I fought against the purge. There are things I’ve done that I am not proud of, but I am very proud that I fought against that.
I can’t recall which scythe began that odious campaign to glean only those who were born mortal, but it spread throughout each regional Scythedom, a viral idea in a post-viral time. “Shouldn’t those who were born to expect death be the sole subjects of gleaning?” went the popular wisdom. But it was bigotry masquerading as wisdom. Selfishness posing as enlightenment. And not enough scythes argued—because those born in the post-mortal age found mortal-borns to be too uncomfortably different in the way they thought, and in the way they lived their lives. “Let them die with the age that bore them,” cried the post-mortal purists in the Scythedom.
In the end it was deemed a gross violation of the second commandment, and all those scythes who participated in the purge were severely disciplined—but by then it was too late to undo what had been done. We lost our ancients. We lost our elders. We lost our living lifeline to the past. There are still mortal-borns around, but they hide their age and their history, for fear of being targeted again.
Yes, I fought the purge—but the Thunderhead did not. By its own law of noninterference in scythe affairs, it could do nothing to stop the purge. All it could do was bear witness. The Thunderhead allowed us to make that costly mistake, leaving the Scythedom to wallow in its own regret to this very day.
I often wonder, should the Scythedom run entirely off the rails and decide to glean all of humanity in a grand suicide of global gleaning, would the Thunderhead break its noninterference law and stop it? Or would it bear witness again as we destroyed ourselves, leaving nothing behind but a living cloud of our knowledge, accomplishments, and so-called wisdom?
Would the Thunderhead grieve our passing, I wonder? And if so, would it grieve as the child who has lost a parent, or as the parent who could not save a petulant child from its own poor choices?
—From the gleaning journal of H.S. Curie