I sat on the toilet and noticed the sunlamp fixture standing unplugged next to the linen cabinets. The bulbs sat in a row on the edge of the sink counter. “You’re sure that’s what you want,” I said, my shoulders slumping.

  “Yeah, I think so,” he said. “They can take better care of me. I’m getting cleaned up, going over there this evening. Bernard’s picking me up in his limo. Style. From here on in, everything’s style.”

  The pinkish color in the water didn’t look like soap. “Is that bubble bath?” I asked. Some of it came to me in a rush then and I felt a little weaker; what had occurred to me was just one more obvious and necessary insanity.

  “No,” Vergil said. I knew that already.

  “No,” he repeated, “it’s coming from my skin. They’re not telling me everything, but I think they’re sending out scouts. Astronauts.” He looked at me with an expression that didn’t quite equal concern; more like curiosity as to how I’d take it.

  The confirmation made my stomach muscles tighten as if waiting for a punch. I had never even considered the possibility until now, perhaps because I had been concentrating on other aspects. “Is this the first time?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. He laughed. “I’ve half a mind to let the little buggers down the drain. Let them find out what the world’s really about.”

  “They’d go everywhere,” I said.

  “Sure enough.”

  “How…how are you feeling?”

  “I’m feeling pretty good now. Must be billions of them.” More splashing with his hands. “What do you think? Should I let the buggers out?”

  Quickly, hardly thinking, I knelt down beside the tub. My fingers went for the cord on the sunlamp and I plugged it in. He had hotwired doorknobs, turned my piss blue, played a thousand dumb practical jokes and never grown up, never grown mature enough to understand that he was sufficiently brilliant to transform the world; he would never learn caution.

  He reached for the drain knob. “You know, Edward, I—”

  He never finished. I picked up the fixture and dropped it into the tub, jumping back at the flash of steam and sparks. Vergil screamed and thrashed and jerked and then everything was still, except for the low, steady sizzle and the smoke wafting from his hair.

  I lifted the toilet lid and vomited. Then I clenched my nose and went into the living room. My legs went out from under me and I sat abruptly on the couch.

  After an hour, I searched through Vergil’s kitchen and found bleach, ammonia, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I returned to the bathroom, keeping the center of my gaze away from Vergil. I poured first the booze, then the bleach, then the ammonia into the water. Chlorine started bubbling up and I left, closing the door behind me.

  The phone was ringing when I got home. I didn’t answer. It could have been the hospital. It could have been Bernard. Or the police. I could envision having to explain everything to the police. Genetron would stonewall; Bernard would be unavailable.

  I was exhausted, all my muscles knotted with tension and whatever name one can give to the feelings one has after—

  Committing genocide?

  That certainly didn’t seem real. I could not believe I had just murdered a hundred trillion intelligent beings. Snuffed a galaxy. It was laughable. But I didn’t laugh.

  It was easy to believe that I had just killed one human being, a friend. The smoke, the melted lamp rods, the drooping electrical outlet and smoking cord.

  Vergil.

  I had dunked the lamp into the tub with Vergil.

  I felt sick. Dreams, cities raping Gail (and what about his girlfriend, Candice?). Letting the water filled with them out. Galaxies sprinkling over us all. What horror. Then again, what potential beauty—a new kind of life, symbiosis and transformation.

  Had I been thorough enough to kill them all? I had a moment of panic. Tomorrow, I thought, I will sterilize his apartment. Somehow, I didn’t even think of Bernard.

  When Gail came in the door, I was asleep on the couch. I came to, groggy, and she looked down at me.

  “You feeling okay?” she asked, perching on the edge of the couch. I nodded.

  “What are you planning for dinner?” My mouth didn’t work properly. The words were mushy. She felt my forehead.

  “Edward, you have a fever,” she said. “A very high fever.”

  I stumbled into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Gail was close behind me. “What is it?” she asked.

  There were lines under my collar, around my neck. White lines, like freeways. They had already been in me a long time, days.

  “Damp palms,” I said. So obvious.

  I think we nearly died. I struggled at first, but in minutes I was too weak to move. Gail was just as sick within an hour.

  I lay on the carpet in the living room, drenched in sweat. Gail lay on the couch, her face the color of talcum, eyes closed, like a corpse in an embalming parlor. For a time I thought she was dead. Sick as I was, I raged—hated, felt tremendous guilt at my weakness, my slowness to understand all the possibilities. Then I no longer cared. I was too weak to blink, so I closed my eyes and waited.

  There was a rhythm in my arms, my legs. With each pulse of blood, a kind of sound welled up within me, like an orchestra thousands strong, but not playing in unison; playing whole seasons of symphonies at once. Music in the blood. The sound became harsher, but more coordinated, wave-trains finally canceling into silence, then separating into harmonic beats.

  The beats seemed to melt into me, into the sound of my own heart.

  First, they subdued our immune responses. The war—and it was a war, on a scale never before known on Earth, with trillions of combatants—lasted perhaps two days.

  By the time I regained enough strength to get to the kitchen faucet, I could feel them working on my brain, trying to crack the code and find the god within the protoplasm. I drank until I was sick, then drank more moderately and took a glass to Gail. She sipped at it. Her lips were cracked, her eyes bloodshot and ringed with yellowish crumbs. There was some color in her skin. Minutes later, we were eating feebly in the kitchen.

  “What in hell is happening?” was the first thing she asked. I didn’t have the strength to explain. I peeled an orange and shared it with her. “We should call a doctor,” she said. But I knew we wouldn’t. I was already receiving messages; it was becoming apparent that any sensation of freedom we experienced was illusory.

  The messages were simple at first. Memories of commands, rather than the commands themselves, manifested themselves in my thoughts. We were not to leave the apartment—a concept which seemed quite abstract to those in control, even if undesirable—and we were not to have contact with others. We would be allowed to eat certain foods and drink tap water for the time being.

  With the subsidence of the fevers, the transformations were quick and drastic. Almost simultaneously, Gail and I were immobilized. She was sitting at the table, I was kneeling on the floor. I was able barely to see her in the corner of my eye.

  Her arm developed pronounced ridges.

  They had learned inside Vergil; their tactics within the two of us were very different. I itched all over for about two hours—two hours in hell—before they made the breakthrough and found me. The effort of ages on their timescale paid off and they communicated smoothly and directly with this great, clumsy intelligence who had once controlled their universe.

  They were not cruel. When the concept of discomfort and its undesirability was made clear, they worked to alleviate it. They worked too effectively. For another hour, I was in a sea of bliss, out of all contact with them.

  With dawn the next day, they gave us freedom to move again; specifically, to go to the bathroom. There were certain waste products they could not deal with. I voided those—my urine was purple—and Gail followed suit. We looked at each other vacantly in the bathroom. Then she managed a slight smile. “Are they talking to you?” she asked. I nodded. “Then I’m not crazy.”

  For the next twelve hours, control seemed to loosen on some levels. I suspect there was another kind of war going on in me. Gail was capable of limited motion, but no more.

  When full control resumed, we were instructed to hold each other. We did not hesitate.

  “Eddie…” she whispered. My name was the last sound I ever heard from outside.

  Standing, we grew together. In hours, our legs expanded and spread out. Then extensions grew to the windows to take in sunlight, and to the kitchen to take water from the sink. Filaments soon reached to all corners of the room, stripping paint and plaster from the walls, fabric and stuffing from the furniture.

  By the next dawn, the transformation was complete.

  I no longer have any clear view of what we look like. I suspect we resemble cells—large, flat, and filamented cells, draped purposefully across most of the apartment. The great shall mimic the small.

  Our intelligence fluctuates daily as we are absorbed into the minds within. Each day, our individuality declines. We are, indeed, great clumsy dinosaurs. Our memories have been taken over by billions of them, and our personalities have been spread through the transformed blood.

  Soon there will be no need for centralization.

  Already the plumbing has been invaded. People throughout the building are undergoing transformation.

  Within the old time frame of weeks, we will reach the lakes, rivers, and seas in force.

  I can barely begin to guess the results. Every square inch of the planet will teem with thought. Years from now, perhaps much sooner, they will subdue their own individuality—what there is of it.

  New creatures will come, then. The immensity of their capacity for thought will be inconceivable.

  All my hatred and fear is gone now.

  I leave them—us—with only one question.

  How many times has this happened, elsewhere? Travelers never came through space to visit the Earth. They had no need.

  They had found universes in grains of sand.

  Introduction to “Time’s Rub”

  by Gregory Benford

  My first contact with Greg Benford is just too embarrassing to write about. OK, I will anyway. He had been the first of the “young” SF writers that I saw in person at a convention. I didn’t speak to him—I couldn’t get close. He was walking briskly from A to B, and was surrounded by several people struggling to keep up. Some of them, eagerly talking to him, had sort of a puppy-dog posture, walking sideways, hopping, skipping, trying to stay parallel with him while facing him. It was kind of pathetic; kind of funny, too, at least to the young kid, the outsider I was then.

  So when I wrote about it in some review of something or other in Richard Geis’s SF Review (of fond memory), I mentioned that I saw Benford but hadn’t spoken to him because he was surrounded by his sycophants.

  I got a letter back from him. A nice letter, but just a little chilly. “I don’t call them sycophants,” he said. “I call them friends.”

  I felt like such an idiot. I had judged relationships I knew nothing about, on the basis of a fleeting visual impression. And I had earned the scorn of a writer I admired. But the lesson was learned. No more careless phrases that give offense where none is intended. People still get offended at what I write, sometimes, but it’s not because I dismissed them with a tossed-off phrase or flourish. Rather I do so because I think they’re wrong about something that matters, and said so, and they didn’t like hearing it. I can live with that.

  Which brings me back to Gregory Benford. He could have flamed me for my offense. I’ve had a few letters like that, and I’ve seen others (please, God, let me never get Harlan Ellison really, really mad at me). But never such a letter from Benford. He’s a class act, a generous man.

  And a wonderful writer. Which has never been clearer than in “Time’s Rub.” Oh, sure, the physics professor shows through a little—we get a chalkboard presentation of the logical dilemma the characters in the story are faced with. But why not? It works within the story. Sentient beings on the cusp of decision, life or death, or perhaps just how to give their life meaning. A gamble. A bet. It could have been just a puzzle, a logic problem. But this is Benford, and so the characters aren’t just placeholders. They’re alive, and we care what happens to them, and that’s why Benford has earned his place, not as one of the best writers of hard SF—scientific SF—but simply as one of the best writers of science fiction, period.

  TIME’S RUB

  Gregory Benford

  1.

  At Earth’s winter ebb, two crabbed figures slouched across a dry, cracked plain.

  Running before a victor who was himself slow-dying, the dead-stench of certain destiny cloyed to them. They knew it. Yet kept on, grinding over plum-colored shales.

  They shambled into a pitwallow for shelter, groaning, carapaces grimed and discolored. The smaller of them, Xen, turned toward the minimal speck of burnt-yellow sun, but gained little aid through its battered external panels. It grasped Faz’s extended pincer—useless now, mauled in battle—and murmured of fatigue.

  “We can’t go on.”

  Faz, grimly: “We must.”

  Xen was a functionary, an analytical sort. It had chanced to flee the battle down the same gully as Faz, the massive, lumbering leader. Xen yearned to see again its mate, Pymr, but knew this for the forlorn dream it was.

  They crouched down. Their enemies rumbled in nearby ruined hills. A brown murk rose from those distant movements. The sun’s pale eye stretched long shadows across the plain, inky hiding places for the encroaching others.

  Thus when the shimmering curtains of ivory luminescence began to fog the hollow, Xen thought the end was here—that energy drain blurred its brain, and now brought swift, cutting death.

  Fresh in from the darkling plain? the voice said. Not acoustically—this was a Vac Zone, airless for millennia.

  “What? Who’s that?” Faz answered.

  Your ignorant armies clashed last night?

  “Yes,” Xen acknowledged ruefully, “and were defeated. Both sides lost.”

  Often the case.

  “Are the Laggenmorphs far behind us?” Faz asked, faint tracers of hope skating crimson in its spiky voice.

  No. They approach. They have tracked your confused alarms of struggle and flight.

  “We had hoped to steal silent.”

  Your rear guard made a melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.

  Xen: “They escaped?”

  Into the next world, yes.

  “Oh.”

  “Who is that?” Faz insisted, clattering its treads.

  A wraith. Glittering skeins danced around them. A patchy acrid tang laced the curling vacuum. In this place having neither brass, nor earth, nor boundless sea.

  “Come out!” Faz called at three gigaHertz. “We can’t see you.”

  Need you?

  “Are you Laggenmorphs?” Panic laded Faz’s carrier wave a bright, fervid orange. “We’ll fight, I warn you!”

  “Quiet,” Xen said, suspecting.

  The descending dazzle thickened, struck a bass note. Laggenmorphs? I do not even know your terms.

  “Your name, then,” Xen said.

  Sam.

  “What’s that? That’s no name!” Faz declared, its voice a shifting brew of fear and anger.

  Sam it was and Sam it is. Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes, shall outlive it.

  Xen murmured at a hundred kiloHertz, “Traditional archaic name. I dimly remember something of the sort. I doubt it’s a trap.”

  The words not yet free of its antenna, Xen ducked—for a relativistic beam passed not a kilometer away, snapping with random rage. It forked to a ruined scree of limestone and erupted into a self-satisfied yellow geyser. Stones pelted the two hunkering forms, clanging.

  A mere stochastic volley. Your sort do expend energies wildly. That is what first attracted me.

  Surly, Faz snapped. “You’ll get no surge from us.”

  I did not come to sup. I came to proffer.

  A saffron umbra surrounded the still-gathering whorls of crackling, clotted iridescence.

  “Where’re you hiding?” Faz demanded. It brandished blades, snouts, cutters, spikes, double-bore nostrils that could spit lurid beams.

  In the cupped air.

  “There is no air,” Xen said. “This channel is open to the planetary currents.”

  Xen gestured upward with half-shattered claw. There, standing in space, the playing tides of blue-white, gauzy light showed that they were at the base of a great translucent cylinder. Its geometric perfection held back the moist air of Earth, now an ocean tamed by skewered forces. On the horizon, at the glimmering boundary, purpling clouds nudged futilely at their constraint like hungry cattle. This cylinder led the eye up to a vastness, the stars a stilled snowfall. Here the thin but persistent wind from the sun could have free run, gliding along the orange-slice sections of the Earth’s dipolar magnetic fields. The winds crashed down, sputtering, delivering kilo Volt glories where the cylinder cut them. Crackling yellow sparks grew there, a forest with all trunks ablaze and branches of lightning, beckoning far aloft like a brilliantly lit casino in a gray dark desert.

  How well I know. I stem from fossiled days.

  “Then why—”

  This is my destiny and my sentence.

  “To live here?” Faz was beginning to suspect as well.

  For a wink or two of eternity.

  “Can you…” Faz poked the sky with a horned, fused launcher. “…reach up there? Get us a jec?”

  I do not know the term.

  Xen said, “An injection. A mega Volt, say, at a hundred kiloAmps. A mere microsecond would boost me again. I could get my crawlers working.”

  I would have to extend my field lines.

  “So it is true,” Xen said triumphantly. “There still dwell Ims on the Earth. And you’re one.”

  Again, the term—

  “An Immortal. You have the fieldcraft.”

  Yes.

  Xen knew of this, but had thought it mere legend. All material things were mortal. Cells were subject to intruding impurities, cancerous insults, a thousand coarse alleyways of accident. Machines, too, knew rust and wear, could suffer the ruthless scrubbing of their memories by a random bolt of electromagnetic violence. Hybrids, such as Xen and Faz, shared both half-worlds of erosion.