Someone to Ask

This is told the way things are told below the roof, and this time the telling begins in the warm, with people disagreeing, which is a thing the Told do not often do and had never before done about the manners.

The stone had been heard. Everybody agreed about that. The up-people had come through the squeeze, and stood at the line, and looked once into the dark, and taken their humming stone, and gone, and had not come past the line since. Stone-First had told it, standing up, and it had been told again by people who had not been there, and so it was the people's.

And then nothing happened, for many tellings, and the nothing was the trouble.

"They cannot ask," said Went-Round.

Went-Round was called that for going round things. Where the passage was blocked, Went-Round did not clear it; Went-Round found another passage. Where a thought was hard, Went-Round did not finish it; Went-Round came at it from the far side and saw whether it looked easier from there. It is a good way to be, and Stone-First had always said so, and it was not Stone-First's way.

"They asked each other," said Went-Round. "That is what the youngest said. All that talking, at the light. They ask each other. But they cannot hear the ground, and so they cannot ask us, because they do not know how, and so the manners say leave them alone until a thing happens that cannot happen. That is not manners. That is leaving them alone forever and calling it manners."

Several people in the warm made the small sound that means that is a thing worth saying, and Stone-First heard it and did not mind it. A thing worth saying is worth saying.

"The manners were made before anyone knew who they would be for," said Stone-First. "That is what makes them manners. If you only keep them for people you are sure of, they are not manners. They are a habit you have with your friends."

"Then they are the wrong manners."

"Perhaps. I have thought about it for longer than you have been alive, and I have not got to the end of the thought, and I am not going to get to the end of it tonight because you are impatient."

That got the sound too, from a different part of the warm, and Went-Round took it well, because Went-Round always did.

But here is the thing about an argument among the Told. It is not settled by who talks best. It is settled by who was there. And nobody in the warm had been where the up-people were, close enough to see, except one, and that one was lying in the warm listening, and had been named for it.

Stone-First turned.

"You said they ask each other. How?"

And Carried-It-Sleeping, who had watched the up-people twice from the edge of their light and could have told you every glowing thing they held and every time one of them laughed, found that they did not know. They had been watching the light. They had not been watching the asking.

"I don't know," said Carried-It-Sleeping, because saying so is also manners.

"Then that," said Stone-First, "is the thing we do not have. Not whether they can. How."

Nobody said go and look. Nobody had to.

Carried-It-Sleeping moved a stone at the bottom of the squeeze, a good one, so that everybody in the warm heard it and knew, and went up.

Two small ones tried to follow. They had been trying since the name. A name does that: the small ones hear a telling being told about someone, and the someone is there, in the warm, and can be followed. Carried-It-Sleeping had not known that a name would come with small ones attached to it. Nobody tells you that part.

"No," said Carried-It-Sleeping, at the foot of the squeeze, and then, because no is not a telling, "you do not fit yet. When you fit, I will take you. Move a stone when you go back, so they know where you are."

The small ones moved stones. Both of them, very loudly. And went back. Carried-It-Sleeping stood a moment at the foot of the squeeze and felt the warm change shape behind them as the small ones left it, and thought: so that is what it feels like. That is what Stone-First feels every time.

Then up, and through, and along the long passage toward the light.

The up-people were there this time. That was what Carried-It-Sleeping had come for. They were at the junction, all three, in their moving light, being loud, and Carried-It-Sleeping stood at the edge of the light where nothing could see them, and did not watch the light, and did not watch the glowing things, and watched, for the whole of a long telling, nothing but the asking.

It was everywhere. Once you were looking for it you could not stop seeing it.

One of them would hold a hand out, empty, toward another. And make a sound. The sound went up at the end, the way a passage goes up toward the cold; you could hear it going up. And then they waited, with the hand out, and the other one put a thing in the hand, and the sound the first one made afterwards went down again, and that was the end of it.

An empty hand. A sound that goes up. Waiting.

They did it for the glowing things. They did it for the humming stone, when one of them wanted it passed. They did it for a thing to drink out of. One of them did it and got nothing, and made the up-sound again, louder, and got the thing, and laughed. They asked each other, by Carried-It-Sleeping's count, more times in one telling than the Told ask each other in a whole life. Asking was most of what they did. It was the thing they were best at.

So Went-Round was wrong, and Went-Round was right. They could ask. They asked all the time. They had never once asked us.

Carried-It-Sleeping was about to go, with the telling complete and good, when the up-people finished their work. They always finished it the same way, gathering their glowing things, and the light swinging, and the talking getting louder as it got ready to go up the long passage toward the cold. Carried-It-Sleeping had seen it twice before and knew the shape of it.

The shape had changed.

One of them, the smallest of the three, the one who knelt to the humming stone, did not go up the passage with the others. Not at once. That one turned round, with the light held low, and faced the dark. Not the dark where Carried-It-Sleeping stood. The other dark, the deep dark, down the way the squeeze was. And stood, and said something.

It went up at the end.

And then the up-person waited. Stood there with the light low and the others already going, and waited, the way they waited with a hand out, for as long as you would wait for a hand to be filled. Nothing filled it. Nothing answered. The humming stone hummed once, the way it did, and stopped.

Then the up-person went.

Carried-It-Sleeping stood in the dark a long time after the light had gone, and the finding sat in them like a stone that has not been moved yet.

That was asking.

Not the hand. There was no hand out; both hands were on the light. But the sound had gone up, and they had waited, and they had waited facing us.

Carried-It-Sleeping told it standing up, in the warm, to everyone, because this was a telling for everyone: the hand, the sound that goes up, the waiting, and how many times, and what for. That part was easy and the people liked it. Several of them tried the up-sound to see what it felt like, and it felt silly, and the small ones did it for the rest of the telling until they were told to stop.

Then the last part. The up-person who turned to the dark, and said the up-sound, and waited, and went.

The warm was quiet.

"They asked," said Went-Round.

"They asked the dark," said Stone-First.

"We are the dark."

"We are in the dark. It is not the same thing. If I say a thing to the roof, I have not asked the roof for anything. I have said a thing where the roof could hear it."

"You do not know what they asked," said Went-Round, "or of whom, and neither do I, and neither does the youngest, who was there. So it is not settled by who was there. Nobody was there for that part. Nobody can be."

And that, Carried-It-Sleeping thought, was the truest thing Went-Round had ever said, and Stone-First's stillness said that Stone-First thought so too.

"I know one thing," said Carried-It-Sleeping, and everyone turned, because this was the one who had been there. "When a small one asks you for a thing, in a sound you do not know yet — a new sound, one they have just made up — you do not wait until you know the word. You go and see what they want."

It was not an answer. Carried-It-Sleeping knew that. It was the only thing they had, and they had been told that a thing you have done something with is yours, and they had not done anything with this yet, and so it was still not theirs, and they said it anyway.

Stone-First did not say anything at all. Stone-First went out of the warm, and up, toward the margin.

Here is the thought, finished.

Stone-First had kept it for longer than the youngest's whole telling, and had said, more than once, that it was for keeping and not for finishing. That was true. It had also been an excuse, the way a kept thing becomes an excuse if you keep it long enough, and Stone-First had known that too, and had kept it anyway.

Leave it to them until they ask. The whole of the manners for a stranger. Short, because it had never needed to be long. And every word of it assumed one thing so plainly that nobody had ever noticed the assumption was there: that the stranger knew you were there. Of course they did. A stranger is in your place. You have moved a stone. They have heard it. The manners begin after that; they are what you do once the stranger knows. Nobody had ever needed manners for the time before the stranger knew, because there had never been a time before. Not until the up-people.

And now there was a time after, too. Now the stranger knew. Their own stone had told them, at the line where their feet had stopped, and they had come and looked into the dark and gone away, and had not asked, and the manners said leave it to them until they ask, and Went-Round was right that the manners had not been made for a stranger who could not.

But that was not the thought. That was Went-Round's thought, and it went round.

The thought was this. The manners did not say wait for them to ask. They said leave it to them. Leave the place to them. Leave the asking to them. Do not do it for them. And in all this time the Told had been keeping the second half of that and forgetting the first, because they had left the place to the up-people so thoroughly that when the up-people looked into the dark for someone to ask, there had been nobody there.

You cannot ask an empty room.

So it was not a question of asking, and it was not a question of answering. Neither of those was the people's to do. It was a question of the margin, and Stone-First knew about the margin. Keeping the margin means being there. On all the times when nothing happens, so as to be there on the time when something does. And the margin had moved. It was not down in the dark any more, at the place where the deep begins, where nobody could see it and nothing had ever come. It was up at the line, in the open, at the top of the shelving where the up-people's feet had stopped and their stone had stood and their light had reached.

That was where the margin was now. So that was where Stone-First would keep it.

Stone-First went up through the shelving, the way the adults go, which is not the squeeze; the squeeze was closed to Stone-First before the youngest was born. The adults go up the broad broken slope where the deep shelves into the upper levels, slowly, over ground that announces you whether you like it or not, and Stone-First liked it, and moved a stone at the top as well, a proper one, so that anything with ears in the upper levels would know.

The line was where the youngest had said. Three sets of marks in the silt, come through the squeeze and stopped, all together, and turned. The place where the humming stone had stood was still there too: a round print, pressed in, with the silt pushed up round it where the youngest had turned it straight.

Stone-First stood on the line. Not on the up-people's side of it, and not behind it in the dark. On it.

And stayed.

That is all the chapter has to tell, and it is enough, because it is the thing Stone-First does. There is no more to it than there ever was. You go to the place where the deep stops and you are there, on all the times when nothing happens. The light did not come that time. It did not come the next time either, or for many times after. Stone-First went back down to the warm to sleep, and came up again, and stood on the line, and the silt took the shape of Stone-First's feet next to the shape of the up-people's, and the two shapes stayed there together in the light that never changes, which was, Stone-First thought, already a kind of telling, even if nobody had heard it yet.

Below, Carried-It-Sleeping kept the small ones from the squeeze, every telling, with the same no and the same when you fit, and moved stones for them, and felt the warm change shape when they left it, and was beginning, slowly, to understand what it had cost Stone-First to stand at the margin all those tellings while nothing happened, and to let a small one go up past it unannounced, and to wait to be told.

Above, on the line, Stone-First waited to be asked.

It is not the same as waiting to be told. It is harder, because you cannot move a stone for it. But it is the same shape of thing, and the Told are good at that shape. They have been practising it since before the tellings begin.