A show of polite shock. “Why?”

Rachel could not hold back anymore. “He’s an alien! A culture we don’t know.”

Chen smiled prettily with her thin lips, but the large, cold reptilian eyes did not give anything away. “Alien, yes. But. He took you through the Orbitfall Plunge, I gather. Alone. And you won’t do anything more with him.”

Rachel looked across her desk at the woman and tried to put aside her feelings, which were ringing off the hook. “He’s a risk taker. He likes that. Ythri do. Carnivores generally do. Alien, sure, with motives unclear. But think this through. I hear from the Prefect that Fraq wants to do other things, hallucination-crazy things.”

“Well, yes. He does.”

“Like?”

“Everest.”

“I heard.”

“You turned that down?”

“You bet.”

“This visitor to our world, his flock”—Chen stood to make her point, spreading her arms—“wants to carry out a daring ascent, using our advanced technology. All to know our world in a way we have known it, to sense our challenges, test them—and you will not help him?”

Rachel sat back, amazed. Must be a prepared line. “You bet.”

“He insists on being accompanied by a Librarian.”

“See? That doesn’t make sense to us, but does to him. And you’re a Seeker of Script, not a full Librarian.”

“He doesn’t care about rank.”

“But he wants a woman companion?”

Chen shrugged uncomfortably. “I doubt that matters.”

Ha. “How can we be sure?”

A nod. “We can’t, of course. But Fraq now wishes to ‘ascend’ the atmosphere—he offers plans for a rocket-assisted device to soar to the top of Mount Everest.”

“The Prefect wants you to go with Fraq?”

Slowly, Chen said, “Yes.”

“In trade for more information about the wormhole?”

“In exchange for some data useful to the Library,” Chen said guardedly. “Otherwise, Fraq will not go further.”

“So why come to me?”

“Fraq wants you to accompany him, too.” Still withholding. What were those reptile eyes hiding?

“For what?”

“Companionship, I think. He was very disappointed that you did not agree to make the ascent. He regards working together and these ‘challenges’ as one and the same. Flock culture so demands, he says.”

“Bonding? He can’t seem to explain—and believe me, I and the Prefect and plenty of others have tried to understand—why those should go together.”

“I think that makes your point—he has a culture we learn only by inference from his behavior. To him, social truths are self-evident. I think he is social in a way we don’t get.” Chen shrugged again, but it was a mannered shrug, calculated. “He seems to work only with those who have shared what he calls ‘the barriers to knowing.’ Apparently that means, to use another translated phrase, ‘ways of challenging a world.’ Fraq is a complex… being.”

Rachel had to smile. “This is our first alien visit. We’ve apparently gathered him in as a first harvest of the old METI program, Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”

Chen brightened. “Yes—so I gathered from the transcripts. What a boon, for a centuries-old extravagance. Have we traced the cause?”