The book follows Joneny Horatio T'waboga, a student of Galactic Anthropology, who studies "The Ballad of Beta-2", a poem written by the passengers of generation ships.

In others the passengers survived, but by the time the spaceships arrived at the destination star system, it has long since been settled through the already developed FTL ships.

The descendants were incapable of and uninterested in settling on the system's planets, showed themselves extremely hostile to any outsiders entering their ships, and were left alone – to continue living in the spaceships as an obscure backwater culture isolated from broader human history.

Only one researcher had bothered to record their songs, these being dismissed as "derivative" due to their repeated reference to "cities", "desert" and other Earth-bound concepts.

Misfits escaped to the weightless areas at the core of the ships, where they could easier avoid capture, and which in effect became a kind of ghetto.

", the Captain managed to establish communications with the deep space being, and make it stop, saving her own ship and most of the others.

However, the Miracle Child, born of the Deep Space being and the Captain, was there – able and willing to greatly facilitate spaceborne Humanity in making contact with newly discovered alien species and cultures.

[1][3] Lavelle Porter sees the book "to be a reckoning with what World War II wrought, including the horrors of the Holocaust and the United States’ descent into the anticommunist paranoia of the McCarthy era", and compares it with The Jewels of Aptor and The Fall of the Towers (both set in "imagine worlds in the aftermath of nuclear war").

Some of the One-Eyes are missing limbs or other body parts, others are marked as abnormal because their physical characteristics do not match The Norm.

The book's plot includes a re-enactment of some of the main themes of Christian theology - the Immaculate Conception and birth of a miraculous child.