He asked her to explain religious intolerance.
“You will not understand it because in your world you only have one religion.”
“What is religion?”
“As I said, in your world everyone believes in the great creator. In the world of mans, people believe many different things.”
“How can they believe many different things?”
“It is hard to explain.”
Then he asked her to explain racism, which translated poorly into his language as hatred of the difference in the hue of the fruit on a single branch.
She struggled for the words to explain. “Well, as you can see,” she said, “my husband Rufus has dark skin and my skin is pale.”
“Frecked,” he corrected.
“Well, okay, but see, Rufus and I are considered to be from different races, uhm, er, from different family trees, understand? And this causes a problem for some people down there.”
He snorted. “You are pulling my leg, right? I’m no pinhead. You come from the same racing fruit tree, or whatever you call it. You are both mans. A little female man and a little man man.”
They both laughed at that but for different reasons; he at the truth in it, and she for the irony of it.
Then since she had mentioned that in her new world she was wealthy and he had always dreamt of being wealthy, he asked, “So how do you earn your money in your world? What do you do for a living, little wealthy man?”
She said, “Nothing. Rufus comes and steals silver from your world every few years.”
“Aha, silver is money in your world too.” For some reason this pleased him. Perhaps because at last here was a thing he understood. Their worlds had something in common — the love of silver.
“I arrived in that new world with wealth. Silver is worth money there, but so is a substance called gold. Gold, in your world, is used to make rope and thread. It is found in most cloth. The hair cloths I went there with were worth a fortune. My loin pouch also. The tunic of war that I wore was lined with it. And the small singing harp I was given by one of the evil soldiers I told you about who owned me before I left — it too was made of pure gold. Your mother’s singing harp would be worth a fortune in my world. In my world you and your family would be wealthy because of that small singing harp alone, which in your world is regarded as the least significant of instruments.”
They talked about many other things, but eventually she asked him, “What has happened to this world? It used to be so vibrant, so green. It looks like a desert everywhere we’ve been. Was it the war? Who won the war?”
He said, “Which war? It has been ten years of wars. There have been four wars in ten years. I fought in one of these.”
Shaking his head sadly, he pulled up his pant leg to show her the scar, as winding and ugly as the one on her arm.
“Nobody ever wins a war. A new one is starting right now, but it is of no concern to us. A war changes nothing for the poor, except that if you are the right age you fight in it and die. And my friend Auutet, my best friend in the whole wide world and your first master, though he was wealthy, he was also noble and earnest and good; and he did fight on the side of the poor in the war and was killed in battle. My heart still aches for him.”
Auutet. Auutet. Her heart did ache as well, but in silence as the boy of her childhood spoke.
“This desert, as you call it, is because we are going through a worldwide famine. This happens in a cycle every few thousand years — oafenkind has been on earth for 10,000 years. It is nothing to worry about. Things will get better. We will survive.”
“Oh.”
He lowered his voice. “That is what the wealthy say… but our sacred speaker says there are people, scientists, who believe that it signals the end of days.”
“What do you mean?”
“They say we have angered the great creator and he has turned his back on us and left us to perish in a world that we have destroyed. We have poisoned the air with our mining and the waters with our waste, we have scorched the face of the earth with our overharvesting and our wars. We have caused the cold places to become warm. Many animals have died and will never return. The free-range mans are almost all gone. There are almost no more mans in the wild. We have hunted them into near extinction. The only mans alive now are mans that we raise for pets and circuses.”
She frowned. “Pets and circuses.”
“I do not mean to hurt your feelings.”
“I know. You are a good oaf.”
“I remember you told me that your mother said this world was going to die. But I do not think I believe it. The great creator would not give the oaf the power to destroy the world. The oaf is but a part of the world. The oaf is a creature of nature too. If the oaf overhunts an animal and it dies out, then that is a natural death because the oaf is a natural creature too.”
“True, but the great creator gave the oaf understanding,” she argued, “which makes him greater than other natural creatures. The oaf, unlike other creatures, understands that he is destroying the world for a selfish and temporary purpose, and he is able to correct his actions and halt the destruction. If he does not do that, then maybe he is indeed but a dim-witted pinhead and does not deserve to be called the greatest of the great creator’s creations, right?”
She saw from his expression that he lacked understanding. There was a chasm between them that she could not bridge. But he was soooooo big. She had forgotten how big he was. How big and how handsome.
They looked at each other, and there was something that he wanted to tell her and there was something that she wanted to tell him.
It was she who spoke first.
He knelt close and she whispered into his face: “I have learned of a thing that I did not know before. The way I learned it was painful… but now I understand some things about us, you and me. We are not different beings, your people and mine. We come from the same family tree. We are the same people, just different sizes. Man is but a smaller version of the oaf. And there is no such thing as talking mans and mans that cannot talk. Mans that cannot talk are simply mans who speak a different language.”
She saw the look on his face and she knew he was about to ask a question, and she raised a hand for him to be silent.
“You do not know of languages because your people only have one language. So you do not even have a name for the language you speak. You do not even have a word for the word language.” She paused to look at his eyes. Did he have understanding? Was it even worth it to keep trying to explain? “In my world,” she went on, “your language would be called Frisian, which is not too different from the language I speak with my husband and my family, which is called English. My husband, who is learned among the mans of our world, speaks English, Frisian, French, Dutch, and German. These are languages. In my world, mans have many languages…”
She wanted to tell him that in many ways the humans of her world, and even the mans of his world, were more advanced than the oafs, who lived mostly clumped in large, overpopulated groups instead of spreading out and expanding their civilizations into the wildernesses and other continents of their world. The oafs, who possessed an almost religious fear of the unknown, had a belief that wildernesses were for hunters, adventurers, and scientists, but not for building cities in. Most oafs believed that wildernesses, along with forests, deserts, and mountains, were for plundering and bringing stuff back from, but not for living in. As a result of having lived so close together for such a long time, the oafs had never had their language or their blood stretched out and then comingled. They all looked alike and sounded alike, even when they were mortal enemies facing off in their many and devastating wars.