The Tattoos had made a comeback. Their extermination had not been complete. Under a valiant leader, a surviving Ataar giant and living miracle, a few of their number had managed to hold out against the Sentas in a far corner of the Peaceland. In spite of being consistently shipped to the front lines to fight the Brethren's constant wars, they had survived in an annoying manner.
Most of their descendants had found their way onto the colony planet, where they had grown more powerful than the Sentas because the Brethren had wanted it that way. In areas where the Blues were most concentrated, the Tattoos did not experience their usual prosperity, so that the necessary level of tension would be attained. After all, the Tattoos posed by far the most dangerous threat to Brethren power. Though the Brethren were still way ahead of them, standard policy required that the flames of hatred be fanned as high as possible between the Blue People and the Tattoos in order to prevent at all costs the ultimate Brethren nightmare –an alliance between the two.
Since their ancestors had arrived as slave labor, the Blue People were assured that the Tattoo ancestors had been their masters. Slaveowning Brethren whose ancestors had invaded Tattoo countries were identified as Tattoos. Hired at minimum wage as overseers back in the days of slavery, the Tattoos had been deliberately pitted against the Blues on a daily basis while the Brethren had sipped refreshments indoors. Later the Blues were used as strike breakers whenever the impoverished Tattoos became organized. In short, the Brethren set up the Blues and the Tattoos to be enemies.
The ultimate People of Fire, the Tattoos fell into every trap. Their hot blood would not tolerate the crimes committed against them by angry Blues, and they formed vigilante groups to protect themselves. The Brethren supplied these groups with whatever they needed, then ensured that they received a great deal of publicity, and that the Blues took note of the savage methods which they used. The Blues responded in kind, and the game was on. Numerous dramas displayed government agents hunting demonic vigilante leaders when in fact the two forces were in collusion. It was not an equal partnership, however –the vigilantes knew that if they ever sought a truce with the Blues, their reputation was such that even the victims of Blue crimes would cheer on the government’s sudden success in apprehending them. The moment they turned good they would be arrested, and a duped public would take it as a sign that the government was free from corruption. As time went on Brethren agents infiltrated the vigilante groups, inflicting bizarre tortures upon their victims in the name of the Tattoos.
The Tattoos gravitated toward police work, and the Brethren encouraged them –a daring move they would never have risked on their home planet. As policemen the Tattoos constantly came face to face with the Blue People. Thinking that every other ethnic group on the colony had them slated for extermination, the Blues specialized in violent crimes. Like most Brethren victims, they would go down fighting. The Brethren distributed drugs to alleviate the Blues' depression, then declared them to be illegal. For those who sought to free themselves from this influence, they arranged fatal drug therapies. The Blue People became the scourge of the colony. The Brethren deliberately arranged that their latest target would be more than the police could handle. They understaffed and underfunded the Tattoos so that in their frustration the warriors would grow to hate the Blue People even more than they hated the Brethren. The best way to keep the Tattoos from blowing the whistle on an extermination was getting them to do it. This way they were too busy and too close to see the truth.
It wasn't the first such trick the Brethren had played upon the Tattoos. They had become practiced at turning the warrior people against each other. They knew that with a few lies the People of Fire could be manipulated into internal disputes, instead of turning upon the Brethren themselves. Back on Calandria, the Brethren had even taken advantage of the Tattoos' memory of war with the Sentas. A group of Tattoos whose struggle had been particularly hard had been deliberately transported onto the land of a remote Tattoo nation which had escaped unscathed. This nation had so forgotten the Senta threat that it professed an alliance with the Sentas in defiance of the Brethren. Naturally the two Tattoo groups fought, and in the meantime the Brethren took over the ancestral lands of the first Tattoo group. These were the very lands for which their forefathers had fought the Sentas in the first place. The Brethren then confused the first Tattoo group with another in the area, so no one would notice that most of its members were living somewhere they really had no business to be. An added perk was the fact that this other group in the area had Seer features, which could now be dismissed as Tattoo characteristics.
The Brethren were fully aware of the fact that the Tattoos appeared more dangerous than themselves. Many centuries before, with uncharacteristic blindness, a remote Seer group on Calandria had invited the Brethren to their country, hoping the Brethren would protect them from Tattoo raiders. The irony could not have been more perfect, for in time the Tattoos came to love the Seers. When all was said and done, they alone remembered who the Seers had truly been and mourned the passing of the only race capable of healing the shattered solar system.
But the Tattoos did more than this, for they had foiled the Brethren's most thorough extermination. They had managed to save a few Seers in their sparse communities on Calandria. Those few looked up to the Tattoos with trust and admiration in their shining eyes. And the warriors, who had come from a place where self aggrandizement was the rule, turned around and frankly revered a people who were as different from themselves as night from day. In the Warland everyone had pushed to the limit, and people had controlled each other. The self abnegation and self discipline of the Seers had touched the warriors' hearts. Attempts were made to turn the Tattoos against the Seers, but they were doomed to failure. The Tattoos knew that the Seers were good, and no one could convince them otherwise. It was the one subject upon which they had absolute solidarity. In a solar system which the Brethren had ruined, amid all the lies that had been told, the love between the Tattoos and the Seers remained untouched, and among them the truth was not forgotten.
People from other planets were not so experienced. They did have the sense to identify the physical appearance of their conquerors, but they never were clear on behavior patterns. The villains in Brethren dramas always operated like the People of Fire, as though the tough options of the Warland were the worst of all possible evils. The Tattoos possessed the conquerors' features, that much was known. And their straight talking could not compete with the pleasant manner of the Brethren. To the logic of ignorance, the Tattoos appeared to be the guilty ones.
The colony on which the Tattoos and the Blues were fighting publicized an old war of theirs against one particular Brethren group on Calandria, portraying themselves as desperate and victimized. Members of the group who looked like full blooded Brethren were portrayed as redeemable, but those with even the faintest trace of Seer characteristics were demonized. Throughout the colony they were portrayed as the ultimate Brethren, and immigrants were taught to regard them as enemies of all the virtues which the colony claimed to uphold.
At the same time that they were regarded as evil, they were also carefully presented as trivial and undisciplined in case they revealed the truth to other Brethren targets. Dirty minded propaganda reminiscent of the third Seer extermination was snapped up by immigrants on the colony who knew nothing of Calandrian history. Dramas about the Hearer scandal and the colony's war of independence invariably endowed the villains with Seer features. The Seer remnants could speak up and be killed by Brethren, or they could keep their silence and be killed by the immigrants.
They were unaware of the third alternative –an alliance with the Tattoos. Since their Brethren group on Calandria had invaded the Tattoos, they mistakenly thought the fierce warriors would dismiss them as Brethren and abandon them to their fate. And so they failed to appeal to the very people who would have championed their cause. Because they were not fully aware of their own identity, they missed an alliance with the Hearer survivors and the Sentas, who had been taught to despise them. But surrounded as they were by enemies, they did not die, for they were part Brethren themselves and made up at least half the Brethren population. Bred from survivors within Brethren society, they were quite terrible enough in their own right to prevent a fourth annihilation from getting off the ground. Their numbers and position were enough to combat the hatred that surrounded them.
People who knew nothing about Calandria were antagonized by the ferocity of the Tattoos, supposing them to be a pack of particularly hostile Brethren. And they despised the stoicism of the Seer remnants, for in these traces of a destroyed race they imagined Brethren agents who were worse than the Brethren themselves. They hated both the Tattoos and the Seer remnants for not participating in the feigned remorse which the Brethren flagrantly displayed at public functions. The Seer remnants swallowed their spit. The Tattoos did not.
Thus were allies made with the Brethren –the conquerors arranged that other groups were held responsible for their crimes. Their victims hated these groups on cue, and it was assured that in self defense the slandered parties would have to turn on the victims. To some extent or another all ethnic groups from Calandria were toyed with in this manner. All Ataar groups were regarded as Brethren. Except for the Sentas, the People of Fire were regarded as Brethren. The People of Knowledge and the Sentas were considered co-conspirators.
And wherever possible, the Brethren pretended they were something else. For those who knew the true identity of the People of Fire, the Brethren empire that invaded the Warland was identified as one of their groups. And very few people knew that every one of the empires which had impoverished or destroyed the other planets in the solar system belonged to the Brethren. In the false dramas which were fed to the public, one of the worst of these empires was always portrayed as belonging to the Sentas, because it had a large immigrant Speaker population. This empire took over one of the two largest destroyed planets, and it was notorious for torturing people on various pretexts. The Brethren blamed the tortures on the Senta emissaries.
It was ironic that the People of Knowledge were suspected of being in league with the Brethren, for the killers could not bear the very sight of them. The Blue People, believing themselves to be singled out, never suspected that the Brethren hated all the People of Knowledge with a far greater passion. Of course this hatred was masked; the Brethren always had to be the pleasant ones. Various disguises were used, the most ironic of which was –this is priceless– a love of honesty. The People of Knowledge were portrayed as untrustworthy. They were full of tricks, everyone was told, but the Brethren cut through all that with their straightforward, no-nonsense attitude. It works on so many levels.
Such hypocrisy incensed the People of Fire. The Brethren tried to pacify them, claiming that the terrible rage of the warriors would lower themselves to their enemies' level. Violence exhibited a loss of self control, and should be beneath their dignity. When this met with peals of laughter, the Brethren said that it was wrong for them to use power in case they became as corrupt as their enemies. To this was added the claim that getting rid of their enemies was only adding more evil onto that which already existed. The warriors were in stitches. Then the Brethren claimed that anger was an internal corrosion which would destroy the People of Fire. This statement may have been made in good faith, for the Brethren were themselves being slowly consumed by the hatred that seethed beneath their calm veneer. Of course anger never did destroy the People of Fire, for theirs was an honest rage that made them strong. But it did destroy some of the more impertinent Brethren, and the project was quickly abandoned.
At this time in history, appearances were deceptive. People could not tell who was on the Brethren side and who was not. For one thing, other populations were so hurt by the Brethren that many of them had begun to copy their ways. They were in pain, and bouncing that pain onto others seemed to offer temporary relief. Snobbishness and child abuse infiltrated the Blues, and even the People of Fire were not immune, though the majority of them remained faithful. Unfortunately, they were widely identified as Brethren. The Seer remnants were divided into two groups of about the same size, those who had unknowingly retained their culture and those who had not. Those who had not were the most dangerous people on the planet, for they possessed the terrible knowledge of the Seers without a trace of the wisdom that had controlled it in ancient times. These people worked as part of the Brethren system, introducing Seer weapons into the arsenal and bringing an undeserved reputation to those of their kind who refused to participate. This reputation was not improved by the fact that some of the most sadistic Brethren had decided to adopt Seer mannerisms.
The Beast ate only dead meat, and its enemies could defeat it only by dying and becoming consumed, so that it became the very thing that it ate. Sometimes this process of integration did not work, and the meal became the Beast. Then the enemy was more terrible than ever, for it had acquired Seer skills but lacked the heart and mind that had gone with them. Before the end, some said that the real power struggle was between people of mixed Brethren and Seer blood, the good against the bad, those who were truly integrated against those who pretended. This was a bit of an overstatement, for the full blooded Brethren were still powerful. But they were working with the pretenders, who to all intents and purposes were no more than unintegrated Brethren with horrible weapons. Had the pretenders known that the full blooded Brethren were plotting their extermination, they would have united with their integrated brethren. As it was, Brethren slanders prompted genocide threats toward these people. The targets retained strong reactions to this sort of talk, though they could not explain why, and in self defense their scientific talents were applied against fellow victims. The Brethren financed the experiments with a generosity that was warmly appreciated.
As time went on, the situation became more confusing. For the most part, people from ethnic groups who were least like the Brethren resembled them closely, while those who were most like the Brethren had a very different appearance. It became harder and harder to pinpoint the source of everyone's pain. People were discouraged from analyzing the state of affairs, being taught early in life that both sides in a fight were culpable, and that it was childish to ask who had started it. Every culture had indulged in mass murder at some time or other, they were told, and it was bigoted to criticize any particular one, since each abided by its own rules. In solemn voices they were assured that if they criticized a sin it was because they must be carrying the same within themselves. And so they did not question.
The Brethren had a long history of setting up smokescreens so that their victims had no idea whom to blame. Each one of them was a brick in the wall, yet each brick in itself appeared virtually harmless. Diffusion of responsibility was the Brethren's most effective survival technique. Brethren units did not act as individuals, and it was the mistake of other ethnic groups that they judged each as a self governing entity, and thus did not perceive its true role. These other ethnic groups knew that terrible crimes had been committed, yet there seemed to be no specific persons upon whom to place the responsibility. They did not understand that the collective was the criminal, that the criminal was a Beast comprised of many individuals, each of which in its passive contribution to the whole acted willfully as an enabler, and shared the Beast's full intentions. While members of other ethnic groups were merely trapped in the machine, Brethren units were actually part of it, communicating like insects and sharing a common goal. Each Brethren unit benefited from an individual-based conception of justice which did not recognize the collective as an individual to be judged. That alleged instrument of peace which was secretly a weapon of war provided the Brethren with full protection, for their victims persistently placed in it an absurd faith.
But the greatest source of confusion was actually a boon to the freedom fighters, and of course it was the fifth column which had developed within the Brethren population on Calandria. As you know, the Brethren had inadvertently become integrated with the remains of their victims. At least half of them had been exposed to the ideas of these victims, and had been raised with their values. Now, people with a flawless Brethren appearance were allies of the freedom fighters. They found their way into governments throughout the solar system, and were in a position to initiate widespread reforms. Some of them were full blooded, and most of those who were not believed that they were. But there was something different about them. They had morals. They came from every Brethren nation, spoke every Brethren language, and were steeped in every identifiable aspect of Brethren culture. But they were good.
Where once Seers had fought against Brethren, now people with the blood of both squared off in the spirit of the two ancient enemies. This time they decided the fate of an entire solar system that had no idea what was happening.
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