Without consciously thinking about it, Rolando untied one of the trapezes and gripped the rough surface of its taped bar. He did not bother with resin. There would be no need.
As if in a dream, he swung out into the empty air, feeling the rush of wind ruffling his gray hair, hearing the creak of the ropes beneath his weight.
Once, twice, three times he swung back and forth, kicking higher each time. He grunted with the unaccustomed exertion. He felt sweat trickling from his armpits.
Looking down, he saw the hard ground so far below. One more fall, he told himself. Just let go, and that will end it forever. End the fear. End the shame.
“Teach me!”
The voice boomed like cannon fire across the empty tent. Rolando felt every muscle in his body tighten.
On the opposite platform, before him, stood the chief administrator, still wearing his dinner jacket.
“Teach me!” he called again. “Show me how to do it. Just this once, before you have to leave.”
Rolando hung by his hands, swinging back and forth. The younger man’s figure standing on the platform came closer, closer, then receded, dwindled as inertia carried Rolando forward and back, forward and back.
“No one will know,” the administrator pleaded through the shadows. “I promise you; I’ll never tell a soul. Just show me how to do it. Just this once.”
“Stand back,” Rolando heard his own voice call, it startled him.
Rolando kicked once, tried to judge the distance and account for the lower gravity as best as he could, and let go of the bar. He soared too far, but the strong composite mesh at the rear of the platform caught him, yieldingly, and he was able to grasp the side railing and stand erect before the young administrator could reach out and steady him.
“We both have a lot to learn,” said the Great Rolando. “Take off your jacket.”
For more than an hour, the two men swung high through the silent, shadowy air. Rolando tried nothing fancy, no leaps from one bar to another, no real acrobatics. It was tricky enough just landing gracefully on the platform in the strange lunar gravity. The administrator did exactly as Rolando instructed him. For all his youth and desire to emulate a circus star, he was no daredevil. It satisfied him completely to swing side by side with the Great Rolando, to share the same platform.
“What made you come here tonight?” Rolando asked as they stood gasping and sweating on the platform between turns.
“The security robot reported your entry. Strictly routine, I get all such reports piped to my quarters. But I figured this was too good a chance to miss!”
Finally, soaked with perspiration, arms aching, and fingers raw and cramping, they made their way down the ladder to the ground. Laughing.
“I’ll never forget this,” the administrator said. “It’s the high point of my life.”
“Mine too,” said Rolando fervently. “Mine too.”
Two days later the administrator came to the rocket terminal to see the circus troupe off. Taking Rolando and his wife to one side, he said in a low voice that brimmed with happiness, “You know, we’re starting to accept retired couples for permanent residence here at Moonbase.”
Rolando’s wife immediately responded, “Oh, I’m not ready to retire yet.”
“Nor I,” said Rolando. “I’ll stay with the circus for a few years more, I think. There might still be time for me to make a comeback.”
“Still,” said the administrator, “when you do want to retire . . .”
Mrs. Rolando smiled at him. “I’ve noticed that my face looks better in this lower gravity. I probably wouldn’t need a face-lift if we come to live here.”
They laughed together.
The rest of the troupe was filing into the rocket that would take them back to Earth. Rolando gallantly held his wife’s arm as she stepped up the ramp and ducked through the hatch. Then he turned to the administrator and asked swiftly:
“What you told me about gravity all those years ago—is it really true? It is really universal? There’s no way around it?”
“Afraid not,” the administrator answered. “Someday gravity will make the sun collapse. It might even make the entire universe collapse.”
Rolando nodded, shook the man’s hand, then followed his wife to his seat inside the rocket’s passenger compartment. As he listened to the taped safety lecture and strapped on his safety belt, he thought to himself: so gravity will get us all in the end.
Then he smiled grimly. But not yet. Not yet.
Introduction to
“Sepulcher”
Why do human beings create works of art?
Among the earliest products of human hands that archeologists have uncovered are tiny, palm-sized bits of stone that have been shaped into miniature statues—often crude female figures with prominent sexual characteristics.
Why did someone take the time and spend the energy to convert a lump of stone into a work of art?
Why do I spend most of my life creating stories, writing tales about imaginary people in fantastic settings?
I think one of the motivations for creating artworks is communication. The artist—whether sculptor, painter, or even a writer of science fiction—is trying to speak to an audience, trying to say: this is the way the universe looks to me. Can you see what I see? Can you feel what I feel?
Each of us is trapped inside his or her own shell, groping through a lifetime of experiences, trying endlessly to make meaningful contact with all those other people around us.
I think that, at heart, that is why some of us try to create works of art. From those earliest figurines to the grandest monuments of human history, artworks are attempts to communicate, at least in part.
“Sepulcher” is a tale about such a work of art, and how it affects three very different—and very human—people.
SEPULCHER
“I was a soldier,” he said. “Now I am a priest. You may call me Dorn.”
Elverda Apacheta could not help staring at him. She had seen cyborgs before, but this . . . person seemed more machine than man. She felt a chill ripple
