It's like a bit from The Smoke Ring (or Integral Trees) by Larry Niven, where a very weird planetary configuration made a human-habitable ecosystem out of an orbiting ring of gas. [0]
The locals refer to "East" as in the direction of orbit (prograde), "In" as towards the central star, and teach their children: "East takes you Out, Out takes you West, West takes you In, In takes you East, North and South take you back."
