There Will Be War Volume II

by Jerry Pournelle

  “But, Father, you can’t condone what he’s trying to do. Isn’t adultery a sin for him, as well as the rest of us?”

  The old priest raised his hands in gentle reproof. “Now, Liam, I did not say that I condoned the O’Meara’s actions. No doubt he is as much a sinner as the rest of us.”

  “Well—couldn’t you excommunicate him, or something?”

  Father Constantine smiled patiently.

  “Excommunication is the Holy Father’s business, son, and I haven’t had word from His Holiness for many a long year.”

  Liam’s lower lip protruded stubbornly. “You could at least refuse him the sacraments.”

  Father Con frowned. His eyes narrowed in unspoken rebuke. He said, “Liam, the church is for sinners. If the O’Meara is our biggest sinner, he must have the biggest need of it.”

  Liam got to his feet. “Then you can’t do anything for me?”

  The priest washed his hands in agitation. “My son, although it is no business of yours, because of your involvement I will tell you that I have spoken my mind frequently and forcibly to the Lord of Barley Cross. And I will tell you that, in his own eyes, his deeds are justified. Beyond that I will not go. If you are still unsatisfied, I can only recommend that you seek an interview with the O’Meara himself.”

  Liam shambled from the grey stone presbytery, anger mounting inside him. His resolve grew firm. No one was willing to help him defy the tyrant. The O’Meara had ruled for so long they were inured to his tyranny. He would follow Father Con’s advice. An interview—on different lines to those the priest envisaged!

  Liam McGrath turned his steps towards Barra Hill. In the old, dangerous days, tradition had it, the Fist had been used as a sanctuary when the village was attacked. Certainly he remembered spending days in the castle as a child, playing in its grounds in summer. And he knew a way to get up there unobserved…

  In the great dining hall of O’Meara’s Fist, the Lord of Barley Cross caroused with his henchmen.

  The O’Meara himself slumped in a frayed armchair before a smouldering turf fire, a glass of poteen on the bare boards beside him. In a chair across the hearth, Denny Mallon, M.D., hunched like a shriveled embryo, clutching his glass tightly. Kevin Murphy, the vet, and General Larry Desmond shared a broken-backed settee and a half bottle. On a stool on the pegged rug, knees skirt-covered and primly closed, hunched beneath her chin, Celia Larkin, M.A., sipped a cup of herb tea brewed specially for her.

  The schoolmistress put down the teacup carefully onto the saucer on the rug. “Did you have any trouble with young McGrath, Larry?”

  General Desmond eased a leg over the end of the sofa. He stared reflectively into his glass. “Ah, no, Celia. Andy McGrath is a good man. He’d march off a cliff edge if I so ordered. I gave him the job of breaking the news. And Tom O’Connor’s a biddable man. We’ll have no trouble with either of them.”

  Dr. Denny Mallon stirred in the depths of the old chair. “How did the women take it? I think it’s getting harder for them to accept when it hits their own kids.”

  The general snorted with laughter. “Bedam—I believe they are both dead keen on it. Don’t they both want a grandchild to cosset? And do you think that either of them is fussy how it is managed?”

  “How about the youngsters?” persisted the schoolmistress. “Are they accepting it?”

  The general looked less comfortable. “Andy tells me the lad was upset. He sent him in to talk to his mother. The girl is level-headed. She will do as Tom and Brigit tell her.”

  “Do you think the Master should attend the reception?”

  “Ah, no. Let’s keep his ugly mug out of it for as long as possible.” The general grinned placatingly at the O’Meara. “I’ve sent down the usual gift.” He swirled the colorless fluid gently in his glass. “It’s amazing the influence a bar of real, old-fashioned toilet soap has on the opinion of a nice woman. I reckon we can celebrate another eighty or ninety nuptials before we get down to the carbolic.”

  The O’Meara opened his eyes. He said plaintively, “Do you ever get the feeling you’re invisible? All very fine for you schemers—but it’s me is the fall guy.” He turned to the schoolmistress. “Do I have to go through with it? After all, the lad may be…”

  Celia Larkin interrupted him incisively. “Let be, Pat. We get this from you every time there’s a wedding. And it won’t make a damned bit of difference. You’ll do it if we have to hold you down.”

  The Master of the Fist leaned forward to pack a fresh turf at the back of the fire. “One day I’m going to disappoint you all. Ask Denny. I’ve been getting these pains in my chest. ’Twouldn’t surprise me, if, one time…”

  Denny Mallon waved a dismissive glass. “Whisht, Pat! I’ll give you a couple of pills. The exercise will do you good.”

  “If only you knew,” sighed the O’Meara, “what I have to put up with. Coaxing them, turning my back, apologizing, listening to them cry themselves to sleep…”

  Patrick O’Meara, ex-Grenadier Guardsman, had altered in the years since his strategic retreat in a stolen Chieftain tank from the burning docks of Belfast to a more defensible position in his native Connemara. Now, discipline sat heavy on his shoulders.

  “Maybe I was wrong,” he groaned. “Maybe we should have gone underground.”

  Big Larry Desmond tilted the bottle recklessly above his glass. “If the Lord had intended us to live in burrows, He’d have given us long ears and little furry tails.”

  “Maybe we should have stuck to the cities?”

  “Nyet!” said Kevin Murphy, who had read Marx in his youth. “The Kelly boy took two pigs down to Galway Town last week and came back witless. The dead are lying in the street there, he tells me.”

  “You can criticize Galway Town,” protested the O’Meara, “but we don’t make progress.”

  Celia Larkin straightened her back. “What do you expect? No one is going to invent a turf-driven aeroplane. Nor produce vacuum cleaners from cow pats. But we have twenty-four children attending school. And, if you think you can claim all the credit, you can think again. That Kelly boy was never a ten-month child. He’s their own, I’m sure.”

  “Then why don’t they produce more children?”

  She looked shocked. “It isn’t for us to be prying into private matters! We interfere enough by insisting on your droit du seigneur.” She turned to the general. “Please give that Kelly boy an escort if he has to go outside the village in future.” She sighed. “God forgive me—one could almost wish he’d grow up promiscuous.”

  Kevin Murphy rumbled indistinctly. “Nothing wrong with that idea.”

  She shook her head sadly. “Kevin, your farmyard solutions won’t do for us. Children are entitled to their own parents, just as parents are entitled to their own children.” She removed her rimless spectacles and polished them on the hem of her sleeve. “Remember the ecology freaks? Predicting what we would run out of—oil, coal, gas, living room, fresh air. Never thought we’d run out of people.”

  Denny Mallon exhaled clouds of smoke. “I thought the dark-skinned races might have done better. But their crops are letting them down. Something to do with radiation affecting bacteria and viruses, which in turn affects the plants. I caught a broadcast from Athlone years ago—when we had the radio,” he added apologetically.

  Celia Larkin’s lips tightened. “If it is the ultraviolet. If those clever professors were so sure, why wasn’t something done when they first discovered what was happening?”

  Denny Mallon sucked imperturbably on his pipe. “The ozone layer never stopped all the ultraviolet. Can anyone know how much radiation it takes to cripple a gene?”

  Kevin Murphy scratched his scalp. “Sure— ’tis a statistical thing. Genes are getting hit by radiation all the time. Suddenly, for some reason, the percentage of hits tips the scale from acceptability to calamity.”

  General Desmond reached again for the bottle. “Statistics be damned—it’s our cloudy Connemara skies that I’m gratef
ul for.”

  Kevin Murphy accepted the bottle from the General. He said, “The beasts seem to hold their own. Maybe it is Larry’s clouds, or maybe they are not as sensitive as us. But we’re getting enough births to keep the herds and flocks going.” He grinned at the Lord of Barley Cross. “Be grateful I don’t need your services in my department.”

  Celia Larkin frowned. “That’s enough of your lewd talk, Kevin. If we can hold on long enough, Barley Cross might start producing radiation-resistant kids. Or the ozone layer might yet repair itself.” The shriveled, childless spinster pulled out a frayed handkerchief and blew her nose loudly. Sunlight glinted on her spectacles as she raised her head. “But, in any Goddamned case, I can go to my grave hoping that, in the years to come, if there is the faintest chance of things getting going again, we simpletons of Barley Cross will have done our bit to supply a few of the hands and heads that will be needed to get this poor, sorrowing planet progressing again.”

  There was silence for a moment.

  Then General Desmond put down his glass and said, “Amen to that.”

  “Amen,” mumbled veterinary surgeon Kevin Murphy, scowling at no one in particular.

  “Amen,” whispered Denny Mallon, M.D., staring into the empty bowl of his pipe.

  The Lord of Barley Cross got to his feet. He consulted the old wind-up watch he had used since batteries ran out. “Well, madame and gentlemen, if anything is going to happen, it must be soon. There is only an hour to the wedding. If you will excuse me, I’d better be getting a bath and a shave. Can’t let the future Mrs. McGrath see me in this state.” He jerked a thumb at the servant’s door. “Shout for Michael if you want another bottle.”

  “You shout, if you want us,” said the general.

  The Lord of Barley Cross pushed stockinged feet into slippers and shuffled towards the door. He paused to stare sourly at his henchmen. “If only I hadn’t promised Celia thirty years ago—” He sighed. “You’ll be flogging O’Meara along until he drops, I suppose?”

  The doctor’s eyes gleamed puckishly. “We might let you off the hook when you’re eighty.”

  A metal arm on the wall moved from the vertical to the horizontal, causing a bell to tinkle. The general reached out and reset it.

  “There’s your signal, Pat.”

  The O’Meara shrugged. “I’ll be off then to face the music.”

  He opened the door of his bedroom and went in. An arm encircled his neck, another his chest. The tip of a knife pricked his shirt front.

  “Easy now, son,” he grunted, tugging at both arms, striving to maintain his balance.

  “If you think you can beat me to it—go ahead,” he invited. “But I warn you, I don’t need to count up to ten before I kill a man. And, no matter who gets who, the sound of a shot will bring those fellers out there running. If that happens, the man to watch is Larry Desmond— he’s a killer.”

  Liam felt the moisture filling his eyes. “You—you bastard!”

  “Ah, no!” The O’Meara seemed genuinely surprised. “It’s you that is the bastard.”

  Liam blinked furiously. “Don’t call me a bastard. I’m not planning to sleep with your wife.”

  The O’Meara tossed his socks into a corner. He picked up the gun and clicked the chamber round thoughtfully.

  “I have no wife with whom you might sleep, Liam. And a bastard is precisely what you are. Your mother was not married to your father.”

  Liam quivered, as though an electric current galvanized his limbs. “Put away the gun, and I’ll show you how I feel about that statement.”

  The O’Meara laughed. “Liam—poor old Flinty Hagan couldn’t have fathered you. He lost the necessary equipment in a raid on Oughterard a year before he was married. We all kept quiet about it because he was a sensitive man, and we thought a great deal of him.”

  Liam’s lips trembled. The old goat was trying to provoke him, but he wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing him lose his temper. He said, “Then why did my mother agree to marry Flinty?”

  The O’Meara sat silent for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision.

  “Well now, Liam. We seem to have arrived at what you might call the moment of truth. You have asked me a question which I would rather not answer. If you insist on an answer, I’m afraid we must escalate our discussion to a more formal level.”

  Liam let his lip curl scornfully. “Don’t fence with me. Let’s have a straight word out of you.”

  The O’Meara nodded in agreement. “So be it, son. Up to this moment you could have walked out of this room any time you wanted, and no hard feelings on my part. Now, as I warned you, you’ve promoted our chat to a really serious plane—that is, namely, your examination for citizenship. Some lads never learn about this test. Others, quite naturally, avoid it. But you have headed straight for it. So, now, I’m going to answer your question. And also provide you with some additional information that you haven’t asked for. Your response, after due consideration, will govern whether you leave this room vertically or horizontally—and remember I am the judge.

  “Here goes. Your Mam married Flinty Hagan because Barley Cross needed children, and at the time Flinty was the only available bachelor.”

  “But you said Flinty couldn’t…”

  “Don’t interrupt, son, or I might make a hasty decision. Just listen. Very few men in Barley Cross can father a child. The reason goes back a long way, and it isn’t their fault. Responsible adults in the village are aware of this and have accepted the solution the people out there in my dining room thought up. The solution is that I— because I’m a freak, being fertile—I father most of the children in Barley Cross, but their legal fathers get the credit.

  “That, briefly, is how our village has managed to remain a living, functioning community, with enough people to do all the work required to keep it going. Now, Liam, if you wish to graduate into a citizen of Barley Cross, you must accept our solution, and keep quiet about it. That doesn’t mean you can’t talk it over with your Eileen. But it does mean you don’t discuss it in front of the children. Because the way a child grows up governs how he or she acts as an adult. And we want the children of Barley Cross to believe that the world is a sane and happy place where everyone gets his own Daddy and Mammy. And we hope that the child will be able to adjust to our madhouse when he is old enough to understand it. It also means that you don’t gab about it in the village or do anything which might inadvertently destroy the illusion we have built up so painstakingly. And it means that your Eileen comes up here tonight, like every bride in the last thirty years.”

  The O’Meara paused, rubbing his jaw reflectively. “Those are the facts. Don’t go shouting for help. No one is going to rush in to save you from the crazy O’Meara. Those gentlemen outside have an idea that you might be in here. And they realize that I am making a reasonable attempt to dispel any objections you may hold to the way the village is run. What they do not know, are my methods of persuasion. But it has all happened before, and they have confidence in me.”

  The O’Meara straightened his back. He raised his arm. The gun pointed at Liam’s breastbone.

  “You may have qualms about accepting our solution. Your views on putative incest, for instance, may not correspond with ours. The subject is not open for debate. You may walk from this room a responsible adult, or you may be carried out a dead juvenile. Now, sir—how do you say?”

  Liam’s eyes had been growing wider and wider. “But, if Flinty Hagan wasn’t my father—?”

  “Keep going,” urged the O’Meara. “You are getting warm.”

  Liam McGrath fingered his own hooked nose, as if he had just become aware of it. He eyed the similar protuberance on the face of the elderly man sitting barefoot and shirtless on the bed. Suddenly he grinned.

  “Put up the gun, Da, or you’ll have me late. A citizen ought to be on time for his own wedding.”

  Editor's Introduction to:

  SUPERIORITY

  by Arthur C. Clarke<
br />
  Arthur Clark swore that he would not write another book after FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE. Why should he? He doesn’t need money, and the Republic of Sri Lanka (formerly the colony of Ceylon) has declared him a national treasure as well as Chancellor of its national university.

  However, his fans kept after him to write the sequel to 2001, and Arthur made a discovery: small computers make writing easy. Arthur has an Archive computer (naturally he calls it Archie).

  When Arthur was on tour promoting 2010 we held a small reception for him here at Chaos Manor. He was surprised to see a copy of Archie. I don’t have an Archive computer, but their keyboard is so nice that we’ve adapted it to the CompuPro machines I work with.

  Archie not only allowed Dr. Clarke to turn in the manuscript to 2010 nearly a year early, but has, by his own admission, made letter writing fun again. In past years, old friends of Clarke’s counted themselves lucky to receive a postcard every couple of years; now he’s sending five page letters. He’s sure it isn’t going to last, but he’s enjoying himself.

  The small computer revolution goes on, and it’s changing the world. The Falklands War demonstrated that. To win in today’s conflicts, you must have good soldiers, but you must also have high technology weapons.

  Of course there can be too much of a good thing…

  SUPERIORITY

  by Arthur C. Clarke

  In making this statement—which I do of my own free will—I wish first to make it perfectly clear that I am not in any way trying to gain sympathy, nor do I expect any mitigation of whatever sentence the Court may pronounce. I am writing this in an attempt to refute some of the lying reports broadcast over the prison radio and published in the papers I have been allowed to see. These have given an entirely false picture of the true cause of our defeat, and as the leader of my race’s armed forces at the cessation of hostilities I feel it my duty to protest against such libels upon those who served under me.