It has been years, now, since the first testimony concerning the treacherous Drusillanx! from Cybania reached Brittania Tertius, and through the subether medianet quickly spread from system to system. It was not long after that, in the long measure of time, that the remaining executive corps of Disney, fighting a desparate rearguard battle to preserve a volatile, disintegrating empire that had entirely lost its unifying credibility, moved their gargantuan central headquarters back to the more economical site of their first triumphs on ancient Terra. The barren surface of the planet bore little resemblance to the flourishing verdant hills that once graced her face; but EIsnerians were in a throttling life-threatening cash-flow crunch, and needed every time they could extort to try and recover some scrap of their lost credibility.

For a short while, they felt sure they had committed a fatal error, when their astronomers reported from the bastions of Tomorrow Land that a comet the size of a large town was careening for the planet. As the inconceivable mass approached through the reaches of the local system, updates indicated that it was, perhaps, not a catastrophe, but a miracle! For it was in fact the figure of their original icon made gargantuan, smoothed by its long passage from the unknown and uncharted depths of space. The leadership of Waltworld Inc., the shell corporation to which all the crumbling assets of the once glorious empire had been gathered, was less decisive and less insightful than it had been, in Cruella's heyday; since her suicide, nothing had seemed to be quite as good. But those who still had two brains to rub together conceived among them, at a long dry conference in the barrens of Southern Californ I.A., that this appearance, which astronomers were now swearing looked just like their legendary saviour Mickey, could be claimed as a Cosmic Omen, and perhaps they could parlay that tale into a regeneration of the greatness of former years.

They poured all their resources into a plan to bring the great icon to land safely in the heart of the wide Anza-Borrego desert country east of Ann O'Heim, where their towering headquarters building stood in sooty disrepair. They leased a fleet of powerful tractorships to come along of the hurtling mass of rock. and guide it into an asymptotic approach which according to their best caculations would land it safely on the dry sands.

Well, their systems engineering people, raised on the CInderella mythology, used their best BibbityBobbetyBoo algorithms, and the result was more like a pumpkin than a coach; as the hurtling Mouse approached atmosphere on the careffully calculated trajectory, it met more resistance from the atmospheric density than they had estimated, and skipped like a stone, heading toward the moon; the pull of the gentle homeplanet drew her back, and again the Great Mouse struck the highest layer of atmosphere and skipped away, bound for Antarctica; again, penetrating slightly further and slowing significantly, on a parabola aimed at Easter Island; finally, slowed too much to continue the insane dance, the gigantic form entered atmosphere and drew slowly toward Manhattan from a height well above L.E.O. It gyred, waving the three fingered glove of stone in a bizarre grimace of synthetic, heartless happiness to the ragged citizen the breadth of North America; then it began to glow with the friction of atmospheric resistance to her breakneck speed. The honeycombed interior heated, and ancient cleverly designed stoppers and seals began to blow away with the heat, trailing into the wind; one by one, from a thousand small pipettes drilled into the back, shoulders and buttocks of the gigantic Mouse, streams of tiny particles were cast into the jetstream of the planet and into the lower layers of the sky's winds, carrying home the ancient songs of yore to their many sites of reborning under Terra's ancient sun.

As the horrified citizens watched in fear for their lives on a late summer evening, the plummeting form of the giant mouse, waving spasmodically, tore asunder across the summer sky, leaving a trail of life giving calcite that slow drifted to land across a hundred-mile wide swath through central Illinois.

As the summer waned in the Northern hemisphere, and the early rains of fall began, the fields of Earth were visited with a new color, never before beheld there. and wild fields of beautiful golden mini-suns sprang up to assert the power of life, and fend off vile winter's dark promises. In week after week of th elongest Indian summer in recorded time, the flowers born from Tern gave back to the people of Earth every song they had ever lost.

In the years that followed, planet after civilized planet reported on the aether's far-flung network that it too had gained a similar crop, dating from the arrival in their skies of hordes of microflechettes sprinkling the tiny seeds to every populated surface in the known Universe.

Thus, John Henry, John RIley, and John the Baptist were again upon the lips of humans, and indeed every song-loving species throughout populated space, where once only the branded lyrics of Walt had been allowed. A renewed interest in religions began, a burgeoning of philosophical centers and biological research institutes, centers of social invention and new forms of drama began to flourish, and the soul of life itself among the many stars of the universe flourished, and was healed.