Pirate Utopia

by Bruce Sterling

  The Ace of Hearts raised his hairy brows. “Are you truly that dogmatic? Are you a monk? Our Fiume Revolution is a Revolution of Love! Our Revolution is a great world rebellion about Youth, Love, and Music. That’s what makes our Prophet’s cause entirely different from all other revolutions.”

  Secondari did not care to contradict the political doctrines of the Prophet. A poet with a thousand mistresses was an Overman. “Well,” he said, “I admit it, I have no mistress at the moment. If I did, then she wouldn’t be a woman like Frau Piffer.”

  “Oh, come on, why not give it a whirl? Everyone in Fiume knows that she adores you. To conquer a woman is dangerous—but to scorn a woman is worse.”

  “No woman is a technical solution, that’s why! I’m a pirate engineer! I don’t want a girlfriend, I want a revolution in popular mechanics! We need real factories that can work! We can’t just lift the skirts of pretty girls, after we give them votes, and hashish, and jazz records!”

  “Whatever does it take to please you, Lieutenant? I’ve never once seen you look happy. I worry about you. The Prophet must be thrilled about your new torpedoes now. He will let you name your own reward in Fiume. Isn’t that enough?”

  “I hate all these useless, beautiful gestures!” Secondari shouted. “The Prophet is a poet! He can’t build industries with his sonnets! No matter what reward a poet may give me, those rich bourgeois louts with their ballot boxes, they’ll just grab it all back! Capitalism must be smashed.”

  The Ace of Hearts said nothing. He gave the sky a last careful scan, including the zenith, and all three hundred and sixty degrees of the horizon.

  Then he silently climbed down from the observation platform in the oak tree. Secondari followed him.

  “You are not an easy man to please,” the Ace of Hearts remarked at last. “I have tried to help you. I contacted those two professors you mentioned, in Turin. Those engineers, the two men who invented that Italian flying torpedo. They answered me, too—but they set me impossible conditions. They want stock ownership, and their own corporation. Also, they want to register their patents inside Britain and the USA. We can’t do that. The USA is our enemy.”

  “They’re engineers, but they’re also cowards,” said Secondari. “Did they tell you that they are loyal to the Kingdom of Italy, and the House of Savoy? My brother always preaches that rubbish.”

  “They made a few such patriotic noises in their confidential letters, yes.”

  “To hell with the King’s engineers. We’ll send our own agents to Turin, sir. We will steal their plans and blueprints. We will pirate the flying torpedo. We’ll build hundreds of them. Pirate torpedoes, with no legal rights, no patents, no permissions, and no mercy asked or given! Let them come here and try to sue us in our own courts. Ha! Those cowards wouldn’t dare.”

  The Ace of Hearts brightened. “I believe I can help you with that plan. I like the sound of all that. That’s how we’ve done things here from our very first day.”

  The factory girls naturally had to celebrate their great success with the torpedoes. Ceremonial festivities were conducted in the factory all day. Secondari was forced to participate in these rituals. He also had to wear his new, Syndicalist, Regency of Carnaro uniform, which he disliked.

  A great many medals and ribbons were distributed. As a special sign of his favor, the Prophet sent along his mistress, the Pianist, to perform a concert within the factory. Much valuable production time waslost as the Pianist tinkled her way through the works of Claude Debussy.

  After her concert, the Pianist left her instrument and harangued the factory girls. The Pianist was a ferocious Venetian patriot. She swore a blood-oath that every scrap of land ever owned by the historic Republic of Venice would be seized and redeemed to Venetian control.

  Since the Republic of Venice had once owned Crete, Cyprus, and large parts of Turkey and Bulgaria, this was a land-grab to surprise even the wildest Italian patriot.

  The factory girls gave the Pianist a generous round of applause because she was a fine lady. They also admired the Pianist’s willingness to flout convention. She was a classical musician openly living as the concubine of a married poet. In this way, the First Lady of Carnaro was visibly living the dream.

  The Constitutionalist also took care to appear at the festivities. Carnaro’s greatest political theorist made no formal speech, but he simply mixed, in his friendly, persuasive fashion, directly with the workers.

  The Constitutionalist registered the workers to vote, and he explained to them that their Syndicate owned the factory. He told the working women that their factory was in the avant-garde of all world factories.

  In the Regency of Carnaro, property would be owned by those who made the best use of property. Absentee financial ownership of factories would be entirely illegal. Only those who ran the means of production would own it.

  Under the ingenious Constitution of the Regency of Carnaro, the ownership of property was determined entirely by judgements of its use-value. The State was divided into ten Corporations—including a Tenth Corporation of Supermen.

  These ten republican corporations would jointly guide civil society, in a harmonious method, akin to the various sections of an orchestra.

  The franchise was universal for all citizens of Carnaro, regardless of their race, creed, ethnicity, or color. Women had completely equal political rights, with equal pay as well. Unemployment was banished by decree. Fulfilling work in an atmosphere of beauty and creativity was guaranteed to all.

  The women of the Torpedo Factory were excited to learn that they were leaders of such worldwide significance. Several women workers solemnly swore to move into the factory around the clock, and live there, and eat there, and sleep in there, until production levels were doubled.

  Frau Piffer was overjoyed by this flow of pride and good spirits within her establishment. She was radiant and thriving, but Secondari found the crowd stifling. Ceremonies always bored him, and his right ear, newly restored to life, was itching and panging him.

  Secondari was preparing to flee when an unforeseen event occurred. A young military engineer came to him to shyly offer his own services.

  The new recruit was a radio engineer, a Genoese war veteran named Giulio Ulivi. Ulivi had witnessed the torpedo demonstration.

  Ulivi said that he had been conducting some private radio experiments in the amateur tradition of Marconi. During these amateur efforts, Ulivi had discovered a new form of radiation, the “F-Ray.”

  Ulivi claimed that his invisible F-Ray, when properly focussed and aimed, had military potential. He’d killed some rabbits and mice with his F-Ray apparatus at his mother’s house.

  Ulivi had patriotically offered his discovery to the Italian War Ministry. The short-sighted bureaucrats had rejected his generous offer, though, and even insulted him.

  Secondari could not understand half of the excited ramble of this Genoese technician. However, his deafness had taught him to read expressions. Secondari therefore knew, within a matter of moments, that Ulivi was entirely honest and sincere. He was intelligent and rational, as well.

  However, the Genoese engineer was hopelessly misled by an extraordinary obsession.

  Secondari was kind to Ulivi. He made him welcome. He promised him food, shelter, political protection, and a career of important work on the radio-guidance of flying torpedoes.

  The sudden appearance of Giulio Ulivi was like the first flower in spring. In the future, there would be many bright young men, just like Ulivi, arriving in Carnaro. The Regency of Carnaro was growing powerful, and there would be consequences in this.

  He, Secondari, would have to organize these eager men, and set them into the course of useful work, and become their patron. He would have to be, not just a pirate engineer, but the boss of pirate engineers.

  This matter distinguished the work of engineers from the work of poets. Successful mass production needed scale, it needed hierarchy. Understanding this, Secondari retreated, to confront his own thoug
hts in his diary.

  Secondari had built himself a snug private barracks within the Torpedo Factory. He lived within a windowless store-room. This bomb-shelter was sturdily blastproofed, through the battlefield expedient of lining walls, floor, and roof with thick, crisscrossed sets of steel railroad ties.

  In his six-sided steel bomb-shelter, Secondari slept in safety. He passed each night on his military trestle-cot, with its four wooden legs set into four pannikins of kerosene. This trench-warfare trick kept any rats, lice, or bedbugs at bay.

  His secured shelter had toolboxes, water canteens, canned rations, pistol ammunition, a sturdy kerosene lantern, and thick stacks of popular science magazines, most of them in English.

  The shelter was silent, secured and restful, and once he’d barred the steel door with two heavy fragments of railroad tie, he was left alone, to think and strategize. Alone, in the golden lamplight, with only the pure, strange music of his damaged ears for company.

  Two days after the torpedo demonstration, the Ace of Hearts sent a courier to the Torpedo Factory, demanding Secondari’s immediate at tendance at the Hotel Europa.

  The Hotel Europa was the best hotel in the city of Fiume, and therefore the watering hole of the Italian rebel officer corps. The Prophet and his writerly staff worked inside the Fiume City Hall. The Ace had chosen the Hotel Europa for the regime’s covert and underground activities.

  The Ace of Hearts received Secondari in a penthouse suite at the Europa. The suite was littered with operational maps, glistening aerial photos, and framed, signed photos of pretty French actresses.

  The Ace of Hearts closed and locked his mahogany office door. He checked all the windows, shuttered them, and took his white telephone off its shining brass hook.

  “Secret news has just arrived, of vital importance,” said the Ace of Hearts. “Some news is good, while some is bad. Which intelligence would you like to learn first?”

  Secondari rolled up a leather chair on its castors, cupped his hand to his good ear, and leaned across the desk. “Tell me the bad news.”

  “Fiume has lost one of our best allies. There was an armed attack yesterday in the offices of the Milanese newspaper, People of Italy (Popolo d’Italia). The editor was one of our boldest friends.”

  Secondari struggled with his instant surge of outrage. “Ha! So! Attacking our writers, is it? To stifle our voices of justice! The Communists, I suppose! Those cowards burn one of our newspapers? Well, we’ll burn five of theirs!”

  “It was the editor’s ex-wife who shot him, actually,” said the Ace of Hearts. “Or she was his mistress, anyway. Some creature he was involved with, before his regular church marriage. You know the irregular lives of these newspaper men… Anyway, this mad wife of his brought along a female accomplice, a Futurist cabaret dancer. These two pretty girls sweet-talked their way into the newspaper office. Then they pulled pistols out of their purses, and they opened fire on our man.”

  “Women,” said Secondari.

  “Small caliber, single-shot pistols,” said the Ace of Hearts. “They hit him twice. Mussolini’s not dead—but they aimed right at the area where a man least likes to be shot.”

  “So, our Mussolini’s been shot, eh? Too bad, I liked Mussolini! A brave man, hit by a cannon shell on the front—I know what that’s like! To think that he’d survive the Great War, and then be shot down by two pretty girls! What a bordello of a country Italy is, for God’s sake! Always some dirty scandal.”

  “They caught the wife. The cops have locked her up,” said the Ace of Hearts. “She’s a madwoman, she’s raving her head off. That Futurist girl, though, she escaped the police in Milan. She’s a clever, dangerous woman. She fled to Egypt, my agents tell me.”

  “Marinetti is from Egypt,” said Secondari. “She knows Marinetti, being a Futurist?”

  “Oh, yes. And Egypt is in full rebellion now, against the British Empire. So Cairo makes a splendid place for a Futurist dancing girl to hide from authorities. Our little fugitive is Valentine de Saint-Point, the author of the Manifesto of Futurist Lust. Did you ever read that?”

  “No.”

  “You should read it. It’s excellent.”

  “She’s some lustful, Futurist, dancing girl in Egypt, yet she’s also a published writer?”

  The Ace of Hearts nodded. “She can write. She’s great. I can’t say that I blame her, really. What is a free woman of spirit to do—about a tactless cad like Mussolini? You never see any women shooting at our Prophet, although he’s had a thousand women.”

  “Well, we can always get ourselves another newspaper editor,” said Secondari. “The world is full of writers who want to be editors. Just pick another one! Our Cause marches on.”

  The Ace of Hearts leaned back in his leather office chair, and laced his hands through his mass of tangled hair. “Mussolini lacked any proper taste in literature, anyway. He’s a typical village Socialist. Did you see that silly emblem that Mussolini foisted on our Movement?”

  “That old axe with the sticks tied to it?” said Secondari. “I hated that axe! You can’t use an axe with sticks tangled all over it! We’re all Futurists now! That ancient Roman fascist axe is two thousand years old!”

  “You seem rather angry about Signor Mussolini, Lorenzo,” the Ace of Hearts observed. “I don’t suppose you had some personal quarrel with Mussolini? Those women who shot Mussolini—they used some pistols that were made right here in your factory.”

  “I don’t get angry, sir.” Secondari patted the new Beretta mounted on his hip. “Because I’m a man of cold-blooded logic. That’s why. If I’d shot Mussolini, he’d have five rounds from this! One in the gut, three in the heart, and one through the head.”

  The Ace of Hearts pursed his bearded lips. “I’m going to tell you the good news, now.”

  Secondari leaned forward in taut anticipation. Ooze flowed from his right ear.

  “This is good news about our very worst enemy,” said the Ace of Hearts. “I mean President Woodrow Wilson, the tyrant of the League of Nations. Woodrow Wilson has had a stroke. He’s paralyzed. He’s crippled in his brain. Wilson is even worse off than our own Mussolini—and Mussolini is ruined for life.”

  “So, was it the Communists?” said Secondari.

  “We do suspect the Communists, yes. Wilson fell ill during the Paris Peace Talks. Likely, Woodrow Wilson fell on the very same evil day when he gave Fiume away to the Yugoslavs.”

  Secondari shook his head. The stump of his right ear was tingling. “Oh, well, I just don’t believe that news, sir. That news is too good to be true. Isn’t that wishful thinking?”

  “I know, it does sound fantastic—but I also know that it’s true. The President’s habits, his daily activities, they’ve all changed since that injustice that he did to Fiume. I’ve kept a careful dossier. I have many different sources. Wilson is finished.”

  “Well, then I hope it really was poison,” said Secondari. “I’d love to shake the hand of the man who poisoned Woodrow Wilson. I don’t care if he’s a Communist, or a black magician. After what he did, he is one of us.”

  “We may never know what struck Wilson down, but we do know that the American President is an imbecile. The American government is now being run through Wilson’s aide-de-camp. Colonel House is his name. Wilson’s equerry is a Texan gentleman, he’s an Army cavalier. A fighting man, like us.”

  “Wait, be careful, sir,” said Secondari. “This is too good. This must be a trap, sir. It’s some American trick.”

  The Ace of Hearts drew a deep, satisfied breath. “The truth is: Woodrow Wilson was always an imbecile! That stupid American professor—he meddled in Europe, and the Swedes gave him the Nobel Peace Prize for that—well, Wilson has met the fate he fully earned! He’s a wreck now, a ruin! But this Colonel House fellow, this Texan cavalryman—he’s a man we can understand.”

  Secondari began to tremble in his chair. “Please speak more slowly, sir.”

  “I’ll let you savor it. You see: Colonel
House is one of us—in his own Texan way, of course. The Prophet wrote to Colonel House secretly, to that effect. The Prophet wrote him a wonderful letter, eloquent, persuasive, one of his best! And—just yesterday—we have received a secret reply from Colonel House. House wants to negotiate with us.”

  “Your good news is amazing, sir!” said Secondari, his heart hammering in his chest. “It’s as if—in one moment— we were suddenly living in a different world!”

  “Yes, we are. The world of the League of Nations is doomed,” said the Ace of Hearts. “Without President Wilson to push his crazy scheme, his own Congress won’t vote for the League of Nations! The American people will defy their own tyrant and refuse to the join the League! Because the Americans want to be free, just like we do!”

  Secondari felt a pang deep within his ear. Dizziness seized him and the world spun around him. He almost fell from his swivel chair.

  “We’re winning!” he shouted. “I always believed we would win—but my God, we really are winning! I don’t have to believe any more, because it’s the truth!”

  “Colonel House is sending us agents from the United States Secret Service. American spies are coming here. They want to discuss the suppression of Communism and also our local oil refinery.” The Ace allowed himself a predatory smile. “And the Yankees want to talk to us about your naval torpedoes, of course. That’s why I’ve called you in here. You are our expert in arms proliferation.”

  “Hurry! Quick! Give the American spies whatever they want!” Secondari cried. He struggled to rise, became even dizzier. “Give them wine, women, opera songs! Forgive me for weeping, sir! I can’t help myself, I’m so happy.”

  “My ‘good news’ is quite shocking, isn’t it?” said the Ace of Hearts. “Until yesterday, the Americans were our worst enemies. Now, imagine the Yankees as our friends, eh? The Balkans will be at our feet.”

  Secondari sat upright. The news about the wreck of the League of Nations had lifted the weight of the whole world from his bones. “This is Great Power politics at work. Any Italian child would know what to do next!”