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

Here is what the small ones were doing, in order, because they explained it at once and all at the same time, and it took a while to get it in order.

They had made a line. Not the line; a line of their own, at the foot of the shelving, where the broken rock begins: a row of stones laid across the passage, the way the telling says the up-people's feet stopped in a row across the silt. One small one stood on it. Standing the way Stone-First stands, with the whole body still, facing the shelving, which the small one was very pleased about and said twice.

The others were below the line, in a bunch, close together, so that the warm was all one piece there and you could not tell by feeling it which of them was which. Then one of them, and the others were not to know which, put a hand to a stone and moved it. Once. Well. And stepped back, one step, the way the up-people step back from their knock. And then everyone waited, with the whole body still, for the ground to say it.

Someone is coming.

Then the one on the line answered with a stone, moved well, the way Stone-First answers, and said who had knocked. A scraped answer or a right guess put the knocker on the line instead. And a bad knock, where the ground did not say it plainly but only said noise, was you and not the ground, and did not count, and everyone said so.

That was the game. The smallest, who had not said anything yet, said what it was called, which was the thing the ground says. Someone is coming. It is a good name for a game.

"Who are you moving it for?" said Carried-It-Sleeping.

"Nobody," said the one on the line. "It's a game."

Carried-It-Sleeping had said a thing once, lying in the warm with the whole of the small ones watching to see which way it would go, and it had been true, and now it came back. A stone is so that the one who is there is not surprised by you. That is the whole of what a stone is for. A stone moved for nobody is not a stone. It is a noise, and the ground does not know the difference, and that is exactly why you do not.

"Stone-First moves a stone at the top of the shelving every time," said the smallest, going round it, because that is what happens to a small one who listens to Went-Round. "Every time. Before the silt. And nothing up there can hear it. You told us. Who is that for?"

Carried-It-Sleeping had not expected to have to answer that with all the small ones waiting. But that is what keeping is.

"That is manners," said Carried-It-Sleeping.

"So is this," said the smallest. "We are only doing it more."

"Stop until it is settled," said Carried-It-Sleeping, which was the only true thing there was to say, and went down into the warm to tell it, because a thing you cannot settle at the foot of the shelving is a thing you tell standing up.