Enders In Exile

"Andhra," after the province whose capital was
Hyderabad.
    Everyone agreed with
her proposal instantly. The world would be named Ganges, but the first
village would be Andhra.
    "Our language must be
Common," she said. "This breaks my heart, to submerge the beautiful
languages of India, but we must all be able to speak to each other with
one voice, one language. Your children must learn Common in their
homes, as the first language. You may also teach them Hindi or Telugu
or any other language, but Common first."
    "The language of the
Raj," said one old man. Immediately the other colonists shouted at him
to be respectful to Virlomi.
    But Virlomi only
laughed. "Yes," she said. "The language of the Raj. Conquered once by
the British, and again by the Hegemony. But it is the language we all
have in common. We of India because the British ruled us for so long,
and then we did so much business with America; the non-Indians because
it is a requirement to speak Common or you cannot come on this voyage."
    The old man laughed
with her. "So you remember," he said. "We have a longer history with
this so-called 'Common' than anyone but the English and the Americans
themselves."
    "We have always been
able to learn the languages of our conquerors and then make them our
own. Our literature becomes their literature, and theirs becomes ours.
We speak it our own way, and think our own thoughts behind their words.
We are who we are. Nothing changes."
    This was how she spoke
to the Indian colonists. But there were others, about a fifth of the
colonists, who were not from India. Some had chosen her because she was
famous, and her struggle for freedom had captured their imagination.
She was the creator of the Great Wall of India, after all, and so they
thought of her as a celebrity and sought after her for that reason.
    But there were others
who were assigned to Ganges Colony by the luck of the draw. It was
Graff's decision, to allow no more than four-fifths of the colonists to
come from India. His memo had been concise: "There may come a day when
colonies can be founded by one group alone. But the law of these first
colonies is that all humans are equal citizens. We are taking a risk
letting you have so many Indians. Only the political realities in India
made me bend from the normal policy of no more than
one
-fifth from any one nation. As it is, we have
now demands from Kenyans and Darfurians and Kurds and Quechua speakers
and Mayans and other groups that feel the need for a homeland that is
exclusively their own. Since we're giving one to Virlomi's Indians, why
not to them? Do they need to fight a bloody war in order to . . . etc.,
etc. That is why I have to be able to point to the twenty percent who
are not Indian, and why I need to know that you will in fact make them
equal citizens."
    Yes, yes, Colonel
Graff, you will have it all your way. Even after we arrive on Ganges
and you are lightyears away and can no longer influence what we do, I
will keep my word to you and encourage intermarriage and equal
treatment and will insist on English—pardon me,
Common—as the language of all.
    But despite my best
efforts, the twenty percent will be swallowed up. In six generations,
five generations, three perhaps, visitors will come to Ganges and find
blond and redheaded Indians, freckled white skins and ebony black
skins, African faces and Chinese faces and yet they will all say, "I am
Indian," and treat you with scorn if you insist that they are not.
    Indian culture is too
strong for anyone to control. I ruled India by bowing to Indian ways,
by fulfilling Indian dreams. Now I will lead Ganges
Colony—the village of Andhra—by teaching the
Indians to pretend to be tolerant of the others, even as they befriend
them and bring them inside our ways. They will soon realize that on
this strange new world, we Indians will be the natives, and the others
the interlopers, until they "go native" and become part of us. It can't
be helped. This is human nature combined with Indian stubbornness and
patience.
    Still, Virlomi made it
a point of reaching out to the non-Indians here in Battle
School—here on the Way Station.
    They accepted her well
enough. Now her fluency in Battle School Common and its slang stood her
in good stead. After the war, Battle School slang had caught on with
children all over the world, and she was fluent in it. It intrigued the
children and young people, and amused the adults. It made her more
approachable to them, not so much of