by Umberto Eco
(SIGNED) GENERAL BOOSAMMETH AND GENERAL BOOSAMETH
(REQUEST CONFIRMATION COMMANDER IDENTITY AFTER RECENT TOP LEVEL SCISSION)
***
ASTROGRAM
FROM: GHQ, GALACTIC CORPS, SOL III
TO: ARMY HQ, ZONE IV, URANUS
AND ARMY HQ, ZONE V, PLUTO
SPECIOUS EXCUSES UNACCEPTABLE STOP EXCESSIVE LAXITY UNDERMINING GALACTIC FORCES STRICT TRADITIONAL MORALITY, QUICK THINKING AND SCRUPULOUS HYGIENE ALSO PROUD TRADITION MARINE CORPS ROYAL CARABINEERS GRENADIER GUARDS SUBMITTING MASS RESIGNATIONS STOP ALL OFFENDERS CONFINED TO QUARTERS
(SIGNED) GENERAL PERCUOCO
CIC, CASINO
***
Intergalactic Commission for Defense of Ethnic Minorities
Fomalhaut (Piscis Australis)
Your Excellency, I am taking the liberty of drawing to your attention the episodes referred to in the enclosed file, which clearly suggests that General Percuoco (a Terrestrial, I presume) brings to the galactic military administration a mind-set I would say has been obsolete at least since the administration of President Flanagan, who (before his unfortunate assassination by an African fanatic) so intelligently defended the rights of marginal races to total equality. As you well know, the Flanagan doctrine decrees that all galactic beings are equal before the Great Matrix, irrespective of shape, number of scales or limbs, or even the physical state (solid, liquid, or gaseous) in which they happen to exist. The Intergalactic Federal Government has rightly established a High Commission for Cultural and Biological Relativity, which produces the Intergalactic Ethnic Registry and proposes to the High Court of Justice suitable additions and emendations to the intergalactic laws as terrestrial civilization expands to the farthest extremes of the Cosmos. After the fall of the Great Atomic Empires (the former Russia and America), when the peoples of the Mediterranean basin, thanks to the discovery of the energy-generating capacity of citric acid, became masters, first of Earth, and then of the entire universe, crisscrossing it with their astrocraft propelled by what a poet had extolled as "the golden trumpets of solar-ity," it seemed to all a good omen that dominion over the universe had been given to peoples who had previously suffered severe racial discrimination on their own planet. You surely recall the enthusiasm that greeted the Hefner Law, which allowed copulation between terrestrial women and the pentaphallic men of Jupiter—even though we all know the cost in bloodshed of this ill-starred pioneering experiment, which required the no doubt overvigorous males of Jupiter to satisfy five simultaneous urges in conjunction with a single univaginal female. But that undeniable breakthrough nevertheless inspired the intergalactic interracial laws that continue today to be the boast of our Federation.
It is a source of great general satisfaction, too, that our intergalactic military regulations have conformed to the principle of integration and, in fact, have established the principle that citizens should fulfill their military service requirement on a planet other than the one of their birth. We have noticed with great dismay, therefore, that this regulation has for a long time been flouted, as is evidenced by the fact that, like the drillers of Pluto, who serve today only on their native planet, the Boos Attack Force serves only on Uranus. This situation explains why General Percuoco, whose military and management skills are naturally beyond debate, is unaware of the anatomical details and reproductive methods of these troops. But Your Excellency can assess the enormity of this diplomatic incident from the television coverage of the consequent uprisings on the two planets involved.
I therefore beg Your Excellency to take measures to ensure the implementation of the intergalactic principle of integration, and I am confident that from the splendid heights of the Moyenne Corniche, and from the Presidential residence, the Palais LaTurbie, which affords Your Excellency such an enchanting view of the Mediterranean, a prompt and paternal admonition will be sent to the military command that from the historic palace of the former Casino of Monte Carlo presides over the Galactic Maneuvers, the all-important Conflictual Potlatch.
I beg you to consider me your most devoted subject, and in the name of the Great Combinatory Matrix of the Universe I bend my thirty knees,
Avram Boond-ss'bb
***
To the Illustrious Polypod Avram Boond-ss'bb Fomalhaut (Piscis Australis)
In the name of the Southern Cross, peace, my dear Polypod. Allow me to answer your letter, on behalf of our beloved Intergalactic President, whose humble PR representative I am, hastening to guarantee the satisfaction of your request, the will of the Great Matrix be done.
His Excellency is well aware of his grave responsibilities as Guarantor of Integration, but he must also bear in mind his equally grave responsibilities as Supreme Commander of the Great Conflictual Potlatch Games.
Through all the centuries of recorded history it has always been difficult to control armies, and the ancient Hebrews actually assigned that task to their Deus Sabaoth. Today more than ever before, this task is overwhelming, if not impossible, in the context of Intergalactic Peace. You know that the greatest statesmen in history, as far back as the twenty-second century of the Christian era, emphasized the dangers of an unruly army of several hundred thousand troops during a transitory period of peace. The great coups d'état of the twentieth century derived, in fact, from an excess of peace (as the late President Flanagan said, only wars are the cradles of democracy and of libertarian revolutions). So you can imagine (but, indeed, you already know) how stressful it is to govern an army of billions of beings from numerous intergalactic ethnicities, in a state of Perpetual Peace and in the constitutional absence both of boundaries to be defended and of threatening enemies to be warded off. In this situation, as you are well aware, an army not only costs much more but tends to multiply its component units in deference to the well-known law of Parkinson. The ensuing difficulties are easily imagined.
Take, in fact, the cases of the drillers of Pluto and the Boos of Uranus. The original plan was to include them in the Lunar Mixed Corps, which, by long-standing rule, is made up of tractor patrols comprising two terrestrials (an Italian Bersagliere and a Canadian Mountie) and two extraterrestrials. You are surely familiar with the endless problems this lunar patrolling has caused. The incompatibility between the two terrestrial bodies was evident, first of all: coexistence was impossible for two soldiers both wearing broad-brimmed hats in the cramped oxygenated space in the forward cabin of the tractor. And you will recall that the feathers of the Bersagliere's headgear proved to contain allergens extremely irritating to horses (this, by the way, may explain why traditional military wisdom has always opposed the formation of units of mounted sharpshooters). But you also know the Mounties' proverbial attachment to their mounts, which they will not give up even in a tractor (the attempt to mount the Redcoats on bicycles ended in miserable failure, as the traditions of the various corps cannot and must not be ignored). But that was nothing compared to the disastrous installation of Plutonians and Uranians in the rear section of the tractors—not only because the Uranian Assault Boos' notoriously long tails cannot be accommodated in the tractor and must therefore drag behind it on the ground, suffering countless slow-healing abrasions, but also because, while the Boos normally live in an inflammable gaseous atmosphere, the Pluto drillers survive only at a temperature of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and no com-partmentation, however airtight, can guarantee sufficient reciprocal isolation. But the most serious consideration is that the Pluto drillers have a compulsive tendency to root in the ground and bore (in the petroliferous sense of the word); and while on their native Pluto this activity has no serious consequences, thanks to the regenerative capacity of the terrain, on the moon it promptly led to that condition to which mining experts have given the colorful term "green-cheesing" (endangering the gravitational stability of that celestial body). In short, it was necessary to abandon the integration program and today lunar tractor patrols are manned exclusively by Pygmies from Bandar (Bengal jungle), exquisitely suited to this assignment. Fu
nctional considerations had to prevail over integrational ones. Bear in mind that this solution is not strictly in line with regulations and is apparently justified only by a temporary order. You will thus understand the extent of the problems the central authorities must face, and I will not conceal the fact that the above-mentioned solution was adopted against the wishes of the Casino High Command. But it is also true that not all military commanders are capable of coping with the countless problems that arise in the administration of an intergalactic army.
In any case, as far as the matter in question goes, His Excellency has instructed me to inform you that he is providing for an ordinary rotation in the high commands: as of tomorrow General Percuoco will be OIC, Quartermaster HQ, on Betelgeuse, and command of the Galactic Corps will be assumed by General Corbetta, the efficient former CO of the Lancers of Novara. As for the whole Intergalactic High Command, it will be under General Giansaverio Rebaudengo, former head of the Secret Services, an officer in the finest Piedmontese tradition, certainly ideally suited to assume this complex and grave responsibility.
We are confident that these solutions offer adequate guarantees to the Intergalactic Commission for the Defense of Ethnic Minorities, and special care has been taken not to choose for this delicate post an officer coming from a traditionally racist area such as Africa, Sicily, and the upper Brescia region. His Excellency is further of the opinion that it will never be too soon to abandon the legitimate tradition by which the highest command positions are always occupied by soldiers of Mediterranean origins, but you know as well as I do what enormous prestige the so-called Lemon Belt enjoys. We cannot forget we are the children of a citric acid technology.
Your most devoted
Giovanni Pautasso
Chief, Public Relations Section
His Excellency the President
of the Intergalactic Federation
***
From La Turbie Palace,
Mediterranean
Confidential Report
For: HE President of the Federation
From: Joint Secret Services, Rome
With some hesitation, I have executed Your Excellency's order to clarify the position of Agent Wwwsp Gggrs. I hesitated because the prime condition of the existence of an office coordinating Secret Service activities, always in reciprocal competition, is the absolute secrecy of its information. This is a principle we observe so scrupulously that, as a rule, this office—to avoid leaks—tries not to be informed of anything being done by the services it must coordinate. If we occasionally allow ourselves to learn of some event, it is only to keep our twenty-six thousand staff members on their toes, in accordance with the theory of Institutionalized Wheelspinning, which regulates the entire existence of the Intergalactic Armed Forces.
In any case, to understand the position of agent Wwwsp Gggrs, a miniaturized bivalve from Cassiopeia, we must bear in mind also the situation of the thirty-seven Secret Services of the Federated Galaxies. If I may remind Your Excellency, I would begin with the principle that, if these services are to function well and if our coordinating office is to fulfill its task of Disinformation, the government must remain completely ignorant of everything regarding these services.
As Your Excellency knows, the Federated Galaxies labor under the burden of belonging to the government of a nation without boundaries and therefore without any possible enemies, and hence condemned, if you will, to perpetual peace. This situation has unquestionably created difficulties for the formation of an Army, though the Galaxies have been unwilling to give up the idea of having one; they could hardly be expected to renounce one of the chief prerogatives of a sovereign state. Hence their recourse to the enlightened idea of Institutionalized Wheelspinning, which allows an Army of immeasurable dimensions to concern itself only with its own maintenance—getting around the genuine need for renewal by regularly conducting a Conflictual Potlatch: War Games, in other words.
This solution was not difficult to implement, inasmuch as (even before the Pax Mediterranea and the unification of the Galaxies) the armies of the Vulgar Era had for some time already been devoted largely to self-maintenance. Nevertheless, they had two important release valves. One was the instigation of endless local wars, under the pressure of the centers of economic power, to keep a profitable war economy functioning; the other was reciprocal espionage among nations, whose consequent ongoing tensions provoked coups d'état, cold wars, and the rest.
As Your Excellency is well aware, the discovery of the energy-generating possibilities of citric acid not only caused galactic leadership to pass into the hands of the underdeveloped, lemon-producing countries, but also brought radical economic change, ending the age of industrial technology and mass consumption. Now, while in theory the possibility of provoking local wars remains, their utility has vanished. And this has obviously exacerbated the two major problems of the Army's internal functioning, as it eliminates the normal renewal of the troops (once necessitated by casualties) and the promotion of officers for feats in combat. These serious deficiencies have been remedied thanks to the Conflictual Potlatch, and today our space stadiums are thrilled every Sunday by the bloody clashes between units of our glorious Army, who regularly perform, in amicable combat, splendid acts of bravery and daring, inspired by friendship, the spirit of cooperation, and contempt for danger. Never in previous history had anyone seen young people of every race and social background die with a smile on their lips, without a word of hatred for the "enemy," who in fact is sportingly hailed as a friend and a brother, fighting on the opposite side merely through random selection. And, at this point, I trust I may remind you of the heroic behavior of the Fourth Chameleon Hypertransported Division last Sunday in the Southern Cross Derby. Driven towards the boundary of the celestial hemisphere by the Lions of Serpentarius, rather than crash into the government's grandstand erected on Fomalhaut, it crashed on Alpha, enhancing the Conflictual Potlatch with the annihilation of fifty thousand civilian inhabitants—boldly reintroducing into our War Games the sacrifice of non-belligerent victims, a practice that had fallen into complete desuetude since the archaic Napalm period.
But to return to our problem: while the Conflictual Potlatch has solved the problem of the rotation of troops as well as that of bravery-in-action promotions, it has certainly not solved the espionage problem. Obviously it is pointless for a fighting unit to engage in espionage against the unit it is to face in the Potlatch Galactic Series, because the selection of the forces involved is a matter of public record, readily ascertained via the various military sports publications. But, on the other hand, the non-existence of foreign enemies would risk stripping the Secret Services of any raison d'être: for, just as a nation cannot survive without Armed Forces, so Armed Forces cannot survive without Secret Services. If for no other reason than, as the Honki-Henki doctrine illustrates, the Secret Services play an essential biological role, allowing an army in order to "burn off" that surplus of generals and admirals who can never be promoted to the highest responsible positions. Therefore Secret Services must exist, and must carry out an intense activity; but this activity must be totally ineffectual and harmful to the self-maintenance of the State. A knotty problem not easily solved.
Now, one virtue of the Honki-Henki doctrine is that it has revived a valuable practice that originated in the area formerly known as Italia, today's Vinotria, towards the end of the twentieth century of the Vulgar Era: the system of reciprocal espionage among the Special Branches.
For the Special Branches to spy on one another there are two ineluctable requisites. First, each must engage in intense and secret activity that the other Special Branches are anxious to know about, and spies must have easy access to this information. The second requisite is the existence of the Loner Spy: a single agent expert in double-dealing and thus able to spy on several Special Branches at once. He can always be relied on for fresh news from an unimpeachable but unidentified source.
But what is to be done when the Special Branches,
in accordance with the principle of Institutionalized Wheelspinning, have nothing to do, publicly or secretly? Then the spy concerned must possess a third requisite, namely the ability to collect and redistribute invented information. In this sense the spy becomes not only a conveyor but the very source of his information. In a certain sense it can be said that it is not so much the Special Branch that creates the Spy as it is the Spy who creates the Special Branch.
It was in this perspective that agent Wwwsp Gggrs was suggested as the most appropriate candidate—and for various reasons. First of all, as a Cassiopeian bivalve, he reasons according to a polyvalent logical system and only in sentences of a high referential opacity; the wondrous blend of these two characteristics makes these bivalves peculiarly adept at lying, systematic self-contradiction, rapid manipulation of apparent synonyms, and judicious mixing of terms de re and terms de dicto (on the order of "if Tullius is Cicero and Tullius is a seven-letter word, then Cicero is a seven-letter word"—a kind of reasoning that, thanks probably to the high level of logical formalization achieved by our officers, proves especially popular even in the most remote garrisons of the galactic outskirts).
In the second place, Wwwsp Gggrs is, as I mentioned, a miniaturized bivalve (like the majority of Cassiopeia's inhabitants, for that matter). It is thus easy for him to penetrate the most unlikely places, compensating for his motor handicap by adopting an appropriate disguise, as a cigarette case or a lady's compact, and slipping into the pocket or the handbag of his contact. Coming and going, passing in this fashion from one body to another while eluding all surveillance, he brilliantly carries out the mission assigned to the Infiltrators of every Special Branch.
