Enders In Exile

same
for China, and Alai, once her husband until she betrayed him, did so
for the Muslim world. More or less, it worked.
    All of them accepted
exile. But Virlomi knew that only she deserved it.
    Their exile consisted
of being made governors of colonies. Ah, if only I had been appointed
when Ender Wiggin was, and had never returned to Earth to shed so much
blood! Yet it was only because she had so spectacularly won India's
freedom from an overwhelming Chinese army, had united an ununitable
country, that she was deemed capable of governing. Only because of the
monstrous things I did, she thought, am I being entrusted with the
foundation of a new world.
    In her captivity on
Earth—months spent in Thai and then Brazilian custody,
watched over but never mistreated—she had begun to chafe and
wish she could leave the planet and begin her new life.
    What she hadn't counted
on was that the new staging area was the space station that once was
Battle School.
    It was like waking up
from a vivid dream and finding herself in the place of her childhood.
The corridors were unchanged; the color-coded lights along the walls
still did their service, guiding colonists to their dormitories. The
barracks had been changed, of course—the colonists were not
going to put up with the crowding and regimentation that the Battle
School students had endured. Nor was there any nonsense about a game in
zero gee. If the battleroom was being used for anything, they didn't
tell her.
    But the mess halls were
there, both the officers' and soldiers'—though she ate now in
the one that she had never entered as a student, the teachers' dining
room. Her own colonists were not allowed there; it was her place of
refuge from them. In their place, she was surrounded by Graff's people
of the Ministry of Colonization. They were discreet, leaving her alone,
which she was grateful for; they were aloof, keeping away from her,
which she resented. Opposite responses, opposite assumptions about
their motives; she knew they were being kind but it still hurt as if
she were a leper, kept apart. If she wanted friendship, she could
probably have it; they were probably waiting for her to let them know
whether she would welcome their conversation. She longed for human
company. But she never crossed the short space
between her table and anyone else's. She ate alone. Because she did not
believe she merited any human society.
    What galled her was the
worshipful way the colonists treated her. When she had been a student
in Battle School, she was merely ordinary. Being a girl made her
different, and she had to struggle to hold her own—but she
was no Ender Wiggin, no legend. She wasn't much of a leader. That would
come later, when she was back in India, with people she understood,
blood of her blood.
    The problem was that
these colonists were overwhelmingly Indian. They had volunteered for
the colonization program precisely because Virlomi would be the
governor of the colony—several of them told her that they had
competed in a lottery for the chance to come. When she went among them,
to talk to them, get to know them, she found it nearly futile. They
were in such awe of her they became tongue-tied, or when they managed
to speak, their words were so formal, their language so lofty, that
there was no chance of real communication.
    They all acted as if
they thought they were talking to a goddess.
    I did my work too well
during the war, she told herself. To Indians, defeat was not a sign of
the disfavor of the gods. What mattered was how she bore it. And she
could not help it—she kept her dignity, and to them she
seemed godlike because of it.
    Maybe this will make it
easier to govern them. Or maybe it will make the day of their
disillusionment a terrible thing to behold.
    A group of colonists
from Hyderabad came to her with a petition. "The planet has been named
Ganges, for the holy river," they said, "and that is right. But can we
not also remember the many of us from the south? We speak Telugu, not
Hindi or Urdu. Can we not have a part of this new colony that belongs
to us?"
    Virlomi answered them
in fluent Telugu—she had learned it because she could not
have fully united India if she spoke only Hindi and
English—and told them that she would do what the colonists
allowed her to do.
    It was the first test
of her leadership. She went among the people and asked them, dormitory
by dormitory, whether they would accept naming the village they would
build in the new world