Waiting to Be Asked

This is told the way things are told below the roof, and this time nothing happens in it, which is a hard kind of telling to do well, and the Told are better at it than most.

Stone-First kept the line.

Here is what that was. Up through the shelving, the way the adults go, slowly, over ground that announces you. A stone moved at the top, a proper one, so that anything with ears in the upper levels would know, though nothing with ears in the upper levels could hear it, and Stone-First moved it anyway, because manners you only keep when somebody is listening are not manners. Then out onto the silt, to the line, and onto it, and stand. That was all. Stand, on all the times when nothing happens, so as to be there on the time when something does.

The light did not come. Stone-First had known it would not, most times, and it did not, all of them. The silt held the two shapes of feet side by side, the up-people's and Stone-First's, and every time Stone-First came up the shape was a little deeper and nothing else about it had changed.

But the sound came.

Stone-First had not expected that. The youngest had told it, standing up, and everyone had heard: at the end of each working time, one of the up-people turned to the deep dark and said a thing that went up at the end, and waited, and went. The youngest had heard it from the edge of the light, close. Nobody had said that you could hear it from the line. Nobody had known.

You could. It came a long way to get there. Down the long passage, and along it, and through the crack in the rock that is the squeeze, thinned by all that distance until it was hardly a sound at all, and then it was on the silt with Stone-First, rising at the end, the way a passage rises toward the cold. And then the waiting, which you could hear too, if you knew the shape of waiting, and Stone-First did. And then nothing, and the light going away up the long passage, which you could not hear but could tell.

Every working time. Stone-First stood on the line and the dark was asked, and Stone-First did not answer it.

Here is why not, because people in the warm had begun to ask, and a reason is a thing you give people once they have the telling.

It had not been asked of Stone-First. It had been said to the dark. Stone-First was in the dark; Stone-First was not the dark, and had said so to Went-Round, and had meant it. If a small one, going to sleep, says a thing to the roof, you do not answer for the roof. You would be surprising them. You would be putting yourself in a place you had not been asked into, and there is a word for that, and the word is not answering. It is interrupting. A telling interrupted has a hole in it that never quite closes, and an asking is the beginning of a telling, and Stone-First was not going to be the hole in it.

So Stone-First stood, and heard the dark asked, and kept still, with the whole body, the way the old ones listen, so that nothing Stone-First did while listening became part of it by mistake.

And began, without meaning to, to count.

The Told do not count much. There is nothing below the roof that needs counting; the light does not change and the warm does not run out and the tellings are as long as they are. But a thing that happens every working time is a thing you can wait by, the way you can wait by a telling, and Stone-First found that the askings had a number, and that the number went up, and that Stone-First knew what it was.

It was not a large number yet. Stone-First did not tell anyone what it was. A number is not a telling. But it was the first thing Stone-First had ever counted, in a whole life of keeping the margin, and Stone-First noticed that, and put it aside to think about on a time when nothing happened, which was every time.

Below, Carried-It-Sleeping kept the small ones from the squeeze, and it was not getting easier.

There were two of them, and they had been trying since the name, and they had got better at it. At first they had gone at the squeeze the way small ones go at everything, straight, and loudly, and Carried-It-Sleeping had only to be at the foot of it and say no. Then they had learned to wait until Carried-It-Sleeping was telling something, and go then. Then they had learned to go one at a time, so that whichever one was caught, the other was already halfway up the margin. Carried-It-Sleeping had not known that keeping a thing meant being outthought by it, a little more every telling. Nobody tells you that part either.

"When we fit," said the smaller one, at the foot of the squeeze, for the whole of a short telling, "you said. We fit. We fit better than you."

This was true, and Carried-It-Sleeping had no answer to it, and said so, because saying so is also manners, and it did not help.

"Then when?"

And Carried-It-Sleeping, who had said when you fit so many times that it had worn smooth, heard it properly for the first time, and found that it was not a reason. It was a thing said to make a small one go back. Stone-First had never said it. Stone-First had never said anything at all, the time the youngest went up; had felt the warm change shape, and let it, and waited at the margin to be told. That had been the hardest thing there is below the roof. Carried-It-Sleeping had understood that for some tellings now, from the outside. Understanding a thing from the outside is not the same as being able to do it.

"I don't know when," said Carried-It-Sleeping. "Go back."

The small one went back. Both of them did. They moved stones, loudly, and went down into the warm, and Carried-It-Sleeping stood at the foot of the squeeze a while longer, and then went down too, and lay in the amber, and told the first warm seep to whoever wanted it, which was most of the small ones, and did not sleep.

Some time before the telling was over, the warm changed shape.

It is a small thing to feel. A warm place has a shape, and a person leaving takes a piece of it with them, and Carried-It-Sleeping had felt the small ones take their pieces and bring them back so many times now that it should not have been anything. This time only one piece went. The smaller one. And it did not come back.

And at the foot of the squeeze, a stone moved.

Properly. A good one. The small one had moved a stone first, before going up, so that the ground would tell whoever was standing on it. Which the youngest, the first time, had not done, and had been asked about, and had never forgotten being asked.

Carried-It-Sleeping lay in the warm with the telling going on around them and the piece gone out of the shape, and did the hardest thing there is below the roof, which is nothing.

And waited to be told.

Stone-First heard the stone. Small, and at the bottom of the squeeze, and moved well.

Then a long quiet, which was the squeeze itself, and then the small one came out of the crack onto the silt, scraped and pleased and breathing hard, and stopped, because Stone-First was standing there.

Stone-First had kept the line for a good many tellings now, on all the times when nothing happened, so as to be there on the time when something did. This was the first time something did. It was not the light. It was a small one from below, who had come up the squeeze the way the youngest once had, and who stood on the silt looking at the oldest of the people standing alone on a line in the open where nobody had ever stood, and did not, Stone-First noticed, ask why.

Good.

"You moved a stone," said Stone-First.

"Yes."

"Good."

The small one came and stood beside Stone-First on the line. Not behind it, in the dark; not past it, on the up-people's side. On it, because that was where Stone-First was. The two of them stood there, and the small one's feet made a third shape in the silt, next to the other two, and the small one looked at the three shapes and then up at Stone-First and still did not ask.

They stood for as long as a short telling takes. Then, up above, the working time ended, the way it did, and the sound came down.

It came the way it always came: the long passage, the crack, the silt, hardly a sound at all, rising at the end. The small one heard it. Stone-First felt the small one hear it, and go still.

"What is that?"

"That is them."

"What are they doing?"

"Asking."

"Asking what?"

"I don't know."

"Asking who?"

"I don't know that either."

The sound finished rising, and there was the waiting after it, and the small one waited too, without being told to, with the whole body still. Nothing answered. Then the waiting ended, and Stone-First knew, without hearing it, that the light was going away up the long passage toward the cold.

"Why didn't you answer?"

"Because it was not asked of me. If you answer a thing that was not asked of you, you have not answered it. You have interrupted it."

"Then what are you doing?"

"Being here."

"Is that all?"

"It is the whole of it."

The small one looked at the dark on one side of the line, and at the crack on the other, where the sound had come from, and at Stone-First. And then did a thing Stone-First had not expected, which was to say nothing at all, and go on standing there.

They stood until Stone-First judged that the small one's piece had been out of the warm long enough, and then Stone-First said, "Go down now. Move a stone at the bottom. And tell it."

"Tell what? Nothing happened."

"Tell that Stone-First is on the line, and that the dark is asked, every working time, and that nobody answers. You were there. That is a telling. It is yours."

The small one went. Stone-First heard the stone at the bottom, moved well, and stayed on the line, and thought that the first person to come and stand there had come from the wrong side, and that this was, on the whole, the right way round.

The small one told it standing up, in the warm, to everyone, the way you do the first time: the squeeze, the silt, the three shapes of feet, Stone-First alone on the line in the open, and the sound that came down out of the crack and went up at the end, and nobody answering it. It was a short telling. There was not much in it. The warm listened the way it listens to a small one's first, which is kindly and all the way to the end.

Carried-It-Sleeping listened lying down, with the piece back in the shape where it belonged, and found that what they felt was not what they had expected to feel. Not relief, though there was that. Something with more room in it. The youngest had gone up once, unannounced, and come back with nobody looked up, and it had been theirs, and it had been the first thing that was. And now a small one had gone up announced, and come back with a telling too, and it was theirs, and it was about somebody else.

That was the thing. The small one had told it, and it was a good telling, and everyone had heard it, and nobody in the warm was going to call the small one the one who stood on the line, because the telling was not about the small one standing there. It was about Stone-First standing there. A name is the first true thing said of you that others go on saying. The small one had brought down a true thing, and it was said, and it was somebody else's name.

So you could do that. You could go somewhere first and bring back a telling and have it be yours, and not be named for it. Nobody had told Carried-It-Sleeping that either. It seemed to be the kind of thing nobody tells you.

Went-Round, from the far side of the amber, said what Went-Round said, which was the thing from the far side.

"So they ask the dark. And we are in the dark. And nobody answers." A pause, the length of going round something. "That is everybody below the roof keeping manners at everybody else."

Several people made the small sound that means that is a thing worth saying, and the small one, who did not know yet what the sound meant, made it too.

On the line, alone again, Stone-First heard the warm settle a long way below, the way you can, and stood.

The count went up by one. It would go up by one every working time, and Stone-First would be there for each of them, and would not answer, and had told a small one why, and the small one had told the warm, and now the whole of the people knew what the waiting was and what it was for. That had not been true before. Before, the people had known that Stone-First was on the line. Now they knew what Stone-First was doing there. It is not the same thing, and the second is the one that becomes a telling.

Here is what Stone-First had worked out about waiting, on the line, one asking at a time.

There are two kinds below the roof. There is waiting to be told, which the Told have done since before the tellings begin, and are good at, and can move a stone for. And there is waiting to be asked, which nobody had ever done before, because nobody had ever come. Stone-First had thought, going up to the line the first time, that the second kind would be a different shape from the first, and had been ready for that.

It was not. It was the same shape. You go to the place where the deep stops, and you are there, on all the times when nothing happens, and the ground will tell you the moment something does. Stone-First had done it for a whole life.

The only difference was the stone. In the first kind, the stone is yours to move. In the second, it is theirs. And the Told had never once in all the tellings waited for somebody else to move a stone, and did not know how long that took, and were finding out.

Every telling begins with one. Stone-First stood on the line and waited for theirs.