Characters in Revelation Space

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

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 [...] 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.

Antoinette Bax

Antoinette Bax is a starship pilot in the Rust Belt in Redemption Ark. She is harassed by police authorities in the area until she rescues Clavain, which draws her into the conflict between Clavain and the Conjoiners. She goes with Clavain to Resurgam and Ararat and participates in the battle against Triumvir Volyova. During the events of Absolution Gap, the Nostaliga for Infinity leaves Ararat. Antionette opts to remain on the planet and is thus caught in the inihibitor bombardment of the planet (although it is implied that the pattern jugglers may have absorbed her into the ocean before the bombardment commenced).

Aura

Aura appears in Absolution Gap. The daughter of Ana Khouri and a renegade from Resurgam named Thorn, Aura is altered in the Hades matrix to convey knowledge of advanced technologies in order to fight the Inhibitors. She is also 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 (which Skade allows in exchange for Nevil Clavain's death). She later falsifies her own memories and assumes the name Rashmika Els to gather intelligence on Hela. In the prologue and epilogue of the book (roughly 400 years after the Hela mission), she has returned to Ararat as the Greenfly machines are consuming the galaxy. She decides to head to the Pleiades star cluster, which other humans have already retreated to (this colony later features in Galactic North).

Cahuella

Caheulla lived on Sky's Edge in a renovated zoological compound called the Reptile House, from where he sold weapons to both sides involved in the planet's civil war, which led to a bounty being placed on him for war crimes. Cahuella is fascinated by snakes and reptiles, and aims to capture an adult hamadryad to keep in the Reptile House and undertakes frequent hunting trips to achieve this aim.

In Chasm City it is told how he hired Tanner Mirabel to provide an expert level of security for himself and his wife, Gitta. However, Gitta is accidentally killed by Mirabel when she is taken hostage in a revenge attempt by Argent Reivich. In his grief, Cahuella tortures Mirabel by having him eaten alive by a near adult hamadryad (despite the fact that all terran species are poisonous to Hamadyads) then trawls his memories in order to flee the planet believing Mirabel dead.

Toward the conclusion of Chasm City, we discover that Cahuella is in fact the immortal Sky Haussmann, who slept in reefersleep whilst his decoy was crucified.

"Captain" John Brannigan

Possibly the oldest human character in the series, born in The Twenty-first century. A victim of the Melding Plague, the Captain becomes more integrated with his ship, Nostalgia for Infinity as the series progresses. He ultimately becomes one with the ship: afterwards he has erratic moods, attempting [...] with hell-class weapons, before eventually being 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, although the Captain stated that he was already an old man when Clavain was born. 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 used by NASA astronauts, suggesting he originates 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 [...] of his first officer/crewmate Sajaki. Performed during a visit to a Pattern Juggler world, Brannigan had Sajaki's neural pattern overwritten by his own – erasing Sajaki 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 Stealer's growing control over the ship, reveals her knowledge to Brannigan before destroying the medical equipment previously holding the Melding Plague at bay. The Melding Plague affects the captain in a different way to other descriptions of the plague in the Revelation Space series. Two suggestions are 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 retains his own consciousness, and demonstrates increasing control over the ship and its weapons.

The Captain sheds large parts of himself during a descent to Hela, where he intends to 'dock' with the planet and alter its orbit so that it rotates at exactly the same speed it orbits. Shortly after landing, Quache's solders infiltrate the Nostalgia for Infinity and begin to eradicate his presence within the ship. It is not know if the Captain dies during this invasion but it is considered very likely and Captain John Armstrong Brannigan is not mentioned again. Before he dies, however, he is able to activate the hypometric weapon and kill Grelier, who was holding Aura hostage.

Nevil Clavain

Nevil Clavain is one of the oldest Conjoiners and can be credited with playing an overwhelming part in saving the human race from the Inhibitors. His actions throughout Redemption Ark set the scene for the evacuation of Resurgam and steers all factions of humanity towards stopping the Inhibitors. 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 infiltrating 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. Before leaving Mars, Clavain meets and befriends Remontoire, the two remain close and loyal friends for centuries.

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 and Skade have a showdown on the planet Ararat, where he accepts a deal with the dying Skade to allow a Caesarian section to be performed on her to recover the unborn Aura in exchange for the simultaneous torturing to the death of Clavain by the unwilling Scorpio. Clavain's last request is to be buried at sea which is carried out by Scorpio who witnesses Pattern Juggler activity as Clavain meets Galiana and Felka at last in his presumed final resting place. 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.

Warren Clavain

Warren Clavain is Nevil's older brother, who is introduced in the short story "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. The war with the Conjoiners has left Warren with only one eye, having lost the other and sustaining other severe injuries in combat with the Conjoiners and with the robotic worms on Phobos. Their differing experiences of the war lead Nevil and Warren to 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.

Clockmaker

A robot that functions using Shrouder technology, it is encountered in The Prefect. Originally a docile entity that did little but (as its name implies) make intricate clocks, it later went on a [...] spree throughout the facility it was in and killed or maimed numerous people (including attacking a woman with a scarab, a device that would kill her if she fell asleep and could not be removed) until Panoply stopped it. It is later resurrected by a secret research organisation in Panoply and used against Aurora, the antagonist of the novel. The Clockmaker is said to be extremely dangerous, with conventional human weaponry having no effect on it whatosever (it took an extremely strong EMP to disable it for a little while). It is implied that the Clockmaker was once human.

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.

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.

Galiana

Galiana was one of the most prominent founding members of the Conjoiners, a group that began on Mars and became linked with each other in a partial transhumanist collective consciousness through experimenting with interfacing their brains with nanotechnology and AI components. Galiana captured Nevil Clavain during the Conjoiner-Coalition war and held him captive on Mars for several months, but rather than the harsh treatment Nevil expects due to Coalition propraganda, Galiana attempts to befriend him and convince him of the Conjoiners' merits. Galiana later leaves on an interstellar exploration mission where she encounters inhibitor machinery that consumes her crew and places her under permanent mind control.

Skade captures Galiana's Reefer Casket in an attempt at ransom but Clavain decides that destroying Skade is more important than the possibility of healing Galiana and so detonates pin-head munitions planted on Skade's ship by Scorpio. Skade escapes the explosion by placing her head in a torpedo and having it fired towards the pursuing Conjoiner fleet. It is implied at the conclusion of Redemption Ark that Galiana saved an imprint of herself in the oceans of Ararat.

Grelier

Grelier was originally employed on the lighthugger Gnostic Ascension by Queen Jasmina, the captain. His job as surgeon-general seemed to involve constantly cloning the extremely masochistic Queen new bodies so she could repeatedly torture herself to death. He also used some of the bodies himself; Quaiche hints he carried out various immoral acts on them and then claimed that they were non-viable. Quaiche eventually uses this to blackmail him into helping him overthrow Jasmina. He is then employed by Quaiche to generate indoctrinal viruses to maintain his and others' religious feelings. When the Nostalgia for Infinity arrives on Hela, Grelier attempts to hold Aura hostage, prompting John Brannigan to kill him with a Hypometric Weapon, removing him from space-time.

Schuyler "Sky" Haussmann / "H"

In Chasm City, Sky Haussmann is the son of Titus Haussmann, the head of security aboard the Santiago. Sky discovers that he is not in fact his father's son, and was an infant 'momio' awakened by Titus seceretly after the death of his own son. As such Sky Haussmann is immortal. 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 of ships from Earth landed there and mockingly named in Sky's honour as a reminder of the action he took to ensure that the Santiago would be the first of the Flotilla to arrive.

Sky's greatest crime and best-known action was the ejection of entire rings of reefersleep caskets in order to gain an advantage in speed over the other craft of the Flotilla, destroying the "momios", or "sleepers", that were to be the colonists for the new world of Journey's End. This strategy meant the Santiago had less mass than the other ships and so could decelerate later and arrived at Journey's End first.

Due to his crime, Haussmann was apparently crucified after the other colonists landed on Sky's Edge. However, in actuality, he managed to get a stand-in to be martyred, while Sky himself entered reefersleep for several decades, before eventually fleeing the planet.

Sky Haussmann is the center of a pervasive cult, and those who worship him do so as if he were a god. This bizarre cult has developed an indoctrinal virus that alters the infected's perceptions, often giving them physical symptoms similar to stigmata or whole chapters of Sky's life as simulated experiences. The virus is designed to reprogram the victim, in a sense.

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 Resurgam and, with Clavain, saving much of humanity.

The Mademoiselle

The Mademoiselle was an emissary of the Shrouders, possibly an artificial intelligence, who was imprinted on the brain of Carine Lefevre when the latter entered Lascialle's Shroud. She returned to Chasm City in Lefevre's body and secretly became a major underworld figure, with the ultimate goal of making sure Sun Stealer was prevented from provoking the Inhibitors.

Her original body was apparently killed by H, but some remnant of her lived on inside Skade's brain (disguising itself as the voice of the "Night Council").

Tanner Mirabel

Tanner Mirabel was a former soldier/assassin from Sky's Edge, later becoming security chief to arms trader Cahuella. 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. (Although it is implied that this is because of Cahuella's torture of him by feeding him to a hamadryad, an alien monster native to Sky's Edge).

Quaiche

Quaiche was the second baseline human among Queen Jasmina's Gnostic Ascencion. After discovering Hela, the Gnostic Ascension 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.

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. She originally believes that humanity should negotiate with the Shadows, a race that claims to exist in a parallel brane world to ours, but Scorpio convinces her otherwise by suggesting that this caused the last race to do so to be wiped out. At the end of the novel, Rashmika is seen back on planet Ararat as the Greenfly are consuming the galaxy.

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.

Remontoire's last action in Absolution Gap is to try to draw an Inhibitor swarm away from Nostalgia for Infinity. The outcome of this engagement isn't shown, but the leaders of the Infinity crew consider him dead after his last transmission.

In the short story Galactic North, it's revealed that Remontoire's experiences were merged into the Conjoiner collective memory at some point in the past; they're kept preserved for thousands of years, and at one point used create a likeness of him to negotiate with Irravel Veda. (Galactic North anthology, pages 334-335.)

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 found captive on the Demarchist vessel when Clavain attacks it at the beginning of Redemption Ark. After Clavains' defection, Scorpio and Remontoire 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 Remontoire 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 destroy the bridge crossing Absolution Gap, decide to let the Scrimshaw Suit carrying the shadow envoy fall to its destruction with Quaiche's cathedral. His fate after this is unknown (all that is said is that "after that, he didn't remember very much"). It is implied though that he is the one accompanying Aura on planet Ararat in the prologue and epilogue of Absolution Gap.

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 infiltrated 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. At some point between "Redemption Ark" and "Absolution Gap" a new body is grown for her and her head is reattached.

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 Calvain being tortured to death by Scorpio.

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.

Dr. Trintignant

Dr. Trintignant is a one of the main characters that appear in Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days. He also makes a re-appearance in the short story Grafenwalder's Bestiary. Though little is known of his personal background, Trintignant is an overzealous cyberneticist who worked with Calvin Sylveste on the mysterious "Eighty" project. His ambition becomes so extreme that he is forced to abandon the project. Without anymore subjects to experiment on, he experiments on himself in order to pursue his thirst for knowledge.

In Diamond Dogs, Trintignant is hired by Roland Childe to go on an expedition to visit a mysterious alien structure known as the Blood Spire. In the end, Trintignant transforms Childe and Richard Swift into sleek-looking mechanical dogs, diamond dogs. When Swift comes back from the Spire to change back into his original form, he discovers that Trintignant has "committed [...]". Trintignant proclaims what he did to Childe and Swift is his greatest work, his magnum opus, and he would rather die than take them apart.

However, in the short story Grafenwalder's Bestiary, Trintignant is retrieved by the former Denizen, Ursula Goodglass. Her husband, Edric Goodglass, is revealed to be Trintignant himself at the end of the story, and it is hinted that Trintignant has turned Grafenwalder into one of his test subjects.

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 [...] 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 [...] mission attacking the Inhibitors around Resurgam in an attempt to slow them down, giving the Nostalgia for Infinity the best possible chance of escape. Her actions apparently had no effect on the Inhibitors and all cache weapons that she took were wasted.

fr:Personnages du cycle des Inhibiteurs