The Atlas Six (The Atlas 1)

“Self-deprecation is such a waste,” said Parisa, sounding bored by the prospect of his interior thoughts. “Either you believe you’re worthy or you don’t, end of story. And if you don’t,” she added, opening the door to her room, “I certainly don’t want to chance ruining the high opinion of you I may have mistakenly gotten from last night.”

Tristan rolled his eyes. “So I’m too good, then? Is that the problem?”

“The problem is I don’t want you getting attached,” Parisa said. “You can’t just replace one high-maintenance woman with another, and more importantly, I don’t have time for your daddy problems.”

“By all means, let me down gently,” drawled Tristan.

“Oh, I’m not letting you down at all. I’m sure we’ll have our fun, but certainly not two nights in a row,” Parisa said, shrugging. “That’s sending entirely the wrong message.”

“Which is?”

“That I wouldn’t eliminate you if given the chance,” she said, and slipped inside her bedroom, shutting the door.

Great, Tristan thought. It was such a confounding reality that Parisa was beautiful even when she was being mean; especially then, in fact. She was also much more beautiful than Eden, which said a lot about beauty, and about cruelty, too.

He had such a talent for finding women who put themselves first. It was like he was some sort of sniffer-dog for emotional fatality, always able to dig it up from the one person in the room who would have no trouble making him feel small. He wished he were less attracted to it, that brazen sense of self, but unfortunately ambition left such a sweet taste in his mouth, and so had Parisa. Maybe she was right; maybe it was daddy problems.

Maybe after a lifetime of being useless, Tristan simply wanted to be used.

IV: SPACE

LIBBY

“So,” Ezra said. “How’s it going?”

“Oh, you know,” Libby said. “Fine.”

“...fine?” Ezra gave a little groan; half-charmed, half-doubtful, accompanied by an eye roll she could hear through the phone. “Come on, Libs, I just went on for ten minutes about my supervisor’s affinity for onion bagels. I think you can probably come up with something to tell me about your new job.”

Well, magnificent. She thought she’d escaped any necessity for confession, given her dutiful half-listening to said story about supervisor and bagels along with the likelihood that she could slip casually into phone sex, but evidently not. It was just what she needed, really, to have to tell someone who would want to know everything the absolutely nothing she was allowed to explain.

“It’s a fellowship,” Libby began, chewing the inside of her cheek. “We do… you know. Fellowship things. Research.”

There. That was one way to put it. A boring one, ideally, i

nviting no further questions.

“What are you researching?”

Alas.

“Oh, um…”

“There has always been an intersect between magic and science,” Atlas had said upon introduction to their first topic of study, leading them inside what he referred to as the reading room. It was a split level, high-ceilinged open space with a series of tables in the center, most of which were occupied with nothing aside from one or two chairs and a small reading lamp. Illumination was minimal in the bottom half of the room, so as to not disturb the literature itself, while the top level glowed faintly with track lighting, looked down from a balcony lined with shelves.

At the moment they entered, a middle-aged man had glanced down from above, observing their entry and nodding to Atlas.

Atlas, in return, gave the visitor a courteous wave. “Bom dia, Senhor Oliveira,” Atlas offered in greeting, startling Libby slightly with the reference to someone she was fairly certain was currently the chairman of the medeian offices of Brazil.

“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.”)