The Headmaster of Horatio College, the Representative for Allbridge and Horatio Colleges, the Crown Prince of Arizona, and Tortoise Magnate John Jean Ulysses Horatio are in a retiring room following a midwinter feast hosted by the Headmaster.

I say, Reginald, this vintage is superb!

The 19,998 Blackadder? Yes, that was the fifth straight rainless summer. Had to hike gallons up a nearly vertical slope in August. Water and powdered marble

What, for the soil? The Crown Prince is the least informed on wine of the quartet, preferring brewed hallucinogenics and cocain. He's still nursing his second glass of the long evening now half after 2:00 in the morning, a velvatine merlot, the Saviogn blanc he'd been poured before the helipad even touched down having been wielded like a protective scepter in it's temperature controlled glass until half way through appetizers when he surrendered to the necessity of a red.

No, they dusted the leaves with the marble, to help reflect sunlight. Even with the wind machines it was 115 degrees in the shade, but the real danger was overexposure to ultraviolet. at the same time it's the ultraviolet which gives the Blackadder Vintage it's deep, almost charcoal quality, which "sits like a toad on the highway of the mid pallet, staring down a driver with all the determination of a soul with nothing left to live or leap for."

ah, and that's, appealing?

the Headmaster kids, your highness. He is quoting the review my dear Tiffany wrote of Horatio's Diving Team.

Nihilism is the premier school of thought going into the 22,040 Olympics. You're just bitter because clown diving went out of fashion 66 years ago and it's never coming back.

Clown Diving?

Oh yes, big shoes, painted faces, red noses, the works. I once saw a clown car of 11 divers in the synchronized dive disembark their vehicle and change places all in midair on the Ultra-High Synchronized Team Dive.

That must have been, oh, at a Tibbet Invitational. They would have won if they hadn't been disqualified.

Tiffany knows that nihilistic diving’s the school what's breaking new water. I mean my God she's the one who traveled 9 months in a tin can to watch the 3 fatalist astronauts--

spationauts

yes, fatalist spationauts

whats the difference

spationauts are French

oh

3 spationauts who chose to hurl themselves out of a perfectly good spacecraft in a flyby of Ganymede to fall 666,000 miles and orbit the planet thirty three times to land 3 consecutive bullseye's on the New Red Spot.

how were they recovered?!

they weren't. hence the nihilism. we lost radio contact 44 minutes after the last one crossed into the exosphere. I understand that once of them wrote Tiffany a poem shortly before that.

Yes, they'd grown quite close over the 9 months of the voyage. she was one of only 3 sports writers. plus the 3 divers, a combination of 6 spationaut and cosmonaut crew, three officials from the Olympic committee. they tried to throw their silver metals into the storm after them, but they ended up missing the planet completely. probably got stuck in the planets rings.

what, they only got silver for that?

yes, a pair of divers, formerly conjoined twins actually, did a flyby of Sol. closest a human has ever come to a star and lived. they were recovered. they'd both gone blind but they expected that and had gotten implants installed allready for their navigation home, and the Olympic committee had the courtesy to outfit them with transplanted eyes but only one of them took them up on it, the other one said that after staring into all that light the wasn't anything left to see.

what did Tiffany do on the trip home? other than read that poem.

actually she didn't read it. not then. they told her the broadcast was on the private channel and for her eyes only. but she refused to read it and

spent the return trip writing her article and fucking one of the other sports writers and one of the members of the crew. and helping them all with their research. all of them were assigned research work, even the divers, though in the end their research was symbolic I guess, since instruments had been dropped into the New Red Spot before and the divers didn't manage to transmit anything new.

other than the qualitative experience of having jumped into Jupiter.

true. and that poem I suppose represents the research of one of them. but Tiffany didn't want to read it. she was grieving, and then she was working 18 hour days and still grieving, picking up slack among the researchers while they held the crew with emergency repairs.

who were the other sports writers like?

Gabriella and Sjøn. Gabriella and Tiffany knew each other back from their college days, both Allbridge girls. They'd done field work in extreme sports on the same junket before. Gabriella did her doctorate in Retro-Hiddegarianism. she was critical of the whole performance. Argued that by refusing to work towards a means of diving where there was at least a chance at extraction the gesture was obsessed with it's own futility. she was a partisan of the Solar jump, even threatened to kill a Olympic Judge if they didn't award the twins a perfect 10. she would have too. she spent right years in an Afghan jail for kidnapping.

what about Sjøn?

he maintained that the act was one of “supreme inscrutability.” from weeks worth of continuous interviews conducted before and during the voyage he never admits he understands why they do the jump.

Sjøn was the brother of one of the divers.

what?

yes, Irish Twins--they were born 11 months apart. he never stopped asking him why he was doing it. the three divers had each nominated a sportswriter who they felt would best capture the team's performance.

Tiffany had known one of the divers for about 5 years before. not the one who sent her the poem. that one was Sjøn’s. they knew each other from earlier fads. Jumping from space elevators. Spelunking through the Earth's crust to find the longest underground waterfalls. magma diving. hyper-urban diving. deep wilderness diving.

elevator diving was the one they first met at. the technology was what attracted Astrix to diving.

in elevator shaft diving the goal is to race an elevators in the neighboring shafts, weaving in between them, riding their undersides to accelerate, clining to their roofs to battle air resistance. the sport is completely illegal, it's done during elevator rush hour.