A Taste of The War With the Zylv

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This Saturday at noon, Marianne Porter puts Dragonstairs Press's latest chapbook, The War With the Zylv on sale. That's at noon, East Coast Time. The chapbook is signed, numbered, lovingly stitched, and available for $11 within the US and $13 elsewhere, postage included. 

The story was inspired by Ariel Cinii's artwork reproduced above and used by permission of the artist's estate.

And just so you can have an idea of what the story is like, here's the first of six chapters:

FirstContact

 

They camein peace.

 

The Zylvship—sprawling, sinister, and elegant—entered the Solar System on a tight,sun-grazing vector, exiting and re-entering repeatedly over the next twentyyears, dumping velocity with every passage. All the while radiating attemptsacross the electromagnetic spectrum to communicate with whomever might beliving here: One plus one equals two. Two times two is four. The square of thehypotenuse. Pi. The Fibonacci sequence. Quadratic equations. Chaos theory. Aform of combinatorics no one could make any sense of.

 

Earthresponded as best we could. Once the conversation moved beyond mathematics, itbecame obvious how different the Zylv were from Terran lifeforms. Slowly,painfully, a common pidgin was created. Neither species learned much about theother. But by the time the Zylv ship—dark, gothic, and miles-long—had settledinto a parking orbit around the Moon, it was hoped that with physical contact,it would be possible to move beyond COME VISIT. ALL LEARN.

 

I was ajunior assistant nobody on the first embassy mission to the Zylv ship. Theinterior was humid and murkily lit, which made sense because we knew alreadythat the Zylv came from a planet orbiting a red sun. The air smelled like across between turpentine and the reptile house in the zoo. At the far end of animprobably large space were creatures—the Zylv, we assumed, though our tokenbiologists thought they were six different species—that moved listlessly, like somany barnyard animals, and did not approach us.

 

There wasalso a large screen. On it, a word: WELCOME. Our spokesperson began a carefullycomposed speech in pidgin.

 

The firstword was replaced by a second: BREATHE. As if we had a choice.

 

Then twomore: NOW LEAVE.

 

Thescreen went dead. A partition rose to separate us from the beings that might ormight not be our hosts. Though we stayed far longer than made any sense, therewas no further attempt to communicate on the part of the Zylv.

 

Eventually,because there was no alternative, we went back home to Earth.

 

Quarantinewas supposed to be a formality. But then one of us came down sick. Followedquickly by the rest. A virus, moon-suited biologists told us. Of alien origin.

 

BREATHEthe Zylv had commanded.

 

And, likefools, we’d obeyed.

 

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