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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, t
o 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 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 "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."
