Diaspora (novel) - Characters

Characters

• Yatima appears as an Orphan, a being formed by the Konishi polis conceptory rather than by a parent or parents. A central character in the novel, ve usually takes the iconic form of an African herdsman in a purple robe. Yatima exhibits a deep love of mathematics and a desire to explore the unknown.
• Blanca, who habitually uses the icon of a featureless black silhouette, also inhabits the Konishi polis. One of the first three people that Yatima meets and a physicist and scape-architect, Blanca has a reputation as an acknowledged expert on Kozuch Theory throughout the Coalition of Polises.
• Inoshiro, another of Yatima's earliest friends, uses an icon featuring metallic, pewter-grey skin. A native of Konishi but a frequenter of Ashton-Laval, a polis of great artistic merit, ve proudly considers verself delinquent. Inoshiro frequently attempts to attract Yatima away from philosophical Konishi and into more aesthetic and avant-garde pursuits. Inoshiro originates the idea of visiting the fleshers of Atlanta in ancient gleisner bodies.
• Gabriel, Yatima's third early friend, has an icon covered in short, golden-brown fur. Gabriel, Blanca's lover and another great physicist, differs from most polis citizens in having chosen for himself a specific (though non-functional) gender, a trait considered eccentric and perhaps perverted by many citizens of the Coalition.
• Karpal, a gleisner astronomer who lives on the surface of the Moon, first discovers the collapse of Lac G-1 in Lacerta. He later leaves his robotic body and gleisner society to transmigrate to the Carter-Zimmerman polis, seeking a more profound understanding of physics, unavailable to creatures whose minds remain programmed to think of things in terms of their bodies.
• Orlando Venetti, originally a leader of the Bridger colony of Atlanta; he and his mate Liana Zabini first welcome Inoshiro and Yatima upon their arrival in gleisner form. In the Lacerta Event, Liana dies but the visitors from Konishi rescue Orlando and bring him into the polis; he joins the Diaspora, and thanks to his Bridger training he makes the first interactive contact with an alien intelligence. Before joining the Diaspora he creates a son, Paolo, who ultimately joins Yatima in exploring higher universes on the trail of the "Transmuters".
• Radiya is Yatima's first mentor in abstract mathematics and in exploration of the "Truth Mines", Konishi’s metaphoric representation of the world of mathematical theorems. Vis icon is a fleshless skeleton made of twigs and branches, with a skull carved from a knotted stump.
• Hermann, an extremely eccentric member of the Diaspora, often appears as a segmented worm with six flesher-shaped feet attached to elbow-jointed legs, based on the curl-up from the work of M. C. Escher. Very old (a member of the original 21st-century Introdus), Hermann describes verself as vis own great-great-grandchild because ve has reinvented vis own personality so many times during vis long life.
• The Star Puppies, a group of Carter-Zimmerman citizens, elect to stay conscious, in real time, for the duration of their spaceflight in the Diaspora (most others enter a state of suspension). The Puppies take the form of space-evolved creatures dwelling in a scape representing the hull of the spacecraft, employing personality outlooks (software which accentuates specific moods & values) to ensure they feel constant joy in, and at, the universe around them and retain their sanity.