“The spinners,” Gahn Thaleo replied. And when one of those lights flew right by my face, jolting me with delight, I realized what I was looking at.
The spinners were basically bugs. Something akin to a firefly, perhaps, but instead of only the back end being lit-up, their butterfly-like wings also glowed, alight with extraordinarily detailed patterns.
“Their wings!” I said, in awe of the intricacies of the glowing patterns now that I’d noticed them.
“Each one is entirely different,” he said.
“Like snowflakes!” I said, laughing as another flew right by my face.
“No,” he said, and I could practically feel the confused frown in his voice. “Snowflakes do not differ from each other that much. I have experienced snow in the heights of the mountains. Some may be a little larger or wetter than others, but ultimately, all snowflakes are the same.”
“No, they aren’t,” I said. “When you use magnifying tools to analyze them, you can see their crystalline structures. They are all unique.”
He seemed to consider this for a time. As he did so, I watched the spinners. Some of them were fluttering around the cave. Others appeared to be hard at work spinning spidery webs.
“Do they catch prey in those webs?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “They subsist off the minerals in the water and on the walls of the cave. Their larvae eat the thread untilthey can fly and feed themselves from the walls or the pools. The patterns of the web always corresponds to the patterns on the wings of the spinner that made it.”
“Really?” I swung my head to look at him, only then noticing he was still holding onto me and was standing very close. He had bent down a little, ostensibly to avoid cracking his skull on a precariously close stalactite, and his face was barely a breath from my own.
“That’s, um, amazing,” I whispered.
“As is what you’ve told me about the snowflakes. I wonder if they are the same here as they are on your world.”
“The same, as in, entirely different?”
“Precisely.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
He studied me. “You know much about it.”
This drew a laugh from me. “Not really. It’s something we’re all told as children.”
That killed my laughter. Because I’d spent my childhood being told about how special snowflakes were. Meanwhile, Gahn Thaleo had been told not to feel anything while he bled.
He’d been told to disappear.
“But I know you are some sort of scholar,” he pressed, as if I’d done myself some disservice by brushing off my knowledge of snowflakes.
“That’s true,” I admitted. “We all are. We all studied different things.”
“What did you make a study of?”
“Poetry,” I said. “I was writing my PhD dissertation on the poetry of diaspora populations in Australia, with a focus on how the shift in climate or natural geography during immigration comes through in literature.”
“Po-et-ry.” He said it in English, just as I had. If there was a Sea Sand or Deep Sky equivalent for the word, I didn’t know it.And I supposed he didn’t, either, because the next moment he asked, “What is it?”
“It’s a type of literature. It’s…It’s a way of using words in an artistic fashion, often adhering to specific forms or poetic principles, in order to express an image or a feeling or an experience. Some poems tell epic stories about heroes. There are oral traditions of poetry as well. Laments, and poems of grief. Or love poems.”
“Love poems,” he repeated, sounding entirely mystified.
“Yeah. Those were Baba’s – my father’s – favourites. He used to write them for my mother.”
“Give me an example.”
I remembered many of Baba’s poems, the lines milling about in my head like unmoored ghosts.
