Layla ate dinner warmed on the Earth-fashioned stove. Her parents said they’d heard them. She thought they would be cross, but they smiled: ‘The songs were beautiful,’ her mother told her. ‘Meade has such a fine voice, he could easily sing with the best.’ Mother was smiling when she said this. Father kept his nose buried in his tablet as Layla blushed.

After they had eaten, they sat in front of the holoscreen. Father liked to watch the news while Mother read a novel. The glow warmed her face, and she muttered to herself often, sometimes laughed. Layla played on her visor, snatching quick glances at the screen. Something about the rumblings of a war on Meccanoa. A bomb blast on the neighbouring moon. A call for ES-residents to be vigilant about possible terrorist activities on their own planets. It didn’t seem to matter to Father that the news from other worlds was delayed, sometimes by as little as decades if he was lucky. It only mattered that he be ‘brought up to speed’, in his own words. Layla imagined him sprinting to keep up with news, a blurred streak of black, racing just ahead.

And then it was time for bed, too soon as always. She brushed her teeth, kissed her mother and trotted to her room, climbed in. When her father had finished reading Layla a story from her tablet and leant over to kiss her goodnight, she couldn’t help but ask.

‘Daddy, what’s an ES-resident?’

He smiled, stroking his beard.

‘That’s us, Layla. Extra-Solar residents. That’s who we are.’

He told her the things she knew, about his father and his father before who made the journey to Kepler from Earth more than a century before. He spoke of the hardships of the unstable atmosphere, the new life forms and the changes the planet made to their forebears. He said Layla was a pioneer, not of this world but from it, for her to be proud of the person it made her into. And he told her that the Cosmogramma was a gift from a benevolent ancestor who saw fit to bless her with a power she could share with the world. That she, Meade and Marshan had been granted the ability to become great, universally known, of that he was sure.

He kissed her forehead twice, pulled the covers tight and left the room in darkness. Immediately, Layla slept.

The dusky van came two days later. It parked at the vehicular turning point, a red square of tarmac not far from the path to the woods. Two matt-uniformed attendants fetched the children and brought them back to the van, one after another. Layla was amazed to climb aboard and see the small, pale faces of a dozen children she didn’t know, and two she recognised, Meade and Marshan. She hurried along the aisle to where they were seated.