Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (165 page)

“So…” Harry said. “If, like you said, the bond that held Professor Snape to the Headmaster
has
broken… what would he do then?”

There was a long silence.

What would he do then?

Minerva lowered her hands, gazing down at the upturned face of the Boy-Who-Lived. One simple question shouldn’t have caused her so much dismay. She’d known Severus for years; the two of them bound, in some strange way, by the prophecy they’d both heard. Though Minerva suspected, from what she knew of the rules of prophecy, that she had only
overheard
it herself. It had been Severus’s acts which had brought about the prophecy’s fulfillment. And the guilt, the heartbreak which had come of that choice, had been tormenting the Potions Master for years. She couldn’t imagine who Severus would be without it. Her mind went blank, trying to imagine; her thoughts an empty parchment.

Surely
Severus was no longer the man he’d once been, that angry and terribly foolish young man who’d brought the prophecy before Voldemort in exchange for being admitted into the Death Eaters. She’d known him for years, and surely Severus was no longer that man…

Did she really know him at all?

Had
anyone
ever seen the real Severus Snape?

“I don’t know,” Professor McGonagall finally said. “I truly don’t know at all. I can’t even imagine. Do
you
know anything of this, Mr. Potter?”

“Er…” Harry said. “I think I can say that my own evidence points in the same direction as yours. I mean, it increases the probability that Professor Snape isn’t in love with my mother anymore.”

Professor McGonagall closed her eyes. “I give up.”

“I don’t know of anything wrong he’s done apart from that, though,” Harry added. “I assume the Headmaster cleared you to ask me about this?”

Professor McGonagall looked away from him, staring at the wall. “Please don’t, Harry.”

“All right,” Harry said, and turned and hurried out into the hallways, hearing Professor McGonagall more slowly walking after, and the rumbling sound of the gargoyles moving into place.

It was the morning after next, during Potions class, that Harry’s
potion of cold resistance
boiled over his cauldron with a green froth and mildly nauseating smell, and Professor Snape, looking more resigned than disgusted, told Harry to stay after class. Harry had his own suspicions about this affair, and as soon as class let out - Hermione, as usual for the last few days, being the first to flee out the door - the door swung shut and locked behind the departing students.

“I apologize for ruining your potion, Mr. Potter,” Severus Snape said quietly. There was upon his face the strange sad look that Harry had seen only once before, in a hallway some time ago. “It will not be reflected in your grades. Please, sit down.”

Harry sat back down at his desk, filling up the time by scrubbing a bit more at the green stain on the wooden surface, as the Potions Master incanted a few privacy spells.

When the Potions Master was done, he spoke again. “I… do not know how to broach this topic, Mr. Potter, so I will simply say it… before the Dementor, you recovered your memory of the night your parents died?”

Harry silently nodded.

“If… I know it must not be a pleasant memory, but… if you could tell me what happened…?”

“Why?” Harry said. His voice was solemn, definitely
not mocking
the pleading look that Harry had never expected to see from that person. “I wouldn’t think that would be a pleasant thing for you to hear either, Professor -”

The Potions Master’s voice was almost a whisper. “I have imagined it every night these last ten years.”

You know,
said Harry’s Slytherin side,
it might not be such a good idea to give him closure, if his guilt-based loyalties are already wavering -

Shut up. Overruled.

It wasn’t something that Harry could
actually
bring himself to deny. He took one suggestion from his Slytherin side, and that was it.

“Will you tell me
exactly
how you came to learn about the Prophecy?” Harry said. “I’m sorry to make this a trade, I
will
tell you afterward, only, it could be really important -”

“There is little to say. I had come to be interviewed by the Deputy Headmistress for the position of Potions Master, and so I was waiting outside the room of the Hog’s Head Inn when the applicant before me, Sybill Trelawney, came to seek the position of Professor of Divination. As soon as Trelawney finished speaking her words, I fled, forsaking my chance at Hogwarts’s Mastery, and went to the Dark Lord.” The Potions Master’s face was drawn and tight. “I did not even pause to consider why that riddle might have come to me, before I sold it to another.”

“A
job interview?
” Harry said. “Where you and Professor Trelawney both happened to be applying, and Professor McGonagall was interviewing? That seems… like rather a large coincidence…”

“Seers are the pawns of time, Mr. Potter. Coincidence is beneath them, and they are above it. I was the one meant to hear that prophecy and become its fool. Minerva’s presence made no final difference to how it came about. There was no Memory Charm as you supposed, I do not know why you thought that, but there was no Memory-Charm, there could have been no Memory-Charm. The voice of a seer has a quality, an enigma which even Legilimency cannot share, how could that be imbued in a false memory? Do you think the Dark Lord would believe my mere words? The Dark Lord seized my mind and saw the mystification there, even if he could not seize the mystery, and so he knew the prophecy had been true. The Dark Lord could have killed me then, having taken what he wanted - I was a fool indeed to go to him - but he saw something in me I do not know, and took me into the Death Eaters, though on his terms rather than mine. That is how I brought it about, brought it all about, from beginning to end, always my own doing.” Severus’s voice had gone rather hoarse, and his face was filled with naked pain. “Now tell me, please, how did Lily die?”

Harry swallowed twice, and began his recounting.

“James Potter shouted for Lily to run away with me, that he would hold off You-Know-Who.”

“You-Know-Who said -” Harry stopped, the chills going all over his own skin, his own muscles tightening as if in preparing for a seizure. The memory was returning strongly, now, accompanied by cold and darkness in association. “He used… the Killing Curse… and then he came upstairs somehow, I think he must have flown, I don’t remember any footsteps on stairs or anything like that… and then my mother said, ‘No, not Harry, please not Harry!’ or something like that. And the Dark Lord - his voice was so high, like water whistling out of a teakettle only
cold
- the Dark Lord said -”

Stand aside, woman! For you I am not come, only the boy.

The words were very clear in Harry’s memory.

“- he told my mother to get out of his way, that he was only there for
me
, and my mother begged him to have mercy, and the Dark Lord said -”

I give you this rare chance to flee.

“- that he was being generous and giving her a chance to run, but he wouldn’t bother fighting her, and even if she died, she couldn’t save me -” Harry’s voice was unsteady, “- and so she ought to get out of his way. And that was when my mother begged the Dark Lord to take her life instead of mine - and the Dark Lord - the Dark Lord said to her - and his voice was lower this time, like he was dropping a pose -”

Very well, I accept the bargain.

“- he said that he accepted her offer, and that she should drop her wand so he could kill her. And then the Dark Lord waited, just waited. I, I don’t know what Lily Potter was thinking, it hadn’t even made sense in the first place, what she said, it wasn’t like the Dark Lord would kill her and then just
leave,
when he’d come there for me. Lily Potter didn’t say anything, and then the Dark Lord started laughing at her and it was horrible and - and she finally tried the only thing left that wasn’t abandoning me or just giving up and dying. I don’t know if she even could’ve, if the spell would’ve worked for her, but when you think about, she had to try. The last thing my mother said was ‘Avada Ke-’ but the Dark Lord started his own curse as soon as she said ‘Av’ and he said it in less than half a second and there was a flash of green light and then - and then -
and then
-”

“That’s enough.”

Slowly, like a body floating to the surface of water, Harry returned from wherever he’d been.

“That’s enough,” the Potions Master said hoarsely. “She died… Lily died without pain, then? The Dark Lord… did not do anything to her, before she died?”

She died thinking that she’d failed, and that the Dark Lord was going to kill her baby next. That’s pain.

“He - the Dark Lord didn’t torture her -” Harry said. “If that’s what you’re asking.”

Behind Harry, the door unlocked itself and swung open.

Harry left.

It was Friday, April 10th, of 1992.

Thursday, April 16th, 1992.

The school was almost deserted now, nine-tenths of the students having gone home for the Easter holiday, just about everyone she knew missing. Susan had stayed behind, her grand-aunt being quite busy, as had Ron for reasons she didn’t know - maybe the Weasley family was poor enough that feeding all the children for an extra week would’ve been a noticeable strain? It all worked out well enough, since Ron and Susan were just about the only ones left who’d still talk to her. (At least that she wanted to talk back
to.
Lavender was still nice to her, and Tracey was, um, Tracey, but neither of them were quite
relaxing
to spend a free hour around; and in any case, neither of those two had stayed over for the Easter hols.)

If she couldn’t go
home
- and she wasn’t allowed to go home, her parents had been lied-to and told she’d had Glowpox - then an almost-empty Hogwarts was the next best thing.

She could even visit the library without people staring at her, since there were no lessons and nobody was trying to do schoolwork.

It would be a mistake to think that Hermione drooped about the corridors weeping all day long. Oh, she’d cried a lot the first two days, of course, but two days had been enough. There were parts of Harry’s borrowed books about that, how even people who were paralyzed in car accidents weren’t nearly as unhappy as they’d expected to be, six months later, just like lottery winners weren’t nearly as happy as they’d expected. People adjusted, their happiness levels went back to their happiness set point, life went on.

A shadow fell over where Hermione was reading her current book and she whirled around, the wand hidden on her lap coming up to point directly at the surprised face of -

“Sorry!” Harry Potter said, hastily holding up his palms to show his left hand empty, and his right hand holding a small red-velvet pouch. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”

There was an awful silence, her heartbeat increasing and her palms starting to sweat as Harry Potter just looked at her. She’d
almost
talked to him, on the first morning of the rest of her life; but when she’d come down to breakfast Harry Potter had looked so
awful
- so she hadn’t sat down beside him at the breakfast-table, just quietly eaten in her own little bubble of nobody else sitting next to her, and it had been horrible, but Harry hadn’t come to her, and… she just hadn’t talked to him, since then. (It wasn’t hard to avoid everyone, if you stayed out of the Ravenclaw common room, and ran out of classes before anyone could talk to you.)

And ever since she’d been wondering what Harry thought of her now - if he hated her for having lost all his money - or if he really
was
in love with her and that’s why he’d done it - or if he’d given up on her keeping pace with him because
she
couldn’t
frighten Dementors
- she couldn’t face him now, she just couldn’t, she spent sleepless nights worrying what Harry thought of her now, and she was afraid, and she’d been avoiding the boy who’d spent all his money to save her, and she was a horrible ungrateful wretch, and a terrible person and -

Then her eyes glanced down to see that Harry was reaching into the red-velvet pouch and taking out a heart-shaped red-foil-wrapped sweet, and her brain melted down like chocolate left out in the sun.

“I was going to give you more space,” said Harry Potter, “only I was reading up on Critch’s theories about hedonics and how to train your inner pigeon and how small immediate positive and negative feedbacks secretly control most of what we actually do, and it occurred to me that you might be avoiding me because seeing me made you think of things that felt like negative associations, and I really
didn’t
want to let that run any longer without doing something about it, so I got ahold of a bag of chocolates from the Weasley twins and I’m just going to give you one every time you see me as a positive reinforcement if that’s all right with you -”

“
Breathe
, Harry,” Hermione said without thinking about it.

It was the first word she’d spoken to him since the day of the trial.

The two of them stared at each other.

The books stared at them from the surrounding shelves.

They stared some more at each other.

“You’re supposed to eat the chocolate,” Harry said, holding out the heart-shaped sweet like a Valentine. “Unless just being given a chocolate feels good enough to count as a positive reinforcement, in which case you probably need to put it in your pocket or something.”

She knew that if she tried speaking again she’d fail, so she didn’t try.

Harry’s head slumped a bit. “
Do
you hate me now?”

“
No!
” she said. “No, you shouldn’t think that, Harry! Just - just - just
everything!
” She realized that her wand was still pointed at Harry, and she lowered it. She was trying very hard not to burst out into tears. ”
Everything!
” she repeated, and couldn’t find any better to say than that, although she was certain that Harry wanted to tell her to be specific.

“I think I understand,” Harry said cautiously. “What’re you reading?”

Before she could stop him, them, Harry bent over the library-desk to see the book she was reading, leaning his head forward before she could think to grab the book away -

Harry stared at the open page.

“The World’s Wealthiest Wizards and How They Got That Way,” Harry read off the book’s title from the top. “Number sixty-five, Sir Gareth, owner of a transportation company that won the 19th-century shipping wars… monopoly on oh-tee-threes… I see.”

“I s’pose you’re going to tell me that I don’t need to worry about anything and you’ll take care of it all?” It came out sounding harsher than she would’ve wanted, and she felt another stab of guilt for being such a terrible person.

“Nah,” Harry said, sounding oddly cheerful. “I can put myself in your shoes well enough to know that if
you
paid a bunch of money to save
me, I’d
be trying to pay it back. I’d know it was silly on some level, and I’d
still
be trying to pay it back all by myself. There’s no way I wouldn’t understand
that
, Hermione.”

Hermione’s face screwed up and she felt moisture in the corners of her eyes.

“Fair warning, though,” Harry went on, “I might solve the debt to Lucius Malfoy myself if I see a way before you do, it’s more important to get that sorted immediately than
which
one of us gets it sorted. Anything interesting so far?”

Three-quarters of her was running in circles and smashing into trees as she tried to figure out the implications of everything Harry had just said (
did
he still respect her as a heroine? or did that mean he thought she
couldn’t
do it on her own?) and meanwhile a much more sensible part of Hermione flipped back the book to page 37 which had the most promising entry she’d seen so far (though in her imagination she always did it on her own and took Harry completely by surprise) -

“I thought this seemed quite interesting,” her voice said.

“Number fourteen, ‘Crozier’, true name unknown,” Harry read. “Wow, that is… that is the gaudiest checkered top hat I’ve ever seen. Wealth, at least six hundred thousand Galleons… so around thirty million pounds, not enough to make a Muggle famous, but good enough for the smaller wizard population, I guess. Rumored to be a modern alias of the six-century-old Nicholas Flamel, the only known wizard to succeed at the incredibly difficult alchemical procedure for creating the Philosopher’s Stone, which enables the transmutation of base metals into gold or silver as well as… the Elixir of Life which indefinitely prolongs the youth and health of the user… Um, Hermione, this seems obviously false.”

“I’ve read more references to Nicholas Flamel,” Hermione said. “
The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts
says he secretly trained Dumbledore to stand up to Grindelwald. There’s a lot of books that take the story seriously, not just this one… you think it’s too good to be true?”

“No, of course not,” said Harry. Harry pulled out the chair next to her own, at the small table, and sat down beside her in his accustomed place on her right, just like he’d never left; she had to choke back a catch in her throat. “The idea of ‘too good to be true’ isn’t causal reasoning, the universe doesn’t check if the output of the equations is ‘too good’ or ‘too bad’ before allowing it. People used to think that airplanes and smallpox vaccines were too good to be true. Muggles have figured out ways to travel to other stars without even using magic, and you and I can use our wands to do things that Muggle physicists think are literally impossible. I can’t even imagine what we could rule out the
real
laws of magic being able to do.”

“So what’s the problem, then?” Hermione said. Her voice sounded more normal now, in her own ears.

“Well…” Harry said. The boy reached over her own outstretched arm, his robes brushing hers, and tapped the artist’s illustration of an ominously glowing red stone dripping scarlet liquid. “Problem one is that there’s no logical reason why the
same
artifact would be able to transmute lead to gold
and
produce an elixir that kept someone young. I wonder if there’s an official name for that in the literature? Like the ‘turned up to eleven effect’, maybe? If everyone can see a flower, you can’t get away with saying flowers are the size of houses. But if you’re in a flying saucer cult, since nobody can see the alien mothership anyway, you can say it’s the size of a city, or the size of the Moon. Observable things have to be constrained by evidence, but when somebody makes up a story, they can make the story as extreme as they want. So the Philosopher’s Stone gives you unlimited gold
and
eternal life, not because there’s a single magical discovery that would produce both of those effects, but because someone made up a story about a super happy thingy.”

“Harry, there’s a lot of things in magic that aren’t sensible,” she said.

“Granted,” said Harry. “But Hermione, problem two is that not even
wizards
are crazy enough to casually overlook the implications of
this
.
Everyone
would be trying to rediscover the formula for the Philosopher’s Stone, whole
countries
would be trying to capture the immortal wizard and get the secret out of him -”

“It’s not a
secret.
” Hermione flipped the page, showing Harry the diagrams. “The instructions are right on the next page. It’s just so difficult that only Nicholas Flamel’s
done
it.”

“So entire countries would be trying to kidnap Flamel and force
him
to make more Stones. Come on, Hermione, even wizards wouldn’t hear about
immortality
and, and,” Harry Potter paused, his eloquence apparently failing him, “and
just keep going.
Humans are crazy, but they’re not
that
crazy!”

“Not everyone thinks the same way
you
do, Harry.” He did have a point, but…
how
many different references had she come across to Nicholas Flamel? Besides
World’s Wealthiest Wizards
and
Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts,
there’d also been
Stories of Moderately Ancient Times
and
Biographies of the Justly Famous…

“All right then,
Professor Quirrell
would’ve kidnapped this Flamel guy. It’s what an evil person
or
a good person or just a
selfish
person would do if they had any sense. The Defense Professor knows a lot of secrets and he wouldn’t miss
that
one.” Harry sighed and looked up; she followed his gaze, but he was apparently just looking at the larger library, the rows and rows and rows of bookcases. “I don’t mean to mess with your project,” said Harry, “and I certainly don’t mean to discourage you, but… Honestly, Hermione, I’m not sure you’re going to find any good ideas for making money in a book like this. Like the old joke about how if an economist sees a twenty-pound note lying in the street, they won’t bother picking it up, because if it were real, someone else would’ve picked it up already. Any way of making lots of money that everyone
knows
about to the point where it’s in books like this… you see what I’m saying? It can’t be possible for everyone to make a thousand Galleons a month in three easy steps, or everyone would be doing it.”

“So? That wouldn’t stop
you,
” Hermione said, her voice now roughening again. “You do impossible things all the time, I bet you’ve done something impossible in the last
week
and you didn’t bother
telling
anyone.”

(There was a slight pause, which, if Miss Granger had known, was exactly the length of pause you’d make if you’d fought Mad-Eye Moody and won exactly eight days earlier.)

“Not in the last seven days, no,” Harry said. “Look… part of the trick of doing the impossible is being selective about
which
impossibilities you challenge, and only trying when you have a special advantage. If there’s a money-making method in this book that sounds difficult for a wizard, but it’s easy if we can use Dad’s old Mac Plus,
then
we’d have a plan.”

“I
know that,
Harry,” Hermione said, her voice wavering only slightly. “I was looking to see if there was anything here I
could
figure out how to do. I thought, maybe the difficult part about making a Philosopher’s Stone was that the alchemical circle had to be super precise, and I could get it right by using a Muggle microscope -”

“That’s
brilliant,
Hermione!” The boy rapidly drew his wand, said “
Quietus,
” and then continued after the small noises of the rowdier books had died down. “Even if the Philosopher’s Stone is just a myth, the same trick might work for other difficult alchemies -”

“Well, it
can’t
work,” Hermione said. She’d flown across the library to look up the only book on alchemy that wasn’t in the Restricted Section. And then - she remembered the crushing letdown, all the sudden hope dissipating like mist. “Because
all
alchemical circles have to be drawn ‘to the fineness of a child’s hair’, it isn’t any finer for some alchemies than others. And wizards
have
Omnioculars, and I haven’t heard of any spells where you use Omnioculars to magnify things and do them exactly. I should’ve realized that!”