THE MOUNTAINS OF WESTERN CHINA WERE AS REMOTE
and forbidding as any in the world and impossible to monitor or
control effectively. There were no permanent natives to the region;
the nearest settlements were far down the slopes and forty
kilometers or more from the spot where the raiding party now stood,
many of its members equipped with breathing apparatus to help them
in the rarefied atmosphere where split seconds might mean living or
dying. Colonel Chung, the old pro soldier in dark-green battle
uniform, heavy boots, and cap, had a cigar stuck out of the side of
his mouth. He needed no breathing gear; he sat in a skimmer, a
dark, saucer-shaped craft that was rigged for totally silent
running. It hovered there in the air while many others, deployed
around the seemingly unbroken high cliffs of the mountains,
disgorged soldiers and equipment. Chung was thankful that the spot
was so remote; here he was not handicapped by Cultural Zone
restrictions and could use his best and most modern equipment.
“They are good, I’ll give them that,” the
colonel remarked for the benefit of anyone who could hear him there
in the command module section of the skimmer. “I can’t
imagine where they even got their energy sources up here, let alone
how they shielded them.”
Song Ching looked at the gray-purple rock walls and understood
what he meant. To go to these lengths, this group must have had
something really important to hide and work on, something that,
like all technology, required power. Satellites overhead could
monitor even the smallest differences in temperature, pressure, and
energy below, even through the densest clouds, and when they
spotted something in an unauthorized spot, they immediately flagged
security on the ground. Technologists’ cells were rare in
this day and age, but the few who remained were the best.
She was the sort of woman men fantasized about: small but
perfectly proportioned, her face one of classical Han beauty, her
gestures and movements somehow always erotic. Her looks masked her
extreme intelligence: Her IQ off the measurable scale, and she was
an authentic genius whose mind worked so fast and on so many levels
it often seemed more computerlike than human. She was not without
flaws; as the oldest child of the chief administrator of the Han
district, she was spoiled rotten, and her intellectual and physical
development had not been accompanied by any real emotional growth;
there she was almost childlike, a situation her parents kept
excusing because of her age, although she had just turned
seventeen.
The colonel did not like having her there, but she’d been
forced upon him by his superiors. They didn’t know what this
cell could be working on, and they needed her fine mind to figure
it out before it was either destroyed or confiscated. Others might
have done as well, but as the daughter of the chief administrator
she had pulled her own strings to get here. It was an escape,
however temporary, from her luxurious prison, from the reality she
didn’t particularly like.
She did, however, appreciate the irony of her being here, for
she herself was the result of illegal technologists, her looks and
her intelligence achieved through elaborate genetic manipulation.
Like all the administrators, not just on Earth but throughout the
Community, her father chafed at the restrictions placed upon him
and his power and dreamed of some sort of end run. His own solution
was an attempt, at great risk to his position and his life, to
breed a superior line that might eventually be bright enough and
fast enough to figure a way out of the trap the human race had
woven for itself. Song Ching appreciated the goal and approved of
it, but she did not like her own role, which was not to find that
solution but to breed those who might.
“Burners locked on!” someone reported over the
ship-to-ship channel. “All ships in place, troopers in
position and shielded. Awaiting orders to proceed.”
“Commence firing,” Colonel Chung ordered without
hesitation.
Immediately the five skimmers rose to preset positions, now
visible to whatever lookout devices the cell might employ, and
opened fire with bright rays of crimson and white that struck the
rock face and began to cut through it. Ships’ computers now
had control, and once penetration had been achieved, the five
attack skimmers moved in an eerie ballet, cutting through the
imposing rock face as if it were butter.
Just before the circle was completed, a different skimmer rose
and shot out a purple tongue of energy which struck the center of
the cutout, and as the entire area was separated the thick
purple ray receded, pulling the rock cutout with it.
Suddenly revealed was a honeycomb of tunnels melted through the
rock. It reminded Ching of a glass-sided ant farm, although there
did not appear to be any “ants” here.
Now the troops, two hundred of them, sprang from cover on ledges
and slopes opposite the target and flew into the air using
null-gravity backpacks and small compressed-air steering jets.
“It’s very large,” she noted to the
colonel. “I wonder why anybody who built something that large
wouldn’t defend it.”
“They’ll defend it,” he assured her in an
absent tone, his attention on his status screens and on the view
out the control port. “When they find that their escape exits
are blocked, they will defend or surrender.”
Almost in answer to his comments, there was the sound of distant
but large explosions which echoed through the valleys and passes of
the high mountains, and from some of the revealed tunnels came
large puffs of gray and black smoke.
Over the ground-to-air intercom came lots of shouts, curses, and
screams. The colonel cut in.
“Ground, do you require reinforcements at this
point?” he asked calmly, as if he were some distant observer
of a football game between two teams he hardly cared about.
“Captain Li here,” came a thin response. “They
detonated explosives along the main tunnel walls leading to a main
chamber. Only a few casualties, but we’re having to burn our
way through. Give us ten minutes, then send in second wave.
Acknowledge.”
“Acknowledged,” the colonel responded. “Stand
by, second wave. Ten minutes.”
Song Ching stared at the colonel and wondered how he could
maintain such a calm demeanor. She herself was feeling a tremendous
rush of excitement, and she only regretted that she wasn’t
allowed down there to experience it firsthand. She longed for the
real thrill, the adrenaline rush, her life on the line, her mind
and body against another’s . . .
She was paying the price for stealing the skimmer when
she’d been just fifteen and zooming along the rivers,
panicking the peasants in the fields, going under bridges and
zooming full speed at low levels through valleys between the hills.
She’d finally blown two enercells and had to make a glide-in
landing in a rice paddy, and it had been the most fun she’d
ever had. However, the cost to her father in favors granted,
promises extracted, and all-out trouble to cover up the incident
had clamped the lid on. Even then, totally covering it up had been
possible only because no one believed that a fifteen-year-old girl
with no pilot’s training could take up and fly something as
complex as a skimmer.
“I want to go down there, now,” she told the
colonel.
He gave a low chuckle. “You know better.”
“I said I want to go now!” she snapped.
“Arrange it!”
“I am not one of your servants or your parents’
functionaries,” he responded coolly. “You did
everything possible to put yourself here, so you are under my
command and you take my orders. I do not take yours.”
She grew angry. “How dare you speak to me that
way? I will have you cleaning out toilets in the
paddies!”
“No, you will not. You will sit back and calm down and do
as I say or you will be sent back and severed immediately from this
operation. Your parents briefed me on you and gave me full
authority in this matter. They want me to kick you out, if
you must know. You are presenting me with an excuse and a
temptation I find difficult to resist.”
“No one speaks to me in that way! What do you want me to
do? Scream rape?”
He was unfazed. “A mindprint would clear me and indict
you, and since it would be in another jurisdiction because of your
rank, your father couldn’t get rid of that evidence. You are
already coming close to the inevitable day when you will commit an
act that your family cannot cover up or patch over. I am too busy
for this. You have a choice. Go back over there and shut up, or
persist in any way and I will have you restrained and taken back
where you—not me—will bear responsibility for delaying
or imperiling this operation. One more word and you may complain to
your father at a later date, but it will not get you down
there!”
She was furious, but she wanted desperately to get down. Clearly
he could and would do what he said, and she had no choice but to
sit and sulk. She would get him, though. She would make him burn,
somehow, somewhere, someday.
It took almost four hours to clear and secure the technologist
cell. At the end, forty-seven had been killed and almost twice that
number wounded, but all but two of the three hundred twenty-four
technologists had been killed. Those who were not killed in the
defense committed suicide, taking their families with them. The
only two survivors were young boys who had been felled in an
explosion and had been presumed dead by their own. They would be
taken to Center for interrogation and disposition. The rest could
hardly be blamed for choosing death. There were punishments far
worse than death for people like them.
Finally, when the whole place was scanned and the remaining
booby traps were dismantled, the signal was given for the follow-up
technicians to come on in, and that included Song Ching.
It had been bitter cold outside, and the tunnels were not much
warmer, although they offered protection from the outside winds.
She entered wearing a sable coat and parka and matching fur pants
and fur-lined boots, but she was still cold. “Didn’t
they have any heat in here?” she griped.
“Plenty,” one of the officers responded. “They
actually had a home-built fusion reactor in a chamber well below
here, although they had air locks on the tunnels to keep any
temperature changes from registering on the monitor surveys. Had it
rigged to blow, too, but we got lucky and intercepted the destruct
system. Like most amateurs they never expected to be hit from the
rock face side; they thought in terms of defending from attack
through their entry and exit tunnels. Their big blowup was rigged
right along where we came in. Of course, cutting the mains here
also cut the master systems throughout the complex, so no real
heat, and we have to supply our own lights. We don’t dare
restore that reactor. It’s an odd design, and we might still
blow it out of ignorance.”
She was led into a large chamber that was clearly a high-tech
laboratory. There were a number of small independent computers
there, as well as test areas and hardware assembly divisions. It
was impressive; she had never seen or heard of anything like it
before.
There was a vast supply of data storage modules that would have
to be examined and a fair number of actual books, which was
something of a surprise. They appeared to be mostly facsimiles of
ancient texts in a number of languages, and those she examined were
totally unfamiliar to her, although she saw a few patterns in the
choice of subjects.
The assemblage was all the more amazing because almost all of it
was modified from stock items and therefore had to be stolen from
somewhere—yet that was supposed to be impossible. Every
single computer and even every single module was coded and tracked
at all times by the Master System. Even disconnecting or moving
such things without permission would be flagged and investigated
immediately. Flowers of Heaven! There were even three
mindprint devices here! Those could not even be
operated except by the Master System!
She examined everything thoroughly. A brown-clad Special Team
was there now, working swiftly and efficiently, taking her
direction. The Special Team was expert at doing just one
thing—diverting parts of illicit technology from such finds
without their activities showing on the visual or scan records.
These were the same experts who could make certain that a chief
administrator, or his daughter, had no trace of this on their
mindprints to flag the Master System. The colonel placed far too
much faith in mindprint evidence for his own good, Song Ching
thought smugly.
The brown-clad workers were wizards at what they did, but the
risk was very high, even more to them than to their employers. They
were, however, richly rewarded for their skills.
Just as the administrators and regents had discovered holes in
the supposedly static system over the centuries, so, too, did the
technologists here find holes no one else had ever dreamed of. To
divert this much, all undetected, and build a complex this grand,
remaining undetected for who knew how long—years,
certainly—was an incredible achievement. It was her primary
job to evaluate what the brown troopers should deal with before the
mass was turned in to Master System, but after that the real
challenge would be to discover what they discovered and whether or
not it would be of any use to her family. She would also love to
know how they’d managed all this, but to trace it all back
without tripping any flags would be far more risky than this.
She used a small hand-held device to check out storage modules
at random. She couldn’t read them, but she could read their
directories if they weren’t severely encoded and choose which
ones she’d need herself. As for the books, she wanted them
all and insisted on it. These sort of books were so unusual that
Master System would not even suspect they had ever been there, but
she would bet that they held the key to a lot of work done here.
Certainly the texts had been copied onto modules for insurance, but
that would only give consistency to the mass of data Master System
would get.
Her hand-held checker indicated that all data on the modules was
in complex code, but the directories, although a bit obscure in
title, were in the clear. A machine would translate the data;
however, they wanted to make certain that anyone could read the
directories if need be.
It was simple to find a pattern; she hardly needed to look at
more than one in a hundred to see that. Their primary project was
something to do with spacecraft computer logic control and
navigation. She wanted those and some of the ancient archival
material copied by the brown team before removal. Much of the rest
involved how they had been able to fool Master System for so long.
She would have loved to have it all, but there wasn’t time,
and Master System would take particular care in seeing that they
had not been opened or copied on to foreign devices. They had to
remain.
Major Chi, head of the brown team, was efficient and methodical
and completed the work with a speed she would have thought
impossible, even as the regular troops were carting out the
contraband to be hauled away and turned over to Master System.
Chi shook his head in wonder. “What were they doing that
they would risk so much and die rather than surrender? What kind of
people were these?”
“Dissident fanatics,” she told him.
“Apparently they were working on a way to hijack and seize
control of a large spacecraft and steer it to some world so far out
that they would be beyond the reach of the Community.”
He seemed startled. “Is that possible?”
“I don’t know. They thought so, and they
certainly did a lot even here.”
The family generally spent the worst of the winter months at
their estate in Hainan. The island province was always warm, if a
bit too wet, and technically her father was a leading warlord
there, with an estate and peasants and vast agricultural lands as
befitted a chief general. The people of Hainan, and even the bulk
of those on his own lands and in his own service, did not even know
that he was anything more than their warlord and leader. When
there, the family lived in the ancient style and observed the
age-old ways, as the rules required.
That, of course, was the primary hole through which almost all
the administrators and regents slipped eventually. When spending
time outside the administrative district, one was required to take
on a template properly suited to blending in with the natives. It
was a simple, routine procedure, in which trusted technicians
marked forbidden secrets in the subject’s mind, to be
suppressed in the conscious band, which was the only one recorded.
There were no flags in this procedure because the local computers
controlling the mindprint machinery had never really been able to
distinguish between what had to be suppressed to keep the rules
straight and what was requested suppressed because otherwise it
would be flagged as high treason.
Computers were in fact smarter than humans, but they were not
human and never had been able to grasp totally the intricacies of
the human mind, particularly its deviousness. They
thought they did, but they actually found only the
clear-cut and the obvious. The amateur would always get caught; the
professionals slipped through as if the barriers and checks were
not even there. Since the computers understood very well how to
control people in groups, and manage them, and understand when
things didn’t go their way and why, it apparently never
occurred to any of the machines that they were being had. The price
of true superiority was in underestimating the capabilities of the
inferior.
Song Ching, after filing her reports, had gone almost
immediately to the estates, allegedly to prepare them for the
coming of the full family a bit later. That would be quite a crowd,
too—not merely the immediate family but grandparents, aunts,
uncles, their families and their children’s
families, and all the rest. Since this was routine family business,
no recording would be made, and so no suppression was necessary.
Going back, however, she would be forced to surrender many memories
and much knowledge until they could be restored by her family
physicians later. And in this case she was more under the
clock’s gun than usual. Even chief administrators were forced
to take Leave, and that time for her parents and for their children
was fast approaching. At that time a recording would be
made, and much would have to be suppressed. So much, in fact, that
long sessions with hypnotic drugs would be necessary before Leave
to ensure their safety and even longer ones after it to restore
what had been lost.
While on Leave, even they wouldn’t know about the special
underground rooms built beneath and in back of the main house on
Hainan, containing the private and illegal technology garnered by
ambitious administrators past and present.
A number of other teenage boys and girls from the greater family
were also sent down ahead to prepare things. Most would do exactly
that, but because of their family position all knew far more than
they should about the forbidden things Song Ching and her family
were doing.
She always hated the time they stayed there, although it was a
beautiful house in a beautiful land and she certainly felt the
strong cultural ties to her ancestors and their customs and ways
very strongly. The problem was the pecking order, which was so
complicated that it was nearly impossible to sort out in a
situation like this. Culturally, girls were supposed to be at one
and the same time the strength of the family and deferential to the
boys and drip humility, something she had never been much good at
doing. On the other hand, she was for this time the ranking family
member of the warlord’s immediate family and as such was in
total charge of her home. She was in the position of having to be
the gracious and humble hostess to her cousins, particularly the
male ones, yet able without argument to kick their rear ends out of
there and into the rice paddies if they gave her cause. The best
balance was something of a truce—a public posture as
expected, while in private she was the acting matriarch.
She had, in fact, a small circle of friends who were also quite
bright, although none were in her league. These were her cousins,
sixteen-year-old Tai Ming, fifteen-year-old Ahn Xaio, and
seventeen-year-old Wo Hop. Ahn and Wo, the two boys, were both very
much smitten with Song Ching’s naturally erotic moves and
build that was the Han ideal and tended to be very desirous of her
company and attention. This caused a bit of friction with Tai Ming,
who herself would have been a beauty in most cultures but whose
rather large breasts were considered too much for Han beauty, and
she spent time and discomfort in keeping them tied down so she
would appear flatter.
Trusted servants who were also security personnel prepared the
meals, but the two girls served as befitted custom, then joined the
boys.
“You’ve been missing much the past two weeks,”
Ahn said to Ching, not without a certain regret in his voice.
“You work too hard.”
She smiled. “I have had much to do and little time to do
it. What I have found, though, is most incredible and most
dangerous to know.”
They leaned forward, all ears.
“Have any of you ever been on a spaceship?”
The conversation, within a house whose design went back a
thousand years or perhaps many times that, among children eating on
mats on the floor by lantern light while outside hordes of peasants
chanted as they finished the day’s rice planting, seemed
remarkably out of place and time.
“I have,” Tai responded, surprising them all.
“You? When?” Wo Hop responded
incredulously.
“At the spaceport in Inner Mongolia. My father once had to
go there on business and took me along. We got to tour a big
one.”
“Oh. On the ground,” Hop responded, sounding a bit
derisive. “I thought you meant you went in
one.” Almost no one was permitted to do that.
Tai Ming was not taking the comment well. “And I suppose
you have flown in one? Gone to another world?”
“Of course not! That’s silly!”
“Not so silly,” Song Ching put in. “The cult
we raided last month had plans to steal a ship and fly it to a new
world far beyond the reach of the Community, and they solved the
hard part of the problem.”
“That’s dumb,” Ahn responded. “Maybe you
could sneak on or something, or even fool the records into getting
you aboard, but all spaceships are flown by computers to preset
destinations. Everybody knows that!”
“Well, they weren’t always,” Ching told him.
“Way back in the past they were flown by people and
computers, with the people in charge. That’s clear from the
records. What these people discovered is that while the Master
System took the people out of the loop, it never really altered the
basic design interfaces. They’re still made so a human who
knew what she was doing could easily remove just three modular
electronics bridges and restore it the way it was.”
They were interested but skeptical. “Yeah, well, maybe
that’s so, but who would know how to fly it? That’s no
skimmer you’re talking about,” Wo Hop noted.
“You’re right, but that’s the crazy thing. You
don’t have to know how to pilot it or navigate it to fly it.
The computer does that. It just does it at your command,
that’s all. It’s a human-to-computer interface. Lets
you direct the computer at the speed of thought, but the computer
does all the work and even watches out for the dangerous
stuff.”
“And you could fly it?” Tai Ming asked
incredulously. “To Mars or something?”
“Far beyond Mars if you wanted. Plot and create your
wormholes and you could go almost anyplace in the known galaxy. The
only major time involved is when you’re in the solar system
or another system.”
“Well, that may be true,” Ahn said, “but what
good is it? They’d pick you up or shoot you down before you
got too far, anyway. And even if you got away—then what? Any
place you land you’d get whisked to Master System so fast,
you wouldn’t even know where you were.”
“You are right, of course, my cousin, but still, to pilot
your own spaceship . . . ”
They had gotten involved with her on a number of very dangerous
and risky escapades in the past, but this was a bit beyond even
Song Ching’s scale of daring. It scared them, and they
didn’t like it. Aware that the servants, too, had ears, Tai
Ming successfully maneuvered the conversation to other, less
dangerous channels.
Still, Song Ching worked on the problem far beyond what her
duties required, because it fascinated her—not merely the
fact that this interface existed but that it was so obvious if you
knew what you were looking for. Few would, but she found it hard to
believe that these techies had actually discovered the principle
first after all this time. Stolen it perhaps, and modified it for
their own purposes, or even deduced it from lots of pilfered
information, but there was nothing here to suggest the kind of work
it would take to discover and develop this from scratch. The
implication of that was of even greater import than the existence
of the interface itself.
Somewhere, out there in space, there were people—human
beings—flying their own spaceships, going where they
directed and for their own, not the Master System’s,
purposes. As a chief administrator’s daughter, she took the
subversion of the supposedly ironclad hold of the computers for
granted, but this—this was on a scale that none of
her family even dreamed was possible, of that she was certain.
They, who had believed themselves masters of the system, were
hardly that. It was as if they were the comptrollers of some
exchange who had managed to embezzle just a tiny bit each month and
thought they had beaten the system only to discover suddenly that
someone else had been stealing from the master vaults all the time.
But who were these people who had such knowledge, and what else
could they do that was impossible? The implications continued to
mount in her mind. The impossible, the inconceivable, was suddenly
probable. There might be many people, perhaps large numbers, living
in cracks in the system known only to them, totally outside the
Community and its controls. The concept was exciting, yes, but also
frightening. If the gods could be so mocked, how less than absolute
might their powers be?
The old Earth turned creakingly, originally the birth-world but
now a minor and half-forgotten backwater in the universe. Inward
along the spiral arm and across to another such arm of the galaxy
was the Community, although communal it was not. The old term stuck
only because all the inhabited worlds of the two arms did in fact
have something in common: All were subject to the Master System;
all were owned and operated by the same manager.
Its long-ago origins on Earth were lost; the creation had
suppressed or discarded what was not relevant to its goals. One
thing was certain: Once, upon the Earth, humanity had built a great
machine that thought better and faster than they did and had such
intelligence and such a capacity for storing and analyzing
information that the servant had become the master. The legends all
said that it acted to preserve humanity from its own bent for
self-destruction, but then, the legends were also part of the
system.
All that was truly clear to the tiny minority who knew what
truth they were permitted to know was that the great machine,
called a computer only because it was unique and there was no other
term for it, had restructured and revolutionized humanity under a
Master System, or set of imperatives, that only it knew or
understood. Only the results could be seen, and what was known of
the imperatives deduced from what resulted.
There was certainly an imperative to preserve humanity against
destruction from within and without. The great machine had elected
expansion as the best means of ensuring this. It solved the
enormous roadblocks to interstellar travel and did so as a
practical engineering problem because it needed to do so. Such
travel was under its own control and no other. It had created more
great machines, each specific to the tasks at hand, all also under
its control and subject to the same imperatives. These machines
went forth and explored the universe as they could and developed
other worlds for habitation.
But there were few Earthlike worlds out there, and massive
terraforming of the ones that had potential was slow and not an
efficient or logical use of resources. Far easier to modify the
inhabitants to fit existing conditions, with minimal terraforming
for the worst—exobiology and psychogenetics were mere
engineering problems to the great machine, which itself was growing
and developing its own powers and capabilities as it proceeded with
its own plans for humanity.
Earth’s five-plus billion had been reduced to a mere five
hundred thousand scattered over the planet. The rest had been sent
to settle the stars. Earth itself had been divided into districts,
and each district had its own imposed culture drawn from its own
history and background. These cultures were quite correct as to
their ethnic and geographic places, but they shared a common
limitation: All were frozen in preindustrial eras of their
past.
But the great machine had a universe to develop, and other
imperatives as well, and had no wish to rule, only to maintain. A
few, only the best and the brightest from each cultural district,
would have to know the truth—that there was something beyond
the world and culture into which they had been born. Such a static
set of cultures required management, and the great machine wished
neither to manage nor to set lesser machines to manage. No one knew
why, since it would have been easy to do and absolute in its
controls. Master System was incomprehensible to all but itself.
Those who oversaw the system were routinely checked for a series
of things they might know or intend which were on the Master
System’s proscribed list, and supposedly all the computers of
Earth reported regularly and often all that they had been asked or
were doing to that same Master System. Occasionally someone was
flagged; when one was, it was up to the administrators to apprehend
and deal with the culprit in any way they saw fit but in all cases
to remove and isolate the marked individual. In a very few cases,
the Master System would send its own, the Vals, to minimize any
chance of something really dangerous or threatening creeping into
human knowledge.
All contact between the worlds of the new humanity was indirect;
computers under the Master System alone piloted and navigated the
spacecraft and alone knew the secrets of how it was done. Most
spacecraft, in fact, had no provisions for human occupancy: no air,
no pressurization, no way for any living thing to have a
spacefaring habitat. There were, however, a few that had such
provisions, because there was occasionally a need for a few to
travel somewhere. Most ships were interplanetary rather than
interstellar, since Mars, at least, was colonized and there was
some natural contact and interdependency among the human
administrators, and a certain level of experimentation was allowed
on isolated outposts.
Just where the great machine was that administered and
coordinated this as it had for many centuries was unknown as well,
but it had originated on Earth and was certainly nearby. The space
traffic to and from the solar system was enormous, always dense and
busy, yet the worlds and people there were now considered
unimportant. Master System’s term was
“stabilized.” Earth and Mars were stabilized worlds,
more zoos or carefully managed living exhibits than natural social
institutions. One thing was very clear: The Master System wished to
stabilize the entire galaxy, at the very least, and spent much of
its time doing just that.
North America had its native American exhibit, quite varied but
strictly pre-Columbian; South America had become Portuguese
colonial, about 1600. China had its Han exhibit and also smaller
exhibits for the Mongols and the Manchus. Europe was thinly
populated and medieval; the Slavs had European Russia and the
Balkans. There was also a precolonial India, an aboriginal
Australia, a medieval Arabic mideast and Mediterranean Africa, and
a complex polyglot of sub-Saharan African cultures, pre-thirteenth
century, although the major ones were the Zulu Empire of the south,
the Bantu of the center, and Songhai to within a few hundred
kilometers of the Arabic-Berber coast. There was no Sahara; that
human-made waste had been reclaimed to savannas and plains and once
again teemed with game.
The Earth was a vast area of living, breathing, thinking
exhibits who lived as their culture dictated and had no knowledge
of the greater world or the universe beyond. A living museum with
no visitors, no students, no onlookers at all save the tiny number
of those who were its caretakers.
And now the daughter of one of those caretakers sat at her
computer, an illegal device that did not speak to Master System or
to anyone or anything else but its operator, and deduced with a
fair degree of certainty that there were a few not in the exhibits,
that in spite of the seeming absoluteness of the system there were
some who were not in their cages but out there somewhere, running
wild.
Song Ching was anxious to tell her father all about her
experiences and her discoveries, but he never just arrived; as
Governor, or warlord, of the entire island province, he came in
with a massive entourage and had a huge load of prescribed duties,
audiences and the like, when he did settle in.
Although she was spoiled and protected, she and her father were
not close. It was unlikely that a man who had risen to his position
and power would allow anyone really close to him, but he was also a
man of his dynastic culture, one in which daughters were not highly
prized and women were supposed to know their place and joyously
accept it. She was there not because he wished a daughter but
because sons would inherit many duties and responsibilities and be
much in the public eye, while a daughter could be kept to the one
task that was his dream.
For herself, she could think only of her discoveries and
anxiously awaited the inevitable summons. It came three days after
he arrived, and it was to be a totally private audience in his
office. There were the usual guards at the doors, of course, but
she was shown right in and discovered her father sitting Buddhalike
on a silk mat, totally alone.
He was a large man, not just for a Han, but in general, but his
round face, broad shoulders, and thick, squat body made him appear
chubby and less imposing.
She bowed and then sat on another mat, facing him, and waited
for his eyes to open and for him to speak. He was the one man she
feared and respected and, despite his coldness, loved.
He began to speak without opening his eyes. “I have read
the reports on the raid and your conduct, and they say you did
quite well. It seems that we acted just in time with these people.
There is a ship capable of carrying passengers in system now, and
several shuttle boats are in for refurbishing at Ulan Bator. It
appears that these were the target. They would not have been able
to get away with it, of course, but it would have brought dishonor
upon me and my administrators. We would certainly—and
deservedly—be held responsible for such a breach. It was for
that reason that I allowed you to go along on the raid. Our family
honor required one of us to participate in its success.”
She bowed her head. “I humbly thank you, my father, for
the opportunity. I have learned much from what was
recovered.”
His eyes opened, and he stared at her. “Oh? And what did
you learn?”
She was required to keep herself humble and calm, but inside she
was highly excited. “They had found a way that humans could
both pilot and navigate spaceships, even interstellar ones, almost
without training.” She paused, expecting at least an
exclamation of surprise, but he did not react.
“Yes? And what else?”
She suddenly realized that he must have known that in order to
have made the opening comment he did. A little shamefaced, she
realized that she had not been exclusively privy to the copies of
the files, records, and devices from the raid.
“It is almost certain—well over ninety-nine
percent—that this was known to others and that this sort of
thing has been done in the past and is being done now by person or
groups unknown. I believe that there are people out there who have
access to all that we have but who are not in or subject to the
Community. It was this discovery that led to their
plans.”
“It is so,” he admitted. “The question is how
such a group came into possession of this knowledge.”
She was rocked by the comment. He knew!
“That information was not in the files we
recovered,” she told him, stifling her emotions as much as
possible. “It is something that security personnel must
discover by other means.”
“Yes. Unfortunately, it will take much time to identify
and trace all the illegals and find the leak without alerting
Master System.”
It was getting to be too much for her. “Please excuse my
forwardness, but it is inconceivable to me that Master System does
not at least know of their existence.”
“You are quite correct, daughter, but you do not
understand the vastness of space. Consider what these illegals were
able to build and accomplish right here, under our very noses, as
it were. If it can exist here, imagine how much easier it is to
hide in space. It is not our concern and is no longer your concern.
It is, however, deadly knowledge that threatens us all. I will
arrange to have all traces of it removed from your mind at the
first opportunity.”
“Father! I beg of you! Do not do this to me!
I—”
He stopped her with a glance and a gesture. “Enough. I
tolerate too much from you now.” He paused a moment. “I
have allowed you a grand childhood, the envy of any others, male or
female. I have, in fact, been far too patient far too long. Yet
someone who will threaten one of my officers with a false rape
charge, a most dishonorable action that brings shame on your mother
and on me, I am forced to notice—and to realize that the time
has come to end this period of your life.”
He was the one man who could chasten her, make her feel real
shame, and she felt tears coming up inside of her. Yet deep down an
inner voice said angrily, “That son of a pig Chung!
Somehow I will kill him personally!” Aloud she
responded, “It was my excitement and my enthusiasm. I meant
to bring no shame upon anyone, not even the colonel.”
“I can understand and perhaps excuse the infraction on its
face, but this is a special case. You interfered with a key man in
the midst of a mission vital to our family’s survival, and
you did it to get him to violate my orders. My orders. The
gods know you have violated everyone else’s orders and
advice, but attempting to willfully violate my orders is
intolerable. You were designed to bear tomorrow’s leaders,
the offspring who will ensure this family’s rule and perhaps
advance it. We are coming up on Leave Time. During this Leave you
will be married, here.”
His words startled her. He had talked like this before, but now
it really sounded as if he meant it. “Married? To
whom?”
“It would serve you right if I gave you to Colonel Chung.
He has most of the correct qualities, and it would be justice.
However, it would also place him within this family and far too
close to me for my own liking. The truth is, there are a number of
candidates, subject to the same sort of breeding attributes as
yourself, but I have had more pressing matters and have put off
making a final choice. I will no longer let it go. You are
seventeen, and that is old enough. You will be informed in due
time.”
She wanted to protest, but there was really only one way to do
so, and that was to appeal to an intermediate power. “Does
mother know of this?”
He did not take offense at the question. Of course, what her
mother liked or didn’t like was beside the point when he made
such a decision, but she was not exactly one who would be easy to
mollify. The wife of a great man was herself a politician and had
many ways to work her will upon him. If all else failed, his wife
alone knew many secrets that would be uncomfortable to have leaked,
even in the family holdings and on the Han cultural level.
“Your mother and I have talked this over many times. She
will, of course, have a voice in the final selection as is her
right and duty, but she is certainly in full agreement on this. It
is decided, daughter. Go. Enjoy this time, which is the last of
childhood. It is precious.”
This disturbing interview had suddenly turned her world upside
down. She had gone in flush with discovery and wanting so much her
father’s approval and appreciation of her work; instead, she
had found that what she knew was known to him, and that her
comfortable life was about to take a radical turn for what could
only be the worse.
She occupied her mind over the next few days helping the
relatives move in and lending a hand in the kitchens and service
areas, but there was no joy in it. Ahead, the marriage loomed like
a great threatening wall against which she was to be dashed, and
every day that wall drew closer and closer.
She was in the great formal gardens in back of the main house,
just looking at the beautiful flowers and wanting to be as alone as
possible in this environment, when Tai Ming and Ahn Xaio sought her
out.
They greeted her warmly, but something was clearly on their
minds. “You two are so serious,” she noted.
“What—are your parents marrying you off as well?”
The knowledge of her father’s decision had spread quickly, if
only because such things for one of her rank took much time to
prepare.
“No—not yet, anyway,” Ming responded
hesitantly. “It’s just that there are—”
“There are rumors,” Ahn put in. “Strong
rumors. Rumors supported by things overheard and
repeated.”
“About what? My marriage? My husband to be?”
“In a way,” Ming responded, trying to figure out a
way to say it.
Song Ching knew that these two had much closer contact with the
servants and staff than she possibly could and that the servant and
staff gossip network was extremely reliable and useful. “One
of you—out with it! I can no longer stand this!”
“Your father has told you that the knowledge you gained
from the raid must be erased?” Tai Ming asked her.
She nodded. “Yes, and I don’t like it. I have never
liked anyone inside my mind even when it was for safety’s
sake, and I like erasures even less, but they have no choice in
this matter. Surely you have been told the same.”
“Yes. All of us will be sent back to the Center before
Leave time comes,” Ahn admitted, getting it out at last.
“You, however, will be treated differently, although you are
not supposed to know that. They have a team of experts ready.
Psychochemists, a complete psychotech team—all for you. Your
father was overheard giving the orders to General Chin.” Chin
was his chief aide, his deputy up at administration headquarters,
and would be acting director while her father was on Leave.
“Oh, Song Ching, they are going to remake you!” Tai
Ming blurted tearfully. “They—he said it was the only
way you would ever be a good wife and mother.”
She suddenly felt a little nauseous. “He wouldn’t
dare!” she responded angrily, but she knew her
father well enough to know that not only would he dare, he’d
do it. He had probably been planning it all the time, which was why
he’d let her go on so long as she was. He’d been
testing her, both for abilities and for physical and mental
development! Now she’d passed the last test. But her father
would never consider her an end result, merely the bearer of
grandsons who would be allowed the power and position she craved
and deserved but which could never be hers.
Now she would fulfill her father’s master plan. There was
no way around it. She could hardly avoid the psychotechnicians who
would be required before going on Leave—to leave undisturbed
all that she knew would be sure death not only for the family but
for her—and then she’d be at the mercy of her
father’s power and directives. She would never come
off Leave. She would be wiped clean of active memory and
replaced with a template she was quite certain her father had
commanded to be made up for her long ago, one which would leave her
a docile, obedient, subservient little woman with no knowledge of
any world beyond Hainan and no interest in it, either. She’d
still be as smart, but that would just make it worse, since she
would be totally bound and constricted by her culture. It would be
a boring, pampered, frustrating life of perpetual
pregnancy—with no way out.
She knew that they could do it. They could erase anything from
your mind and replace it so you’d never know. They could give
you chemicals that would go to your brain and settle into receptors
that could make even someone like her into a meek, docile,
bubble-headed nymphomaniac.
She thanked them for their warning and concern and asked to be
alone once more, but she did not remain in the garden. Instead, she
went back to the house and then down through the secret chambers
and guarded passages to the computer room. She was a genius and
genetically superior to them all, even her father. Given enough
information to go on, there had to be a solution even to this sort
of problem.
She sat down at the computer and activated it, then stopped,
staring at the bank of machinery that was so familiar and so simple
to her. In another month she would not even dream that this room or
this equipment existed, and if shown it, she would find it magical
and incomprehensible. No matter what risks might be involved, the
alternative was too much to bear. She would show them all!
THE MOUNTAINS OF WESTERN CHINA WERE AS REMOTE
and forbidding as any in the world and impossible to monitor or
control effectively. There were no permanent natives to the region;
the nearest settlements were far down the slopes and forty
kilometers or more from the spot where the raiding party now stood,
many of its members equipped with breathing apparatus to help them
in the rarefied atmosphere where split seconds might mean living or
dying. Colonel Chung, the old pro soldier in dark-green battle
uniform, heavy boots, and cap, had a cigar stuck out of the side of
his mouth. He needed no breathing gear; he sat in a skimmer, a
dark, saucer-shaped craft that was rigged for totally silent
running. It hovered there in the air while many others, deployed
around the seemingly unbroken high cliffs of the mountains,
disgorged soldiers and equipment. Chung was thankful that the spot
was so remote; here he was not handicapped by Cultural Zone
restrictions and could use his best and most modern equipment.
“They are good, I’ll give them that,” the
colonel remarked for the benefit of anyone who could hear him there
in the command module section of the skimmer. “I can’t
imagine where they even got their energy sources up here, let alone
how they shielded them.”
Song Ching looked at the gray-purple rock walls and understood
what he meant. To go to these lengths, this group must have had
something really important to hide and work on, something that,
like all technology, required power. Satellites overhead could
monitor even the smallest differences in temperature, pressure, and
energy below, even through the densest clouds, and when they
spotted something in an unauthorized spot, they immediately flagged
security on the ground. Technologists’ cells were rare in
this day and age, but the few who remained were the best.
She was the sort of woman men fantasized about: small but
perfectly proportioned, her face one of classical Han beauty, her
gestures and movements somehow always erotic. Her looks masked her
extreme intelligence: Her IQ off the measurable scale, and she was
an authentic genius whose mind worked so fast and on so many levels
it often seemed more computerlike than human. She was not without
flaws; as the oldest child of the chief administrator of the Han
district, she was spoiled rotten, and her intellectual and physical
development had not been accompanied by any real emotional growth;
there she was almost childlike, a situation her parents kept
excusing because of her age, although she had just turned
seventeen.
The colonel did not like having her there, but she’d been
forced upon him by his superiors. They didn’t know what this
cell could be working on, and they needed her fine mind to figure
it out before it was either destroyed or confiscated. Others might
have done as well, but as the daughter of the chief administrator
she had pulled her own strings to get here. It was an escape,
however temporary, from her luxurious prison, from the reality she
didn’t particularly like.
She did, however, appreciate the irony of her being here, for
she herself was the result of illegal technologists, her looks and
her intelligence achieved through elaborate genetic manipulation.
Like all the administrators, not just on Earth but throughout the
Community, her father chafed at the restrictions placed upon him
and his power and dreamed of some sort of end run. His own solution
was an attempt, at great risk to his position and his life, to
breed a superior line that might eventually be bright enough and
fast enough to figure a way out of the trap the human race had
woven for itself. Song Ching appreciated the goal and approved of
it, but she did not like her own role, which was not to find that
solution but to breed those who might.
“Burners locked on!” someone reported over the
ship-to-ship channel. “All ships in place, troopers in
position and shielded. Awaiting orders to proceed.”
“Commence firing,” Colonel Chung ordered without
hesitation.
Immediately the five skimmers rose to preset positions, now
visible to whatever lookout devices the cell might employ, and
opened fire with bright rays of crimson and white that struck the
rock face and began to cut through it. Ships’ computers now
had control, and once penetration had been achieved, the five
attack skimmers moved in an eerie ballet, cutting through the
imposing rock face as if it were butter.
Just before the circle was completed, a different skimmer rose
and shot out a purple tongue of energy which struck the center of
the cutout, and as the entire area was separated the thick
purple ray receded, pulling the rock cutout with it.
Suddenly revealed was a honeycomb of tunnels melted through the
rock. It reminded Ching of a glass-sided ant farm, although there
did not appear to be any “ants” here.
Now the troops, two hundred of them, sprang from cover on ledges
and slopes opposite the target and flew into the air using
null-gravity backpacks and small compressed-air steering jets.
“It’s very large,” she noted to the
colonel. “I wonder why anybody who built something that large
wouldn’t defend it.”
“They’ll defend it,” he assured her in an
absent tone, his attention on his status screens and on the view
out the control port. “When they find that their escape exits
are blocked, they will defend or surrender.”
Almost in answer to his comments, there was the sound of distant
but large explosions which echoed through the valleys and passes of
the high mountains, and from some of the revealed tunnels came
large puffs of gray and black smoke.
Over the ground-to-air intercom came lots of shouts, curses, and
screams. The colonel cut in.
“Ground, do you require reinforcements at this
point?” he asked calmly, as if he were some distant observer
of a football game between two teams he hardly cared about.
“Captain Li here,” came a thin response. “They
detonated explosives along the main tunnel walls leading to a main
chamber. Only a few casualties, but we’re having to burn our
way through. Give us ten minutes, then send in second wave.
Acknowledge.”
“Acknowledged,” the colonel responded. “Stand
by, second wave. Ten minutes.”
Song Ching stared at the colonel and wondered how he could
maintain such a calm demeanor. She herself was feeling a tremendous
rush of excitement, and she only regretted that she wasn’t
allowed down there to experience it firsthand. She longed for the
real thrill, the adrenaline rush, her life on the line, her mind
and body against another’s . . .
She was paying the price for stealing the skimmer when
she’d been just fifteen and zooming along the rivers,
panicking the peasants in the fields, going under bridges and
zooming full speed at low levels through valleys between the hills.
She’d finally blown two enercells and had to make a glide-in
landing in a rice paddy, and it had been the most fun she’d
ever had. However, the cost to her father in favors granted,
promises extracted, and all-out trouble to cover up the incident
had clamped the lid on. Even then, totally covering it up had been
possible only because no one believed that a fifteen-year-old girl
with no pilot’s training could take up and fly something as
complex as a skimmer.
“I want to go down there, now,” she told the
colonel.
He gave a low chuckle. “You know better.”
“I said I want to go now!” she snapped.
“Arrange it!”
“I am not one of your servants or your parents’
functionaries,” he responded coolly. “You did
everything possible to put yourself here, so you are under my
command and you take my orders. I do not take yours.”
She grew angry. “How dare you speak to me that
way? I will have you cleaning out toilets in the
paddies!”
“No, you will not. You will sit back and calm down and do
as I say or you will be sent back and severed immediately from this
operation. Your parents briefed me on you and gave me full
authority in this matter. They want me to kick you out, if
you must know. You are presenting me with an excuse and a
temptation I find difficult to resist.”
“No one speaks to me in that way! What do you want me to
do? Scream rape?”
He was unfazed. “A mindprint would clear me and indict
you, and since it would be in another jurisdiction because of your
rank, your father couldn’t get rid of that evidence. You are
already coming close to the inevitable day when you will commit an
act that your family cannot cover up or patch over. I am too busy
for this. You have a choice. Go back over there and shut up, or
persist in any way and I will have you restrained and taken back
where you—not me—will bear responsibility for delaying
or imperiling this operation. One more word and you may complain to
your father at a later date, but it will not get you down
there!”
She was furious, but she wanted desperately to get down. Clearly
he could and would do what he said, and she had no choice but to
sit and sulk. She would get him, though. She would make him burn,
somehow, somewhere, someday.
It took almost four hours to clear and secure the technologist
cell. At the end, forty-seven had been killed and almost twice that
number wounded, but all but two of the three hundred twenty-four
technologists had been killed. Those who were not killed in the
defense committed suicide, taking their families with them. The
only two survivors were young boys who had been felled in an
explosion and had been presumed dead by their own. They would be
taken to Center for interrogation and disposition. The rest could
hardly be blamed for choosing death. There were punishments far
worse than death for people like them.
Finally, when the whole place was scanned and the remaining
booby traps were dismantled, the signal was given for the follow-up
technicians to come on in, and that included Song Ching.
It had been bitter cold outside, and the tunnels were not much
warmer, although they offered protection from the outside winds.
She entered wearing a sable coat and parka and matching fur pants
and fur-lined boots, but she was still cold. “Didn’t
they have any heat in here?” she griped.
“Plenty,” one of the officers responded. “They
actually had a home-built fusion reactor in a chamber well below
here, although they had air locks on the tunnels to keep any
temperature changes from registering on the monitor surveys. Had it
rigged to blow, too, but we got lucky and intercepted the destruct
system. Like most amateurs they never expected to be hit from the
rock face side; they thought in terms of defending from attack
through their entry and exit tunnels. Their big blowup was rigged
right along where we came in. Of course, cutting the mains here
also cut the master systems throughout the complex, so no real
heat, and we have to supply our own lights. We don’t dare
restore that reactor. It’s an odd design, and we might still
blow it out of ignorance.”
She was led into a large chamber that was clearly a high-tech
laboratory. There were a number of small independent computers
there, as well as test areas and hardware assembly divisions. It
was impressive; she had never seen or heard of anything like it
before.
There was a vast supply of data storage modules that would have
to be examined and a fair number of actual books, which was
something of a surprise. They appeared to be mostly facsimiles of
ancient texts in a number of languages, and those she examined were
totally unfamiliar to her, although she saw a few patterns in the
choice of subjects.
The assemblage was all the more amazing because almost all of it
was modified from stock items and therefore had to be stolen from
somewhere—yet that was supposed to be impossible. Every
single computer and even every single module was coded and tracked
at all times by the Master System. Even disconnecting or moving
such things without permission would be flagged and investigated
immediately. Flowers of Heaven! There were even three
mindprint devices here! Those could not even be
operated except by the Master System!
She examined everything thoroughly. A brown-clad Special Team
was there now, working swiftly and efficiently, taking her
direction. The Special Team was expert at doing just one
thing—diverting parts of illicit technology from such finds
without their activities showing on the visual or scan records.
These were the same experts who could make certain that a chief
administrator, or his daughter, had no trace of this on their
mindprints to flag the Master System. The colonel placed far too
much faith in mindprint evidence for his own good, Song Ching
thought smugly.
The brown-clad workers were wizards at what they did, but the
risk was very high, even more to them than to their employers. They
were, however, richly rewarded for their skills.
Just as the administrators and regents had discovered holes in
the supposedly static system over the centuries, so, too, did the
technologists here find holes no one else had ever dreamed of. To
divert this much, all undetected, and build a complex this grand,
remaining undetected for who knew how long—years,
certainly—was an incredible achievement. It was her primary
job to evaluate what the brown troopers should deal with before the
mass was turned in to Master System, but after that the real
challenge would be to discover what they discovered and whether or
not it would be of any use to her family. She would also love to
know how they’d managed all this, but to trace it all back
without tripping any flags would be far more risky than this.
She used a small hand-held device to check out storage modules
at random. She couldn’t read them, but she could read their
directories if they weren’t severely encoded and choose which
ones she’d need herself. As for the books, she wanted them
all and insisted on it. These sort of books were so unusual that
Master System would not even suspect they had ever been there, but
she would bet that they held the key to a lot of work done here.
Certainly the texts had been copied onto modules for insurance, but
that would only give consistency to the mass of data Master System
would get.
Her hand-held checker indicated that all data on the modules was
in complex code, but the directories, although a bit obscure in
title, were in the clear. A machine would translate the data;
however, they wanted to make certain that anyone could read the
directories if need be.
It was simple to find a pattern; she hardly needed to look at
more than one in a hundred to see that. Their primary project was
something to do with spacecraft computer logic control and
navigation. She wanted those and some of the ancient archival
material copied by the brown team before removal. Much of the rest
involved how they had been able to fool Master System for so long.
She would have loved to have it all, but there wasn’t time,
and Master System would take particular care in seeing that they
had not been opened or copied on to foreign devices. They had to
remain.
Major Chi, head of the brown team, was efficient and methodical
and completed the work with a speed she would have thought
impossible, even as the regular troops were carting out the
contraband to be hauled away and turned over to Master System.
Chi shook his head in wonder. “What were they doing that
they would risk so much and die rather than surrender? What kind of
people were these?”
“Dissident fanatics,” she told him.
“Apparently they were working on a way to hijack and seize
control of a large spacecraft and steer it to some world so far out
that they would be beyond the reach of the Community.”
He seemed startled. “Is that possible?”
“I don’t know. They thought so, and they
certainly did a lot even here.”
The family generally spent the worst of the winter months at
their estate in Hainan. The island province was always warm, if a
bit too wet, and technically her father was a leading warlord
there, with an estate and peasants and vast agricultural lands as
befitted a chief general. The people of Hainan, and even the bulk
of those on his own lands and in his own service, did not even know
that he was anything more than their warlord and leader. When
there, the family lived in the ancient style and observed the
age-old ways, as the rules required.
That, of course, was the primary hole through which almost all
the administrators and regents slipped eventually. When spending
time outside the administrative district, one was required to take
on a template properly suited to blending in with the natives. It
was a simple, routine procedure, in which trusted technicians
marked forbidden secrets in the subject’s mind, to be
suppressed in the conscious band, which was the only one recorded.
There were no flags in this procedure because the local computers
controlling the mindprint machinery had never really been able to
distinguish between what had to be suppressed to keep the rules
straight and what was requested suppressed because otherwise it
would be flagged as high treason.
Computers were in fact smarter than humans, but they were not
human and never had been able to grasp totally the intricacies of
the human mind, particularly its deviousness. They
thought they did, but they actually found only the
clear-cut and the obvious. The amateur would always get caught; the
professionals slipped through as if the barriers and checks were
not even there. Since the computers understood very well how to
control people in groups, and manage them, and understand when
things didn’t go their way and why, it apparently never
occurred to any of the machines that they were being had. The price
of true superiority was in underestimating the capabilities of the
inferior.
Song Ching, after filing her reports, had gone almost
immediately to the estates, allegedly to prepare them for the
coming of the full family a bit later. That would be quite a crowd,
too—not merely the immediate family but grandparents, aunts,
uncles, their families and their children’s
families, and all the rest. Since this was routine family business,
no recording would be made, and so no suppression was necessary.
Going back, however, she would be forced to surrender many memories
and much knowledge until they could be restored by her family
physicians later. And in this case she was more under the
clock’s gun than usual. Even chief administrators were forced
to take Leave, and that time for her parents and for their children
was fast approaching. At that time a recording would be
made, and much would have to be suppressed. So much, in fact, that
long sessions with hypnotic drugs would be necessary before Leave
to ensure their safety and even longer ones after it to restore
what had been lost.
While on Leave, even they wouldn’t know about the special
underground rooms built beneath and in back of the main house on
Hainan, containing the private and illegal technology garnered by
ambitious administrators past and present.
A number of other teenage boys and girls from the greater family
were also sent down ahead to prepare things. Most would do exactly
that, but because of their family position all knew far more than
they should about the forbidden things Song Ching and her family
were doing.
She always hated the time they stayed there, although it was a
beautiful house in a beautiful land and she certainly felt the
strong cultural ties to her ancestors and their customs and ways
very strongly. The problem was the pecking order, which was so
complicated that it was nearly impossible to sort out in a
situation like this. Culturally, girls were supposed to be at one
and the same time the strength of the family and deferential to the
boys and drip humility, something she had never been much good at
doing. On the other hand, she was for this time the ranking family
member of the warlord’s immediate family and as such was in
total charge of her home. She was in the position of having to be
the gracious and humble hostess to her cousins, particularly the
male ones, yet able without argument to kick their rear ends out of
there and into the rice paddies if they gave her cause. The best
balance was something of a truce—a public posture as
expected, while in private she was the acting matriarch.
She had, in fact, a small circle of friends who were also quite
bright, although none were in her league. These were her cousins,
sixteen-year-old Tai Ming, fifteen-year-old Ahn Xaio, and
seventeen-year-old Wo Hop. Ahn and Wo, the two boys, were both very
much smitten with Song Ching’s naturally erotic moves and
build that was the Han ideal and tended to be very desirous of her
company and attention. This caused a bit of friction with Tai Ming,
who herself would have been a beauty in most cultures but whose
rather large breasts were considered too much for Han beauty, and
she spent time and discomfort in keeping them tied down so she
would appear flatter.
Trusted servants who were also security personnel prepared the
meals, but the two girls served as befitted custom, then joined the
boys.
“You’ve been missing much the past two weeks,”
Ahn said to Ching, not without a certain regret in his voice.
“You work too hard.”
She smiled. “I have had much to do and little time to do
it. What I have found, though, is most incredible and most
dangerous to know.”
They leaned forward, all ears.
“Have any of you ever been on a spaceship?”
The conversation, within a house whose design went back a
thousand years or perhaps many times that, among children eating on
mats on the floor by lantern light while outside hordes of peasants
chanted as they finished the day’s rice planting, seemed
remarkably out of place and time.
“I have,” Tai responded, surprising them all.
“You? When?” Wo Hop responded
incredulously.
“At the spaceport in Inner Mongolia. My father once had to
go there on business and took me along. We got to tour a big
one.”
“Oh. On the ground,” Hop responded, sounding a bit
derisive. “I thought you meant you went in
one.” Almost no one was permitted to do that.
Tai Ming was not taking the comment well. “And I suppose
you have flown in one? Gone to another world?”
“Of course not! That’s silly!”
“Not so silly,” Song Ching put in. “The cult
we raided last month had plans to steal a ship and fly it to a new
world far beyond the reach of the Community, and they solved the
hard part of the problem.”
“That’s dumb,” Ahn responded. “Maybe you
could sneak on or something, or even fool the records into getting
you aboard, but all spaceships are flown by computers to preset
destinations. Everybody knows that!”
“Well, they weren’t always,” Ching told him.
“Way back in the past they were flown by people and
computers, with the people in charge. That’s clear from the
records. What these people discovered is that while the Master
System took the people out of the loop, it never really altered the
basic design interfaces. They’re still made so a human who
knew what she was doing could easily remove just three modular
electronics bridges and restore it the way it was.”
They were interested but skeptical. “Yeah, well, maybe
that’s so, but who would know how to fly it? That’s no
skimmer you’re talking about,” Wo Hop noted.
“You’re right, but that’s the crazy thing. You
don’t have to know how to pilot it or navigate it to fly it.
The computer does that. It just does it at your command,
that’s all. It’s a human-to-computer interface. Lets
you direct the computer at the speed of thought, but the computer
does all the work and even watches out for the dangerous
stuff.”
“And you could fly it?” Tai Ming asked
incredulously. “To Mars or something?”
“Far beyond Mars if you wanted. Plot and create your
wormholes and you could go almost anyplace in the known galaxy. The
only major time involved is when you’re in the solar system
or another system.”
“Well, that may be true,” Ahn said, “but what
good is it? They’d pick you up or shoot you down before you
got too far, anyway. And even if you got away—then what? Any
place you land you’d get whisked to Master System so fast,
you wouldn’t even know where you were.”
“You are right, of course, my cousin, but still, to pilot
your own spaceship . . . ”
They had gotten involved with her on a number of very dangerous
and risky escapades in the past, but this was a bit beyond even
Song Ching’s scale of daring. It scared them, and they
didn’t like it. Aware that the servants, too, had ears, Tai
Ming successfully maneuvered the conversation to other, less
dangerous channels.
Still, Song Ching worked on the problem far beyond what her
duties required, because it fascinated her—not merely the
fact that this interface existed but that it was so obvious if you
knew what you were looking for. Few would, but she found it hard to
believe that these techies had actually discovered the principle
first after all this time. Stolen it perhaps, and modified it for
their own purposes, or even deduced it from lots of pilfered
information, but there was nothing here to suggest the kind of work
it would take to discover and develop this from scratch. The
implication of that was of even greater import than the existence
of the interface itself.
Somewhere, out there in space, there were people—human
beings—flying their own spaceships, going where they
directed and for their own, not the Master System’s,
purposes. As a chief administrator’s daughter, she took the
subversion of the supposedly ironclad hold of the computers for
granted, but this—this was on a scale that none of
her family even dreamed was possible, of that she was certain.
They, who had believed themselves masters of the system, were
hardly that. It was as if they were the comptrollers of some
exchange who had managed to embezzle just a tiny bit each month and
thought they had beaten the system only to discover suddenly that
someone else had been stealing from the master vaults all the time.
But who were these people who had such knowledge, and what else
could they do that was impossible? The implications continued to
mount in her mind. The impossible, the inconceivable, was suddenly
probable. There might be many people, perhaps large numbers, living
in cracks in the system known only to them, totally outside the
Community and its controls. The concept was exciting, yes, but also
frightening. If the gods could be so mocked, how less than absolute
might their powers be?
The old Earth turned creakingly, originally the birth-world but
now a minor and half-forgotten backwater in the universe. Inward
along the spiral arm and across to another such arm of the galaxy
was the Community, although communal it was not. The old term stuck
only because all the inhabited worlds of the two arms did in fact
have something in common: All were subject to the Master System;
all were owned and operated by the same manager.
Its long-ago origins on Earth were lost; the creation had
suppressed or discarded what was not relevant to its goals. One
thing was certain: Once, upon the Earth, humanity had built a great
machine that thought better and faster than they did and had such
intelligence and such a capacity for storing and analyzing
information that the servant had become the master. The legends all
said that it acted to preserve humanity from its own bent for
self-destruction, but then, the legends were also part of the
system.
All that was truly clear to the tiny minority who knew what
truth they were permitted to know was that the great machine,
called a computer only because it was unique and there was no other
term for it, had restructured and revolutionized humanity under a
Master System, or set of imperatives, that only it knew or
understood. Only the results could be seen, and what was known of
the imperatives deduced from what resulted.
There was certainly an imperative to preserve humanity against
destruction from within and without. The great machine had elected
expansion as the best means of ensuring this. It solved the
enormous roadblocks to interstellar travel and did so as a
practical engineering problem because it needed to do so. Such
travel was under its own control and no other. It had created more
great machines, each specific to the tasks at hand, all also under
its control and subject to the same imperatives. These machines
went forth and explored the universe as they could and developed
other worlds for habitation.
But there were few Earthlike worlds out there, and massive
terraforming of the ones that had potential was slow and not an
efficient or logical use of resources. Far easier to modify the
inhabitants to fit existing conditions, with minimal terraforming
for the worst—exobiology and psychogenetics were mere
engineering problems to the great machine, which itself was growing
and developing its own powers and capabilities as it proceeded with
its own plans for humanity.
Earth’s five-plus billion had been reduced to a mere five
hundred thousand scattered over the planet. The rest had been sent
to settle the stars. Earth itself had been divided into districts,
and each district had its own imposed culture drawn from its own
history and background. These cultures were quite correct as to
their ethnic and geographic places, but they shared a common
limitation: All were frozen in preindustrial eras of their
past.
But the great machine had a universe to develop, and other
imperatives as well, and had no wish to rule, only to maintain. A
few, only the best and the brightest from each cultural district,
would have to know the truth—that there was something beyond
the world and culture into which they had been born. Such a static
set of cultures required management, and the great machine wished
neither to manage nor to set lesser machines to manage. No one knew
why, since it would have been easy to do and absolute in its
controls. Master System was incomprehensible to all but itself.
Those who oversaw the system were routinely checked for a series
of things they might know or intend which were on the Master
System’s proscribed list, and supposedly all the computers of
Earth reported regularly and often all that they had been asked or
were doing to that same Master System. Occasionally someone was
flagged; when one was, it was up to the administrators to apprehend
and deal with the culprit in any way they saw fit but in all cases
to remove and isolate the marked individual. In a very few cases,
the Master System would send its own, the Vals, to minimize any
chance of something really dangerous or threatening creeping into
human knowledge.
All contact between the worlds of the new humanity was indirect;
computers under the Master System alone piloted and navigated the
spacecraft and alone knew the secrets of how it was done. Most
spacecraft, in fact, had no provisions for human occupancy: no air,
no pressurization, no way for any living thing to have a
spacefaring habitat. There were, however, a few that had such
provisions, because there was occasionally a need for a few to
travel somewhere. Most ships were interplanetary rather than
interstellar, since Mars, at least, was colonized and there was
some natural contact and interdependency among the human
administrators, and a certain level of experimentation was allowed
on isolated outposts.
Just where the great machine was that administered and
coordinated this as it had for many centuries was unknown as well,
but it had originated on Earth and was certainly nearby. The space
traffic to and from the solar system was enormous, always dense and
busy, yet the worlds and people there were now considered
unimportant. Master System’s term was
“stabilized.” Earth and Mars were stabilized worlds,
more zoos or carefully managed living exhibits than natural social
institutions. One thing was very clear: The Master System wished to
stabilize the entire galaxy, at the very least, and spent much of
its time doing just that.
North America had its native American exhibit, quite varied but
strictly pre-Columbian; South America had become Portuguese
colonial, about 1600. China had its Han exhibit and also smaller
exhibits for the Mongols and the Manchus. Europe was thinly
populated and medieval; the Slavs had European Russia and the
Balkans. There was also a precolonial India, an aboriginal
Australia, a medieval Arabic mideast and Mediterranean Africa, and
a complex polyglot of sub-Saharan African cultures, pre-thirteenth
century, although the major ones were the Zulu Empire of the south,
the Bantu of the center, and Songhai to within a few hundred
kilometers of the Arabic-Berber coast. There was no Sahara; that
human-made waste had been reclaimed to savannas and plains and once
again teemed with game.
The Earth was a vast area of living, breathing, thinking
exhibits who lived as their culture dictated and had no knowledge
of the greater world or the universe beyond. A living museum with
no visitors, no students, no onlookers at all save the tiny number
of those who were its caretakers.
And now the daughter of one of those caretakers sat at her
computer, an illegal device that did not speak to Master System or
to anyone or anything else but its operator, and deduced with a
fair degree of certainty that there were a few not in the exhibits,
that in spite of the seeming absoluteness of the system there were
some who were not in their cages but out there somewhere, running
wild.
Song Ching was anxious to tell her father all about her
experiences and her discoveries, but he never just arrived; as
Governor, or warlord, of the entire island province, he came in
with a massive entourage and had a huge load of prescribed duties,
audiences and the like, when he did settle in.
Although she was spoiled and protected, she and her father were
not close. It was unlikely that a man who had risen to his position
and power would allow anyone really close to him, but he was also a
man of his dynastic culture, one in which daughters were not highly
prized and women were supposed to know their place and joyously
accept it. She was there not because he wished a daughter but
because sons would inherit many duties and responsibilities and be
much in the public eye, while a daughter could be kept to the one
task that was his dream.
For herself, she could think only of her discoveries and
anxiously awaited the inevitable summons. It came three days after
he arrived, and it was to be a totally private audience in his
office. There were the usual guards at the doors, of course, but
she was shown right in and discovered her father sitting Buddhalike
on a silk mat, totally alone.
He was a large man, not just for a Han, but in general, but his
round face, broad shoulders, and thick, squat body made him appear
chubby and less imposing.
She bowed and then sat on another mat, facing him, and waited
for his eyes to open and for him to speak. He was the one man she
feared and respected and, despite his coldness, loved.
He began to speak without opening his eyes. “I have read
the reports on the raid and your conduct, and they say you did
quite well. It seems that we acted just in time with these people.
There is a ship capable of carrying passengers in system now, and
several shuttle boats are in for refurbishing at Ulan Bator. It
appears that these were the target. They would not have been able
to get away with it, of course, but it would have brought dishonor
upon me and my administrators. We would certainly—and
deservedly—be held responsible for such a breach. It was for
that reason that I allowed you to go along on the raid. Our family
honor required one of us to participate in its success.”
She bowed her head. “I humbly thank you, my father, for
the opportunity. I have learned much from what was
recovered.”
His eyes opened, and he stared at her. “Oh? And what did
you learn?”
She was required to keep herself humble and calm, but inside she
was highly excited. “They had found a way that humans could
both pilot and navigate spaceships, even interstellar ones, almost
without training.” She paused, expecting at least an
exclamation of surprise, but he did not react.
“Yes? And what else?”
She suddenly realized that he must have known that in order to
have made the opening comment he did. A little shamefaced, she
realized that she had not been exclusively privy to the copies of
the files, records, and devices from the raid.
“It is almost certain—well over ninety-nine
percent—that this was known to others and that this sort of
thing has been done in the past and is being done now by person or
groups unknown. I believe that there are people out there who have
access to all that we have but who are not in or subject to the
Community. It was this discovery that led to their
plans.”
“It is so,” he admitted. “The question is how
such a group came into possession of this knowledge.”
She was rocked by the comment. He knew!
“That information was not in the files we
recovered,” she told him, stifling her emotions as much as
possible. “It is something that security personnel must
discover by other means.”
“Yes. Unfortunately, it will take much time to identify
and trace all the illegals and find the leak without alerting
Master System.”
It was getting to be too much for her. “Please excuse my
forwardness, but it is inconceivable to me that Master System does
not at least know of their existence.”
“You are quite correct, daughter, but you do not
understand the vastness of space. Consider what these illegals were
able to build and accomplish right here, under our very noses, as
it were. If it can exist here, imagine how much easier it is to
hide in space. It is not our concern and is no longer your concern.
It is, however, deadly knowledge that threatens us all. I will
arrange to have all traces of it removed from your mind at the
first opportunity.”
“Father! I beg of you! Do not do this to me!
I—”
He stopped her with a glance and a gesture. “Enough. I
tolerate too much from you now.” He paused a moment. “I
have allowed you a grand childhood, the envy of any others, male or
female. I have, in fact, been far too patient far too long. Yet
someone who will threaten one of my officers with a false rape
charge, a most dishonorable action that brings shame on your mother
and on me, I am forced to notice—and to realize that the time
has come to end this period of your life.”
He was the one man who could chasten her, make her feel real
shame, and she felt tears coming up inside of her. Yet deep down an
inner voice said angrily, “That son of a pig Chung!
Somehow I will kill him personally!” Aloud she
responded, “It was my excitement and my enthusiasm. I meant
to bring no shame upon anyone, not even the colonel.”
“I can understand and perhaps excuse the infraction on its
face, but this is a special case. You interfered with a key man in
the midst of a mission vital to our family’s survival, and
you did it to get him to violate my orders. My orders. The
gods know you have violated everyone else’s orders and
advice, but attempting to willfully violate my orders is
intolerable. You were designed to bear tomorrow’s leaders,
the offspring who will ensure this family’s rule and perhaps
advance it. We are coming up on Leave Time. During this Leave you
will be married, here.”
His words startled her. He had talked like this before, but now
it really sounded as if he meant it. “Married? To
whom?”
“It would serve you right if I gave you to Colonel Chung.
He has most of the correct qualities, and it would be justice.
However, it would also place him within this family and far too
close to me for my own liking. The truth is, there are a number of
candidates, subject to the same sort of breeding attributes as
yourself, but I have had more pressing matters and have put off
making a final choice. I will no longer let it go. You are
seventeen, and that is old enough. You will be informed in due
time.”
She wanted to protest, but there was really only one way to do
so, and that was to appeal to an intermediate power. “Does
mother know of this?”
He did not take offense at the question. Of course, what her
mother liked or didn’t like was beside the point when he made
such a decision, but she was not exactly one who would be easy to
mollify. The wife of a great man was herself a politician and had
many ways to work her will upon him. If all else failed, his wife
alone knew many secrets that would be uncomfortable to have leaked,
even in the family holdings and on the Han cultural level.
“Your mother and I have talked this over many times. She
will, of course, have a voice in the final selection as is her
right and duty, but she is certainly in full agreement on this. It
is decided, daughter. Go. Enjoy this time, which is the last of
childhood. It is precious.”
This disturbing interview had suddenly turned her world upside
down. She had gone in flush with discovery and wanting so much her
father’s approval and appreciation of her work; instead, she
had found that what she knew was known to him, and that her
comfortable life was about to take a radical turn for what could
only be the worse.
She occupied her mind over the next few days helping the
relatives move in and lending a hand in the kitchens and service
areas, but there was no joy in it. Ahead, the marriage loomed like
a great threatening wall against which she was to be dashed, and
every day that wall drew closer and closer.
She was in the great formal gardens in back of the main house,
just looking at the beautiful flowers and wanting to be as alone as
possible in this environment, when Tai Ming and Ahn Xaio sought her
out.
They greeted her warmly, but something was clearly on their
minds. “You two are so serious,” she noted.
“What—are your parents marrying you off as well?”
The knowledge of her father’s decision had spread quickly, if
only because such things for one of her rank took much time to
prepare.
“No—not yet, anyway,” Ming responded
hesitantly. “It’s just that there are—”
“There are rumors,” Ahn put in. “Strong
rumors. Rumors supported by things overheard and
repeated.”
“About what? My marriage? My husband to be?”
“In a way,” Ming responded, trying to figure out a
way to say it.
Song Ching knew that these two had much closer contact with the
servants and staff than she possibly could and that the servant and
staff gossip network was extremely reliable and useful. “One
of you—out with it! I can no longer stand this!”
“Your father has told you that the knowledge you gained
from the raid must be erased?” Tai Ming asked her.
She nodded. “Yes, and I don’t like it. I have never
liked anyone inside my mind even when it was for safety’s
sake, and I like erasures even less, but they have no choice in
this matter. Surely you have been told the same.”
“Yes. All of us will be sent back to the Center before
Leave time comes,” Ahn admitted, getting it out at last.
“You, however, will be treated differently, although you are
not supposed to know that. They have a team of experts ready.
Psychochemists, a complete psychotech team—all for you. Your
father was overheard giving the orders to General Chin.” Chin
was his chief aide, his deputy up at administration headquarters,
and would be acting director while her father was on Leave.
“Oh, Song Ching, they are going to remake you!” Tai
Ming blurted tearfully. “They—he said it was the only
way you would ever be a good wife and mother.”
She suddenly felt a little nauseous. “He wouldn’t
dare!” she responded angrily, but she knew her
father well enough to know that not only would he dare, he’d
do it. He had probably been planning it all the time, which was why
he’d let her go on so long as she was. He’d been
testing her, both for abilities and for physical and mental
development! Now she’d passed the last test. But her father
would never consider her an end result, merely the bearer of
grandsons who would be allowed the power and position she craved
and deserved but which could never be hers.
Now she would fulfill her father’s master plan. There was
no way around it. She could hardly avoid the psychotechnicians who
would be required before going on Leave—to leave undisturbed
all that she knew would be sure death not only for the family but
for her—and then she’d be at the mercy of her
father’s power and directives. She would never come
off Leave. She would be wiped clean of active memory and
replaced with a template she was quite certain her father had
commanded to be made up for her long ago, one which would leave her
a docile, obedient, subservient little woman with no knowledge of
any world beyond Hainan and no interest in it, either. She’d
still be as smart, but that would just make it worse, since she
would be totally bound and constricted by her culture. It would be
a boring, pampered, frustrating life of perpetual
pregnancy—with no way out.
She knew that they could do it. They could erase anything from
your mind and replace it so you’d never know. They could give
you chemicals that would go to your brain and settle into receptors
that could make even someone like her into a meek, docile,
bubble-headed nymphomaniac.
She thanked them for their warning and concern and asked to be
alone once more, but she did not remain in the garden. Instead, she
went back to the house and then down through the secret chambers
and guarded passages to the computer room. She was a genius and
genetically superior to them all, even her father. Given enough
information to go on, there had to be a solution even to this sort
of problem.
She sat down at the computer and activated it, then stopped,
staring at the bank of machinery that was so familiar and so simple
to her. In another month she would not even dream that this room or
this equipment existed, and if shown it, she would find it magical
and incomprehensible. No matter what risks might be involved, the
alternative was too much to bear. She would show them all!