Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (177 page)

Silence. The stars had not shifted, not even as they would have in an Earthly night sky, over time.

A very slight rustle, as of someone shifting their body. Harry realized that he had been standing for a while in the same position, and dropped down to the almost unseeable circle of grass that still stayed beneath him, careful not to touch the edges of the spell.

“Tell me this,” said the soft voice. “Why does that girl matter to you so much?”

“Because she is my friend.”

“In the English language as it is customarily used, Mr. Potter, the word ‘friend’ is not associated with a desperate effort to raise the dead. Are you under the impression that she is your true love, or some such?”

“Oh, not you too,” Harry said wearily. “Not you of all people, Professor. Fine, we’re best friends, but that’s
all,
okay? That’s enough. Friends don’t let friends stay dead.”

“Ordinary folk do not do as much, for those they call friends.” The voice sounded more distant now, abstracted. “Not even for those they say they love. Their companions die, and they do not go in search of power to resurrect them.”

Harry couldn’t help himself. He looked over again, despite knowing it would be futile, and saw only more stars. “Let me guess, from this you deduce that… people don’t actually care as much about their friends as they pretend.”

A brief laugh. “They would scarcely pretend to care
less
.”

“They care, Professor, and not just for their true loves. Soldiers throw themselves on grenades to save their friends, mothers run into burning houses to save their children. But if you’re a Muggle you don’t think there’s any such thing as magic to bring someone back to life. And normal wizards don’t…
think outside the box
like that. I mean, most wizards aren’t searching for power to make
themselves
immortal. Does that prove they don’t care about their own lives?”

“As you say, Mr. Potter. Certainly I myself would consider their lives pointless and without a shred of value. Perhaps, somewhere in their hidden hearts, they also believe that my opinion of them is the correct one.”

Harry shook his head, and then, in annoyance, cast back the hood of his Cloak, and shook his head again. “That seems like a rather
contrived
view of the world, Professor,” said the dim-lit head of a boy, floating unsupported on a circle of dark grass amid stars. “Trying to invent a resurrection spell just isn’t something normal people would think of, so you can’t deduce anything from their not taking the option.”

A moment later, the dim-lit outline of a man sitting on the circle of grass was visible as well.

“If they
truly
cared about their supposed loved ones,” the Defense Professor said softly, “they would think of it, would they not?”

“Brains don’t work that way. They don’t suddenly supercharge when the stakes go up - or when they do, it’s within hard limits. I couldn’t calculate the thousandth digit of pi if someone’s life depended on it.”

The dim-lit head inclined. “But there is another possible explanation, Mr. Potter. It is that people play the
role
of friendship. They do just as much as that role requires of them, and no more. The thought occurs to me that perhaps the difference between you and them is not that you care more than they do. Why would you have been born with such unusually strong emotions of friendship, that you alone among wizardkind are driven to resurrect Hermione Granger after her death? No, the most likely difference is not that you care more. It is that, being a more logical creature than they, you alone have thought that playing the role of Friend would require this of you.”

Harry stared out at the stars. He would have been lying if he’d claimed not to be shaken. “That… can’t be true, Professor. I could name a dozen examples in Muggle novels of people driven to resurrect their dead friends. The authors of those stories clearly understood exactly how I feel about Hermione. Though you wouldn’t have read them, I guess… maybe Orpheus and Eurydice? I didn’t actually read that one but I know what’s in it.”

“Such tales are also told among wizardkind. There is the story of the Elric brothers. The tale of Dora Kent, who was protected by her son Saul. There is Ronald Mallett and his doomed challenge to Time. In Sicily before its fall, the drama of Precia Testarossa. In Nippon they tell of Akemi Homura and her lost love. What these stories have in common, Mr. Potter, is that they are all
fiction.
Real-life wizards do not attempt the same, even though the notion is clearly
not
beyond their imagination.”

“Because they don’t think they
can!
” Harry’s voice rose.

“Shall we go and tell the good Professor McGonagall about your intention to find a way to resurrect Miss Granger, and see what she thinks of it? Perhaps it has simply never occurred to her to consider that option… Ah, but you hesitate. You already know her answer, Mr. Potter. Do you know why you know it?” You could hear the cold smile in the voice. “A lovely technique, that. Thank you for teaching it to me.”

Harry was aware of the tension that had developed in his face, his words came out as though bitten off. “Professor McGonagall has not grown up with the Muggle concept of the increasing power of science, and nobody’s ever told her that when a friend’s life is at stake is a time when you need to
think very rationally
-”

The Defense Professor’s voice was also rising. “The Transfiguration Professor is
reading from a script,
Mr. Potter! That script calls for her to mourn and grieve, that all may know how much she cared. Ordinary people react poorly if you suggest that they go off-script. As you already knew!”

“That’s funny, I could have sworn I saw Professor McGonagall going off-script at dinner yesterday. If I saw her go off-script another ten times I might actually try to talk to her about resurrecting Hermione, but right now she’s new to that and needs practice. In the end, Professor, what you’re trying to explain away by calling love and friendship and everything else a lie is just
human beings not knowing any better.
”

The Defense Professor’s voice rose in pitch. “If it were you who had been killed by that troll, it would not even
occur
to Hermione Granger to do as you are doing for her! It would not occur to Draco Malfoy, nor to Neville Longbottom, nor to McGonagall or any of your precious friends! There is not one person in this world who would return to you the care that you are showing her! So
why?
Why do it, Mr. Potter?” There was a strange, wild desperation in that voice. “Why be the only one in the world who goes to such lengths to keep up the pretense, when none of them will ever do the same for you?”

“I believe you are factually mistaken, Professor,” Harry returned evenly. “About a number of things, in fact. At the very least, your model of my emotions is flawed. Because you don’t understand me the tiniest bit, if you think that it would stop me if everything you said was
true.
Everything in the world has to start somewhere, every event that happens has to happen for a first time. Life on Earth had to start with some little self-replicating molecule in a pool of mud. And if I were the first person in the world, no -”

Harry’s hand swept out, to indicate the terribly distant points of light.

“- if I were the first person in the
universe
who ever really cared about someone else, which I’m
not
by the way, then I’d be honored to be that person, and I’d try to do it justice.”

There was a long silence.

“You truly do care about that girl,” the man’s dim outline said softly. “You care about her in the way that none of
them
are capable of caring for their own lives, let alone each other.” The Defense Professor’s voice had become strange, filled with some indecipherable emotion. “I do not understand it, but I know the lengths you will go to because of it. You will challenge death itself, for her. Nothing will sway you from that.”

“I care enough to make an actual effort,” Harry said quietly. “Yes, that is correct.”

The starlight slowly began to fracture, the world shining through the cracks; slashes through the night showing treetrunks and leaves glowing in the sunlight. Harry raised a hand, blinking hard, as the returning brightness smashed into his dark-adjusted eyes; and his eyes automatically went to the Defense Professor, just in case an attack occurred while he was blinded.

When all the stars had gone and only daylight remained, Professor Quirrell was still sitting on the grass. “Well, Mr. Potter,” he said in his normal voice, “if that is so, then I shall give you what help I can, while I can.”

“You’ll
what?
” Harry said involuntarily.

“My offer as I made it yesterday still stands. Ask and I will answer. Show me the same science books you deemed suitable for Mr. Malfoy, and I shall look them over and tell you what comes to mind. Don’t look so surprised, Mr. Potter, I would hardly leave you to your own devices.”

Harry stared, tear ducts still watering from the sudden light.

Professor Quirrell looked back at him. Something strange glinted in the pale eyes. “I have done what I can, and now I fear I must take my leave of you. Good -” and the Defense Professor hesitated. “Good day, Mr. Potter.”

“Good -” Harry began.

The man sitting on the grass fell over, his head impacting the ground with a light thud. At the same time the sense of doom diminished so sharply that Harry leapt to his feet, his heart suddenly in his throat.

But the figure on the ground slowly pushed back up to a crawling position. Turned to look at Harry, eyes empty, mouth slack. Tried to stand, fell back to the ground.

Harry took a step forward, sheer instinct telling him to offer a hand, although that was incorrect; the apprehension that rose up in him, however faint, spoke of continued danger.

But the fallen figure flinched away from Harry, and then slowly began crawl to away from him, in the general direction of the distant castle.

The boy standing amid the forest gazed after.

A/N: For those who have not read canon: The wooden sign has somewhat changed, but the inscription here is the same as in J.K. Rowling’s original.

The fourth meeting:
(4:38pm, April 17th, 1992)

The man wearing the worn, warm coat, with three faint scars etched forever into his cheek, observed Harry Potter as closely as he could while the boy looked around politely at the rows of cottages. For someone whose best friend had died yesterday, Harry Potter seemed strangely composed, though not in any way reminiscent of unfeelingness, or normality.
I don’t wish to talk about that,
the boy had said,
with you or anyone.
Saying ‘wish’ and not ‘want’, as though to emphasize that he was able to use grownup words and make grownup decisions. There had been only one thing Remus Lupin had thought of that might help, after he’d received the owls from Professor McGonagall and that strange man Quirinus Quirrell.

“There’s a lot of empty houses,” the boy said, glancing around again.

Godric’s Hollow had changed, in the decade since Remus Lupin had been a frequent visitor. Many of the old, peaked cottages looked deserted, with green leafy vines growing across their windows and their doors. Britain had contracted noticeably, in the aftermath of the Wizarding War, having lost not only the dead but the fled. Godric’s Hollow had been hard-hit. And afterward still more families had moved elsewhere, to Hogsmeade or magical London, the deserted houses too uncomfortable a reminder.

Others had remained. Godric’s Hollow was older than Hogwarts, older than Godric Gryffindor whose name it had taken, and there were families which would reside here until the end of the world and its magic.

The Potters had been one such family, and would be again, if the last Potter so chose.

Remus Lupin tried to explain all that, simplifying it as best he could for the young boy. The Ravenclaw nodded thoughtfully and said nothing, as though he had understood it all without need of questions. Perhaps that was so; the child of James Potter and Lily Evans, the Head Boy and Head Girl of Hogwarts, would hardly be stupid. The child had certainly seemed highly intelligent, for the little time that they had spoken in January, though at that time Remus had done most of the talking.

(There was also that business with the Wizengamot which Remus had heard rumors about, but Remus didn’t believe a single word of that, any more than he’d believed it about James betrothing his son to Molly’s youngest.)

“There’s the monument,” Remus said, pointing ahead of them.

Harry walked beside Mr. Lupin toward the black marble obelisk, thinking silently. It seemed to Harry that this adventure was essentially misguided; he had no use for grief counseling, that was not Harry’s chosen path. So far as Harry was concerned, the five stages of grief were Rage, Remorse, Resolve, Research, and Resurrection. (Not that the usual ‘five stages of grief’ had any experimental evidence whatsoever that Harry had ever heard about.) But Mr. Lupin had seemed too sincere to refuse; and visiting James and Lily’s home was something Harry felt he ought not to turn down. So Harry walked, feeling oddly detached; walking silently through a play whose script he was not interested in reading.

Harry had been told that he wasn’t to wear the Cloak of Invisibility for this journey, so that Mr. Lupin could keep track of him.

Harry was morally certain that Dumbledore, or both Dumbledore and Mad-Eye Moody, were following them invisibly to see if anyone tried for the bait. There was no way Harry would have been let out of Hogwarts with only Remus Lupin for a guard. Harry didn’t expect anything to happen, though. He’d seen nothing to contradict the hypothesis that all the danger centered on Hogwarts and only Hogwarts.

As the two of them walked closer toward the center of town, the marble obelisk transformed into -

Harry drew in a breath. He’d been expecting a heroic pose of James Potter with wand leveled against Lord Voldemort, and Lily Potter with arms outstretched in front of the crib.

Instead there was a man with untidy hair and glasses, and a woman with her hair let down and a baby in her arms, and that was all.

“It looks very… normal,” Harry said, feeling an odd catch in his throat.

“Madam Longbottom and Professor Dumbledore put their foot down hard,” said Mr. Lupin, who was looking more at Harry than at the monument. “They said that the Potters should be remembered as they had lived, not as they had died.”

Harry looked at the statue, thinking. Very strange, to see himself as a baby of stone, with no scar upon his forehead. It was a glimpse at an alternate universe, one where Harry James Potter (no Evans-Verres to his name) became an intelligent but ordinary wizarding scholar, maybe Sorted into Gryffindor like his parents. A Harry Potter who grew up a proper young wizard, knowing little of science for all that his mother was Muggleborn. Ultimately changing… not much. James and Lily wouldn’t have raised their son with what Professor Quirrell would have called
ambition
and what Professor Verres-Evans would have called
the common endeavor.
His birth parents would have loved him very much, and that would not have been much help to anyone in the world except Harry. If someone had undone their death -

“You were their friend,” Harry said, turning to look at Lupin. “For a long time, since you were children.”

Mr. Lupin nodded silently.

Professor Quirrell’s voice resounded in Harry’s approximate memory:
The most likely difference is not that you care more. Rather it is that, being a more logical creature than they, only you are aware that the role of Friend ought to require this of you…

“When Lily and James died,” Harry said, “did you think at all of whether there might be some magical way to get them back? Like Orpheus and Eurydice? Or the, what was it, Elrin brothers?”

“There is no magic which can undo death,” Mr. Lupin said quietly. “There are some mysteries which wizardry cannot touch.”

“Did you do a mental check of what you thought you knew, how you thought you knew it, and how high the probability was of that conclusion?”

“What?” said Mr. Lupin. “Could you repeat that, Harry?”

“I’m saying, did you think about it anyway?”

Mr. Lupin shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Because it was already done, and over,” Remus Lupin said gently. “Because wherever James and Lily are now, they would wish me to act for the sake of the living, not the dead.”

Harry nodded silently. He’d been pretty sure of the answer to that question before he’d asked. He’d already read that script. But he’d asked anyway, just in case Mr. Lupin had spent a week obsessing about it, because Harry could have been wrong.

The soft voice of the Defense Professor seemed to speak in Harry’s mind.
Surely, if Lupin truly cared, he would not need special instruction for something as simple as thinking for five minutes before giving up…

Yes, he would,
Harry answered the mental voice.
Human beings wouldn’t suddenly obtain a skill like that just because they cared. I learned about it because I’d read library books, produced by a huge scientific edifice -

And that other part of Harry said, in that soft voice,
But there is also another hypothesis, Mr. Potter, and it fits the data in a much less complicated way.

No it doesn’t! How would people even know what to pretend, if nobody had ever cared?

They don’t know. That is what you observe.

The two of them walked onward toward a certain house, past a long row of occupied wizard cottages and other cottages overgrown with vines.

Coming finally to the house with half its top blown off, and green leaves growing over into the inside; behind a shoulder-high wild-growing hedge lining the sidewalk, and a narrow metal gate (Mr. Hagrid had probably stepped right over it, being unable to fit through). The gap in the roof was like a giant mouth had taken a circular bite from the house, leaving spines of wood, what had maybe been support beams, sticking out. To the right side a single chimney still stood upright, uneaten by the giant bite, but leaning dangerously without its former support. Windows were shattered. Where there should have been a front door were only splinters of wood.

To this place Lord Voldemort had come,
silently, making less noise than the dead leaves slithering along the pavement…

Remus Lupin put a hand upon Harry’s shoulder. “Touch the gate,” Mr. Lupin urged.

Harry reached out a hand and did so.

Like a fast-growing flower a sign burst from the tangled weeds in the ground behind the gate, a wooden sign with golden letters, and it said:

On this spot, on the night of 31 October 1981,
Lily and James Potter lost their lives.

They were survived by their son, Harry Potter,
the only wizard ever to withstand the Killing Curse,
the Boy-Who-Lived, who broke You-Know-Who’s power.

This house has been left in its ruined state,
as a monument to the Potters,
as a reminder of their sacrifice.

In a blank space below the golden letters were written other messages, dozens of them, magical ink that rose to the surface and gleamed brightly enough to be read before fading and giving way to other messages.

So my Gideon is avenged.

Thank you, Harry Potter. Fare well wherever you are.

We will always be in the Potters’ debt.

Oh James, oh Lily, I am sorry.

I hope you’re alive, Harry Potter.

There is always a price.

I wish our last words had been kinder, James. I’m sorry.

There is always a dawn after the night.

Rest well, Lily.

Bless you, Boy-Who-Lived. You were our miracle.

“I guess -” Harry said. “I guess that’s what people do - instead of trying to make it better -” Harry stopped. The thought seemed unworthy of this place. He looked up, and saw Remus Lupin gazing at him with a look so gentle that Harry wrenched his eyes away to the blasted and broken roof.

You were our miracle.
Harry had always heard the word ‘miracle’ in the context of how, in the natural universe, there was no such thing. And yet looking at the ruined house, he suddenly knew exactly what the word meant, the note of grace all unexplained, the blessing inexplicable. The Dark Lord had almost won, and then in one night all the darkness and terror had ended, salvation without justification, a sudden dawn from out of the darkness and even now nobody knew
why
-

If Lily Potter had lived beyond her confrontation with Lord Voldemort, she would have felt that way when she saw her baby alive, afterward.

“Let’s go,” whispered the baby boy, ten years later.

They went.

The graveyard’s entrance was guarded by a lockless gate of the sort that kept out animals, with a place to stand while you moved the door from one side of the standing-place to the other. Remus took out his wand (Harry was already holding his) and there was a brief blur as they stepped through.

Some of the stones rising up from the ground looked as old as the wall in Oxford that his father had said was around a thousand years old.

Hallie Fleming,
said the first stone that Harry saw, in a carving almost invisibly faded with the erosion of time.
Vienna Wood,
said another.

It had been a long time since Harry had visited a graveyard. His mind had still been childlike the last time he’d come to one, long before he’d seen within Death’s shadow. Coming here now was… strange, and sad, and puzzling, and
this has been happening for so long, why haven’t wizards tried to stop it, why aren’t they putting all their strength into that like Muggles do with medical research, only more so, wizards have more reason to hope…

“The Dumbledores lived in Godric’s Hollow too?” Harry said, as they walked past a pair of relatively new stones saying
Kendra Dumbledore
and
Ariana Dumbledore.

“For a long, long time,” Mr. Lupin said.

They walked further into the graveyard, far toward the end, past many deaths that had been mourned.

Then Mr. Lupin pointed at a linked double headstone, of marble still white and unaged.

“Are there going to be messages there?” Harry said. He didn’t want to deal any more with the way that other people dealt with death.

Mr. Lupin shook his head.

They walked toward the linked white stones.

And stood before -

“What is this?” Harry whispered. “Who…
who wrote this?
”

JAMES POTTER
BORN 27 MARCH 1960
DIED 31 OCTOBER 1981

“Wrote what?” said Mr. Lupin, puzzled.

LILY POTTER
BORN 30 JANUARY 1960
DIED 31 OCTOBER 1981

“
This!
” Harry cried. “The
inscription!
” There were tears welling up in Harry’s eyes, at the brightness out of place and unexplained, the touch of grace where no grace should have been, the mysterious blessing, tears welling up at

THE LAST ENEMY THAT SHALL BE DESTROYED IS DEATH

“That?” Mr. Lupin said. “That’s the… motto, I suppose you could call it, of the Potters. Though I don’t think it was ever something as formal as that. Just a saying handed down from long, long ago…”

“This - that -” Harry scrambled down to kneel beside the grave, touched the inscription with a trembling hand. “
How?
Things like that can’t just be, be
genetic
-”

Then Harry saw what tears had blurred, the faint carving of a line, within a circle, within a triangle.

The symbol of the Deathly Hallows.

And Harry understood.

“They tried,” Harry whispered.

The three Peverell brothers.

Had they lost someone precious to them, was that where it had begun?

“With all their lives, they tried, and they made progress -”

The Cloak of Invisibility, that could defeat the Dementors’ sight.

“- but their research wasn’t finished -”

Hiding from Death’s shadow is not defeating Death itself. The Resurrection Stone couldn’t really bring anyone back. The Elder Wand couldn’t protect you from old age.