Enemy Papers

by Barry B. Longyear

  The fourth hole Zammis and I tried drained out below the entrance to the cave in the face of the cliff. Not ideal, but better than answering the call of nature in the middle of a combination ice storm and blizzard. We rigged up the hole as a drain for both the tub and toilet. As Zammis and I prepared to enjoy our first hot bath, I removed my snakeskins, tested the water with my toe, then stepped in. “Great!” I turned to Zammis, the child still half dressed. “Come on in, Zammis. The water’s fine.” Zammis was staring at me, its mouth hanging open. “What’s the matter?”

  The child stared wide-eyed, then pointed at me with a three-fingered hand. “Uncle. What’s that?”

  I looked down. “Oh.” I shook my head, then looked up at the child. “Zammis, I explained all that, remember? I’m a human.”

  “But what’s it for?”

  I sat down in the warm water, removing the object of discussion from sight “It’s for the elimination of liquid wastes… among other things. Now, hop in and get washed.”

  Zammis shucked its snakeskins, looked down at its own smooth-surfaced, combined system, then climbed into the tube. The child settled into the water up to its neck, its yellow eyes studying me. “Uncle?”

  “Yes?”

  “What other things?”

  Well, I told Zammis. For the first time, the Drac appeared to be trying to decide whether my response was truthful or not, rather than its usual acceptance of my every assertion. In fact, I was convinced that Zammis thought I was lying—probably because I was.

  Winter began with a sprinkle of snowflakes carried on a gentle breeze. I took Zammis above the cave to the scrub forest. I held the child’s hand as we stood before the pile of rocks that served as Jerry’s grave. Zammis pulled its snakeskins against the wind, bowed its head, then turned and looked up into my face. “Uncle, this is the grave of my parent?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  Zammis turned back to the grave, then shook its head. “Uncle, how should I feel?”

  “I don’t understand, Zammis.”

  The child nodded at the gravel “I can see that you are sad being here. I think you want me to feel the same. Do you?”

  I frowned, then shook my head. “No. I don’t want you to be sad. I just wanted you to know where it is.”

  “May I go now?”

  “Sure. Are you certain you know the way back to the cave?”

  “Yes. I just want to make sure my soap doesn’t burn again.”

  I watched as the child turned and scurried off into the naked trees, then I turned back to the grave. “Well, Jerry, what do you think of your kid? Zammis was using wood ashes to clean the grease off the shells, then it put a shell back on the fire and put water in it to boil off the burnt-on food. Fat and ashes. The next thing, Jerry, we were making soap. The kid’s first batch almost took the hide off us, but the formula’s improving.”

  I looked up at the clouds, then brought my glance down to the sea. In the distance, low, dark clouds were building up. “See that? You know what that means, don’t you? Ice storm number one. By this time tomorrow there’ll be five centimeters of ice over everything.” The wind picked up and I squatted next to the grave to replace a rock that had rolled from the pile. “Zammis is a good kid, Jerry. I wanted to hate it. After you died, I wanted to hate it. Zammis is pretty hard to hate, though.”

  I replaced the rock, then looked back toward the sea. “I don’t know how we’re going to make it off planet, Jerry—”

  I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my vision. I turned to the right and looked over the tops of the trees. Against the grey sky, a black speck streaked away. I followed it with my eyes until it went above the clouds. I listened, hoping to hear an exhaust roar, but my heart was pounding so hard, all I could hear was the wind. Was it a ship? I stood, took a few steps in the direction the speck was going, then stopped. Turning my head, I saw that the rocks on Jerry’s grave were already capped with thin layers of fine snow. I shrugged and headed for the cave.

  “Probably just a bird.”

  Zammis sat on its mattress, stabbing several pieces of snakeskin with a bone needle. I stretched out on my own mattress and watched the smoke curl up toward the crack in the ceiling. Was it a bird? Or was it a ship? Damn, but it worked on me. Escape from the planet had been out of my thoughts, had been buried, hidden for all that summer. But again, it twisted at me. To walk where a sun shined, to wear cloth again, experience central heating, eat food prepared by a chef, to be among… people again.

  I rolled over on my right side and stared at the wall next to my mattress. People. Human people. I closed my eyes and swallowed. Girl human people. Female persons. Images drifted before my eyes—faces, bodies, laughing couples, the dance after flight training… what was her name? Dolora? Dora?

  There was that one fighter jock in the squadron. Carmia Jackman. Hard as nails, but beautiful. Worshipped her from afar, then there was a date. Dinner along the rec corridor, a walk in the hydroponic gardens, and a vid, then a strange goodnight. There was a kiss, then she held me at arm’s length, frowned at me, and then said that very strange thing. “I don’t know where you are, Will, but you’re not here.” Then she went into her quarters. I always thought there would be time for another try. Perhaps another time I would be there.

  I shook my head, rolled over and sat up, facing the fire. Why did I have to see whatever it was? All those things I had been able to bury—to forget—boiling over.

  “Uncle?”

  I looked up at Zammis. Yellow skin, yellow eyes, noseless toad face. I shook my head. “What?”

  “Is something wrong?”

  Is something wrong, hah. “No. I just thought I saw something today. It probably wasn’t anything.” I reached to the fire and took a piece of dried snake from the griddle. I blew on it, then gnawed on the heat-softened strip.

  “What did it look like?”

  “I don’t know. The way it moved, I thought it might be a ship. It went away so fast, I couldn’t be sure. Might have been a bird.”

  “Bird?”

  I studied Zammis. It’d never seen a bird; neither had I on Fyrine IV. “An animal that flies.”

  Zammis nodded. “Uncle, when we were gathering wood up in the scrub forest, I saw something fly.”

  “What? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I meant to, but I forgot”

  “Forgot!” I frowned. “In which direction was it going?”

  Zammis pointed to the back of the cave. “That way. Away from the sea.” Zammis put down its sewing. “Can we go see where it went?”

  That was the same direction in which my bird had been flying. I shook my head. “The winter is just beginning. You don’t know what it’s like. We’d die in only a few days.”

  Zammis went back to poking holes in the snakeskin. The winter would kill us. But spring would be something else. We could survive with double layered snakeskins stuffed with seed pod down, and a tent. We had to have a tent. Zammis and I could spend the winter making it, and packs. Boots. We’d need sturdy walking boots. Have to think on that.

  It’s strange how a spark of hope can ignite, and spread, until all desperation is consumed. Was it a ship? I didn’t know. If it was, was it taking off, or landing? I didn’t know. If it was taking off, we’d be heading in the wrong direction. But the opposite direction meant crossing the sea. Whatever. Come spring we would head beyond the scrub forest and see what was there.

  The winter seemed to pass quickly, with Zammis occupied with the tent and my time devoted to rediscovering the art of boot making. I made tracings of both of our feet on snakeskin, and, after some experimentation, I found that boiling the snake leather with plumfruit made it soft and gummy. By taking several of the gummy layers, weighting them, then setting them aside to dry, the result was a tough, flexible sole. By the time I finished Zammis’s boots, the Drac needed a new pair.

  “They’re too small, Uncle.”

  “Waddaya mean, too small?”

  Zammis p
ointed down. “They hurt. My toes are all crippled up.”

  I squatted down and felt the tops over the child’s toes. “I don’t understand. It’s only been twenty, twenty-five days since I made the tracings. You sure you didn’t move when I made them?”

  Zammis shook its head. “I didn’t move.”

  I frowned, then stood. “Stand up, Zammis.” The Drac stood and I moved next to it. The top of Zammis’s head came to the middle of my chest. Another sixty centimeters and it’d be as tall as Jerry. “Take them off, Zammis. I’ll make a bigger pair. Try not to grow so fast.”

  Zammis pitched the tent inside the cave, put glowing coals inside, then rubbed fat into the leather for waterproofing. It had grown taller, and I had held off making the Drac’s boots until I could be sure of the size it would need. I tried to do a projection by measuring Zammis’s feet every ten days, then extending the curve into spring. According to my figures, the kid would have feet resembling a pair of attack transports by the time the snow melted. By spring, Zammis would be full grown. Jerry’s old flight boots had fallen apart before Zammis had been born, but I had saved the pieces. I used the soles to make my tracings and hoped for the best.

  I was doing my nightly reading of The Talman, absorbing the wisdom of Maltak Oi, who wrote its message to me, and to a few others: “The Talman does not contain all truth, and never will it. For this generation, and for all the generations of all the futures, newer and better truths exist. We must keep The Talman open to these truths, or see The Way become another curious myth of the past. To all of those generations and futures, then: if you have such a truth, stand before The Talman Kovah, as did Uhe before the Mavedah, and speak it—”

  “Uncle?”

  “What?”

  “Existence is the first given?”

  I shrugged. “That’s what Shizumaat says; I’ll buy it.”

  “But, Uncle, how do we know that existence is real?”

  I lowered my work, looked at Zammis, shook my head, then resumed stitching the boots. “Take my word for it.”

  The Drac grimaced. “But, Uncle, that is not knowledge; that is faith.”

  I sighed, thinking back to my sophomore year at the University of Nations—a bunch of adolescents lounging around a cheap flat experimenting with booze, powders, and philosophy. At a little more than one Earth year old, Zammis was developing into an intellectual bore. “So, what’s wrong with faith?”

  Zammis snickered. “Come now, Uncle. Faith?”

  “It helps some of us along this drizzle-soaked coil.”

  “Coil?”

  I scratched my head. “This mortal coil; life. Shakespeare, I think.”

  Zammis frowned. “It is not in The Talman.”

  “He, not it. Shakespeare was a human.”

  Zammis stood, walked to the fire and sat across from me. “Was he a philosopher, like Mistan or Shizumaat?”

  “No. He wrote plays—like stories, acted out.”

  Zammis rubbed its chin. “Do you remember any of Shakespeare?”

  I held up a finger. ” To be, or not to be; that is the question.”

  The Drac’s mouth dropped open; then it nodded its head. “Yes. Yes! To be or not to be; that is the question!” Zammis held out its hands. “How do we know the wind blows outside the cave when we are not there to see it? Does the sea still boil if we are not there to feel it?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “But, Uncle, how do we know?”

  I squinted at the Drac. “Zammis, I have a question for you. Is the following statement true or false: What I am saying right now is false.”

  Zammis blinked. “If it is false, then the statement is true. But… if it’s true… the statement is false, but…” Zammis blinked again, then turned and went back to rubbing fat into the tent “I’ll think upon it, Uncle.”

  “You do that, Zammis.”

  The Drac thought upon it for about ten minutes, then turned back. “The statement is false.”

  I smiled. “But that’s what the statement said, hence it is true, but…” I let the puzzle trail off. Oh, smugness, thou temptest even saints.

  “No, Uncle. The statement is meaningless in its present context.” I shrugged. “You see, Uncle, the statement assumes the existence of truth values that can comment upon themselves devoid of any other reference. I think Lurrvena’s logic in The Talman is clear on this, and if meaninglessness is equated with falsehood…”

  I sighed. “Yeah, well—”

  “You see, Uncle, you must first establish a context in which your statement has meaning.”

  I leaned forward, frowned, and scratched my beard. “I see. You mean I was putting Descartes before the horse?”

  Zammis looked at me strangely, and even more so when I collapsed on my mattress cackling like a fool.

  Deep in winter, I saw a crack of sunlight come through the clouds. As I stood next to Jerry’s grave in the scrub forest, I watched the sunbeams touch the ocean and became overwhelmed at the beauty of it. Before I could take a few steps toward the cave to call Zammis out to see it, the sight had vanished in a snow squall, returning the world to whites and endless grays. I sat on the ice next to Jerry’s grave.

  “Maybe it’s a good thing Zammis didn’t see it, Jerry. It’d have us dragging all our firewood outside for signal fires.” I thought for a moment. “Maybe not. The kid doesn’t seem to hate the place like you and me. The way Zammis explores and collects rocks, maybe it’ll be a geologist. It collects plants and bugs, too. Did I tell you about that one bug Zammis dragged in at the end of last summer? It was dead, but it had an egg sac full of nasty little biters who were very much alive. We had to boil, crush, or shovel out damn near everything in the cave to get rid of the little bastards.”

  I laughed at the memory and imagined Jerry laughing, too. God, I wished that Jerry could see Zammis; that Zammis could meet and know its parent. Then words came into my head, Tochalla in the Koda Hiveda, The Talman. It was Tochalla who began the movement to reassemble the Talmani and to rebuild the Talman Kovah after its destruction half a millennium earlier. Tochalla faced a tougher problem than I had trying to tell Zammis about its parent. Tochalla was trying to tell the world about lessons and a discipline that had been crushed and forbidden five centuries before. In the intervening five hundred years, the surviving memories and fragments had taken on lives of their own, twisted by faulty memories and embellished by generations of imaginative, self-serving scoundrels. “We will take it all,” wrote Tochalla. “We will gather in everything, much as Rhada did with all the many versions of the Laws of Aakva, and we will examine, test, discuss, and challenge everything. If we are honest and mean only to serve truth, then what remains will be the truth of it.”

  The truth of it.

  All I had was a few memories and a lot of feelings. Perhaps, instead of hiding them, if I gave them freely to Zammis, some part of the truth of its parent and its line would come through.

  I glanced up and saw another sunbeam reach the sea as a crack opened in the cloud cover. I raced to the top of the path to call down to Zammis, but, far below me, I saw the kid standing at the edge of the cliff, looking over the sea at the light from above. Its arms were outstretched. The opening in the cloud cover closed, Zammis lowered its arms, and went into the cave.

  “Uncle, why does the line of Jeriba have only five names? You say that human lines have many names.”

  I put down my sewing and nodded. “The five names of the Jeriba line are things to which their bearers must add deeds. The deeds are important—not the names.”

  “Gothig is Shigan’s parent as Shigan is my parent.”

  “Of course. You know that from your recitations.”

  Zammis frowned. “Then I must name my child Ty when I become a parent?”

  “Yes. And Ty must name its child Haesni. Do you see something wrong with that?”

  “I would like to name my child Davidge, after you.”

  I smiled and shook my head. “The Ty name has been
served by great bankers, merchants, inventors, and—well, you know your recitation. The name Davidge hasn’t been served by much. Think of what Ty would miss by not being Ty.”

  Zammis thought a while, then nodded. “Uncle, do you think Gothig is alive?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “What is Gothig like?”

  I thought back to Jerry talking about its parent, Gothig. “It taught music, and is very strong. Jerry… Shigan said that its parent could bend metal bars with its fingers. Gothig is also very dignified. I imagine that right now Gothig is also very sad. Gothig must think that the line of Jeriba has ended.”

  Zammis frowned and its yellow brow furrowed. “Uncle, we must make it to Draco. We must tell Gothig the line continues.”

  “We will.”

  “How do you know we will?”

  “I made a promise to your parent, Zammis. I promised to teach you line and book and to stand with you before the Jeriba archives and see you into adulthood.”

  “How will you keep this promise, Uncle?”

  “I don’t know. The Talman tells me to do the best I can and leave the rest to the event stream of the universe.”

  “But how, Uncle?”

  I lowered my sewing to my lap and looked at Zammis. “In the spring we’re going to see where those birds were going. Maybe that’s how.” I shrugged and returned to my sewing. “Maybe not. How it turns out isn’t up to us.”

  “Faith again, Uncle?”

  “Reality, Zammis. Genuine, washable, colorfast, one hundred percent, guaranteed non-shrinkable reality, and that’s a fact.”

  Spring. The winter’s ice began thinning, and boots, tent, and packs were ready. We were putting the finishing touches on our new insulated suits. As Jerry had given The Talman to me to learn, the golden cube now hung around Zammis’s neck. The Drac would drop the tiny golden book from the cube and study it for hours at a time.

  “Uncle?”

  “What?”

  “Why do Dracs speak and write in one language and the humans in another?”

  I laughed. “Zammis, the humans speak and write in many languages. English is just one of them.”