POSTTAPE
Today, at thirty-three and a third, I record indirectly into WESCAC's storage the last of these tapes — at my protégée's behest, as always, but not, this final time, in her presence. She awaits my coming daily in the Visitation Room, with a pair of youngsters who had far rather be out romping in the lovely spring than languishing in this caged, sunless place. Let her wait.
My self-wound watch runs fast; anyhow I have small time left, and so futile is this work now approaching its end, I am sore tempted to abandon it unfinished and go gambol in the April air myself. She thinks it done already, whose notion it was I render my tale during this my recentest and last detention. Her great nagging faith has alone sustained me, for better or worse, through the monstrous work — this "Revised New Syllabus," as she calls it, which she is convinced will supersede the Founder's Scroll. I smile at that idea, as at the olive lad she calls our son, and in whom I see as much of Stoker, of Croaker, indeed of Bray, as of myself. Supposing even that the Scroll were replaced by these endless tapes, one day to feed Him who will come after me, as I fed once on that old sheepskin — what then? Cycles on cycles, ever unwinding: like my watch; like the reels of this machine she got past her spouse; like the University itself.
Unwind, rewind, replay.
No matter. Futility and Purpose, like Pass and Fail, themselves have meaning only for her sort, and her son's (in whose dark eyes I see already his mother's single-mindedness). For me, Sense and Nonsense lost their meaning on a night twelve years four months ago, in WESCAC's Belly — as did every such distinction, including that between Same and Different. Thus it is, and in no other wise, I have lingered on the campus these dozen years, in the humblest capacity, advising one at a time undergraduates to whom my words convey nothing. Thus it is I accept without much grumble their failings and my own: the abuse of my enemies, the lapses of my friends; the growing pains in both my legs, my goatly seizures, my errors of fact and judgment, my failures of resolve — all these and more, the ineluctable shortcomings of mortal studenthood. And thus it is — empowered as it were by impotence, driven by want of motive — I record this posttape (which she will not know of), in order to speak of the interval between my "triumph" of twelve years back, just recounted, and my present pass. Perhaps too to speak to myself of what is to come: the end Max saw from the beginning; the "Commencement" I saw at the end.
To begin with, my original "Tutees": of the two I Graduated out of hand — my mother "Lady Creamhair" and "My Ladyship" Anastasia — the latter I've spoken of already and will surely return to (as I will return to the Visitation Room where she waits, go out released with her once again into New Tammany, and abide with her until that last release of all, whose imminence she little dreams); the former passed away not long after her grandson's birth, the EAT-rays having got to her more sorely than at first appeared. She died smiling, I understand, with Reginald Hector, Anastasia, and the infant named Giles Stoker at her bedside — but then, she had lived smiling, too, since the day I shocked her out of sense, and, as the effect of her EATing spread, had lapsed unhappily into a more or less constant chuckle. Anastasia's conviction, therefore, that Mother died happy in the knowledge of her "gift to studentdom," I take in the spirit of her other convictions: that "Gilesianism" (her term, for her invention) will cure the student body's ills, and that "our" son will establish "the New Curriculum" on every campus in the University. I long since ceased attempting to explain — never mind what. It is terms now since I raised an eyebrow or even sighed. Not impossibly dear Anastasia was a little EATen herself, that gorgeous night; not impossibly I was too, either in infancy or in one or more of my descents into the Belly. How would I know? Not impossibly (as Dr. Sear once speculated) all studentdom was EATen terms ago — by WESCAC, EASCAC, or both — and its fear of Campus Riot III is but one ironic detail of a mad collective dream.
No matter.
Sear himself is dead too, of course; was so, it turned out, even as I affirmed his Candidacy that afternoon on Founder's Hill. It was his cancer killed him — but alas, not directly. Persuaded, in his clear delirium, that he had achieved not only fatherhood but total illumination, his old sympathy with Gynander became obsessive: blind already, he saw his generative organs as all that stood, as it were, between him and proph-profhood, removed them in the nurse's absence with a shard of tumbler, and expired of massive hemorrhage. No doubt he would have smiled like Mother at the end, had he not lacked at the time a great part of his face. Hedwig, too old and weakened by their past to bear children safely, did indeed prove to be impregnated (as did Anastasia: a circumstance I keep in mind when tempted to protest her extremer convictions); but the birth of her child — a fine strapping girl the hue of dark honey — ruined both her health and her brief lucidity. She and Mother died a week apart in the room they shared for their last term on campus, in the NTC Asylum. Stoker even has it they were sweethearts at the end — but that's Stoker. One never knows. When he says with a grin, "What the flunk, George, love's where you find it," I neither agree nor disagree.
Of the others whose Candidacies I affirmed — or would affirm, or was held to have affirmed — three more are dead now also, not counting Max: Reginald Hector, Classmate X, and Leonid Alexandrov. Of Grandfather the fact was that I neither affirmed nor denied him: were it not for him I'd never have been born; on the other hand, had his will been done I'd have perished at birth — I regard both circumstances with mixed feelings, but in any mood they cancel each other. Reciprocally, as it were, he neither affirmed nor denied my Grand-Tutorship, for though his real preference, like most other people's, was for Bray (insofar as he concerned himself at all with such questions), he never openly supported those who called for my expulsion on the grounds of Grand-Tutorcide. Family loyalty it was, I suppose, or the kind of affection sometimes displayed by old professor-generals for those they once tried and failed to kill. He passed away not long ago, after an extended invalidity, with his belief unshaken that he was beholden to none. His faithful receptionist — who for many years had written all his speeches, managed his affairs, and warmed his old flesh with her young — arranged a splendid funeral at the joint expense of the Military Science Department and the Philophilosophical Fund.
Leonid Alexandrov redefected immediately after Max's Shafting, making his way by some unknown means, blind though he was, through the steel-mesh partition in the Control Room. I never saw him again, nor heard anything of his activities for some years after, during which the Boundary Dispute alternated (as indeed it does yet) between crisis and stalemate — each crisis a little more critical, each stalemate a quantum uneasier, than the last. Then one day two Nikolayans, one old and one not, were caught wrestling at midnight in the Control Room. How they'd managed to open the locked and electrified partition, no one knew. Their tussle gave the alarm; guards from both sides ran to the scene in time to see the younger man push the older through to the NTC side, intentionally or not, and electrocute himself in the process. The older man — who turned out to be Classmate X — might then have made good his own defection, if that was his object, had he not attempted to reclose the door behind him. But the Nikolayan guards were at his heels, and Chementinski (as he called himself again thereafter), uncertain whether they meant to shoot him or defect themselves, kicked the mesh-gate shut, and was immediately shocked to the point of death. Summoning me to the Infirmary before he expired (I was working, between detentions, as a freelance freshman advisor), he told me among other things that his stepson had helped dozens of undergraduates on each side of the Power Line to transfer illicitly to the other, risking his life in the two-way enterprise again and again without remuneration; in the end he had given his life to save that of a secret agent assigned to kill him, but who in fact so admired him that he'd resolved to kill himself instead. The agent, you will have guessed, was Classmate X, to whom Leonid had repeated a hundred times in vain my advice, as he understood it: that the special vanity of suicide was, in X's case, permissible, even passèd, affirming as it did the self that destroyed itself — which self, being anyhow inescapable, had to be got beyond instead of suppressed. The nature of the conflict in the gate I never did get clear — who was trying to do what to whom, and why — but Chementinski seemed convinced of two things: that his stepson perished in his behalf, wrongheadedly or not; and that he himself, in closing the gate on guards from both sides who possibly meant to defect, had committed suicide twice over (because the act was impulsively selfish, and hence fatal to the selfless character called X; and because Chementinski, whose self was thus reaffirmed, was dying of the consequent shock — "by his own hand," he vowed, not altogether consistently or accurately). His final word to me, as he expired, he declared had been Leonid's to him, upon their recognizing each other and themselves on that fatal threshold: "Gratituditynesshoodshipcy!"