«I love it here,» he repeated for the fortieth time that day.
Gradually, though, his euphoric mood sank. The circus began giving abbreviated performances inside its Big Top, and Rolando stood helplessly pinned to the ground while the spotlights picked out the young fliers in their skintight costumes as they soared slowly, dreamily through the air between one trapeze and the next, twisting, spinning, somersaulting in the soft lunar gravity in ways that no one had ever done before. The audience gasped and cheered and gave them standing ovations. Rolando stood rooted near one of the tent’s entrances, deep in shadow, wearing a tourist’s pale green coveralls, choking with envy and frustrated rage.
The crowds were small—there were only a few thousand people living at Moonbase, plus perhaps another thousand tourists—but they shook the plastic tent with their roars of delight.
Rolando watched a few performances, then stayed away. But he noticed at the Olympic-sized pool that raw teenagers were diving from a thirty-meter platform and doing half a dozen somersaults as they fell languidly in the easy gravity. Even when they hit the water the splashes they made rose lazily and then fell back into the pool so leisurely that it seemed like a slow-motion film.
Anyone can be an athlete here, Rolando realized as he watched tourists flying on rented wings through the upper reaches of the Main Plaza’s vaulted dome.
Children could easily do not merely Olympic, but Olympian feats of acrobatics. Rolando began to dread the possibility of seeing a youngster do a quadruple somersault from a standing start.
«Anyone can defy gravity here,» he complained to his wife, silently adding, Anyone but me.
It made him morose to realize that feats which had taken him a lifetime to accomplish could be learned by a toddler in half an hour. And soon he would have to return to Earth with its heavy, oppressive, mocking gravity.
I know you’re waiting for me, he said to gravity. You’re going to kill me—if I don’t do the job for myself first.
Two nights before they were due to depart, they were the dinner guests of the chief administrator and several of his staff. As formal an occasion as Moonbase ever has, the men wore sport jackets and turtleneck shirts, the women real dresses and jewelry. The administrator told hoary old stories of his childhood yearning to be in the circus. Rolando remained modestly silent, even when the administrator spoke glowingly of how he had admired the daring feats of the Great Rolando—many years ago.
After dinner, back in their apartment, Rolando turned on his wife. «You got them to invite us up here, didn’t you?»
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 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.