Enemy Papers

ON ALIEN LANGUAGES

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.

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, good-bye 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:

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 forgiveness in your heart.

Predictable, pointless, perfidious, poop—there is absolutely nothing you can say about "Darkness" that I have not already said to myself (which was only somewhat more brutal than what the rejection slips said).

My amusement with misunderstandings in translation had been exercised earlier in my story, "The Slick Gentlemen," one of the tales of the original star circus that eventually crashed on the planet Momus (the circus, not the story). This story had its language fun from several angles. First was circus lingo, the jargon spoken by the employees of O’Hara’s Greater Shows. This was complicated somewhat by aliens being part of the company, and was complicated further by the even more alien aliens for which the show performed. We enter the story where Warts, the keeper of the show’s route book, has a crisis of conscience and decides to turn in John J. O’Hara and the show to the police because the show is crawling with pickpockets, grifters, and scam artists who paid O’Hara a very large sum for the privilege of fleecing the inhabitants of Planet Chyteew, all of whom had never before seen a circus. The more Warts sees of the "slick gentlemen," the less he likes them.

And so on.

These kinds of translation misunderstandings provided the foundation for such exchanges in "Enemy Mine" as the following:

What follows are some notes I made on another story idea flop that contributed to the form "Enemy Mine" took. At this point, though. I feel obligated to point out that I never condemn any idea, no matter how badly it smells. This is how I keep in check this overly developed critical faculty of mine that tends to dry up everything that comes within its range. The advantage is that parts and pieces are saved, allowing such things as "Enemy Mine" to come into being. The disadvantage is that my files are crammed with a whole lot of crap that is going to be very embarrassing if someone should wade through them after my mortal exit for the purpose of writing the definitive Barry B. Longyear biography. Chances are, the work will be titled: I Can’t Believe He Wrote All This Crap!

Again, I digress.

Here are my notes on the other story language idea:

The idea above went into my story dump, but many of the attempts at learning the other’s language wound up in "Enemy Mine."

Speaking of translations, "Enemy Mine" has been translated into a number of languages, and it always makes me wonder about the sense the reader gets when he or she reads my stuff in another language. The title of my collection Manifest Destiny in German, for example, is Erbfeinde. To me it sounds like a city planning board addicted to rules, regulations, permits, and payoffs stalking the urban landscape in search of human angst. According to my Cassell’s German Dictionary it means either "hereditary enemy" or "old foe." In that volume, "Enemy Mine" becomes "Mein lieber Feind," which means, as near as I can tell, "My beloved Enemy." The little barracks ditty Davidge sings in the story:

came out like this in German:

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, warmth, 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.

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.

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.

At a writer’s workshop I conducted some months before, a woman with a political ax to grind demanded to know, "Why don’t you use more female protagonists in your stories?" So, when it came time to begin on The Tomorrow Testament, I asked myself if it made any difference if the lead character was male or female. In a supreme fit of either ignorance or arrogance. I said "no."

I had a character with a name: Joanne Nicole. In a spasm of enthusiasm I cranked out ten thousand words, then took them to bed and gave them a read. In a matter of minutes I began crawling beneath my covers. Naw, a female protagonist wouldn’t make any difference. Not much. What I had captured magnificently was ten thousand words of myself stumbling around on the pages in drag.

The sensible thing would have been to dump Joanne Nicole on the spot and start over again with a male character. That probably would have been the professional thing to do. Despite her ill-defined character and proportions, however, Joanne Nicole was very much alive. Story characters of mine, once animated, refuse to die except under their own terms. Raising stubbornness to the nth power, therefore, I stuck with Joanne Nicole by writing yet another book. I began with her birth on another planet, grew up with her as a child, experienced her school years, her hopes and dreams, her courtship and marriage, the birth of her daughter, the death of her husband, her entrance as an intelligence officer in the USE Force, until the Battle of Catvishnu when she enters the story. Then started The Tomorrow Testament again, from the beginning, this time with my character as Joanne Nicole, rather than as a "female protagonist."

There was an additional complication. She is the point-of-view character throughout the entire book, and soon after the beginning of the story, she is blinded. Writing from the POV of a sightless person presented some incredible challenges. I spent months stalking my house at night with my eyes shut, gouging pieces of meat out of my shins, burning myself trying to make coffee, and falling down stairs. I kept that up until I could read the interior of my house by touch, by sound, and by smell.

While I was in the process of writing that, at the Worldcon in Denver that year, the story editor from Kings Road Productions said that his bunch would like to make a movie out of "Enemy Mine." He said that one thing that appealed to him was that "Enemy" was a story of character and could be done without a great deal of budget-breaking special effects. When I told Jean that a producer wanted to make a movie out of "Enemy Mine," she didn’t believe me.

After getting and signing the contract, she began believing. It was not long afterward, however, when I stopped believing. I was not happy about how the movie turned out, although the performances by Dennis Quaid and Lou Gossett, Jr. were incredible. There are moments watching the film, when I would see the characters I invented saying the words that I wrote, that gave me a hint about what the movie might have been; but there is neither profit nor serenity in dwelling on might-have-beens. Nevertheless, there are an astonishing number of fans who have told me that Enemy Mine is either their favorite or near-favorite motion picture. Perhaps the problem I have with the film is mine, not the movie’s.

As an aside, at a science-fiction convention I was attending, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a Russian guest who was currently teaching at the University of Chicago who told me that Enemy Mine was his favorite movie. He then related the expensive, harrowing, and dangerous experience he had undergone obtaining a copy and smuggling it into Russia—where it was released a few weeks later.

It was at a Windycon, the annual convention put on by the Chicago science-fiction bunch, where I got the idea for what eventually became the third work in the Enemy series, The Last Enemy.

A friend of mind had written a book and I had been sent a copy for blurb purposes. I finished it while I was at Windycon. What interested me the most about the story was a sort of thesis statement at the end that was conveyed by two of the characters conversing. It is this: the tribe comes first. Before rationality, before honor, before good sense, before self-interest, before mercy, love, or justice, the tribe comes first. That’s what you have to do, to be, in order to remain a member of the tribe.

I thought then that he had put his finger on the whole Middle East/ Northern Ireland/Bosnia/Rwanda mess. It’s the whole world of us-and-them thinking that has kept this planet blood-soaked for endless thousands of years.

There was a military sf panel I was on at Windycon, and we thoroughly discussed the premise and my friend’s new book. At the panel I made a point of remembering to suggest to my friend that he take this premise, stick it at the beginning of another book, and use it as a take-off point to solve the Middle East problem and the dilemma of self-perpetuating war and terrorism.

I met my friend at another convention, and he was interested not at all in my suggestion. As far as he was concerned, anyone who stood up in Israel and tried to make peace between Jews and Arabs would be killed within a minute after doing so. With all of the tools and magic of science fiction and fantasy at his command, he regarded peace as a lost cause before it began. I was stunned. It became clear to me for the first time that there are those who have no use for peace. Some find their meaning in having a perpetual enemy. Others want nothing to do with a peace that includes anyone being left alive on the other side. Us-and-them. The tribe comes first, and nothing comes in second. There is us, and then there is death.

Maybe it was too scary a challenge. As for myself, I couldn’t see any answers. Why should anyone else? In the Middle East, other than a sufficient number of Israelis and Palestinians to keep things at a boil, there are no real issues to resolve such as land, or rights, or money, or reparations. All those things could be solved to everyone’s satisfaction, and the fighting would continue to erupt. The wounds suffered by both sides are so numerous, so old, so cruel, senseless, and deep, there seems to be no healing to be had short of the complete and total annihilation of the other side. I could see no answers, but I couldn’t stop playing with the problem in my head.

What grafted the problem to me for life was remembering that the planet Amadeen in The Tomorrow Testament is very much an analogue of Middle East/Northern Ireland/Bosnia kinds of conflicts. That was why peace on the planet was impossible, and to achieve peace in the rest of the quadrant, the principals had to resort to radically unconventional means. Still, at the end of The Tomorrow Testament, although the rest of the quadrant is at peace, the problem of the war on Amadeen still exists. Taking the premise and Amadeen together, what about a third book? What about taking my own challenge and end the war on Amadeen? The title was obvious: The Last Enemy What was not so obvious was what to do with it.

Then word came to me that Stewart Wieck at White Wolf Publishing was expanding into science-fiction books, and maybe I ought to drop him a line. I suggested The Last Enemy and he wanted it.

The Last Enemy was not an easy book to write, First I had to make the war impossible to resolve, which was the easy part. All I had to do was look at the world around me. Then I had to come up with a believable way to achieve peace, and I think I did. No one has tried it yet, although it requires nothing in the way of technology that we don’t already have. The only thing this world might be lacking to implement it are the integrity, conviction, and singularity of purpose to go and do it. In any event, the manuscript was completed and I was very happy with it.

Will there be a fourth book in the series? Well, when I reached the end of The Last Enemy I looked at the situation and characters, where the characters were, and all of the possibilities about where they could go and what they could become, and a very familiar itch began working on me. I’m thinking on it.

DRAC FOR TRAVELERS