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 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?"