Portraits revealed through your current reading position.
Author of the nineteenth edition of the cookbook, who died in orbit after a failed run at two admins.
Coolie comes to Carl's mind the instant he looks down through the glass floor of the Security Checkpoint and sees his own planet. Coolie wrote the nineteenth edition of the Cookbook — the guide Carl has been living out of — and this same vantage, a world hanging below and pulling away, was his last view, except that it was of his own home planet. He died after a failed assassination attempt on a pair of admins.
The association is what turns the view from spectacle into grief: Carl is standing where a previous author of his own manual stood at the end, and the ship he is on is the kind of place where crawlers who reach too high are killed.
Never seen; nothing of his species or looks is given here beyond the fact that his homeworld was not Earth.
A dead predecessor whose fate frames the checkpoint's view and the cost of moving against the administration.
Also appears in books you've already read — spoiler-safe to their endings: