Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like a lot of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don't see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millepedes—“with babies' legs at one end and old people's legs at the other,” says Billy Pilgrim.

This is getting weird enough to trip his weird-out meter, and that takes some doing. Manfred's whole life is lived on the bleeding edge of strangeness, fifteen minutes into everyone else's future, and he's normally in complete control – but at times like this he gets a frisson of fear, a sense that he might just have missed the correct turn on reality's approach road.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

“Say hello to the jellyfish, Boris.”

Boris, in human drag, for once, glares at Pierre, and grips the pitcher with both hands. The contents of the jug swirl their tentacles lazily: One of them flips almost out of solution, dislodging an impaled cocktail cherry. “Will get you for this,” Boris threatens. The smoky air around his head is a-swirl with daemonic visions of vengeance.

Su Ang stares intently at Pierre who is watching Boris as he raises the jug to his lips and begins to drink. The baby jellyfish — small, pale blue, with cuboid bells and four clusters of tentacles trailing from each corner — slips down easily. Boris winces momentarily as the nematocysts let rip inside his mouth, but in a moment or so, the cubozoan slips down, and in the meantime, his biophysics model clips the extent of the damage to his stinger-ruptured oropharynx.

“Wow,” he says, taking another slurp of sea wasp margaritas. “Don't try this at home, fleshboy.”

“Here.” Pierre reaches out. “Can I?”

“Invent your own damn poison,” Boris sneers — but he releases the jug and passes it to Pierre, who raises it and drinks. The cubozoan cocktail reminds him of fruit jelly drinks in a hot Hong Kong summer. The stinging in his palate is sharp but fades rapidly, producing an intimate burn when the alcohol hits the mild welts that are all this universe will permit the lethal medusa to inflict on him.

“Not bad,” says Pierre, wiping a stray loop of tentacle off his chin.

Without warning, the lobster lurches forward and rises up on its rear legs. It reaches out with huge claws, chellipeds coated with spiny hairs, and grabs Glashwiecz by his arms. “Hey!”

Glashwiecz tries to turn away, but the lobster is already looming over him, maxillipeds and maxillae reaching out from its head. There's a sickening crunch as one of his elbow joints crumbles, humerus shattered by the closing jaws of a chelliped. He draws breath to scream, then the four small maxillae grip his head and draw it down toward the churning mandibles.

Pierre scurries sideways, trying to find a line of fire on the lobster that doesn't pass through the lawyer's body. The lobster isn't cooperating. It turns on the spot, clutching Glashwiecz's convulsing body to itself. There's a stench of shit, and blood is squirting from its mouthparts. Something is very wrong with the biophysics model here, the realism turned up way higher than normal.

“Merde,” whispers Pierre. He fumbles with the bulky trigger, and there's a faint whirring sound but no explosion. More wet crunching sounds follow as the lobster demolishes the lawyer's face and swallows convulsively, sucking his head and shoulders all the way into its gastric mill.

The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher's elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation's youth - or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world's expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it. Something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evident pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.

But can that be the whole story? There's a deeper answer to be had at infinitecat.com, where users post pictures of their cats gazing at pictures of other cats already posted on the Infinite Cat site. You see an infinite regress: pictures of cats looking at pictures of cats looking at pictures of cats.

Remind you of anything? Those cats are like so many bloggers sitting at home staring into their computer screens and watching other bloggers blog other bloggers. Cats, who live indoors and love to prowl, are the soul of the blogosphere. Dogs would never blog.

But this Lujanera I mentioned, who was Rosendo's woman, she outdid'em all, and by a good long ways. La Lujanera's dead now, señor, and I have to admit that sometimes whole years go by that I don't think about her, but you ought to have seen her in her time, with those eyes of hers. Seein' her wouldn't put a man to sleep, and that's for sure.

As he enters the baggage reclaim zone, his jacket stiffens, and his glasses dim: He can hear the lost souls of suitcases crying for their owners. The eerie keening sets his own accessories on edge with a sense of loss, and for a moment, he's so spooked that he nearly shuts down the thalamic–limbic shunt interface that lets him feel their emotions. He's not in favor of emotions right now, not with the messy divorce proceedings and the blood sacrifice Pam is trying to extract from him; he'd much rather love and loss and hate had never been invented. But he needs the maximum possible sensory bandwidth to keep in touch with the world, so he feels it in his guts every time his footwear takes a shine to some Moldovan pyramid scheme. Shut up, he glyphs at his unruly herd of agents; I can't even hear myself think!

“Hello, sir, have a nice day, how may I be of service?” the yellow plastic suitcase on the counter says chirpily. It doesn't fool Manfred: He can see the Stalinist lines of control chaining it to the sinister, faceless cash register that lurks below the desk, agent of the British Airport Authority corporate bureaucracy. But that's okay. Only bags need fear for their freedom in here.

“Just looking,” he mumbles. […]

There's a row of unclaimed bags in front of the counter, up for sale in the absence of their owners. Some of them are very battered, but among them is a rather good-quality suitcase with integral induction-charged rollers and a keen sense of loyalty: exactly the same model as his old one. He polls it and sees not just GPS, but a Galileo tracker, a gazetteer the size of an old-time storage area network, and an iron determination to follow its owner as far as the gates of hell if necessary. Plus the right distinctive scratch on the lower left side of the case. “How much for just this one?” he asks the bellwether on the desk.

“Ninety euros,” it says placidly.

Manfred sighs. “You can do better than that.” In the time it takes them to settle on seventy-five, the Hang Sen Index is down fourteen-point-one-six points, and what's left of NASDAQ climbs another two-point-one. “Deal.” Manfred spits some virtual cash at the brutal face of the cash register, and it unfetters the suitcase. […] Manfred bends down and faces the camera in its handle. “Manfred Macx,” he says quietly. “Follow me.” He feels the handle heat up as it imprints on his fingerprints, digital and phenotypic. Then he turns and walks out of the slave market, his new luggage rolling at his heels.

If you've ever bought a house, you've probably seen a deed of sale for a chunk of real estate. Page after page of inscrutible legalese, complete with crossings-through and footnotes and sidenotes and whatever. When you sign your name in blood on the bottom of the last page against the signature of the vendor, it is generally taken as meaning that you “own” the house, but if you get into the small print it's a lot more complicated than that.

Ownership of a novel is like ownership of a house. I wrote “Accelerando” and I “own” the copyright on it, but I'm like a landlord who owns a plot of land, then sells the right to build on it and live in the building to someone else. Worse still: to several different folks on different continents at the same time. The “tenants” are publishers, who take the unformed land (the book) and turn it into something people enjoy using. And they like to sublet the property for money to other tenants — the reading public. They don't want squatters moving into the attic and setting up home without paying them — or worse, claiming to have owned the land all along.

Back in the solar system, Earth orbits through a dusty tunnel in space. Sunlight still reaches the birth world, but much of the rest of the star's output has been trapped by the growing concentric shells of computronium built from the wreckage of the innermost planets.

Two billion or so mostly unmodified humans scramble in the wreckage of the phase transition, not understanding why the vasty superculture they so resented has fallen quiet. Little information leaks through their fundamentalist firewalls, but what there is shows a disquieting picture of a society where there are no bodies anymore. Utility foglets blown on the wind form aerogel towers larger than cyclones, removing the last traces of physical human civilization from most of Europe and the North American coastlines. Enclaves huddle behind their walls and wonder at the monsters and portents roaming the desert of postindustrial civilization, mistaking acceleration for collapse.

The hazy shells of computronium that ring the sun — concentric clouds of nanocomputers the size of rice grains, powered by sunlight, orbiting in shells like the packed layers of a Matrioshka doll — are still immature, holding barely a thousandth of the physical planetary mass of the system, but they already support a classical computational density of 1042 MIPS; enough to support a billion civilizations as complex as the one that existed immediately before the great disassembly. The conversion hasn't yet reached the gas giants, and some scant outer-system enclaves remain independent – Amber's Ring Imperium still exists as a separate entity, and will do so for some years to come – but the inner solar system planets, with the exception of Earth, have been colonized more thoroughly than any dusty NASA proposal from the dawn of the space age could have envisaged.

From outside the Accelerated civilization, it isn't really possible to know what's going on inside. The problem is bandwidth: While it's possible to send data in and get data out, the sheer amount of computation going on in the virtual spaces of the Acceleration dwarfs any external observer. Inside that swarm, minds a trillion or more times as complex as humanity think thoughts as far beyond human imagination as a microprocessor is beyond a nematode worm. A million random human civilizations flourish in worldscapes tucked in the corner of this world-mind. Death is abolished, life is triumphant. A thousand ideologies flower, human nature adapted where necessary to make this possible. Ecologies of thought are forming in a Cambrian explosion of ideas: For the solar system is finally rising to consciousness, and mind is no longer restricted to the mere kilotons of gray fatty meat harbored in fragile human skulls.

It sits confidently at the end of every color spectrum. Stoic and without compromise. Mystery tangled in its darkness. A sibling to the deepest shadow. Befriending the night. Simple. Complicated. The only color that can pull you in while pushing you away is… Black.

It may be that after all this time, and after all that has happened, I do not remember that first time as it really was. Perhaps I remember it as it should have been; we do that sometimes, all of us. Whatever I've added, if I've added anything, was the right touch; the memory is perfect:

Midmorning, late spring in the Catskills and the mist burning away, but still there an underwater-green with the rich new greenness of the spring-struck trees radiating through it. A broken old stone fence, green-grey, and at the corner of the two roads, he sat naked. He alone in all that green was red, was reds: fine hair down to his earlobes copper-orange, slab-sided cheeks picking a ripe-peach-red out of the bars of sun, gold-red on the down of his chest and lower belly. He was sitting absolutely boneless, comfortably round-shouldered, and with his chin gone to bed on his collarbones.

And—maybe this is the part I've added, but it remembers like a real memory, and I'd like to think it happened that way—around his head flew a circle of white moths, turned pale, pale apple-green in that light and amazing against that hair. I stopped the car. I don't think it was because he was naked.

Because I couldn't help myself, I called to him, “Hey!”

He raised his head, swiftly but not startled, and opened his eyes; then, as part of a flowing sequence without stopping anywhere, he placed his hands on the stones and lifted himself and vaulted down, landing lightly and already walking. Walking, his body moved forward as if on tracks, not bobbing up and down the way most of the rest of us do. If his shoulders had been the least bit wider they would have been too wide; if his body were by a finger's breadth flatter it would have been too flat. He made no attempt to cover his nakedness and he wasn't displaying it, either; it just didn't matter to him. The moths whisked away in the wood as he stepped out in the road.

Then: his eyes. Think back now; in all the talk, in everything you have read or heard about Godbody, has anyone ever used a color-word for Godbody's eyes? Someone with hair that color is called a redhead, but redheads don't have red hair; it's orange or russet or brown-gold, and you just can't say that this man had red eyes and be right. Cinamon, maybe, but that's too brown. Sherry is too yellow, ruby is too red. His eyes were a rich color, that's all you can say, and warm.

At last I looked at her; I took her elbows and looked down into her face, her dear face. Liza is one of those women who is the envy and despair of all the other women her age; she always, always would look younger than she was and younger than all of them. It wasn't only the small, slender, firm body and the smooth skin and clear eyes; it was the way she carried herself, the way, when she moved or spoke, she released energy rather than stoking it up and eking it out like the rest of us. She kept her masses of blue-fired black hair rolled and folded up into a gleaming dark helmet and her eyes were not green, as they seemed to be, but an illuminated blue full of so many flecks of gold that they seemed to be green.

She was trying to say something: “Dan, I don't know what you're thinking. If you think I was, if you think he—let me go. Let me go!” or some such. I kissed, I corked up her words and her breath with my mouth. Her eyes, so huge and close, were big enough for me and a dozen like me to tumble into and drown; I tumbled, I drowned.

With a deep and quiet joy I recognized the beginnings of my own climax, and here again it was new, new. For usually it was rush upward toward the final explosion, with perhaps a split-second pause of almost unbearable sensitivity before the ejaculation—and that was a short series of electric thumps and a complete fall from whatever heights to the ever-present here-and-now. Thinking of the way it used to be, a phrase occurs to me: “I never left home.” But now…

Now I rode no rockets to a quick burst of color and a cinder-fall. They say that when a three-hundred-foot tidal wave struck somewhere in the Pacific, fishermen eleven miles were unaware of its passage, so gently and massively were they raised and let down. This is the way I was carried up to a height I had never before known; it was that all-but-unbearable point of sensitivity that I had flicked past so many times before; but this time I rested there forever, while time stopped. It was from this altitude that my joybursts were launched—not the abrupt sequence of little gouts of relief, but long sibilant syllables arcing up and out into a universe I had never known existed. Four, five of them, another, and then an interminable rest on that summit, and then one more, and then the last.

I had always been silent before; now, I shouted.

[…]

Then the great wave let me down, let me down peacefully and easily into the presence of my wife and my world and a sunshowered here and now.

She cried out, and here was Dan Currier, professional (obsessional) consoler: a cry was to be heeded, the affliction of pain was to be stopped and existing pain consoled. This is everything I was and everything I meant to be. But now at my first great delving lunge, miraculously made swift and easy, she cried out, and I withdrew almost all the way and lunged again so deep and so hard that it bruised my pubic bone against hers, and again she cried out, louder. Of course there was pain, that shattering drive of flesh into flesh and bone against bone, and my great weight on her and my big arms locked around her so that the cry was forced out as shockingly as it was driven out by whatever was moving her. How, then she could take in enough air to do what she did I can not explain, but she cried out again and again, each cry like a plucked string, sharply appearing and fading, four, five … seven of them, diminishing. And with each cry, that incredible gripping inside, but harder, stronger than I had ever known it, so much so that I could realize, now, that I had not felt those earlier ones, but merely sensed them.

She was silent at last, and drenched with sweat from head to foot. I took my weight off her, raising myself on my elbows and placing my hands on the sides of her face and locking my gaze with hers. In hers I saw only a great wonder—no fear, no pain—and in this and in the strange slack slightly swollen new shape of her lips, such love as I have never known.

I began to move slowly, deeply inside her, and then, like a slow-motion reenactment of that first great drive, withdrew almost all the way and pressed inward again, right to the root. Each time I penetrated to that depth her eyes almost closed, but not quite—not enough to sever the cable of withness that had been woven between her eyes and mine. We had never done this in the light before; we had never seen each other experiencing it; I think that in a deeply important way we had never seen each other.

She went with me willingly, bewildered, until she found herself at the foot of the stairs, and then she held back—not much at all, but even that little made something explode inside me. I picked her up like a doll and sprang up the stairs two at a time and crossed the upstairs hall as if my feet, somehow, weren't touching the floor; but we were at the top of an arc, having been thrown by some huge force. The bed was a blaze of gold from the tops of the two wide windows and a floodlight of sun; there was nothing on it but the bottom sheet, and I dropped her, or threw her down. She bounced, she screamed; I took her wrist and hauled her up sitting and broke the two top buttons off the soft denim jacket, then got hold of the hem and snapped it off over the head. She wore nothing under it, which was a vast surprise to me; I hadn't known, one way or the other—how could I? I punched her shoulder with the heel of my hand and down she went on her back; I snapped her waistband as if it had been a single thread and snatched her skirt off. Her sandals had disappeared somewhere along the way, and she lay naked in that glory of light. I had seen her naked before, of course, but I had never let myself look at her, really look, and as I got out of my clothes—it seemed to take forever, but it couldn't have been long, for I tore my shirt and ripped the zipper in my trousers halfway down; one of my socks, I found later, was still in its shoe!—I held her pinned down to the bed in the circle of my vision with her eyes tied to mine in the center of it. I was breathing deeply but not rapidly at all—strange, that—while her breath came and went like a pulse, making and losing shadows between her ribs and the superb taut hollows at the sides of her belly. And as I held her so, where she lay with her arms crossed over her breasts and her hips half-turned, one knee drawn up to conceal herself, something from me—a demand which was not anger, but still was like a fury—reached out invisible hands and pulled those arms down and away from her breasts, dropped the small strong hands curled to the sheet, rolled back the hips, straightened that leg. The sunlight (you take pictures in your mind at certain moments) slanted down through the hair on the mound between her legs and tinted the skin under it, making the clear cream-color radiate up—a wonder. It was all a wonder, even in the violence and speed of the act itself, frozen forever in the mind, ready to be retrieved forever after, spellbinding, breathtaking.

What would a Martian visitor think to see a human being laugh? It must look truly horrible: the sight of furious gestures, flailing limbs, and thorax heaving in frenzied contortions. The air is torn with dreadful sounds as though, all at once, that person wheezes, barks, and chokes to death. The face contorts in grimaces that mix smiles and yawns with snarls and frowns. What could cause such a frightful seizure?