The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(41)

Most of their ‘lessons,’ if one could call them that, were Socratic discussions that took place in one of the outrageously stuffy drawing rooms, various places redeemed only by the presence of their countless first edition texts. Any additional books—anything referenced during the day’s discussion, for example—were easily summoned from the archives; in fact, they were so easily available that a handwritten copy of Heisenberg’s notes once appeared beside Libby on the table even before she had spoken her curiosity aloud.

(“Interestingly,” Atlas said, “Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is based, in large part, on a major misconception. Perhaps you might have heard that on the evening he first began his calculations, Werner Heisenberg had been watching a man a little ways before him who seemed to appear beneath a lamp, then disappear into the night, and appear from another pool of light, so on and so forth. Naturally, Heisenberg’s estimation was that the man was not actually disappearing and reappearing, but simply becoming visible and invisible due to light sources; thus, if Heisenberg could reconstruct the man’s trajectory by its interaction with other things, the same could be done for electrons, which is a tenet of physics that has been proven time and time again. Unfortunately,” Atlas chuckled, “the man that poor Werner was watching was actually a medeian called Ambroos Visser, who could very much disappear and reappear at will, and who happened to be having a marvelous time doing so that very evening. Post-death, Ambroos came to lead the poltergeist society at that very park in Copenhagen, and today he is deeply revered for his contribution to our understanding of atomic spectra.”)

“Lib?” Ezra asked, startling Libby back to their phone call. “Still there?”

“Yes, sorry,” she said, blinking. “What was the question?”

He gave a low laugh, the sound of it muffled into the receiver. He must have been in bed, turning onto his side to prop his phone against his ear. “What are you working on at the moment?”

“Oh, um… ecological conservation. In a sense.” That was sort of true, if one considered the process of terraforming hostile environments to be an ecological study. The previous afternoon, Libby and Nico had spent nearly all their energy trying to alter the molecular makeup of the painted room, hoping to tweak the nature of its atmosphere to their preferred specifications. They had been told to stop, though, in a rather snippy tone, when Reina said the fig plant in the corner was suffocating.

“We’re just trying to understand basic principles of science and magic so we can apply them to… bigger projects.”

Like, for example, wormholes. So far, Nico and Libby had managed to successfully create one wormhole, which had taken two weeks of research and an entire day of casting to accomplish. Ultimately, Nico had been forced to test it himself, because no one else was willing to take the chance they might accidentally wind up on Jupiter. (An impossibility, technically, as it would have taken at least ten thousand Nicos and Libbys to power anything even close to that magnitude of power and precision, but still, Tristan in particular had looked as if he’d rather eat his own foot than test it out.)

In the end, it took Nico from the first floor corridor of the west wing to the kitchen. In typical Nico fashion, he now used it on a regular basis.

“Well, it’s understandable if it doesn’t feel interesting yet,” said Ezra. “Most of academia can feel fairly pointless while you’re in the early research phase. And probably for quite a while after that, I imagine.”

“That’s… true,” Libby permitted hesitantly, not wanting to admit that the creation of a wormhole was actually not a pointless thing at all, even if it meant Nico was constantly and inconveniently disappearing and reappearing with snacks.

As far as Libby knew, they were the first ones who had ever managed to do it, even on a micro level. If there were sufficient power sources in the future—if, by chance, some medeian was born somewhere with nuclear energy in their fingertips—then they could easily do the same thing in space, in time… in spacetime! In fact, if any government agencies knew they had done it, they could easily get enough medeians together to bolster a magical space program. She had wanted to call NASA the moment they managed it, only then she remembered it would ultimately be controlled by a politician (any politician, somewhere, or at least a whole flock of them, some which would inevitably be less competent than others), and as Atlas often said, most forms of knowledge were better reserved until they were certain such revelations wouldn’t be abused. Even if Libby could manage to successfully terraform Mars, there was no guarantee it wouldn’t bring about a second global Age of Imperialism, which would be disastrous and destructive. Better they kept it in the archives.

“—’s Varona?”

“What?” Libby asked, having been daydreaming about planetary exploration again. “Sorry, I was just—”

“I just wondered how things were going with Varona,” Ezra said, sounding slightly more tense now than when he’d laughed her inattention off before. She supposed Ezra would never not sound tense about Nico, and understandably so; she had a practice of bristling at the sound of his name, too. “Is he being… you know. Himself?”

“Oh, well—”

At that precise moment, Libby heard a burst of nonsensical Nico-sounds from the gallery, which meant he was probably sparring with Reina again. That had begun almost immediately after the installation (‘installation’ being Atlas’ word for all of them nearly dying on their very first night as part of the Society) and now, Nico and Reina had a habit of doing what appeared to be daily martial arts workouts together.