For information on the Hebrew month, see Ab.
The Abh are a space-dwelling race of artificially-bred humans in the fictional universe of Crest of the Stars.
The Abh all artifically created through genetic engineering this in part is due to their genetic makeup being artifical that natural conception is not possible. All Abh are beautiful, with blue hair (which is a requirement for being an Abh). They also have a very long life expectancy: well over 200 years, but they age very little after reaching a certain age. Thus, a 200-year-old Abh would die looking exactly as they did when they were 25. This means that the Abh as a race have negligible senescence. Abh are also space-dwelling and space-faring. They are born in space and stay there for their whole lives, seldom ever set foot on land. Their language is called Baronh whose meaning is Abh-language in their own tongue.
History
The Abh were originally bred to be slaves, meant to be used for deep space exploration. One group of these early pioneers, left their mother space city and but chose not to returned to their creators. Unfortunately, their fear that their creator would send a force back to destroy them was too great and eventually the Abh rose to destroy their mother space city. It was only later they discovered their creators were too weak to even put up much of a resistant. Known to every Abh but never official recorded in any text is that every Abh carries the sin of the mother space city's annihilation, and their blue hair are the mark of their sin.
In the Humankind Empire of Abh, there are eight royal families from which an emperor or empress is chosen. In Crest of the Stars, Lafiel (Lamhirh) is the granddaughter of the current empress, who is from the Clyuve (Clybh) family - Nei Dobrusk (néïc Dobreuscr), and is, thus, a princess who is potentially in line for the throne.
Culture
The mother space city of Abh was created to keep and reconstruct culture of a certain land on the Earth. In Crest of the Star the land is referred "islands in East Asia" and strongly implied it is Japan in future. Abh incline strongly to the culture of their mother city, that is, the reconstructed Japanese culture. This inclination is sometimes referred as their racial burden: since they destroyed the mother space ship, it became their main mission to keep that culture instead of the city. Through their space travel they gathered information of that culture, merged the information and reconstructed it. Because of changing in time, and of their space nomadic life, the Abh culture is different from any other culture on the earth, but the Abh insist to keep it purified, although they admit it is not totally same of its original form, hence without influence from any other cultures. They import goods from planets both in their domain Empire and in other intersteller states, but don't import any social or cultural system.
The Abh society is very aristocratic. There are three classes, the royal, noble and knight. The royal and the noble classes hold hereditary titles, but an heir can receive their hereditary title after military duty. or knights military service is not mandatory but most of them go to the cenrue, military space academy for spending some years in the laburec, space navy. The space academy is only one school where the Abh learn to navigate in the planary space.
The Abh have no marriage system. They love each other but don't marry. The basic Abh 'family' consists of one parent and his or her children, though some Abh like to live with their relatives together. Most common way to make a child is to unite one's gene with their lover's one. These offspring are known as "Children of Love." At an early age Lafiel was told by her father that her genetic mother was the family cat. However, this proved to be untrue.
The Abh think it's important that a family heritage both genetical and cultural. As for genetical heritage, a clan share a same feature (Ūalitec). For example, the Abliarsec, the imperial house have elfish ears called Nuic Abliarsec (Ears of Abliasec). Each clan has their own feature and it can't be shared by other clans. As for keeping cultural heritage, it is ethnical significant for the Abh to keep the cultural heritage of the clan pure. Even the emperor or empress can intervene the cultural heritage of other clans. It is one of heaviest insult to critisize their cultural heritage. For this purpose the Abh have their child grow up without help of others. Until their children grow up, they make nursary vacances for many years, usually over ten years.
The Abh spend their whole life in space ships and space station. Since Their culture has been developed during the long term trader life of their ancestors, most of the Abh find no difference between a space ship and a space station. Where they stay mainly at that time is a home for them. According to their opinion, a space station is principally a space ship without engine for planary space navigation. In contrary most of the Abh consider a planet surface as somewhere fearful.
The Abh in birth believe in no religion. But they celebrate the birth, the remerkable point of their life and moarn the death. In the funeral celemony they sing a song without lyrics in honor of the dead. And then the body of the dead in a coffin departs into the space.
According to the traditional Abh idea, their life has three stages: life as a military person, life as a trader and life as a parent. For most of them, the most important stage is the life as a parent.
Morioka Hiroyuki, the original author of the various Crest of the Stars novels, even created a full Abh language, known as Baronh, with an alphabet called Ath.
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