The Assassination of the General Secretary of the Workers' Central Union
On the day predicted by De Gaula Iseka and at approximately the same time, the mandatory general secretary of the Soria Congress of General Trades Workers was assassinated. The Soriator decreed national mourning and ordered that the radio stations broadcast only news reports and funeral music. In this regard, "You Fell Like a Rat, Holy Victim," a union song, was a favorite. It was a highly allegorical march, referencing the magical animal on the banners.
The night of the secretary's funeral—in Soria, burials were only held at night—was quite eventful. The national newscasts explained the events in their own way:
After the stupor caused by the unspeakable attack on the mandatory general secretary of the C.T.O.G. of S., Muralla, Defender of the Humble, Soria sets out to avenge him. We speak to you, degenerate criminals: you will be punished! As is public knowledge, Muralla was assassinated by the enemies of the homeland with a thousand-petal disintegrating grenade, which, as is also known, also had a special device to diffuse mustard gas in a volume of eight thousand cubic meters. For this reason, the deceased secretary's guard—composed of seventy-two men armed with machine guns, long weapons, whips, and steel helmets—was struck down along with five hundred and fourteen curious passersby who happened to be there. But, as terrible as it was, the iniquity did not end there. The funeral procession that was carrying his remains, carrying torches and banners with folded rats on their legs as a funerary emblem, saw its march to the Escarlatina cemetery constantly altered because, from the neighboring rooftops, the enemies of the deceased, with unappeasable and ferocious hatred, insisted on shooting at the coffin - something they achieved on five occasions - piercing it from one end to the other, despite the security device of a thousand soldiers, police officers and guards of the Troops of Assault that were guarding the corpse, and the fact that numerous troops occupied the nearby houses, gradually vacating them as the procession advanced a little further. They used infrared sights, the scoundrels. With the coffin already in the velarium, and just as the six holy men were beginning the rituals of the descent into the seventh, last, deep, invisible minaret, a group of some thirty kamikazes rushed the catafalque and, while twenty of them had themselves shot to distract the guards, the remaining ten tried to open the coffin that was being castrated. "Cut off his little mice!" shouted the bloodthirsty, necrophilic beasts. Only one of these terrorists was captured alive, wounded. Before the police handed him over to the public outrage, the subject confessed the group's intentions toward the deceased Wall. He clarified that he, personally, had opposed castration; instead, he had voted for the removal of his eyes.
Once the glorious remains were interred, a permanent guard was posted at the cemetery—fourteen soldiers with fixed bayonets and war uniforms—to prevent further sacrilegious attacks.
The Soriatorial government issued a statement condemning the murder and the subsequent attempted desecration. It accused the technocrats and their savage anti-union sentiments quite clearly, though without saying it directly. Such were the perpetrators, it was suggested.
The president of Chanchin del Norte, for his part, after sending a telegram of condolences to his colleague, the Soria Soriator, said indignantly in a speech:
We, the Chanchintas, know well the repellent barbaric evil of the technocrats. Power is the only thing they have left, and they will use it for a short time longer. Soon the people will settle the score with them.
Deplorable.
The Gorion of Goria stated:
It was the technocratic pigs.
The Super of Derivia maintained:
Unjust. Because no matter how much hatred one has for someone, simple reason, the most elemental conscience, says enough... enough, the Wall has already collapsed, so let it rest in peace.
This bastion of the humble, this hero, this great national figure of Soria, is now dead. The exemplary life of that crime and abyss has ended: a mountain above the abyss, the whole, in short. What more do they want, what do they hold back then? Allow his corpse to rest in peace. Leave the little rations alone. Let the little everything be integrated with the Great. Everything. Enough... enough.
It should be made clear that Dervion de Dervia was a great reader of the I Ching.
That same night, however, a new group of suicide bombers carried out a night attack, killing the guards watching over the tomb of the deceased leader. Then, digging the earth with tiny combat shovels, the kind soldiers use to dig trenches, they managed to reach the coffin and tear off its lid. Then, in a horrific and macabre ceremony, at the very bottom of the grave, they proceeded to cut off the corpse's hands. They immediately fled with their sinister loot, having previously spray-painted the initials of a supposedly technocratic subversive organization to which they belonged, along with their intention: to take the dead man's hands and boil them.
Soriator ordered three new divisions to be sent to their border with the Technocracy. The technocrats, in turn, taking it in stride, limited themselves to the usual military precautions, denying all accusations.
According to world opinion, a general conflagration had never been so close.
The Soviet Union, naturally, sent a message of condolence to Soriator, lamenting "this latest victim of reactionary savagery." But in the face of all the subsequent war hysteria that ensued over the affair, the Soviets remained completely silent. As mute as if a cat had eaten their tongue.
The exarchate—this time not through the Exarch but through the Congress of Holy Men meeting in Divan in Velolar, capital of Exapirifacia—repudiated the crime, but in terms so extraordinary that they deserve at least a brief comment.
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They took advantage of the circumstances of the attack to blame the technocrats; not for being the direct agents of the crime, as is notable here, but for the indirect causes. According to them, the increase in violence in the world, with the consequent danger to world peace, was driven by the attitude of "a certain country that is not worth naming," which, by prohibiting ritual killings at minarets, had produced "with its theological outrage a great cosmic imbalance" and the "irritation of our six holy gods." This clear allusion to Technocracy merited no comment from the rulers of that country, although they took it seriously.
To make matters worse, just four days after the secretary's burial, another technocratic field marshal died on the Chanchin del Sur battlefront, hit by a shell shot that struck him just above a decoration, vaporizing it... along with everything else. Of the late marshal—the second to die in action on that combat front—only fourteen grams and forty-five milligrams were collected, including his boots.
It just so happened that the aforementioned military man was very popular and well-liked in the Technocracy. Soria was not at war with that country; therefore, any joyful comment would have been equivalent to a formal declaration of hostilities. Only one Soria radio station made veiled, biting allusions.
On the day of the marshal's death, the technocratic radio stations broadcast funeral music. The others, meanwhile, having already passed the obligatory period of mourning for their secretary general, broadcast their usual programming. Only the aforementioned Soria station expressed its joy with music and half-words (in the style of bolero): "Decorations you threw over the lake of silver..." Etc. Thus, the technocrats, without the slightest comment, began jamming the radio waves. The Sorias, for their part, unaware, did the same to their enemies in retaliation. In the Technocracy, there were so many stations that it would have been impossible to shut them all down. But since on that occasion they were broadcasting in a chain from the central station, the Soriator men didn't really need to interfere with more than one, and this interference was automatically transmitted to the airwaves. In turn, the technocrats took the trouble to block all of Soria's stations, one by one.
After it was all over and everything returned to normal, no one made the slightest comment, protest, or complaint. It was a secret war, although known to all, invisible, without words.
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