Vrie Guyen
Vrie Guyen is the commander of the ark ship Gilgamesh, which carries the last human cargo away from a poisoned Earth. He brings it to the system of the green planet, then spends the rest of his life preparing to take that planet from its satellite.
Appearance
Guyen is a thin, small framed man, with a nose and mouth that seem to have been salvaged from a far broader face. By the end he is a shade of grey Holsten has never seen, bagged about the face where his cheeks and eye sockets have sunk in. Two thick ridged tubes run under his ribs, a machine breathes for him, and thinner pipes past his left collarbone clean his blood. Servos lift him to his feet. The voice that answers Holsten comes from the machinery rather than from him.
Command of the Gilgamesh
Holsten remembers his command style as aggressive motivation and good delegating. His tone is adversarial even when he is praising the crew. Lain, who read his Key Crew Aptitude records, says he scored high on long term planning. He did not want Holsten among Key Crew, thinking him too old and too proud of his education.
The ship arrives after one thousand, eight hundred and thirty seven years. When Holsten translates the signal as an Old Empire distress beacon, Guyen says they have won their gamble, and he orders the answer to the satellite’s maths test with two words: “Do it.” His own message to the Second Brin Sentry Habitat says the Gilgamesh carries five hundred thousand humans in suspension and that their survival comes first. When Avrana Kern refuses them the planet and asks whether he is condemning the last survivors of his species, he answers with the same patient formality, then agrees to leave. Immediately he orders a colony left behind anyway on a moon of the gas giant, in case the next terraform project is worse. “The future, no. A future, yes,” is how he puts it.
Mutiny and the moon colony
The colonists picked for that moon reach the armoury before the fighting starts. Guyen will not deal with them, even with his chief engineer and his classicist held as hostages: “I will not negotiate with those who defy my authority.” Lain reads the pursuit that follows as calculation. He cannot allow a rival settlement on the planet he wants, and the best result short of surrender would be the satellite destroying the shuttle that got away. The colony goes ahead anyway, fifty awake and two hundred in suspension, with children expected to inherit what they build.
The upload facility
Among the finds on the abandoned terraform station is an emergency upload facility, a coffin shaped device built to store a mind electronically. Guyen keeps the translation work for himself, asking Holsten for particular files in person, has the machine rebuilt in a shuttle bay, and runs his own test subjects through it. Copies of him end up loose in the software, and the ship’s systems begin to fail.
His account is that he is dying anyway and the upload changes nothing for the man sitting there, but a copy in the ship can see the plan through: fight Kern, take the green planet, let the human race start again. The cost stands around him, a generation of specialists worked to death from old age and a congregation born outside suspension and raised on the story of his return.
Ascension
He holds a ceremony in the shuttle bay and calls the upload his ascension and his eternal duty. Holsten tells the assembled followers that Karst and Vitas have been meeting Lain behind his back, and the room turns into a brawl. Lain walks up the steps dressed as one of his acolytes and puts an industrial nail gun to his head.
He had been feeding his mind into the Gilgamesh for a long time before that. What is left is another incomplete copy, shouting “I! I! I!” and fighting for control of life support. Lain curses it as a virus, and later, when the copies keep multiplying through the ship, the Guyen archipelago.
After his death
Vitas calls the war on Kern Guyen’s own plan and says it has been his since the moment he saw the planet, and that he cracked under the strain only at the end.
Unanswered questions
- What became of the test subjects he uploaded before himself, beyond Lain’s account of things in the system that think they are people.
- Whether any copy of him is still in the ship at the end of the book.
- How old he was when the Gilgamesh left Earth.