# Short Fiction — Character guide

> Key figures in Short Fiction by Walter M. Miller Jr..

- [Asir](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/asir.md): Asir of Franic survives execution only to be scarred as an outcast and banished from the plains, his hands still leaking through bandages as he staggers to Welkir's door. What he carries is worse than the wound: thief's 
- [John Smith XVI](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/john_smith_xvi.md): John Smith XVI sits down to a historic broadcast with Ivan Ivanovitch, the masked chieftain of the Asian League, and finds his careful disarmament preamble met with a gutteral 'Why?' and an accusation of talking Achesoni
- [Inspector Norris](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/norris.md): Inspector Norris drives his district with a radiophone that never brings Anne's voice, chasing a memo from Chief Franklin: find and test every Bermuda-K-99 born in July 2234, because Delmont passed one nonstandard unit a
- [Big Hogey Parker](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/hogey.md): Big Hogey Parker is dropped off on a barren stretch of Great Plains highway, drunk, legs failing him, duffle bag lost twice, insisting he's okay to a bus driver who has two daughters and a job he should quit. He used to 
- [Mitch Laskell](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/mitch_laskell.md): Mitch Laskell has always gotten along in the Navy — the undersea equivalent of a fighter pilot, a man who grinned when he streaked in for a kill — and he has never needed a philosophy to do it. Then a message crackles th
- [Spaceman Old Donegal](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/spaceman_old_donegal.md): Old Donegal lies paralyzed in his own rented flat, listening to the Keith mansion's servants set up the terrace for late afternoon guests, while his wife Martha squeezes a hand he can barely feel and begs him to let her 
- [Martha](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/martha.md): Martha is the woman who tends Donny through his final illness, her brittle smiles and swallowed grief the counterweight to his dry, deflecting humor. She cannot bear the thought that he might accept death gracefully, sin
- [the man](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/the_man.md): Asir stole the holy phrases of his masters, not just their wealth, and for that the village suspends him by his wrists while a squat executioner plays mumblety-peg with the bleeding-blade. Cocky even in agony, he clings 
- [the girl](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/the_girl.md): She is the owner whose grief over a failing K-48 series neutroid has become a fantasy Doctor Georges cannot bring himself to shatter. Unable to pay for treatment no hospital would give a machine, she becomes the reason G
- [Anne](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/anne.md): Anne is the quiet domestic anchor of the neutroid roundup, the woman who answers the door and notices the welts on her husband's cheek before he will explain them. Her flat, joyless tone and her unreturned smile suggest 
- [the old man](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/the_old_man.md): He is a dying man who has decided that the dead must humor the mourners, so he complains about the bed and proposes returning to the moon-run at sixty-three to spare Martha the sight of him accepting death calmly. His ha
- [Chief Franklin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/chief_franklin.md): Franklin is a man who kept promising his wife one more tour would be the last, and who signed on for every bonus run from station to moon-base to make good on it. Now he stands at a fence post near the Hauptman farmhouse
- [Chief Miler](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/chief_miler.md): A chief whose authority is tested by the desperate logistics of a fleet returning home, weighing duty to his men against the cost of touching Earth again.
- [Big Joe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/big_joe.md): A burly farmer with a florid face and an old gasoline car, who picks up a staggering stranger on a dusty road and delivers him toward Marie Hauptman's place.
- [Evon](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/evon.md): A figure remembered in fragments of confusion, tied to the fleet's tangled history and the uneasy choices that brought its people back to Earth.
- [Peony](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/peony.md): A woman whose name surfaces amid the fleet's reckonings with home, carrying the weight of what was left behind and what waits below.
- [the priest](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/the_priest.md): A religious figure appearing in the story.
- [Ivan IX](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/ivan_ix.md): A royal or numbered character, possibly a ruler.
- [Mara](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/mara.md): A named female character with limited presence.
- [Donny](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/donny.md): A young male character with a narrative role.
- [Tokra](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters/tokra.md): A character with a few mentions.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/short_fiction_57_se/characters