The youngest (Pandoid, the deep networks)

This is told the way things are told below the roof, and it begins with a question, because the youngest had one and could not put it down.

The youngest had a telling now. A short one: three small loud people who looked at their lights and never turned round. It had been heard, by Stone-First first and then by others, and one of the others had told it to someone who had not been there, and that is the moment a telling stops being a thing that happened to you and becomes the people's. The youngest had lain in the warm and listened to their own telling being told by somebody else, and it had been like hearing your own footsteps come back off a far wall.

But the question was not about that. The question was about the humming stone.

The up-people had set it down at the junction and gone away. They did that. They went up the long passage toward where the air went cold, all three, and stayed away a telling or two, and came back. And all that time the humming stone sat where they had left it, on the floor, asleep.

Nobody in the deep leaves a sleeping one. It is not a rule. It is too plain to need to be a rule. If a small one falls asleep in the wrong place you sit with them, or you carry them into the warm, and you do not walk off up a passage and leave them on the stone in the cold. The youngest had thought about this for a whole telling and could not make it come right. The up-people talked to the humming stone. They knelt to it. They were pleased when it hummed. And then they left it alone in the dark as if it were nothing to them at all.

So the youngest went to the margin and asked Stone-First, who was there, because Stone-First is always there.

"Why don't they ask?"

Stone-First did not answer at once. Stone-First never did, on the grounds that an answer given quickly is usually an answer you already had lying about.

"Nobody has told them anything," said Stone-First.

The youngest waited, in case there was more, and there was.

"You know what we are called."

The youngest did. Everybody did. It is the first thing a small one is told, before the first warm seep, before anything. The people are called the Told. It is a name of the same kind as Stone-First, the first true thing said of them that everyone went on saying: they were told. A runner is not told anything. A runner is born knowing where the grazing is, and bellows, and that is the whole of what a runner has to say. But a person is told. You are told the first warm seep and the long dark and the coming of the up-people, and every telling before that back to where the tellings run out, and when you can tell them yourself without a mistake, you are one of the Told. That is what it means. There is no other way in.

"The up-people have not been told," said Stone-First. "Not by us. Not by anyone, that I can see, or they would move a stone. They are people who have not been told. That is a different thing from not being people. Keep the difference. It is easy to drop."

"Then why doesn't somebody tell them?"

"How would you begin?"

And the youngest, who had been going to say by telling them, stopped, because that was not the beginning of a telling and everybody knew it. A telling begins before the words. It begins with a stone. You move a stone, and the ground tells whoever is standing on it that you are there, and only then does anyone say anything, because you cannot be told by somebody you do not know is there.

The up-people could not hear the ground. That was the youngest's own finding, from the first time, the one Stone-First had said was not theirs yet.

But they could hear the humming stone. They listened to it the way the people listen to the ground. They knelt to it and it hummed and they were glad.

The youngest did not say any of this. Some thoughts you carry up the passage with you, and see whether they are still true at the top.

The youngest moved a stone, properly this time, at the foot of the squeeze, and went up.