Fire?
The linguist grunted. Fire where and against what? The poor sods on the other side had retreated deep into their trench. All you could possibly shoot were air molecules.
“Fire!!” shouted the lieutenant again.
She sighed and rested the barrel of her HK416 on the parapet of the trench.
The war had started the Summer before. Like all wars, because of a regrettable misunderstanding. On a beautiful day in July, bees from Oberholzberg-an-dem-Flüsschen had decided to explore new horizons. They had flown across the mountain to Schwarztannen-Frutt and there, had somehow mated with the local queen (said the people from Schwarztannen-Frutt). Soon after, some bees had started dying, clear proof that the bees of Oberholzberg-an-dem-Flüsschen had been carrying some god-awful virus which had now spread across the hives of Schwarztannen-Frutt. There was a counter-rumour that the epidemic may really have been the fault of young Dietrich (from the third house on the forest side), who had recently ordered a new queen from the Internet, one of those that arrive through the letterbox (said the people from Oberholzberg-an-dem-Flüsschen). But this, really, was 100% fake news (said the people from Schwarztannen-Frutt).
The situation had slowly degenerated. Some individuals had started fighting on the mountain crest, and the matter had moved up to the regional level (Oberholzberg-an-dem-Flüsschen and Schwarztannen-Frutt were on two sides of a political border). Threatening letters had been sent by responsible officers on both sides. Police, then military had driven into the perimeter. Soon, the mountain had turned into a gruyère of trenches and bunkers.
They had enlisted everybody. Like, everybody. The linguist shared her corner of the trench with a 92-year-old Scotland-born lady named Dora, who had come to the area seventy years earlier to marry a businessman with a thriving nuts and bolts fabric. She, the linguist, had of course objected to the war. She’d shouted she would not go and that she had better things to do than mindlessly press a trigger on a pathetic big gun. But they had dragged her out of her house and that had been the end of that.
And there she was, 9 months later.
She gave her best shot at simulating a fighting position, released the HK416’s safety for good measure, and muttered in a tired voice:
“Bang… bang… bang…”
That’s when she realised that Dora, next to her, was shooting for real.
“Dora!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing? You’re gonna hurt someone!”
“Course not, deary. I’m just pruning them trees.”
She pointed at the other side with a little movement of her chin. The linguist risked a look above the parapet. There was indeed a little mountain orchard behind the enemy trench, with some apple and cherry trees.
“What do you mean, you’re pruning?”
Dora did not reply. She just shot again. Bang. Bang. Bang. And a few branches flew off an apple tree. It already looked much more in shape.
“Dora! You can shoot! All those months and you never told me…”
“Wasn’t pruning time, deary. Do you want a mint?”
She took a little box out of her breast pocket. The linguist helped herself, expressing her gratitude.
“Cover!!!!!” shouted the lieutenant.
The other side was now retaliating badly. Luckily, the lieutenant was now frantically speaking on his satellite phone, and when he was on the phone, he liked posing like the early Napoleon (the successful one). He would not notice anything or anyone for a little while. The linguist sat down to savour the fresh sensation of the mint on her tongue and Dora joined her, not without first brushing the earthy, soggy ground with her hand. She always did that.
“Explain to me what you do again, deary,” said Dora. “Perhaps I won’t forget, this time.”
“Computational linguistics? Well… we write computer simulations of linguistic phenomena and…”
“Wait. Tell me again. What’s it good for?”
“Well, I mean… I don’t know whether it’s good for anything. I mean, some people, not me, they actually make software, you know. Like search engines, or that lady you can talk to on your mobile phone, or automatic helpdesks…”
“I don’t use any of that.”
“I don’t blame you.”
Dora was polishing her mint box against her uniform.
“So, it’s not good for anything?” she said.
“Well… it’s science. You know, science. A bit like art. You look at the world and you paint a picture of it, and then you realise it’s all distorted like a Picasso and if you’re lucky, people say it’s genius. Most often they don’t, so you try again.”
“My Wilfried used to paint. Flowers and things. Tulips were my favourite. Oh, did he paint tulips!”
“That’s nice…”
“Fire!!!!!!” screamed the lieutenant.
The linguist took a quick look above the parapet. Both sides had now unleashed their drones. Hundreds of them. The enemy was now impossible to see. She retreated with a smile.
“Dora, it’s drone time. Dare you. First one who shoots one of our own.”
“‘kay!”
Bang. Bang. Bang. The linguist had not even had time to stand up again, and three units already exhibited dreadful convulsions, falling haphazardly towards the ground.
“Fire!!!!!!” shouted the lieutenant in a desperate tone of voice. “We’re under heavy attack!”
“I’ll do that wee little one too”, said Dora.
A bang and another unit, one of the expensive Apis-359 with 3D cameras and biological warfare capabilities, exploded in flight.
“Gosh, you’re good…” said the linguist with admiration.
“Everybody on their dirty fucking feet!! Fire!! Fire!!” said the lieutenant. “I’ll beat the crap out of you!”
“Dora…” said the linguist. “Do you think you could ever kill someone?”
Dora’s tongue clicked on her false teeth.
“I don’t know, deary. I’ve never tried. Who do you want me to kill?”
The linguist tilted her head towards the lieutenant.
Dora seemed a little puzzled.
“That’s one of our own, deary. And a person, not one of them buzzing machines,” she said. “That’d be treason, or not? I don’t want to get in trouble. At my age.”
The linguist breathed the smoky air with some satisfaction.
“Dora,” she replied. “Linguistics may be no good for anything, but I’ll tell you something language is good for.”
“Okay.”
Dora took her mint box out again.
“So… Words have meanings, right?”
“Right.” “And meanings can change. Like, you know, the word ‘computer’ used to refer to a female mathematician who worked for NASA and solved incredibly difficult equations by hand in record time to send rockets into space, and now it is some piece of plastic junk that sits on your kitchen table with at most 16GB of RAM and a most likely bugged operating system. Right?”
“Right. That’s why I ain’t got one.”
“Too right, Dora. Too right. So what I’m getting at is this. You may think you know what ‘treason’ means, but that meaning is not static either. You and I can change it, by using language. For instance, I can tell you ‘Dora, treason is the abject denial of our shared humanity. You’re a traitor every time you look at another human being and refuse to see one of your own.’ And then you can argue with that, and we’ll have a conversation and eventually converge on what we think is treason.”
“Okay.”
“Okay? Well, shall we try it?”
“Okay.”
“Fire!!!!!! Cover the 359s!!!!!” yelled the lieutenant.
“Alright. Dora, treason is the abject denial of our shared humanity. You’re a traitor every time you look at another human being and refuse to see one of your own.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes, deary. That was really convincing. Do you want another mint?”
…
Dora had never tried to kill anybody. When she made her first attempt, she realised she could not do it. Even though, as she put it, the target was as exposed as a museum painting.
So in the end, they had to snatch the lieutenant in his sleep. They gagged him and dragged him to the next bank of beehives, covered him with honey and left him there.
Then they walked home.
Dora was chirpy and taking extreme pleasure in her newly acquired linguistic knowledge. She would point at a stone and say “cat”, pick a flower and say “book”, start running on her nimble 92-year-old feet and say “look at me, I am flying, shrieking, waving, an equation, 29, I am twenty-nining, because I say so!”
And the linguist would laugh.
They parted at the old lady’s door. The linguist perhaps felt a little teary. Emotional, you might say.
“Are you going to keep this?” she asked, pointing at the HK416 still hanging across Dora’s shoulders.”
A smile.
“Course. It’s pruning time, deary.”
By Aurelie Herbelot
This story was written at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Spring 2020. A friend had proposed to a few of us that we should rewrite the Decameron. Over weeks of lockdown, we were given assignments by the Decameron Master. The assigned topic for this particular piece was ‘Fire? Fire!!’.