xeelee类似炮弹形状的身体和圆形嘴巴,没有头且长了比人类更灵活的触手,还带有很精致的翅膀:
Jophiel could not have said how he knew that this was the Xeelee itself, the enemy, naked. But the form was so familiar. The Xeelee was, he thought, like a scale model of its own ship, the sycamore-seed craft Poole had first seen when it came bursting out of the Jupiter wormhole. There was the core body, squat, compact, like an elongated artillery shell – but Jophiel could recognise, now, that this central core had much in common in its form with the beetle-like condensate creatures they had seen in the Fifth Room. Maybe it was made of the same stuff, a condensate, an exotic state of matter. It had no head, as such. Yet the forward rim of the main body seemed to be equipped with tentacles, narrow, slimy, surrounding what might be a circular mouth. Tentacles capable of manipulation more finely than human fingers, perhaps.
And there were the wings, delicate, lobed, sweeping back. So fine he could see the pale glow of the walls through them. Jophiel thought he made out structure in those wings: lines, a kind of webbing, almost too fine for him to see, and if there was a pattern that was elusive too.