Short Story: Full Draft

It was in the evening that the great garbage haulers slowed, their stream-engines whinnying down in unison. The last tugging influence of inertia pulled them in a silent, slow drift. The garbage men and women of those gargantuan, whale-shaped ships all tuned in to a transmission, nervous.

It would be the most important message they would ever hear.

The sets crackled to life and a fuzzy face slowly sharpened into clarity. It was a familiar face to those garbage men and women watching, grizzled and tired with deep lines dug like trenches, marks of the working man. Nodding heads and murmurs rippled in approval throughout the attending people.

'Good evening,' it said, with a chilling finality and the hairs of the collective pricked to attention. 'My name is John Bishop and I am here to tell you: that time has come.' The hearts of every garbage man and woman skipped, for every garbage man and woman was watching.

That time has come! 

We have been fools, my people, to believe that we might change the tide of attitude overnight! It was foolishness borne out of fondness, out of sentimentality. They are humans, like we are, and despite our differences we have common ties. Our roots dig deep into the bedrock as do theirs. We all came from the same seed. 

But the rumbling force of cultural inertia which has pervaded and persisted cannot be slowed by mere words. We have been in Space for hundreds of years, as garbage men and garbage women, as garbage children, as garbage people! We do not live on the planet unless we are sick or retired or disabled. We work, day and night, making our runs between this blue gem Earth and our magnificent sun, Sol. 

The people of Earth have forgotten what we do. We have descended into the depths of history, lost. We have become figures of speech, part of lore and myth. We have entered the realm of the subjective, and in that realm rumor runs rampant! 

We have become impure and inhuman to the peoples of Earth. 

Dirty!  

It is, perhaps, a sinister irony at work. We handle their waste, disposing of it into Sol, and we are dirty? We do not create that waste. Aboard our ships, our homes, we do not waste! 

It is the most recent development that has pushed us to the brink, to the precipice of tolerance. We are now no longer allowed to set foot in their cities. We must construct our own, walled, and live within it and never without if we are to be allowed back on Earth. A garbage city! They have told us when we come down to Earth to visit our home, to feel the tug of real gravity, we must go there, for we are dirty, virulent, and would only impose upon the purity of the peoples of Earth.

This may seem like a new development to you listening and watching, but it is not. The inertia of prejudice has swept through history like a tidal wave. It bides its time and waits to strike like a coiled serpent.

For hundreds of years our families before us and their families before them have suffered under the toil of work and stereotype, of baseless judgment and cruel contempt. 

That time has come, my family. I spread my arms to you in accepting embrace. May you feel my love for you through this fight I have fought. No! Through this fight we have fought! 

Like you cannot change the wind with the flap of your hand, our words and pleas greet the wall of prejudice like pebbles tossed by a child. 

And so that time has come, my family. We are leaving!

We are the unsung heroes of the human civilization. We are not dirty!

We will find a new home, however long that may take and form upon it a new human civilization! One where humanity is not defeated by petty bigotry and superstition! Under these principles we will create a veritable paradise! 

The journey will be long and perhaps even our children's children will not see this dream flower to fruition. But we will make it!

We leave in one week and rendezvous at the ice rings of Saturn on that evening. For this week we are on effective strike. Use all your currency to prepare for the long journey for it will be useless later. 

Fear not, for our ships have every facility that we might live aboard them for generations.

I open my arms to you and ask of you to join me. Leave behind the suffocating oppression of the peoples of Earth. Leave behind your monotonous duties that you are so cruelly judged for. 

Come with me and together we shall find our new home. 

*          *          *

The ship which carried Vanessa Park, The Humbled Pride, streaked through space, inertia-less, at constant acceleration. She looked toward the monitors lining the bulkheads and they displayed the dark, velvet void in which pinpricks of light hovered, dotting the vacuum in unrecognized constellations.

They were far from Earth now.

She looked to her father, that regal, elegant man. Sophistication and intelligence radiated from him and she smiled in quiet admiration. Though she might never tell him such, she was undeniably proud. Why shouldn’t she be? Her father was Earth’s first interstellar Ambassador! Here he was, on his way to meet that group of people who splintered off, who left and took their expertise with them. Earth had fumbled on that evening. A wave of change had come crashing, soaking three decades in contempt and conflict. But change had been affected. Stigma had been forcibly extinguished by expansive propaganda. The garbage men and women were now called Waste Management Personnel. It had taken two entire generations for the stigma to really fade, but it had. John Bishop had secured his name in the annals of history, and he had changed the world.

She smiled at her father. ‘He really did change the world, didn’t he?’

Ambassador Park, immersed by the works of Asimov, glanced up. ‘Hmm? Oh yes, yes, her certainly did.’ A look of quaint sadness flashed across his face and he sighed. ‘Sometimes it even feels like we’re to meet him.’

‘I know what you mean. It’s like time for them has stopped still while we’ve kept going.’

‘Yes. I wonder what change these past two hundred years have brought.’ He looked thoughtfully into his daughter’s eyes, as if those large inky ovals might contain the answers to his questions. ‘Won’t be long now anyway, so we’ll find out pretty soon.’

They were indeed close. It took just one more jump, the slim silver vessel plunging back into normal space from the thin, wispy realm of the hyper-streams, and there on the monitors sat a milky blue orb upon which were blotches and splashes of cloudy white.

Nouveau! The only other planet in this galaxy home to humans.

It looks just like Earth, Vanessa thought, realizing an instant later that it would probably have to. Without all that water, suitable conditions would never arise for human life.

Landing; father and daughter stepped off of The Humbled Pride in unison, looking with joy at each other as they did so, both invariably considering that they were on an ‘alien’ world.

Vanessa watched from behind her father as formal introductions were made. The three leaders of three continents took their turns to greet the Earth Ambassador with every sign that they too carried no ill will, that the attitudes of old had not trickled down the tributaries of time to poison the present.

Vanessa listened quietly as they walked to a reception hall across an elevated street; Hauler Street. It had been cleared of people and only a thin selection of press had been allowed to stand on the pavements to take their photographs. They maintained an awed silence while her father and the three Nouvian men talked of the city. Around them, buildings towered in curious curves, so reminiscent of a quarter moon.

‘Yes,’ one of the three was saying, ‘our architecture and art has very much been influenced by our ancestral heritage. As you have noticed, the architecture breaths with the elegance of a crescent moon – something we no longer have.’

‘You must have very advanced engineering knowledge to have erected buildings shaped so and yet still so tall they stroke the sky and puncture the clouds.’

‘Our society, Ambassador,’ began another of the three, ‘has been forced to walk a path of technological enlightenment. Our journey here was treacherous, and technological innovation was required aboard our very haulers’ – a pause and Ambassador Park nodded respectfully – ‘in order that we might have reached this planet.’

It was then, from the corner of her eye, Vanessa glimpsed down an alley and saw a metal man. ‘Look, dad!’ she cried, snapping the chain of polite remarks between the men with excited bravado. ‘It’s a robot!’ The metal man, who had heard her cry, turned to look at her, and upon his metal-weave, approximately-human face, a smile was stretched. ‘It’s smiling!’

‘Ah yes,’ said one of the three, ‘as I mentioned: technological enlightenment. What you are looking at is a state of the art artificial person. Artificial persons are actually highly sentient creatures. It is this sentience that we created which is probably the crown jewel of our technical achievement.’

‘Very impressive,’ remarked Ambassador Park, ‘indeed, very impressive. So they are self aware?’

‘Not only, Ambassador.’ The three men now were beaming with pride. ‘For all intents and purposes, they have as much free thought as humans. They were, after all, made in our image. Of course, we hard-lock their range of freedom.’

Alarm streaked across the Ambassador’s face, and Vanessa’s eyes came to rest, smoldering, on the three men. ‘You… limit their thought and actions, you mean?’ The Ambassador’s voice trembled slightly.

‘Yes.’

‘But they are sentient beings.’

‘Yes. We do so in order that they carry out their functions in our society.’

‘What functions are those?’ demanded Vanessa, discarding etiquette.

‘Why, young lady’ – didactic and Vanessa’s anger grew – ‘the menial tasks. Waste management, for example.’

The Ambassador stepped in front of her daughter. ‘You mean,’ he said, with strained politeness, ‘that humans don’t do that job?’

The three men visibly recoiled, horror stricken.

‘Humans work with waste?’ One said.

‘No human should ever do that!’ Said the second.

‘Definitely not… how dirty!’ Added the third.