73 pages • 2-hour read
Empire of Silence
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Chapters 12-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child abuse, emotional abuse, graphic violence, ableism, and sexual violence.
Chapter 12 Summary: “The Ugliness of the World”
Hadrian runs into difficulty while trying to find a way to leave the planet. Buying passage on a ship requires paperwork and blood scans that would instantly alert his father, so he considers hiring pirates, but Gibson tells him that “fear is a poison” (113) and gives him a book titled The King with Ten Thousand Eyes. Unlike most of his books, this is an adventure novel about the pirate king Kharn Sagara. Hidden inside is the handwritten, encoded letter of introduction required for Hadrian to enter the scholiast athenaeum. Gibson warns him about “the ugliness of the world” but also advises him to “focus on the beauty of it” (116).
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Scourging at the Pillar”
As Hadrian packs to leave, bells call for a special assembly of everyone in Devil’s Rest. He hides the book and Gibson’s letter in his bags, then attends the assembly and watches as Alistair announces that he has caught a traitor who planned to have Hadrian kidnapped and sold to the Extrasolarians (humans who have broken away from the Sollan Empire). He then reveals Gibson, who is tied to a whipping post. Hadrian tries to stop Alistair, but guards emerge and grab him. Alistair tells the crowd that Gibson has betrayed them. To protect Hadrian, Gibson confesses to the trumped-up charges, claiming that he arranged for a kidnapping. Alistair orders Gibson whipped and his nostrils cut to mark him as a criminal, then banishes him from Delos.
Hadrian breaks free and rushes to Alistair, demanding to know the reason for this display. Alistair explains that he punished Gibson because he could not publicly punish Hadrian. Hadrian returns to his rooms and finds his coat moved and the book with the letter gone. Defeated, he screams.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Fear is a Poison”
Hadrian tries to think of a new plan, but without the letter from Gibson, the scholiasts will deny him entry. Paralyzed by fear, he flies to Liliana’s summer palace to visit her for a week before he is shipped off to the seminary. Crispin accompanies him.
Hadrian is surprised when Crispin attempts to make friendly conversation during the flight. Crispin reveals that he does not want to be Alistair’s heir; he is jealous that Hadrian is leaving the planet and will eventually join the Chantry’s efforts in the war against the Cielcin. He does not understand why Hadrian would want to be a scholiast. Hadrian realizes that Crispin is trying to make peace, but he is too angry to accept Crispin’s overtures.
Chapter 15 Summary: “The Summer Palace”
Hadrian and Crispin arrive at the summer palace, only to learn that their mother is visiting another city. Hadrian is hurt that she did not care to see him. Crispin tries to make peace by inviting Hadrian to visit the harem girls with him. Disgusted, Hadrian declines. As his departure looms, Hadrian becomes depressed and sullen. Finally, Liliana returns from her trip and asks to see Hadrian.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Mother”
Liliana shuts off the surveillance in her personal quarters so that she and Hadrian can speak safely. She then reveals that she has a spy watching over Hadrian; that spy is the one who stole the book and Gibson’s letter. She knows that Gibson is alive and has been banished, but she does not know to which planet or system he was sent. She wants to help Hadrian escape and has arranged for a Free Trader ship to take him to Teukros.
Hadrian is afraid of the repercussions she will face, but Liliana believes that she is safe, as her mother far outranks Alistair. When Hadrian asks why she is doing this, Liliana embraces him and states, “You’re my son” (148). He is overcome by this first and only expression of her parental affection.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Valedictory”
The day before Hadrian is due to leave, several of Alistair’s guards arrive to escort him to the seminary. To his surprise, Kyra is among the group, claiming that she was specifically requested.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Rage Is Blindness”
That evening, Hadrian packs. He is unsure how his mother plans to separate him from Alistair’s guards. Crispin visits and once again attempts to be friendly but he then makes a lewd remark about Kyra and suggests that Gibson deserved a harsher punishment. In response, Hadrian insults him, and they fight. When Crispin threatens to assault Kyra, Hadrian loses control, hitting Crispin with brutal force and knocking him unconscious.
Horrified by his own actions, Hadrian recalls Gibson’s aphorism that “rage is blindness” (157). Crispin is alive, but the surveillance cameras have recorded everything. Liliana arrives and calmly takes control. She calls Kyra to take Hadrian to the port to meet the Free Trader ship and reveals that Kyra is the spy she had watching him. As they part, Liliana confides that Hadrian was always her favorite son.
Chapter 19 Summary: “The Edge of the World”
Kyra accompanies Hadrian to meet the captain of the Free Trader ship. The captain, Demetri Arello, is a Jaddian. (Jadd is another human group that broke away from the Sollans.) His ship is a transport called the Eurynasir. The trip to Teukros will take 13 years, during which the passengers will sleep in stasis. However, Demetri is suspicious of Hadrian’s motives. Knowing that the Jaddian principalities hate the Chantry, Hadrian explains that he is running away to escape being forced to join them. This satisfies Demetri. Hadrian bids Kyra farewell, attempting again to apologize for his behavior. She does not react, and he is unsure whether she believes him.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Off the Map”
Aboard the Eurynasir, Demetri introduces Hadrian to his crew. Some are Jaddian; in their culture, beauty has been “raised to a moral imperative” (173), and even the middle classes use genetic manipulation to enhance their appearance. Another passenger on the ship is a homunculus named Saltus; he is four feet tall, ugly, and deformed. Homunculi are not considered human because they have been genetically engineered for labor and have limited physical or mental capacities. However, Saltus claims that he and Hadrian are the same because they are “both children of the tanks” (175). Hadrian is deeply offended and disgusted.
They move to the ship’s bridge for takeoff. The acceleration hits Hadrian hard, and he vomits at the loss of gravity. Amid the chaos, he barely registers when his home planet goes out of view.
Chapter 21 Summary: “The Outer Dark”
Once they are in space, Demetri takes Hadrian to the fugue creches: tubes in which they will be frozen and placed in stasis for the journey. Because the creches halt aging, Hadrian will be the same biological age when he emerges in 13 years. To enter, Hadrian must undress. He does so with embarrassment and accidentally drops the card with his secret funds. Demetri notices, and Hadrian promises to give him the entire amount when they reach Teukros safely. The only thing Hadrian refuses to remove is his signet ring, even though it will freeze to his skin. Hadrian enters the tube, and his vision goes black.
When he wakes, everything is wrong.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Marlowe Alone
Hadrian wakes in pain and confusion with an old woman and young girl hovering over him. He is naked, and his ring is gone. The old woman explains that he was found naked and unconscious on the street; someone brought him to her clinic. He is on a planet called Emesh on the outskirts of the empire. He has never heard of the planet and does not know where he is in relation to Delos or Teukros. The old woman says that ships often dump their sleeping passengers if a better deal comes along. Hadrian does not believe the Eurynasir dumped him because they were not being paid until he arrived. Guessing that he is some kind of lord, the woman states her expectation of payment for her services. With no possessions or identification, Hadrian waits until dark, steals clothes, and sneaks away. He hides in an alley and cries.
Chapters 12-22 Analysis
The title of Chapter 12, “The Ugliness of the World” (110), is an apt description for Hadrian’s experiences as he grapples with the sudden need to flee his family connections and his home planet in order to maintain his agency and avoid his father’s command that he join the Chantry. However outlandish his situation, Hadrian’s struggles in this section nonetheless constitute the typical inciting incidents of a bildungsroman, in which an inexperienced protagonist endures the dismantling of known support structures and the disappearance of trusted protectors. As the young protagonist finds himself increasingly disillusioned and isolated, he is forced to confront the true ugliness of his world for the first time. Piece by piece, his plans go awry, and as Alistair reveals new depths of cruelty, Hadrian realizes precisely how little his father cares about him as a son. Perhaps worst of all, however, is the ugliness that Hadrian is forced to see in himself when he succumbs to rage and beats Crispin nearly to death. In this pivotal moment, he is shocked by his own capacity for violence, and the implications of his actions haunt him for the rest of the novel.
In a sharp contrast to these moments of ugliness, however, Hadrian also discovers one thing that gives him comfort—his mother’s love. In the novel’s exposition, the narrator-Hadrian has made it clear that neither of his parents showed him any affection, and his descriptions of his experiences with Alistair clearly illustrate the man’s disregard and even hatred of his eldest son, whom he views as inadequate to his appointed role. Likewise, Hadrian’s mother, Liliana, has never shown her children much regard. Notably, the behavior of Hadrian’s parents is portrayed less as a moral failing and more as an element of world-building, given that they both act in accordance with the palatine view that children are merely an extension of the lineage. Thus, when Liliana offers to help Hadrian on a personal level, he responds with shock that reflects a lifetime of emotional neglect. Even now, Liliana is not effusive in her affection, but given the paucity of her interest in the past, her brief show of care reveals the depth of Hadrian’s desire for parental affection and approval. Indeed, early in the narrative, Hadrian’s primary motivation is his need to earn the praise of at least one of his parents, and only when he realizes that he will never gain his father’s approval does he finally cut ties with the Marlowe family entirely.
In this section, the narrative also includes the popular science fiction trope of genetic engineering. In Hadrian’s world, genetic engineering is the purview of those in power, signifying a drastic division between the nobile and plebeian classes. The author normalizes the topic of genetic engineering by describing Hadrian’s birth in a tank, and the fact that the protagonist has been artificially created from his parents’ combined genetic material suggests that the upper classes of this world readily embrace the morally questionable practice of eugenics. The perceived beauty “norms” of Ruocchio’s world-building pointedly reflect real-world attitudes of white supremacy, given that the so-called palatines are easily distinguishable from the lower class plebeians by specific genetic markers such as very pale skin, perfectly symmetrical features, and unnaturally long lives. By contrast, the plebeians are described as plain, with rough features, and they also age prematurely, looking haggard by the time they are only 40 years old. Because the genetic manipulation used by the palatines and lesser nobiles (e.g., the wealthier merchant class) is strictly controlled by the Chantry and the Emperor, these aspects of the novel introduce both the subtler domination and The Violence of Imperialism and Religion.
Ironically, in human societies that have broken away from the Sollan Empire, such as the Jaddians, genetic engineering is less heavily controlled, and even the middle classes use it extensively. However, the Jaddians push genetic manipulation to its extremes, embracing eugenics and creating such perfect inhuman beauty that the Chantry accuses them of exceeding acceptable limits and crossing into heresy. The moral implications of such genetic engineering are further explored when Hadrian meets Saltus, a homunculus who has been specifically engineered to undertake hard labor that even the poorest plebeians refuse to do. The very fact that this genetically altered human is seen as utterly inhuman reflects the deeply ingrained prejudices of the world that produced Hadrian himself. Indoctrinated into a system that draws a direct correlation between morality and beauty, he is disgusted by the idea that he and Saltus are essentially the same.
The novel also embraces the common trope of long-distance space travel. In “hard science fiction,” which adheres to the laws of astrophysics, the concept of space travel is complicated by the distances between stars and planetary systems, as well as the problem of relativity. Most physics theories agree that nothing can enable travel at or above the speed of light, and it would therefore take hundreds or thousands of years for humans to travel such vast distances. Stories categorized as “soft” science fiction often employ technology that conveniently negates the hard limits of lightspeed or invent concepts such as folding space or using wormholes to travel great distances instantaneously. A compromise between these options is to employ long-term stasis chambers that allow humans to hibernate without sacrificing their longevity. In Empire of Silence, Ruocchio uses a “warp”-style drive and the cryogenic sleep of the “fugue creches” to overcome the practical issues of lightspeed travel. As such, the novel honors and embraces the full range of science fiction conventions even as the author employs them in unique ways.
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