Where the Tellings Run Out

Status: A telling, rendered by the record the way the Below the Roof thread is rendered; held by nobody in the record; valid for its author

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The record's note

What follows was told standing up, in the warm below the roof of Fliade, by Went-Round, to everyone there. Nobody of the survey heard it. Nobody took it down, and nobody translated it; the Told keep nothing in any form that can be taken down. The record renders it as it renders every telling of the Told: in translation, with the people's names in hyphens and not one word of the people's speech, and it marks that it has done so. The telling is kept by the ones who heard it. That is its provenance, and it is the only kind the Told have.

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This is told the way things are told below the roof, by someone who was there. Only this time I am going to go round the tellings, not through them. Everyone in this warm can tell them. So I am going to stand up and say where each one is, and what it is for, in order, from where they run out to the coming of the up-people, and then stop, because after that there is somebody here who was there, and it is theirs.

Where they run out

Go back past the first warm seep, and there are still tellings. They are short. They get shorter. The last one is one breath long, and it has no place in it. You cannot go to it, the way you can go to the seep. It is a telling about warmth, and not about a warm. Nobody was there. That is what running out means: not that the tellings stop, but that they stop having anybody in them.

The small ones do not like them, because there is nobody to be. I did not. I have gone round them since, and they have no other side. A telling with nobody in it is still a telling. It is just not anybody's.

The first warm seep

Then the seep, which is the first telling with a place in it, and the place is still there. That is why it is long. Nothing in it is a reason, and everything in it is a thing: the warmth coming up out of the ground on its own, the way down, the amber thickest at the bottom, the manners for a beginning, which are that you may go to it and you do not sleep on it. You cannot take anything out of it without making a different telling about less. So it is told whole, and it is the one we measure by.

Who found the seep is in the telling, said in full there and nowhere else, which is the right number of places.

The long dark

The long dark is before the fungus came. There was warmth and there was ground, and that was all there was to go by, and the people went by it. The warm was lost. That is most of the telling: the losing, and the going by the ground, and the going on. The part where the warm is found again comes late, and every small one who is counting a thing through by the long dark knows the place, because it is where you stop being afraid. Then the fungus came, amber on one wall and blue-green on the other, and it has been like that since, and nobody looks at it.

The small ones like this one least and the old ones like it best. I have gone round that. The old ones know where the warm is found again. The small ones are still counting toward it.

The manners

The manners are two. Move a stone first. Leave a place to a stranger until they ask. They are short, and they were made when everything below the roof was one or the other: a stranger, who is announced by the ground, or a person, who asks.

Who made them is not in any telling. So I will give you what I have, and it is mine. Somebody moved a stone for nobody, because they liked the ground saying someone. Somebody else heard it, and waited for it, and liked that. So they did it again. Then it was a thing you did. Then it was a thing you had to do. That is how a thing becomes manners: a game somebody played seriously until everyone was playing it. Nobody was there for it, so it is not settled, and I do not ask you to settle it.

The Told

The people are called the Told. It is the first thing a small one is told, before the seep, before anything. It is a name of the same kind as every name we have: the first true thing said of us that everybody went on saying. We were told. A runner is not told anything. A runner is born knowing where the grazing is. A person is told the seep and the long dark and everything before them back to where they run out, and when they can tell them all without a mistake, they are one of us. There is no other way in.

A stranger is somebody who has not yet been told. Hold on to the yet. It is the whole of the manners, and it is the part that is easy to drop.

The coming of the up-people

Then the last of the old tellings, and the only one I was there for, which is why I am the one standing up.

The light came down the long passage. It swung. Nothing below the roof swings. Something went across the floor ahead of the light, dark, and moving, and moving no stone, and the old ones went back from it before they went back from the light. The small ones learned a word that season. A shadow. A thing that moves, and moves no stone. We had the word already. We had never needed it for anything that stood up.

Then the loud. Then three of them, small, in the upper levels, with lights that moved and a humming stone they left asleep on the floor. They were in our place for longer than the first warm seep takes to tell, many times over. We left it to them. They did not ask. Stone-First said, in that time, the truest thing anyone said in it, and it went round: they are people who have not been told. That is a different thing from not being people. That is what was said then.

That is where the old tellings end. Everything after it, somebody in this warm was there for, and the youngest of us then carried the next one through the squeeze, and you have heard it from them, and you will not hear it from me.

Stopping

I have gone round the tellings and there is nothing on the far side of them but us. I thought there would be a reason. There is not. There are the tellings, and the ones who were there, and the ones who were told, and that is the whole of what we are, and it is a great deal.

You have heard this. So it is yours now. Go round it. When you have found the other side, tell me, standing up.

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The record's note, continued

Held as a telling and not as a document. The record has set nothing in it to a year, and has nothing to set: the Told keep no day, and a telling measures itself by other tellings. It carries nothing the survey has recorded, copied or heard, and it stops before the first thing the record's own log holds from the line. Three things in it the record already carries in the thread's own voice: the people's name and how one comes to bear it, the two manners and the word for a stranger, and the shadow ahead of the light. The manners' beginning is the author's, and is left unsettled, as the author left it. The rest is the Told's, and the record has not been told it.

See also: The Told, Fliade, Went-Round, Stone-First, Carried-It-Sleeping, Below the Roof, Marked Absences.