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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andor" data-source="post: 2616710" data-attributes="member: 1879">The center of all mass is nothingness. Significant? Nah.... There is so very much some Zen buttkicking goodness in that thought. You need to center some of the funkier monk Prcs from Rokugan around than. The Empty fist style of the monks of the void....The gist... Oi... Tell ya what, I'll quote you the start, which provides some direction.[QUOTE="Under Old Earth" by Cordwainer Smith]There were the Douglas-Ouyang planets, which circled their sun in a single cluster, riding around and around in 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 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 though this story. The soft sweet music of Earth Goverment and the Instrumentality, bland as honey and sickening in the end. The wild illegal pulsations of the Gebiet, where most men were forbidden to enter. Worst of all, the crazy fuges and improper melodies of the Bezirk, closed to men for fifty-seven centuries - opened by accident, found, trespassed in! And with it our story begins.</blockquote>[/QUOTE]

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