This was about the alien.

Fraq welcomed her with an odd, jerky bow as she approached. His diamond-sharp yet golden eyes glittered behind his visor. His conic nose flared wide and red. Excitement cues, she now knew. Reading alien expressions was difficult, but she had learned a lot since she had plunged a hundred kilometers with this daredevil. That, plus many days spent slogging through SETI texts, deciphering them with him, had made Fraq seem understandable. An error, probably.

The translator, Natal, stepped forward. She was a small, intense type who had worked with Fraq since his arrival. His command of Anglish was good, but some Ythri elements needed work. Natal had developed audio pickups that transduced human speech into the alien’s own sounds if Fraq could not shape human words. So she gave a greeting: “He welcomes your kind assistance. It is time to surmount the heights.”

Rachel nodded, smiling at the impassive—or maybe just unreadable—alien face. He reached over with his long wing-arms and clasped her hands together.

Fraq spoke like gravel beneath tires, chunks spitting out, utterly unlike their song-sounds. The translator said stiffly, “Again we perform the ceremony of greeting. You and I have joined the Great Fallen. Now follows an invocation of need. You will help the human female Reader-of-Truths to accompany Fraq—yes?”

Rachel bowed. “Yes.”

Fraq began reciting phrases. Rachel was used to this by now: the ceremonial assurances and introductions, salutes to past flock heroes, females of renown who wore a golden crown, the lot—time-honored in his culture. She smiled slightly and kept her face otherwise blank.

There were Earthly precedents, after all. The first lasting writings came from temple bureaucrats marking down economic transactions. In these texts from ancient Iraq, books did not have titles. Librarians used the incipit—the first few words of the text—to identify a tablet, just as poems were still listed by opening lines in present indexes. Some of the Library SETI messages used this wildly archaic method. They were welters of first lines, so that even their indexes read like weird poems of disconnected thoughts.

Fraq came from a culture that insisted on such formalisms in speech.

Humans had long abandoned those.

Finished now, bowing with a curious two-handed gesture like slow-flying birds, the alien turned away to speak to the engineer, who approached with a team to go through procedures. Techtalk flew, mediated by the interpreter.

Rachel could not follow that. Luckily, she didn’t need to. She was here because Fraq wanted her, following some odd Ythri social protocol. She had done the Plunge with him, which seemed to mean a lot to his rigid manners.

Rachel turned to leave and found Chen at her elbow.

The slight woman whispered, “The… Everest… seems so, so… D-do you think this is possible?”

Rachel looked at her in wonderment. It was as though their first meeting had never happened. But Rachel recalled it well….

3.

The small Asian woman who came confidently into Rachel’s office had large eyes with a strange, penetrating look in them. Eerily like reptile eyes, Rachel thought.