Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (153 page)

The Defense Professor had not reacted at all to any of this, except that his eyes had half-closed, as though in weariness.

“The young man took up his family’s seat in the Wizengamot, becoming among the most steadfast voices against You-Know-Who. Several times he led forces against the Death Eaters, fighting with skillful tactics and extraordinary power. People began to speak of him as the next Dumbledore, it was thought that he might become Minister of Magic after the Dark Lord fell. On the third of July, 1973, he failed to appear at a key Wizengamot vote, and was never heard from again. We assumed You-Know-Who had killed him. It was a grave blow to all of us, and matters went much the worse from that day on.” The old witch’s gaze was questioning. “I mourned you myself. What happened?”

The Defense Professor’s shoulders moved lightly, a small shrug. “You make many assumptions,” the Defense Professor said softly. “For myself, I would believe that man died years ago. But if that man is nonetheless alive - then it is clear he does not wish the fact announced, and has reasons enough for silence. That man was once of some help to you, it seems.” The Defense Professor’s lips curved in a cynical smile. “But I am no longer surprised when gratitude is fleeting. Is there yet more that you would demand from him?”

The old witch leaned back in her Auror’s monitoring-chair, looking rather startled, maybe even hurt. “No -” she said after a moment. Her fingers tapped the leather folder;
nervously,
you might have thought, if you had believed that Amelia Bones could ever be nervous. “But your
House
- there are not many Ancient Houses remaining -”

“It shall matter little to this country whether eight Ancient Houses remain, or seven.”

The old witch sighed. “What does Dumbledore think of this?”

The man in the detention cell shook his head. “He does not know who I am, and promised not to inquire.”

The old witch’s eyebrows rose. “How did he identify you to the Hogwarts wards, then?”

A slight smile. “The Headmaster drew a circle, and told Hogwarts that he who stood within was the Defense Professor. Speaking of which -” The tone went lower, flatter. “I am missing my classes, Director Bones.”

“You seem to -
rest
, sometimes, in a peculiar manner. This has also been reported. And you seem to be
resting
more and more frequently, as time goes on.” The old witch’s fingers tapped the leather folder again. “I cannot recall reading of such a symptom, but when one hears of such a thing, one imagines… Dark Wizards fought, and terrible curses received…”

The Defense Professor remained expressionless.

“Do you require a healer’s help?” said Amelia Bones. Her own mask had slipped, clearly showing the pain in her eyes. “Is there anything at all that can be done for you?”

“I agreed to teach Defense at Hogwarts,” the man in the cell said flatly. “Draw your own conclusions, Madam. And I am missing my classes, of which there are not many left. I would return to Hogwarts, now.”

When Hermione woke the third time (though it felt like she’d only closed her eyes for a moment) the Sun was even lower in the sky, almost fully set. She felt a little more alive and, strangely, even more exhausted. This time it was Professor Flitwick who was standing next to her bed and shaking her shoulder, a tray of steaming food floating next to him. For some reason she’d thought Harry Potter ought to be leaning over her bedside, but he wasn’t there. Had she dreamed that? She couldn’t remember dreaming.

It developed (according to Professor Flitwick) that Hermione had missed dinner in the Great Hall, and was being woken to eat. And then she could go back to the Ravenclaw dorm, and her own bed, to sleep the rest of the night.

She ate in silence. There was a part of her that wanted to ask Professor Flitwick whether
he
thought she’d been Memory-Charmed or she’d tried to kill Draco Malfoy of her own will -

- like she remembered doing -

- but most of her was afraid to find out.
Afraid to find out
was a warning sign, according to Harry Potter and his books; but her mind felt tired,
bruised,
and she couldn’t muster the strength to override it.

When she and Professor Flitwick left the infirmary they found Harry Potter sitting cross-legged outside the door, quietly reading a psychology textbook.

“I’ll take her from here,” said the Boy-Who-Lived. “Professor McGonagall said it would be all right.”

Professor Flitwick seemed to accept this, and departed after a stern look at both of them. She couldn’t imagine what the stern look was supposed to say, unless it was
don’t try to kill any more students.

The footsteps of Professor Flitwick faded, and the two of them stood alone outside the doors of the infirmary.

She looked at the green eyes of the Boy-Who-Lived, the mess of hair that didn’t quite obscure the scar on his forehead; she looked upon the face of the boy who’d given all his money to save her without a second thought. There were feelings inside her - guilt, shame, embarrassment, other things as well - but no words. There was nothing she knew how to say.

“So,” Harry said abruptly, “I did a quick skim through my psychology books to see what they said about post-traumatic stress disorder. The old books said you should talk about the experience immediately afterward with a counselor. The newer research says that when they actually ran experiments, it turned out that talking about it immediately afterward made it worse. Apparently what you really ought to do is run with your mind’s natural impulse to repress the memories and just not think about it for a while.”

It was so
normal
for the way she and Harry usually talked that she felt a sudden burning in her throat.

We don’t have to talk about it.
That was what Harry had just said, more or less. It felt like cheating, maybe even like a lie. Nothing
was
normal. Everything wrong was still horribly wrong, everything left unsaid still needed to be said…

“Okay,” said Hermione, because there wasn’t anything else to say, anything else at all.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t waiting when you woke up,” Harry said, as they started to walk. “Madam Pomfrey wouldn’t let me in, so I just stayed out here.” He gave a small, sad-looking shrug. “I suppose I should be out there trying to run damage control on public relations, but… honestly I’ve never been good at that, I just end up speaking sharply at people.”

“How bad is it?” She thought her voice should have come out in a whisper, a croak, but it didn’t.

“Well -” Harry said with obvious hesitation. “The thing you’ve got to understand, Hermione, is that you had a lot of defenders at breakfast-time today, but everyone on your side was…
making stuff up
. Draco tried to kill you first, things like that. It was Granger versus Malfoy, that’s how people saw it, like a seesaw where pushing his side down meant pushing your side up. I told them you were probably
both
innocent, that you’d both been Memory-Charmed. They didn’t listen, both sides treated me like a traitor trying to play the middle. And then people heard that Draco had testified under Veritaserum that he’d been trying to help you before the battle - stop making that expression, Hermione, you didn’t actually do anything to him. Anyway, all people understood was that the pro-Malfoy faction had been right and the pro-Granger faction had been wrong.” Harry gave a small sigh. “I
told
them that when the truth came out later they’d be embarrassed…”

“How bad is it?” she said again. This time her voice did come out weaker.

“Remember Asch’s conformity experiment?” Harry said, turning his head to give her a serious look.

Her mind was
slow to remember
for a few seconds, which frightened her, but then the reference came back. In 1951, Solomon Asch had taken some experimental subjects, and each one had been put among a row of other people who looked like them, seeming like other experimental subjects, but actually confederates of the experimenter. They’d shown a reference line on a screen, labeled X, next to three other lines, labeled A, B, and C. The experimenter had asked which line X was the same length as. The correct answer had obviously been C. The other ‘subjects’, the confederates, had one after another said that X was the same length as B. The real subject had been put second-to-last in the order, so as not to arouse suspicion by being last. The test had been to see whether the real subject would ‘conform’ to the standard wrong answer of B, or voice the obviously correct answer of C.

75% of the subjects had ‘conformed’ at least once. A third of the subjects had conformed more than half the time. Some had reported afterward actually believing that X was the same length as B. And that had been in a case where the subjects hadn’t known any of the confederates. If you put people around others who belonged to the same group as them, like someone in a wheelchair next to other people in a wheelchair, the conformity effect got even stronger…

Hermione had a sickening feeling where this was going. “I remember,” she whispered.

“I gave the Chaos Legion anti-conformity training, you know. I had each Legionnaire stand in the middle and say ‘Twice two is four!’ or ‘Grass is green!’ while everyone else in the Chaos Legion called them idiots or sneered at them - Allen Flint did really good sneers - or even just gave them blank looks and then walked away. The thing you’ve got to remember is,
only
the Chaos Legion has ever practiced anything like that. Nobody else in Hogwarts even knows what conformity
is.
”

“Harry!” Her voice was wobbling. “How bad
is
it?”

Harry gave another sad-looking shrug. “Everyone in the second year and above, since they don’t know you. Everyone in Dragon Army. All of Slytherin, of course. And, well, most of the rest of magical Britain too, I think. Remember, Lucius Malfoy controls the
Daily Prophet
.”

“Everyone?” she whispered. Her limbs had started to feel cold, like she’d just gotten out of an unheated swimming pool.

“What people really believe doesn’t feel like a
belief
, it feels like the way the world
is.
You and I are standing in a private little bubble of the universe where Hermione Granger got Memory-Charmed. Everyone else is living in the world where Hermione Granger tried to murder Draco Malfoy. If Ernie Macmillian -”

Her breath caught in her throat.
Captain Macmillian -

“- thinks he’s ethically prohibited from being your friend now, well, he’s trying to do the right thing as he understands it, in the world he thinks he lives in.” Harry’s eyes were very serious. “Hermione, you’ve told me a lot of times that I look down too much on other people. But if I expected too much of them - if I expected people to get things
right
- I really would hate them, then. Idealism aside, Hogwarts students don’t
actually
know enough cognitive science to take responsibility for how their own minds work. It’s not their fault they’re crazy.” Harry’s voice was strangely gentle, almost like an adult’s. “I know it’s going to be harder on you than it would be on me. But remember, eventually the real culprit gets nailed. The truth comes out, everyone who was confidently wrong gets embarrassed.”

“And if the real culprit doesn’t get caught?” she said in a trembling voice.

…or if it turns out to be me after all?

“Then you can leave Hogwarts and go to the Salem Witches’ Institute in America.”

“
Leave Hogwarts?
” She’d never even thought of that possibility except as an ultimate punishment.

“I… Hermione, I think you might want to do that anyway. Hogwarts isn’t a castle, it’s insanity with walls. You
have
got other options.”

“I’ll…” she stammered. “I’ll have… to think about it…”

Harry nodded. “ At least nobody’s going to try hexing you, not after what the Headmaster said at dinner tonight. Oh, and Ron Weasley came up to me, looking very serious, and told me that if I saw you first, I should tell you that he’s sorry for having thought badly of you, and he’ll never speak ill of you again.”

“
Ron
believes I’m innocent?” said Hermione.

“Well… he doesn’t think you’re
innocent,
per se…”

The whole Ravenclaw dorm went silent as the two of them walked in.

Staring at them.

Staring at her.

(She’d had nightmares like this.)

And then, one by one, people looked away from her.

Penelope Clearwater, the 5th-year prefect in charge of first-years, looked away slowly and deliberately, turning her head to face in another direction.

Su Li and Lisa Turpin and Michael Corner, all sitting at a table together, all of whom she’d helped with their homework at one time or another, all looked away, their faces suddenly nervous, the moment she tried to catch their eyes.

A third-year witch named Latisha Randle, whom S.P.H.E.W. had twice saved from Slytherin bullies, quickly bent back over her desk and started doing homework again.

Mandy Brocklehurst looked away from her.

If Hermione didn’t burst into tears, then, it was only because she’d expected it, had played it out in her mind over and over again. At least people weren’t screaming at her or shoving her or hexing her. They were just looking away -

Hermione walked very straight up to the staircaise that led toward the first-year girl’s dorms. (She didn’t see Padma Patil or Anthony Goldstein looking at her, those two lone heads turning to track her as she left.) From behind her, she heard Harry Potter saying in a very calm tone, “Now eventually the truth’s going to come out, you all. So if you’re all that confident she’s guilty, can I ask you all to sign this paper right here, saying that if she later turns out to be innocent, she gets to say ‘I told you so’ and then hold it over you for the rest of your lives? Step on up, one and all, don’t be cowards, if you really believe you shouldn’t be afraid to bet -”

She was halfway up the stairs when she realized that there would be other girls inside her dorm room, too.

The stars hadn’t quite come out yet, only one or two of the brightest ones visible through the reddish-purple haze of the horizon, though the sun had fully sunk.