The Told

The Told is the name the Pandoids of Fliade carry for themselves, rendered in the record's translation register. Pandoid is the survey's coinage and is kept in every filing; this is what the people say, as far as the record holds it, which is by way of the Below the Roof thread rather than by anything the survey has been told.

It is a name of the same kind as every other name the people have. Among the Told a person is called by the first true thing said of them that others went on repeating — a telling, worn down to a name by use. Stone-First moves a stone before entering a place, every time. Carried-It-Sleeping carried the survey's relay through the squeeze and it woke, and they held it, and it slept. Went-Round goes round a thing rather than through it. The people's name for the people is made the same way: the first true thing said of all of them is that they were told. A small one is told the first warm seep, the long dark, the coming of the up-people, and every telling before those back to where the tellings run out, and when they can tell them all without a mistake they are one of the Told. There is no other way in.

A name grows. It is not replaced when a truer thing is said of a person later; the truer thing is added, and the name gets longer. A long name is a grown one, and what it shows is clarity and maturity — the person has been seen more exactly, and has become more. The record renders a grown name the way it renders the first one, in translation with hyphens, and does not shorten it.

The name draws the line the people draw. A runner is not told anything. The up-people — the survey — are, in the people's reckoning, people who have not been told, which the Told hold to be a different thing from not being people, and easy to drop.

What the record does not hold. No phonetic form. The people's speech has not been recorded in any medium the Archive keeps, and the thread told from inside is a telling rendered, not a transcription; the record translates their words the way it converts their intervals into UCSD, and marks that it has done so. Whether the people's word is one word or a phrase, the record has not been told. The record's they for an individual is its translation default, not a claim about a pronoun system of their own.

See Fliade for the people, and the Below the Roof chapters — Nobody Looked Up, Carried It Sleeping, Someone to Ask, Waiting to Be Asked and Theirs to Move — for the name in use, including a telling that is a small one's own and names nobody, because it is about somebody else, and the first name the record has watched grow: Stone-First-Who-Waited, said in the warm the night the up-people moved a stone.