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."
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."
