Scene 5

Stone-First (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

Time: 2832 UCSD, the survey's second year on the ground, the telling after the small one stood on the line
Location: Fliade — the line at the top of the margin, the squeeze, and the warm below the roof

Stone-First went back up to the line, afterwards, because that is where the margin is and keeping it means being there.

The two stones were where they had been left. Stone-First did not move either of them. A stone that has been moved for you is not yours to move again; it is the beginning of a telling, and you do not tidy a beginning away.

The count did not go up. Stone-First noticed that, standing there, and understood it. The count had been of askings said to the dark, and the last thing said had not been said to the dark. It had been said to Stone-First. There was nothing to count any more, because the thing that was being counted had stopped being nothing. Stone-First had never wanted the number. Stone-First let it go, the way you let a kept thing go once it has done what it was kept for.

What the up-people would do next, Stone-First did not know. What the people would do next, Stone-First did not know either. That was not this telling's. A telling has an end, and this one had reached it, on the line, with a stone on each side of the place where the feet had stopped, and neither side of the line any different from what it had been except that both sides now knew the other was there, and had said so, each in the only way it could.

It was not a telling yet. Stone-First knew that. A stone is not a telling. It is only the beginning of one.

But every telling begins with one, and this one had two.

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