There is a place beyond the Crab Nebula, an uncharted zone neglected for a thousand years by the tumultuous waves of inter-system history, hidden behind belts of lethal asteroids and regions thick with the dust of nuclear explosions, a part of space into which no ship has tried to penetrate since the original Diaspora from Terra's first Lunar Colony in the year just prior to the DisneyMicroWarner Rebellion first sowing the seeds of galactic corporate independence. There is no sign of mineral wealth there, and no large center of civilization to be sought, courted, or reckoned with in battle. So it is unnoticed in the scheme of things. The zone is generally marked off as the Crab Bottom sector on modern holocharts, a grayed out zone of no danger, help or profit.

There is one planet that can be found in Crab's Bottom, with the energy-spectrum bandwidth required for the operation of humanoid carbon-oxygen exchange organisms. It circles a large star known only by an ancient catalog number, NEZ0999899881. Neezy, as it is known to its gravitational captives, is about 1.023 solar standards in diameter, richer in deuterium and borium flares than is the corona of Terra's dimming sun, but comparable in the bands between infrared and ultraviolet. Her sole planet, a lopsided muddy mass with a single large equatorial ocean running 3/4s of the way around it, is slightly further from Neezy than Terra is from Sol, but having a slightly more carbon-rich atmosphere, maintains a temperature between viable extremes of -10 and +63 centigrade.

Rich in some ways, blessed with a verdant chlorophyllic ecosphere, relatively few predators of any scale, and an abundance of some rare mineral classes which would sell well on any other civilized planet, the planet, known only to its inhabitants, is called Terrnetterna, or Tern, by its residents, for reasons their wisest scholars can only imagine. The capitol center is a rambling collection of finely shaped wood-like structures, displaying a fineness of joinery, finish, forming skills and design genius known nowhere else in the Universe. They are arrayed in graceful curves along the shores of the equatorial ocean straddling what the locals consider to be their Zeroeth Meridian. A wide, fresh water river navigable for at least 100 klicks flows through the city -- if that is the name for such a place -- to the sea, and along the polished wooden quais and docks, gracious sailing craft opf strange design can be seen moving passengers and cargo, raising and lowering graceful wind-arms of strangely translucent fabric to catch the breezes as they depart for other Tern centers.

NEar the delta of this broad river, where the docks end and the walls are older, less well-kept, the buildings cruder and the passage ways darker, set a few hundred meters apart from any other building, is a beautiful but ramshackle building made of the same dark and lustrous wood as the docks and quais. It is an old building, once crafted with love and attention which shows yet through the grime of centuries, containing a large central room and a number of smaller outlying rooms. Stages enhance two sides, and above the far entrance a mezzanine extends into the room, chairs neatly arranged on it. THe entire room is lined with strangely crafted objects, instruments with bulbous bodies and animal-gut strings, flat round ones, graceful figure-eight shapes in stunning red-grained hand carved wood, small tubular ones, triangular string ones -- the walls are an array of every historical instrument known tot he race of Terran.

For such is the blood of these men and women, whose own lore tells them of a long-ago flight in a large stolen starship from Terra's own Low-Earth orbit, no more than three hundred desperate men and women who threw their lives and futures onto Fate's gambling table in a wrenching determination to stay free, and won -- this wet and muddy land, a planet with almost no metals, where, in consequence, some technologies died, while others bloomed.

Along the wall that supports one side of the mezzanine, on the ground level, can be seen a long, ornately carved bar, lit by small lanterns in lovely carved cases. Outside, the quiet whisper of the river in the moonlight is a calming sound. Over the main entrance of this ancient building is a sign, much revered for its antiquity by the elders, if little understood. Its carving has faded over the centuries, but can still be made out on close inspection:

"´|*|*)CA¯*** T/ \vERÚN

Inside, a broad and ancient carved door bearing the carved legend "Lomaxion Centre" opens into one of the side rooms, where a wide desk-like table is littered with vellum sheets, and fine large boxes holding thousands more strangely marked sheets stand in stacks along the walls; a young Yokel holds one of the ancient hardwood instruments, shaped after a feminine form of his species, and strums its strings and sings:

Blow, ye wind o' the mornin'
Ah, blow ye wind Ohio!
Clearasil the rum and drecks
Way, Annie, blow, blow!

He is interrupted by the sudden arrival of a tall broad-shouldered man in a rich finely-spun gray cloak, who steps suddenly through the door.
"What news from Cornucopia, boy!??"

The lad leaps to his feet, and salutes hastily with his free hand.

"Non, bon sir, since the beamed fragment I tole you of last watch!".

The Elder Statesman, for it is he, strokes his jaw thoughtfully.

"If that bungler has sent my only son into harm, I will flail him with greaser-vines until he cannot see at noon!" He strides out into the night, and the Yokel resumes his strumming, little suspecting that the crude library of songs and ballads that filled the drawers and chests around him would soon become the focus of forces beyond all his imagination.