The ancestors of the Brethren arrived in the Warland after Creation. When they were expelled by the People of Fire, these ancestors separated into groups that left at different times. One moved to the Peaceland, successfully integrating with the Seers and giants. Another joined the People of Fire who were taking over the Oldland. A third travelled southeast, to be heard of no more. It was rumored that they ended up on another planet. But the largest group was pushed into the Newland, and spread both north and west. These people were the Brethren –people with a distinct culture, people who became different from the ancestors.
By the time they tried to move directly west into the Peaceland, the Brethren had already developed this culture. At its heart was an evil hunger which knew only how to destroy other people. And so they attacked the Seers in those very ancient times. Such horrors followed that the Brethren withdrew. As their population increased they spread to the northwest, destroying the Ataar giants instead.
The development of the insatiable hunger which plagued the Brethren is an ugly story to tell. The expulsion of their ancestors into the north was remarkably sudden. Their food supply was simply not adequate for the size of their population. In the harsh northland each of the Brethren was another mouth to feed, so he had better be an agreeable one. Therefore he learned behaviors which would prevent rejection by the community. Open hostility was not permitted, and if it slipped out he would pretend it was prompted by someone else's antisocial behavior. Parents did not respect their children's anger, and blamed the children for their own frustrations, pretending that the children had misbehaved. Generation after generation became practiced in the complex skill of avoiding blame, of making it appear as though another party were responsible for every outbreak of hostility and resentment.
Since the Brethren's survival depended upon the community, its welfare assumed paramount importance, and each person's beliefs had to take second place to the wishes of that group as a whole. Although he would plunge into danger on behalf of his people, he never thought of opposing them, no matter what they decided to do. Inevitably, there was resentment at this self imposed suppression, but if anyone expressed such resentment every member of the group would be happy to vent his own upon that individual. Each of the Brethren put up with the situation, and each of them felt outraged if someone else tried to avoid it.
Enforced friendliness and the suppression of natural honesty took their toll upon the minds of the Brethren. Each found it necessary to vent his resentment upon someone selected by the group, in order to avoid rejection himself. This might take an active form as persecution, or a passive form as exclusivity, a group snobbishness which cut off rejected individuals from partaking in the necessities of life. It made the participants feel that their sacrifices for group membership had been worthwhile, and the more necessary it was for them to reinforce this conviction the less they sympathized with the outcasts.
Of course, in the process they were making the very situation in which their sacrifices were necessary, and long after the Brethren became prosperous, this obsolete system persisted on its own momentum. The misery which it created generated needs that were met by the continuation of the pattern. People participated for fear of becoming scapegoats themselves, glad that the focus was not on them. All members of the society had a vested interest in proclaiming this pattern 'normal' even while it hurt them. People who openly disapproved of it were considered to be troublemakers and potential targets themselves –the participants were not.
It is immediately apparent that the Brethren were people who shirked responsibility. And such people are reduced to chaos through universal mutual finger pointing unless they separate selected individuals and collectively point fingers at them. Had the Brethren been deprived of their scapegoat system they would have experienced a crisis forcing them to choose a better path. But in their isolated misery this never happened. And they developed a pattern of behavior which, sadly, ensured their success because many people were fooled by it.
The Brethren did not simply kill their victims like the People of Fire. They had to pretend that the victims were doing something wrong. So without any overt antagonism they quietly worked together to create double binds, triple binds, whatever was necessary to create a trap. They wanted a situation in which the victim had no chance of survival. This would inevitably provoke some response for which the victim could be blamed. The response was the excuse the Brethren always needed, and they would not close in for the kill until they saw it, because they had to pretend they were administering justice. Time after time they played through this charade –and amazing as this may seem, it offset criticism for thousands of years.
Their culture specialized in enduring hardships, not in getting rid of what caused them. Developed under duress, it was designed for a bad situation that simply could not be changed at the time. But later on, when the Brethren were wealthy and other bad situations arose that could be changed, their culture provided no method for finding a solution. It helped people to keep going, but it didn't tell them if they were moving in the wrong direction. This did not serve them well when their scapegoats started to become dangerous.
The Brethren found themselves under siege by the scapegoats within their society, who had begun to band together and organize themselves into a real threat. Possessing no negotiating skills to deal with this situation, the Brethren became nervous and insecure. They demanded an absolutely serene surface in their communities, and had no interest in the turbulence which lay underneath it. Unable to deal with that, they pretended it did not exist and focused their attention on the appearance of peace and harmony, hoping that superficial pleasantness would prevent a disturbance. To preserve it, they were willing to turn a blind eye to all evil. They confused a veneer of serenity with the inner peace they could not have.
The righteous anger they never felt was dismissed as emotional instability. Strong feelings were regarded as a loss of control –over seething inner resentment, one must assume. In any argument both sides were blamed for causing a disturbance, without any inquiry whether someone had been wronged. In a fine irony, the Brethren convinced themselves that open aggression was primitive.
When even a mild disturbance occurred as a matter of course (since people with minds of their own occasionally disagree) all the Brethren could do was build a wall between themselves and the offender, who was viewed as an obstacle to maintaining a good situation rather than as a means to developing a better one. Since a dissatisfied person's objections were never addressed and he found himself behind a wall for speaking up, what was originally a small problem grew into a large one, hidden behind the barrier. The rejected individual joined a growing subculture that preyed upon Brethren citizens.
Back in the Warland, the People of Fire favoured open combat between evenly matched individuals or kinship groups. The Brethren feared its lack of resolution and swiftly ganged up to ensure that one of the combatants lost as quickly as possible. Among the People of Fire there was no idea that the entire community must dutifully turn against someone who had disturbed its serenity. There was no desperate, hasty move to maintain an appearance of peace, to keep things under control, because the People of Fire felt no loss of control. As a result, overall peace was genuinely kept because the matter was contained, and problems involving the entire community were avoided.
The Brethren feared loss of control, and wanted to have power over everything which they observed. They wanted to know other people's thoughts, and even developed a false science of mind reading to pretend they could do this. The Seers had maintained that people should guess these things for themselves, but the Brethren didn't want to take the trouble. The false science was no more than an opportunity to label victims as rejects so that no one would support them. The irrational behaviour of victims stripped of alternatives was labelled as 'crazy', and the false science served to legitimize the label by parading it as a medical diagnosis, pretending that their victims were mentally ill and that they were trying to help.
The Brethren did not like anyone to be different from themselves because of the possibility, however remote, that these people might become enemies. They did not like mixed blood because it confused the line between themselves and such people. Even among their own kind they targeted anyone who had suffered from abuse, just in case he harbored resentment. In short, they wanted a level of security which was not their right.
The impulse to eliminate anything which might possibly be dangerous grew like a cancer, for everything in the world was potentially dangerous. This impulse grew into a desire to destroy everything in the world, but it would turn upon the original group only after it was finished with everything else. This ultimately suicidal pattern was enacted in microcosm by outcasts from the system. Socialized Brethren rejected such an independent path; instead they contributed to the larger version of the pattern.
As the society enlarged, the truly intolerable rejects who once would have been executed managed to hide in secret enclaves, from which they supported themselves by conducting illegal activities. Constantly fearing attack by these people and their organizations, the Brethren developed a pathological quest for security, for absolute guarantees. Reticence and observation were regarded as suspect; everyone had to participate in whatever the group was doing, to be either a leader or a follower, to 'fit in'. Differences could not be endured because they involved the potential threat of an enemy within the society.
In turn, the rejects formed perfect little copies of the society which reviled them. They became enemies within that society. The pattern formed a vicious circle as they became increasingly cut off. And so whatever the Brethren feared, it came to pass. They made it happen, over and over again. The stories they told reflected this dilemma, full of monsters which had to be destroyed. Even the most wholesome reform groups reacting out of this situation carried within them the seed of the problem. For instead of improving the society which resulted from these trends, the reform groups isolated themselves from it.
The terrible hunger of the Brethren was only one flaw in an otherwise great culture. Correcting this flaw would not have disturbed the rest of the culture or undermined its strength. Its people would not have been torn by internal strife. If they had placed less arbitrary conditions on their loyalty, it would have been more reliable. And the tightening of their circle not only decreased their numbers; it swelled the ranks of their enemies until that circle became a noose around their own necks. Their art, which possessed a heavyweight profundity, would not have lost its impact had their souls become free. They could have applied their amazing tenacity to saving the world.
For these people had staying power. When glorious speeches were forgotten and all glamour and bravado were long gone, it was always one of the Brethren who showed up on the finish line, and the wisdom of his culture was the knowledge that it didn't matter how fine he looked when he got there, as long as he made it. It was the Brethren who had faith when there was no God, who kept on when there was no reason to go on, when all hope had died, because they were Like That. They would not desert a lost cause –unless, of course, everyone around them did.
And it was because they persisted in the face of despair, fully agreeing when puzzled bystanders assured them of the futility of their ventures, that they achieved things which seemed humanly impossible. It was only in the last few centuries before the Brethren exterminated their solar system and themselves with it, that about half their people finally overcame the trauma of their ancestors' sudden expulsion to a starving land. Through gradual integration with the remnants of the cultures the Brethren had consumed, these people found an alternative to the pain in which their culture had been born. They were still forged from the strongest of metals, and had lost none of their Brethren advantages. Had they only managed to seize power in time, the solar system would have been saved.
The ancestors could not be swayed, because they did not base their loyalties upon favours given or received. Living in a harsh environment, they were expert at networking, but there were no strings attached. The People of Fire could not be bought off –they were far too proud for that– but living in the Warland, they would feel that a gift presupposed an alliance. Among the Brethren, a gift was a gift. Even if you refused it, they would back you up in times of trouble. One could relax within the reassuring comfort of their friendship, for it was more than a truce. Loyalties were not based upon kinship, and family members would not support a traitor. And what the People of Fire called business, the Brethren dismissed as graft. In the last years before the end came, the half of their population who had absorbed a sense of right and wrong from other cultures discovered that their ancient attitudes had paved the way toward an incorruptibility which possessed the strength peculiar to their kind, instrumental in keeping the peace they considered so important. The Brethren, both the good and the bad, could not be tricked into internal disputes. They were not stopped or started by outside influences. They were a people who decided their own fate. But the essence of mind control is this, that the slave chooses his fate, that in fighting for his freedom he obeys his master to perfection.
The Warland was exactly opposite to the Newland, and this was why the People of Fire could live with mistrust, and love what they feared. They were wealthy but under constant siege, able to feed all their warriors and needing every one of them. Therefore, each could be as disagreeable as he liked without fear of rejection. Living in a perpetual war zone, each one of them formed alliances which were not dependent upon friendship, and in a snap he could fight alongside people whom he actively hated. Although he gave precedence to his own people, he would do business with anyone. Competition for land had made him an expert negotiator skilled at preventing unnecessary wars (though incapable of stopping them midway) and the Warland was made up of a complex network of alliances. Unfortunately these alliances were fragile, and the People of Fire could be turned against each other. They lacked the internal solidarity for which the Brethren had paid so high a price.
In the world of the Brethren one was either friend or foe, with nothing in between –either in the survival group or out of it. The definitions were clear: a friend was trusted, and a foe was not. The Brethren considered it a serious problem if even one person refused to share this close bond with everyone else. They were eternally, unswervingly loyal to their own kind. Needing to feel secure, they knew that they must supply the same need in others, and they did. Knowing that their suspicions made them vulnerable to chaos, they went to great lengths to guarantee that no one broke the bonds between them. So that no one would disrupt their peace, they made sure an outsider would always be attacked before an insider. They developed a culture of loyalty which went a long way toward counteracting their feelings of insecurity. This culture of loyalty was a source of strength which they would never give up.
But there is more to the story, for the Brethren did not permit the existence of any other culture around them. Another culture meant intermarriage. It also meant the occasional disagreement. If a disagreement arose with the other culture, people of mixed blood would have conflicting loyalties and could not be trusted. Therefore, the Brethren learned to act not upon evidence, but on possibilities –not on what was really there, but on what might happen. On the grounds that they were a peace loving people, they got rid of (are you ready?) troublemakers. Well, potential troublemakers. And so they decided to eliminate other cultures simply for being different. Because these cultures might possibly turn against them. Which, of course, is precisely what other cultures invariably did.
Needless to say, the natural environment around the Brethren suffered from this policy. For the wilderness could not be predicted with the level of accuracy these people required. Many plant species were torn up, and forests were destroyed. Even reclusive predators who had never attacked the Brethren were hunted to extinction, and sparse populations of smaller species were under siege. The People of Fire made their mark on the forest, but they liked to keep an element of risk just for fun. They accidentally rendered large predators extinct, which ruined their sport and disappointed them greatly, for they had rather identified with the creatures.
Behind the Brethren's inability to adjust to the Newland there was a more sinister reason for their predation upon all who were different from themselves. A few corrupt Seers believed that they could extend their lifespans by drinking concentrated blood drawn from their own womenfolk. These were the same few Seers who sought to regain the knowledge which had been forbidden by the Creator. The blood they drank could not be mixed, and so they captured Brethren children and conditioned them to encourage insularity and paranoia throughout the Brethren population, with the intention of keeping the two races separate.
It seems absurd that they would bring about the destruction of their own kind, but they were different from other Seers. Indeed, it was rumored they were not Seers at all, but something else impersonating the Seers. The priests of the Seers were taller than their congregations, and the blood drinkers had been able to operate among them in disguise before being discovered and expelled. Consequently the blood drinkers hated the Seer priesthood and its congregations of tiny people. Their Brethren slaves were conditioned to become docile in response to signals which only the blood drinkers knew, and so the blood drinkers were never threatened by the Brethren's hatred toward them. However, the Seers were very much at risk.
Lacking the faintest idea how to resist the blood drinkers, the Brethren became desperate. An inept people with no healing ability, they reacted with panic at the sight of anything disturbing or unfamiliar. And of course in doing so they embraced the very evil they sought to escape, and became its servants. Descendants of the captured children, conditioned to covet the blood drinkers' power, were deliberately introduced to their 'elite' circles, where they became staunch advocates of unmixed blood. It fed the desire, typical of their kind, to place themselves above others as unconditionally more worthy of consideration. Needless to say, the idea caught on. In fact, the Brethren came to fancy themselves the masters of Calandria. The reason being, of course, that they were in fact the most miserable of slaves.
The evidence was unmistakable. Their obsessive fear that other people were 'looking down' on them. Their panicky scramble for control over others. Their feckless habit of dodging responsibility. Everything about them bore the mark of slavery. They were incapable of relating to others as equals. They knew only domination and submission.
The Brethren did learn one mechanism for dealing with the blood drinkers, and this was the creation of a seamless solidarity which allowed no exceptions. Together they formed a living wall without the smallest crack. All other people were weaklings compared to them, because only they understood the true meaning of zero tolerance. Regarding this matter they possessed a strength and wisdom that no other culture taught. But they ruined everything by applying their infallible technique against innocent people just because those innocent people were not their kind. Terrified that anything unfamiliar might be a blood drinker, the Brethren took no chances.
And of course, they ruined everything in an even more serious manner: conditioned as they were, they left the blood drinkers on their own side of the wall. But unable to rely upon the entire Brethren population, the blood drinkers were reclusive, living in luxurious castles, waited on hand and foot by whole communities of their Brethren slaves. Thus they managed to avoid the predation which they had caused, but they were not as powerful as their slaves believed them to be. For almost two thousand years more they would pay for their crimes by avoiding public appearances. In the meantime the slave families became rich, but they still thought like slaves. It had become their habit to hold the enemy responsible for every vicissitude. And when there was no enemy, they appointed some innocent person to the position. Thus they never had to process pain, to examine it and learn from it. They never had to figure out what had gone wrong, and so they never had to scrutinize their own contribution.
Anyone related to the Brethren who had gone through the Warland was expected to become part of the machine, or fight to the death. The giants had chosen the second alternative. Unrelated nations like those of the Seers were not offered a choice, and were automatically attacked. People who lost a war with the Brethren suffered one of two fates. Either their populations were reduced to a safe level and their vestiges incorporated, or else they were eliminated altogether. In either case their names became forgotten, or were assumed to belong to the Brethren.
The People of Fire possessed a sense of honour which did not permit methodical exterminations. Savagely ferocious, they slaughtered all who challenged them. If every one of their enemies died, they felt no remorse whatsoever. But their warrior ethic demanded an open declaration before combat. The Brethren felt quite differently about killing people who had done them no harm. They did not question the honour of such a process because they regarded it as an unpleasant chore which must be done from a sense of duty. When the project ceased to be a challenge they did not stop, because they weren't in it for the challenge. They were just getting rid of a problem.
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