Went-Round (Pandoid, the deep networks)

Went-Round went up to the line.

Went-Round did not go up there much. The line is Stone-First's, the way the far side of the amber is Went-Round's, and you do not stand in someone else's place without a reason. But a thing you have only been told is a thing you go round until you have seen it from another side, and the other side of this one was up the shelving, so Went-Round moved a stone at the foot of it and went.

The ground said someone is coming, all the way up, the way it does, and nobody answered, because nobody was there.

Three stones. The up-people's, with the silt worn smooth round it. Stone-First's answer. Nobody's, at the edge, by the mark of where it had lain. And the silt holding its shapes of feet, the up-people's and the small one's from the season before, and, between the two stones, worn deeper than any of them, the place where Stone-First stands.

Went-Round looked at it for a while.

Then Went-Round stepped onto the silt, and stood in it.

It fitted. That was the first thing. Stone-First and Went-Round are much of a size, as the old ones are, and the place took Went-Round's feet the way it had been made to take feet, which was by a whole life of standing in it. And the second thing was that it felt wrong. Not dangerous. Wrong the way it is wrong to answer a thing that was not asked of you: like standing somewhere you had not been asked into, which Went-Round had not been, and which was, Went-Round thought, standing there, exactly what the shape had done.

Below, a stone moved. Good, and plain, at the foot of the shelving.

Went-Round knew who it was before the ground had finished saying someone. There is only one person below the roof who moves a stone like that.

Went-Round bent, and put a hand to a rock at the edge of the silt, and moved it. Once. Well. Went-Round could not remember ever answering a stone on the line, and would have remembered.

Stone-First came up the shelving, slowly, the way the old ones go, and out onto the silt, and stopped, and looked at Went-Round standing in Stone-First's place, and did not say anything for as long as it takes to say a name.

"You are in my place."

"I wanted to see what it looked like from the other side."

"And?"

"It looks like you," said Went-Round. "Even with nobody in it."