 However, an Anthropology professor charges a promising student with looking deeper, pointing out that these were the only humans to ever actually cross the depths of space between the stars, since later FTL ships are able to simply bypass these depths.The professor's intuition proves amply right.The student, for his thesis, is charged with investigating the source and antecedents of a ballad which begins 
On arriving at the spot, the student finds the present day Star Folk in themselves just as much of an uninteresting dead end as had been supposed - but he still makes very startling and important discoveries.