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

Stone-First told it standing up, in the warm, to everyone, and left nothing out, because there was nothing in it that was a reason and nothing that was not the thing itself.

The loud that came on instead of settling. The one light, low. The small up-person out of the crack, and the looking. The stone, carried to the front, and knelt with, and set down on the line, late. The step back. The sound that went up at the end, and what it was, which Stone-First did not know and said so, because saying so is also manners. The rock at the edge of the silt. The going.

The warm was quieter than Carried-It-Sleeping had ever heard it.

"They asked," said Went-Round, from the far side of the amber, and for once did not go round it.

"They began," said Stone-First. "A stone is not asking. It is the thing before. They have done the thing before. That is what a stone is for."

"They said a thing to you. It went up at the end. That is asking. You have said yourself that is what their asking is."

"I do not know what they said."

"Nobody knows what anybody says," said Went-Round, "until the telling goes on. That is what a telling is."

Several people made the small sound. Stone-First heard it, and did not mind it, and did not answer, and Carried-It-Sleeping saw that Stone-First was not going to, and that this was not a thing the people were going to settle tonight, and that it did not matter, because both of them were true. They had begun. They had asked. A stone, and a sound, and a stone back. It was the beginning of a telling, and the whole of the people had heard it now, and it was theirs.

Carried-It-Sleeping lay in the warm and thought about the two stones on the line. The humming stone, carried sleeping, set down at the edge of the up-people's place so that their own ground would tell them someone was here. And now a plain stone of the runners' ground, carried by the smallest of them through the crack, set down late, at the edge of the people's place, so that the people's ground would tell them the same. The same thing, done twice, from both sides. Carried-It-Sleeping had done the first one and had not known, doing it, that it was the first half of anything.

And then the telling began to go round the warm, the way tellings do, from the ones who had heard it to the ones who had been asleep, and Carried-It-Sleeping heard, lying down, what the people were saying of Stone-First now. Not Stone-First. Not only. What they said, over and over, so that it was already worn smooth by the time it reached the far end of the warm, was: the one who moves a stone first, and went up and stood on the line, and waited to be asked, and was.

A name grows. It is not replaced. A truer thing said later is added on, and the name gets longer, and a long name is a grown one.

Stone-First-Who-Waited.

Carried-It-Sleeping let it go by a second time, and a third, to be certain, and it was, and the small ones were already saying it, so that they would be able to say it when they were old.