The Enemy Papers

by Barry B. Longyear

  What then erupted was a "Si!" followed by a highly relieved verbal machine gun that ran on at top speed for about a minute. When he finished, I smiled lamely and said, "That's tough, because I don't." Then I got the hell out of there.

  My most recent attempt at learning a language involves a dream of mine. When I was in the Army I was stationed in Okinawa, and did not take the opportunity to learn the language. I did learn this demented patois that evolved between semi-literate soldiers and the resentful inhabitants of an occupied country. It is not, however, the kind of language to use among Japanese with whom you want to become friends. Besides, way too many persons on this planet hold black belts in karate.

  My dream, especially after getting into science fiction and getting to meet a few men and women in Japanese fandom, is to go to Japan, tour the country, do a science-fiction convention or two, and be able to converse adequately in Japanese. For health reasons, I find myself walking on a treadmill half an hour every day. That is a brain-dead half-hour, so I purchased a Walkman and some Japanese language tapes. I must confess that I am learning something of the language, but, because of the learning environment, it appears that I am developing a rather strange accent.

  "Konnichiwa *puff puff!* Watakushi wa *gasp!* Barry Longyear desu. *wheeze!*"

  RUN DRAC RUN

  It was February, 1978, deep in a Maine winter so harsh bears were taking time-outs from hibernation to move into the motels. This was before I discovered either cross-country or downhill skiing, hence I was deep in cabin fever and in one criminal mood.

  I was trying to think up something I wanted to write when I turned away from my word processor and looked at the snow falling outside my home office window. There was already a great deal of snow on the ground, and it looked like lots more was on its way. The temperature was in single digits and a wind was picking up.

  I can get hypnotically captured by falling snow, fog, and starry nights. I was mentally lost in watching the snow when I started thinking about building a little shelter out in the woods to see if I could survive in the snowstorm. When I was young I used to sneak out of my parents' house late at night and go deep into the woods and build little lean-tos, and even more elaborate shelters. I'd build a warm little fire and spend the night safe from the insanity back at the house.

  Still looking at the snow, I wondered what would happen if I were thrown naked out into the snow with only a knife. Would I be able to survive? Shelter, clothing, warmth, food. I figured I wouldn't be able to last for ten minutes. But what if I started earlier in the season, before the snows, and built a shelter that would protect me? I'd have to have food to last the winter, and wood for a fire, warm coverings, a bed, and there was the whole toilet-paper problem.

  I seemed to be exploring the outlines of some sort of survival story, but I began picking at my reasons—what the attraction was to hiding out in the woods. What if I had such a place? No telephones, no computers, no radio, CDs or TV. What would I be doing?

  Waiting.

  Waiting for what?

  The answer brought me back to my earliest memories. What would I be waiting for? I would be waiting for the same thing that I had been waiting for as a child in my clandestine lean-tos in the woods. I'd be waiting for someone who had some answers to come talk with me and fill my head with solutions to the mountain of problems that seemed to follow me wherever I went.

  I scribbled out a few notes, tossed them into my story dump, and got on with other things. Later in the year, as Maine sizzled beneath a July sun, the title "Enemy Mine" popped into my head. Thinking about the survival notes I had written the previous January, and with the ghosts of my nights as a child sitting in lean-tos observing, I began writing. In a matter of hours I had before me an alien whose heritage and upbringing are such that it knows who it is, what it is, and what it has to do. This alien, Jeriba Shigan, is also very happy being Jeriba Shigan. It has no internal conflicts. I desperately wanted to know how to do that.

  The alien, by example, teaches the human how to love and how to allow himself to be loved. By example, the alien teaches the human how to be a human, something neither the character in the story nor I knew how to do very well. The pages seemed to fly from my typewriter, and my wife Jean was reading them page-by-page as they were finished. At the point where Jeriba Shigan dies, I cried. I had literally lost my best friend in the universe, and now it was time for the human to test all that he had learned by overcoming his grief and keeping his promise to bring the Drac child before the line's archives. I was on the next page when Jean came into my office, wound up, and punched me in the arm.

  "Ow!"

  "That's for killing Jeriba Shigan!" she snarled as she grabbed the next page and stormed out of my office.

  I reached the point in the story where Davidge buries Jerry's body with the rocks he has beaten loose from the ice, when I realized that I was in the middle of the story, not at the end. I had told George Scithers, then editor of Isaac Asimov's Science-Fiction Magazine, that I had a five-thousand-word short story in the works. I was already at ten or eleven thousand words, and there was no end or ending in sight. I whipped up another ten pages for an ending and sent it off to George, asking what I should do. A curious thing: after I mailed it off, Jean told me that she didn't think it would be accepted. She said that it was too good.

  A few days later. George telephoned me about "Enemy Mine." As I recall it, he said there were some problems with the piece and he was sending it to Isaac Asimov for an opinion. I Immediately dropped everything that I was doing and went into one monumental panic. I whacked out everything that I could, finished the story, and then read over "Enemy Mine" and went over it again and again and again. Eventually, I sent it off with the following cover letter to George Scithers.

  24 July 1978

  Dear George,

  I've gone over "Enemy Mine" so many times I'm beginning to get word-happy. My main conclusion is that I'm too close to the story and just don't know what's best for it.

  My original idea for the piece called for one scene following the birth of Zammis. It would have taken place on Draco, with Davidge standing with Zammis for the recitation in front of the Jeriba archives. Following that, Davidge and Zammis go back to Fyrine IV to found the colony. However, when I got to that point, I was out of control and the story was writing itself. Right now it still seems better this way.

  A possible alternative would be to lengthen the piece from the birth of Zammis, which could be done by developing the existing conflicts. One thing this would allow is making a bigger deal out of Zammis's recitation, with more detail on Drac society, Gothig, etc. Still, right now it seems better the way it is.

  None of this casts anything in plastisteel, and I shall join you in waiting upon the good doctor's suggestions.

  I got on with something, I can't remember what, and then a couple of weeks later George sent me a copy of the letter he had gotten from Isaac Asimov regarding my story.

  13 August 1978

  Dear George,

  As I just told you on the phone, I read ENEMY MINE and was very moved. If I weren't so old and such a fixture in the s.f. field, I would be so jealous of Longyear. As it is, I love him.

  My feeling is he tried to squeeze two stories into one.

  I wish he would end ENEMY MINE in the middle of page 51—knitting the wording to make it a more proper ending.

  Then I wish he would make the last fourteen pages about three times as long, adding the conflict he mentioned in his covering letter to produce SON MINE as a sequel that can stand on its own.

  Isaac

  Present the story in two installments, basically, as two separate stories. "Son Mine" was not an option because Dracs have this little biological quirk: they're hermaphrodites. They don't have sons or daughters. Nevertheless, I wrote the rest of the piece, and the lost feeling experienced by many Vietnam vets formed the emotional core of the second half as Davidge found himself on Earth and belonging nowhere. The quadrant was at peace
, but Davidge was still at war with himself. I sent it off and got on with the next story.

  A few days later George telephoned me to tell me that Asimov's was going to do 'Enemy Mine" as a single novella rather than two novelettes. When he had gotten the second installment, beginning with the burial of Jeriba Shigan, George had given it to one of his readers and asked him to read the beginning and tell him what he thought was going on. The answer was humbling: "Well, the protagonist has just killed this alien and is feeling pretty bad about it." After that he decided to run it as one piece. I made the repairs and "Enemy Mine" appeared in the September 1979 issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.

  The mail I got on "Enemy Mine" stunned me. The story struck a chord out there that vibrated on levels from motherhood and alienation to racism and anti-war. One reader wrote in to say that she was reading it on the bus going to work and she was crying so much, it was all she could do to fight off the help from numbers of her well-intentioned fellow passengers so she could finish the damned story.

  Afterward, a fellow out there on the West Coast, Steve Perry, was the first to recommend "Enemy" for a Nebula Award. He no doubt thought this was amusing since, in a moment of sheer bratism some weeks earlier, I had written a letter to the SFWA Forum denouncing the award.

  Just before the Nebula Awards banquet in Los Angeles that year, I got a telephone call. Since it's a long way to L.A. from Maine and money was short, Jean and I didn't go. George Scithers was going, so I asked him to pick up the award in the unlikely event "Enemy" should win.

  A day or two before the Nebula Awards, there was a telephone call from someone in SFWA asking me if I was going to be in L.A. for the awards. I said no. I couldn't afford it.

  "Are you sure I can't talk you into coming?"

  "Yeah. I'm sure. I'm broke."

  "Are you really, really sure I can't talk you into coming?"

  "Why?" I asked. I mean, it wasn't like I was the science-fiction community sweetheart or anything.

  "Well. I can't really tell you. But you really ought to come."

  "Did 'Enemy Mine' win?" I asked.

  "Uh, well, uh, yeah."

  It's not like a Nebula comes with a cash award, so we still couldn't go, but we did call up Steve Perry and tell him, since he was the one who started it. He never did say much of anything, He just kept laughing and laughing.

  Right after the Nebulas there was Noreascon Two, and the Hugo Awards. "Enemy Mine" and another story of mine were both up for awards, and I was up for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer, as well. If I won them both, I would be the only writer to have won a Nebula, a Hugo, and the John W. Campbell new-writer award all in the same year.

  I won the Hugo and the Campbell. If you go to worldcons these days, they prohibit using flash cameras during ceremonies. The reason for this has to do with insurance fears concerning blinding those on stage who are attempting to negotiate the stairs. There was no such prohibition when I received my awards. As I faced the audience both times, I had my retinas burned out by thousands of flash bulbs going off. I had never before seen anything so magnificently beautiful in my life. It was a terrific night. Hell, even my picks for best editor and best dramatic presentation won.

  There were two more very special moments waiting for me. The first was late that night in George's suite at the hotel. There were a number of fans in there, and I was sitting cross-legged on top of a table. George had won the Hugo for best editor, and Isaac was looking at us both saying, "What a night this is."

  The next morning came my second moment. I was entering the hotel restaurant for breakfast, and with me was Jean and my mathematician sister Judith, whom I had always wanted to impress. As we entered, everyone in the restaurant stopped what they were doing and applauded. It just goes to show what building a little lean-to in the woods can do.

  A few weeks after the convention, I signed a contract with Berkley for a book-length sequel to "Enemy" to be titled The Tomorrow Testament. The foundation for The Tomorrow Testament, and the key for the resolution of the story, is the Drac bible, The Talman. It was necessary to invent the philosophy, the alien history, and to outline The Talman, as well as write portions of it. Writing that and working out the language only got me started on this particular mountain.

  At a writer's workshop I conducted some months before, a woman with a political ax to grind demanded to know, "Why don't you use more female protagonists in your stories?" So, when it came time to begin on The Tomorrow Testament, I asked myself if it made any difference if the lead character was male or female. In a supreme fit of either ignorance or arrogance. I said "no."

  I had a character with a name: Joanne Nicole. In a spasm of enthusiasm I cranked out ten thousand words, then took them to bed and gave them a read. In a matter of minutes I began crawling beneath my covers. Naw, a female protagonist wouldn't make any difference. Not much. What I had captured magnificently was ten thousand words of myself stumbling around on the pages in drag.

  The sensible thing would have been to dump Joanne Nicole on the spot and start over again with a male character. That probably would have been the professional thing to do. Despite her ill-defined character and proportions, however, Joanne Nicole was very much alive. Story characters of mine, once animated, refuse to die except under their own terms. Raising stubbornness to the nth power, therefore, I stuck with Joanne Nicole by writing yet another book. I began with her birth on another planet, grew up with her as a child, experienced her school years, her hopes and dreams, her courtship and marriage, the birth of her daughter, the death of her husband, her entrance as an intelligence officer in the USE Force, until the Battle of Catvishnu when she enters the story. Then started The Tomorrow Testament again, from the beginning, this time with my character as Joanne Nicole, rather than as a "female protagonist."

  There was an additional complication. She is the point-of-view character throughout the entire book, and soon after the beginning of the story, she is blinded. Writing from the POV of a sightless person presented some incredible challenges. I spent months stalking my house at night with my eyes shut, gouging pieces of meat out of my shins, burning myself trying to make coffee, and falling down stairs. I kept that up until I could read the interior of my house by touch, by sound, and by smell.

  While I was in the process of writing that, at the Worldcon in Denver that year, the story editor from Kings Road Productions said that his bunch would like to make a movie out of "Enemy Mine." He said that one thing that appealed to him was that "Enemy" was a story of character and could be done without a great deal of budget-breaking special effects. When I told Jean that a producer wanted to make a movie out of "Enemy Mine," she didn't believe me.

  After getting and signing the contract, she began believing. It was not long afterward, however, when I stopped believing. I was not happy about how the movie turned out, although the performances by Dennis Quaid and Lou Gossett, Jr. were incredible. There are moments watching the film, when I would see the characters I invented saying the words that I wrote, that gave me a hint about what the movie might have been; but there is neither profit nor serenity in dwelling on might-have-beens. Nevertheless, there are an astonishing number of fans who have told me that Enemy Mine is either their favorite or near-favorite motion picture. Perhaps the problem I have with the film is mine, not the movie's.

  As an aside, at a science-fiction convention I was attending, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a Russian guest who was currently teaching at the University of Chicago who told me that Enemy Mine was his favorite movie. He then related the expensive, harrowing, and dangerous experience he had undergone obtaining a copy and smuggling it into Russia—where it was released a few weeks later.

  It was at a Windycon, the annual convention put on by the Chicago science-fiction bunch, where I got the idea for what eventually became the third work in the Enemy series, The Last Enemy.

  A friend of mind had written a book and I had been sent a copy fo
r blurb purposes. I finished it while I was at Windycon. What interested me the most about the story was a sort of thesis statement at the end that was conveyed by two of the characters conversing. It is this: the tribe comes first. Before rationality, before honor, before good sense, before self-interest, before mercy, love, or justice, the tribe comes first. That's what you have to do, to be, in order to remain a member of the tribe.

  I thought then that he had put his finger on the whole Middle East/ Northern Ireland/Bosnia/Rwanda mess. It's the whole world of us-and-them thinking that has kept this planet blood-soaked for endless thousands of years.

  There was a military sf panel I was on at Windycon, and we thoroughly discussed the premise and my friend's new book. At the panel I made a point of remembering to suggest to my friend that he take this premise, stick it at the beginning of another book, and use it as a take-off point to solve the Middle East problem and the dilemma of self-perpetuating war and terrorism.

  I met my friend at another convention, and he was interested not at all in my suggestion. As far as he was concerned, anyone who stood up in Israel and tried to make peace between Jews and Arabs would be killed within a minute after doing so. With all of the tools and magic of science fiction and fantasy at his command, he regarded peace as a lost cause before it began. I was stunned. It became clear to me for the first time that there are those who have no use for peace. Some find their meaning in having a perpetual enemy. Others want nothing to do with a peace that includes anyone being left alive on the other side. Us-and-them. The tribe comes first, and nothing comes in second. There is us, and then there is death.