Morsels
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
As promised, here is a second piece of autofanfiction as a thank-you to my readers! This story may or may not be canon, but either way, it has a Sispirinithas.
NOTE: This story contains ENDING SPOILERS for THE INFINITE. If you’d rather not read the spoilers but would like some exciting book-launch-related news, you can jump to the end of the post. There’ll be a big graphic; you can’t miss it.
Just as the battle-lights in the sky above him reached their peak, there was a sudden burst of static from the communicator Sispirinithas carried with him, and then the device went dark.
"Excuse me," said Sispirinithas, even though there was no one around to hear him. He shifted his large, spidery body in dismay. Sispirinithas had been crouching in a little cave in a forested ravine, just outside the Chaos Zone and safely sheltered from all but the most direct hits. If things went according to plan, there wouldn't be direct hits to this side of the planet. Just outside the cave lay the array of sensors he'd carefully laid out in hopes of getting in touch with Enga.
The translator device that hung around his pedicel translated the words from Sispirinithas' first language to Earth creole, but the communications device paired with it did not send them. No signal, it said.
How could there be no ansible signal? Curious. Something must have gone wrong for the Gods - perhaps a small thing, or perhaps a very large one indeed.
Sispirinithas squinted out of the cave, with the topmost pairs of his eight eyes, at the sky. It looked as though the light show had also stopped.
He did not wish to be hasty, but this bore investigation. Cautiously, tensed to leap back into the cave at the first sign of trouble, he picked his way out through the gravel and rubble at the mouth of the cave into the messy scrub and greenery lining the bottom of the ravine. There were definitely no more of those strange lights. His sensory array displayed the same strange pattern of failurs as his personal equipment. Autonomous devices, like radar, were still working fine for the moment. Anything that relied on the ansible network had failed.
There in the undergrowth, he paused, just to see if he was about to be obliterated in a fiery blast. If the battle was in fact over, and had not been resolved entirely in the Gods' favor, then that was one strong possibility.
But no blast came. Only the buzzing of insects, chirping of birds, and whisper of small leaves in the wind.
So Sispirinithas skittered out of his ravine and went to check on Jai's humans.
*
The situation in the nearest town - whose name Sispirinithas had forgotten - was pandemonium. Humans were out in the streets in a chaotic crowd, making the hasty movements and high-pitched noises humans made when they were panicked. Sispirinithas did not possess the right kind of mouthparts to speak human languages, but he understood a few of them, and his translator took care of the rest. Through bits and pieces and fragments of shouted speech, he began to piece the facts together.
Of course, Sispirinithas's eight-foot-tall body tended to be distracting for humans. The informative kind of shouting was very heavily mixed with Look, it's a Spider! What is a Spider doing here? Oh, no - it's going to eat us!! Followed, generally, by the humans running away from him at top speed.
Humans and Spiders could peacably work together without killing and/or eating each other. In the trade frontiers, it was more likely than the reverse, because after all, humans had wonderful technology on offer for the right price. They usually took offense to being eaten, unlike Spiders, who considered it an honor in the right circumstances. Spiders who worked with humans had adjusted their behavior accordingly, just as they had done for the eccentricities of the many other species they knew. But here in the human heartland, where most people had never seen a non-human in their life, the humans tended to forget all that nuance.
Sispirinithas clacked his mandibles together patiently. Human xenophobia didn't bother him. In fact, he rather liked the sight of running, screaming humans.
Still, after a while the lack of useful communication became tiresome. Sispirinithas decided to hide in an enclosed garden behind a hedge, off the side of the road. With the help of the directional and volume control on his translator, this became a good place to eavesdrop without being seen, and he was gradually able to put the real pieces together.
Everything connected to the Gods had failed, all at once. Every ansible terminal in the city was down, and likely all over the world. So were the portals, which was troublesome, as humans relied on those not only for travel but for the import and export of basic goods. Angels had fainted away and died before people's eyes. Priests had mostly survived, but their circuitry wasn't working anymore and they were mostly lying on the ground, moaning in pain. And at some point, said some of the more lucid and excited people, there had been a strange message broadcast to the city ansible terminal, one that wasn't from the Gods at all.
Yasira Shien and her friends hadn't simply won this battle. Somehow, they'd overthrown the Gods Themselves.
Sispirinithas took his time to digest this - a little shocked, but not as panicked as the humans. He was a folklorist by training, and there was a familiar rhythm to all this, a set of tyrants overthrown by a ragtag team against all odds. Sispirinithas had never actually worshipped the humans' Gods. He had simply, after a number of mishaps with the Spider authorities, found them a convenient employer.
So now he was out of a job, which was fine, because he had been getting nowhere with his latest assignment anyway. He was out of a job - but here he was, without any higher authority holding his reins, right in the middle of a crowd of running, screaming, delicious-looking humans.
Grinning to himself, Sispirinithas leapt out from behind the hedge in a great ten-legged bound and began to give chase as the screaming humans fled. It was about time he had a proper meal.
Meanwhile:
After some delays that were party my own fault, I can finally announce the in person book launch event for THE INFINITE!
If you are in the Kingston area, come on out!
In other news:
If you missed my panel on Neurodiversity Through Character at TBRcon, you can watch the recorded broadcast here!
THE INFINITE is the very first book mentioned in the “Too Many Favs” video on Shades of Orange!
JamReads describes THE INFINITE as “an absolute experience of a book and a must for lovers of space operas.” You can also read JamReads’ interview with me.