A Million Little Pieces Of My Mind

There is only so much stimulus that a man can take before his mind refuses to accept any more. Bradley simply closed his eyes and lay back on the warm pavement, shaking with laughter. He was laughing out loud without knowing why, rolling in the spilled garbage, tears streaming from his eyes and fists pounding on the ground. Finally, totally exhausted, he came to rest against a building wall; he let his eyes remain closed and willingly allowed himself to drop into unconsciousness.

What seemed like many hours later, sensation returned to Bradley Hunter. He felt hot sunlight on his body and took his time opening his eyes. He was utterly relaxed and at peace; he assumed he was dead, and in so assuming he had nothing more to fear.

Finally he did open his eyes. To his surprise he was still lying amid the garbage cans in what appeared to be an ordinary alley. The sun was directly overhead, shining between columns of buildings that reached very, very high. Here and there the structures were connected by slender threads or catwalks. Bradley was amazed at the solidity of the scene and wondered why it should seem so real.

Finally he got the energy to rise to his feet. He was again surprised to note that his body was stiff and that he had scratches on his arms, painful ones. For the first time it occurred to him that he might somehow have survived the fall into the pit; he began to observe his surroundings with a little more interest.

The pavement seemed to be ordinary concrete, covered as it was with dirt and garbage stains. The wall to his back was composed of triangular-shaped bricks and mortar. The alley emptied onto a street on which Bradley could see people walking. The effect was so commonplace, so—so real, that the archaeologist found himself suspecting that he might somehow be in a modern, living part of the Egyptian city he had just left; but no, there was no room in the meteor crater for anything like this. There must be some other explanation.

Well, first off, he thought, if I survived the fall, perhaps Marquette did, too. So Bradley called out Marquette's name loudly and looked about, but there was no sign of the man. Bradley gave it up and decided to go out on the street and ask some of the people passing by where he was. He couldn't be very far from where he had been and he did speak some Arabic, enough to get by, he hoped.

The street, when he entered it, was almost as narrow as the alley and the smell of decayed food followed him. The buildings lining the road towered into the sky seemingly reaching all the way into the sun. Bradley lived in Chicago and thought he was used to tall buildings; but these were so close together and so overpoweringly tall that the effect was just depressing. The street was curved and one could not see more than a hundred feet at most, in any direction but up.

Bradley decided to travel left down the street; it was as good a direction as any. He was really too emotionally drained at this point to feel the full thrill that the prospect of exploring a strange new city usually brought him; but he was alert enough to note interesting details as he went along the way.

The poverty of the people was obvious, evident not only in their clothing and surroundings, but also in the indolence and hopelessness of their bearing. Here and there drunks lay in the streets; they held a peculiar-looking flower to their noses and Bradley decided that they were not drunk but were intoxicated by some narcotic element in the flowers themselves. There were children playing, but their laughter was the harsh laughter of ghetto children who learn the need for violence early in life. Dirt covered their bodies so thickly that Bradley could hardly tell where dirt ended and clothing began.

But—and here was the surprise—the people were not at all Egyptian; for they all had the coppery bodies and black hair of the Red race. Bradley couldn't guess where in the world he was, but he was obviously a good distance from where he had been. He did not feel dead, but he could not discount that possibility, either. With no explanations available he forced his mind's questions to rest for the time being.

And then, in Arabic, he asked a woman where he was. At her blank look, he switched to English, then French (although all he could ask in French was, Where is the bathroom, Madam?). At this point she seemed to see, through the grime covering most of him, the paleness of his skin; she backed away in confusion, finally turning tail and running down the street. Bradley hastily bent to the street surface and rubbed some of the dirt on his hands and face. Since he wore no hat he also put some of the dirt in his hair to darken it as much as possible. He had no desire to be worshipped, or sacrificed, or whatever these people did to fair-skinned strangers—and he didn't want to find out, at least not until he knew what sort of situation he was in. He knew that if he kept walking in a straight line he would eventually reach the edge of the city; if only he could see some of the surrounding countryside he might at least be able to guess what continent he was on.

But the street didn't go in a straight line; it was endless, and even the cross-streets were curved, as if the city's planners had based their design on a double spiral. Hours passed and as his legs became sore with the unaccustomed exertion his stomach began to growl with more and more insistence. Although he had passed various sorts of shops at infrequent intervals, they had not had the appearance of grocery stores; besides, Bradley carried only a few dozen dinari in his pocket and he somehow doubted that the local merchants would have any idea what they were even for.

As the day grew old and the air began to cool even in the depths of the musty city streets, Bradley came upon a bazaar or fair of some sort. Booths were set up on both sides of the narrow street with fabrics, handicrafts, and simple works of art, with people filling in the space in between. Still of the lower class who had been passing him by unknowingly all day, the people crowded each other, laughing and talking. Elderly people led by young adults, the ever-present children, lovers, they all gawked and haggled as bazaar-goers do the universe over, to obtain some treasure that has caught the eye today only to find its way into a closet tomorrow.

And, there was food: Bradley could smell it even blocks before he actually saw the bazaar. At first he cast his eye around the booths in vain, trying to locate the one selling the local version of hamburgers and French fries; he saw nothing of the sort. What he did see were several booths selling brown or gray leaves or papers, pressed together and wrapped. It didn't look nearly as much like food as it looked like brown paper towels. But people were purchasing packages of it and eating it "raw", or taking it to other booths where the proprietor would place the package into an oven-like contraption, wait a moment, and remove meats or vegetable-like things—none of which looked familiar. Bradley felt his pulse racing up again before he checked it. He would keep his head. He reminded himself that he had probably died, anyway; and thus kept calm. He also felt the urge to write in his journal, but he had left that on the table in the camp—which itself was gone.

With his head straight once more, Bradley tried to watch the transactions at the booths, to figure out how he could get himself something to eat. He unhappily watched a patron hand a booth-keeper a handful of yellow triangles in apparent payment for a food package. Now, what? he asked himself. He didn't like the idea of stealing from anyone (not that his morals were so strong; he just didn't want to get caught!). Nevertheless he was getting hungrier by the second. The booth was against the building, which precluded his sneaking up on it from behind. The sides were blocked by other concessions, and the front was crowded with people.

Then, just as Bradley was considering begging, by sign language, some of the stuff, his chance came. One of the ovens in another booth caught fire, billowing forth huge amounts of black smoke and causing the crowd to scurry to various points of safety. The owner cried for help, beating on the back of the device with his apron to put out the flames. The manager of the concession Bradley had been watching leaped over the side of his booth and ran to the assistance of his neighbor; despite a guilty twinge of conscience Bradley pulled a leafy package from the rack it was hanging on and fled through the confused crowd, running until he had left the bazaar area far behind and felt safely surrounded by the dark streets. He leaned against a brick wall until his pulse and breathing returned to normal, then chewed greedily on the dried leaves. They tasted like paper but dissolved quickly in the mouth and soon Bradley's stomach began to warm and relax and he could pay attention to his surroundings. It was much the same as other parts of the city he had seen, but the skyscrapers above didn't seem to reach quite so high, which Bradley took to be a sign that he was nearing the edge of the city. The sun must have been setting; it was below the buildings and he couldn't see it but the sky above was turning a sullen green. Bradley had never heard of green in a sunset, but then there had been many places he had never seen and it was already obvious that this was one of them.

After the joyous noise of the bazaar, the street on which Bradley stood seemed very quiet indeed. Bradley considered going to sleep; after the sun had set it had gotten so dark, so quickly, that there wasn't now really enough light to see by. Bradley didn't know what the local laws were concerning vagrants but he had lain unconscious God knew how long in that first alley; and he had seen flower-intoxicated men lying along the sidewalks all day.

He had just begun to doze off when he heard the noise.

Having lived years in Chicago, Bradley stiffened. He had probably only heard a cat, but he was in a strange city and knew better than to take a chance. He spun, crouched, and yelled into the darkness, "You'd better watch it—I know Kung Fu!" He didn't really, but saying that had saved him from a mugging once before. He strained his eyes, trying to see into the night, trying to distinguish anything at all. Then there was a scratching sound, and a light appeared—held in the hand of a beautiful, frightened-looking woman who whispered back something that sounded like, "Prtslp snfmr?"

She didn't move and Bradley slowly rose as he gazed at her. Her beauty could not be lessened by the harshness of the light she held (it was not a match but some sort of device). She was not dirty like the other people he had seen, and her copper skin glowed with a radiance that, even after Bradley's recent trying experience, could touch the archaeologist's emotions...and desires.

And his heart did go out to her. He wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her so that those big black doe-eyes wouldn't look so frightened. He tried to think of something appropriate to say to someone who didn't speak English. "I don't really know Kung Fu," was what he said. Then the woman dropped the device, which rolled a trail of brightness down the pavement, and fell to her knees, weeping. Bradley ran to her then and did put his hands gently on her shoulders, still at a loss for words. "I—I'll learn, if you want me to."

She looked at him and said something brokenly in her language; then fresh tears poured forth and Bradley held her close and let her cry on his shoulder, thinking how incredible it should be that he was in this amazing, endless city, holding and comforting a perfect stranger on the pavement of a dark side street. And, although he felt sorry for her, he couldn't keep his mind from wandering to thoughts of her warm body against his and her jet hair brushing his cheek; and he felt his pulse quicken again but this time he didn't attempt to control it— because now he knew he wasn't dead.

Soon the woman's sobbing subsided and she arose, Bradley getting to his feet at the same time. She queried him again in her own mysterious tongue; still all Bradley could say was, "Sorry, honey, I just can't speak your language."

At this her bearing changed slightly and she said, "Quela knkri," in a tone that somehow instantly reversed their roles: she was going to aid him. She picked up her lamp device and held it so she could see his features more clearly; when she gasped Bradley was at first afraid she would run like that other woman did at his pale skin. But this woman appeared to be more brave and she purposely led the way down the dark streets. The lamp device was round and just fit in the woman's hand; by some means Bradley couldn't determine she was able to adjust the beam's intensity and width, and by this means they made their way down one street and another, all deserted in the night darkness, until they finally came to a building with a large window in the front. During the day Bradley had noted that such edifices most often were stores; when an elderly man answered the woman's summons and let them in Bradley saw that this was another such.

Bradley did not receive much opportunity to look around; he only noted that the shop was old and dusty and that he couldn't determine just what was sold there—the only things that could possibly pass for merchandise were some green packages, opaque and completely wrapped—before the old man exposed a narrow passageway behind some shelves and the woman led him into it. They walked several yards and turned a corner and there, set at the end of the passageway was an ancient, beautifully carved door, wider than the widest he had seen in this place. It seemed to be made of some sort of wood, and the fact that such a beautiful artifact was so carefully hidden made it all the more impressive.

The woman placed her ball-of-light device on a stud set in the wall next to the door and waited; and just as Bradley was beginning to wonder if anything at all were going to happen, the door suddenly and silently slid open, revealing a brilliantly-lighted room beyond. The light was so intense after the darkness that the woman had already pulled him into the room and the door had already closed behind him before he realized that the room was bare. Then, it began to rise: it was an elevator.

Although the acceleration was not great it was continuous and Bradley sensed that their upward speed must be tremendous. Minutes seemed to pass, and Bradley tried to talk to his captor/saviour. He pointed to himself. "Bradley," he said slowly. "Brad-ley!" She looked at him, smiled slightly, then turned away. Jane had had it easier with Tarzan, he thought. He continued to gesture frantically at himself. "Brad-ley!" She tilted her head in a puzzled expression. "Bradley," she pronounced perfectly, as if in response to the question of a child.

The elevator began its deceleration, as continuous as its rise had been. Bradley estimated that they were moving dozens of feet per second. He pointed to the woman. She smiled again and said, "Hskn."

"Hskn." Not a very pretty sound, really, but it was strange—somehow, when applied to her, it was a beautiful sound...a beautiful name. Bradley wanted to sing it aloud, like the fellow in "West Side Story", and wondered if he were getting high on something. Hskn's perfume was very strong in the elevator cab and Bradley thought it reminded him of those flowers he had seen the drunks smelling on the street.

Then the room stopped moving. The woman hesitated, then turned to Bradley and smiled. "Bradley," she said, then placed her hand over her mouth. Bradley wasn't sure what she meant by it but he repeated the gesture. She seemed satisfied and then touched her ball-device to another stud on the elevator wall and, again, the door slid open.

But the scene thus revealed was so unexpected that Bradley's jaw just dropped and Hskn had to pull him into the room. Immediately she changed character. With a wail of despair she dragged him through a dozen of the blue-robed people who filled the room. Male and female, they were clean (unlike the other citizens Bradley had seen) and had that professional air about them that one finds in doctors or teachers.

The space they were in was large, and the far wall was entirely glass, looking out on an array of lights which Bradley knew had to be the city below. And yet, for all its size, it had to have been undiscovered by the outside world; for Bradley knew that a skyline as fantastic as the one he was viewing would have long been the Eighth Wonder of the World if anyone had known it existed.

Hskn led the way to a desk and began babbling hysterically to the woman sitting behind it. Bradley didn't have any idea what she was saying, and wondered if these rapid changes of mood were common to everyone in this place, or if Hskn were just an actress.

The robed woman behind the desk rose and led the archaeologist and his guide to a corner of the room, where there was a computer-like console and a chair. All of a sudden, Bradley realized that he was in a hospital, and the two women with him intended to do something to him in that chair! He began to shy away, which was a mistake; the robed woman called two husky-looking men to help, and Bradley quickly sat down. Facing the tremendous window, he looked through Hskn's reflection to the moving lights of the city and wondered fearfully what to expect next. He was getting to the point where he no longer was panicked by these new dangers; he just wanted to get them over with so he could go to bed.

He felt a hair-dryer-like device being fit over his head and could hear Hskn's muffled voice filtering through it. "...Klr 'nkl falling, spl head—I'm so trkn!"

Bradley's head jerked inside the heavy helmet. Could he understand some of Hskn's words?

"—so dazed. I didn't know what to do. Will he be all right, Priestess?"

Bradley's heart thumped—not Hskn. Dawn was her name—and how much better that fit! He watched the woman's reflection remove the helmet. "Can you speak, now?"

The archaeologist tried to force himself to say something, anything. His own tongue felt strange inside his mouth. "Yes—yes I can." He wasn't speaking English but he knew what the words meant!

Hskn—no, Dawn—hugged him. "Oh, husband! I'm so glad!" Bradley's eyes flew up at the word for "husband" but he kept silent, realizing that Dawn was putting on an act for some reason. She whispered in his ear, "Say as little as possible—I must get you out of here before they see through the dirt to your skin color." Bradley suddenly realized that Dawn had stayed as close to him physically as possible since they had entered this place, covering his arms and hair with her hands and body. Now self-conscious, he felt himself flushing and was grateful when the elevator door had closed on them again.

"Dawn," he said, "tell me—"

But she performed the hand-over-mouth gesture again and now Bradley knew that it meant, "Follow my lead."

"Isn't the Imprinter a wonderful device?" she said loudly. "And to think it was invented merely to teach technical vocabularies to college students!"

Surprisingly, Dawn only let the elevator drop for a few seconds; when the door opened the couple found themselves at the end of a walkway suspended between two of the great towers. The height made Bradley a little dizzy but there was a high railing and Dawn led the way confidently, so Bradley followed.

The stars shining above were no match for the brilliancy of the city below. Bradley couldn't believe that the upper levels of the city could be so bright while the lower levels were so dark. As they walked, he glanced at the stars. The air was warm and sweet and it reminded him of summer nights spent studying the stars as a Boy Scout. He knew all the Northern constellations by heart, and he had learned enough of the Southern ones to tell direction. It occurred to him that he could at least learn to which hemisphere of the Earth he had been taken. He looked up with more purpose: yes, there was the Big Dipper. He was in the Northern Hemisphere, meaning North America, Europe, or Asia. But—the Dipper looked...odd. He glanced about the sky, momentarily disoriented. The other constellations..."My God!" he cried aloud. "The constellations—they're backwards!" Dawn, ahead of him, turned around with the hand-over-mouth gesture, then serenely continued. Helplessly he followed, so lost in wandering thought that he was unaware of the passing of time and suddenly found himself descending a stairway to a terrace. When he had followed Dawn onto the floor of it, the woman touched her lamp device to a switch and the stairway rolled itself back to the walkway above it.

Since leaving the hospital Dawn had not worn her masque of the frantic woman and was now what seemed to be her normal, serene, confident self. "Bradley," she said, "I know you must have received many shocks today. Hush—don't interrupt. You haven't yet received your last shock, I'm afraid. But tonight I want you to rest. I am going to give you a relaxing drink; then I want you to clean yourself—I will show you how—and then go to sleep. In the morning, we will talk."

On the terrace was a decanter and some metal cups; while she was yet speaking she poured two drinks and gave one to Bradley. It was not alcoholic but sugary, and seemed to be related to the perfume she wore.

It made Bradley feel warm and giddy, so that he didn't mind when Dawn led him into the apartment off the terrace and helped remove his clothes and placed him in a stone tub filled with crystal green liquid. She sponged the grime from his skin and, finding scratches from his fall in the pyramid, poured on them a soothing oil which took away all the pain from them. Every time he tried to ask a question she refused to answer him until morning; finally he tired of trying.

She took his hand and he followed her back to the terrace, where she showed him an area of floor that was soft, like a mattress. He was tired down to the bone and warm from the drink, and it no longer occurred to him to mind that he was wearing no clothes; modesty had stopped meaning much to him somewhere around the second time she'd had to touch his bare skin to keep him alive. Dawn touched his arm and placed in his palm a metal ring attached by a string to her blouse. Bradley was still working out what the gesture meant—some Kiri courtesy, he assumed, the way a host hands a guest a towel—when the slightest movement of his own arm pulled the string loose, and her outfit came open, and dropped to her ankles at a twist of her shoulders.

And something happened to him that had never happened to him before in his life.

It was not desire, or not desire as he had ever had occasion to name it; it arrived less like wanting and more like an alarm going off behind his sternum, insistent and entirely outside any vote of his. He heard himself make a sound he didn't recognize. His hands were shaking. For one genuinely frightening second he thought he was having some kind of attack.

"Something's wrong with me," he said, and meant it as a warning, not an invitation.

Dawn went still. Whatever crossed her face first, it wasn't offense—it was concern, plain and immediate, the same look she'd worn kneeling over his cut hand in the ruins. "Wrong how?"

"I don't—" He didn't have the words for it in her language and wasn't sure he had them in his own. "This isn't—I don't do this. With women. Ever. It's never once been a question before, so I've never had to explain it." He was still shaking. "But right now my whole body is telling me it's a question, and I don't understand why, and I need you to know that before anything else happens. I don't want you thinking I've lied to you about who I am."

She considered him for a long moment, entirely unhurried, the same patience she'd shown him on his first terrified night in her city. "You are not lying," she said finally. "I can see that you are not lying. And you are not looking at me the way Marquette looks at everyone." A small, private smile. "Whatever this is, Bradley, it is not that you have stopped being who you are."

Which left him standing there with an alarm he couldn't switch off and nothing left to blame it on. He laughed, a little wildly. "Then what is it?"

"I don't know. But I would rather find out with you than watch you stand there shaking until morning."

What happened between them after that Bradley would spend a long time trying to account for, and never quite would. It was not like anything he had done before, with anyone; there was a strangeness in it that never fully resolved into pleasure and never fully stayed apart from it either—his body answering some question his mind had not asked, over and over, until near dawn they lay tangled together, equally undone and equally bewildered.

Then they lay, Dawn's ebony hair on Bradley's freckled chest, gulping air thirstily. Neither of them moved to sleep yet. Bradley lay with the ache still humming under his skin like a struck bell, and did what he always did with anything that frightened him: he took it apart.

"I think I know what that was," he said into the dark. "There's research on Earth—not settled, nothing anyone would swear to, but real research—that says people are drawn most strongly to the scent of someone whose blood runs differently from their own. Different enough that a child of the two of them would inherit defenses against things neither parent could fight alone on their own. It's never strong enough to overrule anything, on Earth, because everyone on Earth is already so close to everyone else, genetically speaking. A few thousand years is the most separation any two of us have ever had." He turned his head. "You and I have four billion."

Dawn laughed—really laughed, the way she had in the museum over the ugly painting, helpless and delighted. "So I smelled irresistible to you because I am nothing at all like you."

"That's my best guess."

"And it will not happen again?"

"I don't think so. Whatever went off in me tonight, it went off because it had never met anything like you before. Now that it has"—he shrugged, though she probably couldn't see it in the dark—"I don't think it gets to be surprised twice."

"A shame," Dawn said, entirely unbothered, "to go to all that trouble only to use it once." She settled more comfortably against him, already half asleep. "On Kiri we would think it very strange, to make yourself blind to half the world on purpose, the way your people do. Imagine choosing your favorite food, and then refusing, forever after, to notice when you were hungry for anything else." She yawned. "But I understand it is not a choice, for you. It is only strange to me. I don't have to understand a thing to like it."

Bradley felt the woman still, her heartbeats at his side, until he knew she was asleep. He gazed at the stars above until they went blurry and he too was on the verge of sleeping.

The last thing in his head was the image of the stars, and the thought that, with this woman beside him, he didn't care that those stars showed him to be, not on Earth at all, but on some completely different planet.