She sat back on the open deck and closed her eyes. People left you alone if you shut your eyes, even if they knew you were awake. She let her mantra sound in her mind, though meditation in her mood now was impossible.

Prefect Velma whispered, “Earthers are giving us sighs of longing and their talktalk simmers with intrigue.”

“Ugh. This is a stunt.” Blazing-fast hot fictionmaggy action, yes.

“For Fraq’s flock, a holy ritual. They remark that on their world, this Great Plunge is shared by all, their greatest sporting event.”

“Okay, I know we have it, too. I never paid any attention to such stuff.” Prefect Velma hovered nearby, blocking her view of the myriad cameras, spectators, tech teams—a mass of floating humanity. Plus… Fraq. Getting into his capsule. Rachel recalled her grandmother saying, in a trying time Rachel had decades back, “You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have.” Rachel wished the grand, wrinkled woman had not died, five years ago, at age 203. She had borne truths from early modernist antiquity.

“This is for the Library,” Prefect Velma said. “We harvest much from this.”

“Media rights, yes.”

“You have all the safety devices possible, with extra controls against buffeting.”

“I’m a firm believer in the right of people to risk their lives doing any damn-fool thing they want to.”

“That is a fine saying.”

“I got it from my father. Southern wisdom. Point is, I’m no damn fool.”

“The Ythri have come up from meat-eating birds. Big built nests, porches without railings—so you could launch off them—perches overseeing large areas—”

“So how did they get larger-scale societies—cities, nations? Starships that zoom through wormholes—”

“The exotranslators say they rose through a ‘challenge culture’—derived from their tribal origins, disputes, social evolution. There are ancient Messages that discuss these ornithoid extraterrestrials.”

“So… this challenge is from the Ythri to… all humans?”

“It would seem so. It is their negotiation method.”

Negotiate through… shared risk? The thought made her press back from the drop. Her hardened suit made movement slow, but she found that rugged heft reassuring. Zero g, but not zero mass, zero inertia. The suit had manifolds and buffers, shock absorbers and thermal dispersers galore—and she sensed the mass of them as a slowing-down of every movement. Weightless, yes, but swimming in molasses.

What is a Librarian doing here? Why did I agree to this stunt? Because the Library was akin to a dictatorship. And she could not face the questions: Why would she drop out of the greatest event ever, contact with real live aliens?

It might be good for her career, sure, but that wasn’t the reason. Call it a… sense of adventure?

The vanes down her back sank into the spongy chair. In the suit chair to her right, the alien stared down at the serene blue-white curve. “Like our world, but large, yes,” Fraq said.

The upper atmosphere glowed in its afternoon shimmer. Clouds lurked far below like icing on a spherical cake. Behind them the Star Tower was a thin line pointing from its ocean base south of Sri Lanka and on out to the counterweight beyond view. Stairway to the stars. Elevator, really. Beside her, the alien blocked her view to the north. Fraq sat in an odd way, feathers around his neck fluttering in magenta flourishes. Nervous? Slowly he turned to take it all in, then stared at her. Fraq—and until this moment she had not thought about what the word might mean. A Librarian should think of such things. What else had she ignored?