Empire of Silence

“There was a clear pattern of events emerging, but I was little more than a child, and could not see it. […] Why I did not see it when I had been trained for such things almost since I could speak, I will never know. Perhaps it was arrogance […]. Perhaps it was greed. Or perhaps it was because we are blind until the knife first takes us, because we believe ourselves immortal until we die.”

An important aspect of the young Hadrian’s character is his occasional inability to understand what is happening around him, despite his intelligence and education. His older self attributes this lack of awareness to arrogance or to ego, and the novel’s events that this flaw becomes his downfall on several occasions. His ruminations also draw attention to his innate hubris and belief in his own infallibility.

“We live in stories, and in stories, we are subject to phenomena beyond the mechanisms of space and time. Fear and love, death and wrath and wisdom—these are as much parts of our universe as light and gravity.”

By employing the first-person plural, the narrator-Hadrian includes the readers in his view of the world, portraying stories as powerful forces that tap into the deepest mysteries of the universe. Here, his portrayal of stories as inevitabilities speak to his view that many of his own actions were “written” and preordained by fate in some unknowable way.

“‘Chess pieces.’ I spat on the strand. ‘I don’t want to be a pawn, Gibson. I don’t want to play.’ I have always hated that metaphor.

‘You have to play, Hadrian. You’ve no choice. None of us has.’”

In this early exchange, the young Hadrian bitterly compares himself to a pawn in his father’s political chess game, expressing his feelings of powerlessness. This metaphor also contributes to the novel’s focus on The Tension Between Fate and Choice, arguing that Hadrian’s life is dictated by a force other than his own, just as chess pieces are moved by a mind and a will that they cannot resist.

“The world’s soft the way the ocean is. Ask any sailor what I mean. But even when it is at its most violent, Hadrian…focus on the beauty of it. The ugliness of the world will come at you from all sides. […] All the schooling in the universe won’t stop that. […] But in most places in the galaxy, […] [t]he nature of things is peaceful, and that is a mighty thing.”

Throughout his tenure, Gibson teaches Hadrian many aphorisms and philosophical lessons that the protagonist clings to later in life. Notably, this is his last lesson before his sentence is carried out. As with Gibson’s other aphorisms, Hadrian repeats the phrase “the ugliness of the world” many times throughout the narrative, each time trying to identity what Gibson is referring to.

“Then something happened that I have never forgotten, something that changed my world as surely as if a passing comet had altered my orbit. My mother wrapped her perfumed arms around me, not speaking. I stood there paralyzed. Not once in nearly twenty standard years—not once—had either of my parents shown me an ounce, an instant of physical affection. That one embrace made up for nearly all of that. I didn’t move for the longest time, and it was only with a sort of shellshocked slowness that I moved to embrace her in turn.”

In this emotion-laden scene, Hadrian’s shock over Lady Liliana’s hug illustrates the depths of his loveless family dynamics over the past decades. Now, she offers to help Hadrian escape Delos and uncharacteristically shows him affection for the first and only time in his life. Previously, Hadrian has ruminated on the lack of affection or approval from his parents, and during his off-world travels, this gap in his upbringing compels him to seek out love and companionship in any form.

“Just as there is a difference between the news of a distant planet’s destruction and the bloody death of a coliseum slave, it is one thing to know there is poverty and illness and another to walk among the poor and suffering.”

Though Hadrian is more educated, open-minded, and compassionate than his father and brother, he is still unaware of many aspects of reality. Only after he is stranded on Emesh and lives in poverty in Borosevo does he truly begin to recognize his own privilege and understand the vast differences between the classes.

“As a child I had wished for an adventure. I had wanted to see the galaxy, to plumb the deaths of the human universe and prize secrets from the darkness between the stars. I had wanted to travel like Tor Simeon and Kharn Sagara in the old stories, […] and to break bread with xenobites and kings. Well, I had gotten my adventure and it was killing me.”

In a spirit of bitter disillusionment, Hadrian reflects upon his childish ambitions, which have paled somewhat in the harsh light of his current hardships. Demonstrating the power of stories to inspire as well as control, he also reflects on the adventures stories he loved as a child, making it clear that these tales have fueled his idealized vision of the universe. Crucially, he does not relinquish this romantic vision even when it proves to be inaccurate.

“Simeon had never been a soldier, but he led the xenobites against the human traitors all the same and helped organize their retreat to the temple at Athten Var, the holiest of holies to the Irchtani people. […] They said their gods built it all out of black stone on the highest mountain on the world and that it could be defended.”

As Hadrian tells stories to Cat and derives inspiration from them, this passage reveals the importance of stories in bringing comfort. The story itself also provides a clue about the novel’s broader world-building, for the temple made of black stone that Simeon encountered long ago is very similar to the black stone ruins that Hadrian will later explore at Calagah.

“The truth we discovered when our long ships plied the oceans of night and planted flags on far shores was simple. We were the first. The Chantry took that fact to heart, declaring loudly and often that the stars were ours. […] They built their religion on that essential fact as much as they did on a fear of the corrupting power of technology and the pollution of the human form. We had a right to conquest, they claimed, as the ancient Spaniards had claimed when their sad ships crashed ashore.”

This passage illustrates The Violence of Imperialism and Religion. The Chantry has built its religion on the false premise of human primacy in space and now uses this story to justify the empire’s colonialist expansion and violent conquest of any xenobite species. The official use of stories as propaganda is thus portrayed as an act of intellectual violence, in and of itself.

“It was concern. […] They cared because they chose to, and they did so with a gruff but quiet indelicacy that propped me up in my despair and whispered that this was what it was to have a family. […] I’d not have traded them for my natural one, not for all the ships in the sky.”

Hadrian realizes that his friends among the myrmidons are more valuable to him than his blood family ever was, and this sentiment underscores the importance he places on human relationships after surviving his cold, emotionless family. By employing the “found family” trope, the author draws upon a popular tradition in many fantasy and science fiction novels.

“‘The Cielcin must be wiped from the face of our galaxy. Purged.’ [Ligeia] slipped then into the guise of a preacher, total and absolute. ‘In the Cantos it is written, “Go out into the Dark and subdue it, and make for your dominion all that is there and will bend to you.” So too it is written, “Thou shalt not suffer demons to live.”’”

In this passage, Grand Prior Ligeia Vas illustrates The Influence of Stories on Perception and History when she pontificates about the Chantry faith, arguing that the Cielcin are demons who must be eliminated. By marking the enemy as demonic, the Chantry encourages xenophobia and justifies any level of violence and cruelty that the empire wishes to use.

“Not for the first time, I wondered at the fire in the man. The hatred. Was it that his deformity spurred him to act twice as viciously in his role as palatine and priest? Or was it only that he saw in me someone beneath him? Was he what all palatines looked like to the plebs? Is this what Switch saw in me?”

In confronting Gilliam’s virulent hatred, Hadrian must also confront uncomfortable aspects of his own identity, including his prejudices about genetic manipulation and physical beauty. Faced with the internal evidence of his own palatine pride, he must reconsider his previous assertion to Switch that his palatine rank does not change who he is. Now, his conflict with Gilliam forces him to acknowledge that he, like any palatine, embodies certain concepts in the eyes of the lower classes. This philosophical confrontation therefore alters his view of himself.

“We were not the first.

The basic cornerstone of the Chantry’s faith was—and is—a lie. I felt myself, my world, shrink in that moment. I became smaller than an atom, crushed beneath the weight of all that space and time, and mankind shrank with me.”

In this shock-laden moment, Hadrian discovers that humans were not the first to travel in space and realizes that their religion is based on a lie. The author thus employs the image of shrinking to indicate the sudden deflation of Hadrian’s cultural pride, and in the protagonist’s disappointment over the fact that humans are not actually the central figures of the universe, the author invokes echoes of the “heretical” real-world shift from a geocentric model to a heliocentric one.

“Perhaps Gilliam deserted to die. Perhaps I did. Perhaps we ought to have killed one another or made peace without the use of steel. It doesn’t matter, nor is it for me to say. I had made a choice […]. That is all we can ever do, then live by our choices and by their consequences.”

Hadrian considers the power of choices and the consequences derived from them, and his tone in this passage contrasts with his earlier discussions of fate and his sense of being powerless. While Hadrian openly contemplates both visions of the world, the novel never fully reconciles The Tension Between Fate and Choice, and this implies that despite such musings about his choices, the narrator-Hadrian ultimately refuses to take full responsibility for the genocide that leads to his death sentence.

“I did not answer. There were tears in my eyes and something like tears in my throat. I could not speak. My ring was a lead weight on my thumb, dead and pointless. It was just a lump of metal. I had nothing, then. Truly nothing. Before, when I was destitute in the streets of Borosevo, I’d had the private dignity of my hidden station […]. But now I was truly destitute, with nothing but the genes in my bones.”

When Hadrian learns that his father has disavowed him, he reacts with heartbreak and despair, and this moment reveals the depths of his desire for his father’s approval even now, when such a gesture is no longer possible. The scene also highlights the significance he once placed on his signet ring, which gave him a sense of pride and safety despite his efforts to hide his identity.

“I had depended on my name […]. We think ourselves the masters of such symbols, but they are our masters. […] I had clung to the bloody [signet ring] like a talisman, hoping it would protect me, save me. It had damned me instead, had made my idiotic behavior catastrophic.”

This passage demonstrates the symbolic power that Hadrian saw in his signet ring, from which he derived pride and a sense of safety. At the same time, irrationally blames the ring for his fate, suggesting that his confrontation with Gilliam would not have been as catastrophic if he had not used the ring to reveal his true identity. Thus, he offloads some of the blame for his actions onto his heritage, shirking a measure of responsibility for his own “idiotic behavior.”

“And then there was the site, blacker than the stones among which it was built, a seamless part of the landscape as if melted into place. A thousand times I’ve tried to sketch that façade, to depict the columns and arches and angled buttresses, and a thousand times I’ve failed.”

In this moment Hadrian sees the ruins of Calagah for the first time and describes them with a sense of awe and reverence that borders on the spiritual. The description of the black stones set into the cliff is similar to the description of the Irchtani temple in the story of Simeon the Red, though Hadrian does not explicitly note this detail himself.

“Those eyes. Those terrible green eyes staring at me out of my face—was it my face? I could see nothing but those eyes. They filled the universe, became the universe, and behind them and through them I beheld countless suns.”

In the tunnels, Hadrian discovers an unknown chamber and has a vision. He sees his own reflection in the black stone, except that the eyes are green instead of violet, and the reflection moves without him. From this image, the vision shifts to a Cielcin army and a ship destroying a star, both of which foreshadow the catastrophic events that occur later in the series. The vision also strengthens the novel’s arguments in favor of fate’s existence and influence.

“The past and the future—our lives and dreams—are stories. We are all stories in the end. Only stories. And it is in the nature of stories that times present and past are present in time future, and the future present in the past. Thus all time is always present in the mind, and in the story of the mind, and perhaps in those forces that shaped the mind.”

This passage reflects the novel’s highly metafictional tone, and the author uses the narrator-Hadrian to express a host of abstract ideas about the interplay between stories and the passage of time. The narrative argues that stories contain all of time, and Hadrian explicitly emphasizes The Influence of Stories on Perception and History.

“If you see a moment—the moment—on which to hang my life, it is there. Upon that stony shore at the margin of the world, on a night when fire reigned and fell from heaven, I found a purpose. I was Hadrian Marlowe again.”

The purpose Hadrian speaks of in this passage is that of translator and negotiator between the humans and the Cielcin. He hopes to prevent more deaths and convince the Cielcin to surrender, and by taking action, he decides that his role in the war will be one of negotiation and peace-making rather than violence and domination. However, this hopeful stance is rendered deeply ironic within the context of the framing narrative.

“‘We can do better. […] Wars aren’t won with soldiers, sir. Not unless you’re willing to kill every single enemy in the galaxy. Wars are fought with soldiers, but they’re won with words.’ I would rue that pronouncement—the naivety of it—and as I write it here, my heart blackens with the irony and the bitter knowledge that I was wrong.”

This passage posits the young Hadrian’s belief that wars are won with words, then immediately refutes that argument with the narrator-Hadrian’s interjections. Crucially, the young Hadrian believes what he is saying, but his future counterpart has experienced a level of bitterness that made him change his mind. His overarching judgment on the scene thus foreshadows the levels of pain that the young Hadrian will experience in subsequent installments of the series.

“It was a machine, of that I’d no doubt. The perversion of the body with machines. She had committed one of the Twelve Abominations, one of the arch-sins for which the Chantry would execute anyone […]. I recoiled inwardly, feeling a compulsive religious need to cleanse myself. […] I’m afraid, I told myself. Afraid of Valka.

But fear was a poison, and whatever I was, I was better than that.”

Despite Hadrian’s romantic feelings for Valka, he is momentarily afraid when he sees her machine implant, viewing her through the dogma of the Chantry and seeing this detail as heresy. This moment underscores the power that religious indoctrination holds over the mind, infecting it like a plague even when a person actively resists it.

“The Cielcin fought for themselves, for their right to exist. We were no different. So long as their existence threatened our colonies, so long as our soldiers destroyed their worldship fleets, there would be no peace. So long as atrocity was met with atrocity, murder with murder, fire with fire, it mattered not at all whose sword was bloodier.”

With this bitter pronouncement, Hadrian sees no difference between the Cielcin and human motivations for violence, as both species fight for survival. His view defies the Chantry’s efforts to demonize the Cielcin outright and is itself a form of heresy in the Chantry’s eyes. The sentiment also comments upon The Violence of Imperialism and Religion, further complicating the question of who the monsters of the story really are.