The agent known as Cornucopia slipped amongst the long shadows of towering Ternian ancient trunks, flinching unconsciously at the sparking dissonances echoing from the sky above.

From three wide spread points on the arc of the planet, the mother ship and her two nephew craft sent down the mind-numbing dissonances of their Eisnerian wave generators; and the atmosphere began to glow with the aftereffects as those waves collided with the sonic blanket of gentle earthen harmonies produced by the endless rolling forests of Tern, the earth song of root, tendril, mulchen bed, lead, breeze, sapling and giant ancient. Gradually the harmonies from Tern formed a shield -- as though a strong quartet of parts had managed to sing so beautifully that the screaming of factories was forgotten. The humming bass of the giants, the tender altos of riverside aspens and saplings, the tenor vibrations of the berry bushes in every damp place and shaded glen combined with the soprano whispers, scintillating, sparking like stars in August skies, to form a harmony which wove the skies into an unstoppable wave of beauty.

The Ternians sighed collectively. A breathing place had been one.

Cornucopia came in the shadows to a central clearing in the forest, a huge circular space where small grasses and fallen leaves lay, but no saplings or bushes intruded. It was a space easily a hundred yards across, and in the center of it stood the largest tree Cornucopa had ever seen. The Plantiarch among Plantiarchs, the god father tree of time itself, it rose toward the skys in sweeps and whorls of timeless, towering strength, wide branches blotting out the sky. The base of it was so wide it would have taken the agent several hours to circumambulate. But he did not pause to consider doing so, either, for his brief was clear and his mission was urgent,

He slipped clockwise around the gigantic elder tree, the ancient rhythms of unknowable depths of time in the wood causing him to wonder and nearly stop in awe; but he pressed on until he found the large arch opening into the gigantic trunk, a scar from some past century which had opened the flank of the giant tree. Into this fine grained archway the agent slipped quickly, and feeling in the half-dark he found the path of a steeply descending burrow, tunneling among the gigantic taproots down into the planet's crust. Bent and half-crawling, he steeled himself and followed the strange burrow downward, following the curved walls with his finger tips. A faint glow kept the blackness from being absolute, and he realized it came from luminescent mosses which lined the low ceiling. He moved down, around and on into the earth of Tern, and the light in the cramped tunnel gradually improved. Suddenly he found himself in a widening chamber where the roof of the tunnel quickly ascended -- he could stand straight. Another turn and the wiles widened further, the chamber expanding out into a large rounded cavern.

He gazed, awe struck even though he had been told what to expect. Along the ceiling, running in long sinuous trails of the huge room, he saw the gigantic muscled taproots of the gigantic tree from which he had begun his descent. And entering the walls, thousands of similar tendrils as large as his leg, en

tered and coiled gracefully, from the floor he saw hundreds more, their reddish glow warming the space. All of them seemed to merge in one end of the cavern, where a huge monolithic reddish bole of ancient wood, gnarled, rippled, seeming to pulse with the strange energies of this strange crossroads of deep earth and the complex crisscrossed network of gigantic taproots and smaller sub-branching cousins that had come together here over countless millennia.

Cornucopia smiled grimly to himself, certain he had come tot he right place. He had found the Root Directory of Tern. And whether it was the safety of his location deep under the surface, or the humming sense of life itself pulsing through the roots trails around him, he began to feel hope.