Characters in Revelation Space

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These are major characters from the Revelation Space series of stories and novels.

Contents 1 Ana Khouri 2 Antoinette Bax 3 Aura 4 "Captain" John Brannigan 5 Nevil Clavain 6 Warren Clavain 7 Tom Dreyfuss 8 Felka 9 Galiana 10 Grelier 11 Schuyler "Sky" Haussman / "H" 12 The Mademoiselle 13 Tanner Mirabel 14 Quaiche 15 Rashmika Els 16 Remontoire 17 Scorpio 18 Skade 19 Dan Sylveste 20 Triumvir Ilia Volyova

[edit] Ana Khouri

Ana Khouri, an ex-soldier from Sky's Edge, was accidentally placed aboard an interstellar lighthugger and brought to Chasm City. At Chasm City she participated in Shadowplay, being the hunter and killing or mortally wounding the participants. After one Shadowplay event she was recruited by the Madamoiselle to infiltrate the crew of the lighthugger Nostalgia for Infinity. She was also recruited by the triumvirate of the lighthugger Nostalgia for Infinity as the Gunnery officer where she thinks she is heading back home to Sky's Edge after Triumvir Ilia Volyova's experiments ended in the death of the previous Gunnery officer, the position she is expected to fill. She plays no part in Chasm City (although a tantalising hint in another story gives us the clue that the woman whom Tanner speaks to at the end is in fact Ana Khouri), as most characters from the other novels do not, and is an important part in Redemption Ark organising the evacuation from Resurgam and again in Absolution Gap.

[edit] Antoinette Bax

[edit] Aura

The product of Ana and a renegade from Resurgam named Thorn, their child is altered in the Hades matrix to convey knowledge of advanced technologies to fight the Inhibitors, and adapted with Conjoiner technology. At one point, Skade kidnaps her and becomes her surrogate mother: she is "born" when she is cut from the dying Skade, who demands the death of Clavain to allow the recovery.

[edit] "Captain" John Brannigan

Possibly the oldest human character in the series, born in the twenty-first century. A victim of the Melding Plague, throughout the series, the Captain becomes more integrated with his ship, Nostalgia for Infinity. He ultimately becomes one with the ship: afterwards, he has erratic moods, attempts suicide with the hell-class weapons, and eventually is coerced to convey the refugees from Resurgam & Ararat.

The Captain is a very mysterious character, hovering between wisdom and abject madness. He does have a respect for Clavain and is the only other 'person' who can compare with him in terms or age, wisdom and experience. The Captain almost certainly met Clavain during the first Demarchist/Conjoiner war, as both characters were fighting on the same side. The Captain at one point projects an image of himself from his oldest memories, in which he appears as a normal human in a spacesuit that is hinted at being very similar to those in familiar use in the real world by NASA astronauts, suggesting he originated from approximately our own time.

Throughout Redemption Ark, and Absolution Gap, it is hinted that Captain Brannigan was responsible for many immoral acts in his pre-plague life. The only act actually revealed to the reader is the murder of his first officer/crewmate Sakagi. Performed during a visit to a Pattern Juggler world, Brannigan had Sakagi's neural pattern overwritten by his own – erasing Sagaki and, effectively, creating a duplicate of himself, ensuring his survival even if he was unable to recover from the Plague.

Volyova, on piecing together this crime, and requiring a force to counteract Sun Stealers growing control over the ship allowing her escape, reveals her knowledge to Brannigan before destroying the medical equipment previously holding the Melding Plague at bay. It is suggested that the long gestation period while the Captain was in stasis may have altered the Melding Plague he was infected with, or that the Sun-Stealer entity may have had an effect; in any case, the result was the melding of the captain to his ship in such a way that he retained his own consciousness, and demonstrates increasing control over the ship and its weapons.

[edit] Nevil Clavain

Nevil Clavain is one of the oldest Conjoiners. Born in the twenty second century, he originally fought against the Conjoiner faction as a senior military leader with the Coalition. In that role, he had designed orbital lasers set above Mars, and led assaults on the Conjoiners on Mars, earning the epithet the Butcher of Tharsis. He is captured at one point and held prisoner by Galiana for months, but she treats him well and refrains from inflitrating his mind with nanobots, to his surprise; instead she tries to convince him of the Conjoiners' merits, and eventually releases him.

Nevil later visits the Conjoiners as an ambassador to try to come to a peace deal, but he and the Conjoiners are sabotaged by a large force led by Nevil's brother Warren. After being injured in battle, he awakens to find that Galiana has interfaced nanobots with his brain as the only way to save him. However, he rather willingly experiments with additional interface, until becoming a full Conjoiner, shortly before leaving with the rest of the Conjoiners in the first interstellar spacecraft that can carry live human beings.

Centuries later, Clavain does not use the newer Conjoiner technology as Skade and other Conjoiners do and continues to rely on his outdated and old implants, which enables him to escape a growing threat from a secret infiltration from within the Conjoiners, by a sinister personality that has taken control of Skade. Clavain defects from the compromised Conjoiners with the intention of joining the Demarchists. Clavain departs from the Yellowstone system for the Resurgam system along with several other Conjoiners and Underworld figures from Chasm City.

Clavain eventually has a showdown with Skade on the planet Ararat, when he accepts a deal with the dying Skade for Clavain to be tortured to death by the unwilling Scorpio simultaneously with and in exchange for Skade allowing a Caesarian section to be performed on her to recover the unborn Aura. Clavain's last request is to be buried at sea which Scopio carries out and witnesses Pattern Juggler activity where Clavain meets Galiana and Felka at last. It is presumed that Clavain finally rests with Galiana and Felka in the oceans of Ararat and it could be presumed that it is Clavain's thinking behind the Pattern Jugglers' scheme to move the Nostalgia for Infinity away from First Base.

[edit] Warren Clavain

Warren Clavain is Nevil's older brother, in the short story in which both are first introduced, "The Great Wall of Mars". Warren and Nevil are both senior military officers of the Coalition, which has long been in warfare with the Conjoiners. Warren has only one eye, having lost the other, along with other severe injuries sustained, in combat with the Conjoiners and the robotic worms on Phobos. Nevil and Warren fall into a dispute just as Nevil is about to make a diplomatic visit to the Conjoiner headquarters. Warren later fabricates evidence that Nevil was massacred by the Conjoiners upon his arrival, as an excuse to resume hostilities, at which point Nevil loses what remaining attachment he had to Warren. The last we know of him, Warren remains secure in his position among the Coalition leadership.

[edit] Tom Dreyfuss

Tom Dreyfuss is a Prefect, an agent with an elite investigative police force around the Glitter Band known as the Panoply. He is the central character of The Prefect.

[edit] Felka

Felka is the product of an experiment carried out by Galliana on Mars during the early days of the Conjoined, by which nanobots were interfaced with Felka constantly beginning early in her embryonic development. She develops into somewhat of an autistic savant, incapable of distinguishing human faces or any normal social interaction, though she has an advanced intellectual capacity, even among the Conjoiners. She spends much of her youth single-handedly operating and keeping alive the Great Wall of Mars, a massive robotic terraforming entity designed by Sandra Voi and critically damaged in the Coalition-Conjoiner War. Felka is rescued by Clavain in the evacuation of the Conjoiners' nest on Mars, shortly before the Conjoiners become the first living humans to depart the Solar System, aboard a starcraft clandestinely manufactured inside of Phobos.

Felka later forms one of her closest friendships on the first extrasolar planet the Conjoiners land on, Diadem, with Iverson, the sole survivor of a prior colony that had been planted there from an AI starship that had raised human colonists from embryos after reaching the planet. Iverson and Felka share a common passion for studying emergent phenomena, including a low-level intelligence formed by a planet-wide network of ice-dwelling worms. Felka makes considerable progress toward a more normal capability for social interaction during her friendship with Iverson, although Clavain later find out Iverson is in fact "Setterholm", another member of the Diadem colony who killed all the others. Setterholm attacks Clavain so Clavain kills him.

Centuries later, Felka lives in the Conjoiner mothernest, still pursuing experiments in emergent phenomena, when she departs from the infiltrated Conjoiners with Clavain. She eventually ends up on the colony on the planet Ararat and is 'taken' by the Pattern Jugglers there, presumably absorbed by them.

[edit] Galiana

Galiana was one of the most prominent founding members of the Conjoiners, when they began on Mars as the result of experimenting with interfacing their brains to nanotech and AI components and through those, became linked with each other in a partial transhumanist collective consciousness. Galiana captured Nevil Clavain during the Conjoiner-Coalition war and held him captive on Mars for several months, but dealt with him by trying to befriend him and convince him of the Conjoiners' merits, whereas Nevil had been expecting far harsher treatment based on acceptance of his own side's propaganda.

[edit] Grelier

[edit] Schuyler "Sky" Haussman / "H"

In Chasm City, Sky Haussman is the son of Titus Haussman, the head of security aboard the Santiago. Sky's story is told in a series of dreams as a counterpoint to the waking life that Tanner Mirabel experiences throughout Chasm City. The planet Sky's Edge was founded after the Flotilla landed there.

Sky Haussman is the center of a pervasive cult, and those who worship him do so as if he were a god. His greatest crime and the action he was known the best for was ejecting entire rings of reefersleep caskets full of "momios", or "sleepers", the colonists for the new world of Journey's End, in order to gain an advantage in speed over the other craft of the Flotilla.

The strategy worked, and because the Santiago had less mass than the other ships, it could decelerate later and arrived at Journey's End much earlier than the other ships. Sky Haussman was part of the original colonization of the planet, which they named Sky's Edge instead of Journey's End as a mocking reminder of his ejection of the reefersleep caskets just to get them ahead of the other ships in the Flotilla.

Eventually, Sky Haussman was apparently crucified after they landed on Sky's Edge. The bizarre cult that has sprung up in his after-death footsteps has developed an indoctrinal virus that alters the infected's perceptions, often giving them thoughts or whole chapters of Sky's life as simulated experiences. The virus is designed to reprogram the victim, in a sense.

In actuality, Sky had managed to get a stand-in mistaken for him to be martyred, while Sky himself entered reefersleep for several decades, before eventually fleeing the planet.

Sky shows up again as a minor character in Redemption Ark, but calls himself only "H"; he meets and becomes friends with Nevil Clavain. He has killed and replaced the Madamoiselle for the 'greater good of the galaxy.' H captures Clavain and convinces him of the best course of action to combat the Inhibitors. H nevertheless is largely responsible for the successful evacuation of Yellowstone, and he and Clavain become largely responsible for saving much of humanity.

[edit] The Mademoiselle

A mysterious, sinister figure in Chasm City; apparently killed by Sky Haussmann, although she may also have survived until later in some form as a mental imprint on the mind of Skade.

[edit] Tanner Mirabel

Tanner Mirabel was a former soldier/assassin from Skys Edge, later becoming security chief to arms trader Cahuella (see Sky Hausmann/H). A ruthlessly efficient and intelligent fighter, he fails to prevent an ambush, and accidentally causes the death of Cahuella's wife. His mind is subsequently trawled by Cahuella, his memories and identity used to create a disguise, allowing Cahuella to leave system seeking revenge, while Tanner is left for dead as punishment for his failures.

Most of our knowledge of Tanner comes from the stolen memories Cahuella implanted into himself, however these are increasingly tainted by the morality and character of Cahuella himself, making reliable character description difficult. When Tanner does, for a short while, appear in Chasm City, he seems considerably colder and more amoral than the version we see through the minds-eye of Cahuella.

[edit] Quaiche

Quaiche was the second baseline human among Queen Jasmina's Gnostic Ascencion. After discovering Hela, the Gnostic Ascention was destroyed by a sentry, and the only person Quaiche has loved, Morwenna, was killed by the high gee force of the Dominatrix, while she was in the Scrimshaw suit. Afterwards, Quaiche set up his own virus, with the help of Grelier and Quaiche's indocturnal virus in his blood. Within his cathedral, the Lady Morwenna, which is to circumnavigate Hela in order to witness the planet it orbits, Haldora, disappear, he keeps the scrimshaw suit, which serves as the prison for the shadow envoy. He is killed when he falls from the top of his cathedral while trying to escape while it falls off of the bridge and into Absolution Gap.

[edit] Rashmika Els

Rashmika is the assumed name that Aura takes as she covertly inserts herself into Quaicheist society in a bid to gain access to Quaiche himself and thus the mysterious Shadows. Rashmika is unaware of this for most of the story, as she has also manipulated her own (Aura's) memories. Instead, she believes she is on a quest to revenge her dead "brother" that happens to take her to the Cathedrals of the Permanent Way. Rashmika is imbued with the unusual ability to know with 100% certainty (and seeming success rate) when someone is lying. This enables her to become useful to Quaiche.

[edit] Remontoire

Remontoire is one of the most prominent of the founding Conjoiners. He plays a leading role in the defense and evacuation of the Conjoiners' main nest on Mars when Nevil Clavain is first inducted into the Conjoined. Centuries later, he, Clavain, and Skade work together among the top leadership of the Conjoiners. After Clavain leaves the Conjoiners, Remontoire also ends up following him and turning against Skade. Remontoire was responsible for originally capturing Scorpio, who tried to kill him then, but would eventually work closely with him. When Remontoire learns that Clavain has been killed, he pauses and focuses all his thoughts on mourning Clavain for a full ten seconds, which is seen as a profound act of devotion for a Conjoiner. Another conjoiner, Weather, who belongs to another faction that has been out of contact with Clavain and Remontoire for centuries, reveres Remontoire as the greatest leader of the early Conjoiners.

[edit] Scorpio

Scorpio, a Pig, is an ex-crime lord from Chasm City. His earliest memories indicate that he was once part of the crew aboard a pleasure craft. When the craft was attacked by a passing lighthugger, he found himself, and fellow crew-pigs, used as game in a sadistic hunt by the human invaders. Being the only pig to survive, and with the revelation that, even while as crew aboard the space-yacht, he was a slave to human masters, Scorpio develops an intense hatred of humankind which drives his rise to infamy, becoming a feared figure in the Rust Belt. Although not described in detail, it appears that he is eventually captured and detained by the Demarchist authorities, being transported to likely execution.

He he found captive on the Demarchist vessel when Clavain attacks it at the beginning of Redemption Ark. After Clavains' defection, Scorpio and Remontiore head to a Habitat orbiting Yellowstone in order to stop Clavain. After a long chase, Scorpio becomes part of the rescue party sent to Resurgam system to save everyone on the planet from the Inhibitor machine.

On Ararat, Scorpio becomes the leader of the settlement after Clavain goes off to consult his losses. After Remontiore and the rest of the Conjoiners arrive in system, Scorpio heads to the island to consult Clavain. After they arrive on Skades' iceberg, Scorpio is forced to kill Clavain in order to save Aura.

Scorpio and those that were on the Nostalgia for Infinity when it left Ararat travel to Yellowstone, only to see it utterly destroyed by the Inhibitors, then head to Hela in order to find Quaiche and negotiate with the shadows. In a twist of plans, Scorpio, Khouri, Vasko and Aura, after Scorpio destroyed the bridge crossing Absolution Gap, decide to let the Scrimshaw Suit carrying the shadow envoy fall to its destruction with Quaiche's cathedral. In the end, it is unsure what happens to Scorpio, but it is presumed that he lived long enough to make contact with the Nestbuilders.

[edit] Skade

Skade appears in the book Redemption Ark and, to a lesser extent, in Absolution Gap. Skade is a Conjoiner, and one of the more recent ones. She is a member of the Closed Council and also the Inner Sanctum, both executive bodies within the Conjoiner Mother Nest. Supposedly, she also works for the ultra-secret Night Council, although in Redemption Ark it is hinted that the Night Council does not exist at all as a Conjoiner body, but is actually an avatar for the mental structure of the Mademoiselle that has inflitrated Skade's mind.

Skade is expert at Conjoiner technology, being able to unleash neural attacks on other Conjoiners and peer past security divisions — even those within the minds of other Closed Council members. She has trouble with unfamiliar mind architectures — one reason why Clavain was able to survive her attack.

When Clavain flees the comet containing the Mother Nest, he snaps the anchor tethers of his ship rather than disengaging them from the comet's surface first, and one of them slices Skade in two through the upper torso. She survives with little more than her original head, mounted on an android body. Later, when a ship she is in is about to be destroyed by weapons deployed by Clavain, her ship jettisons an escape pod containing only her head, with an interface enabled to keep her head alive for long enough for the escape pod to rendezvous with another Conjoiner ship.

Skade is later mortally wounded in battle on the planet Ararat, and makes a deal to allow the unborn Aura to be recovered from her womb before she dies in exchange for Nevil being killed.

[edit] Dan Sylveste

Dan Sylveste, son of Calvin Sylveste and one of the central characters of Revelation Space, is an archaeologist working on Resurgam and studying the Amarantin, convinced that their history holds the key to why no alien species has yet survived long enough for humans to make contact. He unwittingly, under the influence of Sun Stealer, awakens the inhibitors to the existence of mankind. He is eventually inducted into the Hades Matrix, an apparent neutron star that is actually a solid sphere of computronium, where he effectively becomes immortal as a component of the computronium.

[edit] Triumvir Ilia Volyova

Triumvir Ilia Volyova of Nostalgia for Infinity is an implant-free Ultra, and a major character in both Revelation Space and Redemption Ark. She maintains a long friendship with Captain Brannigan, and is the only one to visit him regularly during several years of travel time on the Nostalgia for Infinity in which he is kept in semi-reefersleep to slow down the onset of Melding Plague in his body. She later disengages the reefersleep and warms him up fully, as a way to allow his body to merge with the Nostalgia for Infinity as the only way to save it from an attack. Volyova later, in a plot hatched with Khouri, helps organize the evacuation of Resurgam, the first human-colonised planet doomed to be destroyed by the Inhibitors. She ultimately sacrifices herself preventing the suicide of Captain Brannigan, now indistinguishable from the ship. In doing so, she exposes herself to vacuum, the damage proving almost fatal to her, but preserving the ship and thus the last chance of survival for the inhabitants of Resurgam.

She later dies on a suicide mission attacking the Inhibitors around Resurgam.