“About you owning the valley?”
“Yeah. I think the best way to explain it is to start with my hut. We both feel that when I mixed the water and the grass and the dirt and sticks together to make a little adobe shelter, that I made something that is, in some sense, mine, right?”
“We have similar feelings, yes.”
“OK, well, let’s look at it this way. You Onalbi, at least as far as I can tell, are pretty solitary creatures. So far, I’ve never seen more than three of you together at a time, and that only happened once. The rest of the time, you guys seem to stay by yourselves, right?”
“Yes.”
“Humans, on the other hand, tend to stay together. We evolved to hunt in packs against bigger, stronger animals. You have those claws and you’re pretty much able to take care of yourselves, but humans have little in the way of natural weapons, so we needed to outnumber our enemies.”
“You have pack hunters called hyenas, do you not? Are humans like them?”
My gut reaction was to deny it, but from his point of view, the similarities would outweigh the differences. “Uh, well, sorta. Let’s say wolves instead. A comparison with a hyena is considered insulting—comparison with a wolf is less so.”
“But do not hyenas laugh? Are they not—”
All I could do was laugh out loud, knowing full well that it would only reinforce Hresah’s assumption… and that irony made it all the richer, so I laughed even harder. “Hresah, you’re wonderful. I like the way your mind works. Under better circumstances, I would have liked to offer you my friendship.”
“I do not understand.”
“It’s quite all right. Perhaps we will take the time someday to explore the differences and similarities between humans and hyenas, but it will probably be a long conversation.”
“We will have that conversation. I will remind you. Let us return to humans hunting in groups.”
“The critical thing here is that humans settled down. We used to be nomadic hunters. Then we started living in one place—”
“Ah! Ah! I see! When a group of humans lives in one place, then they all need mud to build huts. Mud becomes scarce. Once mud becomes scarce, then humans must leave to find more. But that goes against the human tendency to want to settle and live near other humans, so a tension is set up to be near other humans, and yet to find enough mud to build huts. This tension will express itself how… as hostility? Yes?”
Like I said, give an Onalbi two facts to work with and he’s as good as a mind reader. “That’s one possibility. They may take mud from one another by force. Another possibility is trade. Someone who lives on the edge of the valley where mud is still plentiful can trade mud for food.”
“Marvelous! Ecstatic! I see it! It explains so many things. You are in competition for resources. Not only for mud huts, but for the mud from which to build them. By your very numbers, you make commodities scarce. The valley is yours because it is where you get your mud.”
I nodded. “Now, you’re on the right track. Follow that train of thought and you’ll derive law and nations and war and the whole concept of advertising.”
“I’m sorry, the computer doesn’t know that word.”
“Well, suppose you have mud and someone else does not. Advertising lets him know you have mud and want to sell it to him.”
“I am fascinated. You and I have done more to further understanding than all other Onalbi-human contacts. This makes it all so clear. The same for food then, yes? Eat too much food in one area and it becomes scarce.”
“Right. You Onalbi are nomadic. When you wander about, the food you eat, whether it’s a besa or whatever, is only a small part of what is in that area. Then you move on. We build a town and it’s not long before the food nearby gets exhausted.”
“And this drove you to agriculture. So clear. Your greatest weakness is also a strength. Amazing. Then agriculture made you learn biology and forced your technological growth. Oh, this is marvelous. Tell me, you must advertise food, right?”
“Relentlessly.”
“You are both strong and weak at the same time.”
“And so when I saw Grenabeloso and the besa, I was acting like a pack hunter defending one of my own kind against a predator.”
“Because the besa might have mud and return the favor in the future by giving you mud when you needed it.”
“Right. But you could also say that I simply acted on a prejudice that anything that stood on two legs must be similar to me.”
“You did not look far enough ahead.”
“Right.”
“And yet you can learn to look ahead. I have seen this.”
“I am trying to learn to look further ahead, yes.”
“Do others look ahead? Your contact group cannot be what they claim to be. Of all humans, they are the ones with the shortest sight, when they should be the ones who see furthest ahead. They do not look beyond the now. We keep waiting for the ones with the vision of the future, and yet they do not come.”
“But, Hresah, they are the contact group.”
“How can this be? They need the furthest vision, but have no idea of even tomorrow’s consequences! Consequences longer down the road—they are blind to them. They are… I cannot say that, it is a bad thing to say even of one of my own kind, much less of a human.”
Knowing full well that what Hresah and I said would make its way to the contact team, I decided to throw caution to the wind. I had empathy for the frustration that the Onalbi must feel when w’ords were malleable depending on the needs of the moment and the shifting objectives behind the opaque eyes. “Hresah… I am going to say a bad thing, myself. After this, I will probably be in trouble with my own people. The contact team is made up of politicians. Does the computer know that word?”
“Elected officials who decide policy. Is that correct?”
“As far as it goes, yes, although not all politicians are elected. But here you must read between the lines. You are aware that humans have jobs. A job is a function that a human specializes in so that someone else may specialize in another task and they both become more efficient at their jobs.”
“We have jobs. We have specialized functions. I understand.”
“We get paid for our jobs. This allows us to—”
“Ah! Money! Wonderful concept. So fluid. So versatile. Our system is more like what you call barter. We are very interested in your money idea.”
“And you realize politicians get paid.”
“Competition for money. Yes. Splendid process. This means that your humans who have the job of politician should each strive to do the best job that they can, so that they will earn the most money, yes?”
“Well, it should work that way, but it doesn’t. Instead, partly because there isn’t a good way to objectively rate the job that a politician does, we get people who are not good at governing. In other words, they are not good at politics.”
“But a rating system should not be the problem. You pay musicians to produce music. How well they play is subjective, yes? Yet you are able to decide who you like. On objective things, simply wait, then evaluate how their decisions worked out.”
“Hmmm, this may be more difficult than I thought. Let’s throw in the concept of advertising. Politicians advertise that they do a good job.”
“So? This should not be a problem. It would allow you to find the politician who does the best job. Then you choose him, then he makes more money. Yes?”
Slowly, sadly, I shook my head. “Add one more thing. Humans do not always tell the truth. Since it’s difficult to tell whether a politician actually does a good job, they can lie to you in their advertising. The better their advertising sounds, the more they get elected. Basically, they get elected, not on how well they govern, but on how well they lie.”