Spoilers through Chapter 23.

Snapshot

The Southern Reach's chief of staff and resident historian. Verbose, grey, rumpled, warm in the way the only true believers in a thirty-year-old agency are warm. The man who walks Control through the corridors on day one, tells him the white-rabbit story in chapter three, and is among the staff absent or absorbed when the building goes faintly green in chapter twenty-three.

Role in the story

Cheney is the agency's institutional memory in human form. He has been there long enough that he carries the white-rabbit experiment, the early expeditions, the dead and the disappeared as casual corridor patter — which means the reader gets the agency's lore the way Control gets it, in the unfiltered chief-of-staff register, on the way somewhere else.

He is also the closest thing Authority has to an unguarded warmth. Cheney is not suspicious of Control. Cheney is not suspicious of much. By chapter twenty-three he is gone — and the book's wager is that the reader, who has spent a hundred pages half-impatient with his chatter, misses him.

In plain English

The mid-career career staffer who has chosen to make peace with the place by narrating it. Gregarious in the unrelenting way of people who have spent thirty years in windowless corridors. A walking patter of half-true corridor anecdote under which a real fondness for the agency runs. Capable, when pressed, of going perfectly still and delivering a single accurate sentence.

What he wants

To keep the agency running, the way the agency has always run. To pass along the folklore. To be of use to the new director without making the new director feel unwelcome.

What he fears / hides

Almost nothing on the page. Cheney's tragedy is that he had no defenses against what was already inside the building.

Key relationships

• Control. First orientation, first cup of coffee, first piece of corridor folklore. The relationship Cheney runs the same way with every new hire.
• Grace. Long working partnership; he is the talkative one in the meeting, she is the one who decides what gets done after.
• The agency itself. Cheney's real relationship in the book is with the building. He has spent his career inside it; it has spent its career inside him.

Visual identity

Middle-aged Anglo-American with a round face, a broad full forehead, and a high, slightly receded hairline. Thin grey-and-white hair parted on the side. Round mid- blue eyes with a faint tired pink at the inner corners. A short, broad, slightly bulbous nose. Soft cheeks with a network of small broken capillaries from years of fluorescent lighting and coastal sun. A weak rounded chin with a faint dimple. A wide soft mouth, lips habitually parted in mid-anecdote. Pale Anglo-American skin gone slightly ruddy. About thirty pounds heavier than he should be. A rumpled charcoal or grey suit, the trousers a little short; a tie always knotted but always a little loose at the throat; brown loafers worn comfortably down. A laminate name badge clipped to the breast pocket. A coffee mug almost always in one hand.

Aliases

The following names and references in the book all point to this character. Use any of these as link anchors back to this page.

• Cheney (canonical — the most common form)
• the chief of staff

Discussion questions

1. Cheney is the warmest figure in the book and gets the least page count. Why does Authority hold him at the edge of frame?
2. He is the one who tells Control about the white rabbits that refused to cross. Does he understand the story he's telling, or only enjoy telling it?
3. By chapter twenty-three he is gone. What is the loss the book is asking the reader to register?
4. Read his corridor patter as folklore. What does Authority think of folklore as a way of knowing?