“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.