# Short Fiction — Character guide

> Key figures in Short Fiction by Algis Budrys.

- [Mr. Sollenar](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/mr_sollenar.md): Sollenar commands a corporation that has just come into control of patents for a new video system, and he conducts business with theatrical gestures, dimming lights and opening doors with a crooked finger. He is guarded,
- [Pat McKay](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/pat_mckay.md): Pat stands between Ash and Harry Thorsten, laughing at Ash's useless race to Titan even as her eyes stay fixed on Thorsten's face. She defends Thorsten's methods with a quick, brittle mockery, insisting the stakes of tra
- [Harry Thorsten](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/harry_thorsten.md): Thorsten rules his burrow from a thronelike chair, raising toasts to Pat and to Ash Holcomb as hired gun and angel of death, his laughter echoing while armed men watch. He has parlayed a lost leg and a lost squadron into
- [Lord Geoffrey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/lord_geoffrey.md): Geoffrey of Geoffrion wakes with broken ribs after his own comrade Dugald's treachery, saved by the enemy raider Hodd Savage, who recognizes his gunnery and lets him live. Proud and quick to vow trial by combat, he is la
- [Ish](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/ish.md): Ish moves through a night of cold stars and the Veld's desperate making, thinking of Charpantier bent over his pot and of the messengers dismissed but not quite sure. He has hands yet lacks them, and he knows he can do l
- [Dave Greaves](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/dave_greaves.md): Greaves stands in the court of conquered monsters beside the atheist Vigil and the excited Adelie, facing Mayron, First of Shadows, who taunts that his whole virtue rests on doing nothing. He has been kept asleep by his 
- [Mr. Ermine](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/mr_ermine.md): Ermine belongs to the machinery of the Foundation, a member whose office can forward recommendations that end careers, and he wears his disguises so cunningly that no one could guess the man beneath. What unsettles him i
- [Mr. Marlowe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/mr_marlowe.md): Marlowe sits behind his desk receiving the desperate — old Dovenilids whose worlds are being picked clean by Holliday Republic raiders the Union will not restrain. He offers no comfort, only the bleak logic that Earthmen
- [Cortwright Burr](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/cortwright_burr.md): Burr has lost his commercial war with Sollenar and comes to the revel in black and crimson robes, gray-powdered and hooded, a pasteboard imitation of himself that silences the room. When he lifts a corner of his fleshed 
- [Merssu](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/merssu.md): Merssu descends in fire, fires his gun at sea and sky, and lets a terrified people grovel until priests and a temple rise in his name. He leaves promising to return, and the centuries do pass for them while he waits out 
- [Ash Holcomb](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/ash_holcomb.md): Holcomb is the undercover agent who finds Lou Foster curled around a rifle on Titan, dying in a suit with air still in the tanks, and learns Thorsten has the diagrams, the charts, and the technicians already. He carries 
- [Harolde Dugald](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/harolde_dugald.md): Dugald moves through the same night as Ermine and Charpantier, but his task is the gentler one: to reach a small town of men he has already chosen, reassure them first, and let them reassure others like older brothers so
- [Riya Sair](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/riya_sair.md): Riya Sair is a massive, herbivorous creature of the old range, spurned by every male of her kind and willing to risk death among the resentful wild dams for one last chance to be a mother. Her telepathic instinct to nuzz
- [Phildee](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/phildee.md): Phildee is a towheaded, chubby child whose mind runs calculations he's too young to bother finishing, and whose only model of 'Mother' is a frantic voice and a hyperthyroid heartbeat from before birth. When Riya's warm, 
- [Charpantier](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/charpantier.md): Charpantier is one of two beings the Veld made, a hunchback missing a finger who governs the western half of an emptied Foundation while his counterpart governs the east. Where his fellow asks where perfection hides in a
- [Mr. Mead](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/mr_mead.md): Mead is the calm, competent bureaucrat who processes planet options for colonists, reading the fear in men like Holliday with quiet pity rather than contempt. He notices what Holliday cannot say — that it is people, not 
- [Mr. Holliday](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/mr_holliday.md): Holliday is a sweating, darting-eyed man who cannot keep his gaze on Mead's face or off the window, haunted by a failure he can't fully explain — a withdrawn mineral deal, a lowered price, a rival option he never saw com
- [Rufus Sollenar](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/rufus_sollenar.md): Sollenar is the quarry of S.P.R.O. agent Ermine, a man whose flight from the space field has already roiled a job of work and who now walks out of a Martian building holding an entertainment machine as if it were a token
- [Mayron](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/mayron.md): Once the First of Men, now a weeping shadow who claims he will be First again when all men are shadows, and asks David Greaves which of them is a god.
- [Young Giulion Geoffrey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/young_giulion_geoffrey.md): A young Leaguesman cannoneer shot out of his tank by Dugald's treachery, he wakes bandaged in the care of the enemy barbarian who admires his gunnery.
- [Mort Weidmann](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/mort_weidmann.md): Ash Holcomb's old drinking companion, the grinning Weidmann who could spot a woman's figure without obvious signs, and who cleared Pat for a mission he thought they shared.
- [V Marlowe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/v_marlowe.md): A grizzled, white-maned Secretary who eats candy bars at a bare desk on the tarmac and tells the Dovenilid envoy, gently, that Earthmen are a race of maniacs.
- [Martin Holliday](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/martin_holliday.md): A gray-faced, shaking man who steps off the shuttle into Earth's vastness and sits politely through a briefing he cannot yet connect to himself.
- [II Marlowe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/ii_marlowe.md): The brooding Secretary behind the tarmac desk, who winces as he thanks Holliday for returning and begins, as gently as he can, to break him.
- [David Marlowe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/david_marlowe.md): A grizzled Union diplomat with a polar bear's mane and weary eyes, he delivers hard truths to dying worlds and hates the necessity of it.
- [The Veld](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/the_veld.md): A character or entity referred to in the story.
- [MacKenzie](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/mackenzie.md): A minor character in the narrative.
- [Old Vigil](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/old_vigil.md): A minor character with limited appearances.
- [Mary Folsom](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/mary_folsom.md): A minor female character.
- [Adelie](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/adelie.md): A minor character with a few mentions.
- [The Stoker](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/the_stoker.md): A minor character from a specific chapter.
- [The Jeks](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/the_jeks.md): A group or entity mentioned in the story.
- [Hodd Savage](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/hodd_savage.md): A barbarian character with a minor role.
- [Dalish ud Klavan](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/dalish_ud_klavan.md): A minor character from the Klavan line.
- [The Priest](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/the_priest.md): An unnamed religious figure.
- [Bess Allardyce](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/bess_allardyce.md): A minor female character.
- [Mr. Bussard](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/mr_bussard.md): A minor character with a brief role.
- [The Martian](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/the_martian.md): A Martian character with a small role.
- [Christopher Mead](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters/christopher_mead.md): A minor character variant of Mead.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_2_se/characters