Barry Longyear - Enemy Papers

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…

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 calling 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.