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Vince
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Regarding treecat's native 'language' (telepathy/empathy), from: War of Honor, Chapter 13 wrote: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."
Italics are the author's, boldface, underlined and colored text is my emphasis. The text makes it clear that treecats do have a 'native language', if by 'treecat native language' you mean the ways treecats communicate (transmitting and receiving) both thoughts and emotions. It just is apparently not anything like any spoken, signed, or written human language. Which is why it took treecats a very long time to understand the way humans used spoken language to communicate. Honor Harrington leaned back in the pinnace seat and tried not to smile as Major Andrew LaFollet, second-in-command of the Harrington Steadholder's Guard and her personal armsman, crawled as far under the seat in front of her as he could get.
"Come on, now, Jason," he wheedled. His soft Grayson accent was well suited to coaxing, and he was using that advantage to the full. "We're due to hit atmosphere any minute now. You have to come on out . . . please?"
Only a cheery chirp answered, and Honor heard him sigh. He tried to crawl still further under the seat, then backed out and sat up grumpily on the decksole. His auburn hair was tousled and his gray eyes dared any of his subordinates to say one word—just one—about his current, less than dignified preoccupation, but no one accepted the challenge. Indeed, Honor's other armsmen were busy looking at anything except him, and their expressions were admirably, one might almost say determinedly, grave.
LaFollet watched them not watching him for a long moment, then sighed again. His own mouth twitched in a small grin, and he turned his eyes to the slender brown-and-white dappled treecat curled up in the seat beside Honor's.
"I don't want to sound like I'm criticizing," he told the 'cat, "but maybe you should fish him out."
"He has a point, Sam," Honor observed, feeling her right cheek dimple as her smile grew broader. "He is your son. And unlike Andrew, you'd fit under the seat."
Samantha only looked at her, green eyes dancing, and her lazy yawn bared needle-sharp white fangs. Two more prick-eared heads, each far smaller than her own, rose drowsily from the warm nest she'd formed by curling about their owners, and she reached out with one gentle true-hand to push them back down. Then she turned her gaze to the larger, cream-and-gray 'cat lying across Honor's lap, and Honor felt the faint echoes of a deep, intricate mental flow as Nimitz raised his head to gaze back. None of the humans present could tell exactly what Samantha was saying to her mate—indeed, no one but Honor even "heard" it at all—but everyone grasped her meaning when Nimitz heaved a sigh of his own, flicked his ears in agreement, and slithered to the deck.
He flowed along the aisle using all three sets of limbs, then settled down beside the seat LaFollet had tried to climb under. He crossed his true-hands on the decksole and rested his chin on them, gazing under the seat, and once again Honor felt the echoes of someone else's thoughts. She also felt Nimitz's mingled amusement, pride, and exasperation as he addressed himself firmly to the most adventuresome of his offspring.
As far as she knew, no other human had ever been able to sense the emotions of a treecat, and certainly no one had ever been able to sense the emotions of other humans through their adopted partner, but for all its unheard of strength, her link to Nimitz remained too unclear for her to follow his actual thoughts. That didn't keep her from realizing that he was taking the time to form those thoughts very clearly and distinctly, and she suspected he was also keeping them as simple as he could . . . which only made sense when he was directing them to a kitten who was barely four months old.
Nothing happened for several seconds, and then she sensed the equivalent of a mental sigh of resignation and a tiny duplicate of Nimitz poked its head out from under the seat. James MacGuiness, Honor's personal steward, had given Jason his name in honor of the kitten's intrepid voyages of exploration, and Honor knew she should have expected the marvelous new puzzle of the pinnace to suck him into wandering. She wished he weren't quite so curious, but that was a trait all 'cats—and especially young ones—shared. Indeed, there was something almost appalling about the compulsion to explore which afflicted all of Samantha and Nimitz's kittens. Jason was simply the worst of them, with a taste for solo boldness worthy of his name, and Honor sometimes wondered how any treecat survived to maturity if they were all this curious in the wild. But this crop wasn't in the wild, and at least every human in the pinnace knew to keep an eye out for the kids.
Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis. And treecat-human telempathy* language is not just limited to emotions, although emotions (feelings) are part of it Nimitz was able to transmit to Honor images through his telempahic channel to Honor in: Flag in Exile, Chapter 3 wrote:Honor stopped dead on the path as Nimitz catapulted abruptly from her shoulder. She watched him vanish into the formal garden's shrubbery like a streak of cream-and-gray smoke, then closed her eyes and twitched a smile as she followed him through flowering masses of Terran azalea and Sphinxian spike-blossom via their link.
***Snip***
Now she located a bench by touch and sank down onto it. LaFollet moved to stand beside her, but she hardly noticed as she sat, eyes still closed, and tracked Nimitz through the undergrowth. Treecats were deadly hunters, the top of Sphinx's arboreal food chain, and she felt his happy sparkle of predatory pleasure. He had no need to catch his own food, yet he liked to keep his skills sharp, and she shared his zest as he slunk silently through the shadows.
The mental image of a Sphinxian chipmunk (which looked nothing at all like the Old Earth animal of the same name) came to her suddenly. The 'cat projected it with astonishing clarity, obviously by intent, and she watched as if through his eyes as the chipmunk sat near its hole, gnawing at a near-pine pod's heavy husk. A gentle, artificially induced breeze stirred the foliage, but the chipmunk was upwind, and Nimitz slithered noiselessly closer. He crept right up to it and hovered, sixty centimeters of needle-fanged predator perched at the small, oblivious animal's shoulder, and Honor felt his uncomplicated delight at his own success. Then he stretched out a wiry forelimb, extended one true-hand's long, delicate finger, and jabbed the chipmunk with a lancet claw.
Italics are the author's, boldface and underlined text is my emphasis. Echoes of Honor, Chapter 40 wrote:Nimitz yawned, baring sharp, white canines in a lazy grin while he radiated approval of that thought. Then he concentrated hard, and Honor smothered a sudden, sharp bark of laughter as he radiated the image of a Sphinx chipmunk with an unmistakable, if very chipmunkish, caricature of Styles' face, fleeing for its wretched life. She looked down at the 'cat in astonishment, for this was the first time he'd ever attempted to send her an image which obviously was not something he'd actually seen and simply stored in memory. But her astonishment turned into a helpless, fiendish giggle as the chipmunk vanished out one "side" of his projected image . . . and a brown-eyed treecat with bared claws, an eye patch, an RMN beret, and the red-and-gold shoulder boards of a commodore went bounding past in hot pursuit.
She half-sat, half-fell back down onto the edge of the bed, laughing delightedly, and Nimitz bleeked his matching delight at having gotten her to laugh. He sat up as straight as his crippled limb permitted, curling his tail primly around his true-feet, and groomed his whiskers at her with insufferable panache.
Boldface and underlined text is my emphasis. * Telempathy, because bonded treecat-human information transfer uses the treecat's empathy channel, if the human can detect it (Honor, Scott MacDallan): Ashes of Victory, Chapter 3 wrote:She broke off suddenly, so abruptly her mother looked up from Faith in quick alarm. Honor's smile had vanished as if it had never existed, and her head snapped to her left, her single working eye locking on the 'cat on MacGuiness' shoulder.
Samantha had reared up, her ears flat to her skull, her eyes fixed on her mate. Allison whipped her head around to follow that intense stare, and her own eyes widened as she saw Nimitz recoiling as if he'd been struck. For just an instant, she had the insane thought that he'd somehow infuriated Samantha, but only for an instant. Just long enough for her to recognize something she had never, ever expected to see in Nimitz.
Terror. A fear and a panic that drove the whimper of a frightened kitten from him.
MacGuiness and Andrew LaFollet had looked up when Honor broke off, and both of them went white as they saw Nimitz. Unlike Allison, they had seen him that way before—once—in the admiral's quarters of GNS Terrible, when the terrible nightmares lashing his person's sleeping mind with the Furies' own whips had reduced the empathic 'cat to shivering, shuddering helplessness. Now they saw the equal of that terror ripping through him, and as one man, they stepped towards him, reaching out to their friend.
But even before they moved, Honor Harrington had hit the quick release of the carrier straps where they crossed on her chest. She caught the straps as they opened, and, in a single, supple movement which ought to have looked awkward and clumsy for a one-armed woman, stripped the carrier from her back and brought it around in front of her. She went to her knees, hugging Nimitz, carrier and all, to her breasts, pressing her cheek against his head, and her eyes were closed as she threw every scrap of energy she had into the horror raging in her link to him.
I should have felt it sooner, some fragment of calm told her. I should have realized the instant we saw Sam . . . but he didn't realize it. My God, how could we have missed it?
She held the 'cat with the full power of her arm and her heart, and for just an instant, as the terrible storm front of his emotions spun its tornado strength through them both, he struggled madly to escape her. Whether to run and hide in his panic or in a desperate effort to reach Samantha physically Honor could not have said, probably because he couldn't have. But then the terrible panic flash eased into something less explosive . . . and far, far bleaker. He went limp with a shudder, pressing his face against her, and a soft, low-pitched keen flowed out of him.
Honor's heart clenched at the desolate sound, and she kissed him between the ears while she held him close.
The pulser butt, she thought. That damned pulser butt on Enki! My God, what did it do to him?
She didn't know the answer to that question, but she knew the blow which had shattered his mid-pelvis had to be the cause of the dark and terrible loneliness of a full half of Nimitz's mind. Nothing else could have caused it, and the shock and terror it produced were infinitely worse than they might have been because neither he nor Honor had even realized that silence was there.
She crooned to him, holding him tightly, eyes closed, and she felt Samantha standing high on her true-feet beside her. Nimitz's mate had exploded off of MacGuiness' shoulder, racing to Nimitz, and her true-hands and feet-hands caressed his silken fur. Honor felt her matching panic, felt her reaching out to Nimitz with every sense she had, trying desperately to hear some response from him, pleading for the reassurance her mate could no longer give her.
Honor tasted both 'cats' emotions, and her tears dripped onto Nimitz's pelt. But at least the initial panic was passing, and she drew a deep, shuddering breath of relief as they realized, and Honor with them, that they could still feel one another's emotions . . . and Samantha realized Nimitz could still hear her thoughts.
The exact way in which the telempathic treecats communicated with one another had always been a matter of debate among humans. Some had argued that the 'cats were true telepaths; others that they didn't actually "communicate" in the human sense at all, that they were simply units in a free-flow linkage of pure emotions so deep it effectively substituted for communication.
Since her own link to Nimitz had changed and deepened, Honor had realized that, in many ways, both arguments were correct. She'd never been able to tap directly into Nimitz's "conversations" with other 'cats, but she had been able to sense the very fringes of a deep, intricate meld of interflowing thoughts and emotions when he "spoke" to another of his kind. Since he and Samantha had become mates, Honor had been able to "hear" and study their interwoven communication far more closely and discovered Nimitz and Samantha truly were so tightly connected that, in many ways, they were almost one individual, so much a part of one another that they often had no need to exchange deliberately formulated thoughts. But from observing them together and also with others of their kind, she'd also come to the conclusion that 'cats in general definitely did exchange the sort of complex, reasoned concepts which could only be described as "communication." Yet what she'd never been certain of until this dreadful moment was that they did it over more than one channel. They truly were both empaths and telepaths. She knew that now, for Samantha could still "hear" and taste Nimitz's emotions . . . but that was all she could hear. The rich, full-textured weaving which had bound them together had been battered and mauled, robbed of half its richness and blighted with unnatural silence, and she felt herself weeping for her beloved friends while they grappled with their sudden recognition of loss.
How could we not have noticed it on Hell? All that time, and we never even guessed—
But then she drew a deep breath of understanding. Of course. Her link with Nimitz operated through the 'cat's empathic sense. They'd never used the telepathic "channel" to communicate, and so Nimitz had never even suspected that it had been taken from him. Not until the moment he'd reached out to his mate . . . and she hadn't heard him at all.
"Honor?" It was her mother's soft voice, and she looked up to see Allison kneeling beside her, her face anxious, her eyes dark with worry. "What is it, Honor?"
"It's—" Honor inhaled sharply. "In the Barnett System, when Ransom announced her plans to send me to Hell, she ordered her goons to kill Nimitz, and—" She shook her head and closed her eyes again. "We didn't have anything left to lose, Mother, so—"
"So they attacked the StateSec guards," Andrew LaFollet said softly, and Honor realized her armsman, too, was kneeling beside her. He was to her left, on her blind side, and she turned towards him. "That must have been it, My Lady," he said when his Steadholder looked at him. "When that bastard with the pulse rifle clubbed him."
"Yes." Honor nodded, not really surprised Andrew had realized what must have happened. But she could taste the confusion of the others, even through the emotional tempest still rolling through the two treecats. She loosened her grip on Nimitz, setting the carrier on the floor, and watched as he climbed out of it. He and Samantha sat face-to-face, and he pressed his cheek into the side of her neck while her buzzing purr threatened to vibrate the bones right out of her, and her prehensile tail wrapped itself about him and her true-hands and hand-feet caressed him. Even now he sat awkwardly hunched, twisted by his poorly healed bones, and she looked back up to meet her mother's worried eyes.
"No one's ever known if the 'cats were truly telepaths . . . until now," she told Allison softly. "But they are. And when that SS thug clubbed him, he must have . . . have broken whatever it is that makes them telepaths, because Sam can't hear him, Mother. She can't hear him at all."
"She can't?" Honor looked up. Her father stood beside her, cradling one of the babies in either arm, and frowned as she nodded at him. "From the way he's sitting, the pulser must have caught him—what? Almost exactly on the mid-pelvis?"
"A little behind it and from the right we think, My Lord," LaFollet said. "Most of the ribs went on that side, too. Fritz Montoya could probably give you a better answer, but it looked to me like it came down at about a seventy-degree angle. Maybe a little shallower than that, but certainly not by very much."
The armsman's eyes were intent, as if he recognized something behind the question from his Steadholder's father, and Alfred nodded slowly.
"That would make sense," he murmured, staring for a moment at something none of the others could see while he thought hard. Then he gave his head a little shake and looked back down at his elder daughter.
"We've wondered for centuries why the 'cats spinal cords have those clusters of nervous tissue at each pelvis," he told her. "Some have theorized that they might be something like secondary brains. They're certainly large enough, with sufficiently complex structures, and the theory was that they might help explain how something with such a relatively low body mass could have developed sentience in the first place. Others have derided the entire idea, while a third group has argued that even though they may be secondary brains, the physical similarities—and differences—between them indicate that they must do something else, as well. Their structures have been thoroughly analyzed and mapped, but we've never been able to link them to any discernible function. But, then, no one ever had a 'cat expert quite like you available for consultation, Honor. Now I think we know what at least one of those super-ganglia do."
"You mean you think the mid-limb site was his . . . well, his telepathic transmitter?"
"I'd certainly say that's what it looks like. I noticed that you said Sam can't hear him, not that he can't hear her. Is that correct?"
"Yes. I think so, anyway," Honor said after a moment. "It's hard to be sure just yet. When he realized she couldn't hear him, he just—"
"Reacted very much the way I would have in his place," her father interrupted. "And not surprisingly. I've always wondered what would happen to a telempath who suddenly, for the first time in his life, found himself isolated and alone, locked up in his own little world. We still don't begin to know all we ought to about the 'cats, but one thing we do know is that they all seem to share that constant awareness, that linkage, with every other 'cat and most humans, at least to some extent, around them. It's always there, from the day they're born, and they must take it as much for granted as they do oxygen. But now—"
Alfred shuddered and shook his head, and Honor nodded mutely, astounded by how accurately her father had described an interweaving of minds and hearts he had never been able to taste himself.
Italics are the author's, boldface, underlined and colored text is my emphasis. -------------------------------------------------------------
History does not repeat itself so much as it echoes.
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