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

Stone-First told it standing up, in the warm, to everyone, and said it was moved well twice, and said nothing else twice.

Carried-It-Sleeping listened lying down. Carried-It-Sleeping was not among the small ones any more, by the warm's count of tellings, and had not been for some time, and still listened lying down from habit, in the middle, with the small ones, who were Carried-It-Sleeping's to keep. There were more of them now. The smallest was one of them, the one with the telling from the seep, who had been quiet since.

The warm did not make the small sound. It had not made it after the seep either. Carried-It-Sleeping was learning what the warm sounds like when it does not know what to say, which is a thing you can only learn twice.

"Was it the one from the seep?" said the smallest.

Stone-First did not answer. Nobody answered for Stone-First. That was manners, and it was also, Carried-It-Sleeping thought, because nobody could.

"The ground said someone," said one of the other small ones. "The ground was there."

"The ground is always there," said Went-Round, from the far side of the amber, and went round it, the way Went-Round does, so that everyone could see it from the other side. "The ground says someone. It has never once said who. Think about it. You move a stone, and the ground tells me someone is coming, and then I know who because you come. Or because I go and look, and there you are. We have always been the ones who said who. The ground never did. We just never noticed, because somebody was always there."

The warm thought about that. You could feel it think, the way you feel the shape of a place.

Carried-It-Sleeping thought about a different stone.

The humming stone. Carried sleeping, down the squeeze, and set at the edge of the up-people's place, so that their own ground would tell them someone was there. And it had. And then, for a whole season, the up-people had stood on their side of it and not known who. They had asked the dark every working time and nobody had answered, and Stone-First had stood on the line and not answered, and Went-Round had said that was everybody keeping manners at everybody else, and everyone had made the small sound.

Carried-It-Sleeping had done that to them. Had not known, doing it, what it was like.

This was what it was like.