Leinder Byron
Leinder Byron Born Earth One First appearance The Glass House, chapter 3 |
Leinder, known for most of his exile as Byron, is a figure of the C9 universe, an E1 of the deep past, and the author of The Glass House. Leinder is his own name and the older one. Byron is the name the Consensus gave him after they took the first one away. The record introduces him as Byron and closes on him as Leinder.
He is the only E1 on record who left the Consensus and came back from it.
Origins
Leinder began where every E1 began. All of them knew the appointment and all of them knew the commission, and all of them put it down and became gods of themselves. He was among them, and this part is not particular to him. It is the shared origin of every E1 in this universe.
The overreach
What separated him came after. While the other E1s settled into administration, running their sectors and their gogoplexes of species like managers, Leinder tried to get above the Consensus itself. He was chaotic and brilliant and bending reality at full strength, and what he wanted was to be something that should not exist even by their standards.
They destroyed him for it. They scoured the memories out of him, put false ones in their place, and dropped what was left back into humanity. The record reads that as fear rather than discipline.
Byron
Byron woke inside a human life with nothing left of what he had been, and kept only the shape of it: the sense of being owed something, with no memory of what or by whom.
He ran the Lost Boys on charm and instinct. He carried Buster, a .50 calibre pistol that needs his bone density to handle, which his body knew how to do and his mind could not account for.
He raided the House of Confidence and was beaten there. Chryssander watched his hand rather than the gun and had a second longer than he needed[1]; Samantha caught him across the forehead with a kicked rock, not hard but precisely[1]; the shot he did fire went into Chryssander instead of Amaryllis, and Chryssander stood up[1]. Forty-seven of his people walked out of the grove in ones and twos. He stopped at the edge and looked back at the eight of them standing in the grass, and Chryssander told him to have a nice day[1].
He could not work out why he kept underestimating them. He was an ancient thing doing a human's arithmetic and getting the wrong answer every time.
The partial return
A child-entity came to the SKW camp and offered him part of what he had lost, on one condition: say your name and mean it. He did it without hesitating. His pupils went black, the smoke closed over him, and what came out was taller, with a golden beard, a white jacket and green eyes trailing light. The lost one, he called himself.
It is not full restoration. The wipe does not reverse; enough of him came back to move with purpose and be dangerous again, and to know what he is.
He took WPU-3710 through the Anchor Suits: he arrived after the temporal accident, offered the only available cure, turned the hospital into a barracks, and held life support over an army that cannot take the suits off. He worked against the House of Confidence through both books, patiently, with the weight of someone who remembers having been more.
The return
The turn does not come from a defeat or a battle. What reaches him is the generational weight of the House of Confidence: the families, the children, and the fact that these people keep choosing each other under conditions that do not reward it. It opens something the wipe never sealed.
He accepts what is offered to him, and stops holding that he has to earn it first. He joins the House.
At the end he stands with Chryssander and looks at the other E1s, still running the hierarchy, still managing their sectors, still gods of themselves, and pities them. He knows what they set down, because he set it down too, went further with it than any of them dared, was destroyed for going, and came back. They are still where he left them.
Compared with John Lyall
John Lyall does not turn. He built a hero to break, and when the hero would not break he had no next move.
Leinder went further out than John ever did and returned. The difference between them is not power. It is whether a thing given can be taken without being paid for.
Physical constants
The white jacket, long to the knees, in both phases. Golden curls as Byron; a golden beard as Leinder. Green eyes throughout, calculating as Byron and trailing light as Leinder. And Buster, which his body knew how to hold before he knew why.
Works
The Glass House is his.