标题: 《Under Old Earth 》作者：- Cordwainer Smith【EPUB】 [打印本页] 作者: zaq 时间: 2013-3-24 09:40 标题: 《Under Old Earth 》作者：- Cordwainer Smith【EPUB】 UNDER OLD EARTH I need a temporary dog For a temporary jola On a temporary place Like Earihl -Song from The Merchant of Menace 1 THERE WERE the Douglas-Ouyang planets, which circled their sun in a single cluster, riding around and around the same orbit unlike any other planets known. There were the gentlemen-suicides back on Earth, who gambled their lives-even more horribly, gambled sometimes for things worse than their lives-against different kinds of geophysics which real men had never experienced. There were girls who fell in love with such men, however stark and dreadful their personal fates might be. There was the Instrumentality, with its unceasing labor to keep man man. And there were the citizens who walked in the boulevards before the Rediscovery of Man. The citizens were happy. They had to be happy. If they were found sad, they were calmed and drugged and changed until they were happy again. This story concerns three of them: the gambler who took the name Sun-boy, who dared to go down to the Gebiet, who confronted himself before he died; the girl Santuna, who was fulfilled in a thousand ways before she died; and the Lord Sto Odin, a most ancient of days, who knew it all and never dreamed of preventing any of it. Music runs through this story. The soft sweet music of the Earth Government and the