FUGUE
By Stephen Marlowe
A NOVELET OF THE FUTURE
Most people actually know a good dealmore than they may be aware of atany given moment. And perhaps oneof the functions of dreams is to remindus of what we know, but will not letourselves know on a conscious level....
"This revolt is hopeless, Ker-jon, because it onlystrikes at the symptoms of unrest, without touching the roots. You maysucceed—you may unseat those now in authority. But whoever moves inwill only perpetuate the tyranny against which you revolted—renew thesame oppression, under different slogans."
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Science Fiction Quarterly November 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The Space Ark left its home planet, Urth, two thousand years agoCanopus IV time, arriving here in the Canopus System some fivehundred years later. That is all we know for certain; the rest is mereconjecture.
Two salient features of the Space Ark's unique social institutionsstand out above the myth and fairytale of our ancestors, however. Thefirst is the fabled story of the Mutant-makers, and when one studiesthe conditions surrounding this phenomenon, the fabled story becomescold scientific fact. On a giant balanced-terrarium of a ship whichwas largely automatic, seemingly isolated forever in the vastnesses ofinterstellar space, our ancestors lacked even a modicum of externalchallenge. They thus had to create their own artificial stimuli or facean inevitable retreat down the ladder of decadence to barbarism. Itappears that for a time they went too far: they created mutants. Thesein turn gave rise to a rigid caste-system on the Ark, a system whichafforded an extreme in internal challenges and responses.
The second salient feature of the Space Ark's social institutionswas its favoring of the biolo-mental sciences over the chemi-physicalsciences. This, again, proves to be an inevitable by-product ofthe Space Ark's static environment. No physical world existed:physics became a useless dogma, a meaningless jumble of termswhich bore no semantic relation to the world-at-large. On theother hand, the Space Ark was a universe of introversion. Thebiolo-mental sciences leaped ahead of what had developed into asomething-less-than-static-civilization. This, as we have seen, gaverise to the Mutant-makers. But on a constructive level, it fosteredthe growth of a new science of psychology, vastly superior to the oldUrth science, and, some suspect, considerably more refined than ourown mental sciences. A particular manifestation of this lost sciencewas the ability to project tri-dimensional images of dreams, to recordthem while the conscious mind slumbered, to play them back later and tointerpret them unerringly....
—Andoos-Rob't, A Short History of the Abortive Social Institutionsof the Urth-Canopus Space Ark, Introduction.
Ker-jon awoke suddenly, sitting bolt-upright in bed. It wascool—night-period temperatures always were—but fine droplets ofperspiration dotted Ker-jon's forehead and dark sweat-stains discoloredthe armpits of his sleeping robe.
Over and over, one thought twisted through his mind; he was nota mutant; he was one-hundred percent normal homo sapiens and abio-technician on the hydroponics staff at that. Yet—why did he alwaysdream the same dream of a big hairless Ker-jon, his ba