‘What does that mean?’
‘It means there’s no monarchy, no presidency and no dictatorship.’
‘So who runs the place?’
‘Elected members of parliament.’
‘Who elects them?’
‘The people.’
‘Who elects the people?’
‘No one elects the people. They’re the people. They just are.’
Fracassus scratched his face.
‘This,’ Professor Probrius went on, ‘is considered to be the fairest form of government mankind has yet devised.’
Fracassus pointed to a couple of beggars sleeping top to tail in a cardboard box in the doorway of a coffee shop. He asked if they were toe-wrestling. Professor Probrius said he didn’t think so.
‘Then why are they here?’
‘Because there’s nowhere else for them to sleep.’
‘But aren’t they the people?’
‘You are indeed a wunderkind, Your Highness,’ Professor Probrius said. ‘You put your finger at once on the contradiction at the heart of government by the people. It doesn’t work because people aren’t nice to one another.’
‘Just a minute – ‘ Dr Cobalt began, but Professor Probrius stared her into silence.
‘How,’ Fracassus wondered, ‘do you unelect the people?’
Dr Cobalt was again frozen into silent compliance by Probrius’s stare.
‘It’s been tried, Your Highness. Your father has been wrongly accused of doing that very thing. A better way, in my view – and, if I may say so, in the the view of many experts – is to give the people what they want in the full knowledge that they don’t know and then let them give the power back to you.’
Dr Cobalt could contain herself no longer. ‘Whereupon it will cease to be a liberal democracy,’ she said.
‘And whose fault will that be?’ Professor Probrius asked.
Fracassus had the answer. ‘The people’s.’
‘It’s never a good idea,’ Professor Probrius said, feeling he was coaching the Prince already, ‘to tell the people you are saving them from themselves. Better to tell them you’re saving them from someone else.’
‘Like who?’ Fracassus wondered.
‘Like anyone you can come up with.’
De Cobalt’s look met Professor Probrius’s. Like your father, they were both thinking.
Fracassus had an identical thought.
The following morning a bomb went off not many streets from their hotel. Six people were killed. Dozen injured. Fracassus watched the news on the hotel television. He could smell sweet gunpowder. And something worse.
It was by no means the first time such a crime had been committed and innocent bystanders killed or wounded. ‘This is the price we pay for our freedoms,’ a senior politician was saying. He had been accused before of taking a sort of satisfaction in it, as though a healthy liberal democracy needed the occasional atrocity to justify itself. But in one form or another almost all the politicians interviewed in the immediate aftermath of the bombing said the same. It was the price – the terrible price – the country paid for its freedoms.
Did Fracassus think it was too high a price? All one can say for sure is that he tweeted Terrible price to pay for freedom.
Because of the outrage, the Prince and his party weren’t allowed to leave the hotel that day. All three sat and watched the television in the hotel lobby in silence. Two hours after the bomb went off a terrorist group claimed responsibility. An hour after that the leader of a civil rights organization warned against scapegoating the immigrant group whose ethnicity the terrorists shared. Already, Probrius nudged Fracassus into noticing, more concern had been expressed for the safety of the immigrant group than for the lives that had been lost. Makes you wonder who the victims are, Fracassus tweeted.
Dr Cobalt knew what Professor Probrius was doing and what Fraccasus, under his tutelage, was struggling to give birth to as a thought. She seized a moment while Probrius was paying a visit to the lavatory to nudge Fracassus in another direction. ‘This could have happened anywhere, you know.’
‘Never has at home.’
‘That doesn’t mean it never will.’
‘Couldn’t happen in Cholm. Spravchik wouldn’t let it.’
‘You can’t be sure of that.’
Probrius was back sooner than she’d calculated. It was possible he’d changed his mind, realising what she was shaping up to say to Fracassus.
The three exchanged suspicious glances in silence until Professor Probrius asked her how she would define a phobia.
‘You know what a phobia is.’
‘I want to hear it from your lips.’
‘A phobia is an irrational fear.’
‘What’s irrational about a fear of being bombed?’
‘Nothing. It’s perfectly rational, unless it paralyses you from living your life.’
‘Then what’s irrational about being afraid of the people doing it?’
‘Nothing. What’s irrational is blaming everybody who looks like them.’
‘Is it wrong to identify a source?’
‘It is wrong to spread the net so wide that the source becomes an entire people.’
‘How else, in a liberal democracy, are we to set about stopping it from happening again?’
‘Increased security. Detective work. Intelligence…’
‘And if they fail?’
‘We have to try making the world a better place.’
‘And in the mean time?’
‘Act humanely.’
‘And that means sympathizing with the terrorists.’
‘If it was terrorists who did it.’
‘Oh, come on, Yoni, they’ve claimed it.’
‘Ah, so now you trust them?’
‘Ah, so now you don’t?’
Fracassus, who had been attending to every word between them – it was the longest conversation he’d ever listened to from start to finish – tweeted underneath the table: Liberal democracy equals more sympathy for bombers than for bombed.
CHAPTER XXI
The loneliness of the braggart
Never was a truer word spoken: A prophet is not without honour, save in his own land.
Far from his native country, where he had grown up in the shadow of his father the Grand Duke, Prince Fracassus was attracting attention for his ability to attract attention. With each new tweet and exploit another clipping was added to that collage of moral force and popular influence known to an age of rapid dissemination of trivia as personality. After his heroics at Gnossia, stories of the temple he was building in Cholm began to appear on message boards and news sites. A photograph of Cholm’s Chief Minister, Vozzek Spravchik, annointing him with Numa oil high in the Blackbread Mountains with nothing but a drop into black infinity behind them, and soft round clouds like women’s buttocks floating above, appeared again and again in celebrity magazines and colour supplements. Only an official selfie of the two men toe-wrestling in the barren Makindo Desert as the sun went down received more coverage – though that mainly in magazines for men who liked looking at photographs of men.
When his tweets on the subject of the Plasentza bombings appeared it was as though the prayers of thousands had been answered. The country did not lack for information and opinion. A Liquid Crystal Display Device in the hands of every citizen facilitated the transmission of all conceivable views on all conceivable subjects. Anything that could be said, had been said. But the digital context was everything: no one, especially in a liberal democracy such as Plasentza, wanted to see their thoughts or secret beliefs replicated word for word on a hate site. Young himself, and photogenic in the sense that people were becoming accustomed to his image, Fracassus made available to the under-thirties what until now only the over-fifties had thought. By virtue of the family he came from, the title he held and the size of his property portfolio, he lent centrality to opinions hitherto only heard on the lips of disreputables and drunks. Though he could no more have strung his random vociferations into a system than he could have read a sentence of Thomas Carlyle on Hero Worship, others had begun to marshal and codify everything he said for him. To those who argued that it hardly amounted to a political programme, others argued that it did. Does/doesn’t was the stuff of twitter and kept Fracassus’s name before the public.