Scene 4

Stone-First (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

Time: 2832 UCSD, the survey's second year on the ground
Location: Fliade — the deep networks below the equatorial band, and the upper levels where the survey works

The youngest went to sleep after that, in the warm, quickly, the way the young do when they have carried something a long way and put it down.

Stone-First went back to the margin.

Nothing had happened, in the sense that mattered. Nobody had been hurt. Nothing had been taken. A small one had stood in a stranger's light and come home with a story, and the story was true, and it was short, and it was theirs. Stone-First had heard worse tellings from people three times the youngest's size.

But Stone-First kept the margin, and keeping the margin means noticing what has changed at it, and something had. For the whole time the up-people had been below the roof, the people had known where the up-people were and the up-people had not known where the people were, and that had been the shape of things, and it had held. Now a small one had been close enough to be touched by their light. Now a small one knew a thing about them that they did not know about themselves.

That was still the same shape. It was just closer.

Above, a long way up, past the squeeze and the runners' ground, the humming stone hummed at the junction where the up-people had left it, asleep, the way they leave things. The youngest had not touched it.

Not yet.

Discussion