Stone-First (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

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.