The Night of Kadar

by Garry Kilworth

Genres: Horror; Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

After roving through space for centuries, a starship unburdens its cargo of human embryos on a harsh new world. They quickly grow to maturity in the ship's artificial womb. A lifetime of Earth memories is programmed into their dreams. But before their indoctrination is complete, an alien intruder infiltrates and destroys the system, and the reason for the odyssey is never learned. Now, on a verdant island surrounded by quicksand, Othman, wanderer, dreamer, and self-proclaimed leader of the Earthling band, builds a mighty bridge to span the ocean of molten mud that keeps them from the world beyond. He has yet to face the deadly toll his quest will take on the delicate ecology of the planet - or the revolt of his beautiful, strong-willed wife, Silandi. And he has yet to discover the hidden knowledge locked deep within their hearts.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 198

Sample

There is a click. A thousand years have passed since such a sound echoed through the starship. It is a lonely sound, limited by the volume of air which surrounds it and, it could be argued, no sound at all since it falls on no ears. If there is no one to hear the tree toppling in the forest, then the fall is silent. Suns are the mute lions of the universe, their roaring contained by the vacuum that envelops them. Like the roaring of the suns, the starship’s click is contained within its producer and goes unheard by any form of organic life.

But the ship itself hears the click, or rather feels it which is the same thing, and it knows that its ancillary homers have found and locked-on to the solar system which is likely to contain the Earthworld. The ship begins its analysis of the available data: number of planets, size of sun, density of individual worlds, planes of ellipses. Eventually for the first time since launching, and through several of those sudden clicks, a world has appeared on the tapes which is suitable for habitation. If it had been capable of such an act the ship would have heaved a long sigh of relief. The timeless journey seemed near its end. The final duty could begin.

Only the low electrical hum of the wide-awake equipment plays around the empty cabins and gangways. In the lightless storage quarters, food containers are stacked squarely and held fast to walls by strong clips: unused styli fill the drawers, and strapped reference tapes line the walls. Everything is clean and neat and was last touched by the hand of a Final Checker not long before the ship had broken clear of Earth’s atmosphere—thousands of years in the past. Throughout the ship cocooned equipment, from the largest crane engine to the smallest needle, awaits the manipulations of non-existent human fingers. The first steps have already been taken towards forming those fingers and the ship begins the continuance of that process.

Deep in the artificial uteri embryos rapidly begin to warm to life from their previously frozen state. The process of birth to the yet unborn two thousand residents of the starship’s mother units is accelerated and each embryo in turn becomes a foetus. Eyes, noses and mouths begin to form. Fluids begin flowing, pulses press against elastic arteries, lungs begin to draw breath from the rich air.

The click is no longer alone. It is joined by the noise that issues from hundreds of small throats. A banshee screaming that would send any aware person on board the ship stark raving mad. But there is no awareness—only unconscious children who race towards adolescence and puberty in their plastic cells. Growth rate is accelerated to forty times its normal speed.

Education is in progress. The adults who finally emerge from the cells must be aware of the planet that spawned them. They require a general knowledge of its history. They need their own specialized information which will make them skilled professionals. Above all, they need the knowledge of their purpose for being alive at all.

It is well. Everything moves smoothly towards the finalization of the overall plan. All is in order. The incubator cossets its young; the intelligence units feed their captive pupils with knowledge; the teacher presents them with stimulating material and searches for the expected behavioural changes in their simulated childhoods; voices cry out from dreams with all the babbling of Nimrod’s tower; ears hear; fingers grasp; the integument encircles the whole, and carries it towards a promised world. Good. Harmony prevails … Harmony?

Question? No. No. Then, yes. A vague disturbance. Unease? Search and, nothing. Where? Uncertainty. Inspection and correction—the proper procedure. But what? And where? Alert the defences. Tell them … tell them …

The incubator continues its work of weaning and rearing its new batch of charges, the teacher still teaches. What then, is wrong?

The ship automatically checks its shell for a breach, beginning at one end and working along to the other. The process takes several minutes to complete and when it is over the result is negative. There has been no breach.

Yet there is a positive alien identification somewhere on board.

The registration in the defence system is definite and unmistakable. Not an accident, not an explosion, fissure, escape of gas. There is no drive malfunction to correct, no corrosion in the power storage units, no fires, no floods. The problem is not from any inherent source. It is from the outside, and it has entered. A small, indefinable trace of alien presence.

The defence mechanism comes into action. Torpedo motors spring to life, missile launchers swivel their snouts searching for their target, armaments bristle over the whole shell. The ship is a porcupine of destructive tubes.

What? Where? Who?

Nothing. They can find nothing. The ship is as puzzled as a piece of semi-intelligent machinery can be. It continues to search for the foe, testing the space for several thousand kiloms around the area of the ship for anything positive.

Suddenly the sniffing weapons find a target, two thousand kiloms away, and almost joyfully blast it out of existence. The dust cloud spreads out into space. It was a large innocent passing meteor and now it is many minute meteors, but it is not the intruder. The intruder is still on board the ship. No hairline crack is too narrow for the alien presence, no wire too thin. It slides between closed hatchways, it travels like a current through the wires and along the metal walls. The ship cannot stop it for there is nothing tangible to grapple with. It is as insubstantial as a ray of light, yet with microsecond speed it changes its direction, retreats, dissipates and reforms.

The current travels throughout the ship cataloguing all that it discovers and transmitting it back to its remote users. Finally the knowledge is acquired and the decision taken. The ray re-enters the intelligence units and fuses the internal circuitry into one coagulate mass of plastic and metal. The teachers cease to function halfway through delivering a crucial piece of information—they are irreparable.

Othman was born in the middle of the day’s third quarter at the age of thirty Earthyears. He was aware of the sun’s rays, warm upon his olive skin, and he opened his eyes slowly to look down the large beak-like nose, past the bearded chin, at his feet some two metres away.

The feet were also large and Othman regarded them thoughtfully before deciding he knew what they were and for what purpose they were designed. He swung himself into a sitting position and full-face into the direct glare of the sunlight, making his head spin. After a while he was able to disconnect the various tubes and electrodes from his body leaving small, temporary white scars in their places.

Others were also coming to life on the great wheel of the open-lidded uteri which the ship had gently detached from itself and laid in the long grasses. Some were attempting to find their feet—others were merely lying inside the transparent cocoons staring at the yellow sky, adjusting themselves to their new state of awareness.

Yellow? It should be blue—or—no, that was some other sky. A sky Othman had been shown in his dreams, but one he would never see in reality. His head began to clear and he climbed unsteadily to his feet to observe his surroundings.

The starship was busy dismembering itself on a grassy clearing not far from the shores of a vast sea. Behind the starship stretched a forest, mountainous and thick with green and other, brighter colours.

Large waxy leaves of some of the plants denoted the infrequency of rain during part of the planet’s year and rich blooms, unless they were self-pollinating, suggested the presence of at least insect life. Othman studied the blooms intently—some of them were over eighty centimetres in diameter. He hoped the local insects did not follow the same size pattern. But if that boded ill, the fruit harvest would compensate for the danger. He nodded with satisfaction. Someone spoke to him in his native Arabic tongue. It was a woman.

“This is a beautiful place, but so cold!”

She turned her dark eyes upon Othman and his response was almost immediate. He said quickly, “How do you know what cold is? Beauty yes, you have seen beauty in your mind—but coldness? Perhaps this is a normal temperature for our bodies to cope with but they have not yet adjusted to being outside the uterus?”

When she saw his hostility she was puzzled but reacted similarly.

“I can tell it’s cool because I feel uncomfortable. You are also wrong about beauty. We only think what we see is beautiful because the starship has told us what our ancestors considered beautiful. We must follow the guidelines set by our forebears because they’re the only ones we have …”

“Wrong,” interrupted Othman brusquely. “It’s beautiful because … it makes me feel comfortable.

They both smiled at this.

“We’re lucky,” said Othman, looking at the forests once more. “They need not have been guidelines—we could have been indoctrinated to accept everything, as we found it here, as perfect. But we were given the chance to decide. A narrow choice I’ll grant, for those who sent us were indoctrinated by their own environments and influenced by their own ancestors—but they gave us as much of an unprejudiced choice of what is, or is not beautiful, as they had themselves.”

He moved away from her dark warm body then, for she was beginning to disturb him.

Othman roamed among the waking bodies, occasionally stumbling; like a new-born foal, he had no confidence in his legs. He paused by a man who was donning a blue robe.

“Where are the garments?” he asked the man.

The other pointed to a place where some canisters lay, their tops unclipped and folded cloth poking from their openings. Othman wondered, as he crossed to the canisters, whether some petty pilfering might now take place. Each person was surely entitled to at least two robes—one to wear and one to wash—but some might be tempted to take and hoard more. However, all the robes were blue and all were of the same cut and fabric. There would be no point in stealing. Soon they would be able to design and weave different styles—when the looms were available.

His eyes swung towards the starship which was in the process of carefully taking itself apart and manufacturing new equipment with the parts. The cannibalization units were neatly cutting the shell of the ship into panels which would later be used as tractor bodies and moulded into hollow girders for the necks of cranes. Wiring was stripped from the ship’s circuitry for use in vehicles and to provide lighting until accommodation was built. Cannibalization was pre-programmed and the peculiar units with their cutting beams and multi-jointed arms would form part of the general assembly of vehicles and machines that would remain after the metamorphosis had been completed.

Othman watched an engine being craned from the ship’s interior where it had been nestling in its packing for thousands of Earthyears. That was another thing, thought Othman. They were going to have to devise their own system of measuring time.

He dismissed it from his mind—there were too many other aspects of their new world to think about.

Pulling on the robe he had acquired for himself, he moved amongst the crowd staring at the faces. Amongst them, somewhere, was his wife’s. He would find her later. What he was looking for now was someone with bearing—someone in authority. Most of the faces belonged to tradesmen, who were distinguishable by their muscular frames and large hands. Othman was an engineer. He had no need for muscles.

Finally he came across a thickset man who was issuing orders and looked as though he had been out of his uterus for longer than most.

“Scouts, gather to me,” the man was calling. “I am Said Rak, Master-at-Arms and leader of this party …”

“What are you doing?” asked Othman.

“Are you a scout?” retorted the Master-at-Arms.

Othman snorted. “Do I look like one?”

The other man began to scrutinize him so he added, “I’m an engineer.”

“Time enough later for engineers,” said Said Rak. “Now we must set up the defences. Post sentries and ensure that we are not taken by surprise by any natives.”

“Aren’t you over-reacting?” suggested Othman gently.

“The ship would not have landed if there had been traces of technological development in the atmosphere …”

It was the other’s turn to regard Othman coolly. “Spears can kill as surely as guns,” he replied. “Listen to a leader’s words.”

Othman remained silent. He was moving away from his own field of knowledge into one relatively unknown to him and he had to be careful of not making a fool of himself.

“Why do you regard yourself as the leader of this, what shall I call us, tribe?” he finally finished asking.

“Because I am,” replied Said Rak simply. “It’s in my mind. Is the suggestion in yours?”

Othman had to admit that it was not, but he was puzzled. Something was not quite right but he could not put his finger on the reason for his apprehension. There was something missing somewhere. He voiced his opinion to the so-called head of the group. The Master-at-Arms replied, “You’re right in that assumption. Look over there.” He pointed to the wheel of the uteri. Othman looked but could see only people, some of them evidently younger than himself, either lying or sitting around on the grass.

“Well?” he finally answered. “I see nothing unusual.”

“Look at their faces. Hard.”

Othman stared, first at one, and then another, and finally he reached a conclusion. The distance between himself and the people he was regarding was considerable but the signs were, once the faces had been brought to his attention, unmistakable. The open mouths and the inarticulate limbs.

“They look …” It was a horrible thought he had to voice and he naturally hesitated. “Some of them look like morons.”

“Right,” said the Master-at-Arms emphatically. “Idiots of the first degree. Not an ounce of brains among them—the young ones that is. We’ll have to get a doctor to look at them later and then decide what’s to be done with them.”

A newly-spawned tractor trundled to life and crossed the clearing to take its place as first in a line of vehicles. One of the young men in question rolled accidentally in its path and stared at it, uncomprehending. The tractor stopped obediently, then after a short wait cautiously circumnavigated the human. The idiot watched it go round him, then giggled and sat up and down hard, knocking all the wind out of his body and changing his expression immediately. Othman winced.

“How in God’s name has this happened?” he said, more to himself than to Said Rak.

“I can answer that too,” replied Said Rak, “though I can’t answer why. You’ll have to find that out, being an engineer. The reason we are blessed with these clowns is that the intelligence units ceased functioning at a certain stage in their development. For us there was no damage done—our education was completed. But the second batch of births, those whose embryos thawed later than our own, had nothing fed to their brains whatsoever. They’re apparently stupid though I imagine we can teach them something—they’re like fully-grown babies …”

“This is terrible,” said Othman. “You found this out from the ship presumably?”

“Yes, I’ve been awake longer than most. Before the ship began its transformation I made a tour of inspection—there were red lights on the panels below the words Intelligence Units. They were the only red lights on the whole vast indicator board. All the others were green. I kept it in mind and later put two and two together…”

Othman was dismayed. And everything, it had seemed, had been going so well! He informed the Master-at-Arms that he, Othman, would not be the one to diagnose the reason for the fault in the units as he was an engineer, not a technician—but he would certainly be interested in the cause of the fault. Would Said Rak keep him informed? The soldier promised he would.



Silandi was certain to be beautiful: both her parents had been so and there was a heritage of beauty throughout the history of both families. Her father had been a high-ranking Arab and had never been nearer to her Indian mother than a thousand miles, since one had once passed through Muscat while the other was in Bombay. As perversity would have it, it was the father who had lived in Bombay. He was the son of an army colonel who had settled in the east after the war. The mother was a member of one of those nomadic Asiatic families that distrusted the stability of a city life which, once the bombs began to fall, proved to be the most unstable of all.

In Silandi’s simulated childhood on board the starship, however, her mother and father had lived and worked together, lavishing love on their growing daughter in a big white-walled house situated on the green shores of a large Arabian island.

Silandi was a trained architect. Her skin was a flawless dusty brown and her eyes the blue-black of a tropical mussel shell. She was the wife of Othman.

By the time Silandi had rested on the grass beside her uterus and had gained the strength to walk, cranes, tractors and bulldozers stood like a small army ready to move against the virgin countryside. She too noticed the large blossoms that Othman had seen, and her observations included large thread-like worms with wings but she had no fear of giant insects.

Once erect and with her hair tied tightly behind and falling like a thick black rope down her back to her buttocks, Silandi went in search of her husband. After several enquiries she was told he had last been seen walking down towards the sea. She went to join him after securing a robe.



Othman was staring out over a vast sea of bubbling silt towards a distant shore—a land barely visible from where they stood and distorted by heat waves rising from the mud.

“What is it?” a woman asked, moving to his side. Indo-Arabic from her colouring, he decided.

“What is what?” he replied, rather inanely, and then saw that the person who had intruded on his private thoughts was looking at the mud.

“Oh, that! It appears to be some sort of mineral disturbance—like lava from a volcano. Only this seems to be a more permanent activity. You’ll notice later that our only river flows out onto the mud, over there, behind that peninsula”—-he pointed towards the place, but the water was hidden from their view—“and then I suppose it spreads out over the surface and evaporates to begin the cycle once again.”

The woman narrowed her eyes, trying to peer across the sea of bubbles that burst into sprays of sandy gelatinous fluid and left acrid smells weaving through the air.

“What interests you so much?” she finally asked.

Othman did not reply directly. Instead he asked, “Is that a range of mountains over there? Can you see?”

She looked again.

“It could be hills, falling down towards the shoreline—but you need a distance viewer to see properly. Why don’t you go and get one if you’re so interested?”

He was mildly irritated by her lack of imagination.

“I shall later—but it won’t help. The heat waves will distort the images—and then there’s the steam …”

Othman lapsed into silence for a while. Then when she did not leave him he asked, “What’s your name? It’s not Silandi?”

She nodded, smiling up into his face.

“Then you’re my wife?”

She nodded again but received no return smile. . . .