by David Weber
“You’re welcome, Your Grace. And it works both ways, you know.”
She nodded, wishing he could taste her emotions as clearly as she tasted his.
You know, that’s sort of unreasonable of you, she told herself as he punched the “audio only” accept key. How many people are lucky enough to have what you already have with him and Emily? I know it’s human nature to always want more, but let’s not get too greedy, okay?
“Yes?” Hamish said.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, Milord,” James MacGuiness’ voice responded.
“That’s all right, Mac. I think we were about to get up anyway.” Hamish gave Honor a wicked, laughing look, then glanced at the time and grimaced. “For that matter, I’ve got that early meeting at Admiralty House, and I need to be in the air in the next couple of hours.”
“I know, Milord. In fact, that’s one reason I went ahead and woke you. Dr. Arif’s on the com for Her Grace, FTL from Sphinx. And I think Her Grace should probably take the call before you leave, Milord.”
“I beg your pardon?” Hamish frowned at Honor, who shrugged.
She had no idea why Adelina Arif might screen her this early, or why MacGuiness thought Hamish should be part of the conversation, but …
“Ask her to hold a few more seconds, please, Mac,” she said, raising her voice.
“Of course, Your Grace,” he replied, and Hamish muted the com.
“I think we should go ahead and get decent,” Honor continued, giving her husband one more peck on the cheek before she rolled out of bed.
“Some people,” he returned, surveying her with obvious approval, “wake up decent because they wear pajamas, you know.”
“No, really?” She laughed and stretched luxuriously, arching her spine and savoring the sharp, bright flicker of desire flowing through his emotions, then scooped up her kimono and slipped into it. “Doesn’t that waste a lot of time?” she asked innocently.
“And you called me a wicked, evil fellow! A case of the pot and the kettle, don’t you think?”
“Certainly not.” She sniffed virtuously. “I’m not a ‘fellow’!”
“No, you’re not, thank God,” he conceded fervently.
“I’m glad you approve. Now get your butt out of bed and into a robe!”
“Yes, Your Grace. At once, Your Grace. As you command, Your Grace,” he said obsequiously, and ducked as she hurled a pillow at him.
* * *
“All right, Mac,” she said a few minutes later, seated at her workstation in their suite’s comfortable sitting room. Hamish sat beside her, casually dressed in a pullover shirt and slacks. “Please put Dr. Arif through.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
The display blanked briefly. Then an attractive, dark-complexioned woman looked out of it at her.
“Adelina,” Honor said. “It’s good to see you.”
“And you, too, Your Grace.” The woman who’d taught the treecats to sign smiled after a brief lag. Despite the fact that she was several light-minutes away, in her office on Sphinx, the delay was little more than ten seconds. “I apologize for screening so early, though.” Her smile turned a bit sheepish. “Actually, I hadn’t realized it was quite this early for you. I counted the time zones wrong.”
“That’s all right,” Honor assured her, and glanced at Hamish. “We needed to get up early this morning, anyway.”
“I hope you’re not just saying that to make me feel better,” Arif chuckled a handful of seconds later. “Anyway, though, the reason I’m disturbing you this early is that something came up about thirty-five minutes ago, and I thought you ought to hear about it ASAP.”
Honor cocked her head and frowned. If she had the numbers right, the time in Arif’s office in the Sphinxian town of Green Bottom was just past Compensate, the “midnight hour” (thirty-seven minutes, actually) inserted into the middle of Sphinx’s night to “round out” the twenty-five standard-hour planetary day.
“You’re up kind of late, aren’t you, Adelina?”
“I think everybody’s working strange hours lately, Your Grace,” Arif replied. “Although, when I realized I’d dragged Mac out of bed, I started to tell him not to disturb you. But he mentioned it was about time for him to be getting you up. Besides”—she shrugged with something that wasn’t quite a grin—“the ’cats are sort of insistent about talking right now. They, ah, don’t seem quite as obsessed with clocks as humans are.”
“You’ve got that one right!” Honor snorted. “It took a couple of years for Nimitz to catch on that two-legs really cared exactly when they got around to doing something.” She smiled. “Actually, it came in kind of handy for a while. I got to be late and blame it on him … until Mom and Daddy figured out who was really to blame, anyway.”
Nimitz made an amused sound, and Arif chuckled.
“I can believe that. And most of the ’cats I’ve been working with are still ‘wild,’ of course. They haven’t had the advantage of Nimitz’s earlier training.”
“No, but they’re probably less stubborn than him, too,” Honor said, reaching up to stroke Nimitz’s ears.
“Far be it from me to agree with you about that,” Arif said a bit primly, and Nimitz bleeked a laugh as Samantha nodded vigorously from the back of Hamish’s chair.
“Anyway,” Arif went on, her expression more serious, “earlier this evening, I was discussing today’s progress with Song Shadow when she suddenly stopped in mid-sign. She just sat there for several seconds, obviously ‘listening’ to someone else. It’s not like her to just stop like that, without at least warning me, and whoever she was talking to, the conversation went on a long time for a ’cat. When it was over, she asked me to send an air car to Bright Water Clan.”
Honor felt herself frowning. She wasn’t going to interrupt with questions—even with the grav-pulse com, interplanetary conversations quickly disintegrated if people started breaking in on one another—but her curiosity burned brightly as she wondered where the linguist was going.
She’d never met Song Shadow, but from her name, she was obviously a “memory singer.” Arif was still exploring exactly what memory singers were, but she’d already learned enough to recognize they were absolutely central to treecat society, as its historians and teachers. From what Arif had so far discovered, a memory singer could literally “record” and play back the actual experiences of another treecat. In fact, they could play back centuries’ worth of those experiences.
Honor doubted any human—even she, who’d developed her own version of the treecats’ empathy—would ever truly grasp what that meant, appreciate the continuity “mind songs” bestowed upon a telepathic species who could literally “hear” the mind-voices and experience the very emotions of treecats who’d died centuries before their own birth. But the fact that Samantha was a memory singer had been critical to Arif’s success in teaching the ’cats to sign, because once she’d learned how, she’d been able to “teach” any other treecat the same thing.
“I sent the car, of course,” Arif continued. “It took an hour or so to get to Bright Water’s range, and the SFC ranger had to wait a while for all his passengers to arrive. Then they had to fly all the way to Green Bottom.”
She grimaced, and Honor nodded. Green Bottom was halfway around Sphinx from Bright Water Clan’s home range. And, she thought more grimly, from the ruins of Yawata Crossing as well.
“Thanks to all the delays, they only got here about an hour ago, and I was more than a little surprised by who Song Shadow had sent a ride for.” Arif shook her head. “It was seven other memory singers.”
Honor felt her eyes widen. One thing they had learned about memory singers was that they virtually never left their clans’ ranges. Which, of course, raised the question of exactly what a memory singer by the name of Samantha was doing bonded to a human. Honor had the impression that neither Nimitz nor Samantha was being as forthcoming about that as they could have, although it was obvious Samantha wasn’t exactly your typical memor
y singer.
Obviously, there’d always been some exceptions (besides Samantha), especially recently, since memory singers had been involved with Dr. Arif’s efforts from the beginning. But Honor didn’t think there’d ever been more than two or three of them in Green Bottom at any one time before.
“I know I don’t have to tell you how surprised I was when the ranger opened the car door and seven memory singers piled out!” Arif said wryly. “I’d met three of them before: Wind of Memory, Songstress, and Echo of Time.” Honor pursed her lips in a silent whistle as Arif named all three of Bright Water Clan’s senior memory singers. “Song Shadow introduced the others once they got to my office. Songkeeper and Clear Song are the senior and second singers of Laughing River Clan. Winter Voice is the senior singer of Moonlight Dancing Clan. And then”—Arif’s eyes darkened and her voice dropped—“there’s Sorrow Singer.” The linguist swallowed. “She’s the only surviving memory singer of Black Rock Clan, Honor.”
Samantha and Nimitz keened softly, and Honor inhaled sharply.
“I didn’t know any of them had survived,” she said, voice soft, when Arif paused. “I thought the entire clan had been killed.”
“As far as Sorrow Singer knows, she’s not just Black Rock’s surviving singer,” Arif said a few seconds later. “She’s the only survivor, period. And the only reason she’s alive is that she was visiting Moonlight Dancing Clan. One of her litter brothers had married into Moonlight Dancing, and their central range was just far enough away to be outside the blast area and firestorm.” The linguist shook her head slowly. “Moonlight Dancing was close enough its memory singers felt Black Rock die … and so did she.”
Honor felt her hand press her lips, felt Hamish’s arm encircle her, felt Nimitz pressing against the back of her neck, and all she could think of was the horror of a telempath—a memory singer—actually experiencing, all at once, the deaths of everyone she’d ever known and loved.
“I don’t know how they kept her from suiciding.” Arif’s voice was softer than Honor’s had been. “I … have the impression it wasn’t easy.”
Her eyes met Honor’s from the display, and Honor nodded. Treecats who’d adopted almost never survived the deaths of their human partners. Before prolong, that had been the great tragedy of the bonds, for treecats normally lived over two hundred T-years, and their humans’ deaths had deprived them of all those additional years. Honor could think of only two ’cats in her own lifetime who’d survived their humans’ deaths: Prince Consort Justin’s companion, Monroe, and Samantha herself. What it must have been like when every single person in Sorrow Singer’s clan was ripped away from her in one brutal instant …
“It must have been terrible for all the clans in range,” Arif went on starkly, “and Moonlight Dancing was closest of all. The SFC says they’ve lost over a dozen ’cats since the strike, and others don’t look good. Which made me wonder why in God’s name the clan’s two senior memory singers were traipsing off to visit me at a time like this.”
Stillness hovered. Then, finally, Honor cleared her throat.
“Why—” She paused, her soprano husky, and cleared her throat again. “Why had they come, Adelina?”
“I know Nimitz and Samantha were off-world when it happened,” Arif said a bit obliquely, “but from what Song Shadow and the others say, every ’cat who wasn’t off-world felt it. The more distant clans felt it less strongly, thank God, but even our crew here at Green Bottom got hammered. Trust me, it was … bad. Really bad.
“I don’t know if they understand exactly how it happened even now, but they know it was the result of a human attack. Personally, I wouldn’t have blamed them for turning their backs on all humans, but that’s not the way treecats’ heads work. Apparently they’ve been passing around Nimitz’s experiences with you, and especially what happened with Lieutenant Mears, for some time now. And, according to Song Shadow, they’ve overheard at least part of the newscasts about President Pritchart and Dr. Simões; some of the SFC rangers were viewing the news channels during a medical visit to Moonlight Dancing. They’ve figured out Nimitz and Samantha must’ve actually met Simões, and the clans want them to come home for the memory singers to get their first-hand experience with his mind-glow, but I think that’s just a formality. They figure that if he was lying, or if he was crazy, Nimitz would already’ve told you. For that matter, they know you can sense emotions. So there’s not much question in their minds that Simões is telling the truth … or that Mesa is behind everything that’s happened.”
“I’m glad they don’t blame us for it, although God knows I sometimes do,” Honor said somberly. “I still don’t understand why they wanted to come see you in person, though. For that matter, I don’t see how Song Shadow got the word all the way from Bright Water that they did! Nothing I’ve ever seen has suggested they’ve got enough range to reach halfway around a planet.”
“I’m pretty sure they relayed from clan to clan,” Arif said. “And the reason they wanted to see me is that Sorrow Singer has a proposal.”
“A ‘proposal’?” Honor’s eyes narrowed. “What sort of ‘proposal’?”
“She wants to tell you herself,” Arif replied, and a slender, dappled brown and white form jumped into her lap and into her com’s field of view. The treecat sat up on her rearmost limbs, facing the com, her eyes and body language somber. She looked so small, so fragile, Honor thought, feeling the tears at the back of her own eyes.
“Sorrow Singer?” she asked softly, and the treecat nodded.
Honor wanted to reach out and hug that distant ’cat. To share with her the depth of her own grief for what had happened to Sorrow Singer’s clan. Her sense of guilt that humans—any humans—could have caused such an atrocity. But she couldn’t, and so she simply bent her head in a small half bow of acknowledgment.
Sorrow Singer inclined her own head in response. Then her hands rose, and she began to sign with a flowing grace that somehow communicated a bottomless sea of sadness.
those graceful fingers said.
Her hands emphasized the verb, and as Honor looked into those bottomless green eyes, she realized what Sorrow Singer meant. That for the treecats, the mind-glows of all who’d gone before were still available, still there, as long as the chain of singers was unbroken. In a very real sense, Sorrow Singer had actually met Stephanie Harrington, Honor’s own ancestor, the very first human ever adopted by a treecat, and Honor felt a strange, powerful envy.
“I wish I could share those memories with you,” she heard herself say. “I’ve always wished I could have known her.”
For a moment, Honor was certain she must have misread those flowing fingers. Protect her? Protect her, when humans had destroyed Sorrow Singer’s entire clan?
“Nimitz has already protected me many times,” she said. “And I’ve done my best to protect him. That’s what you do when you love someone.”
Sorrow Singer replied, and her tail flirted as if in a sad laugh.
“Then, forgive me, but what do you mean?”
w Sorrow Singer’s fingers moved with a flat, somehow terrible emphasis.
She paused again, and Honor nodded.
“I’m afraid you’re right,” she said soberly. “And we don’t know how they’re doing it. How to stop them.”
Honor inhaled sharply. She looked at Sorrow Singer for several seconds, then spoke very carefully.
“We’ve thought—I’ve thought—about that possibility,” she admitted. “As you say, Nimitz recognized the same fear, the same desperation, I saw in Tim that day. And from the security footage of the attempt to assassinate Berry Zilwicki, Judson Van Hale and Genghis recognized those same things in the killer they sent after her. So, yes, I’ve thought about it. But Genghis was bonded to Van Hale just like Nimitz is bonded to me. They tried to protect each other because they loved each other, just like Nimitz and I love each other. And Genghis died, Sorrow Singer, just like Nimitz could have died trying to stop Timothy.” She shook her head. “Like I said, you protect the ones you love.”