The unintegrated Brethren became alarmed. Swiftly, they realized that here at last was an enemy capable of destroying their regime. As owners of banks and industries, they could afford to sue governments into bankruptcy, and they quickly pushed legislation which permitted them to do so. As industrialists, they still controlled the military machine that allowed them to get away with such a move. The reformers had their fingers on all the buttons, but the buttons had been manufactured by their enemies. The bottom line was that the unintegrated Brethren owned everything because they had been willing to get rich at others' expense. In the short term, their wickedness gave them the advantage.
But the integrated Brethren were spreading ideas, and the obvious truth of these ideas made them popular. Large numbers of unintegrated Brethren joined the revolutionary trend and thereby subverted it. The integrated Brethren had drawn public attention to the pollution and desertification caused by Brethren industries, and to the sudden increase in extinctions of plant and animal species throughout the solar system. The unintegrated Brethren purred their concurrence.
They appeared to be far gentler than the integrated Brethren, if the People of Knowledge were not around to annoy them into self exposure. Many were genuinely trying to free themselves from their culture, since it had not brought them happiness. They avoided strong reactions, even to the greatest atrocities, thinking this must be the morality everyone was talking about. Cultivating an appearance of serenity, they gravitated toward group therapies to assuage their misery instead of healing themselves like responsible people. In their quest for absolute guarantees they turned to the Creator's promise that true repentance would bring forgiveness. They actually imagined that a declaration of repentance was tantamount to the real thing, and thought they could win salvation without having to continually strive for virtue. Mouthing their concern for the state of the world, they pointed fingers in true Brethren fashion. And though the fingers were pointed at the right targets, their owners were busily dismantling the opponents of those targets. All in all, they managed to look virtuous without paying any prices. They desired above all things to disassociate themselves from the Hearer scandal, and unleashed a deluge of propaganda against it.
Masquerading as great souls, they assumed a gentle and often patronizing air characterized by a complete lack of humor. They promoted unrepentant criminals in the name of forgiveness, thinking that this made them appear more virtuous than the honest people who despised them. One upmanship was their credo. They were able to feign forgiveness more swiftly than people who genuinely aspired to a ceasefire. Coming from a culture which did not permit neutrality and aloofness, they were practiced in the art of forced friendliness. They were quick to predate upon those who refused to participate, who (they claimed) knew nothing of 'true forgiveness'. Lying about lying was an old trick. Many had so little sense of reality that they thought the pretence was the genuine article. They appeared sincere because they could not distinguish truth from deception. For them there was no truth, there was only expedience.
Every cause was sabotaged by their contribution. Typically, they cut off all people resembling themselves who did not participate in the charade, maintaining that these sour individuals were enemies to progress, and not enlightened. They particularly liked to pit causes against each another by pretending to sympathize with one of them, as if its rival for their support were antagonistic to the favourite and had to be attacked. They went so far as to feign support for the Blues against the Tattoos. They employed the standard distraction used by all oppressors –they got their victims to fight over who was suffering more. Eventually they would return to their Brethren culture. They had never really left, for it was the only culture they possessed. Even unconsciously, everything they did was another trick. Their touch was fatal.
Had the unintegrated Brethren found their race in a minority, their thoughts would have turned to genocide in an instant. Their pleasantness was entirely conditional upon having total control. By this time, they had won so many enemies throughout their ravaged solar system that a minority position truly would have been dangerous. They reacted by deflecting the hatred they deserved onto those of their enemies who resembled them.
The ruse actually worked. Observers from other planets fell for the fashionable cult of remorse. They despised the Tattoos and the integrated Brethren. Once again the empire builders had capitalized on their resemblance to those who could destroy them, casting themselves as the heroes and their enemies as the villains. The most dangerous enemies of the unintegrated Brethren –integrated people of their own kind– were set up as targets for all those who hated Brethren crimes, just at the time when the Blue extermination gathered momentum.
After the Hearer scandal, unintegrated Brethren groups on Calandria were delighted to blame the city which, after all, had attacked them. This not only provided an outlet for their justified anger on their own behalf, but it also ensured that they would not be associated with its crimes. They posed as integrated Brethren who had been victimized by their unintegrated relatives. When they denigrated those relatives, they made sure to use as an epithet the name of an Ataar nation which had never been involved in Brethren crimes. True to their culture, they made a scapegoat of the city where the scandal had occurred, as if they had no such guilt upon their shoulders.
It was with good reason that they disassociated themselves, for after the Hearer scandal, remnants of the original people on the three destroyed planets began to speak up. The two larger ones had been repopulated by immigrants of various cultures which had not yet gone under. These immigrants started to believe the terrible stories they were being told. They noticed that the indigenous nations of these colonies were mysteriously sparse.
The three planets which were not yet destroyed had been seriously impoverished, and were regarded as the outskirts of two conglomerate Brethren empires. These two empires fought each other for supremacy with soldiers taken from other ethnic groups, and along borders inhabited by other ethnic groups. One of these empires belonged to the uneasy conquerors of the Warland who by this time were disguising themselves as People of Fire. The other empire was centered on the colony planet where the Blue People were fighting Tattoos. One of the two largest destroyed planets, this colony had the forethought to treat its allies with respect, thereby reducing its military expenditures. It also had the advantage of being populated by a mixed group of immigrants, while its rival held uneasy control of intact Ataar and Warland groups. In time, the colony became more powerful than the entire planet of Calandria. As the home planet began to reform, the colony which now ruled the solar system became the headquarters of the unintegrated Brethren.
In structure, both empires followed the model which the Sentas had created long ago. There was the heart of power, which was not a pleasant place to live in because its welfare could be ignored. There were the allies, who had to be allies because their only alternative was victimization. Within their nations they were quite capable of governing well, but they were powerless to change the larger pattern. Last there were the victims, located at a safe distance from the heart of power, on the outskirts. In the Brethren empires these were whole planets, mined for their natural resources and for their slave labor. Because there were two empires, populations living near the borders separating their territories received the best treatment in order to prevent their defection. Location was the key to survival.
At some point, the Brethren empires had to deal with the neglect of their increasingly rebellious home population, and lost control of their borders. But by this time they had expanded the territory inhabited by their own kind. That was their lasting control, exerted through their influence on these people's minds with these people's consent. But the fact remains that initially it had been won by force, and there was no point in pretending otherwise.
The Brethren empires exploited their own populations as much as they could by teaching them that they never had enough consumer goods, then by lending them money at high interest rates. The empires needed to keep them as a market for products which they sold at a profit, and so the populations at home could not be rendered destitute like the faraway victim populations. Typically obsessed with complete control, the leaders of the empires manipulated the food supply of their own populations as well as those on the victim planets. The intention with the market populations was simply to have a blackmail hold on them in case they found out too much and rebelled. But the intention with some of the victim populations was extermination.
The victim populations were located on the three planets which the Brethren had not managed to empty out. The unintegrated Brethren were still trying to get rid of the people on two of them. The third was an exception. With a larger head count than any other planet in the solar system, it posed a formidable challenge. Motivated by overpopulation, its cultures operated in a manner disturbingly like that of the Brethren themselves; some of their children also could be found running around in packs jeering at likely targets, or huddling in clusters and laughing. They were not predatory, however, and therein lay the difference. The conquerors were uneasy about their ability to exterminate this enormous planet, and knew that it could well cause their downfall. They consoled themselves with the reminder that they needed to keep some source of slave labor. They realized that otherwise they would have to use their home populations, mostly made up of Brethren and People of Fire. And that would not work, because they had to keep these populations wealthy enough to provide a market for their banks and for their industries.
The Brethren empires maintained a policy of starving the three slave planets. The overall plan was to exterminate two of these planets, and to work the most populated one. The Brethren empires wanted to know that they could reduce the population of this third planet at will, just in case a rebellion occurred. They wanted to see how fast the population could turn over, how many slaves they could starve to death before those slaves frustrated them by reproducing.
As for the other two planets, they were doomed. The first one to go was the home world of the Blue People. It was largely destroyed by a disease for which the Blues blamed the Seer remnants. Their lives at stake, the Blues realized that an entire race of Calandrians was missing from the history of that planet. Examining Calandrian folklore, they cleverly guessed that this race had excelled as physicians, and they recognized its remnants. But since the folklore they had discovered was Brethren folklore, they believed the Seers were evil and suspected them of creating the disease.
Ancient Seer law forbade such an atrocity, but this law meant nothing to the corrupt Seer families who drank blood. As the virtuous Seer remnants had infiltrated the Brethren, these few families had taken advantage of their own similar appearance and had risen to seats of power in Brethren empires. At last they were able to come out in public. Being taller than other Seers, they were able to maintain the 'pure' blood that was so important to them. They looked exactly like a Seer/Brethren cross which was now being accepted as a strain of full blooded Brethren.
The Blues were used to saying whatever they wanted because, powerless as they were, their words were not taken seriously. Thinking that all Calandrians sought their extermination, they had begun hurling genocide threats. The disease was ready within a few months of the first threat. Horrified at this new development, the virtuous Seer remnants dared not speak, for the Blues hated them with a passion. The Blues knew nothing of the Seer extermination, and were unaware of the fact that all Seer remnants were survivors of the most virulent holocaust in Calandrian history. They had no idea what it meant to threaten such people with genocide. And the Seer remnants unwillingly contributed to the latest Brethren project, precisely because their kind had been Brethren victims in the past. They knew of the trap, but they were caught in it nevertheless.
The unintegrated Brethren circulated conspiracy theories against the blood drinkers and the Blues fell into the trap, thinking that there was only one villain in the scenario. Seeing themselves as unconditionally virtuous in the struggle against their oppressors, they never saw that they had entered a war of evil against evil. Like the virtuous Seers, they were caught between the Brethren and the blood drinkers. They chose the Brethren because the Brethren hated the blood drinkers, and the blood drinkers were more obviously horrifying. But the Brethren, willingly or not, were the blood drinkers' creatures. Everything the Brethren did served the blood drinkers' ends and never harmed them in the least, so it would have been better to join neither side and make alliances elsewhere. But the Blues never saw this.
The slave mentality of the unintegrated Brethren was such that their presumptions had escalated beyond the traditional claim to mastery. Now they fantasized about being supernatural creatures with a special relationship to the Creator. They convinced the Blues that their prejudice against Seer physical features was an 'insight' into hidden evil. If the target displayed any reaction to undisguised hatred, this was taken as further proof. Gradually the Blues became convinced that the targets were demons, in a manner fatally reminiscent of the Seer extermination. The Seers could do nothing to save these people. In short, the Blues brought about their own destruction. It was as if they wanted to die.
On the Blues' planet, the exterminators took full advantage. They played an assortment of games with the dying people. Food and medical supplies were offered to the Blues as temptation, then withheld in a great show of moral indignation at any hint of war between the desperate Blue nations, whose traditional borders had been disrupted during colonization by different Brethren groups. Bad advice on controlling desertification increased the people's poverty, and financial assistance was offered at outrageous interest rates –with the threat of military intervention when the offer was refused. Viewing the results from a comfortable distance, the unintegrated Brethren claimed that their well meaning efforts only ended in disaster, and that 'aboriginal' people and 'developing' planets must be taught how to help themselves. And so they withdrew food and medical supplies, but continued to lend money at high interest rates. The expense was worth their while, for even in those last days they wanted an excuse for their threats, and even in those last days some people fell for the trick.
Both abroad and at home the Brethren empires began to genetically manipulate food plants. They had so much excess food that they could easily have fed the victim planets. They chose instead to sell them seeds which did not reproduce, so that after the first harvest was consumed the victim populations began to starve. The second of the slave worlds was emptied by these means.
No one remembered that this was the very knowledge which had been forbidden by the Creator. No one saw that descendants of those few corrupt Seers who had sought this knowledge were now working with the enemies of their ancestors to bring about the destruction of the solar system.
Finally, the leaders of the Brethren empires possessed the ultimate blackmail. They controlled every population on every planet, both the remaining slave population and their own market populations. They could threaten every planet in the solar system with starvation if they did not get whatever they wanted. But they outdid themselves, for they could not control their own weapon. And when they finally clashed with the surviving slave planet, their consumption of other people became more than a metaphor.
They could never get what they wanted. They could never be happy. Because they themselves were always hungry. Always hungry. Always hungry.
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