Bright Moment and Others Read online

  Praise for Daniel Marcus

  “Betrayed by their dreams, comforted by the ghosts of love, Dan Marcus’s wily, pitiable characters test the boundaries of fresh pasts, skewed presents, and distant futures furnished with decadent toys and ineffably alien yet totally essential technologies. These stories make me ache with nostalgia for an age yet to come. They remind me of why I’ve always wanted to be this good.”

  —Nisi Shawl, author of Everfair; Nebula and World Fantasy Award Finalist; winner of the Otherwise Award

  “What I like best about Daniel Marcus’s stories is the visual clarity, the precision of his imagining. The details he chooses to describe loom larger than themselves, full of implied narrative, and as crisp or newly-minted as money.”

  —Paul Park, author of A Princess of Roumania; Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, and Locus Award finalist

  “Daniel Marcus is one of the best storytellers I’ve ever met. His feel for narrative is his superpower.”

  —Pat Cadigan, winner of the Hugo, Locus, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards

  “Ranging deftly across genres, as unexpected in their bright moments as gemstones spilled from a paper bag, Marcus’s stories unfailingly surprise and delight.”

  —Paul Witcover, finalist for the World Fantasy, Nebula, and Shirley Jackson awards.

  Praise for Binding Energy

  “Raymond Carver crossed with William Gibson.”

  —Salon.com

  “Emotionally taut, tough-minded, and beautifully rendered, these stories are models of compression and power.”

  —Karen Joy Fowler, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Black Glass and Sarah Canary

  “In their range, and the articulation of styles, and in their balancing between self-aware referentiality and fist-clenched passion, Daniel Marcus’s brilliant assemblage of stories in Binding Energy could be seen as a kind of map for the future of literary SF.”

  —Jonathan Lethem, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn

  “Love stories, every one. Dan Marcus knows the shape and sound of Tomorrow, as readers know from his regular appearances in the mags; indeed, like Stross and Doctorow, he is one of its most literate creators. But seeing his edgy stories together, we discover that he’s been working ancient ground with modern tools. This remarkable first collection from a veteran author is a treasure for readers.”

  —Terry Bisson, winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards

  Book Description

  In these twenty-four stories, Daniel Marcus ranges from the distant past to the end of time itself, from contemporary fantasy to space opera, as his characters—saints and scoundrels, sinners and seekers—navigate the treacherous passages of the human heart. Sometimes funny, sometimes dark and edgy, these stories showcase Marcus’s original voice and scrupulous attention to detail, crafting worlds that are both alien and achingly familiar.

  * * *

  With an introduction by Nebula, Philip K. Dick, and World Fantasy Award-winning author, Pat Murphy.

  Bright Moment and Others

  Daniel Marcus

  Bright Moment and Others

  Copyright © 2021 Daniel Marcus

  Additional copyright information in the back

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  The ebook edition of this book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  * * *

  EBook ISBN: 978-1-68057-192-9

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68057-191-2

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-193-6

  Casebind ISBN: 978-1-68057-283-4

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020951791

  * * *

  Cover design by Janet McDonald

  Cover artwork images by Adobe Stock

  Kevin J. Anderson, Art Director

  Published by

  WordFire Press, LLC

  PO Box 1840

  Monument CO 80132

  * * *

  Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

  * * *

  WordFire Press eBook Edition 2021

  WordFire Press Trade Paperback Edition 2021

  WordFire Press Hardcover Edition 2021

  Printed in the USA

  * * *

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  Contents

  Introduction

  Pat Murphy

  Bright Moment

  Prairie Godmother

  Jesus Christ Superstore

  An Orange for Lucita

  Binding Energy

  Clik2Chat

  Chimera Obscura

  Blue Period

  Halfway House

  After the Funeral

  Echo Beach

  Those Are Pearls That Were His Eyes

  Phoenix/Bughouse

  Ex Vitro

  On the Variance of the Cold Equations Under A Basis Transformation

  Random Acts of Kindness

  Angel from Budapest

  Revenant

  Killed in the Ratings

  Quality Time

  O You Who Turn the Wheel

  The Dam

  Memento Morrie

  Albion Upon the Rock

  About the Author

  If You Liked …

  Dedication

  For Chris and David, again

  Introduction

  Pat Murphy

  Dan Marcus writes stories that will knock you off balance. They will take you by surprise. They will make you question your assumptions. They will stretch your thinking and shake up your ideas of what science fiction is and what it can do.

  Each story in this collection will take you somewhere new, somewhere different, somewhere unexpected.

  A man surfing on the ammonia ocean of a Jovian moon catches a glimpse of something that changes the course of his life.

  An entrepreneur opening a Christian-themed megamall brings Jesus Christ himself from another universe to speak at the grand opening.

  Pablo Picasso is painting in Paris—and then the Martians invade.

  A space-faring intelligence that counts humans as long distant ancestors encounters a young woman doing battle with giant bugs straight off a pulp magazine cover.

  So many worlds, each one drawn with an expert hand in a few deft strokes. Dan makes it look easy, but as a short story writer, I can tell you it’s not. Novelists have pages and pages to introduce a complex environment, develop characters, explore grand themes. A short story writer must do all those things in a fraction of the space.

  Each of these stories is a captured moment, brief but complete, memorable, and packed with an emotional charge.

  I’ve given you a hint of what you’ll find in these stories. Perhaps I should offer a few warnings as well.

  Don’t expect stories in which humans reign supreme as galactic overlords, heroic and triumphant. I told you: this is science fiction that will make you question your assumptions. Yes, there is heroism, but it’s not where you expect it. This is science fiction that upends trope
s and smashes expectations.

  Don’t expect this to be science fiction where technology is the point. Oh, the technology is here; every nut and bolt and equation is in place. (Dan Marcus knows his science.) But the nuts and bolts are not the point of the story. These are stories with heart, about people who are trying to find their way.

  And finally, don’t expect this to be a book that you’ll read in an afternoon and put aside. These characters, these places will linger in your consciousness. After reading Dan Marcus’s description of the prairie in “Prairie Godmother,” I’ll never see Kansas as boring again. My view of that landscape will always be colored by the resonance of his description.

  These stories may affect you in unexpected ways. You may find yourself watching the night sky for the ionization trails of ascending spaceships. Alien songs may haunt your dreams. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  —Pat Murphy, 2020

  Bright Moment

  Arun floated in the ammonia swells, one arm around the buoyant powersled, waiting. He’d blocked all his feeds and chats, public and private, and silenced his alerts. He felt deliciously alone. His ears were filled with the murmuring white noise of his own blood flow, intimate and oceanic, pulsing with his heartbeat. Metis was a bright diamond directly overhead. Athena hung just above the near, flat horizon, her rings a plaited bow spanning the purple sky. Persistent storms pocked her striated surface, appearing deceptively static from thirty kiloklicks out. Arun had negotiated the edgewalls of those storms more than once, setting up metahelium deep-mining rigs. A host of descriptive words came to mind, but “static” was not among them.

  The sea undulated slowly in the low gee, about 0.6 Standard. The distant shape of a skyhook was traced out by a pearl string of lights reaching up from the horizon and disappearing into distance haze, blinking in synchronization to suggest upwards motion. The skyhook was the only point of reference for scale. He shuddered involuntarily. His e-field distributed warmth to his body extremities from the tiny pack at the small of his back and maintained his blood oxygenation, but bobbing in the swell, alone in the vast ammonia sea, he felt cold and a little dizzy. He wanted to breathe and felt a fleeting instant of lizard-brain panic.

  The current began to tug at his feet long before he saw the humped swell bowing the horizon upwards, a slight backward drift, accelerating slowly. His heart pounded in his chest as he clambered belly down onto the powersled. He drifted back towards the swell, slowly at first, then faster. He looked over his shoulder at the rising wall of liquid. It appeared solid, like moving metal, completely blocking the sky. He imagined he could feel wind tugging at his e-field.

  Arun felt a vibration through the powersled, a vast low frequency murmur, the world-ocean getting ready to kick his ass. Just as he was about to be sucked beneath the monstrous swell, he activated the sled. He surged forward and stood as the sled began to accelerate up the face of the wave.

  He felt the sled’s stabilizers groaning beneath his feet as he sought balance on the flat surface. The wave steepened, hurtling him forward. He could just make out the landmass upon which this immense wave would break. Brooklyn was the moon’s only continent, a million square klicks of frozen nothing.

  He estimated his height now at half a klick, his forward speed about a hundred meters per second. A fine mist of icy, driving sleet surrounded him, melting to slush as it touched his e-field and whipped past his face. Blobs of static discharge, pale blue and luminous, flickered around him. His vertical position had stabilized about three quarters of the way up the face of the wave. The powersled’s gyros did most of the balancing work but he kept his eyes fixed on the distant, blinking skyhook lights, shifting his stance as perturbations in the flow jostled his footing. He figured he had about a minute before he had to ditch or be dashed against the shore when the wave broke. His e-field’s impact system would prevent major injury, but he’d be black and blue for a week. Worst case, a month in the tank and restoration from backup. He’d only had one full restore, several years back after his singleship’s drive went unstable, and it was disconcerting, a huge unrecoverable swath cut from his life. It was routine as an eye replacement for some people, but he didn’t like it at all.

  His peripheral vision registered motion, a vast, dark shape beneath the wall of ammonia to his left. He didn’t want to take his eyes away from the skyhook lights, but he sneaked a look. Nothing—just a shimmering solid wall of liquid.

  He returned his gaze forward, sought and locked on to the skyhook. There, again, a flicker of something huge, hovering beneath the glassy surface. He looked and for the barest flicker of an instant he saw it, a tapered fifty meter bullet trailing a bundle of tentacles, a quartet of glassy black orbs framing the rounded front of the thing. Eyes, he was sure of it.

  He lost his footing and the wave took him.

  Arun rose through veiled layers of consciousness, gauzy memories caressing him with feather touches and drifting away like smoke. He was a child on Luna, outside for the first time, learning to suppress the choke reflex while the e-field oxygenated his blood. The sky was huge and black, dusted with bright, steady points. Terra was a mottled brown marble.

  Pain woke him to a large pale face hanging over his like a translucent moon. The gentle silken murmur of her voice took him back under.

  The next time he awoke, Ko was there. He imagined that he felt her presence before he opened his eyes—stern, concerned, an undercurrent of agitation.

  His eyes felt gritty. He opened them cautiously. He was in zero gee, swaddled and tethered. He recognized the light green biowalls of the clinic at Athena Station, glowing faintly. The far wall was transparent and filtered: Athena hung mottled and beautiful, suspended in blackness, her ring system covering half the sky. Above Athena, the lacy spiderwork of docks surrounding the Metis Wormhole rotated slowly.

  He was banged up, he knew that much. Gel covered half his jaw and cheek, analgesic and colony nutrient. Pain lanced up his body. He risked a glance down. His left leg ended neatly just below the knee. Beneath it, growing from the stump, a pink stub glistened with more gel.

  “Wow,” he croaked.

  Ko nodded without smiling.

  “Wow indeed. I’d kick your ass if there was anything left to kick.”

  He started to smile and regretted it instantly.

  “Fuck.” It came out sounding like uch. He tried to subvocalize his credentials to a shared channel, but the aether was dead.

  She nodded. “No implants yet. Your nervous system needs an absence of distraction to heal the mess you made of yourself. They wanted to restore you from backup into a noob but I wouldn’t let them.”

  “Thank you.” Anch eu.

  Arun closed his eyes and darkness took him again into velvet arms. As his senses fell away he saw it again, hovering effortlessly behind a shimmering wall of liquid, sleek body rippling peristaltically and buffeting slightly, its sensory nodes—eyes—huge, black, depthless.

  This time, he came fully awake almost immediately. He felt acute pain in his jaw, his side, and his leg. His leg. It had grown several inches since he’d seen it last and now sported five stubby bumps that would become toes. It hurt like a bastard—a surface burning all over the new growth and a bone-deep ache coming from a phantom location several inches below it.

  He tried to call out, emitting only a raspy croak.

  The medic’s avatar appeared immediately, hovering in front of him, a vaguely pretty, middle-aged woman with a round face and shaved head. She was a Mind, of course; Arun recalled that she had chosen the unlikely name Wheat.

  “Hello, Arun,” she said. “Welcome back.” Her voice was low and liquid.

  She pointed to a tube next to his head. “Take some water.”

  He took a sip and tried speaking again, a little more carefully this time.

  “Thanks.”

  She floated there, waiting, her broad features impassive but for a hint of amusement in her large, brown eyes.

  “Any questions?” sh
e said finally.

  Arun laughed and pain flared from his jaw and burst inside his skull. He squeezed his eyes shut and saw purple blotches swimming before him.

  Wheat floated closer.

  “I’m sorry, Arun. I’ll try not to make you laugh.” She paused a beat. “Do you have any idea how angry Ko is?”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I’ll bet you can.” She glided back a bit. “Okay, inventory. You lost a leg, your liver was destroyed, you fractured your skull. Badly, it turns out. You actually lost some brain tissue. Oh, and you broke your jaw in three places. I wanted to just dump your latest snapshot into a new body but Ko wouldn’t let me.”

  “Good,” he said, emphatically. “How did I lose the leg?”

  “Your e-field was breached when the impact systems kicked in. Snipped your leg clean off when it restored itself. What the hell were you thinking?”

  He shrugged carefully. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”