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

The small ones wanted to go up and look at the stone.

Of course they did. A thing had happened at the line, where the small ones were not supposed to go and went anyway, and the thing was a stone that nobody had moved, and the only person who had seen it was the oldest of the people, who had told it in the fewest words there were. The two who had been trying the squeeze since before Carried-It-Sleeping was named were older now, and fitted it less, and had taught the next ones everything. The smallest was among the next ones.

"We would only look," said the smallest. "We would move a stone first."

"Who would you be moving it for?"

The smallest did not know, and said so.

"Then you cannot move one," said Carried-It-Sleeping, "because that is not what a stone is for. A stone is so the one who is there is not surprised by you. Nobody is there. Stone-First is there, and Stone-First has told it, and it is Stone-First's. The stone on the line is not."

"Whose is it?"

"Nobody's. Nobody was there."

"Then it is nobody's to stop us," said the smallest, who was learning to go round a thing, which is what happens to the small ones who listen to Went-Round.

Carried-It-Sleeping had not expected to have to work that out, lying in the warm, with the whole of the small ones listening to see which way it would go. But that is what keeping is: the thing you have to work out while they watch you.

"If a thing is somebody's," said Carried-It-Sleeping, "and you want it, you ask. That is the whole of the manners. If a thing is nobody's, and you want it, there is nobody to ask. So you cannot have it. It is not that nobody can stop you. It is that nobody can say yes. Those are different. Stone-First told me that once, about a different stone, when I was your size, and I did not understand it, and now I do."

Nobody had told Carried-It-Sleeping that either. It had just turned out to be true, the way the things Stone-First says turn out to be true later, when you are lying in the warm being watched.

The small ones did not go up. Carried-It-Sleeping felt the warm keep its shape, all the pieces in it, and did not sleep, and listened to the smallest not sleeping either, and thought that there were now two tellings below the roof with no middle in them, and that the smallest had one and Stone-First had the other, and that neither of them was going to be made comfortable.