John Lyall
John Lyall Species E1 Progenitor (The Architect Class) |
John Lyall is a figure of the C9 universe, an E1 of the architect class, and the adoptive father of Chryssander Randolf Lyall-Helvig. John Lyall is one of his names. He has also gone by Thomas Elliott, Robert Graunos and Hans Luilphr, and his birth name is not on record.
He is of deep time and pre-history, and he does not experience years as they are lived. He is credited with whitholium, and with the tesseract interface as humans received it.
He disappeared thirty years before the events of The Glass House, the day after he published, and is recorded as deceased. He is not.
Method
John does not read time as a sequence. He reads it as a plot, and works at the scale that allows: a seed planted in year 314 yields its harvest in year 340, and he plants accordingly.
He understands human feeling completely and has none of it. Love, anger and grief are settings he adjusts in other people, and his sympathy is an instrument he plays. He survives the tedium of not dying by embedding himself in other people's lives, making families and wars, and watching what they do.
The setup
In his earliest recorded period he was inside the human resistance and its science teams, under other names, as a squadmate of the parents of Eevi and Amaryllis. He gave them whitholium.
He was not helping them. He was arming a conflict he wanted to watch.
As a father
He adopted Chryssander as a child. The choice was not compassion: he selected a child with the qualities the story needed, high intelligence and an affinity for the tesseract, and raised him to carry the wound the rest of it required.
He taught 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 spent years finding what those sentences pointed at[1].
The disappearance was the last move of that period. He removed himself to give his son the loss the arc needed.
Physiology
John is immutable matter. Conventional means do not destroy him, and he can perform an injury or a death when the narrative wants one.
He needs no tesseract energy because he is a source of it, and the interface he built for humans was a toy handed to people who could hurt themselves with it.
The name he gave
As Thomas Elliott he found the pitch-black planet at the centre of the ring, called it Void, and published that the species living there had no brainpower. As Robert Graunos, five years after that, he published that they were as intelligent as anyone, that they had gone after Elliott first, and that Elliott was the one who pushed them to change[2].
The word for them is his too. Voidomorphian means the shapeless thing out of Void, and he said it in contempt. They kept it, which is what people do with a name given that way. It is now the only word the record has for them.
The name that carried
Thomas Elliott and Robert Graunos were made for their moment and set down with it. The name written Luilfr, and in its older spelling Luilphr, is not of that kind. It is ancient register, it predates every identity he has worn on Aerogaea 347n, and it is the one that has carried.
That matters to the reasoning of the man he raised. Chryssander set the Lyall name down on the grounds that a surname holds nothing and carries no history. The record shows a name of his father's that carried.
Physiology
He alters vocal cords, bone structure and pheromones, and shifts identity without a seam. What does not change is the eyes. Whatever warmth the face is doing as John, whatever anger it is doing as Hans, the micro-expressions around the eyes stay exactly as they are: ancient, bored and observing.
Family
John Lyall raised Chryssander Randolf Lyall-Helvig, who later set the Lyall name down.