Barry Longyear - Enemy Papers

Jerry placed a rock beneath the capsule to keep it from rolling back, then quickly untied my wrists and pulled out the rod. Both of us put our shoulders to the capsule, and we quickly rolled it to higher ground. The wave hit and climbed rapidly up the slope until it came up to our chests. The capsule bobbed like a cork, and it was all we could do to keep control of the thing until the water receded, wedging the capsule between three big boulders. I stood there, puffing.

Jerry dropped to the sand, its back against one of the boulders, and watched the water rush back out to sea. "Magasiennal"

"You said it, brother." I sank down next to the Drac; we agreed by eye to a temporary truce, and promptly passed out.

My eyes opened on a sky boiling with blacks and greys. Letting my head loll over on my left shoulder, I checked out the Drac. It was still out. First, I thought that this would be the perfect time to get the drop on Jerry. Second, I thought about how silly our insignificant scrap seemed compared to the insanity of the sea that surrounded us. Why hadn’t the rescue team come? Did the Dracon fleet wipe us out? Why hadn’t the Dracs come to pick up Jerry? Did they wipe out each other? I didn’t even know where I was. An island. I had seen that much coming in, but where and in relation to what? Fyrine IV; the planet didn’t even rate a name, but was important enough to die over.

With an effort, I struggled to my feet. Jerry opened its eyes and quickly pushed itself to a defensive crouching position. I waved my hand and shook my head. "Ease off, Jerry. I’m just going to look around." I turned my back on it and trudged off between the boulders. I walked uphill for a few minutes until I reached level ground.

It was an island, all right, and not a very big one. By eyeball estimation, height from sea level was only eighty meters, while the island itself was about two kilometers long and less than half that wide. The wind whipping my jumpsuit against my body was at least drying it out, but as I looked around at the smooth-ground boulders on top of the rise, I realized that Jerry and I could expect bigger waves than the few puny ones we had seen.

A rock clattered behind me and I turned to see Jerry climbing up the slope. When it reached the top, the Drac looked around. I squatted next to one of the boulders and passed my hand over it to indicate the smoothness, then I pointed toward the sea. Jerry nodded. "Ae, gavey." It pointed downhill toward the capsule, then to where we stood. "Echey masu, nasesay."

I frowned, then pointed at the capsule. "Nasesay? The capsule?"

"Ae, capsule nasesay. Echey masu." Jerry pointed at its feet.

I shook my head. "Jerry, if you gavey how these rocks got smooth"—I pointed at one—"then you gavey that masuing the nasesay up here isn’t going to do a damned bit of good." I made a sweeping up and down movement with my hands. "Waves." I pointed at the sea below. "Waves, up here." I pointed to where we stood. "Waves, echey."

"Ae, gavey." Jerry looked around the top of the rise, then rubbed the side of its face. The Drac squatted next to some small rocks and began piling one on top of another. "Viga, Davidge."

I squatted next to it and watched while its nimble fingers constructed a circle of stones that quickly grew into a dollhouse-sized arena. Jerry stuck one of its fingers in the center of the circle. "Echey, nasesay."

The days on Fyrine IV seemed to be three times longer than any I had seen on any other habitable planet. I use the designation "habitable" with reservations. It took us most of the first day to painfully roll Jerry’s nasesay up to the top of the rise. The night was too black to work and was bone-cracking cold. We removed the couch from the capsule, which made just enough room for both of us to fit inside. The body heat warmed things up a bit; and we killed time between sleeping, nibbling on Jerry’s supply of ration bars (they taste a bit like fish mixed with cheddar cheese), and trying to come to some agreement about language.

"Eye."

"Thuyo."

"Finger."

"Zurath."

"Head."

The Drac laughed. "Lode."

"Ho, ho, very funny."

"Ho, ho."

It was when the talking stopped and the sleeping was to begin that I would find myself inside my own head, behind enemy lines. It’d be right there, a few centimeters away, a Drac. Yellow, loathsome, slick-skinned, noseless, toad face.

The rolls on my ship had a lot of blank spaces because of the pilots the Dracs had whacked. I knew a lot of the names: Ozawa, Chandler, the Starov twins: Mikhail and Whatsisname.

Whatsisname.

I knew a lot of names, I could remember a lot of faces. I didn’t know anyone, though. I felt bad when my fellow pilots went down, but only because it meant my team had taken a hit. It wasn’t as though any friends had taken one.

Friends. Who were my friends?

That one group commander, Dunlap, the one before Santos, used to say, "If you have to ask questions like Who are my friends, you are in trouble."

Dunlap was trying to get us to hang together, rely on each other, work as a team—no. Work as a family.

I asked the question, who are my friends, and still didn’t have an answer an hour later. I wondered how much trouble Dunlap would say I was in.

In the dim green glow of one of the capsule’s fading battery lights, I looked at the Drac and realized that I had spent more time in close contact with this thing than I had with any human, except my parents.

Trouble. Dunlap didn’t know what trouble was.

At dawn on the second day, we rolled and pushed the capsule into the center of the rise and wedged it between two large rocks, one of which had an overhang that we hoped would hold down the capsule when one of those big soakers hit. Around the rocks and capsule, we laid a foundation of large stones and filled in the cracks with smaller stones. ' By the time the wall was knee high, we discovered that building with those smooth, round stones and no mortar wasn’t going to work. After some experimentation, we figured out how to break the stones to give us flat sides with which to work. It’s done by picking up one stone and slamming it down on top of another.

We took turns, one slamming and one building. The stone was almost a volcanic glass, and we also took turns extracting rock splinters from each other. It took nine of those endless days and nights to complete the walls, during which waves came close many times and once washed us ankle deep. For six of those nine days, it rained. ; The capsule’s survival equipment included a plastic blanket, and that became our roof. It sagged in at the center, and the hole we put in it there allowed the water to run out, keeping us almost dry and giving us a supply of fresh water. If a wave of any determination came along, we could kiss the roof goodbye; but we both had confidence in the walls, which were almost two meters thick at the bottom and at least a meter thick at the top.

After we finished, we sat inside and admired our work for about an hour, until it dawned on us that we had just worked ourselves out of jobs.

"What now, Jerry?"

"Ess?"

"What do we do now?"

The Drac looked at the shelter, then up at the gloomy sky. "Now wait, we." The Drac shrugged. "Else what, ne?"

I nodded. "Gavey."

I got to my feet and walked to the passageway we had built. With no wood for a door, where the walls would have met, we bent one out and extended it about three meters around the other wall with the opening away from the prevailing winds.

The never-ending winds were still at it, but the rain had stopped. The shack wasn’t much to look at, but looking at it stuck there in the center of that deserted island made me feel good. As Shizumaat observed, "Intelligent life making its stand against the universe." Or, at least, that’s the sense I could make out of Jerry’s hamburger of English. I shrugged and picked up a sharp splinter of stone and made another mark in the large standing rock that served as my log. Ten scratches in all, and under the seventh, a small x to indicate the big wave that just covered the top of the island.