Metal cylinder burn through world. Fiery screams. Awe. Terror. Much death.
Silence.
The hot thing stand on The Under. Then. Open. Emerging, moving.
New sounds: “. . . and remove your helmets. . . Wow, this is fantastic; get a few lungfuls of this atmosphere. . . Better than Earth’s. . . I could breathe this all day. . .”
Families. Friends. Mutilated. Gone.
(Editor’s Note: We hope this story, translated by Andrew McCann, will be the first in a series we will call “The Best Alien Fiction.” Thithp’s tale, considered a horror classic on the Blipp homeworld, as well as many other planets, was “written” four standard-years ago by Thithp into the Blipp Collective Gas, soon after the chaos of First Contact. For this series, “Noses” was translated directly from the Blipp Odor-Tongue using a specially configured SonyIBM Universal Translator.*
Next issue, we hope to present another chilling tale, this time from a writer on a newly discovered world — Riw in Sector IV. Excerpted from an 800-page novel by Ceh Ff of the Soil People, this menacing story is titled, “Treads.”)
Link to original story (1994): http://planetmag.com/pm1/noses.htm
About the Author and Artist: Andrew G. McCann is from the future. Nothing more may be revealed.
(c) 1994-2006 by Andrew G. McCann andy@planetmag.com
