Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (156 page)

And the human understanding of magic couldn’t possibly be anywhere
near
the underlying laws. What would you be able to do with magic if you
really
understood it?

A year ago, Dad had gone to the Australian National University in Canberra for a conference where he’d been an invited speaker, and he’d taken Mum and Harry along. And they’d all visited the National Museum of Australia, because, it had turned out, there was basically nothing else to do in Canberra. The glass display cases had shown rock-throwers crafted by the Australian aborigines - like giant wooden shoehorns, they’d looked, but smoothed and carved and ornamented with painstaking care. In the 40,000 years since anatomically modern humans had migrated to Australia from Asia, nobody had invented the bow-and-arrow. It really made you appreciate how
non-obvious
was the idea of Progress. Why would you even think of Invention as something important, if all your history’s heroic tales were of great warriors and defenders instead of Thomas Edison? How could anyone have suspected, while carving a rock-thrower with painstaking care, that someday human beings would invent rocket ships and nuclear energy?

Could you have looked up into the sky, at the brilliant light of the Sun, and deduced that the universe contained greater sources of power than mere fire? Would you have realized that if the fundamental physical laws permitted it, someday humans would tap the same energies as the Sun? Even if nothing you could imagine doing with rock-throwers or woven pouches - no pattern of running across the savannah and nothing you could obtain by hunting animals - would accomplish that even in imagination?

It wasn’t like modern-day Muggles had gotten anywhere near the limits of what Muggle physics said was possible. And yet like hunter-gatherers conceptually bound to their rock-throwers, most Muggles lived in a world defined by the limits of what you could do with cars and telephones. Even though Muggle physics explicitly permitted possibilities like molecular nanotechnology or the Penrose process for extracting energy from black holes, most people filed that away in the same section of their brain that stored fairy tales and history books, well away from their personal realities:
Long ago and far away, ever so long ago.
No surprise, then, that the wizarding world lived in a conceptual universe bounded - not by fundamental laws of magic that nobody even knew - but just by the surface rules of known Charms and enchantments. You couldn’t observe the way magic was practiced nowadays and
not
be reminded of the National Museum of Australia, once you realized what you were seeing. Even if Harry’s first guess had been mistaken, one way or another it was still inconceivable that the
fundamental
laws of the universe contained a special case for human lips shaping the phrase ‘Wingardium Leviosa’. And yet even that fumbling grasp of magic was enough to do things that Muggle physics said should be
forever impossible:
the Time-Turner, water conjured out of nothingness by
Aguamenti.
What were the
ultimate
possibilities of invention, if the underlying laws of the universe permitted an eleven-year-old with a stick to violate almost every constraint in the Muggle version of physics?

Like a hunter-gatherer trying to look up at the Sun, and guess that the universe had to be shaped in a way that allowed for nuclear energy…

It made you wonder if maybe twenty thousand million million million meters wasn’t so much distance, after all.

There was a step beyond Abstract Reasoning Harry which he could take, given time enough to compose himself and the right surroundings; something beyond Abstract Reasoning Harry, as that was beyond Harry In The Moment. Looking up at the stars, you could try to imagine what the distant descendants of humanity would think of your dilemma - in a hundred million years, when the stars would have spun through great galactic movements into entirely new positions, every constellation scattered. It was an elementary theorem of probability that if you knew what your answer would be after updating on future evidence, you ought to adopt that answer right now. If you
knew
your destination, you were already there. And by analogy, if not quite by theorem, if you could guess what the descendants of humanity would think of something, you ought to go ahead and take that as your own best guess.

From that vantage point the idea of killing off two-thirds of the Wizengamot seemed a lot less appealing than it had a few hours earlier. Even if you
had
to do it, even if you knew for a solid fact that it would be the best thing for magical Britain and that the complete Story of Time would look worse if you didn’t do it… even as a necessity, the deaths of sentient beings would still be a tragedy. One more element of the sorrows of Earth; the Most Ancient Earth from which everything had begun, long ago and far away, ever so long ago.

He is not like Grindelwald
.
There is nothing human left in him. Him you must destroy. Save your fury for that, and that alone -

Harry shook his head slightly, tilting the stars a little in his vision, as he lay on the stone floor looking upward and outward and forward in time. Even if Dumbledore was right, and the true enemy was utterly mad and evil… in a hundred million years the organic lifeform known as Lord Voldemort probably wouldn’t seem much different from all the other bewildered children of Ancient Earth. Whatever Lord Voldemort had done to himself, whatever Dark rituals seemed so horribly irrevocable on a merely human scale, it wouldn’t be beyond curing with the technology of a hundred million years. Killing him, even if you
had
to do it to save the lives of others, would be just one more death for future sentient beings to be sad about. How could you look up at the stars, and believe anything else?

Harry stared up at the twinkling lights of Eternity and wondered what the children’s children’s children would think of what Dumbledore had maybe-done to Narcissa.

But even if you tried framing the question that way, asking what humanity’s descendants would think, it still drew only on your own knowledge, not theirs. The answer still came from inside yourself, and it could still be mistaken. If you didn’t know the hundredth decimal digit of pi yourself, then you didn’t know how the children’s children’s children would calculate it, for all that the fact was trivial.

Slowly - he’d been lying there, looking at the stars, for longer than he’d planned - Harry sat up from the ground. Pushing himself to his feet, the muscles protesting, he walked over to the edge of the stone platform at the height of the Ravenclaw tower. The stone crenellations surrounding the edge of the tower weren’t high, not high enough to be safe. They were markers, clearly, rather than railings. Harry didn’t approach too close to the edge; there was no point in taking chances. Looking down at the Hogwarts grounds below, he was predictably feeling a sense of dizziness, the wobbly affliction called vertigo. His brain was alarmed, it seemed, because the ground below was so
distant
. It might have been fully 50 meters away.

The lesson, it seemed, was that things had to be
incredibly
close by before your brain could comprehend them well enough to feel fear.

It was a rare brain that could feel strongly about anything, if it wasn’t close in space, close in time, near at hand, within easy reach…

Before, Harry had imagined that going to Azkaban would require planning and cooperation from a grownup confederate. Portkeys, broomsticks, invisibility spells. Some way of getting to the bottom levels without the Aurors noticing, so he could carve his way into the central pit where the shadows of Death waited.

And that had been enough to put the prospect away, into the future, safely apart from the
now
.

He hadn’t realized until today that it might be as simple as finding Fawkes and telling the phoenix that it was time.

Memories were rising up again, memories that Harry could never manage to forget for long. Though the stones beneath his feet were not smooth like metal, though the moonlit sky stretched all around him, somehow it was very easy to imagine himself trapped in a long metal corridor lit by dim orange light.

The night was quiet, quiet enough for memories to be clearly audible.

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

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

Don’t take it away, don’t don’t don’t -

The world blurred, and Harry wiped his eyes with his sleeve.

If
Hermione
had been the one behind that door -

If Hermione had been put in Azkaban, Harry would have called the phoenix and gone there and burned away every last Dementor and it wouldn’t have made a single difference how crazy it was or what else he’d wanted to do with his life. That was just - that was - that was just how it was.

And the woman who
was
behind that door - wasn’t there someone, somewhere, to whom she too was precious? Wasn’t it only Harry’s distance from her life that was preventing his brain from being driven to Azkaban to
save her no matter what?
What would it have taken to compel him? Would he have needed to know her face? Her name? Her favorite color? Would he have been driven to Azkaban to save Tracey Davis? Would he have been compelled there to save Professor McGonagall? Mum and Dad - there wasn’t even any question. And that woman had said she was someone’s mother. How many people had wished for the power to break Azkaban? How many prisoners of Azkaban dreamed nightly of such a miraculous rescue?

None. It’s a happy thought.

Maybe he
should
harrow Azkaban. All he had to do was find Fawkes and tell him it was time. Visualize the center of the Dementor’s pit as he’d seen it from the broomstick, and let the phoenix take him there. Cast the True Patronus Charm at point-blank range and to hell with what came after.

All he had to do was go find Fawkes.

It might be as simple as thinking of the flame, calling for the fire-bird in his heart -

A star flashed in the night.

By the time Harry’s eyes had jumped with a reflex action trained on meteor showers, another part of him was surprised that the astronomical phenomenon was still there; a faint star whose brightness was slowly visibly waxing. There was a startled moment when Harry wondered whether he was seeing, not a meteor, but a nova or supernova - could you
see
them getting brighter like that? Was the first stage of a nova supposed to be that yellow-orange color?

Then the new star moved again, and seemed to grow as well as brightening. It looked
closer
suddenly, no longer so far away that distance became moot. Like what you thought was a star, turning out to be an airplane, a lighted form whose shape you could actually see…

…no, not a plane…

The realization seemed to spread out from Harry’s chest in a wave of prickling, sweat preparing to break out.

…a bird.

A piercing cry split the night, echoing from the rooftops of Hogwarts.

The approaching creature trailed fire as it flew, shedding golden flames like sparks from its feathers as the mighty wings beat and beat again. Even as it swooped up in a great curve to hover a few paces away from Harry, even as the flames surrounding its passage diminished, the creature seemed no dimmer, no less bright; as though some unseen Sun shone upon it and illuminated it.

Great shining wings red like a sunset, and eyes like incandescent pearls, blazing with golden fire and determination.

The phoenix’s beak opened, and let out a great caw that Harry understood as though it had been a spoken word:

COME!

Not even realizing, the boy stumbled back from the edge of the rooftop, eyes still locked on the phoenix, his whole body trembling and tensed, his fists clutching and releasing at his side; stepping back, stepping away.

The phoenix cawed again, a desperate, pleading, sound. It didn’t come through in words, this time, but it came through in feelings, an echo of everything that Harry had ever felt about Azkaban and every temptation to
action,
to just
do
something about it, the desperate need to do something
now
and not delay any longer, all spoken in the cry of a bird.

Let’s go. It’s time.
The voice that spoke came from inside Harry, not from the phoenix; from so deep inside it couldn’t be given a separate name like ‘Gryffindor’.

All he had to do was step forward and touch the phoenix’s talons, and it would take him where he needed to be, where he kept thinking he ought to be, down into the central pit of Azkaban. Harry could see the image in his mind, shining with unbearable clarity, the image of himself suddenly smiling with joyous release as he threw all his fears away and
chose
-

“But I -” Harry whispered, not even aware of what he was saying. Harry lifted his shaking hands to wipe at his eyes from which tears had sprung, as the phoenix hovered before him with great wing-sweeps. “But I - there’s other people I also have to save, other things I have to do -”

The fire-bird let out a piercing scream, and the boy flinched back as though from a blow. It wasn’t a command, it wasn’t an objection, it was the
knowledge -

The corridors lit by dim orange light.

It felt like a tightening compulsion in Harry’s chest, the desire to just
do
it and get it over with. He might die, but if he didn’t die he could feel
clean
again. Have principles that were more than excuses for inaction. It was
his
life. His to spend, if he chose. He could do it any time he wanted…

…if he wasn’t a good person.

The boy stood there on the rooftop, his own eyes locked with two points of fire. The stars might have had time to shift in their constellations while he stood there, agonizing over the decision…

…that wouldn’t…

…change.

The boy’s eyes flickered once to the stars above; and then he looked at the phoenix.

“Not yet,” the boy said in a voice hardly audible. “Not yet. There’s too much else I have to do. Please come back later, when I’ve found others who can cast the True Patronus - in six months, maybe -”