Occasionally at first, but with growing frequency, word of what he was saying leaked out of Plasentza back to the Republics. It began to be invoked in the course of those yoga-mat demonstrations which had been no more than a minor inconvenience for traffic at the time Fracassus left Urbs-Ludus, but had since grown into a serious threat to the stability not only of Urbs-Ludus but to All the Republics. ‘Where is Fracassus?’ was a call heard first on this side of the Wall, and then on that. ‘Who is Fracassus?’ the Prime Mover of All the Republics was reported as enquiring. Though whether in fear of his influence or in expectation of his support no one could be sure.
Outside the Palace of the Golden Gates, few had known of Fracassus in his youth. He had not ventured out into the world much. Brightstar intermittently championed him, but so ironically hyperbolic (unless it wasn’t) had been their coverage that for every enthusiast they won to his cause, they lost a dozen. Now he was somewhere else, theories as to his true identity proliferated. He was an invention of a news-starved media. The house of Origen, having been shaken, first by the rumoured scandal of a sex-change heir, then by the demonstrations outside their properties, had come up with a manufactured robotic figure to mend their fortunes. Fracassus was a charlatan, a chimera, a ghost, a bankrupt. By the same token he was a businessman who turned to gold leaf everything he touched, an architect of wild dreams, a patriot, a hero, and an orator of genius.
That all this made him the ideal person to be given his own television show could not be disputed when the idea was floated to the head of Celebrity at Urbs-Ludus television. The word went out. Find him. Bring him back. Offer him anything.
But no one said ‘Immediately,’ so there seemed to be no hurry.
‘Our boy is shaping up,’ the Grand Duke told his wife.
‘What as?’
‘The thing we always wanted him to be. And quite frankly, if you take a look at what’s happening on the street, the thing we need him to be.’
‘I’m a mother, Renzo. A mother only wants her son to be happy.’
‘He can be happy and great.’
‘I still see his face on the day he left.’
Knowing his wife’s aversion to their son’s looks, the Grand Duke doubted that. ‘Describe it to me.’
‘He looked so sad.’
‘It’s good for someone his age to suffer disappointments.’
‘Renzo, his whole world came crashing down.’
‘He’d only known the girl ten minutes. I’d call that a brief disenchantment. Brief, but necessary.’
‘You seem pleased it happened.’
The Grand Duke rose from his chair and paced the room. He did not like concealing things from his wife. ‘My dear Demanska,’ he said, ‘I am pleased it happened and have no regrets that I made it happen. At the time he left us, Fracassus was, for all his stubbornness of character, a clay man. A person had only to graze him with their thumb and it left an impression that lasted for a month. It struck me as best to get some impressions over and done with while he was still young. I feel wholly vindicated by the figure he is cutting in the world right now.’
‘You made it happen?’
‘I did.’
‘You hired a girl to break my son’s heart?’
‘Demanska, our son doesn’t have a heart.’
‘You actually paid someone?’
‘Sojjourner, yes. I auditioned actresses but none could quite manage the self-righteousness. It turns out that only a Progressive Metropolitan Élitist can convincingly play a Progressive Metropolitan Élitist for money. I wanted Fracassus to fall for her and fall for her he did. I wanted him disillusioned and disillusioned he became. Now look at him. I made him so Progessive-proof that even Reactionaries start from his pronouncements.’
‘And you know for sure the girl is not in his life somewhere?’
‘They wouldn’t last ten seconds in each other’s company today.’
‘Then I wonder who is in his life?’
‘Ambition.’
‘How lonely he must be.’
‘You’ve forgotten how much he enjoys his own company. A vain man is never lonely. Which is a good job because a braggart never has a friend.’
‘My poor Fracassus. How cruel you’ve been to him, Renzo.’
‘Only to be kind, my dear. Only to be kind.’
He didn’t tell her that the Head of Celebrity at Urbs-Ludus television had been enquiring as to Fracassus’s availability and mentioning eye-watering sums of money. Bearing her sensibilities in mind, he did suggest they think about giving Fracassus a book show, an idea they said they’d consider, though in such an event the fee would not be so eye-watering.
CHAPTER XXII
In which the Prince forms an even higher estimate of his gifts
International communication having reached a level of sophistication and celerity unknown to previous ages, word of what the world was thinking of Fracassus reached him almost before it thought it. He would not have been human had this not moved him to what in a lesser person might have been called conceit, but in him passed as self-awareness.
The bomb, he found the modesty to confess, had quickened his maturity. I have gone from boy to man in a single morning, he tweeted.
Within the week, newspaper supplements were carrying the story HOW A BOY BECAME A MAN, alongside photographs of mangled corpses. These he no sooner saw than he retweeted, and so there and back around the globe the message went as though it were the media equivalent of perpetual motion.
In the bomb, Fracassus saw – that is to say Professor Probrius taught him to see – not only his opportunity but a truth that offered opportunity for everyone. Society had grown degenerate. It had lost the ability to draw a distinction between the guilty and the innocent, it had lost the courage to blame, it had taken ordinary decent outrage and turned it into bigotry, it had made good people fear the consequences of their goodness. Bombs only kill when we’re scarred to kill the killer, he tweeted.
That should be scared, Professor Probrius told him. But it was too late.
Bombs only kill when we’re scarred to kill the killer was re-tweeted more than a million times. Scarred was considered a master-stroke, enmeshing in a visual, an auditory but, most important of all, a consequential way, the concepts of fear and wound, cowardice and disfigurement, the momentary and the never-to-be-forgotten. That which scared us scarred us. That which scarred us marked us out as scared. We who were afraid to condemn the bombers were also victims of their bombs. But where other victims died, we were only scarred, which made our being scared the more ignoble. Or was there something holy in our refusal to kill? Scared was an anagram of sacred, the anagrammatizing clue being the verb to scar. Disfigure the word for afraid and we got the word for righteous.
There was no end to the play people could make of this mistake of genius.
‘He’s claiming it as his, I suppose,’ Dr Cobalt said.