Fugue

The Space Ark left its home planet, Urth, two thousand years ago Canopus IV time, arriving here in the Canopus System some five hundred years later. That is all we know for certain; the rest is mere conjecture.

Two salient features of the Space Ark's unique social institutions stand out above the myth and fairytale of our ancestors, however. The first is the fabled story of the Mutant-makers, and when one studies the conditions surrounding this phenomenon, the fabled story becomes cold scientific fact. On a giant balanced-terrarium of a ship which was largely automatic, seemingly isolated forever in the vastnesses of interstellar space, our ancestors lacked even a modicum of external challenge. They thus had to create their own artificial stimuli or face an inevitable retreat down the ladder of decadence to barbarism. It appears that for a time they went too far: they created mutants. These in turn gave rise to a rigid caste-system on the Ark, a system which afforded an extreme in internal challenges and responses.

The second salient feature of the Space Ark's social institutions was its favoring of the biolo-mental sciences over the chemi-physical sciences. This, again, proves to be an inevitable by-product of the Space Ark's static environment. No physical world existed: physics became a useless dogma, a meaningless jumble of terms which bore no semantic relation to the world-at-large. On the other hand, the Space Ark was a universe of introversion. The biolo-mental sciences leaped ahead of what had developed into a something-less-than-static-civilization. This, as we have seen, gave rise to the Mutant-makers. But on a constructive level, it fostered the growth of a new science of psychology, vastly superior to the old Urth science, and, some suspect, considerably more refined than our own mental sciences. A particular manifestation of this lost science was the ability to project tri-dimensional images of dreams, to record them while the conscious mind slumbered, to play them back later and to interpret them unerringly....

—Andoos-Rob't, A Short History of the Abortive Social Institutions of the Urth-Canopus S