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