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  She admitted, “The bionics company told me that they were going to end your consulting fee. They want to give up on you! I asked them to let us come here to see if your leg would be better in low gravity.”

  “And then we go back to Earth.”

  “Yes.”

  “Back to real gravity. Back to my being a cripple!”

  “I was hoping . . .” Her voice broke and she sank onto the bed, crying.

  Suddenly, Rolando’s anger was overwhelmed by a searing, agonizing sense of shame. All these years she had been trying so hard, standing between him and the rest of the world, protecting him, sheltering him. And for what? So that he could scream at her for the rest of his life?

  He could not bear it any longer.

  Unable to speak, unable even to reach his hand out to comfort her, he turned and lumbered out of the apartment, leaving his wife weeping alone.

  He knew where he had to be, where he could finally put an end to this humiliation and misery. He made his way to the big top.

  A stubby, gunmetal-gray robot stood guard at the main entrance, its sensors focusing on Rolando like the red glowing eyes of a spider.

  “No access at this time except to members of the circus troupe,” it said in a synthesized voice.

  “I am the Great Rolando.”

  “One moment, please, for voiceprint identification,” said the robot, then, “Approved.”

  Rolando swept past the contraption with a snort of contempt.

  The big top was empty at this hour. Tomorrow they would start to dismantle it. The next day they would head back to Earth.

  Rolando walked slowly, stiffly to the base of the ladder that reached up to the trapezes. The spotlights were shut down. The only illumination inside the tent came from the harsh working lights spotted here and there.

  Rolando heaved a deep breath and stripped off his jacket. Then, gripping one of the ladder’s rungs, he began to climb: good leg first, then the artificial leg. He could feel no difference between them. His body was only one-sixth its earthly weight, of course, but still, the artificial leg behaved exactly as his normal one.

  He reached the topmost platform. Holding tightly to the side rail, he peered down into the gloomy shadows a hundred feet below.

  With a slow, ponderous nod of his head, the Great Rolando finally admitted what he had kept buried inside him all these long, anguished years. Finally, the concealed truth emerged and stood naked before him. With tear-filled eyes he saw its reality.

  He had been living a lie all these years. He had been blaming gravity for his own failure. Now he understood with precise, final clarity that it was not gravity that had destroyed his life.

  It was fear.

  He stood rooted on the high platform, trembling with the memory of falling, plunging, screaming terror. He knew that this fear would live within him always, for the remainder of his life. It was too strong to overcome; he was a coward, probably had always been a coward, all his life. All his life.

  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 of contempt go through her veins. How could a human being allow his body to be disfigured so?

  He was not tall; Elverda herself stood several centimeters taller than he. His shoulders were quite broad, though; his torso thick and solid. The left side of his face was engraved metal, as was the entire top of his head: like a skullcap made of finest etched steel.

  Dorn’s left hand was prosthetic. He made no attempt to disguise it. Beneath the rough fabric of his shabby tunic and threadbare trousers, how much more of him was metal and electrical machinery? Tattered though his clothing was, his calf-length boots were polished to a high gloss.

  “A priest?” asked Miles Sterling. “Of what church? What order?”

  The half of Dorn’s lips that could move made a slight curl. A smile or a sneer, Elverda could not tell.

  “I will show you to your quarters,” said Dorn. His voice was a low rumble, as if it came from the belly of a beast. It echoed faintly off the walls of rough-hewn rock.

  Sterling looked briefly surprised. He was not accustomed to having his questions ignored. Elverda watched his face. Sterling was as handsome as cosmetic surgery could make a person appear: chiseled features, earnest sky-blue eyes, straight of spine, long of limb, athletically flat midsection. Yet there was a faint smell of corruption about him, Elverda thought. As if he were dead inside and already beginning to rot.

  The tension between the two men seemed to drain the energy from Elverda’s aged body. “It has been a long journey,” she said. “I am very tired. I would welcome a hot shower and a long nap.”

  “Before you see it?” Sterling snapped.

  “It has taken us months to get here. We can wait a few hours more.” Inwardly, she marveled at her own words. Once she would have been all fiery excitement. Had the years taught her patience? No, she realized. Only weariness.

  “Not me!” Sterling said. Turning to Dorn, “Take me to it now. I’ve waited long enough. I want to see it now.”

  Dorn’s eyes, one as brown as Elverda’s own, the other a red, electronic glow, regarded Sterling for a lengthening moment.

  “Well?” Sterling demanded.

  “I am afraid, sir, that the chamber is sealed for the next twelve hours. It will be imposs—”

  “Sealed? By whom? On whose authority?”

  “The chamber is self-controlled. Whoever made the artifact installed the controls as well.”

  “No one told me about that,” said Sterling.

  Dorn replied, “Your quarters are down this corridor.” He turned almost like a solid block of metal, shoulders and hips together, head unmoving on those wide shoulders, and started down the central corridor. Elverda fell in step alongside his metal half, still angered at his self-desecration. Yet, despite herself, she thought of what a challenge it would be to sculpt him. If I were younger, she told herself. If I were not so close to death. Human and inhuman, all in one strangely fierce figure.

  Sterling came up on Dorn’s other side, his face red with barely suppressed anger.

  They walked down the corridor in silence, Sterling’s weighted shoes clicking against the uneven rock floor. Dorn’s boots made hardly any noise at all. Half machine he may be, Elverda thought, but once in motion, he moves like a panther.

  The asteroid’s inherent gravity was so slight that Sterling needed the weighted footgear to keep himself from stumbling ridiculously. Elverda, who had spent most of her long life in low-gravity environments, felt completely at home. The corridor they were walking through was actually a tunnel, shadowy and mysterious, or perhaps a natural chimney vented through the rocky body by escaping gases eons ago when the asteroid was still molten. Now it was cold, chill enough to make Elverda shudder. The rough ceiling was so low she wanted to stoop, even though the rational side of her mind knew it was not necessary.

  Soon, though, the walls smoothed out, and the ceiling grew higher. Humans had extended the tunnel, squaring it with laser precision. Doors lined both walls now, and the ceiling glowed with glareless, shadowless light. Still she hugged herself against the chill that the others did not seem to notice.

  They stopped at a wide double door. Dorn tapped out the entrance code on the panel set into the wall and the doors slid open.

  “Your quarters, sir,” he said to Sterling. “You may, of course, change the privacy code to suit yourself.”

  Sterling gave a curt nod and strode through the open doorway. Elverda got a glimpse of a spacious suite, carpeting on the floor and hologram windows on the walls.

  Sterling turned in the doorway to face them. “I expect you to call for me in twelve hours,” he said to Dorn, his voice hard.

  “Eleven hours and fifty-seven minutes,” Dorn replied. Sterling’s nostrils flared, and he slid the double doors shut.

  “This way.” Dorn gestured with his human hand. “I’m afraid your quarters are not as sumptuous as Mr. Sterling’s.”

  Elverda said, “I am his guest. He is paying all the bills.”

  “You are a great artist. I have heard of you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For the truth? That is not necessary.”

  I was a great artist, Elverda said to herself. Once. Long ago. Now I am an old woman waiting for death.

  Aloud, she asked, “Have you seen my work?”

  Dorn’s voice grew heavier. “Only holograms. Once I set out to see The Rememberer for myself, but—other matters intervened.”

  “You were a soldier then?”

  “Yes. I have been a priest only since coming to this place.”

  Elverda wanted to ask him more, but Dorn stopped before a blank door and opened it for her. For an instant she thought he was going to reach for her with his prosthetic hand. She shrank away from him.

  “I will call for you in eleven hours and fifty-six minutes,” he said, as if he had not noticed her revulsion.

  “Thank you.”

  He turned away, like a machine pivoting.

  “Wait,” Elverda called. “Please—how many others are here? Everything seems so quiet.”

  “There are no others. Only the three of us.”

  “But—”

  “I am in charge of the security brigade. I ordered the others of my command to go back to our spacecraft and wait there.”

  “And the scientists? The prospector family that found this asteroid?”

  “They are in Mr. Sterling’s spacecraft, the one you arrived in,” said Dorn. “Under the protection of my brigade.”

  Elverda looked into his eyes. Whatever burned in them, she could not fathom.

  “Then we are alone here?”

  Dorn nodded solemnly. “You and
me—and Mr. Sterling, who pays all the bills.” The human half of his face remained as immobile as the metal. Elverda could not tell if he was trying to be humorous or bitter.

  “Thank you,” she said. He turned away and she closed the door.

  Her quarters consisted of a single room, comfortably warm but hardly larger than the compartment on the ship they had come in. Elverda saw that her meager travel bag was already sitting on the bed, her worn old drawing computer resting in its travel-smudged case on the desk. Elverda stared at the computer case as if it were accusing her. I should have left it home, she thought. I will never use it again.

  A small utility robot, hardly more than a glistening drum of metal and six gleaming arms folded like a praying mantis’s, stood mutely in the farthest corner. Elverda stared at it. At least it was entirely a machine; not a self-mutilated human being. To take the most beautiful form in the universe and turn it into a hybrid mechanism, a travesty of humanity. Why did he do it? So he could be a better soldier? A more efficient killing machine?

  And why did he send all the others away? she asked herself while she opened the travel hag. As she carried her toiletries to the narrow alcove of the bathroom, a new thought struck her. Did he send them away before he saw the artifact, or afterward? Has he even seen it? Perhaps.

  Then she saw her reflection in the mirror above the washbasin. Her heart sank. Once she had been called regal, stately, a goddess made of copper. Now she looked withered, dried up, bone thin, her face a geological map of too many years of living, her flight coveralls hanging limply on her emaciated frame.

  You are old, she said to her image. Old and aching and tired.

  It is the long trip, she told herself. You need to rest. But the other voice in her mind laughed scornfully. You’ve done nothing but rest for the entire time it’s taken to reach this piece of rock. You are ready for the permanent rest; why deny it?

  She had been teaching at the university on Luna, the closest she could get to Earth after a long lifetime of living in low-gravity environments. Close enough to see the world of her birth, the only world of life and warmth in the solar system, the only place where a person could walk out in the sunshine and feel its warmth soaking their bones, smell the fertile earth nurturing its bounty, feel a cool breeze plucking at their hair.