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.