Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (214 page)

The boy was staring at her, his mouth working soundlessly.

A mysterious name came into her mind, rose to her lips.

“Lucius?” she whispered.

The next update will be on
March 13th, 2015
at
12PM Pacific
(
7PM UTC
).

A good place to start reading Pratchett is with the book
Mort.

A somber mood pervaded the Headmistress’s office. Minerva had returned after dropping off Draco and Narcissa/Nancy at St. Mungo’s, where the Lady Malfoy was being examined to see if a decade living as a Muggle had done any damage to her health; and Harry had come up to the Headmistress’s office again and then… not been able to think of priorities. There was so
much
to do, so many things, that even Headmistress McGonagall didn’t seem to know where to start, and certainly not Harry. Right now Minerva was repeatedly writing words on parchment and then erasing them with a handwave, and Harry had closed his eyes for clarity. Was there any
next
first thing that needed to happen…

There came a knock upon the great oaken door that had been Dumbledore’s, and the Headmistress opened it with a word.

The man who entered the Headmistress’s office appeared worn, he had discarded his wheelchair but still walked with a limp. He wore black robes that were simple, yet clean and unstained. Over his left shoulder was slung a knapsack, of sturdy gray leather set with silver filigree that held four green pearl-like stones. It looked like a thoroughly enchanted knapsack, one that could contain the contents of a Muggle house.

One look at him, and Harry knew.

Headmistress McGonagall sat frozen behind her new desk.

Severus Snape inclined his head to her.

“What is the meaning of this?” said the Headmistress, sounding… heart-sick, like she’d known, upon a glance, just like Harry had.

“I resign my position as the Potions Master of Hogwarts,” the man said simply. “I will not stay to draw my last month’s salary. If there are students who have been particularly harmed by me, you may use the money for their benefit.”

He knows.
The thought came to Harry, and he couldn’t have said in words just
what
the Potions Master now knew; except that it was clear that Severus knew it.

“Severus…” Headmistress McGonagall began. Her voice sounded hollow. “Professor Severus Snape, you may not realize how difficult it is to find Potions Masters who can safely teach Muggleborns, or Professors sharp enough to keep Slytherin House in any semblance of order…”

Again the man inclined his head. “I think it need not be said to you, Headmistress, but I recommend in the strongest possible terms that the next Head of Slytherin be nothing like me.”

“Severus, you only did as Albus told you to do! You could stay on and act differently!”

“Headmistress,” Harry said. His own voice seemed also hollow, and Harry wondered at it, for he hadn’t known Severus Snape that well. “If he wants to go, I think you should let him go.”

Dumbledore was using him. Maybe not exactly the way Professor Quirrell thought, maybe it was prophecy rather than sabotaging Slytherin, but Dumbledore was still using him. There were things that could have been said long ago to Severus, to free him. It’s clear why Dumbledore didn’t risk that, but still, Severus wasn’t being used kindly. Even his blindness and grief were being used, the way he didn’t grasp the consequences of his actions as Potions Master…

“It is well to find you here, Mr. Potter,” Severus said. “There is unfinished business between us.”

Harry didn’t know what to say, so he just nodded.

Severus seemed to be having some difficulty speaking, as he stood before the two of them with the grey knapsack on his shoulder. Finally he seemed to find the words he’d come to speak. “Your mother. Lily. She was -”

“I know,” Harry said, through the thickness of his throat. “You don’t have to say it.”

“Lily was a fine upstanding witch, Mr. Potter. I would not have you think otherwise from any words I said to you.”

“
Severus?
” said Minerva McGonagall, looking as shocked as if she’d been bitten by her own shoes.

The former Potions Master kept his eyes on Harry. “More than one bar lay between myself and Lily, most notably my ill-advised attempts to curry favor with the purebloods of my house. If I made it sound like one mistake upon a muddy field ended it all, if I pretended that she had no reason but shallowness not to love me, I hope your books have also told you why fools may say such things.”

“They did,” Harry said. He was looking at the fine gray knapsack on Severus Snape’s left shoulder, unable to meet the Potions Master’s eyes. “They did.”

“However,” the former Potions Master continued, “I’m afraid I have nothing more to say about your father than what I’ve already told you.”

“Severus!”

The former Potions Master seemed to have eyes only for Harry. “The Dark Mark upon my arm is not dead, nor is the prophecy fulfilled by that story you recounted before the crowd. How did you destroy all but a remnant of the Dark Lord?”

Harry hesitated. “I Obliviated most of his memories and… sealed him, I guess is how wizards say it. Even if the seal breaks, he won’t come back as himself.”

Severus frowned briefly and then shrugged. “I suppose that is acceptable.”

“Professor Snape,” Harry said, because this too was now his responsibility, “the Order of the Phoenix owes you for services rendered. I’m in an excellent position to repay it, both financially and magically. Just in case you want to start your next life in a position of wealth, or with better hair, or something.”

“Strange words to say to such as me,” the former Potions Master said in a soft drawl. “I went to the Dark Lord intending to sell him the prophecy in exchange for Lily’s love becoming mine, by whatever darkness was required to achieve it. That is hardly something to be forgiven lightly. And then, in the years after when I was a Potions Master… that you experienced yourself. Do you think my service to the Order of the Phoenix has repaid all my sins?”

“People are always broken,” Harry said, though the words stuck in his throat. “They always make mistakes. At least you tried to repay them.”

“Perhaps,” said the former Potions Master. “My final duty was to fail in guarding the Stone, to be struck down. This I have done, and I survived it, which I never expected to do.” Severus was leaning against the door through which he’d entered, taking his weight off his left leg. “I would not have thought to ask for your forgiveness, but since you offer it so freely, I will accept with thanks. From this day on I wish to take less unkindly ways, and I think that is best done by starting over.”

Tears glistened on Minerva McGonagall’s nose and cheeks, when she spoke her voice was without hope. “Surely you could start over inside Hogwarts.”

Severus shook his head. “Too many students would remember me as the evil Potions Master. No, Minerva. I will go someplace new, and take a new name, and find someone new to love.”

“Severus Snape,” Harry said, because it was his responsibility to say it, “has all your will been done?”

“Lily’s killer is vanquished,” the man said. “I am content.”

The Headmistress lowered her head. “Be well, Severus,” she whispered.

“I do have one last piece of advice,” Harry said. “If you want it.”

“What is it?” said Severus Snape.

“Ruminating about the past can contribute to depression. You have my blanket permisson to just never think about your past, ever. You shouldn’t think that it’s your responsibility to Lily to bear your guilt for her, or anything like that. Just keep your mind on your future and whatever new people you meet.”

“I shall take your wisdom into consideration,” Severus said neutrally.

“Also, try a different brand of hair shampoo.”

A wry grin crossed Severus’s face, and Harry thought it might have been, for the first time, that man’s true smile. “Drop dead, Potter.”

Harry laughed.

Severus laughed.

Minerva was sobbing.

Without saying anything else, the free man took a pinch of Floo powder, and cast it into the office’s fireplace, and strode into the green flame whispering something that nobody caught; and that was the last that anyone ever heard of Severus Snape.

The last chapter will post on March 14th, 2015, at 9AM Pacific (4PM UTC).
Thank you all for reading.

And it was evening and it was morning, the last day. June 15th, 1992.

The beginning light of morning, the pre-dawn before sunrise, was barely brightening the sky. To the east of Hogwarts, where the Sun would rise, that faintest tinge of grey made barely visible the hilly horizon beyond the Quidditch stands.

The stone terrace-platform where Harry now sat would be high enough to see the dawn beyond the hills below; he’d asked for that, when he was describing his new office.

Harry was currently sitting cross-legged on a cushion, chilly pre-morning breezes stirring over his exposed hands and face. He’d ordered the house-elves to bring up the hand-glittered throne from his previous office as General Chaos… and then he’d told the elves to put it back, once it had occurred to Harry to start worrying about where his taste in decorations had come from and whether Voldemort had once possessed a similar throne. Which, itself, wasn’t a knockdown argument - it wasn’t like sitting on a glittery throne to survey the lands below Hogwarts was
unethical
in any way Harry’s moral philosophy could make out - but Harry had decided that he needed to take time and think it through. Meanwhile, simple cushions would do well enough.

In the room below, connected to the rooftop by a simple wooden ladder, was Harry’s new office inside Hogwarts. A wide room, surrounded by full-wall windows on four sides for sunlight; currently bare of furnishings but for four chairs and a desk. Harry had told Headmistress McGonagall what he was looking for, and Headmistress McGonagall had put on the Sorting Hat and then told Harry the series of twists and turns that would take him where he wanted to be. High enough in Hogwarts that the castle shouldn’t have been that tall, high enough in Hogwarts that nobody looking from the outside would see a piece of castle corresponding to where Harry now sat. It seemed like an elementary precaution against snipers that there was no reason
not
to take.

Though, on the flip side, Harry had no idea where he currently
was
in any real sense. If his office couldn’t be seen from the lands below, then how was Harry seeing the lands, how were photons making it from the landscape to him? On the western side of the horizon, stars still glittered, clear in the pre-dawn air. Were those photons the actual photons that had been emitted by huge plasma furnaces in the unimaginable distance? Or did Harry now sit within some dreaming vision of the Hogwarts castle? Or was it all, without any further explanation, ‘just magic’? He needed to get electricity to work better around magic so he could experiment with shining lasers downward and upward.

And yes, Harry had his own office on Hogwarts now. He didn’t have any official title yet, but the Boy-Who-Lived was now a true fixture of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the soon-to-be-home of the Philosopher’s Stone and the world’s only wizarding institution of genuinely higher education. It wasn’t fully secured, but Professor Vector had put up some preliminary Charms and Runes to screen the office and its rooftop against eavesdropping.

Harry sat on his cushion, near the edge of his office’s roof, and gazed down upon trees and lakes and flowering grass. Far below, carriages sat motionlessly, not yet harnessed to skeletal horses. Small boats littered the shore, prepared to ferry younger students across the lake when the time came. The Hogwarts Express had arrived overnight, and now the train cars and the huge old-fashioned engine awaited on the other side of the southern lake. All was ready to take the students home after the Leave-Taking Feast in the morning.

Harry stared across the lake, at the great old-fashioned locomotive he wouldn’t be riding home this time. Again. There was a strange sadness and worry to that thought, like Harry was already starting to miss out on the bonding experiences with
the other students his age
- if you could say that at all, when a significant part of Harry had been born in 1926. It had felt to Harry, last night in the Ravenclaw common room, like the gap between him and the other students had, yes, widened even further. Though that might only have been from the questions Padma Patil and Anthony Goldstein had excitedly asked each other about the Girl-Who-Revived, the rapid-fire speculations shooting through the air from Ravenclaw to Ravenclaw. Harry had known the answers, he’d known all the answers, and he hadn’t been able to say them.

There was a part of Harry that was tempted to go on the Hogwarts Express and then come back to Hogwarts by Floo. But when Harry imagined finding five other students for his compartment, and then spending the next eight hours keeping secrets from Neville or Padma or Dean or Tracey or Lavender… it didn’t seem like an attractive prospect. Harry felt like he ought to do it for reasons of Socializing with the Other Children, but he did not, in any real sense,
want
to do it. He could meet with everyone again at the start of the next school year, when there would be other topics of which he could speak more freely.

Harry stared south across the lake, at the huge old locomotive, and thought about the rest of his life.

About the Future.

The prophecy Dumbledore’s letter had mentioned about him tearing apart the stars in heaven… well,
that
sounded optimistic. That part had an obvious interpretation to anyone who’d grown up with the right sort of upbringing. It described a future where humanity had won, more or less. It wasn’t what Harry usually thought about when he gazed at the stars, but from a truly
adult
perspective, the stars were enormous heaps of valuable raw materials that had unfortunately caught fire and needed to be scattered and put out. If you were tapping the huge hydrogen-helium reservoirs for raw materials, that meant your species had successfully grown up.

Unless the prophecy had been referring to something else entirely. Dumbledore might have been misinterpreting some seer’s words… but his message to Harry had been phrased as if there’d been a prophecy about Harry
personally
tearing apart stars, in the foreseeable future. Which seemed potentially more worrisome, though by no means certain to be true, or a bad thing if it was true…

Harry vented a sigh. He’d begun to understand, in the long hours before sleep had taken him last night, just what Dumbledore’s last messageimplied.

Looking back on the events of the 1991-1992 Hogwarts school year was nothing short of bone-freezingly terrifying, now that Harry understood what he was seeing.

It wasn’t just that Harry had kept the frequent company of his good friend Lord Voldemort. It wasn’t even
mostly
that.

It was the vision of a narrow line of Time that Albus Dumbledore had steered through fate’s narrow keyhole, a hair-thin strand of possibility threaded through a needle’s eye.

The prophecies had instructed Dumbledore to have Tom Riddle’s intelligence copied onto the brain of a wizarding infant who would then grow up learning Muggle science. What did it say about the likely shape of the Future, if
that
was the first or best strategy the seers could find that
didn’t
lead to catastrophe?

Harry could look back now on the Unbreakable Vow that he’d made, and guess that if not for that Vow, disaster might have already been set in motion yesterday when Harry had wanted to tear down the International Statute of Secrecy. Which in turn strongly suggested that the many prophecies Dumbledore had read and whose instructions he’d followed, had somehow ensured that Harry and Voldemort would collide in
exactly the right
way to cause Voldemort to force Harry to make that Unbreakable Vow. That the Unbreakable Vow had been part of Time’s narrow keyhole, one of the improbable preconditions for allowing the Earth’s peoples to survive.

A Vow whose sole purpose was to protect everyone from Harry’s current
stupidity
.

It was like watching a videotape of an almost-traffic-accident that had happened to you, where you remembered another car missing you by centimeters, and the video showing that somebody had
also
thrown a pebble in exactly the right way to cause an enormous lorry to miss that near-collision, and if they hadn’t thrown that pebble then you and all your family in the automobile and your
entire planet
would have been hit by the lorry, which, in the metaphor, represented your own
sheer obliviousness.

Harry had been
warned,
he’d
known
on some level or the Vow wouldn’t have stopped him, and yet he’d
still
almost made the wrong choice and destroyed the world. Harry could look back now and see that, yes, the alternate-Harry with no Vow would’ve had trouble accepting the reasoning that said you couldn’t get magical healing to Muggles as fast as possible. If the alternate-Harry had acknowledged the danger at all, he would have rationalized it, tried to figure out some clever way around the problem and refused to accept
taking a few years longer to do it,
and so the world would have ended. Even after all the warnings Harry had received, it
still
wouldn’t have worked without the Unbreakable Vow.

One tiny strand of Time, being threaded through a needle’s eye.

Harry didn’t know how to handle this revelation. It wasn’t a sort of situation that human beings had evolved emotions to handle. All Harry could do was stare at how close he had come to disaster, might come
again
to disaster if that Vow was fated to trigger more than once, and think…

Think…

‘I don’t want that to happen again’ didn’t seem like the right thought. He’d never
wanted
to destroy the world in the first place. Harry hadn’t lacked for protective feelings about Earth’s sapient population, those protective feelings had been the
problem
in a way. What Harry had lacked was some element of clear vision, of being willing to consciously acknowledge what he’d already known deep down.

And the whole thing with Harry having spent the last year cozying up to the Defense Professor didn’t speak highly of his intellect either. It seemed to point to the same problem, even. There were things Harry had known or strongly suspected on some level, but never promoted to conscious attention. And so he had failed and nearly died.

I need to raise the level of my game.

That was the thought Harry was looking for. He had to do better than this, become a less stupid person than this.

I need to raise the level of my game, or fail.

Dumbledore had destroyed the recordings in the Hall of Prophecy and arranged for no further recordings to be made. There’d apparently been a prophecy that said Harry mustn’t look upon those prophecies. And the obvious next thought, which might or might not be true, was that saving the world was
beyond the reach of prophetic instruction
. That winning would take plans that were too complex for seers’ messages, or that Divination couldn’t see somehow. If there’d been some way for Dumbledore to save the world himself, then prophecy would probably have told Dumbledore how to do that. Instead the prophecies had told Dumbledore how to create the preconditions for a particular sort of person existing; a person, maybe, who could unravel a challenge more difficult than prophecy could solve directly. That was why Harry had been placed on his own, to think without prophetic guidance. If all Harry did was follow mysterious orders from prophecies, then he wouldn’t mature into a person who could perform that unknown task.

And right now, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres was still a walking disaster who’d needed to be constrained by an Unbreakable Vow to prevent him from
immediately
setting the Earth on an inevitable course toward destruction
when he’d already been warned against it.
That had happened
literally yesterday,
just one day after he’d helped Voldemort almost take over the planet.

A certain line from Tolkien kept running through Harry’s mind, the part where Frodo upon Mount Doom put on the ring, and Sauron suddenly realized what a
complete idiot
he’d been. ‘And the magnitude of his own folly was at last laid bare’, or however that had gone.

There was a huge gap between who Harry needed to become, and who he was right now.

And Harry didn’t think that time, life experience, and puberty would take care of that automatically, though they might help. Though if Harry could grow into an adult that was to
this
self what a normal adult was to a normal eleven-year-old, maybe
that
would be enough to steer through Time’s narrow keyhole…

He had to grow up, somehow, and there was no traditional path laid out before him for accomplishing that.

The thought came then to Harry of another work of fiction, more obscure than Tolkien:

You can only arrive at mastery by practicing the techniques you have learned, facing challenges and apprehending them, using to the fullest the tools you have been taught, until they shatter in your hands and you are left in the midst of wreckage absolute… I cannot create masters. I have never known how to create masters. Go, then, and fail… You have been shaped into something that may emerge from the wreckage, determined to remake your Art. I cannot create masters, but if you had not been taught, your chances would be less. The higher road begins after the Art seems to fail you; though the reality will be that it was you who failed your Art.

It wasn’t that Harry had gone down the
wrong
path, it wasn’t that the road to sanity lay somewhere outside of science. But reading science papers hadn’t been
enough.
All the cognitive psychology papers about known bugs in the human brain and so on had
helped,
but they hadn’t been
sufficient.
He’d failed to reach what Harry was starting to realise was a
shockingly
high standard of being so incredibly, unbelievably rational that you actually started to
get things right,
as opposed to having a handy language in which to describe afterwards everything you’d just done wrong. Harry could look back now and apply ideas like ‘motivated cognition’ to see where he’d gone astray over the last year. That counted for something, when it came to being saner in the future. That was better than having no idea what he’d done wrong. But that wasn’t yet being the person who could pass through Time’s narrow keyhole, the adult form whose
possibility
Dumbledore had been instructed by seers to create.