Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (212 page)

“What
idiot
-” Harry stopped himself. “No,
not
an idiot. Because immediately destroying Dark objects is Department policy. Because of past experiences with rings that really should’ve been dropped into volcanos immediately. Right?”

Moody and Amelia nodded in unison. “Good guess, son,” said Moody.

It might seem literarily inevitable that Harry’s past stupidity was going to come back and haunt him in some horrible fashion later, but that was no reason not to try subverting the plot. “I expect you’ve thought of this already,” Harry said, “but the obvious next step is to put out your equivalent of an international bulletin for a thin witch missing her left arm. Oh, and add twenty-five thousand Galleons pledged from me - Headmistress, it’s fine, please trust me on this - to whatever reward is being offered.”

“Well said.” The old witch leaned forward slightly. “The third and final matter… there was one truly puzzling element to last night’s events, and I am curious to see what you make of it, Harry Potter. Found among the corpses was the head and the body of Sirius Black.”

“
What?
” yelled Moody, starting half from his chair.
“I thought he was in Azkaban!”

“So he is,” said Madam Bones. “We checked that at once. The Azkaban guards reported that Sirius Black was still in his cell. Black’s head and body have been transported to the St. Mungo’s morgue, and show the same cause of death as the other Death Eaters, that is to say, his head spontaneously fell off. I am also told that Sirius Black is, as of this morning, sitting in the corner of his cell rocking back and forth with his head between his hands. No other duplicate Death Eaters have been found. Yet.”

There was a pause filled with ticking and whooping things, as people considered this.

“Ah…” said Minerva. “That’s not possible even by You-Know-Who’s standards of possibility. Is it?”

“I would have thought so too when I was your age, dear,” said Amelia. “It is the sixth strangest thing I have ever seen.”

“You see, son?” said Moody. “This sort of thing is why nobody, even me, can ever be paranoid enough.” The scarred man tilted his head, looking thoughtful, as his bright blue eye kept ever-roving. “Twin brother, concealed from the rest of the world? Walpurga Black gave birth to twins, couldn’t bear to kill one, knew old Pollux would demand it… nah, ain’t buyin’ it.”

“Any ideas, Mr. Potter?” said Amelia Bones. “Or is this another matter into which my Department should not inquire too closely?”

Harry closed his eyes and thought.

Sirus Black had hunted down Peter Pettigrew, instead of fleeing the country as common sense would have suggested.

Black had been found in the middle of the street, surrounded by bodies, laughing.

Nothing left of Pettigrew except one finger.

Pettigrew had been a spy for the Light, not a double agent but somebody who snuck around and found things out.

One of the conspiracy theories about Pettigrew had been that he was an Animagus, since he’d been good at ferreting out secrets even in his Hogwarts years.

Dementors sapped all the magic in their vicinity.

Professor Quirrell had said something about a particular type of magic that rearranged flesh like a Muggle smith reshaping metal with hammer and tongs…

Harry opened his eyes again.

“Was Peter Pettigrew a secret Metamorphmagus?”

Amelia Bones’s face changed. She made a single croaking noise and fell backward within her chair.

“Yes, in fact…” Minerva said slowly. “Why?”

“Sirius Black Confunded Peter Pettigrew,” Harry’s voice explained patiently, “to force him to change shape and pretend to be Black. By the time the Confundus wore off, Peter was in Azkaban and couldn’t change back. The Aurors are used to people in Azkaban saying absolutely anything to get out, so they didn’t listen while Peter Pettigrew was screaming about it over and over again until his voice wore out.”

Even Mad-Eye Moody’s face showed the horror, then.

“In retrospect,” said Harry’s voice, which seemed to be operating entirely on automatic, “you should have been suspicious when you managed to get that
one
Death Eater hauled off to Azkaban without a trial.”

“We thought Malfoy was distracted,” whispered the old witch. “That he was only trying to save himself. There were other Death Eaters we managed to get then, like Bellatrix -”

Harry nodded, feeling like his neck and head were moving on puppet strings. “The Dark Lord’s most fanatic and devoted servant, a natural nucleus of opposition for anyone who contested Lucius’s control of the Death Eaters. You thought Lucius was distracted.”

“Get him out of there,” said Minerva McGonagall. Her voice rose to a scream. “
Get him out of there!
”

Amelia Bones shoved herself up from the chair, whirled on the Floo -

“Stop.”

Everyone looked at Harry with astonishment, none more than Minerva McGonagall.

Something else seemed to have taken over Harry’s voice. “There’s four things we still need to discuss. An innocent man has been in Azkaban for ten years, eight months, and fourteen days. He can stay there a few minutes longer. That’s how urgent those four things are.”

“You -” whispered Amelia Bones. “You should not try to be this person, at your age -”

“First. I think I should look at the complete police records on every other Death Eater that went to Azkaban
while Lucius was distracted.
Can you compile that by tonight?”

“Within the hour,” said Amelia Bones. She looked gray.

Harry nodded. “Second. Azkaban is over. You’ll need to start preparations now to move the prisoners to Nurmengard or other secure non-Dementor prisons, and to provide treatment for their Dementor exposure.”

“I,” said Amelia. The old witch seemed bent, diminished. “I… do not think, that even with this… scandal, that the remainder of the Wizengamot will bend… and the Dementors must be fed, not so much as we have fed them, but they must be given some victims, or they will roam the world, prey on innocents…”

“It doesn’t matter what the Wizengamot says,” Harry said. “Because -” Harry’s voice choked. “Because -” Harry took a deep breath, steadied himself. He thought he could see the shape now of the immediate future, could see it stretching out before him like a golden pathway lit with sunlight.
Was this also written, in the book of Time that I must not see?
“Because if I’m right about what comes next, then sometime very soon, Hermione Granger, the Girl-Who-Revived, is going to go to Azkaban and destroy all the Dementors there.”

“Impossible!” spat Mad-Eye Moody.

“Merlin,” whispered Amelia Bones. “Oh, dear Merlin. That’s what happened to the Dementor that Dumbledore ‘lost’. That’s why they’re afraid of you - and now her as well?” Her voice trembled. “What is this, what is all this?”

If Hermione believes that Death can be defeated -

Whether or not she could’ve believed that before, she’ll believe it now.

“An authorized portkey to Azkaban would be appreciated -” Harry’s voice broke again. Tears were streaming down his cheeks.

She can’t die. I have her horcrux.

But Hermione doesn’t need to know about that. Not for one more week.

If she’s willing to risk her own life to end this -

“Though I think, she might make, her own way there…”

“Harry?” said Headmistress McGonagall.

Harry was crying now, huge ragged breaths bursting from him. But he didn’t stop talking. Somewhere out there Peter Pettigrew was waiting while Harry cried.

Somewhere out there, everyone was waiting while he cried.

“Third. Somewhere just inside the wards of Hogwarts. In a highly defensible position. But where emergency cases can be portkeyed in from just outside the wards. There’s going to be a high-security h-h-hospital. With very powerful guards, that have taken Unbreakable Vows, I don’t, I don’t care how much gold it takes to pay for the Vows, it genuinely does not matter any more. And, and Alastor Moody is going to design the security architecture, and go completely overboard on paranoia without being constrained by a budget or sanity or common sense, only it has to open
soon.
” Couldn’t stop talking to cry.

“Harry,” said the Headmistress, “both of them think you’ve gone mad, they don’t know you well enough to know better. You need to slow down and explain.”

Instead Harry reached into his pouch and made sign language with his fingers, and lifted out, his fingers straining, a five-kilo chunk of gold larger than his fist, from when he’d been experimenting this morning. It made a heavy thud as it landed on the table.

Moody reached over and tapped it with his wand, and then his throat made an incomprehensible sound.

“That’s your starting budget, Alastor, if you need money right away. Nicholas Flamel didn’t make the Philosopher’s Stone, he stole it, Dumbledore didn’t know the secret history but Monroe did. Once you know how it works, the Stone can do one complete restoration to full health and youth every two hundred and thirty-four seconds. Three hundred sixty people per day. One hundred and thirty-four thousand healings per year. That should be enough to stop, all the wizards everywhere, and all the goblins and house-elves and whoever, from dying. Of old age, or anything else.” Harry was wiping away tears, over and over. “Flamel had more blood on his hands than a hundred Voldemorts, for all the people he could’ve saved and didn’t. The whole time, Moody, the Philosopher’s Stone could’ve healed all your scars and given you back your leg, any time Flamel felt like it. Dumbledore didn’t know. I’m sure he didn’t know.” Harry smiled shakily. “I can’t imagine you as a teenage witch, Madam Bones, but I bet it looks good on you. That’ll give you more energy for trying to keep the Wizengamot from messing with me, because if they get the idea that the Stone is something they can mess with in any way, tax, regulate, I don’t care, Hogwarts is going to secede from Britain and become its own country. Headmistress, Hogwarts is no longer dependent on the Ministry for gold, or for that matter food. You may reform the educational curriculum at will. I’m thinking we may want to add some more advanced courses soon, especially in Muggle studies.”

“Slow
down!
” said Minerva McGonagall.

“Fourth -” Harry said, and then stopped.

Fourth. Begin preparations for an orderly take-down of the Statute of Secrecy and to provide magical healing on a mass scale to the Muggle world. Those who oppose this agenda in any way may be denied services by the Stone…

Harry’s lips couldn’t move. Not wouldn’t,
couldn’t.

With six billion Muggles thinking creatively about how to use magic…

Transfiguring antimatter was just one idea. It wasn’t even the most destructive idea. There were also black holes and negatively charged strangelets. And if black holes couldn’t be Transfigured because they didn’t
already exist
as magic defined that to within some spatial radius, there was just Transfiguring lots and lots of nuclear weapons and Black Death plague that could reproduce before the Transfiguration wore off and Harry hadn’t even thought about the problem for five minutes but it didn’t matter because he’d already thought of enough. Someone would think of it, someone would talk, someone would try it. The probability was as close to certainty as made no difference.

What happened if you Transfigured a cubic millimeter of up quarks, just the up quarks without any down quarks to bind them? Harry didn’t even know, and up quarks were certainly a kind of substance that already existed. All it might take was one single Muggleborn who knew the names of the six quarks deciding to try it. That could
be
the clock ticking down to the prophesied end of the world.

Harry would have tried to deny the thought, rationalize it away.

He couldn’t do that either.

It wasn’t a thing-Harry-Potter-would-do.

Like water flowing downhill, Harry Potter would take no chances when it came to not destroying the world.

“Fourth?” said Amelia Bones, who was looking like she’d been hit repeatedly in the face with a planet. “
What comes fourth?
”

“Never mind,” said Harry. His voice did not break. He did not fold over sobbing. There were still lives he could save and those took precedence. “Never mind. Chief Warlock Bones, I’ve given the regency of the Wizengamot into your hands. Please use that position to announce internationally that the Stone’s healing power will soon be made available to all, and that meanwhile, all dying patients are to be kept alive at any cost, no matter what magic is required to do it. That announcement is your absolute priority. When you have done that you may rescue Peter Pettigrew and tell your old Department to begin preparations for shutting down Azkaban. Then please have someone prepare a full list of imprisoned Death Eaters and what was said at their trials and whether Lucius seemed strangely uninterested in defending them. Thank you. That’s all.”

Amelia Bones turned without another word, and dashed into the Floo like it was her own self that was on fire.

“And someone,” Harry said, his voice breaking again now that it was all set in motion, and crying wasn’t costing time, though the vast majority of total lives at stake had turned out not to be savable just yet, “someone has to, someone tell Remus Lupin.”

Ch. 120 will post on
March 12th, 2015
at
12PM Pacific Time
(
7PM UTC
).

The next
long
chapter will be Ch. 122, posting on March 14th, 2015 at 9AM Pacific / 4PM UTC.
If you do not like short chapters, I suggest waiting to read 120-122 at that time.

See
hpmor dot com slash notes
for the following blegs:

If you are attending or supporting this year’s or next year’s Worldcon,
I would like you to,
next year, nominate HPMOR for Best Novel in the 2016 Hugos
.
(Not this year, HPMOR will finish in 2015 so it’s eligible for next year’s batch of awards.)

If anyone can put me in touch with J. K. Rowling or Daniel Radcliffe, I would appreciate it.