And this was not a Sunday morning spirituality, gone when the working week began. Believers could now watch Stoppit! on a Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, and Starttit! on A Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Meaning there would be only one day when he was not on the screen – Sunday, the day of lesser faiths, the day the people rested from Fracassus and missed him.
The one disadvantage of Fracassus’s new show, viewed from where he stood, was that he’d have to speak more. He called back Professor Probrius who’d prepped him for his address to the Plasentza Chamber of Commerce. Could Probrius remember any of the things Fracassus had said on that occasion. Professor Probrius consulted his notes. ‘You advised, Your Highness, to aim high, think big, stay focussed, never quit, push hard, laugh at retards, and pay no tax.’
‘That,’ the Grand Duke Fracassus said, ‘should get me through the first series.’
Soon, between Stoppit! and Starttit! there was little else on television that anyone wanted to watch. Fracassus himself wondered what he’d be watching if he wasn’t watching himself. And then, in the best spirit of reality shows, television broke a story about itself. Halfway through a live breakfast programme a gang of masked men and women burst into the studio – the very studio in which Stoppit! and Starttit! were made – narrowly failing to kill Fracassus. In fact they invaded on his day off, so strictly speaking they didn’t narrowly miss killing him at all. Nor were they carrying any weapons to kill him with. But the implication was there for anyone to see. Fracassus stood for free speech and these brigands stood for the opposite. Exactly what happened was not clear, no matter that the entire Republic watched it live, but the short and the long of it was that the masked raiders shouted ‘Bang’, ordered the presenter and the studio manager to put their hands above their heads, and took them and a young make-up artist hostage.
Who they were; where had they come from; how they had breached security; what they wanted; who shouted ‘Bang’ first; what could have been done to prevent the attack; what could be done to prevent it in the future – these were some of the questions to which the people, watching the event unfold before their eyes, demanded answers.
Nothing of this kind had ever happened in Urbs-Ludus or any of the other Republics before. Had the toy gunmen been nationals their motives would have been easier to fathom. Everyone was angry about something. Everybody was trailing in the wake of someone else. The entire population was but a breath away from marching into a television studio and demanding justice. But these belligerents were not nationals. They had dark skin, black hair and even when they only shouted ‘Bang!’ they shouted it in an alien tongue that made the blood curdle. Once accept that they were foreigners and there were still more questions to be answered. The Republic was peaceable to the point of docility. It had no weapons, no history of colonial adventurism, and no international ambitions beyond inviting visitors to go up and down in lifts with golden doors. It had made no compromising alliances, and to tell the truth had no foreign policy of any sort.
Half an hour into the raid, the attackers took off their masks, revealed themselves to be artisans and demanded, if they were to release their hostages, an end to the opprobrium in which they and their families were held. It wasn’t so long ago that they’d been applauded into the country. Now, the same people who had cheered them at the railway station, were booing them in the street. Even sales of artisanal breads had slowed.
See the matter from their side and they were victims. See it from the point of view of frightened hostages and viewers expecting to catch the news on television and they were common criminals. Knock the crap out of them, Fracassus tweeted.
Whether, with that one tweet, Fracassus – the best known television personality in the Republics and the owner of the twelve highest towers – taught the people what to think, or whether he simply found himself in accord with the popular mood, is a distinction that only history can make. Suffice it to say that he at once became the mouthpiece for a party that did not as yet exist. Whoever believed that the artsans should be arrested for betraying the trust and hospitality of their hosts, water-boarded, horse-whipped, humiliated and shot by firing squad knew themselves to be of the party of Fracassus and that, by the mathematics of anger and vengeance, meant the majority of the people. The Prime Mover of All the Republics, sensing public anger grow but conscious of his government’s obligations to international law, sent in a soft force to break the seige. The artisans surrendered without a fight. They would now be tried in accordance with local law. Should they be found guilty of affray – and the Prime Mover was prejudging nothing – they would be returned to their countries of origin, always provided, of course, that their countries of origin would deal humanely with them on their return. The statement was ill-timed. On the day of its issue, the young make-up artist, though now released and at home, suffered a belated panic attack. Fracassus put out a numbered series of tweets.
(1) Justice in our time? Some justice!
(2) The guilty sent home like heroes.
(3) The victims returned to their loved ones in body bags.
That a body bag was coming it a bit thick as a description of someone prescribed mild anti-depressants, only a few literalists bothered to point out. The Republic’s blood was up. People who had been tweeting Chuck ’em out had suddenly to rephrase their outrage. Keep ’em here, they tweeted, so we can knock the crap out of them. Then chuck ’em out.
On small events rests the fate of nations. The artisanal invasion of the television station was one of those hair-spring moments when you could hear history teeter on the wire. Fracassus felt something even bigger than history – fate, destiny, the hour – run like fire through his veins. The Prime Mover must have felt the same thing drain clean away. There were angry demonstrations outside the Executive Building. People made effigies of him – no matter that no one knew what he looked like – and set fire to them in public parks. Every rioter found common cause with every other. They wanted different things but more than anything else they wanted something. For every tweet supporting the Prime Mover there were a thousand – many, it is true, written by Fracassus – calling for him to resign. So one day in the dead of Winter, perspiring heavily, resign was exactly what he did.
Outside the Palace of the Golden Gates, demonstrators calling to disband all working groups on climate change joined demonstrators calling to raise the age of consent for homosexuals and together they called for Fracassus.
He appeared briefly on the Palace steps under a canopy of gold. ‘We’re going to Muck Out the Pig-Pen,’ he promised.
‘You are the Pig-Pen,’ someone shouted.
Fracassus located him and pointed. ‘Retard,’ he told the crowd, shaking his head as though to ask what could be done about a world that had such retards in it, and then, to their delight, he did his old imitation of a spastic marionette.