Went-Round

The name is a telling, on the pattern by which the Told name everyone: the first true thing said of a person that others went on repeating. What was said of this one is that they go round. Where a passage is blocked, Went-Round does not clear it but finds another; where a thought is hard, Went-Round does not finish it but comes at it from the far side to see whether it looks easier from there. It is a good way to be, and Stone-First has always said so, and it is not Stone-First's way. The name is rendered in translation, as every Pandoid name in the record is; the people's word is theirs.

What the Record Holds

Nothing, from the survey's side. The Fliade survey cannot tell one adult from another at the distance it sees them, and has no name for any.

From inside, Someone to Ask (S11E01C03): the adult who said, after the humming stone had been heard and nothing had followed, that a stranger who cannot hear the ground cannot ask, so that leave it to them until they ask is leaving them alone forever and calling it manners — and who, when the youngest brought down the telling of an up-person speaking to the dark, said the truest thing anyone said that night: that nobody had been there for that part, and nobody could be, so it was not a thing the people's way of settling arguments could settle. And, from the far side of the amber in Waiting to Be Asked (S11E01C04), the reading of the waiting that the warm kept: they ask the dark, and we are in the dark, and nobody answers — everybody below the roof keeping manners at everybody else. And in Theirs to Move (S11E01C05), when Stone-First told the up-people's stone and would say only they began, the reply that the warm kept beside it: they asked — and, for once, not from the far side: nobody knows what anybody says until the telling goes on; that is what a telling is.

What the Record Does Not Carry

Their name. A translation of a telling; the people's word is not held.

Their age, and their sex. The record's they is its translation default.

Whether they were right. The chapter gives the argument to nobody. Stone-First's answer was to go and stand on the line, which is neither asking nor waiting for it; Went-Round's objection stands unanswered beside it, and the record has not been told what the Told decided, if they decided anything.

See also: Stone-First, Teddy, Fliade, Below the Roof.