Safiya's first day of school.

Miss Xing.

Miss Xing smiled at the children as they came in, chirping, chattering, rustling with their lunches wrapped in bits of paper or in little sacks or in old pasteboard boxes. Miss Xing was young and cheerful and hopeful, and she never thought—or never thought much—about growing up in the slums of Shanghai, or in the refugee camps around the ruins of Nanjing. About the lottery, or about the rocket off the planet. About the century of sleep.

Miss Xing looks to the future, and the faces of the children are the future, black and brown and tan and red and yellow and beige and pale peach. Big eyes. Enthusiasm. Little packets of genetic diversity, little minds promising different viewpoints, talents untested in a waste land. She felt excited.

They come hustling in, four years old, in a month that claimed to be September, though it was already six months off the season, since the year was shorter on Iphigenia. It didn’t matter much on the equator, but there were already rumblings from a few of the need for a new calendar. But it was September today, and it was early spring, and it was Monday, and it was the first day of school.

They walked in, or were carried, some of them, teary. There was a tall young man and his wife and they held a little girl with black hair and a wet face who clung to a stuffed something and hid her face in her father’s neck.

“Oh, Mistr’ Ladjubassal,” Miss Xing said. “Nice to see you! And Mis’ Ladjubassal. Is this Safiya?”

“She’s not happy to be here today,” the girl’s mother said. “Safiya! It’s all right. See, it’s Miss Xing. She’s nice. She’s your teacher.

The little girl peeped out and her face was dark and wet with crying in her plastered hair. Miss Xing smiled and waved tiny and made a tiny heart-hands for her. “How sweet. She has her lunch?”

“Yes, but I don’t know if she’ll have an appetite,” her mother said. Her English is precise, educated, accented. North American-sounding. Miss Xing had no trouble understanding her, but she’d been studying the new language and strained not to break out into it. “Safiya,” she said, “would you like to sit down?”

Safiya did not, but there were some toys, carefully made out of scrap polymers by the teenagers. She sat with her stuffed thing and sorted them out, making a room for the button-eyed beast.

The parents go away. Miss Xing watched the children, eighteen of them, with Miss Akibe, and after they let them play with toys or clay, they encouraged them into a circle. She pointed to herself. “Sinjorino Ŝing,” she said, and then at Miss Akibe. “Sinjorino Akibe. Saluton, Sinjorino Akibe!” She waved at Miss Akibe. “Saluton!”

“Saluton,” echoed the children. They’d all heard the word, and used it.

Miss Xing smiled again. Fifty thousand people in Landing and the settlements around it. A hundred languages, to weld into one tongue, one world. Another ship in orbit full of sleepers, and other towns being laid out. Another ship coming in from the stars soon, hopefully. One of the the teachers had called it undoing Babel, undoing the work God had done, putting everything back together again. Miss Xing didn’t know the reference, but she understood the English word babble. The idea, when clarified for her made her a bit uneasy, and she didn’t think about it either.

“Who here speaks English? Hi!—¿Quién habla español? ¡Sí, sí!—Shéi huì jiǎng pǔtōnghuà? Ó, shì de, nǐ huì shuō pǔtōnghuà ma? Wǒ yě huì shuō pǔtōnghuà!—That’s almost all of you. What do you speak?”

“Ya govoryu po-russki, devushka.”

“Da, da,” she said. “How about you, Safiya?”

Safiya twisted on her bottom.

“What do you speak at home, Safiya?” Miss Xing prompted. “Do you know the name?”

“Mag sullay kami Tausug ha bay,” she whispered. “I speak English, too. Some. With Mama.”

“Good, good!” Miss Xing said. “And how about you?”

There were a few more.

“We will speak what we can to learn, but we will work hard to speak a new language together. Who knows some of it? Kiu parolas Ifigenian?”

Their hands went up a little. “Some? I know, it’s new, but you are young. It’s easy! Sinjorino Akibe kaj mi faros ĝin ludo por lerni.”

They worked and they played and ate lunch and they played outside under an alien sun and an alien-colored sky that was not alien to them, it was the only one they had ever seen, and the only one Miss Xing would ever see again.