Wind of Memory asked. She alone tasted almost as calm as Golden Voice, yet she watched the younger female unblinkingly, her concentrated gaze a pale reflection of the intensity with which she tasted the other’s mind glow and mind voice.

Golden Voice told her. those the People have given—who has ever been adopted. You know the full songs of their lives, of how they have protected and kept our secrets… and of how the other humans with whom we share this world have also learned to protect and accept us. We might hide our full cleverness forever, but if we do so only to insure the safety of the People while we learn more of the humans, then we have hidden it long enough. If we are never to reveal the truth, then we must find a better reason than fear of the humans’ reaction, Senior Singer.>

Wind of Memory considered that, then flicked her ears in agreement.

Golden Voice continued, she used the human word, for the mind voices of the People had no matching reference, yet all who heard it knew of what she spoke <—with an enemy with far more nests, far more people, than our humans. Laughs Brightly and I have met some of those enemies.> The tail wrapped about her mate tightened again, and his tail slipped comfortingly about her, as well. stand. Most are not, of course. Indeed, the mind glows of many of those we have met might equally well have been the mind glows of our own humans. Yet Laughs Brightly and I have also seen the weapons they use and tasted the fear of many of the humans—of the enemy humans, as well as our own—of where this war may lead. It may come even here, for our humans are dreadfully outnumbered. They are brave and determined, and I believe they fight much better than their enemies, yet not the bravest heart may hold back the ice days or forbid the mud days’ floods. Their weapons can kill even worlds, Senior Singer—accidentally, as well as deliberately. I know our humans would die before they willingly permitted such weapons to be used here, for this is their world, as well, and they would protect us as fiercely as they do their own younglings. Yet still it may happen, and what would become of Bright Water Clan, or the memory songs of its People, if such a weapon should strike here, in this central nesting place?>

A cold mental silence answered her, and Branch Leaper felt that same icy chill at his own heart. He had never even considered such a possibility, yet he knew now that he should have. He, too, had heard the memory songs, tasted the very mind glows, of Laughs Brightly and his human as they faced the terrible weapons Golden Voice had just described. And in those songs, Laughs Brightly had always known that such terrible human tools might be unleashed even here on the world of the People. Yet somehow the connection had never made itself for Branch Leaper, for such devices were too utterly beyond his own ken. And as he tasted the stunned silence about him, he knew he was not alone in that. That perhaps even the memory singers themselves had not recognized—or admitted to themselves that they did—the implications of all Laughs Brightly and others like him from other clans had reported to their memory singers.