Went-Round (Pandoid, the deep networks)

Went-Round went round it.

That is what Went-Round does, and there had never been a thing below the roof that needed it more. A thing you have only seen from one side is a thing you have only been told, even if your own eyes did the telling. So Went-Round got up from the far side of the amber, where Went-Round had stopped in the middle of the two stones with the small ones waiting for the rest, and walked, slowly, round the ring the people had left, and looked at it from everywhere there was.

It was the same from the back. That was the thing Went-Round would say afterwards, and nobody had thought to ask it, and it mattered. A person has a front and a back. The amber is behind them from one side and in front of them from the other. This had no behind. It was light all the way round, the amber's colour and the blue-green's, gathered up, and from the far side of it the near wall was dim exactly the way it was from the near side, so that wherever you stood, the light had come out of the wall and gone to the shape, and the shape was where the light was now.

Went-Round was close. Closer than anyone. Close enough to feel the gap in the warm with the whole body, not just the part that notices things, and it was a gap, and it was nothing, and it was the size of a person, and it was not cold.

Went-Round did not touch it. You do not touch a thing you have not been asked to touch, and nobody had been asked anything.

Then it went.

Not away. Back. The light went out of it the way it had come, which was into the wall: the shape thinned, and the near wall brightened by exactly that much, and for the length of a breath there was a dimmer shape of light standing in the open floor and the amber on the wall almost itself again, and then there was the wall, as it had always been, and the open floor, with nothing on it, and the ring of people round a place with nobody in it.

No stone had moved. The ground had said nothing, coming or going.

Went-Round stood in the ring and felt the warm close over the gap, the way water closes, and have its shape back, all the pieces in it, and thought: half a telling. It had stood there for about half of the two stones. Went-Round had been telling it, and had stopped, and would have to start again, and did not know where from.