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**Chryssander Randolf Lyall-Helvig** (Lyall by birth, Helvig by his own choosing; born 314) is a figure of the C9 universe, the engineer of the House of Confidence on Aerogaea 347n, and the one who built the place they lived in. He is a tesseract conduit: he can open and hold a folded space with a duration of its own, and he vents the energy of it through his arms.
He was sixteen in year 330, when the Klak Grove was destroyed. He was raised by [[life/john-lyall|John Lyall]] and later took the Helvig name, on the reasoning that the Lyall name held nothing. He married [[life/amaryllis-rigel-helvig|Amaryllis Rigel Helvig]] in year 335, and their daughters are [[life/sienna-astrid-helvig|Sienna Astrid Helvig]] and [[life/celestine-elsa-helvig|Celestine Elsa Helvig]], who carried Helvig from birth. In later years he ran Lyall Dynamics.
He was sixteen in year 330, when the Klak Grove was destroyed. He was raised by [[life/john-lyall|John Lyall]] and later took the Helvig name, on the reasoning that the Lyall name held nothing and carried no history. His reasons were his own and they were good ones. The name did carry: in its older spelling it predates every identity his father has worn here. He married [[life/amaryllis-rigel-helvig|Amaryllis Rigel Helvig]] in year 335, and their daughters are [[life/sienna-astrid-helvig|Sienna Astrid Helvig]] and [[life/celestine-elsa-helvig|Celestine Elsa Helvig]], who carried Helvig from birth. In later years he ran Lyall Dynamics.
He is in more chapters of *The Glass House* than anyone else.
## Early life
Chryssander was born in year 314. He was called Sandy as a child, and the letter that opens *The Glass House* is addressed to him under that name, from parents who tell him that if he is reading it they did it, and that his mother's warmth is in every beat of his heart[1].
He was raised afterwards by John Lyall, who had adopted him. The two of them were developing whitholium together before, as the record puts it, his father stopped being someone who could develop things[2]. John disappeared thirty years before the chapters begin, the day after he published.
What was left was a habit of speaking in suggestions rather than descriptions. *There are places that were built before anyone had names for what they were building, and the structures tell you everything.* Chryssander went looking for the places his father had pointed at, and found them[3].
## The lab
The underground lab at the Klak Grove was his: supercomputers along the east wall, molecular printers on the central table, machines that built machines on the south shelf, all of it retractable so he could clear the room and think without obstacles in it. The walls are whitholium, and the climate system he designed ignores the surface entirely, so winter stops one step down the staircase[2].
He works with his arm inside something and greets a room without looking up. He apologises for the hour and gets to the point. He keeps a plain box behind two other boxes for three weeks before he shows anyone what is in it[2].
He is a linear thinker and says so: the light is off, check the fuse, the fuse is good, check the bulb. He gets overwhelmed when things move faster than that, and relies on Marcus for tactics and on Eevi for routes.
## The tesseract
The maroon dot in his palms is the keyhole. It swells into a portal, and inside it there is a floor exactly where a floor should be, and no ceiling and no wall in any direction, and dark that a lamp holds off for four feet and no further. Bodies inside it are centred on the moment they entered. Nobody can die in there; the worst available is a concussion. Anything made inside is destroyed in mid-tesseract on the way out[4].
He went in alone the first time and told nobody, for that reason. He spent a year of total time in a gym he built inside it, and learned to bring Will in with him, after many days of failing. Will exists everywhere in the tesseract at once, which Will describes as pleasant and which Chryssander has chosen to believe. What he says he wanted from it was company of a particular kind[4].
## The Klak Grove
He is present through the grove chapters at the edge of every scene, doing something to a panel in the bark of Big T, saying the place behind the mountains does not open until eight, saying he is just there for the air[5].
In the raid he watched Byron's hand rather than the gun, and the angle of the wrist before the trigger moved, and had a second longer than he needed. He put his shoulder into Amaryllis and she went down controlled, and the bullet passed through the space where she had been standing and entered him below the left rib. He felt it arrive late, as though the message had a distance to travel. Then he stood up[2].
Forty-seven of them left in ones and twos. Byron stopped at the edge of the grove and looked back at the eight of them in the grass, and at Chryssander on his feet with his jacket pressed to the wound and the calm of a man who had decided to deal with it within the hour. Chryssander told him to have a nice day[2].
He told the boy who called him sir that it was just Chrys. He told him that his allies are his friends, and that he should find whoever sent them and ask their forgiveness anyway, and he meant it[2]. Afterwards he looked up through the klak branches and thought about the bullet that had slowed without being asked to[2].
## The Great Plateau
He moved through the dark under the castle the way he had learned to move in places with no light: slowly, decisively, not reaching for certainty before committing to a step. The shoulder was healing and he could read the progress by the quality of the ache[3].
He identified the place: Elsher Albert's castle, left as shelter, one entrance and one exit, prepared before its builder died. He named the exit, kilometres down through the cloud, and said it was not as bad as it looked[3].
He knew what [[life/raymond|Raymond]] was on sight. Rimfeosta. Extremely intelligent, almost certainly the last, the original 33A[6].
In the hunt at the farm he ran and counted exits and found two, the rock formation north which was reachable and the cliff west which was not, and went north. Time dilated for him the way it does when a calculation is life or death, and he felt the hydrolysis engine run hotter than it had in days and the weakness burn off, the engine deciding that this was the moment[7].
He overspent. Rad Albert found his temperature professionally unacceptable and put him on a cot, breathing shallow and measured, the conduit burns dark on his arms, his colour the particular wrong of an engine that has given more than it had[8].
He got up again for the gate. He told Rad they had twelve minutes before the targeting data was corrected, held out his burned hands and looked at the low unreliable flicker of the sense, and closed his eyes. Afterwards he said, from somewhere against Rad's shoulder, that he could do the next one. Rad did not put him down. When he was set against the gate at last he looked up at a sky that was wide and brown-gold and enormous, three hundred kilometres from where the klak trees are and with Big T gone, and found that the sky looked the same from there[9].
## Physiology
Chryssander is a tesseract conduit. His arms are the exhaust: the energy vents through them, and they need external sleeve technology to manage the heat. He cannot store what he generates. It goes out immediately or it damages his organs.
His system runs on hydrolysis and needs water in quantity to fuel the hydrogen separation that powers him. The sleeves manage the intake. Without water he goes down.
His skin regenerates faster than baseline because it has to: the radiation of his own conduit work damages it continuously, so the skin of his arms is thin and papery and peeling, and he bandages them daily. The regenerative factor also extends his prime.
## Character
He is unhurried in a way that reads as calm and is closer to sequence. He pauses before things that will require patience from whoever is listening, and the House learned to give him the pause.
He believes that allies are friends and behaves accordingly, including toward people who have just shot him. He is a poor liar and knows it, and when he tells someone what they need instead of what is true he can be caught at it.
In later life he ran Lyall Dynamics and worked on the world his daughters would inherit.
## Family
Chryssander is married to [[life/amaryllis-rigel-helvig|Amaryllis Rigel Helvig]]. Their daughters are [[life/sienna-astrid-helvig|Sienna Astrid Helvig]] and [[life/celestine-elsa-helvig|Celestine Elsa Helvig]]. He was raised by [[life/john-lyall|John Lyall]]. He carries both surnames in the record: Lyall by birth and Helvig by his own choosing.
## Appearances
- [[pages/glass-house-letter-to-chryssander|The Glass House, letter to Chryssander]]
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-1-the-klak-grove|The Glass House, chapter 1]]
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-2-the-glitch|The Glass House, chapter 2]]
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-3-the-lab-and-the-threat|The Glass House, chapter 3]]
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-4-rise-and-shine|The Glass House, chapter 4]]
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-5-the-first-of-senetis|The Glass House, chapter 5]]
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-6-the-arena|The Glass House, chapter 6]]
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-7-the-generator|The Glass House, chapter 7]]
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-8-the-cave-and-the-guide|The Glass House, chapter 8]]
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-9-raymond|The Glass House, chapter 9]]
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-10-the-hunter-s-ground|The Glass House, chapter 10]]
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-11-the-poison|The Glass House, chapter 11]]
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-12-the-new-normal|The Glass House, chapter 12]]
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-14-the-catch-22|The Glass House, chapter 14]]
- [[pages/glass-house-chapter-15-the-crucible|The Glass House, chapter 15]]
## See also
- [[life/amaryllis-rigel-helvig|Amaryllis Rigel Helvig]]
- [[works/the-tesseract-phenomenon|The Tesseract Phenomenon]]
## References
1. [[pages/glass-house-letter-to-chryssander|The Glass House, letter to Chryssander]]
2. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-3-the-lab-and-the-threat|The Glass House, chapter 3]]
3. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-8-the-cave-and-the-guide|The Glass House, chapter 8]]
4. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-5-the-first-of-senetis|The Glass House, chapter 5]]
5. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-1-the-klak-grove|The Glass House, chapter 1]]
6. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-9-raymond|The Glass House, chapter 9]]
7. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-10-the-hunter-s-ground|The Glass House, chapter 10]]
8. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-12-the-new-normal|The Glass House, chapter 12]]
9. [[pages/glass-house-chapter-15-the-crucible|The Glass House, chapter 15]]