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

This is told the way things are told below the roof, by someone who was there, and this time it begins with a thing Stone-First said that was too short to be a telling and too long to be a hand.

Stone-First-Who-Waited came down from the line a second time.

The warm noticed. In all the tellings before this season Stone-First had come down to tell a thing and gone back up to keep the margin, and the coming down had belonged to the telling. This was a time when nothing happened. Stone-First moved a stone at the bottom of the shelving so that everyone knew, and stood up in the amber, and said one thing, and it was this.

"They wait for as long as it takes a hand to be filled. Then the stone speaks, and they go. A telling is longer than a hand."

Then Stone-First sat down, which is how you say that the thing is everybody's now, and after a while went back up, because the margin does not keep itself, and left the thing in the warm.

The warm had it for several tellings. Carried-It-Sleeping lay in the middle with the small ones, who had the game, and heard the old ones have the thing, and the two sounds went on at once the way they had all season: a stone moved well, someone is coming, nobody coming, and over it the old ones going round and round a thing that would not go.

Somebody said tell it short. Somebody always says that. But Stone-First has never once in a whole life wanted a telling shorter, and everybody knows it, and the telling of the up-people's stone, told properly, has the loud that came on instead of settling, and the one light held low, and the looking, and the stone carried to the front and knelt with and set down late, and the step back, and the sound that goes up at the end, and the rock at the edge of the silt, and the going. There is nothing in it that is a reason and nothing you can take out. A telling with a piece left out is not the telling. It is a different one, about less.

Somebody said tell it in pieces. A hand's worth at each knock, and let the up-people carry the pieces up the long passage and put them together in the cold. Went-Round liked that for as long as it takes to say a name, and then did not, and said why. A telling interrupted has a hole in it that never quite closes. Everyone below the roof knows that; it is why nobody interrupts. A telling cut into hands, with the loud and the cold and a whole working time between each piece and the next, would be all hole.

Somebody said then let them wait longer. And the warm went quiet, because that was the whole of the thing, said back to itself, and the old ones heard it come round and knew where they were.

"Nobody has told them anything," said Carried-It-Sleeping, lying down, not meaning to say it out loud, and it went by, because it was only the oldest thing anyone knew.