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 devious-ness. 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.