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

It was an old one who said it.

Not Went-Round. Not Stone-First, who was on the line. One of the old ones who lie at the edge of the amber and do not say much, the same one who had made the small sound by mistake, in the middle of nothing, the first time the smallest kept a hand on a stone in front of everyone, and had been teased for it ever since by people who had done the same thing every telling since and not noticed.

The old one waited for the game to come round to the smallest again. Carried-It-Sleeping saw them waiting for it. And when the hand went to the stone and stayed there, and the warm went still, the old one did not go still. The old one said, into the stillness, in an ordinary voice:

"We are doing it."

Nobody answered, because everyone was waiting for the stone.

"All of us. Feel it. The whole warm. Nobody told us to wait. Nobody could. We wait because the hand is on the stone and the stone has not spoken, and a stone that is going to speak is a thing you wait for. We have waited for it every telling since the game began. Old ones. Me. For as long as the one who keeps a hand on it keeps a hand on it."

The stone moved. Nobody said the smallest. The one on the line forgot to.

"They wait for the stone," said the old one, going on, because now it was going. "Stone-First said so. They set theirs down and say their thing and wait, and the stone speaks, and they go. When it speaks. Not before. Stone-First has answered them a hundred times and never once made them wait for it, so nobody knows how long they would, and I say they would wait as long as the hand is on it. The way we do. Put a hand on the stone and do not move it. Tell. When the telling is done, move it. That is how long a telling is. It is as long as the hand is on the stone."

The warm thought about that. You could feel it think, and this time it got somewhere, which it had not done for several tellings, and the getting somewhere felt the way the warm feels when the small ones come back into the middle and the shape is whole again.

"A stone is not a word," said somebody, which was Stone-First's, said for Stone-First, because Stone-First was not there to say it.

"No," said the old one. "The word is told while the hand is on it. The stone is only the stone. It goes at the end instead of the beginning, that is all, and the hand is what holds the end back until the telling has got there."

Went-Round, from the far side of the amber, made the small sound once, and it was not at the old one. It was the sound of a person who has been all the way round a thing and found the far side lying in the middle of the warm with the small ones, where it had been the whole time.

And the telling of it began to go round, the way tellings do, before it had finished being told. The old one had said it; the warm had heard it; somebody at the far edge who had been half asleep asked what, and was told, and told the next, and what the warm said, over and over, was not the hand on the stone and not as long as the hand is on it. What it said, in old ones' voices, so that it was already worn smooth by the time it came back round to the middle, was the thing the small ones had been saying all season and the old ones had never once said back.

The one who keeps a hand on it.

Carried-It-Sleeping heard it go by. Then again, from the other side of the warm, in an old one's voice. Then a third time, and that was the sound: the one Carried-It-Sleeping had heard once before, lying in the warm, a long time ago, about themself, and had never forgotten. A thing said about someone, going past two and three times until it is not a thing said about someone any more.

It had gone round. Carried-It-Sleeping did not need to say it. Everyone was.