Enemy Papers

by Barry B. Longyear

  The truce holds. Black October comes to the table to talk. Tean Sindie comes the next day. By the end of the dry season, the last of the splinter groups, The Rose, sits at the table. They talk, and swear, and bellow, and curse, and threaten, and they reach no agreements, but the truce holds.

  In twenty days another faction forms among discontented humans, but a galaxy of twenty-nines appears on land, forest, streets, and buildings before they can perform their first atrocity. They are frightened off. Eight days later, a lone Drac suicide bomber lets its pain drive it north of Douglasville where The Peace stops it dead. The executioner found it unnecessary to leave a twenty-nine. Those who live on the street marked it with the numbers.

  More come forward to join The Peace, the Mavedah donates two additional ships to the Navi Di, and the Front retaliates by setting up Navi Di offices and observers in all their units. Four months after Davidge earned his blade, Green Fire officially disbands.

  Cudak, Kita, and I are the authorization team, and I hardly look at her. Of all of those I blame for Will Davidge’s death, second only to myself, I blame Kita. It makes no sense, but in my entire life, where had sense ever been a part? I do not accept his death, although the entire planet of Amadeen seems to have accepted it, taking it on as an icon.

  There are things I wanted to do.

  There are things I wanted Davidge to be there to see.

  That foolish child inside me, the one who cries “unfair!” is still there.

  From the shadows I watch the mists and find so much of my purpose for peace gone; so much of my purpose for life gone. As I watch the night avians race through the haze below, I feel a hand on my arm. Without looking I know it is Kita. “What is it?”

  “There is someplace we have to go.”

  I look at her and notice for the first time how puffy her face seems. “Where?”

  “Gitoh.”

  “Why?”

  “The Mavedah has opened it up.”

  I look back at the fog. “What is in Gitoh?”

  “Something Will wanted you to see. It was his last wish.”

  The thin scab across the wound of my grief is scraped clear with a few words. Numbly I follow her across the clearing and into the Aeolus.

  In less than an hour the ship puts down in Gitoh. At first the inhabitants look upon us with suspicion, until they see the twenty-nines marked on our armbands. There are waves, a cheer. There is a Drac who meets us and it leads the way between the bombed-out buildings of the city. The streets are cleared of rubble and the bomb craters filled in. There is a small business repairing appliances in a burned-out building. Another business sells seeds and food plants. A third business sells old clothes. At the end of one street is a pile of rubble that once must have been a huge building. When we reach it, there are twenty or so local Dracs there, all wearing their shabby best. Part of the bottom of the building has been painfully excavated and there is a concrete stairway going down. There is no electricity and the stairs are illuminated with candles. I look at Kita. “What is this place?”

  She nods. “These are the archives of about sixty lines here in Gitoh. It has been over twelve years since they’ve been used. The Yazi archives are here.”

  We enter one of the sub-basements. The candles fill the huge room with a warm yellow light. The room is filled with Dracs and a few humans. Some I recognize, most I do not. There is an open armored shelf containing ornate books of various thicknesses. A blue-robed Jetah takes a very thin book from this shelf and places it on a podium.

  I stop dead and face Kita. “I cannot do this! I am not prepared.” I lower my gaze to the floor mosaic and speak to her in a whisper. “He is not here. I wanted him to be here for me the way he was there for so many others.”

  Kita looks up at me and smiles. “He is here, Ro.”

  I shake my head. “No, the only ghosts I believe in are evil.”

  “Ro, he is here,” she insists. I look at her and she is holding her palms pressed flat against her middle.

  I am so stupid. She is carrying Will’s child. I take her in my arms and hold her. Her arms steal about my waist and we stand there until all pain turns to love. At last she looks up at me. “I have a letter from Will. He wrote it the night before he died. It’s for you.”

  “What―what does it say?”

  “I haven’t read it.”

  I release her and she reaches into a pocket and hands me an envelope. I break the seal, take out the sheet, and open it.

  Dear Ro ,

  On this day you begin the rites to become an adult. Know that I am very proud of you and that I believe you will continue to grow and improve upon the especially valuable being you already are. I once told you that I wish I could have been there to watch you grow. From when I first met you on Friendship through all of our time together, until here on Amadeen, I have watched you grow and celebrated your accomplishments. I have gotten my wish.

  My love is with you always,

  Uncle Willy.

  As I look at that Uncle Willy signature, I can almost see him with that mischievous smile on his face. I look at Kita, hand her the letter, and face the Gitoh Archivist.

  It reveals itself to me, as The Talman said the steps of the universe’s plan of my life would. In time there will be a relaxation of the quarantine and I will travel to Sindie on Draco to tell Matope, the veteran in the wheelchair, that we have remembered and the war is done. From there I will go to Timan to honor my promise to Lahvay ni ‘do Timan, Dakiz of the Ri Mou Tavii, to teach his students the problem and the peace of Amadeen. Afterward, I will go to Friendship, find a cave, and help Kita and the Jeriba line teach her child how to gather the wood, smoke the snake, and withstand the winter. From there I will see where talma leads.

  Before you here I stand, Ro of the line of Yazi,

  Born of Avo, the teacher of English,

  Student of Willis Davidge, the giver of peace…

  ESSAYS

  ON ALIEN LANGUAGES

  (Or, Some of the Dangers of Starting Too Soon)

  Okay, it’s 1978, well into the first year of my writing career, I have a few Momus and Circus World stories under my belt, and I am currently possessed by the writing of a story called “Enemy Mine,” the telling of which has become something of a need. My $20.00 rebuilt IBM Selectric is humming, the paper is in place, and the title is on the paper. My fingers hit the keys and the human in my story flexes his fingers and thinks murder, while the alien does the same. The alien opens its mouth and says…

  Well, what in the hell does it say?

  “Irkmaan!”

  You know, “Earthman” with a bad accent.

  Do these as-yet unnamed and almost undescribed aliens pronounce “th” as “k”? Do they pronounce “man” with a broad double “a” because of their strong Jamaican roots?

  Issues for another time. The story wants to be told and there will be no rest until it is done. In those stirring days of yesteryear, I wrote short stories by starting and not stopping until the thing was finished. Try that with a twenty-thousand-word novella sometime.

  The human eggs the alien on with a few, “C’mon, put up your dukes!” phrases, and the alien retorts, “Irkmaan vaa, koruum su!”

  My human character wasn’t going to take that kind of crap without comment. He responds with a phrase taught to him in military training: “Kiz da yuomeen, Shizumaat!”, which means Shizumaat, the father—er—parent of Drac philosophy, eats kiz. And what is a kiz?

  The kiz turns out to be a repulsive little critter whose name is also the name of its droppings. Did this have something to do with taking care of a friend’s cat for two weeks? The truth of this is lost to the ages.

  In any event, that one sentence, “Kiz da yuomeen, Shizumaat!” saw the birth of both the philosopher Shizumaat and the beginning of the fauna on the alien planet. The first led to the necessity of coming up with a philosophy for the philosopher to philosophize about, and the second had children from three or four continents callin
g their teachers “kiz,” leaving said teachers knowing they had been called something nasty, but not knowing exactly what.

  And what did the Drac say in response? “Irkmaan, yaa stupid Mickey Mouse is!”

  Was this the result of a misspent youth watching old WWII war movies on the Late Late Show? Jarheads and sons of Nippon hurling insults through an endless series of hostile Hollywood nights? Could be.

  A huge wave wipes out my human, and when he regains consciousness, he is tied up and the alien is hovering over him saying, “Kiz da yuomeen, Irkmaan, ne?”

  In other words, “Who eats it now, pal?”

  Soon we find out that “ess” means “what,” “lode” means “head,” and “ne” means “no.” Then the Drac asks the human, “Kos son va?”

  The human doesn’t know how to respond, so the alien tries again. It points at itself and says, “Kos va son Jeriba Shigan.” The Drac points to the human and repeats, “Kos son va?”

  Kos va son—kos son va. I am called—you are called. Hell, now we’re talking not only vocabulary, but grammar! Grammar, That was that stuff that kept getting me into trouble back in high school, I began telling myself that I really ought to start keeping some notes on this alien language that was lurching into being before my eyes, but I had no time for notes. The story is all.

  The human understands the alien and says, “Davidge. My name is Willis E. Davidge.”

  First, where did the character names come from? There seemed to be no time to plan out anything. When possessed by the story bug, you just do it! and let the syllables fall where they may. I had to come up with the alien’s name first. I reached into the air and found Jeriba Shigan. And so where did the name Jeriba Shigan come from?

  There is an actor whom I very much admire named James Shigeta. Need I say more? Okay, I also think James Shigeta is very much underrated and would have done a great job playing the alien in my story. I very much admire the job Lou Gossett, Jr. did playing Jeriba Shigan in the motion picture Enemy Mine, but James Shigeta was the one I had playing the alien in my head when I wrote the story. That’s how I do it, and I don’t apologize for it.

  Then it came time to name the human.

  I knew before I put down a word on paper that I would be playing the part of the human, Although the character was me, it wasn’t really me, so I couldn’t cook up a sloppy anagram of my own name. The name Davidge popped into my head for some reason, and I liked the sound of it. The only Davidge I knew was a fellow student at Staunton Military Academy back in 1960. He was a good kid, and I liked the name. Actually, the character in the story liked the name, and my story characters tend to get pushy with me about what they want. If I want to go one way and the story characters want to go another way, and if I point out to my children that I am god because I own the word processor, the characters will invariably sit down, go on strike, and turn into pine. So if the character wants to be called Davidge, he gets what he wants.

  The first name, Willis, came from a late half-brother of mine. His name was Willis, and for quite a number of years his siblings addressed him as Wibby, which he hated to the point of eventually threatening bodily mayhem and dismemberment if we did not drop the name Wibby and start calling him Bill. I liked Bill, I needed a name that the character would just as soon not insist on using (because the alien keeps referring to him by his last name), so I used it.

  The Drac orders the human, “Dasu!”

  After some pushing and shoving, Davidge figures out that word’s meaning, and some others. In a matter of mere paragraphs, the human and the alien are both speaking pidgin versions of the other’s language, in addition to trying to survive.

  What is going on here?

  A couple of things, actually. First, it always bothers me when, in an sf film or story, beings who evolved on worlds thousands of light years away from Earth all speak English like Lawrence Olivier. I need to at least see a video of the 1944 version of Hamlet in the alien’s hip pocket before I’ll buy it

  It all began, though, as it did for many of us, with that moment in the motion picture The Day the Earth Stood Still when the alien knows the crap is piling up and he’ll need some help. Klatu tells Patricia Neal that if anything happens to him to go to the supercop robot Gort and tell it “Klatu barada nicto. “See, if Gort isn’t told that, the robot will trash the planet. My entire generation memorized that line, “Klatu barada nicto,” just in case.

  Curiously enough, in the movie we are never told what this phrase means. Is it Klatu needs help? Klatu says cool it? Klatu is in deep caca? It seems a little short to be Klatu is in the Washington DC city slams and wants you to bust out his corpse and reanimate it. Nevertheless, we memorized the phrase, and at special moments we would recite it.

  “Hey, where are you going?”

  “I’m going out, Dad.”

  “Out where?”

  “Klatu barada nicto.”

  “Well, make sure you’re back by eleven.”

  A hint of another meaning to that enigmatic phrase came to me while writing two Alien Nation tie-in novels for Pocket. The Newcomers, of course, have a language of their own, and authors who contract to write in this universe are issued a “bible” which outlines the major characters in the series, contains synopses of the various TV episodes, and a “Tenctonese for Travelers” type of vocabulary.

  A word now about credibility and the suspension of disbelief. I can’t speak for every author and reader, but for myself there is this unwritten contract between the reader and the writer. On the writer’s part, the author agrees to approach the tale by believing in it himself. This involves a pact I make with my imagination: whatever setting and characters I dream up actually exist somewhere in the universe. My job? To be faithful to that setting and those characters and to report to the reader as accurately as possible.

  Now, to the Tenctonese language. When I first looked over the Alien Nation bible, I felt that the authors just might not be taking their task seriously. The Tenctonese word for booze, you see, is tanka. The word for brutality is poppy Cattle is moocow, ceremony is oscar, deep is peed, doctor is mare, filth is slum, goodbye is toucus, gun is shoota, investigate is snoop, level is strata, and network, believe it or not, is teeceefox. I have no first-hand knowledge of this, but in my mind I have a picture of a couple of scriptwriters full of themselves, pot, coke, and tanka brainstorming the Tenctonese language.

  “Hey! Hey! Whaddabout this (hic). Moocow for cattle! Ahhh, hah, hah, hah!”

  “Wait a minute! Hee, hee. For investigate how ‘bout snoop! Ahhh, hah, hah, hah!”

  “Hey, let’s throw the Fox network a goddamn bone! What about making the word for network teeceefox! Ahhh, hah, hah, hah, hah, hah!”

  Getting back to Klatu’s enigmatic message to Gort, one of the results of this Alien Nation language jocularity is the Tenctonese name for the Newcomer male lead in the series, Detective George Francisco. According to the bible, his Tenctonese name is Nicto. This opens whole new meanings to the phrase Klatu barada nicto. It seems to be a declaration of teenage love. I have no doubt that future space explorers will find that declaration enclosed in a heart and carved into the bark of a butnut tree:

  Klatu

  barada

  Nicto

  There is a town in Maine named Biddeford. In seeking the origins of this town’s name, I ran across two possibilities: it’s either Algonquian for old woman crossing river (biddy + ford), or ancient Norse for I’m on my way to rehab (Betty + Ford).

  I have also been a student of misunderstandings. The double and multiple meanings of words in most languages can lead to a host of interesting translation situation that I find very amusing. This bit of amusement led to the following piece, titled “Then Darkness Again.” This work’s sole publication, before this appearance, was in my Science-Fiction Writer’s Workshop-I, in the chapter on “Fatal Flaws,” as an example of what not to do. It’s a vignette written before I even knew what a vignette was.

  Read quickly and keep fo
rgiveness in your heart.

  THEN DARKNESS AGAIN

  By

  Accident

  “This is the Big Dip on two-two-one point three. Anybody got their audios on out there?” Al Bragg released his mike key while the twenty seconds ticked off. More than a twenty-second lag between transmissions was a drag. Al checked his instruments and the screen depicting his place in relation to the galactic arm… eighteen, nineteen, twenty.

  Al adjusted the frequency and thumbed his mike. “This is the Big Dip on two-two-one point four. Looking for chat-chat; anybody there?” Al looked at his screen and tried to pick out the Sol system by eye. The computer could have given him an automatic fix, but then that would give Al less to do; and Al was bored, not to mention homesick… eighteen, nineteen, twenty.

  “This is the Big Dip on two-two-one point five craving some communication.” Al sighed, wishing he hadn’t cut across the void from the center to the arm. Nobody ever went this way. Three standard weeks from the candy bar quadrants and he hadn’t raised a peep… eighteen, nineteen, twenty.

  “Bet the translator’s on the poopers again.”

  “Biggy Dippy on two-two-one point six looking for some tricks; let’s hear it out there.”

  Well, it was either go this way or go the long way around empty. Nuts. I could have found a load. Guess I just wanted to get home… eighteen, nineteen, twenty.

  “This is the Dipper on two-two-one point seven searching heaven for some talk-talk.”

  LADLE, THIS BEAR.

  Al jumped, then smiled. Someone was out there, and the literal translations were half the fun of chatter and the game. “Bear, this is the Dipper. I haven’t raised a soul for a sun’s age. Where are you headed?”

  ON TOP, LADLE. ONLY ONE. AND YOU?

  “Negative, Big Bear. What is your destination?”

  SORRY. THE CENTER. QUADRANT TWENTY AND FIVE. WANT THE GAME TO PLAY?