Stone-First (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

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.