Enemy Papers

by Barry B. Longyear

  “Highty tighty Christ almighty,

  Who the Hell are we?

  Zim zam, Gawd Damn,

  We’re in Squadron B.”

  came out like this in German:

  “Groß und prächtig, Christ allmächtig,

  Wer zur Hölle sind denn wir?

  Zicke, Zacke, verfluchte Kacke,

  Das Geschwader B sind wir.”

  I would show you the Japanese version of this song, but I can’t find it in the text.

  I did manage to drive the learning-the-other-language thing to the point where many could read the Drac when Davidge begins teaching the baby Zammis its line: “Naatha nu enta va. Zammis zea dos Jeriba estay va Shigan, asaam naa denvadar.”

  The story completed. I moved on to other things. A year later, however. I found myself writing the book-length sequel to “Enemy Mine,” The Tomorrow Testament. Again I was faced with humans and Dracs rubbing elbows, and other things. This meant, of course, keeping consistent with the language used in “Enemy,” as well as the tidbits of Drac customs and whatnot mentioned in the original story. The only problem was that I had none of this information. It was necessary to go though the original story, pull out the Drac language, and make up a vocabulary. Since the main structure of The Tomorrow Testament depends on the Drac bible, The Talman, a philosophical work by Dracs, about Dracs, and for Dracs, would be necessary to expand the vocabulary considerably, not to mention writing the bloody Drac bible.

  The Tomorrow Testament done, I again got on with other things. Among them were several other alien languages, and I made a point of doing some planning and taking careful notes. Two real screw-ups, however, involved a tribe in my fantasy novel The God Box, whose only use of the verb “to be” is the word “be,” as in “I be hungry,” and “we be a family.” If Aristotle had been born into this tribe, his famous statement of identity would be “A be A,” although there would be no change in Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be.”

  This tribe also cannot pronounce L’s. Instead of substituting another sound, they simply leave it blank, showing this absence by the use of an apostrophe, as in ‘o”ypop. In other words, Aristot’e be a phi’osopher. It was after writing a few pages of dialog using this tribe and its language quirks that I began losing my hair.

  Time passed, dust gathered on my Nebula and Hugo for “Enemy Mine,” and about seventeen years after writing the original story, I signed a contract to do another Drac book, The Last Enemy a work told from the point of view of a Drac. Out came the notes, and I had to face a very uncomfortable truth: my memory of being a meticulous note-keeper is somewhat at variance with reality. Back again through everything, picking out names and language. Perhaps now that I’ve got the vocabulary in a book (at the back of this volume) I won’t have to write it up again.

  What I have learned from the above experiences, beside planning ahead and keeping accurate notes, is that alien languages, as well as alien names, need to be understood and used by humans, at least the alien languages that appear in print science fiction. Movies can get away with a bunch of squeaks, glottal stops, clicks, grunts, and whistles. The characters are usually so one-dimensional anyway, whatever they say isn’t important. In print, however, names need to be remembered, and the alien words that appear at least need to be gotten through, if not understood and remembered.

  All too often, though, writers find themselves in need of an “alien-sounding” name for a character. The result often looks like a convention of consonants assaulted by a shotgun full of apostrophes, hyphens, and asterisks. I have seen grown men and women turn blue from asphyxiation as their tongues became knotted from trying to pronounce some of these efforts. For myself, if I can read my alien words and names out loud without stumbling, I figure the reader won’t have any trouble. For those of you who do have trouble, the character Uhe’s name is pronounced YOO-ee. The rest sound just like they’re spelled in Spanish, Japanese, and Urdu.

  Let’s face it. None of this would have happened except for Mr. Meekle. He was a teacher of mine at the Harrisburg Academy in Harrisburg. Pennsylvania, when I was in the eighth grade. He taught a unique course designed to make one’s choice of a foreign language in high school easier. It went like this: for the first quarter we studied Latin. Second quarter we studied French. Third quarter we studied German. Fourth quarter we studied Spanish. After all of the grammars, verb forms, vocabularies, and irregularities, by the time I entered high school I was confused to the point where I was hardly able to speak English.

  I’ve always wanted to learn another language, though, but did miserably in school in this regard. I took Latin in high school, and as I dropped the course and walked out, I told the teacher, “I’m not going to be a Latin teacher, and I can’t think of another reason to take this course.” Years later, as I was doing mountains of research on ancient Rome and trying to make out various inscriptions, I wept as I begged God to let me take back what I had said.

  I didn’t do well at Spanish, either. I reached my peak in Spanish at Wayne State University in Detroit in 1966. I was sitting outside wondering what to do with the rest of my life when a distinguished gentleman in a very natty three-piece set of pin-stripes came walking by. He asked a student something, the student shrugged, made like, man, a peace sign, you know, and wandered off. However, the man’s question had been in Spanish! This was my chance to do a good deed and put to use some of this stuff I’d been studying for years. I stood up, went to him, and in a perfect Castillian accent asked, “Habla español?”

  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, war
mth, 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.