After the Sentas returned to their own land, the Brethren found themselves possessors of the Peaceland. They now held unprecedented power. They were afraid to test it in the Oldland, but it was enough to win them new territory in an attempt to satiate their hunger. The Warland became theirs, though their hold upon it was tenuous, prompting them to adopt the name of an Ataar nation that might be blamed for their actions. They now possessed three of the four continents on Calandria. But they were not happy.
A few of the Seers who had remained in the Oldland embarked upon a joint project with a small but influential group of Hearers. They knew that the Hearers, who had defied the Sentas, held an insecure position in the Oldland. After what had happened to the Seers in Peaceland, it was obvious that all People of Knowledge must be kept out of Brethren territory. As part and parcel of the Sentas the Speakers were safe from harm, but after what they had heard of Hearer defiance they severed ties with their contentious relatives. Desperately, the emissaries tried to warn the Hearers that the Brethren were more dangerous than the Sentas. They pleaded with the Hearers to cooperate with the Sentas and to stay in the Oldland at all costs, no matter how terrible it seemed to them. But just as the Seers had not seen at the crucial moment, so the Hearers did not hear. Before long they were in the Warland, which belonged to the Brethren.
Some of the emissaries adopted Hearer policy and mourned. Others adopted Seer policy and plunged into the heart of the Senta empire, attempting to transform it and hoping that its citizens could be persuaded to save the Hearers. These emissaries knew that the Sentas felt no great affection for the Keepers of the Flame. Without mentioning the name of the people they wished to save, they integrated with the Sentas. Unfortunately, by the time the Sentas had merged with the emissaries enough to share in their project, the Hearers were already gone. At last the Speakers were ready to speak, but it was too late. In a desperate attempt to retrieve the Hearers, the emissaries convinced the Sentas that they could regain the power they had lost by taking advantage of the Brethren's abject misery. The Brethren were desperately in need of some Oldland wisdom, and that part of the plan worked. The Sentas traded information for power. But the Hearers remained in the Warland.
The Brethren listened to the teachings of the Oldland with great enthusiasm, for they were in need of solace, but there was no reinforcement from within their own culture. When their own relatives in the Newland displayed no interest in the newfound wisdom, the enthusiasts cut them off with devastating cruelty in a manner typical of their kind. Two Brethren kings sought to identify the teachings with their own empires, so that they would not have to give up their power in exchange. In so doing they took over the institutions which the emissaries had set up, and in the name of these institutions claimed that their crimes were attempts to combat evil.
The gentle teachings of the emissaries proved a perfect tool by which victims were conveniently pacified. Within the empires of the two enterprising Brethren kings the whole thing worked very well, but other Brethren sought independence from the emissaries' influence. Having failed to appropriate it for themselves, they still regarded it as a remnant of the Senta empire. Bled dry by the greed of the Brethren kings, they began to realize that they had already heard the information which was being offered, and that they need not trade in their power for something which they had already received. Brethren nations clashed in the ensuing power struggle. They committed obscene atrocities in the name of the Senta emissaries whose institutions they had usurped, so that the Sentas would receive the blame.
Since the Brethren had not truly absorbed Oldland wisdom, the hunger which ruined their lives continued unabated. With each conquest this hunger had been temporarily assuaged, only to return with correspondingly greater intensity. The proximity of the Oldland was a constant temptation. They yearned to defeat the Sentas, but their fear was too great. Frustrated, they searched for new worlds to destroy. By this time they had developed a space program, and had discovered the six other planets in their solar system. They virtually exterminated the population of three planets, and the remainder were impoverished by repeated extraction of their resources.
The Brethren began to refill the emptied planets with their own kind, creating entire societies whose members would work together, herding their victims into situations that would provide an excuse for slaughter. Histories were rewritten to explain away the situation, for the culture of the Brethren demanded that they pretend to be well meaning, even if they were only lying to each other. They destroyed all records of contacts between planets prior to their invasions. The sparsity of the planets' original inhabitants was then blamed on a lack of immunity. It was not the first time the Brethren had tried this trick. Four thousand years earlier, a tidal wave had been blamed for the disappearance of the giants.
The Seers, however, still posed a problem, for in the two thousand years since their ancestors' war against the Brethren, they had regained their numbers. Their presence was regarded as insufferable. Their ability to be happy in the face of Brethen persecution provoked an intolerable jealousy. Like all slaves, the Brethren were threatened by healthy social interaction, and they imagined the Seers to be overbearing. These tiny people seemed to be unconditionally free. It was maddening. In the search for new worlds to conquer, the Brethren had recently discovered the two planets colonized by the ancient Seers. The sight of such large numbers of people who looked like their old enemies triggered the genocidal reflex, and the Brethren embarked upon an aggressive campaign to exterminate.
The Brethren had usually left scattered remnants of their victims which reminded them of their numerical majority. This time they decided that the offending people would have to be completely eliminated, not only on the colony planets, but also on Calandria. Every vestige of their appearance would have to be destroyed. Every individual who displayed even one of their genes would have to be hunted down and killed as vermin. What made it all very peculiar was the fact that some of the Brethren had reason to love the Seers, for their ancestors had been enslaved by other Brethren. The Seers had taught these ancestors to win the slavers' confidence. The ancestors' freedom had been won by the guidance of the very same kind their descendants were determined to destroy.
On the colony planets hunters could indulge in carnage and maintain the usual pretences. Yet even there they destroyed all evidence that the eliminated people had been Seers. A cover was always needed, for they retained the old fear of disclosing to each other their true motivations. Even when they all wanted the same thing, they had to assure one another that hatred had nothing to do with it.
On Calandria, a legal pretext was used. This was a typical move. At first the tiny victims were charged with murder, and executed. It was not only a setup –they were absolutely framed, for they had been doing nothing at all. In time, the charge converted from the crime of murder to the crime of consorting with evil spirits, it being assumed that the communication involved plotting murder. From this it was a short step to claiming that people who consorted with evil spirits were evil spirits themselves. At one time or other, each Seer was bound to wear a distinctive traditional garment which belonged to no other group. Behind the Seers' backs, ringleaders among the Brethren assured their people that this garment was the sign of an evil spirit.
In spite of their advancing technology, the Brethren had retained superstitions from their ancestors' war against the Seers. They were advanced in some ways and backward in others. Unlikely though it seems, rumors were circulated that as evil spirits, the Seers did not feel pain. Seers were publicly attacked with fake blades to lend credence to these stories, and a mob gathered before the target could even find out what had happened. Brethren citizens were murdered by the ringleaders, who thought nothing of killing their own kind. The crimes were timed to coincide with disagreements that arose between Seers and Brethren. The ringleaders then pointed accusing fingers at the Seers. The Peaceland was not safe for anyone.
Once accused, the target was doomed. First he would be subjected to an interrogation, and while the few surviving records indicated that a considerable percentage of cases was dismissed, they did not reveal that in every one of these cases the accused had already died. An astonishing number of assorted tortures was used during interrogations; this was the favoured method of killing off the children, whose disappearance was explained as relocation. If the victim survived interrogation he was subjected to a trial, which consisted of being thrown off a cliff, and if he did not fly (as an evil spirit) then he was innocent. He was also conveniently dead. That had, after all, been the intention from the start. And if he survived the trial, his body fluids were slowly evaporated by an agonizing torture because the Brethren delighted in causing pain. Only members of ruling families escaped death.
The records on Calandria suggested that a small massacre had occurred involving all ethnic groups, and that most of its victims had been weak and helpless. People commented self righteously upon the nastiness of victimizing such people, but that particular nastiness really lay in the coverup, not in the crime. For the records had been altered to exclude mention of ablebodied victims. In fact, the executions had been across the board. The numbers recorded were reduced to a trickle, except in outlying countries where the Seer population had been small. In one such country the Brethren gave themselves away by forgetting to erase court records regarding the capabilities of their victims.
They were unable to erase such records also in countries near the Warland, where an unrelated set of executions was taking place. Brethren power was tenuous in these countries, for they were predominantly inhabited by immigrant People of Fire. These immigrants were busy massacring some of their more unruly nations. The Brethren had enough power to confuse the untouched records of these executions with the drastically altered records of the Seer extermination. Thus the People of Fire would be implicated in the Brethren project, and their lesser crime would be equated with it.
It seems that the victimization of the weak and helpless was not considered a serious offense –especially if they were sick, for the Brethren claimed that most of those executed had been at the verge of death anyway. In later centuries, even people who believed that lie would estimate the death toll to be more than three hundred times what the records showed. As the genocide occurred, the dent in the planet's population was explained away by stories of disease and immigration.
Even after all full blooded Seers were dead, the hunt was on for traces in the Brethren population. Babies died because they had large shining eyes. Corners of the countryside were scoured for the odd refugee who had escaped. The last twenty years were a scramble to find more fuel for the killing machine. And then the machine broke down, not because the Brethren had come to their senses, but simply because they couldn't find any more victims for the machine to consume. So they turned their attention to developing their space program, with the further conquest of other planets. That kept them busy.
The necessity for a change of focus came as a shock to the Brethren. Their eyes were opened, not to the horror of what they had done, but to the necessity for a really good coverup this time. Where there had been a break with the emissaries of the Sentas, this was blamed for the fiasco. Wherever the break had not occurred the emissaries were blamed –even though in the Senta homeland, where the emissaries were beginning to reclaim their institutions, no executions had taken place. The Senta emissaries were seen as enemies to scientific progress. In consequence they were held to blame for the Brethren’s belief that the Seers had been evil spirits.
The Brethren made a great show of discarding such backwardness. First they declared that it was ignorant to believe the Seers had been supernatural beings, since supernatural beings did not exist. Then they started to say that such supernatural beings as the Seers did not exist. You may notice that this was not quite the same thing. Since all the Seers were gone, it became easy to claim that they had never been there in the first place. Before long, they had followed the Ataar giants into the realm of forgotten memories.
One Seer group had become prominent enough to find its way into the histories of the Sentas. The local Brethren dealt with this problem by announcing that they had become integrated with this group. Soon, they started to identify themselves with it. When they wanted to compliment one of their kind they said he genuinely belonged to this group, until their critics were entirely convinced that nothing sinister had taken place. The destroyed Seer group became identified with its new namesake and thus with an assortment of Brethren crimes. But perfect as this lie seems, it paled beside its mother, for the Brethren went so far as to say that they themselves were the Seers, and then to outdo themselves by claiming the name applied to all people who were not Hearers. This proved so successful that the Brethren took note of it as a new technique for covering up their crimes. As time went by they deliberately confused the names of victim populations with their own before their exterminations even began. The victims unwittingly welcomed the ruse, seeing it as an opportunity for integration.
No sooner had the Seer extermination been completed than the Hearers arrived in the capital city of the Peaceland, fleeing imminent extermination by Brethren who lived in the Warland. In the capital city, no Seers were left alive to warn them of their fatal resemblance to the people who had just been eradicated. In fact, the story that the Seers had never existed was going over rather well, for among the Brethren virtually nothing remained of the features which had been hated with such passion. By the time Seer genes were again becoming apparent in offspring of mixed blood, no one knew what they meant. A century before they would have brought death to the bearer. Now they went ignored, and the people who carried them counted themselves as Brethren.
As decades went by, the Hearers became an insupportable irritation in the capital city. They thought that if they demonstrated their willingness to submit and their complete cooperation, then the Brethren would have no reason to destroy them. They did not realize that the reason for the Brethren's destructiveness lay within the Brethren themselves, and that the victims' conduct made no difference whatsoever. Too late they had realized how to deal with the Sentas, and now they were not facing the Sentas. They were facing people who had an internal disease. In the same way, the inhabitants of other planets had discovered too late that there was no negotiating with the Brethren. Like the Hearers, the people on these planets had thought the worst enemy they would ever face were the People of Fire. It had not occurred to them that anything like the Brethren could possibly exist.
The attempted extermination of the Hearers was a departure from the pattern of Brethren genocides. Its pace was too fast and its methods too obvious. To exterminate the Hearers, factories were constructed. Large numbers of people were herded into them and systematically killed. The factories were hidden from the general public so that the Brethren could feel pleasant, but because the project was accompanied by a war which the city lost, the factories were discovered.
The Brethren had traditionally covered their tracks better than this. Many years later it would be surmised that mixed blood had contributed to the fast pace of this particular project. It was argued that individuals with an 'odd' appearance had sought to prove they were real Brethren, tried too hard and gave the game away. The two ringleaders were probably influenced by the fact that they had Seer and Hearer features. However, they could not have made a difference without a whole government of full blooded Brethren behind them. The motive behind the argument was the usual hatred toward the People of Knowledge, and an attempt to blame them for a Brethren crime. And surely they were as guilty as any. Living in the capital city, they had retained nothing of their ancestors' heritage. They had sought to prove that they were undiluted Brethren products, and they had succeeded. But there was more to the story than that.
The Hearer case was an aberration, for the Brethren had always moved slowly enough that only their victims knew what they were about. The Brethren had always despised the physical presence of the Seers, Hearers and Speakers. They had a passion for the blood of these people which surpassed all other obsessions. After finishing off the Seers, they had been infuriated to find the Hearers among them. They lost their self control and exposed their true selves. Whenever People of Knowledge were present, under some pretext or other Brethren hatred came to the surface. On this particular occasion, it overruled the traditional wariness of the killers. This time they just couldn't wait to get rid of the features they despised, even if it meant leaving evidence.
But why on this particular occasion? The answer is simple. The city which attempted to exterminate the Hearers was itself a Brethren victim. In previous years it had become wealthy enough to develop an empire. Not possessing land appropriate for spaceports, it unwisely focused upon its Brethren neighbors instead of attacking other planets. Consequently, its citizens had been rejected by others of their kind, in the classic Brethren manner guaranteed to drive victims out of their minds. The city's inhabitants were in that mental condition which characterized all Brethren rejects. The culture had developed the word 'insane' in order to describe this condition. It was a label that stigmatized the rejects and ensured that they would be done away with. This word meant that their behavior was incomprehensible, although in fact it was perfectly easy to understand.
In the capital city, the reaction to such victimization was the usual violence, but with a difference. For the victims were Brethren themselves, and so it was not surprising that in addition to attacking their tormentors, they selected scapegoats from within their boundaries. As victims themselves, the city's inhabitants did not follow the usual slow, inexorable pattern of their kind. Driven to distraction, they increased the pace of their predation. Also, the city's assault upon its neighbors was far more serious than the usual desperate measures of Brethren victims. The city was powerful enough to be a genuine threat. One by one, its neighbors succumbed to invasion. Had the city confined itself to destroying other planets, the whole thing would have gone more smoothly because the war which was required to cover an obvious genocide would have been waged far away from Calandria. Of course the thing was interrupted, and in the process of overrunning the city, the victors were sufficiently angry that when they discovered the death factories, they told the whole solar system.
The cat was out of the bag. The Hearer scandal was the one mistake in the Brethren's seamless record of lies, the single instance when their true selves were revealed to all seven planets. There were many Hearer survivors, who dispersed throughout the solar system. They were devastating witnesses who proved that there had in fact been a deliberate attempt to kill them off. The more noise they made, the more difficult it was for Brethren nations to get rid of them without revealing that the Brethren were in fact the kind of people who did such things. It may seem strange that the Brethren still cared about maintaining a front when they had such power, and when other groups knew enough to hate them. But the psychological need for pretence lay deep in their culture. They had to keep up appearances even when the game was over.
In more than six thousand years of genocides, this was the one and only time the Brethren were caught redhanded. It was just the tip of the iceberg, their worst job ever, a fifth the size of the most conservative estimates of the Seer extermination on Calandria alone, and a tiny fraction of the grand total. But it was still enough to leave the entire solar system in a state of shock from which it never did recover.
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