Taryte
Not to be confused with Taryte (Later).
By now, the Pabaps in the Swamp had mostly become slaves, and they were being forced by their masters to reproduce as fast as they could. They were able to reproduce so quickly in the Swamp that the Swamp's rulers began to fear that they would soon take over the Swamp. The native (Laban) population of Baeba, called the Pā (Pejo), couldn't reproduce quickly, so they began to fear that they would soon be thrown out of power in their own homeland. Many Pejos began to call for the genocide of all Pabaps, saying that the world would be much better off without them. They showed that these people were excessively stupid and violent, and were responsible for many of the Swamp's problems. But the Swamp's government was interested in the present, not the future, and therefore they took no action against the Thunderers and their allies. A group of Pejos who called themselves the Taryteans began to draw in those Pejos who wanted to destroy the Lenian races. They preached reliance on technology, saying that people had to abandon these powers and build machines. Thus, they agreed with their enemies the Thunderers on some very important issues. Many Taryteans wanted to create a race mixed of Thunderers and Taryteans, but the orthodox Taryteans still preached racial hatred against any Lenian race. Some people felt that because the Lenians were slaves of Pejos, the two races were simply incompatible. But mostly it was because the Taryteans saw themselves as the physical embodiment of a god that supported technology and therefore was opposed to the hypersexual, violent, stupid Lenians, who also preached technology but had so far relied on Nisundusa for almost all of their science. The Taryteans vowed to destroy the Swamp and its government.
In 3696, the Taryteans set up their new government on top of the barren desert of Nipanu-Malamu. They were leaving their old homeland in the Swamp because they felt it was ruled by an evil government that they needed to destroy. They saw no possible way for them to morally justify living in the Swamp. They wanted to purify their race of all undesirable elements, whether they were because of intrusion from outside races or from the few bad traits they admitted existed in their own race. The Taryteans disapproved of their people's bad morals; they theorized that despite the constant rain of weapons from above that within a few decades Taryteans would have so much mechanical power that physical strength and even intelligence would be largely irrelevant, whereas an ethical mind would be very important for the future of their nation. (The development of non-military technology was surprisingly slow despite the tremendous amount of effort put into it by the government simply because it had to be invented "from scratch", as no other nation had such technology).
The new Tarytean leaders enslaved all children under the age of five. When they did this, many Taryteans fled the region with children so that the Taryteans' plans would be spoiled. But they got to keep about 30 schools of kids anyway, and they were able to rely on what they called "Abortion" to purify their population. Abortion here referred to the systematic murder of children under the age of about five who were deemed too expensive to raise. The Taryteans were utilitarian Abortionists, who believed that Abortion was a tool given to them to exercise freely for the benefit of the nation. They did their best to keep the the low-level citizens from being reminded of the existence of this slaughter, which resulted in the annual death of about 76% of Tarytean children under age five, who were then eaten to save on the cost of food production. All children were forced to attend preparation, a sort of nursery school where they were watched closely and forced to undergo various tests while working their hardest to please the adults (the work they were given was much lighter than that given to adults, but they faced a very steep learning curve. If they could not keep up with the learning curve, they were deemed useless and killed.)
At times the Abortionists engaged in complete elimination of the entire male half of the population, which they called "bounty control". The extent of this gender abortion varied considerably from time to time from total emasculation to total indifference, in which case outworld males ("bounty") outnumbered females roughly 4 to 3 (without Abortion), as the other females were underground in the reproduction centers.
The Taryteans actively promoted racial purity among their own people, and from there became the leaders in sex selection and all succeeding innovations, which left the people of Taryte with a rigid conformity and a permanent Abortion regimen that condemned far more than the 50% of the babies born male to death each year. They were frustrated by their weak-willed cousins, the Pejos, and frequently were suspected by the Swamp of planning to invade the Swamp and kill all non-native residents. It was this xenophobia that largely kept the Taryteans from being welcome in their old homeland, Pejo Swamp.
The Taryteans were attempting to create the ultimate race of utilitarian human beings, trying to create people who would be extremely intelligent and ethical. Their plan for purifying their people was little different than some that had been used before. The Taryteans wanted their people to look, think, and act alike. Their clothes were symbols of their status, with the most powerful people wearing light blue clothes, and the most corrupt wearing a dusty pink. Red was a sign of evil to the Taryteans, and blue was a sign of good. In fact, they thought blue eyes were blasphemous, and would not allow any children with blue eyes to survive. In the end, they wanted their people to have grayish hair, light brown-gray skin, and gray eyes. They would also be much thinner than the Baebans. Thus their ideal body type was not much different than the ancient bodies of the first Pejo settlers, and in fact that was where they got their ideals. The Taryteans believed that Sapêpans were evil and were attempting to return their country to a pre-Meri state, believing that it would be more peaceful. It was not just Sapepa they wanted to eliminate, however; they wanted a race of people that was perfect in every way, and they did their best to produce a stable government that they hoped would last hundreds of years. They realized that they probably would not be successful, however, so they rushed into their Abortion project as quickly as they could, hoping to get as much Abortion done as possible in the likely case that they would be forced to stop early on.
Many Taryteans wanted to merge their race with the Sapêpans so that they could create a race of people that were both intelligent and work-minded (like the Taryteans) and able to have a high birth rate (like the Sapêpans). The mixing began shortly after 3696 when Taryteans began venturing into Sapêpa and bringing home male Sapêpans to rape. The majority of Taryteans, however, rejected these new mixed-race people.
Sapêpa began to criticize the Taryteans, claiming Taryteans were unnaturally obsessed with the ideal of purity; that is, after the early Taryteans had managed to survive many years of unjust aggression by ethnic "minorities" in the Swamp, they refused to discard their old mentality and applied it even when there was no danger from within their society, and thus the Taryteans unwittingly had embarked on a quest to purify their society by attacking various groups in the population that unlucky enough to be singled out as undesirable.
The Taryteans were strict especially in their racial policies, refusing to let anyone who appeared to them to have even a trace of non-Tarytean ancestry survive. Thus the majority of the population from their own original homeland, for example, would not have been allowed to live in Taryte. Furthermore, the Swamp's population explosion (which consisted almost entirely of Lenians and other non-native peoples) worried the Taryteans, and they in turn began to ponder embarking on a population explosion program of their own, and slowing down their Abortion program, but instead they focused their energies on attempting to overcome the Pejos militarily and calling for the establishment of a Pejo-Taryte unified government to protect them from what they felt was a flagrant violation of their rights as Taryteans to have theoretically equal power with the Pejos. Taryte was built on land owned by Laba (the Swamp's international government), but it was not part of the government of the Swamp and Laba had little control over it.
Sex selection was another strong trait in the Tarytean agenda; indeed it was a man who around the year 3626 had first dedicated himself to the idea of organized elimination of males. The Taryteans accepted this idea willingly, and immediately reduced their population by half as they had seen that, somewhat contrary to the original sentiment supplied by the firmly entrenched doctrine of female submission, girls were in fact slightly superior in their performance on the abortion tests - enough, the Taryteans theorized, to mandate the total elimination of the male section of the population in order to create a morally pure society of just a small portion of those who had survived because they were female.
With Abortion firmly in place, the Taryteans were pleased at the remarkable improvement in their society, though in fact this change had come about not so much because of the absence of undesirables from their society as the great overwhelming fear of elimination that all residents suddenly were forced to live with. Because the Taryteans, like the hated Thunderers in Sapêpa, equated the present world with the spiritual, the threat of extermination was literally equivalent to the threat of eternal damnation, and to be singled out for abortion or selection was no different than knowing one would spend eternity in Hell. (even Sapeepa realized that the type of people who survived in Taryte (females who were courageous and blindly obedient to the philosophical religion that had developed in the area) were more likely to be bound for heaven than the others; they simply denounced Abortion of the latter as a means to advance the former along the path to heaven because they felt it was not morally justified because it was both cruel and economically unsound.)
Taryte strove to create a sterile utopia, where everyone would be in perfect compliance with the fundamental tenets of Thunder philosophy, but with the rapid acceleration of the incredibly devastating Abortion project and the resulting liberality in death that was ingrained in the minds of the citizens the originally relatively pure ethics were quickly corrupted. Indeed, it was their very actions that promoted ritual purity, demonized most of natural society in favor of a small, supposedly more ethical section, and encouraged the domination of power by this small section over the rest of the population that in reality handed the country over to racially pure women who had taken the idea of punishing the evil to an extreme, as they were not "moderate" as the early Taryteans had affirmed in any way whatsoever, and were eager to abuse the majority of the population who had been unlucky enough to be born at the wrong time in the wrong place in order accomplish their own mortalistic agenda.
Tarytean citizens were encouraged, and sometimes forced, to dress appropriately at all times. Fancy clothes were banned, as the government wanted to save money on producing clothes by making them as cheap as possible. Degrees of formality were established, with the highest-level government officials receiving the best clothes (this was meant to encourage lesser citizens to strive for success in the government). Most girls were required to wear their hair plain and long under normal circumstances, and exceptions were made only for upper-level Taryteans to show their status.
The Taryteans never developed technology to control the harsh desert climate; however, they exploited the natural aridity that entirely dominated much of Taryte to force citizens to endure constant intense thirst; this also was intended to shape the Taryteans into living the Tarise mindset, as they were constantly reminded of the absence of water and animal life in the ideal world.
Orthodox Tarism demonized reliance on the body; it felt that the people most fit to govern a nation were those with physical disabilities or other impediments that would force them to rely on the power of machines. However, this belief was ignored by the early Taryteans, who elected strongly militaristic governments in defiance of the traditional Tarytean ideal of power through peace.
All children in Taryte were forced to attend preparation, a sort of nursery school where they were watched closely and forced to undergo various tests while working their hardest to please the government. If they could not keep up with the learning curve, they were deemed useless and killed.
This slavery instilled in the survivors a sense of fear of the government that stuck with them for life and made them readily obedient. However, it was not so much fitness the Taryteans were looking for as ethics; they correctly theorized that despite the constant rain of weapons from above that within a few decades Taryteans would have so much mechanical power that physical strength and even intelligence would be largely irrelevant, whereas an ethical mind would be very important for the future of the country (the development of non-military technology was surprisingly slow despite the tremendous amount of effort put into it by the government simply because it had to be invented "from scratch", as no other planet had such technology).
By the time the original power structure began to disappear, the entire ideal of pacifism had disappeared completely, and the new leaders came in waves, each more paranoid and wantonly destructive than the last. (On average, three of every four children born in Taryte were killed before their 5th birthday.)
Around 3700, Taryte and Sapeepa signed the Thunderstorm Treaty, which stated that their common philosophy of utilitarian technologism overruled their superficial differences. Their common goal was to be found in technology and the modification of humans to become like machines. This would eliminate the mental problems of both Sapeepans and Taryteans.
But in 3704, Sapêpa was seen as a major threat by one of Taryte's greatest armies, called Kyry (despite the alliance, there were still political conflicts between Sapeepa and Taryte). Kyry was the name given to the great child-killing army that dominated the whole landscape in Taryte. Kyry feared that if Sapêpa became too powerful, it would encroach on Taryte and try to destroy Kyry. So it began to ponder an all-out attack on Sapêpa.
The Taryteans had given up much of their military power to Kyry, and now they feared that it would make decisions they felt unwise. Yet the Taryteans still held to Kyry's decision because they felt that it was smarter and wiser than they, and they agreed to station themselves within Kyry to oversee the killing while the rest of the population traveled to Sapêpa to kill hospital patients.
But when the Tarytean soldiers began cruising into Sapêpa, their presence was detected by Sapêpan soldiers. The soldiers immediately attacked, and many Sapêpans volunteered to fight using their own bodies to help deflect the invaders. The Sapêpans won, and thus Kyry was frustrated as it saw that its strategy, which favored heavy Abortion and cleanliness, was in fact inferior to the Sapêpan strategy, where the population was bounteous and strong, or at least that it would perhaps be strategically superior for Kyry to change its method. But the people refused to change; instead they violated their own rules by attempting to dethrone Kyry and set up another mind for the machine to govern using even more puritanical standards that hated Sapêpa and condemned outsiders even more vehemently than before.
In 3707, Taryte invaded Sapêpa again, and this time they won. In 3710, Taryte had analyzed the last two battles and felt they knew what Taryte's weak and strong areas were, and they sought to amplify the strong spots, and let the weak spots remain, but at the same time try to prevent any enemy nation from taking advantage of the weak spots. They converted their population into one consisting almost entirely of children, although the females of these children grew tall and were able to reproduce as well as adults. They were trying to eliminate their reliance on and vulnerability to "magic". For reproduction, they used incubators, which they themselves had just recently invented. The invention of the incubator caused Nisundusa's power structure to collapse, since they no longer had a monopoly on child care. Nisundusa remained in the Thunder alliance, but they were far less powerful now than they had just recently been. Taryte's birthrate exploded upward, and the Tarises didn't see this as being a problem because they were doing it without the help of the Lenians. The Lenians also had lost a lot of power here, and the Taryteans came to worship incubators because they had given Taryte so much power. Taryte declared itself the new capital of Laba, and declared war on the Swamp. They invaded the Swamp and began to enslave the Pejos. They planned to eliminate all Lenian races, since their high birthrate was no longer an advantage. The Lenian Thunder leaders agreed to this plan, because they had promised to treat pro-Taryte Lenians very well, and use them as long as they were useful. But many of the less powerful Lenians considered switching their alliance to Pejo Swamp, which was now mostly Lenian, although the Thunderers were killing Lenians quickly.
The Tarytean children quickly consumed all of the natural resources of Taryte, and had to start stealing some from Pejo Swamp. They survived on "ralil" insects which had been created for Sapêpa by Nisundusa, and water which they found wherever they could. The Tarytean children were killing Pejos largely through starvation rather than combat. But even so, Pejo's armies were able to strengthen themselves and show the Taryteans that their war would take a very long time to complete.
By 3844, all of the Swamp had fallen to the Thunderers. There were still resistors all over the place, but they were weak. Almost all non-Lenian people in the Swamp now supported the Thunderers, because the Lenians were trying to kill them. The Lenians themselves were difficult for the Thunderers to kill by any means other than starvation or mass destruction of their habitat because of their power and flexibility. But the Thunderers had managed to conquer all of the Swamp's land and to push the Lenians into a few isolated pockets of swampland which the Thunderers had so far been unable to destroy because they were producing food for the Thunderers.
