A Million Little Pieces Of My Mind

Bradley Hunter had become an archaeologist because he had wanted to. It had been his joy and his passion since his childhood, when he had read about Schliemann and Troy and the discoveries of Angkor Wat and Chichen Itza. When the other children had wanted to become firemen and nurses, he had wanted to become an archaeologist. His high school yearbook had called him, jokingly, "The Man Most Likely To Find Something Old". And in college his friends had kidded that he only dated girls who owned shovels.

Discovering the lost treasure of Khufu had been his dream; and yet he had had no chance to enjoy the finding of it. It was funny to think about, even. It was so irrelevant to the situation in which he now found himself. Bradley wondered what the Egyptians had finally done with their camping gear, and what they had thought when he and Marquette vanished at the bottom of that pit. He wondered what had become of his journal.

And now, here he was—in a thousand-year-old room filled with the fantastic remnants of a long-dead culture, the prehistory of a planet Bradley hadn't known existed only a week before.

"What do you hope to find?" whispered Dawn, her voice leaving echoes in the forgotten chambers around them.

Bradley began to speak in a normal tone of voice, but quickly lowered it to the level Dawn had used—anything else seemed almost sacrilegious. "All you are, Dawn, is in these chambers." He hadn't meant to sound so intense; but where archaeology was concerned he had little control over his emotions. "All you are, Dawn. All that your people are. Your successes...your failures. Maybe even...that last failure, the one that nearly destroyed your world."

Dawn shuddered. "I think it had best be left alone. I am not my past. My great-great-great grandparents may have been, perhaps, but not me. I am the present. And maybe the future." She tugged at his arm. "Let's leave it in peace. If we owe the past anything—we owe it that."

"Dawn, Dawn! You 'owe' the past nothing—but it owes you plenty! It owes you for your High Priests, the millions of poor people over our heads. It owes you for giving you a political system that keeps you fighting all the time. Why leave it in peace, when peace is the only thing it hasn't left you?"

"Then why pry here, to find out all those things?" Bradley flushed a bit; he had lured Dawn into the ruins of old Shoorn on the promise that they would merely try to locate the basement walls of the Lod Zu. They had done so, but Bradley couldn't tear himself away and had hoped that a brief history lesson would spark Dawn's interest, over her superstitious fear of the past.

"Because, Dawn, I hope—I pray—that your people won't make the same mistake twice. Your wars haven't stopped in the thousands of years since your Dark Ages began; but your technology has moved forward. Soon you'll have atomic power, and the capability to destroy yourselves again. Only this time, there may not be any survivors.

"Also, I'm curious about many things, such as the fact that we are both human. I am acquainted with the theory of parallel evolution, but it seems to me that we are too much alike to have separate origins."

"We're not identical," the woman smirked.

"We're both human." Bradley was looking around the room, dimly lit by the light globe in his hand. There seemed to be much equipment there, all utterly meaningless to the archaeologist. The technology and culture were too advanced over anything he knew for him to be able to understand any of it without a month's or a year's work. Hell, he couldn't understand the appliances in Dawn's kitchen!

"What we need," he said to himself—Dawn had wandered off on her own—"is something really spectacular—something for the Grand Appearance of a technical God..." There was a device before him; a panel at desk height and a projection with a cone above. Curiously, he tried to turn a dial on the panel—was amazed that it turned easily, and even more amazed that a green beam of light shone from the cone device to the floor. "Dawn, come here!" How could the device possibly work, after thousands of years' hiding in the damp chamber?

He heard Dawn's running footsteps, and a thud before she cried out. He started for her immediately. "Dawn, what is it? Where are you?" he cried.

"Right here, Bradley. I just tripped. I'm all right—oh, I cut my hand!"

Bradley was at her side in a moment, inspecting the injury. It was a nasty scratch but not a bad cut and he felt that it would be better off exposed to the air than bound up in a make-shift, non-sterile bandage. He kissed it.

"What was that for?"

"Oh—it's an Earth custom to kiss a hurt to make it better."

Dawn looked puzzled. "How can you heal an injury by kissing it?"

Bradley grinned. "It's just a custom. Not real. Hard to explain." He took her other hand in his. "Come here—I want to show you something amazing." He led her to the still-functioning, ante-bellum machine. Dawn looked it over carefully, her features eerily lit by the green glow from the device.

"Bradley, why do you say that this device has been untouched for over a thousand years?"

The archaeologist was surprised. That should be obvious to anyone. "Why, you were the one who told me that we were the first people down here in all that time."

"So I thought—but look at the dust on the console." She pointed at it. "Not all those handprints are used; some are too small—and I haven't touched it." Looking at her outstretched hand, New Dawn suddenly gasped. "Bradley, my hand—your kiss did make it better!"

Bradley looked, and sure enough: where seconds ago there had been a red, moist scratch there was now not the slightest mark to mar the smooth coppery skin.

"My kiss couldn't have cured you, Dawn. But—could the machine have done it? You're standing right in the green light."

Dawn instinctively jumped back. "Nursery rhymes say that, in the Old Days, there was no sickness."

"And what's this?" Bradley bent over and lifted an object from the floor.

"It looks like a spear," Dawn answered. "I don't know anything about archaeology, but isn't it odd, finding a spear amidst all this scientific equipment?"

"It would be odd at the best of times—but this is an Earth spear!"

"What? How can you tell?"

Bradley would never forget that peculiar design, the blending of Egyptian and Kiri styles. "Some spears were thrown at me the day I arrived, spears of this type...there's blood, dried blood on this one...Dawn, where are we? In relation to the alley in which I landed, I mean."

The woman activated her electronic compass and raised her eyebrows, a mannerism she had picked up from the Earthman. "We are directly under the spot you said you first appeared." She looked up. "How did you guess?"

The archaeologist firmed his grip on the artifact. "We've found the wall near the computer banks we were looking for. This exploring we can do another time. Let's hurry back to your mother."

"But why, Bradley?"

"This spear is the reason. Now that I know for sure who the new 'Son of God' is—well, we've got to stop him!"

Blessed paced nervously back and forth in his chambers. He had never really wanted this job; but once he had inherited it from his father he had determined to make the best of it. He delegated what authority he could to the other priests but he could see that they all wanted his position and their ideas of promotion always seemed to involve assassination.

News had come up from his spies that another alien was present on Kiri. Things always happen at once. At this rate, half the population of—what was it? Oh, yes, Earth—would be transported to Kiri within the week.

At least there were some bright spots: the spy had been able to infiltrate the alien's group well. An important job, too, since this particular alien was an anarchist. They had been lucky to stumble on Tshunai (Blessed blessed himself) and not this other one.

It did upset him that the Shoorn rebels were exploring the ruins of Old Shoorn. He had tried to discourage that sort of thing, and had largely been successful. There was one secret Blessed had kept all to himself. Let the other priests whisper about the creation of a park in the lower levels; let the underground think they had discovered an evil subterfuge. It kept them all busy. Oh, it was true, Blessed did intend to flood the lower levels; but he had a better reason to do so than merely to starve out the poor people.

The men he had secretly studying those ancient ruins had discovered weapons in the underground vaults. True, without the element that powered them, they were useless—but Blessed, as High Priest, knew what no one else did: the location of the great globe of ALL created and hidden those thousands of years ago.

He, alone of all the billions of people on Kiri, knew that the Great Pyramid near Shoorn was not a natural landmark at all, but the repository of the Gate of the Covenant and the hiding place of the old scientists. As Kiri's technology advanced, the Great Pyramid's true purpose would eventually have to be discovered; and Blessed felt that it was his sacred duty to prevent anyone from being able to get the ancient weapons and the ALL together. He couldn't prevent Kiri's technology from advancing, but there was one way in which he could keep anyone from uncovering the weapons—by actually filling in the ancient ruins. It was a shame to have to kill the wretched souls living in the lower levels (although it was certainly for the best) but there was no help for it. Hostilities were daily increasing between the various nations; only the fact that Shoorn's technology, the most advanced on Kiri, was so limited had thus far saved them from a repetition of the Great War. The discovery of those hidden weapons could upset the balance of power beyond all repair.

If he accomplished nothing else worthwhile in his lifetime, Blessed intended to see this through: by flooding the lower levels of Shoorn he could save the world from all-out eventual war. And, the sooner the better. He could not rest until the job was completed.

That's why he was in such a good mood today. The bombs in the Sea of Waters were set to go off, two days hence.