Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (110 page)

Then returned inward again, to the next step of the spiral.

Why am I different from the other children my age?

If Professor Quirrell’s answer to that had been an evasion, then it was a very well-calculated one. Deep enough and complex enough, sufficiently full of suggestions of hidden meaning, to serve as a trap for a Ravenclaw who couldn’t be diverted by less. Or maybe Professor Quirrell had meant his answer honestly. Who knew what motive might have pulled that lever on those lips?

I will say this much, Mr. Potter: You are already an Occlumens, and I think you will become a perfect Occlumens before long. Identity does not mean, to such as us, what it means to other people. Anyone we can imagine, we can be; and the true difference about you, Mr. Potter, is that you have an unusually good imagination. A playwright must contain his characters, he must be larger than them in order to enact them within his mind. To an actor or spy or politician, the limit of his own diameter is the limit of who he can pretend to be, the limit of which face he may wear as a mask. But for such as you and I, anyone we can imagine, we can
be,
in reality and not pretense.
While you imagined yourself a child, Mr. Potter, you
were
a child. Yet there are other existences you could support, larger existences, if you wished. Why are you so free, and so great in your circumference, when other children your age are small and constrained? Why can you imagine and
become
selves more adult than a mere child of a playwright should be able to compose? That I do not know, and I must not say what I guess. But what you have, Mr. Potter, is freedom.

If that was a snow job it was one heck of a distracting one.

And the still more worrisome thought was that Professor Quirrell hadn’t
realized
how disturbed Harry would be, how
wrong
that speech would sound to him, how much damage it would do to his trust in Professor Quirrell.

There ought to always be one real person who you
truly
were, at the center of everything…

Harry stared out at the falling night, the gathering darkness.

…right?

It was almost bedtime when Hermione heard the scattered intakes of breath and looked up from her copy of
Beauxbatons: A History
to see the missing boy, the boy who had been misplaced at lunch that Sunday, whose dinner nonappearance had been accompanied by rumors - and she hadn’t believed them because they were
completely ridiculous
, but she’d felt a little queasiness inside - that he’d withdrawn from Hogwarts in order to hunt down Bellatrix Black.

“
Harry!
” she shrieked, she didn’t even realize that she was talking directly to him for the first time in a week, or notice how some other students started at the sound of her yelling all the way across the Ravenclaw common room.

Harry’s eyes had already lifted to her, he was already walking toward her, so she stopped halfway out of her chair -

A few moments later, Harry was seated across from her, and he was putting away his wand after casting a Quieting barrier around them.

(And an awful lot of Ravenclaws were trying not to look like they were watching.)

“Hey,” Harry said. His voice wavered. “I missed you. You’re… going to talk to me again, now?”

Hermione nodded, she just nodded, she couldn’t think of what to say. She’d missed Harry too, but she was realizing, with a guilty sort of feeling, that it might’ve been a lot worse for him. She had other friends, Harry… it didn’t feel
fair
, sometimes, that Harry talked to only her like that, so that she
had
to talk to him; but Harry had a look about him like unfair things had been happening to
him
, too.

“What’s been going
on?
” she said. “There’s all sorts of rumors. There were people saying you’d run off to fight Bellatrix Black, there were people saying you’d run off to
join
Bellatrix Black -” and
those
rumors had said that Hermione had just made up the thing about the phoenix, and she’d yelled that the whole Ravenclaw common room had seen it, so then the next rumor had claimed she’d made up
that
part too, which was stupidity of such an inconceivable level that it left her
completely flabbergasted.

“I can’t talk about it,” Harry said in a bare whisper. “Can’t talk about a lot of it. I wish I could tell you everything,” his voice wavered, “but I can’t… I guess, if it helps or anything, I’m not going to lunch with Professor Quirrell any more…”

Harry put his hands over his face, then, covering his eyes.

Hermione felt the queasy feeling all through her stomach.

“Are you crying?” said Hermione.

“Yeah,” said Harry, his voice sounding a little breathy. “I don’t want anyone else to see.”

There was a little silence. Hermione wanted to help but she didn’t know what to do about a boy crying, and she didn’t know what was happening; she felt like huge things were happening around her - no, around Harry - and if she knew what they were she would probably be scared, or alarmed, or something, but she didn’t know anything.

“Did Professor Quirrell do something wrong?” she said at last.

“That’s not why I can’t go to lunch with him any more,” Harry said, still in that bare whisper with his hands pressed over his eyes. “That was the Headmaster’s decision. But yeah, Professor Quirrell said some things to me that made me trust him less, I guess…” Harry’s voice sounded very shaky. “I’m feeling kind of alone right now.”

Hermione put her hand on her cheek where Fawkes had touched her yesterday. She’d kept thinking about that touch, over and over, maybe because she
wanted
it to be important, to mean something to her…

“Is there any way I can help?” she said.

“I want to do something normal,” Harry said from behind his hands. “Something very normal for first-year Hogwarts students. Something eleven-year-olds and twelve-year-olds like us are
supposed
to do. Like play a game of Exploding Snap or something… I don’t suppose you have the cards or know the rules or anything like that?”

“Um… I
don’t
know the rules, actually…” said Hermione. “I know they
explode
.”

“I don’t suppose Gobstones?” said Harry.

“Don’t know the rules and they
spit
at you. Those are
boy
games, Harry!”

There was a pause. Harry ground his hands against his face to wipe it, and then took his hands away; and then he was looking at her, looking a little helpless. “Well,” Harry said, “what
do
wizards and witches our age do, when they play, you know, the kind of pointless silly games we’re
supposed
to play at this age?”

“Hopscotch?” said Hermione. “Jump-rope? Unicorn attack?
I
don’t know,
I
read books!”

Harry started laughing, and Hermione started giggling along with him even though she didn’t know quite why, but it
was
funny.

“I guess that helped a little,” said Harry. “Actually I think it helped more than playing Gobstones for an hour could’ve possibly helped, so thanks for being you. And no matter what, I’m
not
having anyone Obliviate everything I know about calculus. I’d sooner die.”

“
What?
” said Hermione. “Why - why would you
ever
want to do
that?
”

Harry stood up from the table, and there was a rush of restored background noise as his rise broke the Quieting Charm. “I’m a tad sleepy so I’m going off to bed,” Harry said, now his voice was ordinary and wry, “I’ve got some lost time to make up for, but I’ll see you at breakfast, and then at Herbology, if that’s all right. Not to mention it wouldn’t be fair to dump all my depression on you. G’night, Hermione.”

“Good night, Harry,” she said, feeling very confused and alarmed. “Pleasant dreams.”

Harry stumbled a little as she said that, and then he continued on toward the stairs that led to the first-year-boys’ dorms.

Harry turned the Quieting Charm all the way up, on the head of his bedboard, so that he wouldn’t wake anyone else up if he screamed.

Set his alarm to wake him up for breakfast (if he wasn’t up already by that hour, if indeed he slept at all).

Got into bed, laid down -

- felt the lump beneath his pillow.

Harry stared up at the canopy above his bed.

Hissed under his breath, “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me…”

It took a few seconds before Harry could muster the heart to sit up in bed, pull the blanket over himself and his pillow to obscure the deed from the other boys, cast a low-intensity
Lumos
and see what was under his pillow.

There was a parchment, and a deck of playing cards.

The parchment read,

A little bird told me that Dumbledore has shut the door of your cage.

I must admit, on this occasion, that Dumbledore may have a point. Bellatrix Black is loosed upon the world once more, and that is not good news for any good person. If I stood in Dumbledore’s place, I might well do the same.

But just in case… The Salem Witches’ Institute in America accepts boys as well, despite the name. They are good people and would protect you even from Dumbledore, if you needed it. Britain holds that you need Dumbledore’s permission to emigrate to magical America, but magical America disagrees. So in the final extremity, get outside the wards of Hogwarts and tear in half the King of Hearts from this deck of cards.

That you should resort to it only in the final extremity goes without saying.

Be well, Harry Potter.

- Santa Claus

Harry stared down at the pack of cards.

It
couldn’t
take him anywhere else, not right now, portkeys didn’t work here.

But he still felt unnerved about the prospect of picking it up, even to hide it inside his trunk…

Well, he’d
already
picked up the parchment, which could just as easily have been enchanted with a trap, if a trap was involved.

But still.

“Wingardium Leviosa,” Harry whispered, and Hovered the packet of cards to lie next to where his alarm clock rested in a pocket of the headboard. He’d deal with it tomorrow.

And then Harry lay back in bed, and closed his eyes, to dream without any phoenix to protect him, and pay his reckoning.

He came awake with a gasp of horror, not a scream, he’d yet to scream this night, but his blanket was all tangled around him from where his sleeping form had jerked as he dreamed of running, trying to get away from the gaps in space that were pursuing him through a corridor of metal lit by dim gaslight, an endlessly long corridor of metal lit by dim gaslight, and he hadn’t
known
, in the dream, that touching those voids meant he would die horribly and leave his still-breathing body empty behind him, all he’d known was that he had to run and run and run from the wounds in the world sliding after him -

Harry started to cry again, it wasn’t for the horror of the chase, it was that he’d run away while someone behind him was screaming for help, screaming for him to come back and save her, help her, she was being eaten, she was going to die, and in the dream Harry had run away instead of helping her.

“DON’T GO!” The voice came in a scream from behind the metal door. “No, no, no, don’t go, don’t take it away, don’t don’t don’t -”

Why had Fawkes ever rested on his shoulder? He’d walked away. Fawkes should hate him.

Fawkes should hate Dumbledore.
He’d
walked away.

Fawkes should hate everyone -

The boy wasn’t awake, wasn’t dreaming, his thoughts were jumbled and confused in the shadowlands that bordered sleep and waking, unprotected by the safety rails that his aware mind imposed on itself, the careful rules and censors. In that shadowland his brain had woken up enough to think, but something else was too sleepy to act; his thoughts ran free and wild, unconstrained by his self-concept, his waking self’s ideals of what he shouldn’t think. That was the freedom of his brain’s dreams, as his self-concept slept. Free to repeat, over and over, Harry’s new worst nightmare:

“No, I didn’t mean it, please don’t die!”

“No, I didn’t mean it, please don’t die!”

“No, I didn’t mean it, please don’t die!”

A rage grew in him alongside the self-loathing, a terrible hot wrath / icy cold hatred, for the world which had done that to her / for himself, and in his half-awake state Harry fantasized escapes, fantasized ways out of the moral dilemma, he imagined himself hovering above the vast triangular horror of Azkaban, and whispering an incantation unlike any syllables that had ever been heard before on Earth, whispers that echoed all the way across the sky and were heard on the other side of the world, and there was a blast of silver Patronus fire like a nuclear explosion that tore apart all the Dementors in an instant and ripped apart the metal walls of Azkaban, shattered the long corridors and all the dim orange lights, and then a moment later his brain remembered that there were people in there, and rewrote the half-dream fantasy to show all the prisoners laughing as they flew away in flocks from the burning wreck of Azkaban, the silver light restoring the flesh to their limbs as they flew, and Harry started crying harder into his pillow, because he couldn’t do it, because he wasn’t God -

He’d sworn upon his life and magic and his art as a rationalist, he’d sworn by all he held sacred and all his happy memories, he’d given his oath so now he had to do something,
had to do something, had to DO SOMETHING -

Maybe it was pointless.

Maybe trying to follow rules was pointless.

Maybe you just burned down Azkaban however.

And in fact he’d sworn he’d do it, so now that was what he had to do.

He’d just do whatever it took to get rid of Azkaban, that was all. If that meant ruling Britain, fine, if that meant finding a spell to whisper that would echo all across the sky, whatever, the important thing was to destroy Azkaban.