"Detectives in Dibadi" is a post-peak oil sci-fi story based
on the novel "Épépé"
by Hungarian author Ferenc Karinthy. The novel has been translated in English under
the title Metropole.
This story includes elements of my own conworld, though, such as the
sentient gas yeksooch, which absorbs and transforms energy and is used to make
artificial brains as well as super-efficient solar panels and power batteries;
cyborgs, who are androids pretending to be human beings; robots with artificial
brains; a nation speaking a language derived from Chinook Jargon, imposed by
humanoids; covert genocides; etc.
"Detectives in Dibadi" began as an erotic story. To my shame,
I admit I started writing it for fun, in my office, during workhours. Civil
servants are so cavalier with taxpayers' money, sometimes... I didn't intend to
publish it on the Internet. It soon became a conworld story (I've removed most
erotic parts from the text before uploading it). Then other episodes followed.
***************
DETECTIVES
IN DIBADI – Episode One
Sep had been looking forward to that mission in Dibadi for a long time.
An athletic, handsome man in his mid-thirties, with a talent for learning
foreign languages, he was a detective specializing in international crime. His
boss, Immalda, a pretty, vivacious divorcee had asked him to accompany her to
Dibadi, the most mysterious metropolis of the world, for a simple, easy
mission. They had to interview a man in an office of the local militia and ride
the train back to Padza the following day. The interview could lead to other
searches and interviews. If so, Immalda had decided, the mission would be
extended and last several days if necessary.
Immalda was notoriously emotional and difficult to work with, always
trying to conceal her emotional insecurity behind a screen of authoritarian
attitudes. Furthermore, she wasn't a very competent investigator, in spite of
her rank, higher than Sep's. Consequently her subordinates weren't too keen to
work abroad with her.
Sep and Immalda left Padza, the big city where they worked, on a chilly,
rainy February night, just before dawn. Immalda wore a heavy coat and a yellow
jacket over a low-cut, short beige dress which was a little too revealing for
her job. She carried a handbag and an overnight bag. Sep had an overnight bag,
too, and a small briefcase.
They took their breakfast in the carriage. Immalda was still sleepy, and
after a while she rested her head on Sep's shoulder. He discreetly eyed her
big, round white breasts in the low-cut dress. They were only colleagues,
unfortunately.
The train was a fast, modern, Padzan-built supertrain, with a top speed
of 200 miles per hour.
The sun rose as the train passed, without stopping, by Tarquin, the last
Padzan town, with its well-tended vegetable gardens, abandoned commercial
centers and industrial parks, and speeded across the unguarded border into
verdant countryside, where machines and robots toiled alone or in small teams
in corn fields and tree plantations. Sometimes they saw huge expanses of black
solar panels, rising as ridges and mounds in the distance. Thousands
of square miles of black glass. The technology based on the sentient gas
yeksooch enables cyborgs to do without all the necessary exotic metals needed
to fabricate the hardware for conventional solar panels.
They passed roads where heavy trucks and long coaches with dark windows
trundled towards unknown destinations, and clusters of hangars which might have
been farms or small industrial centers. They didn't see any human being at all
for hundreds of kilometers, except dim, rapid glimpses of truck and coach
drivers in their big machines.
Sep wondered if the railway company employees were Dibadian or Padzan.
The stewards he had seen spoke perfect French, as if they were Padzan, but it
meant nothing. Sep had heard at least one of them speak an unidentified
language to an old couple.
If the employees were Dibadian, they were likely to be cyborgs.
According to rumours, only cyborgs travel abroad and speak foreign languages.
But it was impossible to be sure.
They were in Niemelaga, the agricultural, industrial, and energy
heartland of the continent, a large region where all the former villages and
towns have disappeared, sacrificed to economic necessities and cyborg
domination, their vanquished populations brought to Dibadi, the capital city,
obliged to speak a new language and adhere to a new religion.
Immalda woke up in the middle of the morning and started to read a magazine
while Sep opened Budai's Memoirs, the book he had taken for the journey,
taking notes in a weird cursive alphabet she couldn't read.
_ What's that? She asked.
_ Gleaskalan, one of the languages of Gleaskala, the country my
girlfriend hails from, he replied. It has its own phonemic alphabet. I use it
for private writings.
Immalda gave him a quizzical look, and folded her magazine.
_ Szangmih knows several languages, too, she said. I wish I met someone
else, now that he's gone.
Szangmih, an elderly, job-hopping waiter, had been Immalda's lover and
parasite for several years. Sep made no comment.
They chatted for an hour, and Sep sympathized with her. He took her hand
in his, and he kissed her, first on a cheek, then on the lips as she turned her
face towards him, her eyes wide open. Because there were other passengers in
the carriage, they didn't dare do more than kiss once, but they whispered
tender words to each other.
How easy it had been, Sep thought. Easy for whom?
His mind was confused, he didn't know if he had seduced Immalda or if it was
the other way round.
Shortly before
__ Look, Immalda. We're in Dibadi. The third
largest city of the continent: nine million residents. I've read that they are
as diverse as the Padzans: descendents of French-speaking, white-skinned Shama
and many minority groups, such as brown-skinned Klale Tillicum and
copper-skinned Siwash from faraway kingdoms. The cyborgs imposed their language
and religion on them. Those who refused to submit were kept in camps, pregnant women were sterilized after they delivered.
Their children were taught the Dibadian language and religion and eventually
sent to Dibadi.
_ I don't want you to talk to me about those horrible things, Sep. I've
heard about those camps. I've been told that millions of people spent decades
in them, until they died of old age. Then the Niemelagans buried the corpses
and tore down the camps and built solar panels where the camps had been. I've
also been told that some camps still exist.
_ We have lots of satellite photos to document
this, actually, Sep said, and many testimonies. The Niemelagans who did the
dirty work were all robots and cyborgs. Actually the cyborgs were able to evict
tens of millions of people from their homes and herd them into camps by
pretending that they were just removing civilians from battle zones. There is
evidence that they even made up bogus battles. The forced sterilizations in the
camps were also objectionable, from a legal and moral point of view, but at the
time no one wanted to risk men and treasure in a war against the cyborgs. The
whole world was in turmoil back then, and the cyborgs knew it. The transition
from fossil fuels to other sources of energy took decades, and as you know it
was ghastly, an era of wars and famines.
_ Bogus battles? How can that be?
_ There was Melopilli, for instance. Padzan
historians made painstaking research, and some of them think that the
Niemelagans fooled us. Melopilli was a city full of refugees, mostly old
people, women and children. Most of the men of military age had been killed in
combat already. One hundred thousand people, maybe more, were huddled in
Melopilli, almost all of them without weapons. The cyborgs' robot spiders
encircled the city and massacred the residents. They didn't leave anyone alive,
not a single adult or child was spared. Then they razed the buildings and
levelled the place. But the cyborgs were afraid of being attacked by Padzaland
and its allies if the atrocity became known. They created the myth of the
battle of Melopilli, with the robot spiders fighting house by house, street by
street, in ferocious and costly combat against heroic, well-armed enemies. The
cyborgs' propaganda service even invented the story of the young woman with the
red earrings. Do you know it?
_ Yes, I saw it on TV. The robot spiders were stopped in their advance by
a terribly efficient sniper hiding in an old house. It took them several hours
to get him. The sniper refused to surrender and kept shooting. Then the spiders
destroyed the house, and in the ruins they found the corpse of the sniper. She
was a young woman in her late teens or early twenties, with long blond hair and
red earrings. I've seen pictures of the woman in blood-stained battledress,
lying dead on the ground, amid the ruins, while cyborg officers in white
uniforms salute respectfully.
_ It was a hoax, Immalda. The woman was a civilian who had been ruthlessly executed like everyone else
in Melopilli, then her dead body was wrapped in a tattered uniform, and a rifle
was put in her arms. There was no fighting, no snipers, only
cynical mass murder. The cyborg officers accepted to play the role propaganda
told them to play.
_ Oh, but why would the cyborgs make it all up?
_ Because it suited their goals to pretend that
they had won a fierce battle, Immalda. It made them look like warriors, which
they were not, at least in Melopilli. Nobody wants to be known as a mass
murderer, even the cyborgs. Acknowledging the bravery of their enemies made
them look noble. The kind of people who respect the
vanquished and women. But they don't respect anyone, actually. They
treat everyone as if they were animals.
_ Sep, that's horrible, too scary to be true! I'm sure that the story of
the heroine with the red earrings is genuine. Look, what you're saying is just
an ugly myth concocted by conspiracy buffs. I saw the pictures, and I heard on
TV the statements made by the cyborg officers. They sounded authentic.
Sep smiled. Immalda, who didn't always care for the truth, was often
oddly gullible. He said, carefully:
_ In spite of all their machinations and cunning, the cyborgs would have
had to face a coalition of angry nations when the extent of the destruction
became known. But they are not cyborgs for nothing, they are more intelligent
than most human beings, and way more disciplined. They avoided a war they knew
they would have lost: they negotiated a conditional surrender to Padzaland.
Niemelaga became a Padzan protectorate. The cyborgs pay a tribute to Padza in
energy and stuff each year. They have no foreign policy of their own, and the
Padzan police can investigate and arrest people in Dibadi as it pleases. The
cyborgs retained their own currency, political system and flag - red and black
stripes, and a stylized white starling in the middle. They also have their own
army, but it is much smaller than it used to be. The Padzans didn't want the
Immalda looked flustered. She said:
_ The people who live in Dibadi now are former
prisoners of the cyborgs. I've read testimonies. People say that the prisoners
were beaten if they were caught reading or writing non-Dibadian stuff. The
cyborgs deliberately mixed prisoners of distinct linguistic groups to oblige
them to speak Dibadian to each other.
Sep nodded. The cyborgs are manipulators, he said. The prisoners who
learnt Dibadian quickly and used it with their children were given more food,
and they were better treated.
Somewhat clumsily, he tried to lift Immalda's spirits:
_ We in Padzaland and in the other countries,
we are hypocrites. Similar camps still exist now. We are always reluctant to
give shelter to the camp inmates. The Niemelagans feed them and house them at
their own expense, which is rather kind of them if you ask me, and they are
eager to let them go to whatever country is willing to receive them. But very
few countries accept to give shelter to the prisoners. Look, those people would
be starving elsewhere. In the Niemelagan camps, at least they have enough to
eat. Well, sort of. Women are only allowed one child before compulsory
sterilization, which means that the population of the camps will disappear in
the long run. The cyborgs are patient, their lives are
much longer than ours.
_ Niemelaga is a Padzan protectorate. How can we Padzans put up with
this...? Immalda said.
_ The internees are housed and fed. Not
everyone is so lucky, in our oil-depleted world. Padzaland won't give shelter
to people who are neither Padzan nor at risk of
starving or being killed. The internees can leave whenever they want, provided
another country accepts to let them in. But usually even their own countries
won't let the internees back, and many ones fear persecution or destitution if
they return. That's why they stay in the camps, Sep replied.
Immalda still looked glum. Sep kissed her again, and she kissed him back.
"You live with another woman" she said gently. He wondered what she
meant. Immalda was a selfish, hedonistic, self-centered person, not the kind of
woman who cares about other women. Sep gathered that she meant that if they had
an affair it would be brief.
_ We're not in Padza anymore, he replied.
What's happening now will be our secret.
The train entered a tunnel, and after a while it stopped along a
platform in an underground station. Sep and Immalda walked out of the carriage
with their luggage, amid hundreds of people, some of whom spoke Padza's French
language rather than the local Dibadian.
In the station all the signs were written in the quaint Dibadian
alphabet, which Sep could read, albeit slowly and uneasily. He had brought a
dictionary of the Dibadian language and he had learnt a few sentences. Immalda
knew nothing of the Dibadian language or alphabet. Unlike Sep, she loathed the
Dibadians, whose culture was so different from hers.
There were militiamen in brown uniforms everywhere in the station. They
checked every carriage after the passengers had left. Niemelaga has a
non-immigration treaty with Padzaland and enforces it seriously.
_ We must take the red subway line towards
Polatli station, and then we change at Chetencheti and we take the yellow line
to Phalang, where our hotel is, Sep said. I have a map of the city, with the
subway lines.
They stood in line for five minutes to buy subway tickets with the
Dibadian money they had been given in Padza for their mission, and they walked
down long corridors and escalators. Eventually they found the subway platform
they were looking for.
As always in Dibadi, there were many passengers in the carriage, people
of all possible physical types, but seemingly all speaking Dibadian.
Sep had never heard the sounds of the Dibadian language before. It is
spoken only in Niemelaga. Foreign trade is conducted in French. Niemelaga is a
rich country, which exports electricity and agricultural products and imports
technology and information. Only cyborgs travel abroad, as businessmen,
scientists and diplomats. There are not many of them, and they all speak
perfectly the language of the country they work with. Few foreigners travel to
Niemelaga: diplomats, who usually rely on French or English in their dealings
with their cyborg counterparts, and several thousand scientists, engineers and
highly qualified technicians who are usually hosted by the Dibadian
institutions which use them. They seldom stay for more than a year or two.
Tourism isn't encouraged, and immigration, nearly always illegal, usually leads
to destitution and internment in camps.
Every Padzan has read scary stories about those new camps, which house
several hundred thousand inmates. The internees stay there until another country
accepts to give them shelter and pay for their travel. Since most of the
internees came to Dibadi in a desperate attempt to escape extreme poverty, very
few of them can afford the journey back home. Unlike their counterparts of the
previous century, their children are denied the opportunity to settle in
Dibadi.
A Hungarian linguist named Budai spent several years in one of those new
camps and wrote his memoirs, whose first volume is called Épépé – which means
"the baby" in Dibadian - after he managed to fly back to Hungary.
Budai was mentally disturbed. He slept for ten hours in a plane headed for
The Dibadians are keen to maintain normal relationships with foreign
countries, and the internees are correctly, albeit, frugally fed. Housing is
crappy, though, the prisoners sleep in hangars and sheds, and hygiene is
minimal. The camps are regularly visited by foreign diplomats and Red Cross
officials. Budai was thus rescued, when he had an opportunity to talk to a Red
Cross delegation.
The Hungarian linguist had learnt Dibadian in the camp. In his memoirs
he recalls how the language eluded him when he accidentally arrived in Dibadi.
What he heard as "Yéyé tléouatlan... Mouhoula tlalali" was in fact
"Tete tlahanili quolan... Man halu tlalalang wik" which means
"Dear little foreign ear... A guy without a mother tongue, aren't
you?"
The Dibadian language is by no means mysterious. It is a daughter
language of Chinook Jargon, a trade language used between Amerindians and
Europeans in the American North-West in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century.
Dibadian has a pronunciation of its own, and many loanwords of unknown origin.
The vocabulary has become quite large, but the grammar retains much of the
simplicity of its humble beginnings. The alphabet is the Deseret
alphabet, used for a decade by the Mormons in the 19th century. Sep had read
articles by linguists who postulated that the creators of the cyborgs were a
19th or 20th century group of scientific wizards who knew both Chinook Jargon
and the Deseret alphabet and combined them as a code for communicating with the
artificial brains they had created. Eventually that code,
enriched with thousands of words and altered to suit the syntactical and
phonetic tastes of its creators, became the Dibadian language.
Judging from Budai's book, it is obvious that like most people, Budai
had never heard of the independent State of
Sep and Immalda walked out of Phalang subway station, a short distance
from their hotel, an eighteen storey building in south-west Dibadi.
The street was very busy, with noisy, chattering, jostling hordes of
pedestrians on the sidewalks and automobiles on the street. People kept pouring
out of the buildings, looking for restaurants, cafés, shops, or maybe the
nearest bus or subway station. Clerks and secretaries clad in dark coats,
students in cheap, gaudy attire, ubiquitous militiamen in brown uniforms, and
ugly, smelly tramps in worn out rags. The cars, busses and vans were all
electric, as the purring sounds of their engines revealed. The weather was
chilly and dull, a typical Niemelagan winter.
Nobody in the hotel seemed to speak another language than Dibadian, but
a young clerk in a dark uniform, sitting behind a long counter, seemed to
understand the situation when Sep showed him his and Immalda's identity cards
and said several times the Dibadian word for "reservation". The clerk
opened a ledger, raised his eyebrows and handed one key to Sep and another one
to Immalda. Each key had a copper ball attached to it by a short metal chain,
with a number on the ball, obviously the number of a room. The rooms were on
different floors: Sep's key had number 169 and Immalda's had number 153.
They took the elevator, first to Sep's room, then to Immalda's. The
rooms were small but tidy and convenient, each with its own bathroom. They left
their luggage in the rooms and decided to have lunch in the neighborhood.
While they were in Immalda's room, they fell into each other's arms and
began kissing and caressing each other tenderly. Immalda was strangely
submissive, a far cry from the authoritarian boss she was in Padza. It was Sep
who decided to stop:
_ We must have lunch first and then go to the
Polatli office of the militia. Our appointment is at
They walked out of the hotel hand in hand. Immalda had a happy, proud
look on her face. As far as he was concerned, Sep was quite willing to have sex
with Immalda, but not a serious affair. She had hinted that she was of a
similar mind. So far so good.
Sep was both attracted and repelled by several characteristics of the
Dibadian language: it is the only artificial language which became the first
language of millions of people; the only Amerind language spoken outside of the
So far, the Dibadians Sep and Immalda had met looked at ease with their
language. The oldest of them had probably spoken other tongues with their
parents, when the Niemelagan countryside was populated by humans. Their
teachers had been friendly-looking but ruthless female cyborgs in camp schools.
They had used Dibadian to play with children of different linguistic origin.
Nevertheless, the internees had taken their revenge: they had grown
their own accent. The precise, contrived pronunciation of the cyborgs had
become an indistinct, gruff jabbering in the mouths of the second generation.
Opaque slang and crude idioms had sprouted up like mold in a damp cellar. The
internees had shown that they didn't want to resemble the cyborgs, even in
speech. Dibadian had become their language, and they had stamped their mark on
it. Each camp had its own accent, but when the internees were dispersed and
resettled at random in Dibadi, the dialects had merged into a single, common
standard.
The cyborgs had followed suit. They knew that language, like nature
itself, is too complex to be recreated by amateur linguists working with pens,
paper and dictionaries. They had picked up the new accents and styles of
expression, ugly as they were to their ears. But they had stuck to the core of
the language: its phonology, basic grammar and the five thousand words of the Elementary
Dictionary of the Dibadian Language.
Sep and Immalda found a cheap self-service restaurant and they had their
lunch there. Dibadi is a recent city with no culture of its own, except its
artificial, constructed language and state religion, and visitors are sure to
find the same familiar international, smallest common denominator cuisine
everywhere. It suited Sep and Immalda perfectly.
Yet, Immelda felt something wasn't quite right:
_ Sep, it looks like they've added sugar to everything. Even to the
meat. That's weird.
_ In his memoirs Budai wrote that he noticed
that, too, Sep replied. I've read somewhere that the Niemelagans add chemicals
to their crops and they feed their cattle, chicken and fish with stuff mixed
with chemicals. Those chemicals alter the taste of the food, they make it taste
sweet. They also have less benign effects: they cause sterility in the long
run, and birth defects. Most of those chemicals are illegal in Padzaland,
understandably. The cyborgs don't care, they have artificial bodies. Bad food
doesn't do them any harm. And the humans here have no choice...
_ Sep! Why didn't you tell me...
_ Don't worry. The Dibadians have eaten those chemicals for several generations,
and there are still nine millions of them. There's an impressively high
proportion of morons and cripples among them, by the way. Maybe it's a
coincidence...
_ Don't try to frighten me, it's not funny. Gosh, I'm glad we're here
for two days only. I'm not hungry anymore.
Sep kissed her, and she seemed to relax. They left the restaurant and
rode an overloaded subway train to Polatli station.
After a short walk, with Sep nervously studying the map, they saw the
office of the militia. It was a big, square, gray concrete building, with high,
barred windows, and a large, arched entrance. Looking inside, they saw brown
vans and cars parked in a yard. They all had the Niemelagan flag, with the red
and black stripes and stylized white starling, painted on their sides.
Two militiamen wearing long dark coats stood in front of the entrance.
Sep showed them his Padzan detective card, and said the words "Padzan
police" in Dibadian. One of the militiamen, a tall, slim black man, waved
them inside and pointed a gloved finger towards a door, while saying something
which Sep didn't understand.
END OF EPISODE ONE
