“In any case,” Atlas continued, tonally unchanged, “much of what exists in the Society’s archives draws no separation between magic and science; that distinction is more often made in later centuries, particularly pre-Enlightenment and post-Protestant Reformation. The scientific reflections of antiquity, such as the many works of Democritus we have in the archives—”
（Here Reina suddenly came alive from her usual half-comatose look of wanting to be elsewhere. Unsurprising that she would be interested; Democritus wrote dozens of texts on ancient atomism, nearly all of which would have been classified throughout Reina’s classics education as ‘missing.’）
“—indicate that most studies on nature, and of the nature of life itself, do not suggest any preclusion of magic. Indeed, even some medieval studies of heaven and the cosmos suggest both scientific and magical study; take, for example, Paradiso by Dante, which manages an artistically interpreted—but not inaccurate—understanding of the Earth and its atmosphere. The mystique of Dante’s heaven may be attributed to both scientific and magical forces.”
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.”