Enders In Exile

only refers to
what he consciously plans, not what he unconsciously desires. That is,
he will think that he is responding to events as they unfold, but in
fact
he will be interpreting events to justify actions that he wants to
take—even though he does not know he wants to take them. Thus
when we arrive on Shakespeare, there is always the chance that he will
find there's an "emergency" that requires him to stay longer than the
ship can stay, "forcing" him to send it back and remain behind.
    The need to understand
Quincy is why I am remaining so close to the Toscanos. The mother is
clearly betting on Quincy rather than me as the future power, though in
her mind she is no doubt merely hedging her bets, to make sure that no
matter who governs, either she or her daughter will be married to the
powerful figure.
    But the mother has no
intention of letting her daughter out from under her thumb, as she
would be if we married and I actually become governor in fact as well
as name. So, deliberately or not, the mother will be my enemy in this;
however, at present she is my best guide to Quincy's state of mind,
since she is with him as often as possible. I must get to know this
man. Our future depends on knowing what he is going to do before he
does it.
    Meanwhile, you have no
idea what a relief it is to me that there is someone who shares this
with me. In all my years in Battle School, the closest I came to having
a confidant was Bean. Yet I could only burden him up to a certain
point; this letter is my first exercise in genuine candor since I
talked to you on the lake in North Carolina so long ago.
    Oh, wait. It was only
three years. Less? Time is so confusing. Thank you for being with me,
Valentine. I only hope that I can keep it from being a meaningless
exercise that takes us back to Eros in stasis, with eighty years of
human history gone and absolutely nothing accomplished except my being
defeated by a bureaucrat.
    Ender

    What Virlomi hadn't
counted on was the way it would affect her, returning to Battle School
after all that she had been through, all that she had done.
    She turned herself over
to her enemies when she could see there was nothing left to the war but
slaughter. She knew with a sinking desperation in her heart that it was
all her fault. She had been warned, by friends and would-be friends:
This is too much. It was enough to drive the Chinese out of India and
liberate your homeland. Don't seek to punish them.
    She had been the same
kind of fool that Napoleon and Hitler and Xerxes and Hannibal had been:
She thought that because she had never been defeated, she could not be.
She had bested enemies with far greater strength than hers; she thought
she always would.
    Worst of all, she told
herself, I believed my own legend. I had deliberately cultivated the
notion of myself as goddess, but at first I remembered that I was
pretending.
    In the end, it was the
Free People of Earth—the FPE, Peter Wiggin's Hegemony under a
new name—that defeated her. It was Suriyawong, a Thai from
Battle School who had once loved her, who arranged her surrender. At
first she refused—but she could see that the only difference
between surrendering now and waiting until all her men had died was her
pride. And her pride was not worth the life of a single soldier.
    "Satyagraha,"
Suriyawong said to her. "Bear what must be born."
    Satyagraha was her
final cry to her people. I command you to live and bear this.
    So she saved the life
of her armies and surrendered her own body to Suriyawong. And, through
him, to Peter Wiggin.
    Wiggin, who had shown
mercy to her in his victory. That was more than his little brother, the
legendary Ender, had shown to the formics. Had they, too, seen in him
the hand of death, repudiating them? Had they any gods, to pray to or
resign themselves to or curse as they saw their destruction? Perhaps
they had it easier, to be obliterated from the universe.
    Virlomi remained alive.
They could not kill her—she was still worshiped throughout
India; if they executed her or imprisoned her, India would be a
continuous revolution, impossible to govern. If she simply disappeared,
she would become a legend of the goddess who left and would someday
return.
    So she made the vids
they asked her to make. She begged her people to vote to freely join
the Free People of Earth, to accept the rule of the Hegemon,
to demobilize and dismantle their army, and in return, to have the
freedom to govern themselves.
    Han Tzu did the