Farewell Message by David Mason
"Farewell Message" by David Mason is a compact science fiction story built on a single devastating ironic reversal. V'gu, an alien visitor from an advanced civilization, lands his spaceship on Earth's airport runway and refuses to move it, treating humanity with amused condescension throughout his extended stay. He studies Terran customs—marriage rites, racial taboos, social hierarchies—as an anthropologist might study primitives, paying for cooperation with technological trinkets he dispenses the way a colonizer hands out glass beads. Earth's governments tolerate his arrogance out of fear: V'gu's ship is formidable, and they dread whatever interstellar police force might come looking if he is harmed. After years of study, V'gu announces his departure and delivers a farewell speech to a global television audience. Standing on his ship's gangplank, he lectures humanity on its barbarism—its wars, its quarrelsome nature, its inability to achieve the cooperative harmony of truly civilized worlds. He gestures at the night sky and warns that every nova visible from Earth marks the suicide of a race that destroyed itself through war. His tone is that of serene, superior pity. The veteran reporter McCann, cynical and leathery, closes his notepad, having heard it all before. At that moment, a young reporter notices an unusually brilliant object in the eastern sky—brighter than Mars, brighter than any ordinary star. He asks V'gu if it is a nova. V'gu turns, studies the sky for a long, silent interval, then looks back at the crowd with the blank, paralyzed expression of a man who has just understood that he has made a catastrophic mistake. McCann recognizes that expression immediately and pushes through the crowd toward a phone. Pressed by reporters, V'gu confirms that a sun exploded five years ago and the light has only now arrived. He admits he was "very well acquainted" with the people who caused it—and cannot imagine why it happened. He cannot bring himself to say plainly what the nova means: that his own home world, the civilization he held up as the model of peace and cooperation, has destroyed itself in war while he was away delivering lectures about the barbarism of others. His confident diagnosis of humanity's fatal flaw has simultaneously become his own epitaph. V'gu quietly reverses his announced departure. He tells the reporters he has decided to extend his stay—for some time, he thinks. Then, in the story's final and most pointed gesture, he steps down from the gangplank, finds the airfield official he had ignored for years, and asks—humbly—where he should park his ship. The single word "humbly" collapses everything. The being who embodied unearned superiority has nowhere left to go. Earth, the backward primitive planet he was so eager to leave, is now his only home. The story's entire rhetorical structure turns on that last word: the alien who came to deliver a farewell message to humanity ends by delivering one, unknowingly, to himself.
By David Mason · First published 1958 · Genre: Science Fiction, Satire, Ironic Fiction