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

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.