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

Stone-First came down at the end of the working time and told it standing up, and it was short, because the long part had been told already, up there, to someone else.

"They stayed," said Stone-First. "I told it. All of it, the way it is told. Bent to the rock, with the hand on it, which is not how a telling is told, and is how the line lets one be told, and I am saying that so nobody makes a rule of it. They stood for the whole of it. They did not lift the light. When it was done I moved the stone, and they went."

"Did they understand it?" said a small one, which a small one would.

"I do not know. I did not look to see. You do not look to see with a small one. You tell it."

Carried-It-Sleeping was lying in the middle, with the small ones back in it, where they had been told to be, and the smallest nearest, still, with a hand on nothing.

Went-Round, from the far side of the amber, said the thing Carried-It-Sleeping had been lying there waiting for someone to say, and had thought it might be Went-Round, and it was.

"Somebody has told them something."

Nobody made the small sound. It was not that kind of thing. It was the oldest thing anyone below the roof knew, turned over. Nobody has told them anything. Stone-First had said it first, in the warm, a long time ago, to a youngest who had asked why the up-people never asked, and it had been the truest thing anybody had said that night, and it had been true on every telling since, through the stones and the shapes and the game. And Stone-First had ended it, on the line, with a hand.

"Are they Told, then?" said an old one. Not kindly, and not unkindly. The way you ask a thing you want the answer to.

"No," said Went-Round, and for once went straight through it. "Being told one thing is not being Told. It is being a small one. Every one of us was told one thing first, before we knew what a seep was, and then another, and then all of them, and somewhere in there we were one of the people and nobody can say which telling it was. They have been told one thing. They are at the beginning. That is all anybody is ever given first, and it is a great deal."

The warm thought about that. You could feel it think, and you could feel it agree, which is a different feeling from getting somewhere, and quieter.

Carried-It-Sleeping lay in the warm and thought about the humming stone.

Carried up asleep, through the squeeze, held still while it woke, set down at the edge of the up-people's place so that their own ground would tell them someone was there. That was the first stone, and Carried-It-Sleeping had done it, and had not known, doing it, that it was the first half of anything. And tonight the telling of what had come of it had gone up the same squeeze, in the only mouth that had been there for it, and been set down at the edge of the same people, and they had held still for it. The whole of the distance between the one and the other was this: the first time, the up-people's thing had slept through it. This time they had not.

Then the telling began to go round, the way tellings do, from the ones who had heard it to the ones who had been half asleep, and Carried-It-Sleeping listened, from habit, the way Carried-It-Sleeping listened after anything happened now, for a thing said twice and three times until it was worn smooth.

What went round was they stayed. It was about the up-people. It was not a name, because it was not about one of the people, and Carried-It-Sleeping let it go by and did not count it. Nothing grew that night. Carried-It-Sleeping noticed that, lying there, and did not mind it, and did not think it meant that nothing would.