Keeps-A-Hand-On-It (Pandoid, the deep networks)

Keeps-A-Hand-On-It had a hand on a stone when it happened, which is where the hand usually was.

The game was going in the middle of the warm, the way it went now, whatever the old ones were doing. A line of stones across the floor. One on it, standing very straight. The rest bunched below, all one warm piece. It was Keeps-A-Hand-On-It's knock, and the hand was on the stone, and the warm had gone still for it the way it did, piece by piece, old ones and all, and Keeps-A-Hand-On-It was holding the stillness the way you hold a thing that is yours, and making it a little longer, because the waiting is the best part.

Then, far up, from the line, the ground said someone.

Small. Late. The up-people's stone. Everyone below the roof knows that sound; it comes at the start of every working time, and after it, before the ground has finished saying it, comes the other one. Stone-First's answer. A good one, from the line, in Stone-First's way. The two sounds are so close together that the small ones who were born after the stones think of them as one sound with two parts, and Keeps-A-Hand-On-It had never in a whole life heard the first without the second.

The second did not come.

The warm noticed before Keeps-A-Hand-On-It did. You could feel it notice. The stillness that had been for the small one's hand changed what it was without changing anything about itself, and went deeper, and went wider, out to the edge of the amber where the ones who do not say much lie, and it was not for the game any more. It was for the line. Everyone in the warm knew what Stone-First was doing. Everyone had heard the old one say it and had heard it go round. And nobody had known whether it would work, and the whole warm lay in the amber and found out together, by the ground not saying anything.

Keeps-A-Hand-On-It kept the hand on the stone.

Not to make it longer. There were two hands on two stones now, one in the middle of the warm and one on the line, and the whole warm was waiting for the one on the line, and you do not move yours while everyone is waiting for another. Two stones at once is noise. The ground does not know the difference and that is exactly why you do. So the hand stayed, and the game stopped around it, the way it had the day the old one spoke, and this time nobody said anything, because there was nothing to say that the ground was not already saying by saying nothing.

It went on.

Keeps-A-Hand-On-It had never kept a hand on a stone this long and had never known that anyone could. To measure it, the way the old ones measure a thing with no day in it, Keeps-A-Hand-On-It told the first warm seep through, in the head, from the stone moved first to the end, and got to the end, and the ground had not spoken. So started the long dark. And was most of the way through the long dark, at the part where the warm is found again, when the ground said someone, from the line, in Stone-First's way, a good one, once.

The warm let go. All at once, the way it had gone still in pieces.

Keeps-A-Hand-On-It moved the stone. Once, well. The one on the line said the smallest, and was right, and nobody heard, because the whole warm was saying one thing at once, and it was not the small sound and it was not a name. It was two words, going round, from the middle to the edge and back, in old ones' voices and small ones', the way a thing goes round when it has just been found out.

They stayed.

Keeps-A-Hand-On-It lay down with the hand off the stone and let it go by, and did not count it, because it was not the kind of thing that becomes a name. It was about the up-people. Nothing about the up-people had ever gone round the warm like that before, and Keeps-A-Hand-On-It, who had been born after the two stones and had never once thought of the up-people as anything but a told thing, lay in the middle of the warm and heard the people say a thing about them the way the people say a thing about someone.