DesPlaines (Plan) 15 rev cat 4-1076-9525. Hostile PX-3MRKQ. Pop (2440) 7,500,000. COL 2018 Fr (qv) & NrAm (qv) phys. cult. Comm] stndg, 229th. Prin ctrib gal: Circus olt Gal, heav met, prec stones.
(Encyclopedia Galactica, Reel 9, slot 2937)
The circus, in one form or another, is one of the oldest forms of respectable entertainment known to Mankind. Sporting events, theater, films, radio, television and sensables have all attempted to dislodge it from its status of popularity, with little lasting success. There is still the marveling at human agility, the gasping at death-defying feats, the suspense of watching people wager their lives on their skills.
The Circus of the Galaxy was just that - the Circus. It was the top-drawing show everywhere it played, an attraction whose very name was synonymous with excitement. There were good reasons for the Circus’ success, not the least of which was the fact that the Managing Director - who just happened to be Etienne d’Alembert, Duke of DesPlaines - settled for nothing short of perfection in all his acts; and while the Circus remained primarily a d’Alembert effort- fully ninety-eight percent of its personnel were members of that noble family- the d’Alemberts were a clan of considerable talent. At an age when other children were just learning to walk, d’Alemberts were already adept at t umbling. By the time they were five, they were already divided according to their special aptitudes into different branches of the circus that was the family’s life and tradition. The d’Alemberts, despite their exalted lineage, took little part in the affairs of nobility. They were performers - and more.
As usual, the midway and tent were crowded this evening, for this was the first appearance of the Circus on Earth in more than twenty years. Its fame had preceded it, and audiences flocked to it to get a look at what could well be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
The fact that the Circus never allowed its performances to be televised or sensabled enhanced the crowds even more.
There were no ‘freaks’ on the midway; the Duke considered such exhibitions degrading and fit only for carnivals, not for the Circus of the Galaxy. But that is not to say that there was not entertainment. There were food booths, where the curious could sample the delicacies of over a thousand different planets. There were games of skill and amusement rides, and over all this activity boomed the voice of Henri d’Alembert, the Duke’s nephew twice removed. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, nobles and citizens, we present a constantly changing panorama to excite and delight you. Over there in the red booth with the yellow awning is our exotic snack shop. Choose from a menu of over fifty- appealing appetizers, two hundred terrific, tasty tidbits, five hundred enthralling entrees. All these tender, tantalizing treats await your palate, coming to you from the farthest corners of the Galaxy for prices ranging from a small handful of kopeks to a couple of insignificant rubles. For those not interested in food, we invite you to come watch the wrestling matches about to start in the. side tent. See teams of enormous wrestlers vying against one another, testing their strength and skill to the limits. Ride our heart-grabbing Eagle’s Drop for thrills you never thought possible. Take your life in your hands and walk through our Haunted House, where there’s nothing to fear but the ghosts and goblins.’ Henri had been chief barker for over ten years; he could- and did - continue his spiel for hours without repeating himself once.
A traveler going down the midway from the main gate to the big tent would pass a gray pavilion marked ‘Madame Arabella’s Destinies Divined, Futures Foretold’. Inside, the beautiful, swarthy complexioned Arabella would spin tales of the customers’ fates using any of the traditional methods, from tarot cards and tea leaves to palms and crystal balls.
Whether she had any genuine psychic abilities was still a matter for conjecture, but the fact remained that few of her customers ever asked for refunds.
A few meters further down the midway were the wild animal cages, where the most ferocious beasts from all over the Galaxy were penned when not performing in the center ring. The least exotic of the creatures were the lions and tigers, with which the citizens of Earth were already quite familiar. More unusual were such specimens as the braknel, two meters high at the shoulder with a loud roar and sharper claws; the twin gorjas, a hunting team with fifteen centimeter-long fangs that injected into their victims the deadliest natural poison known to Man; the liltheran, whose eyes had been known to paralyze its prey with hypnotic effects; the swifter, a beast capable of attaining speeds greater than a hundred and seventy kilometers an hour, and of killing a full-grown great-ox with one swipe of its powerfully muscled paws; and other creatures, less impressive to look at but equally lethal in abilities. Yet this entire array of animal savagery could be controlled by what looked to be a little slip of a DesPlainian girl named Jeanne d’Alembert who, at only age sixteen, was acknowledged as the greatest animal trainer in all the Galaxy.
Closer still to the main tent was the pavilion of Marcel d’Alembert, Illusionist Extraordinaire. One of the most popular attractions of the whole Circus, his act always drew crowds. ‘You have to watch a magician closely,’ he told his overflow audience. Holding up one deft hand, he said, ‘You see this? Well, you should have been watching this one,’ and from his other hand sprouted a large bouquet of flowers, which he tossed to a pretty girl in the front row. ‘Misdirection is the key. I tell you to watch one hand and something pops out in the other. Suppose you watch both hands?’ He held them up for the audience’s inspection, and while their gaze was riveted on his extremities an orange popped out of his mouth. His act continued on in that vein for thirty minutes, with misdirection both subtle and blatant. Even when he told his watchers exactly what he was going to do, they still couldn’t see how he did it. But of course, that was to be expected - Marcel d’Alembert was one of the best in the business.
Along the midway, clowns performed continuously. Merry -Andrews male and female, in outlandish garb and exaggerated makeup played throughout the throngs, taking pratfalls, miming and, in general, managing to be every where and do everything wrong. The children laughed at their outrageous stunts, and even the adults found it hard not to discard their masks of urbanity and guffaw with the youngsters.
But all these attractions, as colorful and exciting as they certainly were, were merely hors d’oeuvres for the thrilling drama that was now playing inside the enormous, jam-packed main tent.
For twenty-eight minutes, The Flying d’Alemberts the greatest troupe of aerialists in the entire Empire of Earth for the last two centuries - had held its audience silent. Spellbound. Entranced. For twenty-eight minutes both side rings had been empty and dark. The air over the center ring, from the hard-packed, imitation-sawdust-covered earth floor up to the plastic top forty-five meters above that floor, had been full of flying white-clad forms - singles and pairs and groups doing free head stands on trapezes and sway poles, double trapeze catches, juggling on tightropes, aerial somersaults and other stunts, all utterly breathtaking ... and all without a safety net.
Suddenly, in perfect unison, eighteen of the twenty d’Alemberts then performing swung to their perches, secured their apparatuses, and stood motionless, each with his or her right arm pointing upward at the highest part of the Big Top.
As all those arms pointed up at her, Yvette d’Alembert moved swiftly and gracefully out to the middle of her high wire-and that wire was high indeed, being forty-one meters above the floor of the ring. She carried not even so much as a fan for balance, maintaining her equilibrium by almost imperceptible movements of her hands, feet and body. Reaching the center of the span, she stopped and posed. As far as the audience could tell, she was as motionless as a statue.
Like all the other d’Alemberts, she was dressed in a silver spangled leotard and tights that clung to every delicious curve of her body, neck to toes, like a second skin. Thus, while she was too short - one hundred and sixty-three centimeters - and too wide and too thick - massing a hefty seventy kilos - to be acceptable as an Earthly fashion model, the sleek lines of her flamboyantly female figure made a very striking and attractive picture - at a distance. Close up, however, that picture changed.
Although her face was lovely enough to tempt any portrait painter, her ankles were much larger than any Earthwoman’s should have been. Her wrists were those of a two meter, hundred and ten kilo lumberjack.
Her musculature, from toenails to ears to fingertips, would have made any beefcake film or sensable star turn instantly green with envy. For all her weight, she had not a gram of flab any where on her body. She looked for all the universe like that incredibly ancient Greek ideal of solid womanhood.
After a few seconds of posing - she knew exactly how long she could get away with hamming it - she turned her head and looked down at her brother. Jules d’Alembert, wearing the identical outfit to those of his compatriots, was but ten centimeters taller than his sister, though thirty kilograms heavier. The tightness of his costume accentuated rather than hid the bulges’ of his powerful muscles. A stone wall would have been soft by comparison, yet his face was handsome enough to melt the hardest of female hearts.
Jules stood on a perch nineteen meters below his sister’s level and an ‘impossible’ twenty meters off to one side. The siblings’ eyes locked on one another. The audience knew this was to be a feat requiring the utmost in concentration and, as the two d’Alemberts focused all their attentions on themselves, the spectators hushed to a deathly stillness.
Flexing her knees slowly, Yvette began swinging her outstretched arms horizontally. As the limbs moved in ever increasing arcs, she put more and more stress into the tautly stretched steel wire beneath her feet.
Jules, meanwhile, reached out his left hand almost casually and grasped a flying ring. His gaze never wavering from the body of his sister so far above him, he began to flex his own knees and move his body in precise synchronization with the swaying motion of the girl-wire system over his head.
The crowd was quiet, frozen in tense anticipation. Yvette’s body swayed on its wire, preparatory to her fantastic leap, building ever-increasing increments of momentum. Finally, in the last cycle through which she could hold the wire, Yvette squatted and drove both powerful legs downward and to her right. But in that ultimate moment, something snapped. The harsh metallic report, loud as a pistol shot, was like a physical blow to the nerves of the audience that had been sitting so anxiously silent.
Several things happened at once
The wire on which Yvette had stood, no longer being anchored at one end, immediately had all its tension released. Whipping through the air like an infuriated serpent, the thin steel cable dropped toward the ground, coiling in upon itself with loud metallic whinings and slitherings.
Yvette d’Alembert herself, premiere aerialiste of the entire Galaxy, was deprived of her push-off spot at the very moment she needed it the most. As her support vanished beneath her, she sprawled helplessly in midair and began her long fall to the ground.
The eighteen d’Alemberts who had been merely watching the trick came instantly to life on their perches. With the reflexes of the skilled acrobats that they were, they seized all the ropes, rings and trapezes within reach and hurled them in the direction of the falling girl, hoping beyond hope that at least one of the pieces would approach within her grasp and save her from a fatal fall.
Yvette flailed out frantically as she tumbled. One of her fingertips barely touched the bar of a swing, and the spectators gasped and dug their fingernails deeper into their armrests. But the trapeze was just out of reach, and none of the other apparatus even came close. Yvette’s fall continued unchecked.
Jules d’Alembert was in the lowest position, and consequently had more time to act than did any of the others; but even he didn’t have a millisecond to spare. His every iota of concentration had been upon his sister even before the wire snapped, though, so he was mentally prepared to do what had to be done. At the very instant of the break, he pushed himself outward and downward along the arc of the thirty meter radius of his top-hung flying ring. As he flashed through the air, a glittery white blur, it became readily apparent that his aim was true and the force of his launching had been precisely right.
Yvette was falling face down, flat and horizontal, presenting the maximum surface area to the updrafts in an attempt to retard her fall by even so much as a fraction of a second more. As she neared the point of intersection with Jules’ arc, her downward speed was greater than twenty one meters per second. Jules, his body rigidly vertical, was moving almost half that fast as his ring reached the nadir of its prodigious arc.
In the instant before a right-angle collision occurred a collision that would have smashed any two ordinary athletes into shapeless masses of bloody flesh - two strong right hands smacked together in the practically unbreakable handover-wrist grip of the aerialist. At the same time, Yvette did what she could to help her brother with his difficult rescue attempt. Spinning and twisting like a cat - except much faster - she pinioned both her feet against his hard, flat belly. Her hard-sprung knees and powerful leg muscles absorbed most of the momentum of his mass and speed, cushioning the impact his sturdy body would otherwise have had on her. Then, at the last possible instant, her legs went around his waist and locked behind his back. This gave him his right hand free once again, and it flashed upward to join his left in gripping the ring that was all that kept them from seemingly certain death below.
That took care of the horizontal component of the momentum in the two-person system, but the vertical component was worse. Much worse, almost twice as great. Its magnitude pulled at their locked bodies, yanking them downward and into a small but vicious arc. The violent wrenching they received was so savage it would have broken any ordinary man’s back in a fraction of a second. But Jules d’Alembert, although only a hundred and seventy-three centimeters in height, had all of his one hundred kilo mass in his favor to absorb the enormous strain. The muscles that were barely concealed beneath his leotard were super-hard and super-reactive. His skeleton was composed of dense, strong, king-sized bones, held together by resilient, unbreakable gristle. His arms were as thick as, and immensely stronger than - an ordinary Earthman’s legs.
The two bodies were now unstressed relative to one another, but the danger was far from over. They now began to hurtle downward at an angle of thirty degrees from the vertical, toward the edge of the ring facing the reserved-seat and box section of the stands. The people in those sections cringed instinctively and braced themselves for the possible upcoming impact.
Attention now focused on the weakest point in the whole system, namely Jules’ grip on that leather covered steel ring. Could he hold it? Could he possibly hold it? Not one person in all that immense audience moved a muscle; not one of them even breathed. Hands clenched involuntarily, trying by some unknown psychic connection to add their comparatively puny strength to that of Jules in order to help him hold on.
The man on the high ring held his grip for just under half a second; held it while that two-centimeter-thick, superstrength car-long cable stretched more than two meters; held it while the entire supporting framework creaked and groaned under the unaccustomed strain. Then, the merest moment before that frightful fall would have been arrested and both would have been safe, Jules’ hands slipped from the ring.
Men gasped. Women - some of them, at least - shrieked. But no one in the audience fainted; a sense of macabre fascination pinned everyone’s attention on those two d’Alemberts as they began to fall the remaining twelve meters to the ground.
A high-speed camera, however, would have revealed the fact that their fall was neither haphazard nor out of control. They separated and each curled up into a tight position, knees drawn up to their chins, their bodies braced for impact. As the ground came up to meet them they landed perfectly. Hard-sprung knees took up half of the shock of landing; hard-sprung elbows took half of what was left. Their heads were bent low, with chins tucked tightly against their chests. Powerful leg muscles drove them forward, and thick sturdy shoulders and back muscles struck the floor in perfect rolls. In one fluid, seemingly effortless motion, both brother and sister had hit the floor and somersaulted lightly to their feet.
Hand in hand they posed, motionless for a moment while they recovered their breath. Then they bowed deeply in unison, turned and ran lightly to an exit - and they covered the hundred meters of distance in under eight seconds, at a pace that looked less than a lope.
The multitude of spectators went wild.
They had seen a girl falling to certain death. They had felt a momentary flash of relief - or actually of disappointment? - when it seemed as though her life might be saved. Then they had watched two magnificently alive young people fall, if not to certain death, at least to maiming, crippling injury. Then, in the climactic last split second, the whole terrible accident had become the grand finale of the act.
That it was a grand finale - a crashing smash of a finish - there was no possible doubt. The audience had had its emotions ripped out and wrung for the last drop of feeling. The only question was, which emotion was finally being expressed in that shrieking, yelling, clapping, jeering, cheering, whistling and catcalling throng of Earthpeople - relief, appreciation or disappointment?
No matter; for whatever it was, they had all had the thrill of a lifetime - and few if any of them could understand how it could possibly have been done.
For of the teeming trillions of people inhabiting the thirteen hundred and forty-two other planets of the Empire of Earth, scarcely one in a hundred had ever heard of the planet DesPlaines. Of those who had heard of it, comparatively few knew that its surface gravity was approximately three thousand centimeters per second squared - more than three times that of small, green Earth. And most of those who knew that fact neither knew nor cared that harsh, forbidding, hostile DesPlaines was the home world of the Circus of the Galaxy and of The Family d’Alembert.