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:

First Contact

 

They came in peace.

 

The Zylv ship—sprawling, sinister, and elegant—entered the Solar System on a tight, sun-grazing vector, exiting and re-entering repeatedly over the next twenty years, dumping velocity with every passage. All the while radiating attempts across the electromagnetic spectrum to communicate with whomever might be living here: One plus one equals two. Two times two is four. The square of the hypotenuse. Pi. The Fibonacci sequence. Quadratic equations. Chaos theory. A form of combinatorics no one could make any sense of.

 

Earth responded as best we could. Once the conversation moved beyond mathematics, it became obvious how different the Zylv were from Terran lifeforms. Slowly, painfully, a common pidgin was created. Neither species learned much about the other. But by the time the Zylv ship—dark, gothic, and miles-long—had settled into 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 a junior assistant nobody on the first embassy mission to the Zylv ship. The interior was humid and murkily lit, which made sense because we knew already that the Zylv came from a planet orbiting a red sun. The air smelled like a cross between turpentine and the reptile house in the zoo. At the far end of an improbably large space were creatures—the Zylv, we assumed, though our token biologists thought they were six different species—that moved listlessly, like so many barnyard animals, and did not approach us.

 

There was also a large screen. On it, a word: WELCOME. Our spokesperson began a carefully composed speech in pidgin.

 

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

 

Then two more: NOW LEAVE.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

BREATHE the Zylv had commanded.

 

And, like fools, we’d obeyed.

 

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