‘It’s happening,’ he heard the nurse say, wonder in her voice. ‘Look, it’s rising from his limbs . . . His heart has stopped.’ She straddled him and pounded at his chest, even as a glow lit up her face, the bare flesh of her arms – a glow coming from him.
He remembered – a glimmering tetrahedron, looming, an electric-blue framework swallowing him up – memories that had nothing to do with this world . . .
He heard Powpy call, ‘Do you know who you are? Or who you were?’
And suddenly he knew, as if his eyes had suddenly focused, after years of myopia. With the last of the air in his lungs he struggled to speak. ‘Not again. Not again!’
The nurse peered into his eyes. ‘Stay with me, Telni!’
‘Who are you? Who are you?’
The light detonated from deep inside him. Suddenly he filled this box of Construction-Material, he was contained within it, and he rattled, anguished. But there was the door, a way out. Somehow he fled that way, seeking the redshift . . .
Even after the Xeelee had finally won their war against humanity, the stars continued to age, too rapidly. The Xeelee completed their great Projects and fled the cosmos.
Time unravelled. Dying galaxies collided like clapping hands. But even now the story was not yet done. The universe itself prepared for another convulsion, greater than any it had suffered before.
And then—
‘Who are you?’
‘My name is Michael Poole.’
-Xeelee: Endurance, "Formidable Caress"