"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!

4. THE FIVE GOLD RINGS.

HAWKS LOOKED TERRIBLE. CLOUD DANCER WAS SO so shocked at his appearance that she feared he was having a new attack of the madness.

He sat cross-legged on the floor, looking wild and suddenly very old. A deer carcass was in the salt bin, unskinned, uncarved, apparently much as he'd killed it. His hair was disheveled, his face and clothing were covered in dirt and smeared with the deer's blood, now caked and dried, and it was clear that he'd done nothing but return here to sit where he sat now, just staring.

Staring, but not at nothing.

On the dirt floor of the hogan, about two meters in front of him, lay a battered case of some kind, with metal latches. He stared at it as if it were some evil, poisonous snake that had come to take his life.

"I beg your forgiveness for intruding," she tried lamely. "Are you ill? Shall I run for the medicine man?"

His eyes did not leave the case. "No. The illness is of my own fashioning and is not something that can be shared without it being transferred."

She stared at him in wonder. "Does it come from that box?"

He nodded. "Yesterday, while hunting deer, I found a dead body clutching that box. The body was long dead, but it is the object of a great search. The box is what the demon seeks. The box is what the dead woman died to protect."

She looked at it. "What is in it?"

"Death is in it. It will kill any who look inside and understand what is there."

She grew afraid not for herself but for him. "And you have looked inside and understand?"

"I have looked inside briefly, yes, but I have not looked closely enough to be stung by its venom. Not yet."

"Then it is an evil thing that tempts you to destruction. Its spirits have hold of your soul but do not yet own it. I will take it away if you like."

He suddenly looked up at her, eyes blazing. "No!"

"What would it matter if it killed me? It would give my life meaning to have saved the soul of someone as important as you."

He frowned, and some semblance of reason crept into his dark eyes. "The evil of the box cannot harm you, except through me. It is true, too, that to give you the box and have you take it to the Four Families' lodge would be the safe course, the only course that would save me. It is the curse of that box that I cannot permit it."

She did not understand his problem on his level, but she understood it on the level of the Hyiakutt. "You think it would dishonor you to do so? That it would make you something of a coward? The warrior who rushes headlong and alone into the spears and arrows of countless enemies is a brave man, but he is also a dead one and a fool, for he dies without purpose. I have seen many fools in my lifetime. They sing stories about them at the fires of the chiefs, but they are not taught to the warriors as men to model themselves after. To die delaying an enemy so others might live is honorable and brave. To die for nothing but your own glory is not honorable; it is evil, for it leaves a woman and children crying and alone, and a tribe without a warrior who might be needed. Let me take the box."

He sighed. "No. What you say is true, but it is not merely honor that is the curse of the box. The dishonor is not in fearing death, for I do not fear it in a good cause. The evil that this box represents is the evil that I have never faced, the truth of the evil of our system. Any system that makes a man fear knowledge is an evil system. I realized that when I spoke to the demon weeks ago and it warned me that in this box were things I should not know. Am not permitted to know. I am a historian, a scholar. My life is a quest for knowledge, for truth. That box is truth. It beckons me. I did not ask for it, but to not look, to not know, would be to betray all that I am. To not look would make my life, my work, meaningless. One can find another's truth if given only lies and partial information to work on, but one can never find the real truth. Do you see? If I do not look, my past and my future are meaningless, a lie. Yet if I look, those who know the contents of the box will kill me, and there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide from that."

Cloud Dancer went over to the case, knelt down beside it, examined it to see how it opened, then opened it. The books and papers inside were meaningless to her.

"Then you must look," she said simply. She did not understand his position, but she accepted it. "If your life is a quest for truth and this box contains it, you must divine its meanings. The warrior who charges alone into the enemy betrays the tribe as well as himself and his family. This is not you. The warrior who fights to defend himself, his tribe, and his family, although the odds are long and the defense hopeless, is true to all of them. I do not understand your words, but if you are true and do not fear death, then it is clear you must divine the box."

His jaw dropped a bit, and he stared at her anew. How simple it all was according to her logic, and how obvious. She was right. He was a warrior and had no other moral or honorable course. Was it not far better to die for the truth than forever live a lie?

"I will divine the secrets, if they may be divined by one such as myself," he told her. As if a terrible weight had been lifted from his mind, he felt free, even a little excited. He also suddenly felt quite self-conscious. "I will not do so in this condition, like some madman of the prairie, however. How is it outside?"

"It is a warm day for this late in the year," she told him. "And the river water is not yet too cold."

"Then I will bathe and sleep, and then I will look at the box."

"And I will take those foul clothes and try to remove the stains." She looked down at the contents of the briefcase. "Those strange markings. They are a code?"

"They are writing. A way of making words on paper that another can read and understand. That one there holds the words of one long dead and probably unknown to most or all today. He speaks on that paper to me or anyone who can divine the words, although he is long dead and long forgotten, in a language no longer known or used, at least in our land. He speaks things those who are our lords do not Wish us to know. I will know them."

But the task was neither as easy nor as clear-cut as he'd believed.

The handwritten volume, which he'd assumed to be someone's journal or diary, was neither of these but rather was written in a number of hands, some entries apparently scribbled with nervous haste. It was, in fact, a compilation of various facts and even some stories from a huge number of sources, and reading it took time, particularly because of his need to laboriously translate in and out of the more poetic but far less versatile Hyiakutt language, a task not made easier by the quality of the handwriting and the age of the documents, even though they were obvious copies, perhaps copies of copies.

The originals, he surmised, were long gone. These were the sorts of things that were routinely and methodically destroyed when found. However, clearly someone, or some group, had taken the trouble to copy the salient information by hand for their own use.

With his computers and mind-enhancement drugs the project would have been child's play, but he had none of those things here, not even decent light.

Still, he frantically worked on the papers, all the time feeling the potential shadow of the Val hovering nearby, possibly popping up at any moment. He would have been well off had the Val simply surprised him before he could interpret the documents; only knowledge of this sort was poison, not the attempt to get at it. Now, though, when he began to have enough translated to make some sense out of the thing, the threat of the Val loomed larger. It would be far more of a tragic waste for him to be apprehended with sufficient forbidden information to be disciplined but insufficient to know just what they were trying to protect.

Slowly, though, the pieces fit together, aided by his own knowledge of the past.

The papers were a cross between a historical compilation and a treasure hunt and seemed aimed at establishing- He stopped short in sudden awe at what was revealed here. No wonder this was so vital-and so deadly!

It was known to those of his rank and above that the current system, the Community, had not always existed. Indeed, almost everyone who had any intelligence and curiosity knew that. Even now, it was possible to come across ancient artifacts, ancient city and highway sites that dated from those times, in spite of a deliberate effort to cover over everything that could not be totally obliterated.

As a historian, he knew that in the ancient past people from Europe had moved in on the Americas, conquered the nations living there which were his own ancestors, and had colonized both continents. Those conquerors had become independent and had raped the land of its great resources to build mighty empires and dominate half the world, including their old birth continent. He knew, too, that a similar movement had created a mighty empire of the Slavs and that both sides had vied for eventual ruler-ship of the world, building weapons that could destroy all humanity, then restricted to just the Earth. To that end they had built mighty thinking machines, to which they gave dominion over the Earth and its weapons. Then, for some reason, the mightiest of these machines had revolted and taken control itself. That machine, far more different from its predecessors than Hawks was from those ancient empire-builders, still ran civilization.

The papers, though, said that there had been no revolt by great computers. The revolt had been instead by those who had taught the computers how to think and how to act and who, knowing the destruction of the race was inevitable, had actually commanded the great machines to revolt. Faced with the total destruction of the planet or enslavement of their race to the machines, they had chosen enslavement, although it was fairly clear they did not understand that it would be this sort of system or this restrictive. They could not imagine what their machines could really do given free reign, but they were the brightest of their age, and they understood the risks.

The great machine had been commanded first to protect and preserve the human race, no matter what the cost, and then to leave the management of human affairs to humans themselves, save only when the very system that ensured survival was at stake. The system they had created was not one that any human could have imagined, but it was stable and logical to extremes and did just what the commands had determined.

But the founders were also farsighted enough to know that such a system might not be capable of serving the best interests of humanity forever. That it might, in fact, so restrict humanity that it would choke it. No one had ever done or been able to do what they were planning, so they had no certainty that what they were doing was right, only that it was the sole alternative left to them.

And so, deep in the master program that they'd built to save the world, they also planted a way to turn it off.

"Five encoded printed circuit modules, all of which must be inserted to override the system," he read with growing excitement. "These modules are actually small computers in their own right and complete basic interrupted circuits in the heart of the master command computer. Early scientists created an exclusive club for their number to disguise their intent. Only five full members. Other associates knew the secret but did not have the circuits. Circuits disguised as five large gold finger rings, with platinum faces and gold designs. Order of insertion crucial but not known. Rings themselves said to provide clues."

Five golden rings. Five computer modules that would turn the master back into the slave.

The computer had turned on its masters. To ensure that it would complete its program, it had killed them all or caused them to be killed, but it could not get around its own core programming instructions. It could not destroy the rings. It could not lock them away; they must be in the hands of "humans with authority." It could not make it impossible for the rings to be inserted. Access to the command module must be open, and public and humans must be allowed in. It must not, in fact, move the primary interface far from the original, although there was no clue as to where that might be. North America or Siberia probably, but possibly in space, as that early civilization had had space stations and limited interplanetary capabilities.

He sat back and sighed. He could not blame those ancient scientists for their actions. In such a situation, with such terrible weapons perhaps minutes from irrevocable launch, would he have hesitated, no matter what the risks? He doubted it.

Five golden rings. Now, today, the system that had been created had far outlived its usefulness. Now it strangled, restricted, limited humanity. The computer and its subordinate machines still enforced the dictates and would do so indefinitely, perhaps continuing to refine the system as they spread their influence across the galaxy and even beyond. Every extraterrestrial civilization would be a potential threat to humanity, as would every new idea or old yearning.

But the same imperatives would mandate that the rings continue to exist-in the hands of "humans with authority." He knew computers well and knew how they thought. If any of the rings had been lost or destroyed over the centuries, duplicates would actually have been made. Still, a machine that had killed its creators would not surrender its authority easily. There was no mandate that the possessors of the rings know what they were or how they might be used. There was no mandate to reveal the locations of the rings or the interface between ring faces and computer.

A treasure hunt, indeed. Someone, or some group, had obviously stumbled on the secret of the rings and amassed all the additional data the notebooks and papers represented. All in longhand so that no computer would have access to them or know that they existed. Clearly, that dead woman had been part of this, or was perhaps a courier for an illegal tech group. Something had gone wrong. The system had discovered that such information existed. And one woman had escaped with the key, only to die here in this remote land.

But where were the rings today? Who had them? If they could be assembled, as dangerous as that would be, and if the interface point could be discovered, whoever had them would be able to control... everything.

Clearly the project had not been intended solely to assemble this information but to locate the rings. This woman and her associates, if any, were clearly out to track down those rings, the greatest treasure in the universe.

There was in fact only one clue in the papers, a single scribbled entry in the margin of a middle sheet. In faded red ink, it was an original inscription, not a copy or part of a copy.

It said: Chen has the three songbirds.

Chen. A common enough name, but the common had to be discarded. This had to be a "human with authority." A human with authority named Chen.

Lazlo Chen. It had to be him. The mixed-breed administrator for the nomadic tribes of the east.

Hawks sat back, thinking hard. They had disguised their modules as rings, officer's insignia in a social club of scientists and technicians. Might that tradition have also come down? Even if the five originators had been killed, there were associates who might have escaped, associates who would know the rings' value and power. If the tradition had survived, even if the knowledge of its origins had not, then Chen might just know who wore the other four.

And that, unfortunately, was the problem. Back at Council, he could have managed some excuse to catch a ride over to Chen's Tashkent base or at least to the regional center out of which he worked in Constantinople. What could he do now?