The Magicians - Lev Grossman [120]
Quentin tried to like Richard, since everybody else did, and it would just be simpler. But he was so damn earnest. He wasn’t stupid, but he completely lacked any sense of humor—jokes derailed him, so that the whole conversation had to stop while somebody, usually Janet, explained what everybody else was laughing at, and Richard knitted his thick Vulcan eyebrows in consternation at his companions’ merely human foibles. And Janet, who could usually be counted on to ruthlessly flense anybody who made the mistake of taking anything seriously, Janet waited on Richard hand and foot! It annoyed Quentin to think that she might look up to Richard the same way he had once looked up to the older Physical Kids. He had the definite sense that Janet must have slept with Richard once or twice back at Brakebills. It was entirely possible that they slept together once in a while now.
“Magic,” Richard announced slowly, flushed, “is the tools. Of the Maker.” He almost never drank, and two glasses of viognier had put him well over his limit. He looked first left and then right to make sure the whole table was listening. What a fatuous ass. “There’s no other way of looking at it. We are dealing with a scenario where there is a Person who built the house, and then He left.” He rapped the table with one hand to celebrate this triumph of reason. “And when He left, He left His tools lying around in the garage. Then we found them, and we picked them up, and we started making guesses about how they work. Now we’re learning to use them. And that’s magic.”
“There are so many things wrong with that I don’t even know where to start,” Quentin distinctly heard himself say.
“So? Start.”
Quentin put down the food he was carrying. He had no idea what he was about to say, but he was happy to be publicly contradicting Richard.
“Okay, well, first of all, there’s a huge scale problem. Nobody’s building universes here. We’re not even building galaxies or solar systems or planets. You need cranes and bulldozers to build a house. If there is a ‘Maker,’ which I frankly don’t see much evidence for, that’s what He had. What we’ve got are hand tools. Black and Decker. I don’t see how you get from there to what you’re talking about.”
“If it’s a question of scale,” Richard said, “I don’t see that as insurmountable. Maybe we’re just not”—he searched in his wine glass for the right metaphor—“we’re not plugging our tools into the right socket. Maybe there’s a much bigger socket—”
“I think if you’re talking about electricity,” Alice put in, “you have to talk about where energy comes from.”
That’s what I should have said, Quentin thought. Alice relished theoretical arguments as much as Richard, and she was much better at them.
“Any heating spell, you’re demonstrably drawing energy from one place and putting it in another. If somebody created the universe, they actually created energy from somewhere. They didn’t just push it around.”
“Fine, but if—”
“Plus, magic just doesn’t feel like a tool,” Alice went on. “Can you imagine how boring it would be if casting a spell were like turning on an electric drill? But it’s not. It’s irregular and beautiful. It’s not an artifact, it’s something else, something organic. It feels like a grown thing, not a made thing.”
She looked radiant in a silky black sheath that she knew he liked. Where had she been all night? He seemed to keep forgetting what a treasure she was.
“I bet it’s alien tech,” Josh said. “Or fourth-dimensional, like, weather or something. From a direction we can’t even