It turns out that in the early generations, the voyage went well, the fleet of generation ships proceeding as planned. It was at this time that Earth-bound terms got new meanings, "A City" being one of the ships and "The Desert" being the space between them. However. in later generations a fanatic religious ideology arose – its main tenets being that the ships' mission was "To Bring Human Beings to the Stars", that the term "Human Being" was to be defined according to a very strict "Norm" covering both physical characteristics and social behavior – and that anyone not fitting that "Norm" was not a true "Human Being" and had to be weeded out. Fanatic Judges were set up to judge such misfits and almost invariably sentence them to death, with the Judges increasingly usurping the authority of the Captains. Misfits escaped to the weightless areas at the core of the ships, where they could easier avoid capture, and which in effect became a kind of ghetto.