The Vengeance of Rome by Michael Moorcock Page B

French as our common tongue. ‘What, after all, do the words “masculine” and “feminine” mean?’
    Such abstractions were too much for us, so we changed to a different subject. We had Miss Butter inform us of her native Texas, its cowboys and wild Kiowa. She had little direct experience of either, she said, having been educated in Atlanta and raised in Galveston, on the coast. ‘Which has rather more to do with commerce and shipping.’
    I thought it inappropriate to mention my old political connections in Houston. Miss Butter was at a naive stage in her own political development, full of generalised sentimentality towards lame ducks. Sometimes in private I laughed at her, telling her she could not nurse the whole world’s walking wounded. But I had no wish to revive arguments on subjects which still aroused my own passions. I wanted to put all my conflicts behind me and begin my career where the Bolshevists had cut it off some ten years earlier.
    I reminded myself that I was not a politician but a scientist. Not an actor, but an inventor. In future my contribution to the human race would bethoroughly practical. I would no longer talk of ‘lifting the masses’—I would lift them through my deeds, by example. I understood where my own idealism belonged. I think Miss Butter recognised this. Indeed, it was these qualities in me rather than my political opinions which she found attractive. Aside from my admiration of Mussolini, my fear that civil war must soon break out in France and Germany, a sense of the general causes of our European malaise and a notion of who the chief villains were, I expressed few opinions. What my friends wanted to hear from me was not what they already knew. They wanted my vision of tomorrow where flying cities and vast engineering works brought peace and prosperity to all. I described my notion of a huge airliner which was entirely comprised of wing—a massive flying wing, some thousand yards wide! My steam-car, I told Fiorello, on his enquiring, was now a reality in California. My light aircraft were flying in the air force of Marrakech’s Caïd. In France, at a secret hangar near St-Denis, my airship strained to be airborne but was grounded by the squabbling greed of her investors. I had built flying infantry for the Turks and designed a secret weapon for Petlyura in Ukraine. Other ideas of mine, such as the autogyro and ocean-based aeroplane staging platforms, were realities. My intention was never to get rich from these ideas. My first goal was to ease the human burden. Any profit I made was incidental. Again and again Fiorello and Margherita assured me that I was just the type Mussolini wished to recruit for his great army of scholars, scientists, soldiers and engineers. His willingness to give such men as myself a chance was what made him so great.
    My earlier sense of urgency, which had enabled me to sustain myself in Morocco and given me a persuasive motive for returning to Europe, had been replaced by a quieter and, I believe, stronger emotion. I wished to take stock of myself as well as the country before I presented myself to Il Duce. What was more, I had fallen in love a little with the delicious Miss Butter. Soon I would be infatuated, head over heels, with the City of St Mark!
    Together Miss Butter and I visited Venice’s museums and magnificent public buildings, gasping at her astonishing wonders and riches which we came upon often unexpectedly when rounding a corner of an alley and finding, for instance, the white marble church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. We entered her relatively austere portals to discover a wealth of gold, a feast of murals and pictures and a towering altar which seemed to draw you directly up to heaven. Every square had a character of its own, every bridge opened on to a picture, every garden displayed the orderly beauty of centuries of cultivation, nurtured and shaped to gladden the eye and the