To Slip the Surly Bonds of Earth: Upon the Further Shore

By Hugh Cameron

With small colonies established on the moon and on Mars, the Prometheus Group struggles to increase the number of people living off Earth before widespread breakdown of civilization occurs in the Western world and catastrophic numbers try to escape, leading inevitably to overcrowding and conflict, which would likely see the colonies fail. A major war on Earth would mean the loss of the ability to resupply space colonies, so establishing independence is a priority.
There is a continued search for children with extraordinary abilities to help with the space project. Some of the earliest of these children, now adults, realize unwillingly that space alone is not yet an option, and they will almost certainly have to fight a bloody rearguard action to retain, for a while, freedom in the free world to buy more time for the colonies. A major conflict on Earth is inevitable, and clearly, it will begin in Europe. The only question is, What will be the catalyst, and will it remain local or spread to involve the whole world?
The Prometheus Group believes that America is likely to remain a bastion of freedom, so it will be necessary to relocate from a dying Europe. The presidency of the US becomes of crucial importance for long-term survival. They feel it is crucial that the US stay out of the coming European civil war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796060829

Hugh Cameron

Hugh Cameron, born in Scotland, is an internationally known orthopedic surgeon who lives, works, and teaches in Toronto. He was one of the developers of modern joint replacement surgery. Most patients with artificial hips are walking on the technology he was instrumental in developing. He was the lead designer of many artificial hip and knee implants, some of which are currently being implanted. For more than thirty years, he and a group of surgeons crisscrossed the world teaching and demonstrating modern joint replacement surgery. He is the lead author of more than two hundred scientific papers and continues to publish, now mostly on issues related to pain. He has published two technical books and several novels of which this book is the fourth in a series about the decline and fall of the West and its possible redemption.

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Copyright © 2019 by Hugh Cameron.

Library of Congress Control Number:    2019914665

ISBN:             Hardcover               978-1-7960-6084-3

                       Softcover                 978-1-7960-6083-6

                       eBook                      978-1-7960-6082-9

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without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

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Rev. date: 09/24/2019

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CONTENTS

Abstract

Introduction

Chapter 1     The Munro Foundation

Chapter 2     Little Sister

Chapter 3     La Contessa

Chapter 4     Sandra

Chapter 5     Running Bear

Chapter 6     Quiet Bear

Chapter 7     Arizona

Chapter 8     The Legate

Chapter 9     Helga

Chapter 10   Miguel

Chapter 11   Isis

Chapter 12   Carmenlita

Chapter 13   Jacques

Chapter 14   The New Champion

Chapter 15   The Birth Of The Legion

Chapter 16   The Future

Acknowledgments

About the Author

ABSTRACT

With small colonies established on the moon and on Mars, the Prometheus Group struggles to increase the number of people living off Earth before widespread breakdown of civilization occurs in the Western world and catastrophic numbers try to escape, leading inevitably to overcrowding and conflict, which would likely see the colonies fail. A major war on Earth would mean the loss of the ability to resupply space colonies, so establishing independence is a priority.

There is a continued search for children with extraordinary abilities to help with the space project. Some of the earliest of these children, now adults, realize unwillingly that space alone is not yet an option, and they will almost certainly have to fight a bloody rearguard action to retain, for a while, freedom in the free world to buy more time for the colonies. A major conflict on Earth is inevitable, and clearly, it will begin in Europe. The only question is, What will be the catalyst, and will it remain local or spread to involve the whole world?

The Prometheus Group believes that America is likely to remain a bastion of freedom, so it will be necessary to relocate from a dying Europe. The presidency of the US becomes of crucial importance for long-term survival. They feel it is crucial that the US stay out of the coming European civil war.

INTRODUCTION

Western civilization is based on the inherently unlikely concept that each individual human has value. This strange belief, which arose nowhere else in the world’s history, instantiated into law that the poorest man in the kingdom had as much right as the king. In most civilizations, such a concept would have resulted in howls of laughter and derision.

From this arose the equally unlikely concept of private property—that a man’s house is his castle. The corollary is that a king could only enter a peasant’s house if the peasant gave permission. Of course, reality did not necessarily match theory, but episodes of surprising military enforcement of these beliefs, such as the trumpets in the marshes at the eyot of Runnymede, which led to the signing of the Magna Carta, and the trumpets round the scaffold at the dawning in Whitehall, when Cromwell’s forces led to the triumph of parliament in England and enthroned these concepts of justice. These Western concepts allowed equally unlikely people, such as Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther, to escape the usual fate of such thinkers at the gallows or at the stake. These men, in turn, were responsible for the greatest flowering and the greatest civilization the world had ever seen.

Virtually all organisms have within themselves telomeres, the seeds of their own destruction. Five great civilizations in China and five in Europe had previously collapsed into chaos. While the causes of this collapse are well understood, having been studied for centuries, they are generally ignored. The future, after all, is the future, and we live in the present, not the future. One way of looking at life is that we are all mortal and that death is the end, with no afterlife. If that is the general belief, then it is what is happening today that matters. This naturally results in the evolution of a society interested in living for the day only.

Politicians seeking power, of course, encourage this, promising free stuff to be paid for in the future. The future are the children, and they do not vote. The time frame for the politician, desperate for power to control his fellow human beings, narrows to the next election. Looming problems are problems for the future generations to solve.

Faced with the impossibility of altering the course of history, a collection of unlikely characters has come together. They call themselves the Prometheus Group after Prometheus, who brought the gift of fire down to Earth from the gods. Their goal is to make humanity a multiplanet species. The hope is that when the inevitable crash occurs, as Western civilization is accelerating toward the cliff’s edge, the colonies in space will be able to maintain a semblance of the belief of individualism, which is clearly dying out in the West.

The haunting fear of the Prometheus Group is takeover by the stifling hand of the government and the knowledge that their concepts are under relentless attacks by the various authoritarian ideologies. Based originally in Luxembourg, it became clear that a move to the United States would be necessary, not only for political stability but also as a base to launch the rockets to take them into space, eventually destined for settlement on Mars and possibly some moons. War is clearly coming in Europe, and it is unlikely that civilization will survive as it currently exists. A plunge back into the Dark Ages is the most likely outcome. The fear is that the USA and other countries will be pulled into that futile cauldron of war as they had been twice before in WWI and WWII.

The search for more genius children continues, as does the constant need for funding and for security. Young blood will be necessary to replace the aging members of the original group.

CHAPTER 1

The Munro Foundation

At the original meeting in Luxembourg, the originators of what they eventually called the Prometheus Project had discussed starting a search for extraordinarily clever children who would otherwise be overlooked by the world. They had to decide on a name for the project. Names like Einstein or Leibniz or Newton, the famous scientists of old, were considered and discarded. Also, the Luxembourg Institute was felt not appropriate as, even then, they felt that they would eventually have to move to the US as there really was no prospect of being able to launch rockets into space from Europe, which was in the process of self-destructing. Eventually, practicality ruled, and it became the Munro Foundation—after Neil Munro, a former heavyweight champion boxer, now a surgeon, who ran the residential school for the children they had found so far.

The type of advertising to be used was discussed, and eventually, it was decided that print, focused mainly on teachers especially in the poorer countries, was the way to go. Financial inducements were limited for the finders of the children because if too much were offered, it would attract scammers, who would swamp the system. The applicants would have to be scored in-country by a psychologist, who would also have to be paid carefully. He would have to be on a retainer and know that if he turned up with totally inappropriate candidates, he would be let go. Not only IQ but also the big five personality traits were known to be important. The committee examined various reports on these traits and decided that they needed creativity and conscientiousness, realizing that these were poles apart. They did not want empathy as that would tend to smother the other traits. Empathy was not going to help them in their quest to take mankind into space in what was effectively a lifeboat, which could hold a limited number of people.

No decision was written in stone, and after the first few children came through their system, changes might have to be made. Given the stiff criteria, it was not anticipated that many children would qualify, but they initially had no idea of the actual numbers. Additional building and expansion of the chateau in Luxembourg could be done if necessary.

La Contessa was the first significant child, and she was so quiet, clever, and delightful that all thought they had found a winning formula. Recruitment, however, turned out to be as difficult as they had originally anticipated. Some parents would not relinquish their children. Some children would not leave their parents. Some were too homesick and had to be returned. Some were unmanageable and disruptive, and they were sent home. Some of the initial children were just very clever but not as exceptional as they had hoped. These ended up going to the charter schools for very bright children rather than the selective homeschooling planned for the more brilliant.

La Contessa was everyone’s favorite. The next two exceptional girls arrived soon after her. One was from Rotherham, that dirty, depressing town in the north of England, which later became infamous for the so-called grooming gangs. Her name was Agnes Hinchcliff. She did not know who her father was, and her mother was a hopeless drug addict. She was age seven when a schoolteacher noticed the advertisement for the Munro Foundation in one of his teacher’s journals. He knew this child, from a dreadful background, was quite extraordinary and thus wrote to the foundation. A psychologist contacted the teacher, and arrangements were made to test the child. She came in at roughly 170 IQ. She also scored very low on empathy and high in conscientiousness. One of Manon’s people arrived to reward the teacher and negotiate with the mother, who was coming down off a high and wanted more drugs and, in exchange for very little money, happily signed a form indicating that her daughter would be attending a private residential school in Luxembourg, where the group was based.

The child packed her own few pitiful belongings in a bag given to her by the female assistant sent to collect her and left without looking back. She hugged the teacher, who had come along for the negotiations to try to ensure that all would be well with the child and who was the only person in her whole rotten world who had ever shown her any kindness. She ignored her mother as she left her house and entered the limousine, which was there to take her away.

The other child was Maria Martins, who was found on the island of São Miguel in the Azores. Her parents were honored that their child had been chosen to attend this mainland school. They were very proud of her. They had always felt she was exceptional. They were reluctant to take money. The only thing they asked was that they could see the child once or twice a year.

Maria, who spoke only Portuguese and a patois, or a form of it, initially had some trouble with communication but picked up English very quickly. The board had decided that the children should learn mainly English as this was the only truly international language. Living in Luxembourg, of course, they would also learn French and a form of German. They also learned some Japanese because Munro’s first wife had been Japanese, and in consequence, he and his mother learned to speak it. He wanted to ensure that his own children would not lose that ability and thought it would be useful for the other children also. Munro decided that since this was a new beginning for the children, they could call themselves anything they wanted. Munro felt one name was enough, but that was up to the child. Maria was quite happy with her own name.

Agnes Hinchcliff hated the name Agnes. She elected to call herself simply Hinchcliffe. Maria was a happy child, but Hinchcliffe was a stern little thing. She gloried in the fact that she was allowed to shoot. Initially, she was so small that the ninja gave her a .22 pistol. He had been sent by Munro’s first wife’s father as a bodyguard and had remained to look after the children of that marriage. In the household, he functioned not only as a protector but also as a martial arts teacher. When he told her it was an assassin’s gun, it mightily pleased her. She loved the ninja, that silent man of iron who saw in this damaged little child a kindred spirit. He taught all the children martial arts but only Hinchcliffe the use of the shuriken or throwing star. When she was older, he taught her all weapons, including knife throwing, nunchaku, and kendo or Japanese sword fighting. She loved war and violence. Jacques, the video journalist who worked with the group, had an extensive collection of movies and had no problems, or seemingly no problems, in obtaining copies of almost anything. No one mentioned the word pirate, and Jacques did not volunteer anything.

The 1964 movie Zulu was one of Hinchcliffe’s favorites, and she would loudly sing the song Men of Harlech, which the Welch Fusiliers sang when the Zulu impi attacked. Her other favorite movies were almost inevitably Clint Eastwood’s Westerns, especially as Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name. She made Munro promise that someday he would let her meet Clint. When she was with the ninja, he would only speak Japanese to her so that she learned it well enough that, together, they could watch the original Seven Samurai movie without subtitles.

She had one of these eidetic or photographic memories, which was quite spectacular. She was a voracious reader, especially of history, in particular military history, although as Munro would say, there really is no other history. Munro, who had always been interested himself and who had an excellent memory, would gently spar with her. It soon became apparent that she not only had read Decisive Battles of the Western World but she also remembered them. She knew that the Zulu at Isandlwana and Hannibal at Cannae had used the same battle plan.

The ninja taught her of the four hundred terrible years of civil war in Japan before the rise of the shogun, and he and she would sit under the sakura or cherry blossom trees that Kodama, Munro’s first wife, had had him plant at the chateau. Munro himself, coming originally from Scotland, also a feuding, warlike culture, adopted and loved the concept of the sakura blossom time, when the fragility of the falling flowers makes one ponder on the fleeting beauty and sorrow of life. How the young samurai had their brief flowering and died in their thousands. They would all sit under the cherry blossom trees and make up haikus, those famous three-line poems. Munro collected all the poems produced by the entourage. He felt someday they would have enough memorable ones to put into book form.

Hinchcliffe, mightily impressed by the ninja’s stories about Japan, took to writing short letters to Kodama, Munro’s first wife, who, because of homesickness, had returned to her homeland, asking her about various facets of Japanese history. Kodama did not quite know what to make of this fierce little girl. Tomiko-san, the Japanese policewoman and pistol shooter, when she first met Hinchcliffe years later, recognized her being similar, if not a soul mate. The child actually managed to finagle an invitation from Kodama to visit her in Japan. Kodama’s father liked the little girl, who by this time spoke excellent Japanese. She wanted to see Edo Castle and some other places she had read about, especially Hirosaki, where the last samurai battle had taken place. Munro had told her how stunningly beautiful Hirosaki was in April, with the old castle grounds full of both sakura trees and magnolias both flowering at the same time.

Hinchcliffe had been taught kendo by the ninja. She wanted to learn to fence. When offered a choice of weapons, she picked the saber, dismissing as sissy the foil and epee. When visiting Don Pedro, a great friend of Munro’s who lived in Spain, they took her to a bullfight. Immediately, she saw it for what it was and loved the skill and courage of the matador. She thought the moment of truth, when the bullfighter went in over the horns to kill the bull, was the most lyrically beautiful thing she had ever seen.

Maria, in contrast, loved music; in particular, she liked the haunting fados of her own country. At a young age, she sang the songs of love and loss, hope and despair. She also loved the songs of Edith Piaf, which were equally tragic. This was surprising because she was not a sorrowful child. Jacques saw an opportunity, and at an early age, he had recordings done of her singing. He managed to establish a small market in France for the Piaf songs and got a foothold in both Portugal and Brazil for the fados. He thought he could have taken her singing career much further, but Maria had little interest in the exhausting life of a troubadour. She would sing at selected meetings if asked. Her records had a slow but steady sale. One of the surprising places, or maybe it was not so surprising, was in the camps at the mines owned and run by Elizabeth, Munro’s second wife, and among Elizabeth’s father’s roughnecks at the oil wells. Lonely men recognize agonizing songs of loss and sorrow even if the language is different.

The girls, of course, with their high intelligence, simply excelled in scholastics and, at an early age, began to take university courses. The committee had decided that a degree in engineering was probably the basic requirement. Manon, a board member who was Munro’s business partner and who ran a growing conglomerate, also made sure they studied accounting and employed them as interns in her numerous and growing businesses. Because they were chosen largely for their mathematics excellence, they simply raced through these courses. After that, they could do anything they wanted or nothing further academic. It was up to them.

Both Maria and Hinchcliffe grew into beautiful young women, aided by a vigorous exercise program since they were little children, with some orthodontics and some minor plastic surgery here and there as required. Munro could not see any reason not to help nature. Once they became old enough, they learned how to dress from Edith’s fashion boutique, co-owned by Manon and her partner and former employee, Edith.

Both children went home to visit six months after they first moved to Luxembourg. Maria thoroughly enjoyed herself. Her family and her neighbors were proud of her success. She brought some of her new recordings with her, which they played in the local taverns. These places asked her to sing, which she did with great pleasure. She never forgot how good her people were to her when she compared her stories to the majority of the other girls. In later life, she bought her parents a larger house, but not so large that it would make anyone jealous. When she came back periodically to visit the village, and indeed the island, there was always a celebration.

Hinchcliffe simply did not want to go home. Munro felt she should but sent the ninja with her as he was her favorite companion. It was a disaster. The mother had been told the child was coming but either did not care or, more likely, was simply high on drugs and had forgotten. When the ninja and the child turned up at her mother’s small semidetached state-owned house, it was early afternoon. The front door was open. They went in. Three men were sitting in the living room, drinking beer. The ninja asked where the mother was. The men sniggered and indicated the stairs up to the second floor. As they mounted the stairs, the ninja heard noises he recognized. He tried to stop the child, but she evaded him, ran up the stairs, and went in.

Her mother was naked and on her hands and knees on the bed. One man was thrusting into her doggy style, and she had another man deep in her mouth. Maybe she saw the child, or maybe she did not, but the men did. The man in her mouth pulled his organ out, waved it at the girl, and, pulling her mother’s head back by the hair, buried himself in her again. The man in her from the rear also pulled out and showed the child his penis, which he pumped with his hand. He motioned the girl to come closer. The ninja pulled her back, and they went down the stairs.

At the bottom of the stairs, the other three men were waiting, grinning. Two of them grabbed the girl’s arms.

Come on, little girl. We fuck you now, and they pulled her back toward the living room, one of them opening his fly and taking out his erect penis. The other confronted the ninja.

Go home now, old man. We keep the girl.

The ninja, whose shoes were actually steel-toed, said nothing but kicked him very hard in the testicles. The man screamed, seized himself with both hands, and fell on the floor. As the second man turned to look, the ninja broke his nose with a straight right karate punch to the face. He let go of the girl, who, with one arm freed, twisted away from the third man. The ninja, in one smooth motion, took the third man’s exposed arm, brought it round against the joint into full extension, and broke the elbow with his knee. Doubled over, the man screamed. Holding the broken arm in one hand and the back of the man’s head in the other, the ninja jerked him upright and ran him face-first into the doorjamb. He collapsed. The broken-nosed man faced the ninja with his fists up, but a roundhouse kick to the side of the head knocked him down. The ninja then kicked him a couple of times in the face, producing massive facial fractures. The first man was still on the floor, moaning, holding his groin with both hands. The ninja kicked him in the ribs so hard he almost lifted him off the ground. They heard the ribs break, and the man screamed again. His face was turned toward him, so the ninja kicked him in the mouth, breaking and dislocating his jaw and spraying out several teeth.

He took the girl by the hand, and they walked quietly out the door. Hinchcliffe never went back to Britain. She asked Munro to stop giving her mother any money. If