Went-Round (Pandoid, the deep networks)

Went-Round went round it, which is what Went-Round is for, and this is the telling of the time it did not work.

Went-Round went round from the shelving side first. The line. The up-people's side of it, and the thing they did there every working time, which Stone-First had told so often that the small ones played it: a stone set down, a step back, the thing said that goes up at the end, the waiting with the whole body still, the stone answering, the going. Every time the same shape. Went-Round turned it over, looking for the place where it looked different.

You could tell them to wait. No. You could not tell them anything; that was the whole of the thing, and Went-Round had said so first, a long time ago, in the warm. You could go after them when they went. No. Nobody goes past the line, and Stone-First would not if Stone-First could, and a telling you have to chase someone with is not a telling, it is a chasing. You could wait for them to stay longer on their own. They had stayed on the line exactly as long as a hand, a hundred times, and nobody below the roof had ever seen them stay longer, and a thing that has happened a hundred times one way is not a thing you wait to happen another.

Went-Round went all the way round and came back to the near side, and the near side was Stone-First's thing, the same size as before.

That had never happened. Not in Went-Round's whole telling. There is always a far side. That is not a thing Went-Round believes; it is a thing Went-Round has found, every time, by going. A blocked passage has another way in. A hard thought looks different from behind. Went-Round sat in the amber with a thing that was the same from every side, round as a stone, and understood a little of what Stone-First had been standing with on the line for a season, and did not like it, and did not say so.

The game went on in the middle. It did that now, whatever the old ones were doing. A line of stones across the floor. One small one on it, very straight. The rest bunched. A hand to a stone, once, well, someone is coming, a step back, the one on the line answering and saying who, and being right or wrong and pleased either way.

Then the smallest knocked.

Went-Round did not look. Nobody had to. You could feel it. The warm went still, piece by piece, old ones and all, without anyone deciding to, the way it had the first time, and Went-Round went still with it, and sat with a hand on nothing and waited for a small one to move a stone. For as long as it takes to say a name. And longer. The old ones nearest the middle had stopped talking. The ones at the far edge of the amber, who could not have seen the hand from there, had stopped too, because a stillness goes round the warm faster than any telling does. Nobody had told them to. They could not have helped it if they had tried.

Then the stone moved, once, well, and the one on the line said the smallest before the sound had finished, and the warm let go, and the old ones took up Stone-First's thing again exactly where they had left it, as if nothing had happened.

Went-Round, who goes round things, had gone all the way round and come back and sat down with the far side in the middle of the warm, and waited for it, and not seen it. That is kept as Went-Round's, because Went-Round said so afterwards, which is the only way a thing like that gets told at all.