by David Weber
"In Sphinxian celery?" Emily repeated.
"They love the taste of any celery from anywhere," Honor told her. "But back when humans first came to the Manticore System, we had to make some minor adjustments in our Old Terran flora and fauna before we introduced them into their new environments. As," she added in a dust-dry tone, gesturing briefly at herself, "we've done with human beings themselves, in a few other cases. We didn't do anything really drastic in the case of Sphinx, but a few minor genetic changes were designed into most of the Old Terran food plants to prevent the fixing of elements we didn't need in our diet and to discourage some particularly persistent local parasites and the plant diseases they carry. The basic idea was to get the genegineered plants to manufacture and store a Sphinxian organic compound that's harmless to humans but serves as a natural insect repellant. It worked in all of them, but better in some than in others, and it was most effective of all in celery, of all things. The version in the descendants of the modified Old Terran plants is slightly different from that which occurs in the native flora, sort of a hybrid. But it appears to be either necessary or extremely beneficial to the maintenance of the 'cats' empathic and telepathic senses."
"But where did they get it from before we came along with our celery?" Emily demanded.
"There's a Sphinxian plant that produces the native plants' version of the same compound. They call it 'purple thorn,' and they've known about it forever. But it's scarce and hard to find, and, frankly, they say celery just tastes a whole lot better." Honor shrugged again. "And that, it turns out, is the answer to the Great Celery Theft Mystery which first brought humans and treecats together."
"That's fascinating," Emily said, gazing at Honor raptly, and then moved her gaze to Nimitz and Samantha. She watched them for a moment, and they looked back at her solemnly until she drew a deep breath and turned back to Honor.
"I envy you," she said sincerely. "I would probably have envied you anyway, just for having been adopted in the first place, but to be answering so many questions, finding the answers to so many puzzles after so many centuries . . . That has to be especially wonderful."
"It is," Honor said softly, then surprised both Alexanders—and herself—with a giggle. "On the other hand," she explained half-apologetically as her hosts looked at her in surprise, "watching them sign can be an exhausting experience . . . especially when you get a dozen or so of them in one place! It's like being trapped inside a machine shop or an engine turbine."
"Oh, my!" Emily laughed delightedly. "I never even thought of that side of it."
Nimitz looked back and forth between the smiling humans, then rose in one of the human-style high chairs Nico had managed to dredge up for the treecats and began to sign. His spine was stiff with eloquent dignity, and Honor managed to keep any more laughter out of her voice as she translated for Emily and Hamish.
"He says that if we two-legs think it's hard to keep track of all those signs, then we should try it from the People's side. And that if we'd had the good sense as a species not to limit ourselves to 'mouth-noises' as our sole, miserable means of communication, the People might not have had to learn to wiggle their fingers just to talk to us."
The 'cat finished signing, then twitched his whiskers in disgust as all three humans began to laugh once more. He sniffed audibly, and elevated his nose, but Honor felt his inner delight bubbling up as he made them laugh, and she sent him an answering mental caress of approval.
"That's fascinating, as Emily says," Hamish said, after a moment, "and I can see that I'm going to have to go ahead and learn how to read signs myself. But all levity aside, you and Samantha and Nimitz and I have to face the fact that her decision to adopt me is going to create enormous problems. I'm grateful—awed—that she did it, anyway, but I'd truly like to know how it could have happened. And why she chose to do it at this particular moment."
"You still have a lot to learn about treecats, Hamish," Honor pointed out in a carefully neutral tone. "All of us do, actually. In fact, in some ways, those of us who've been adopted the longest have the most to learn, because we're having to disabuse ourselves of some theories and beliefs we've cherished for quite some time. And one of those beliefs was that a 'cat 'chooses' a human half as some sort of conscious process."
"What do you mean?" Emily asked intently.
"I've spent hours talking with Nimitz and Samantha about it, and I'm not entirely certain I've got it all straight yet," Honor replied. "But to boil it down to its simplest, while all treecats are both telepaths and empaths, some appear to be born with a special ability to reach out to human beings, as well as other members of their own species."
Both Alexanders nodded, but Honor could tell neither of them was fully up to speed on all of the new revelations about treecats. It might not be a bad idea, she decided, to give them a little more background before she tried to answer the question she wasn't at all sure she had an answer for in the first place.
"All 'cats are able to sense both the thoughts and the emotions of other 'cats," she began. "They call thoughts the 'mind-voice' and emotions the 'mind-glow.' Well, to be more accurate, those are the human-style words they've come up with to use when they try to explain things to us. As near as we can tell, Dr. Arif was correct in her original theory that telepaths wouldn't use a spoken language at all. In fact, that was probably the greatest single stumbling block to their ever learning to communicate with us. They knew we communicated using 'mouth-noises,' but the concept of language was so alien to them that it took them literally centuries to learn the meanings of more than a handful of words."
"How did they ever learn at all?" It was Hamish's turn to ask the question, and he reached out to caress Samantha's prick ears gently and tenderly.
"Well, that sort of brings us back to Samantha, in a way," Honor told him, and he looked up from the 'cat sharply.
"It's going to take us years and years to really square away our understanding of treecats," she went on, "but we've already learned an awful lot more than we ever knew before. There are still problems in getting complex concepts across from either side, especially when they're concepts which relate to abilities like telepathy and empathy that humans simply don't have any experiential basis with."
She carefully took no note of the thoughtful glance Hamish gave her over her last sentence.
"One thing which does seem to be clear, however, is that 'cats simply aren't innovators. Their heads don't work that way—or, at least, they haven't in the past. I suppose it's possible that that will change, now that they've begun interacting so much more fully with humans in general. But traditionally, 'cats who're capable of new insights or of conceptualizing new ways to do things have been very, very rare. That's one reason treecat society tends to have been extraordinarily stable, and also the reason that it seems to be difficult for them, as a species, to change their minds once they've embarked upon a consensual policy or way to do things."
This was not the time, she decided, to mention the fact that the treecats had spent the better part of four hundred T-years systematically concealing the true extent of their intelligence from the humans who had intruded into and settled upon their planet. Personally, she understood their motives perfectly, and she was confident Hamish and Emily would, as well, but it wouldn't hurt to get the groundwork established before they or the public at large were admitted into the full truth about that little treecat decision.
"But if they produce a limited number of innovators," she continued instead, "they have at least one huge offsetting advantage when it comes to promoting change. Once any 'cat figures out something new, the new knowledge can be very rapidly transmitted to all other treecats."
"Telepathy." White Haven nodded, blue eyes bright. "They just 'tell' each other about it!"
"Not quite," Honor disagreed. "From what Nimitz and Samantha tell me, the level of communication between most treecats is actually fairly analogous to human language, at least where the deliberate exchange of information is concerned.
I doubt that most humans will ever be able even to imagine what it must be like to receive all of the emotional 'sideband transmissions' that accompany any treecat conversation. But their ability to explain things to one another on a cognitive level isn't all that much greater than it would be for humans. Faster—lots faster, apparently—but not the sort of mind-to-mind, my-mind-is-your-mind, sharing some science-fiction writers have postulated."
"So how do they do it?" the earl asked. "You said they can transmit the new knowledge very rapidly, so obviously something else is happening."
"Exactly. You see, the 'cats' entire society revolves around a particular group called 'memory singers.' They're always female, apparently because females have naturally stronger mind-voices and mind-glows, and they're almost but not quite matriarchs."
Honor frowned thoughtfully.
"The treecat clans are governed by their elders, who are chosen—by a process, I might add, which apparently bears absolutely no relationship to human elections or the hereditary transmission of leadership—primarily for their particular abilities in specific activities or crafts which are critical to the clan's survival. But the memory singers form a special craft group, almost a caste, which is treated with enormous deference by the entire clan. In fact, every memory singer is automatically a clan elder, regardless of her actual age. And because of their importance to the clan, they're protected and guarded fanatically and absolutely banned from any activity which might endanger them—sort of like a steadholder."
She grinned with unalloyed cheerfulness for the first time in what seemed to have been years, and both Alexanders chuckled sympathetically.
"The thing that makes them so important is that they're the keepers of the 'cats' history and information base. They're able to form so deep a mental bond with any other 'cat that they actually experience what happened to that other 'cat as if it had happened to them. Not only that, but they can then reproduce those experiences in precise, exact detail, and share them with other 'cats . . . or pass them on to other memory singers. You might think of it as sort of the ultimate oral history tradition, except that the entire experience itself is transmitted, not simply from 'cat to 'cat, but actually across generations. According to Nimitz and Samantha, there's a 'memory song' which consists of the actual eyewitness experience of a 'cat scout who saw the first landing of a survey crew on Sphinx almost a thousand T-years ago."
Emily and Hamish gazed at the two treecats in something very like awe, and Nimitz and Samantha returned their looks calmly.
"So what happens," White Haven said slowly, "is that these . . . 'memory singers' are able to share the new concept or the new ability with whatever 'cat it first occurs to, and then to transmit it, like a gestalt, to all the others." He shook his head. "My God. They may be slow to think of new things, but once they do, they're certainly equipped to spread the good news!"
"Yes, they are," Honor agreed. "But the individuals who are most important of all to the 'cats are the innovators who are also memory singers in their own right. Apparently, a sister of Lionheart, the 'cat who adopted my great-great-great-whatever-grandmother, was exactly that sort of memory singer, and pretty nearly single-handedly convinced all of the other 'cats that human-'cat bonds were a good idea.
"Which brings me to the point of this somewhat long-winded explanation. You see, none of the 'cats had been able to make heads or tails out of the way that humans communicate until one of their memory singers was injured in a fall."
Her expression darkened for a moment. Then she shook it off and continued levelly.
"As I'm sure you both know, Nimitz was . . . injured when we were captured, and he lost his mind-voice as a result. He can no longer 'speak' to any of the other 'cats, which was why my mother came up with the brilliant idea of teaching him and Samantha to sign. It had been tried centuries ago without any success, but that was mostly because at that time the 'cats still didn't understand how human communication worked. Since they didn't use words at all, they simply couldn't make the connection between hands communicating information and thoughts any more than they could connect 'mouth-noises' to doing the same thing.
"What had changed by the time Nimitz and Sam came along was that the memory singer the 'cats call Singer From Silence had lost not her mind-voice, but her ability to hear other mind-voices. She could still taste emotions, still sense the mind-glow, but she was deaf to everything else."
She drew a deep breath.
"It must have been devastating, especially for a memory singer. She could still project, still share the memory songs she'd learned before, but she could never learn a new one. For that matter, she could never be entirely certain that anyone else 'heard' her properly, because there was no feedback channel, no way for her to be sure her signal hadn't been garbled.
"So she left her clan, gave up her position as one of its elders, and moved to Bright Water Clan—Nimitz's clan, the same one Lionheart came from. She chose Bright Water because it's always been the clan with the most intimate contact with humans, and she wanted to spend time around the two-legs. She knew we communicated somehow without mind-voices, and she wanted desperately to learn how we did it in the hope that possibly she could learn to do the same thing.
"She couldn't, not in the end, because 'cats simply can't reproduce the sounds of human language. But even though she never learned how to overcome her own mental deafness, she did, after years of listening to humans speak, deduce the rudiments of how spoken language worked. And because she could still transmit memory songs, she was able to pass that knowledge along to all other treecats, which is why they were able to understand us when we spoke to them even before they had a way to speak back with their hands."
"Fascinating," Hamish repeated yet again, his voice soft and his expression rapt. Then he cocked his head and frowned. "But you said all of this relates to Sam somehow."
"Yes, it does. You see, Samantha's treecat name is 'Golden Voice.' She's a memory singer, Hamish."
"She's what?" White Haven blankly at Honor for a moment, then turned to stare at Samantha, who looked back and gave an unmistakable human-style nod.
"A memory singer," Honor confirmed. "Remember that I said earlier that 'cats who adopt don't really make any choice to do so in the human sense of the word. That extra sensitivity, or ability, or whatever that's part of the ability to taste the mind-glow that makes adoption possible, also drives those of them who have it towards us. They know what it is they're looking for from the memory songs of other 'cats who have adopted, but they don't have any idea who they're looking for. It's their choice to seek adoption—or, rather, it's the choice of 'cats for whom adoption is possible to place themselves close enough to humans that it can happen—but the actual moment of adoption is more one of recognition than of seeking someone out. It just sort of . . . happens when they meet the right person.
"Well, Samantha—Golden Voice—was, as far as she or any other treecats know, the first 'cat born with both the mental strength to be a memory singer and the whatever it is that drives 'cats to adopt. From what she's told me, it must have been a dreadful decision to give up either of those possibilities, but she chose to pursue the adoption bond, which is how she met Harold Tschu and adopted him."
"And he was killed serving with you in Silesia, after she and Nimitz had become mates," White Haven said, nodding slowly.
"Which is the only reason she didn't suicide after Harold's death," Honor agreed somberly. The earl's eyes narrowed, and she tossed her head and looked back at him almost defiantly as she sensed his instant flare of denial of any such possibility.
"That's what treecats usually do when they lose their adopted people or their mates, Hamish," she said quietly. "Suicide, or simply . . . shut down and starve themselves to death or die of dehydration. That was the enormous tragedy of adoptions for three T-centuries, until the invention of prolong made it possible for us to live as long as they do. They knew they would almost certainly be giving up decades of life, as much as a cent
ury or more, if they adopted . . . and the need for the human mind-glow drove them to it, anyway."
She saw the understanding dawn in his eyes, the shadow of all the centuries of sacrifice which had claimed its victims in the name of joy and love, and she nodded slowly.
"The fusion is so deep and so complete, from their side, at least, that it leaves a huge void deep inside them when they lose their other half. Most of them simply choose not to live after that. King Roger's 'cat Monroe would almost certainly have starved himself to death if—"
She stopped herself abruptly. The fact that Queen Elizabeth's father had been assassinated by Havenite proxies was a secret known only to a handful of her subjects. Honor was one of them, and she knew William Alexander was, too, because they'd both been told at the same time. But they'd also been sworn to secrecy.
"He probably would have starved himself to death if Prince Justin—who wasn't Prince Consort at the time, of course; he and Elizabeth were engaged, but they hadn't married yet—hadn't been attacked by a lunatic while he was trying to get Monroe to eat," she went on instead. "That roused Monroe, and in the ensuing fight against the lunatic, he and Justin adopted one another, which is the only reason Monroe is alive today. Well, the situation was similar with Samantha and Nimitz, because as far as we know, they're the only mated pair ever who have both adopted, and her bond with Nimitz was powerful enough to make her stay with us."
"I see." White Haven gazed at her for a moment, then reached back across to Samantha and stroked the soft, thick fur of her spine.
"Where you lonely?" he asked her quietly. "Was that it?"
The small, slender treecat looked back up at him out of bottomless grass-green eyes, then turned those same eyes to Honor and rose to sit higher on her true-feet so that she could sign.
