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

Carried-It-Sleeping heard the rest lying down, with the small ones back in the middle, where they had been told to be, and the smallest nearest, still.

"Here is what I think," said Went-Round, to the warm, when it had settled. "Nobody is told how to move a stone. You are told what a stone is for. You are told the manners, and why. Nobody tells your hand. Your hand learns it by doing it, on stones that are for nobody, over and over, until the ground says someone the first time you mean it. Every one of us did that. We did it alone, in a passage, where nobody heard, and so nobody tells it, and so we have forgotten that we did."

The warm thought about that. You could feel it.

"And the other thing." Went-Round went round to the far side of it, where the thought looked different. "The manners say move a stone first. They have said it since before the tellings begin. Who moved the first one? Somebody did, before it was manners. Somebody moved a stone for nobody, because they liked the ground saying someone, and somebody else heard it, and waited for it, and liked that, and so they did it again. And then it was a thing you did. And then it was a thing you had to do. That is the whole of how a thing becomes manners. It is a game somebody played seriously until everyone was playing it."

Nobody made the small sound. Then several people did, all at once, which is a different sound.

"So the small ones are not doing it wrong," said Went-Round. "They are doing the beginning of it. They have gone round to the start."

Carried-It-Sleeping had said stop until it is settled, and it was settled, and not the way Carried-It-Sleeping had been going to settle it. That was all right. A thing you have done something with is yours; Stone-First had said so once, about a telling. The small ones had done something with the manners, and Carried-It-Sleeping lay in the warm, outthought by them again, a little more than the last time, and did not mind.