Went-Round (Pandoid, the deep networks)

Here is what the small one told, with the who left out, and Went-Round has not improved it.

The stone at the top of the shelving, moved well. The ground saying someone is coming. Then the silt, and the three stones on it, the up-people's and the answer and the one that was nobody's, and between them, on the line, a shape. The size of Stone-First. Standing the way Stone-First stands, with the whole body still, facing the squeeze. It did not answer the stone. It did not move. The small one did not go onto the silt, because the manners say you do not go up to someone who has not answered you, and stood at the top of the shelving and looked for as long as it took to be sure, and did not count, and came down.

"Was it warm?" said Went-Round.

"I could not tell. The line is where the warm runs out. Nobody can tell up there."

That was true. Went-Round had not thought of it until the small one said it. At the seep, the smallest had known the shape had no warmth, because the seep is the bottom of the warm and the warm is thick there and a gap in it is a gap. At the line, the warm is finished. You feel nothing up there but yourself. It is the one place below the roof where the only way to know who is there is to look.

"So," said Went-Round, and went round it, so the warm could see it from the other side. "You saw a shape, in the place where Stone-First always stands, standing the way Stone-First always stands. And it did not do the one thing Stone-First always does."

"It was Stone-First."

"Who was there?"

"I was."

"Was Stone-First there?"

The small one looked at Stone-First, in the amber, where Stone-First had been for a whole long telling.

"No."

"Then you were there and Stone-First was not, and both of those are true, and the telling is yours. It is a telling of a shape in Stone-First's place. It is not a telling of Stone-First. Say it that way and it is true all the way through."

The small one said it that way. It was shorter. Stone-First nodded, the way the old ones nod when something is getting true, and Went-Round saw that the nod cost something.

"Here is the thing I think," said Went-Round, to the warm. "Down here we know where everyone is by the shape of the warm. We never look. Up there you cannot do that, so you have only the one thing left, which is where a thing stands. And a thing standing where someone always stands looks like them. It would look like them to anyone. Until it does what they do."

"And it did not," said Stone-First.

"No."

"Then it was not me," said Stone-First, "and it was where I stand, and I do not know what to do with that."