Carried-It-Sleeping (Pandoid, the deep networks)

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.