nature of her daughter’s misunderstanding, which was of course quite apparent to me; what
wasn’t
evident however, even when her mother made it clear that she’d been speaking of a male child, the GILES Himself, I was pleased to see Anastasia question next: how came it that she had been spared, and I condemned? Miss Hector grew vague; seemed not readily to understand the question …
“It had to be twins you had, didn’t it?” Anastasia persisted. “Uncle Ira
never mentioned any brother of mine—I see why, now!—but he always liked to tell how he’d helped deliver me himself …”
“Well. Yes. Naturally.” But Miss Hector’s tone bespoke a fuddledness.
“Then how come we weren’t
both
EATen?”
Instead of replying directly to the question, Lady Creamhair declared sharply that no one had been EATen: the whole hope of her strategy, she said, was that WESCAC would recognize its own and not only desist but contrive my preservation when she restored me to it.
“It was a terrible risk,” she admitted proudly. “An awful risk! But I was
right:
they never found him, dead or alive! And I happen to know for a fact he didn’t die: my Gilesey’s alive, this very minute! Of course, we mustn’t ever tell Papa …”
Forgetting her original question now in her excitement—as did I, quickened to the heart by these disclosures!—Anastasia flung her arms about her mother (as I inferred) and confessed that she’d not only learned of her brother’s existence, just that day, but had actually met him. “He’s on Great Mall right now!”
“No, no,” Virginia Hector protested, distracted into an odd air of serenity. “That isn’t so, you see.”
Anastasia laughed. “It
is
so, Mom! If you ever watched Telerama you’d have seen him yourself this morning, at the Turnstile Trials.”
Her mother still declined to believe her—I knew well why—and began to ramble. Anastasia demanded good-humoredly to know whether she’d recognize me if she saw me.
“Well, yes, my, no, gracious. Children change so … Dear me, yes! No, I’d know my little Giles, yes indeedy; a mother doesn’t forget. There was even a birthmark under his little hiney, down on his leg, a little dark circle. No sirree!”
As she went on in this vein I made use of the mirror on my stick to examine the back of my legs, and though the light was poor, and my hands unsteady, I satisfied myself that there was indeed, on the back of my left thigh, about halfway to the knee, a mark such as she described!
“I brought him with me, Mom!” Anastasia said triumphantly. “He’s right outside!”
“Oh my, dear me, no …”
“Dear me,
yes!
And wait’ll you see who he
is!
George?”
Considering Lady Creamhair’s obvious distress, I thought it imprudent to reveal myself before she’d had time to assimilate the news of my presence in the College proper; but Anastasia, ignorant of our sore past, summoned me again. Even so I might have fled, for the present: but I
heard a sound behind me and saw at the Scroll-case the white-caped figure of Harold Bray. Luckily he seemed not to have observed me. My hands perspired with anger at the sight of him. How he had got in so silently I couldn’t imagine; the noise that alerted me proved to be the clack of a key against the glass case as he unlocked it. There was a large black cylinder in his other hand—the Founder’s Scroll, I did not doubt, or some false copy which he meant stealthily to put in its place! Yet so brazen was he, Anastasia’s call seemed not in the least to alarm him; he didn’t even glance our way. The lights flickered, the crowd hummed; for half a second I considered whether to challenge him, exhibit myself to Lady Creamhair, or hide from both until a better moment. Then Anastasia opened the door, our mother clucking behind her, and said, “
There
you are! Did you hear it all?” She hugged my arm. “Here he is, Mom:
hug
each other!” That same moment she saw Bray, and joyfully invited him to witness our reunion. No help for it then: I turned to Miss Hector … Lady Creamhair … my mother … put out a hand to shake, and said, “How d’you do, ma’am. Nice seeing you again.”
I might have gone on to apologize once more for having tried to mount her at our last meeting, but clearly she was hearing nothing. She opened and closed her eyes, smiled and squinted, shook her head.
“Oh no, indeed. No indeedy,” she said, stunned into mildness.
“Billy Bocksfuss,” I reminded her tersely, and glanced to see where Bray was. “The Goat-Boy, you know.
George
nowadays. I apologize—”
“
Kiss
her!” Anastasia insisted, drawing us together.
Bray’s voice clicked jovially towards us down the aisle: “What is it, Anastasia? Reunion, did you say?”
“Oh my, no,” Virginia Hector said. “Oh well! My!”
“The Goat-Boy himself,” Bray said. “Good evening to you, Miss Hector; I hope the noise outside hasn’t disturbed you. A most upsetting situation.”
He put his arm familiarly about Anastasia’s waist as he spoke; even whispered something in her ear, whereat she quickly lowered her eyes and drew in her lips.
“Stop touching her!” I demanded. “Take your hands off my sister!” I blushed, whether at the term or from anger at Bray. Anastasia colored also, but clearly with pleasure, and went obediently to her mother’s side.
“What’s this I hear?” Bray’s tone I judged to be amused.
“Goodness me,” Miss Hector sighed at the same time; but the whimsicality in her voice verged upon hysteria.
“Lady Creamhair—” I began again. At once she shut her eyes fast, and
set her mouth against the name. “You know who I am. You knew all along!”
“Oh no sirree Bob …”
Touching her arm I reminded her, as Anastasia looked on amazed, of our seasons in the hemlock-grove, of her endless patience and wondrous solicitude; I fully understood, I declared, why she’d done what she’d done in my infancy, and so far from thinking ill of it, thanked her from the heart for having saved my life. What grief I’d occasioned I begged her to charge to my want of sophistication, especially to my ignorance of our true relationship.
She wouldn’t open her eyes. “Oh. Gracious. Hm. Well.”
“But we both know who I am now!” I said warmly, and turned to defy the pretender. “I’m the GILES, and this is my passèd lady mother!” I looked to her to tell him so; but though tears started now behind her pert spectacles, she smiled and shook her head still.
“Well. Now. No. I don’t suppose—”
“Really,” Bray tisked at me, “you go too far! We’ve all been
much
too patient with you, I’m afraid; if you only knew what trouble you’ve caused today! The clockworks, and the Power Lines … Enough’s enough!”
I heartily agreed, adding that directly I’d seen to the Founder’s Scroll’s re-placing and had passed the Finals, I meant to present my
ID
-card to my mother for signing, and the campus would know once for all who was the GILES and who the impostor.
“They will indeed!” Bray chuckled. “The Scroll, by the way, you can forget about: it’s back in place now. I took it out front at Chancellor Rexford’s suggestion and read off a few Certifications to reassure the crowd. But you can’t be serious about this GILES nonsense …”
I turned my back on him and bade Lady Creamhair and Anastasia to come with me. If there was an unruly herd of undergraduates to be calmed, their Grand Tutor was the man to calm them, and I would leave no mother or sister of mine in the odious, if not criminal, company of a base impostor.
Bray pursed his lips and shook his head. “If you choose to deliver yourself up to a mob which wants nothing better than to tear you to pieces, I suppose that’s your affair. But I most certainly won’t permit my mother and sister to be lynched with you.”
“
Your
mother and sister!” I exploded. At the same time Anastasia cried, “Lynched!” and Lady Creamhair laid two fingers to her cheek and said. “Oh. Well.”
Bray assured me levelly that I had a fair chance yet of escaping with my life if I listened to reason; it was to that end exactly he’d stopped at sight of me instead of returning at once to the work of calming the crowd. To Anastasia then, who asked him what the trouble was, he reported dryly that Tower Clock had stopped, for one thing, thanks to some disastrous move of Dr. Eierkopf’s of which it was known only that I had advised it; further, that Eierkopf himself was reportedly paralyzed from head to toe, that Croaker was once again amok, that the Power Plant was in grave trouble for want of supervision, that the Nikolayans were threatening riot at the Boundary, that WESCAC was rumored to be in danger of failing for lack of power, and that Chancellor Rexford, so far from making an appearance to calm the student body’s alarm, would see no one, not even his highest advisors. General panic and breakdown of the College seemed imminent, and as my presence appeared to be the single common factor in these several crises, the crowd’s fear was turning to wrath against me.
“Ridiculous!” I protested. But the lights winked again, and my heart misgave me. “You stirred them up yourself!”
Bray ignored me. “As for the rest,” he said to Anastasia: “it’s good you know now I’m your brother and the GILES, but
that fact changes nothing between us
—do you understand me?”
Anastasia objected faintly, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and I very loudly. He’d said nothing of their kinship thitherto, Bray explained, out of concern for Miss Hector’s state of mind, which was known to be precarious—witness her agreeing that he and Anastasia were twins, when in fact they were of different ages and had different fathers. Nor did he approve of proclaiming the truth thus bluntly to her now, but my pretenses forced his hand—another item in my daysworth of ill deeds.
“I won’t hear this!” I shouted. “Get on out of here!”
“We’d all best get out,” he said flatly, “before they come in after you. Tell Anastasia I’m the GILES, Mother, so she’ll believe it. We’ll try the Chancellor’s Exit.”
Lady Creamhair (so I still thought of her, and would ever think) hemmed and chirped, quite glazed now; then she said with surprising distinctness: “He’s my Gilesey. Yes he is.” And lest anyone mistake her reference she shook her finger at me and added: “Not you.”
“Mom!” Anastasia cried.
Lady Creamhair shook her head firmly. “That’s a naughty young man.”
Bray beamed.
“She’s upset,” I said to Anastasia. “And no wonder! But just look
here …” I lifted my infirmary-gown enough to display the dark disc on my leg. “Look here, Mother: there’s proof, if you need it.”
Now the dear lady’s murmurs became a plaint: “Oh. Oh.” Anastasia clapped and bounced. I glared at Bray, and was pleased to take his expression for chagrin. But in fact it proved a curious concentration, like a man’s at stool; he even grunted and grew red. Then he sniffed and smiled—I am obliged to say
sweetly—
and turning up the back hem of his cape and tunic, exposed a brown left knee, gaunt and hairless, in the crook of which however was undeniably a browner spot. Too low, surely, and something wanting in definition—but a round brown birthmark after all! Anastasia caught her breath; Virginia Hector whimpered; I could have wept for frustration.
“Flunk you! Flunk you! Flunk you!” I shouted.
“Please,” he said: “Not in front of Mother. I’m still ready to help you.”
Poor Lady Creamhair now grew quite incapable; I flunked the hour I had agreed to this confrontation. Anastasia—no less confounded but still in command of her faculties—led her away toward the Chancellor’s Exit and Reginald Hector’s offices, next door to Tower Hall. This was Bray’s suggestion, and further to infuriate me he asked whether I did not affirm its prudence.
“You should go with them,” he advised me. “I’ll try to pacify the crowd till you’re safely out.”
Angrily I replied that neither he nor I was going anywhere until the issue between us was resolved.
“You go ahead,” I told Anastasia. “I’m going to end this right now, one way or the other.”
Bray bristled and said: “Pah.”
Virginia Hector’s growing delirium permitted no tarrying; Anastasia cast us a troubled last glance from the doorway. “You won’t fight?”
“Of course not,” Bray said grimly, and the women left. I myself was by no means so certain: a showdown between us, I now conceived, was what my whole day’s labor had been pointing to, as the final separation of Truth and Falsehood. And I had no real fear of him, though he was both taller and heavier than myself—only a kind of uneasiness inspired by his manner and smell, which however would not have stayed my hand had I chosen to take stick to him. But he proposed now, with a kind of dry distaste, that the surest and fittingest way to resolve our differences was to go down forthwith together into WESCAC’s Belly: not only could I take the Finals (which he would gladly administer himself), but the EATing of whichever of us was false, and the subsequent emergence of an
unquestionably authentic Grand Tutor, might be just the thing to save New Tammany from pandemonium, and the whole West Campus from collapse in that grave hour. Galling as it was to be obliged once again to agree with him, I seconded this proposal at once.
“I’ll send word of this to the crowd,” Bray said. “That should keep them quiet until one of us comes out.”
I clenched my teeth and agreed; then, both to assert my own authority and to preserve the order of my Assignment-tasks, I insisted that the Scroll-case be unlocked, so that I could re-place its contents before passing the Finals.
Bray clicked impatiently. “You’ve done harm enough, don’t you think? Besides, there’s no time, Goat-Boy!”
“I can
do
it in no time,” I replied. “Give me the key.”
A number of men rushed now into the Catalogue Room—library-scientists and campus patrolmen, it turned out, searching desperately for Bray to speak once more to the crowd before they stormed Tower Hall. They glared at me with bald hostility as Bray explained his strategy—
our
strategy—and instructed them to broadcast it.