Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (6 page)

“I
could,
” Harry said, “but I would end up obsessing all day long about whether I’d remembered to feed it that day or if it was slowly starving in its cage, wondering where its master was and why there wasn’t any food.”

“That poor owl,” the older witch said in a soft voice. “Abandoned like that. I wonder what it would do.”

“Well, I expect it’d get really hungry and start trying to claw its way out of the cage or the box or whatever, though it probably wouldn’t have much luck with that -” Harry stopped short.

The witch went on, still in that soft voice. “And what would happen to it afterward?”

“Excuse me,” Harry said, and he reached up to take Professor McGonagall by the hand, gently but firmly, and steered her into yet another alleyway; after ducking so many well-wishers the process had become almost unnoticeably routine. “Please cast that silencing spell.”

“
Quietus.
”

Harry’s voice was shaking. “That owl does
not
represent me, my parents
never
locked me in a cupboard and left me to starve, I do
not
have abandonment fears and I
don’t like the trend of your thoughts, Professor McGonagall!
”

The witch looked down at him gravely. “And what thoughts would those be, Mr. Potter?”

“You think I was,” Harry was having trouble saying it, “I was
abused?
”

“Were you?”

“
No!
” Harry shouted. “No, I never was! Do you think I’m
stupid?
I
know
about the concept of child abuse, I
know
about inappropriate touching and all of that and if anything like that happened I would call the police! And report it to the head teacher! And look up social services in the phone book! And tell Grandpa and Grandma and Mrs. Figg! But my parents
never
did anything like that, never ever
ever!
How
dare
you suggest such a thing!”

The older witch gazed at him steadily. “It is my duty as Deputy Headmistress to investigate possible signs of abuse in the children under my care.”

Harry’s anger was spiralling out of control into pure, black fury. “Don’t you ever
dare
breathe a word of these, these
insinuations
to anyone else!
No one
, do you hear me, McGonagall? An accusation like that can ruin people and destroy families even when the parents are completely innocent! I’ve read about it in the newspapers!” Harry’s voice was climbing to a high-pitched scream. “The
system
doesn’t know how to
stop
, it doesn’t believe the parents
or
the children when they say nothing happened!
Don’t you dare threaten my family with that! I won’t let you destroy my home!
”

“Harry,” the older witch said softly, and she reached out a hand towards him -

Harry took a fast step back, and his hand snapped up and knocked hers away.

McGonagall froze, then she pulled her hand back, and took a step backwards. “Harry, it’s all right,” she said. “I believe you.”

“
Do you,
” Harry hissed. The fury still roaring through his blood. “Or are you just waiting to get away from me so you can file the papers?”

“Harry, I saw your house. I saw you with your parents. They love you. You love them. I do believe you when you say that your parents are not abusing you. But I
had
to ask, because there is something strange at work here.”

Harry stared at her coldly. “Like what?”

“Harry, I’ve seen many abused children in my time at Hogwarts, it would break your heart to know how many. And, when you’re happy, you don’t behave like one of those children, not at
all
. You smile at strangers, you hug people, I put my hand on your shoulder and you didn’t flinch. But sometimes, only sometimes, you say or do something that seems
very
much like… someone who spent his first eleven years locked in a cellar. Not the loving family that I saw.” Professor McGonagall tilted her head, her expression growing puzzled again.

Harry took this in, processing it. The black rage began to drain away, as it dawned on him that he was being listened to respectfully, and that his family wasn’t in danger.

“And how
do
you explain your observations, Professor McGonagall?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s possible that something could have happened to you that you don’t remember.”

Fury rose up again in Harry. That sounded all too much like what he’d read in the newspaper stories of shattered families. “Suppressed memory is a load of
pseudoscience!
People do
not
repress traumatic memories, they remember them all
too
well for the rest of their lives!”

“No, Mr. Potter. There is a Charm called Obliviation.”

Harry froze in place. “A spell that erases memories?”

The older witch nodded. “But not all the effects of the experience, if you see what I’m saying, Mr. Potter.”

A chill went down Harry’s spine.
That
hypothesis… could
not
be easily refuted. “But my parents couldn’t do that!”

“Indeed not,” said Professor McGonagall. “It would have taken someone from the wizarding world. There’s… no way to be certain, I’m afraid.”

Harry’s rationalist skills began to boot up again. “Professor McGonagall, how sure are you of your observations, and what alternative explanations could there also be?”

The witch opened her hands, as though to show their emptiness. “Sure? I’m sure of
nothing
, Mr. Potter. In all my life I’ve never met anyone else like you. Sometimes you just don’t seem eleven years old or even all that
human
.”

Harry’s eyebrows rose toward the sky -

“I’m sorry!” Professor McGonagall said quickly. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Potter. I was trying to make a point and I’m afraid that came out sounding different from what I had in mind -”

“On the contrary, Professor McGonagall,” Harry said, and slowly smiled. “I shall take it as a very great compliment. But would you mind if I offered an alternative explanation?”

“Please do.”

“Children aren’t meant to be too much smarter than their parents,” Harry said. “Or too much saner, maybe - my father could probably outsmart me if he was, you know, actually
trying,
instead of using his adult intelligence mainly to come up with new reasons not to change his mind -” Harry stopped. “I’m too smart, Professor. I’ve got nothing to say to normal children. Adults don’t respect me enough to really talk to me. And frankly, even if they did, they wouldn’t sound as smart as Richard Feynman, so I might as well read something Richard Feynman wrote instead. I’m
isolated
, Professor McGonagall. I’ve been isolated my whole life. Maybe that has some of the same effects as being locked in a cellar. And I’m too intelligent to look up to my parents the way that children are designed to do. My parents love me, but they don’t feel obliged to respond to reason, and sometimes I feel like they’re the children - children who
won’t listen
and have absolute authority over my whole existence. I try not to be too bitter about it, but I also try to be
honest
with myself, so, yes, I’m bitter. And I also have an anger management problem, but I’m working on it. That’s all.”

“
That’s all?
”

Harry nodded firmly. “That’s all. Surely, Professor McGonagall, even in magical Britain, the normal explanation is always worth
considering?
”

It was later in the day, the sun lowering in the summer sky and shoppers beginning to peter out from the streets. Some shops had already closed; Harry and Professor McGonagall had bought his textbooks from Flourish and Blotts just under the deadline. With only a slight explosion when Harry had made a beeline for the keyword “Arithmancy” and discovered that the seventh-year textbooks invoked nothing more mathematically advanced than trigonometry.

At this moment, though, dreams of low-hanging research fruit were far from Harry’s mind.

At this moment, the two of them were walking out of Ollivander’s, and Harry was staring at his wand. He’d waved it, and produced multicoloured sparks, which really shouldn’t have come as such an extra shock after everything else he’d seen, but somehow -

I can do magic.

Me. As in, me personally. I am magical; I am a wizard.

He had
felt
the magic pouring up his arm, and in that instant, realised that he had always had that sense, that he had possessed it his whole life, the sense that was not sight or sound or smell or taste or touch but only magic. Like having eyes but keeping them always closed, so that you didn’t even realise that you were seeing darkness; and then one day the eye opened, and saw the world. The shock of it had poured through him, touching pieces of himself, awakening them, and then died away in seconds; leaving only the certain knowledge that he was now a wizard, and always had been, and had even, in some strange way, always known it.

And -

“It is very curious indeed that you should be destined for this wand when its brother why, its brother gave you that scar.”

That could not
possibly
be coincidence. There had been
thousands
of wands in that shop. Well, okay, actually it
could
be coincidence, there were six billion people in the world and thousand-to-one coincidences happened every day. But Bayes’s Theorem said that any reasonable hypothesis which made it
more
likely than a thousand-to-one that he’d end up with the brother to the Dark Lord’s wand, was going to have an advantage.

Professor McGonagall had simply said
how peculiar
and left it at that, which had put Harry into a state of shock at the sheer, overwhelming
uncuriosity
of wizards and witches. In no
imaginable
world would Harry have just went “Hm” and walked out of the shop without even
trying
to come up with a hypothesis for what was going on.

His left hand rose and touched his scar.

What…
exactly…

“You’re a full wizard now,” said Professor McGonagall. “Congratulations.”

Harry nodded.

“And what do you think of the wizarding world?” said she.

“It’s strange,” Harry said. “I ought to be thinking about everything I’ve seen of magic… everything that I now know is possible, and everything I now know to be a lie, and all the work left before me to understand it. And yet I find myself distracted by relative trivialities like,” Harry lowered his voice, “the whole Boy-Who-Lived thing.” There didn’t seem to be anyone nearby, but no point tempting fate.

Professor McGonagall
ahemmed
. “Really? You don’t say.”

Harry nodded. “Yes. It’s just…
odd.
To find out that you were part of this grand story, the quest to defeat the great and terrible Dark Lord, and it’s already
done.
Finished. Completely over with. Like you’re Frodo Baggins and you find out that your parents took you to Mount Doom and had you toss in the Ring when you were one year old and you don’t even remember it.”

Professor McGonagall’s smile had grown somewhat fixed.

“You know, if I were anyone else, anyone else at all, I’d probably be pretty worried about living up to that start.
Gosh, Harry, what have you done since you defeated the Dark Lord? Your own bookshop? That’s great! Say, did you know I named my child after you?
But I have hopes that this will not prove to be a problem.” Harry sighed. “Still… it’s almost enough to make me wish that there were
some
loose ends from the quest, just so I could say that I really, you know,
participated
somehow.”

“Oh?” said Professor McGonagall in an odd tone. “What did you have in mind?”

“Well, for example, you mentioned that my parents were betrayed. Who betrayed them?”

“Sirius Black,” the witch said, almost hissing the name. “He’s in Azkaban. Wizarding prison.”

“How probable is it that Sirius Black will break out of prison and I’ll have to track him down and defeat him in some sort of spectacular duel, or better yet put a large bounty on his head and hide out in Australia while I wait for the results?”

Professor McGonagall blinked. Twice. “Not likely. No one has ever escaped from Azkaban, and I doubt that
he
will be the first.”

Harry was a bit sceptical of that “
no one
has
ever
escaped from Azkaban” line. Still, maybe with magic you could actually get close to a 100% perfect prison, especially if you had a wand and they did not. The best way to get out would be to not go there in the first place.

“All right then,” Harry said. “Sounds like it’s been nicely wrapped up.” He sighed, scrubbing his palm over his head. “Or maybe the Dark Lord didn’t
really
die that night. Not completely. His spirit lingers, whispering to people in nightmares that bleed over into the waking world, searching for a way back into the living lands he swore to destroy, and now, in accordance with the ancient prophecy, he and I are locked in a deadly duel where the winner shall lose and the loser shall win -”

Professor McGonagall’s head swivelled, and her eyes darted around, as though to search the street for listeners.

“I’m
joking
, Professor,” Harry said with some annoyance. Sheesh, why did she always take everything so seriously -

A slow sinking sensation began to dawn in the pit of Harry’s stomach.

Professor McGonagall looked at Harry with a calm expression. A very,
very
calm expression. Then a smile was put on. “Of course you are, Mr. Potter.”

Aw crap.

If Harry had needed to formalise the wordless inference that had just flashed into his mind, it would have come out something like, ‘If I estimate the probability of Professor McGonagall doing what I just saw as the result of carefully controlling herself, versus the probability distribution for all the things she would do
naturally
if I made a bad joke, then this behavior is significant evidence for her hiding something.’