Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (22 page)

“I can’t name my source,” Harry said. “In fact I have to ask you to pretend that this conversation never happened. Just act like you happened across them naturally while you were on an errand, or something. I’ll run on ahead as soon as Herbology gets out. I think I can distract the Slytherins until you get there. I’m not easy to scare or bully, and I don’t think they’ll dare to seriously hurt the Boy-Who-Lived. Though… I’m not asking you to run in the hallways, but I would appreciate it if you didn’t dawdle along the way.”

Professor Sprout looked at him for a long moment, then her expression softened. “Please be careful with yourself, Harry Potter. And… thank you.”

“Just be sure not to be late,” Harry said. “And remember, when you get there, you weren’t expecting to see me and this conversation never happened.”

It was horrible, watching himself yank Neville out of the circle of Slytherins. Neville had been right, he’d used too much force, way too much force.

“Hello,” Harry Potter said coldly. “I’m the Boy-Who-Lived.”

Eight first-year boys, mostly the same height. One of them had a scar on his forehead and he wasn’t acting like the others.

Oh wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursel’s as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
And foolish notion -

Professor McGonagall was right. The Sorting Hat was right. It was clear once you saw it from the outside.

There was something wrong with Harry Potter.

Love as thou Rowling.

Today’s historical tidbit: The ancient Hebrews considered the boundary of a day to be sunset rather than dawn, so they said “evening and morning” not “morning and evening”. (And as many reviewers noted, modern Jewish halacha asserts the same.)

“I’m sure I’ll find the time somewhere.”

“
Frigideiro!
”

Harry dipped a finger in the glass of water on his desk. It should have been cool. But lukewarm it was, and lukewarm it had stayed. Again.

Harry was feeling very, very cheated.

There were hundreds of fantasy novels scattered around the Verres household. Harry had read quite a few. And it was starting to look like he had a mysterious dark side. So after the glass of water had refused to cooperate the first few times, Harry had glanced around the Charms classroom to make sure no one was watching, and then taken a deep breath, concentrated, and made himself angry. Thought about the Slytherins bullying Neville, and the game where someone knocked down your books every time you tried to pick them up again. Thought about what Draco Malfoy had said about the ten-year-old Lovegood girl and how the Wizengamot really operated…

And the fury had entered his blood, he had held out his wand in a hand that trembled with hate and said in cold tones “
Frigideiro!
” and absolutely nothing had happened.

Harry had been
gypped.
He wanted to write someone and demand a
refund
on his dark side which clearly
ought
to have irresistible magical power but had turned out to be
defective.

“
Frigideiro!
” said Hermione again from the desk next to him. Her water was solid ice and there were white crystals forming on the rim of her glass. She seemed to be totally intent on her own work and not at all conscious of the other students staring at her with hateful eyes, which was either (a) dangerously oblivious of her or (b) a perfectly honed performance rising to the level of fine art.

“Oh,
very
good, Miss Granger!” squeaked Filius Flitwick, their Charms Professor and Head of Ravenclaw, a tiny little man with no visible signs of being a past dueling champion. “Excellent! Stupendous!”

Harry had expected to be, in the worst case, second behind Hermione. Harry would have preferred for
her
to be rivalling
him,
of course, but he could have accepted it the other way around.

As of Monday, Harry was headed for the bottom of the class, a position for which he was companionably rivalling all the other Muggle-raised students except Hermione. Who was all alone and rivalless at the top, poor thing.

Professor Flitwick was standing over the desk of one of the other Muggleborns and quietly adjusting the way she was holding her wand.

Harry looked over at Hermione. He swallowed hard. It was the obvious role for her in the scheme of things… “Hermione?” Harry said tentatively. “Do you have any idea what I might be doing wrong?”

Hermione’s eyes lit up with a terrible light of helpfulness and something in the back of Harry’s brain screamed in desperate humiliation.

Five minutes later, Harry’s water did seem noticeably cooler than room temperature and Hermione had given him a few verbal pats on the head and told him to pronounce it more carefully next time and gone off to help someone else.

Professor Flitwick had given her a House point for helping him.

Harry was gritting his teeth so hard his jaw ached and that wasn’t helping his pronunciation.

I don’t care if it’s unfair competition. I know exactly what I am doing with two extra hours every day. I am going to sit in my trunk and study until I am keeping up with Hermione Granger.

“Transfiguration is some of the most complex and dangerous magic you will learn at Hogwarts,” said Professor McGonagall. There was no trace of any levity upon the face of the stern old witch. “Anyone messing around in my class will leave and not come back. You have been warned.”

Her wand came down and tapped her desk, which smoothly reshaped itself into a pig. A couple of Muggleborn students gave out small yelps. The pig looked around and snorted, seeming confused, and then became a desk again.

The Transfiguration Professor looked around the classroom, and then her eyes settled on one student.

“Mr. Potter,” said Professor McGonagall. “You only received your schoolbooks a few days ago. Have you started reading your Transfiguration textbook?”

“No, sorry professor,” Harry said.

“You needn’t apologise, Mr. Potter, if you were required to read ahead you would have been told to do so.” McGonagall’s fingers rapped the desk in front of her. “Mr. Potter, would you care to guess whether this is a desk which I Transfigured into a pig, or if it began as a pig and I briefly removed the Transfiguration? If you had read the first chapter of your textbook, you would know.”

Harry’s eyebrows furrowed slightly. “I’d guess it’d be easier to start with a pig, since if it started as a desk, it might not know how to stand up.”

Professor McGonagall shook her head. “No fault to you, Mr. Potter, but the correct answer is that in Transfiguration you do
not
care to guess. Wrong answers will be marked with extreme severity, questions left blank will be marked with great leniency. You must learn to know what you do not know. If I ask you any question, no matter how obvious or elementary, and you answer ‘I’m not sure’, I will not hold it against you and anyone who laughs will lose House points. Can you tell me why this rule exists, Mr. Potter?”

Because a single error in Transfiguration can be incredibly dangerous.
“No.”

“Correct. Transfiguration is more dangerous than Apparition, which is not taught until your sixth year. Unfortunately, Transfiguration must be learned and practised at a young age to maximise your adult ability. So this is a dangerous subject, and you should be quite scared of making any mistakes, because none of my students have ever been permanently injured and I will be
extremely put out
if you are the first class to
spoil my record
.”

Several students gulped.

Professor McGonagall stood up and moved over to the wall behind her desk, which held a polished wooden board. “There are many reasons why Transfiguration is dangerous, but one reason stands above all the rest.” She produced a short quill with a thick end, and used it to sketch letters in red; which she then underlined, using the same marker, in blue:

TRANSFIGURATION IS NOT PERMANENT!

“Transfiguration is not permanent!” said Professor McGonagall. “Transfiguration is not permanent! Transfiguration is not permanent! Mr. Potter, suppose a student Transfigured a block of wood into a cup of water, and you drank it. What do you imagine might happen to you when the Transfiguration wore off?” There was a pause. “Excuse me, I should not have asked that of you, Mr. Potter, I forgot that you are blessed with an unusually pessimistic imagination -”

“I’m fine,” Harry said, swallowing hard. “So the first answer is that I don’t
know
,” the Professor nodded approvingly, “but I
imagine
there might be… wood in my stomach, and in my bloodstream, and if any of that water had gotten absorbed into my body’s tissues - would it be wood pulp or solid wood or…” Harry’s grasp of magic failed him. He couldn’t understand how wood mapped into water in the first place, so he couldn’t understand what would happen after the water molecules were scrambled by ordinary thermal motions and the magic wore off and the mapping reversed.

McGonagall’s face was stiff. “As Mr. Potter has correctly reasoned, he would become extremely sick and require immediate Flooing to St. Mungo’s Hospital if he was to have any chance of survival. Please turn your textbooks to page 5.”

Even without any sound in the moving picture, you could tell that the woman with horribly discolored skin was screaming.

“The criminal who originally Transfigured gold into wine and gave it to this woman to drink, ‘in payment of the debt’ as he put it, received a sentence of ten years in Azkaban. Please turn to page 6. That is a Dementor. They are the guardians of Azkaban. They suck away at your magic, your life, and any happy thoughts you try to have. The picture on page 7 is of the criminal ten years later, on his release. You will note that he is dead - yes, Mr. Potter?”

“Professor,” Harry said, “if the worst happens in a case like that, is there any way of
maintaining
the Transfiguration?”

“No,” Professor McGonagall said flatly. “Sustaining a Transfiguration is a constant drain on your magic which scales with the size of the target form. And you would need to recontact the target every few hours, which is, in a case like this, impossible. Disasters like this are
unrecoverable!
”

Professor McGonagall leaned forwards, her face very hard. “You will absolutely never under any circumstances Transfigure anything into a liquid or a gas. No water, no air. Nothing like water, nothing like air. Even if it is not meant to drink. Liquid
evaporates,
little bits and pieces of it get into the air. You will not Transfigure anything that is to be burned. It will make smoke and someone could breathe that smoke! You will never Transfigure anything that could conceivably go inside anyone’s body by any means. No food. Nothing that
looks like
food. Not even as a funny little prank where you mean to tell them about your mud pie before they actually eat it. You will never do it. Period. Inside this classroom or out of it or
anywhere.
Is that well understood by
every single student?
”

“Yes,” said Harry, Hermione, and a few others. The rest seemed to be speechless.

“
Is that well understood by every single student?
”

“Yes,” they said or muttered or whispered.

“If you break any of these rules you will not further study Transfiguration during your stay at Hogwarts. Repeat along with me. I will never Transfigure anything into a liquid or gas.”

“I will never Transfigure anything into a liquid or gas,” said the students in ragged chorus.

“Again! Louder! I will never Transfigure anything into a liquid or gas.”

“I will never Transfigure anything into a liquid or gas.”

“I will never Transfigure anything that looks like food or anything else that goes inside a human body.”

“I will never Transfigure anything that is to be burned because it could make smoke.”

“You will never Transfigure anything that looks like money, including Muggle money,” said Professor McGonagall. “The goblins have ways of finding out who did it. As a matter of recognised law, the goblin nation is in a permanent state of
war
with all magical counterfeiters. They will not send Aurors. They will send an army.”

“I will never Transfigure anything that looks like money,” repeated the students.

“And
above all
,” said Professor McGonagall, “you will not Transfigure any living subject,
especially yourselves.
It will make you very sick and possibly dead, depending on how you Transfigure yourself and how long you maintain the change.” Professor McGonagall paused. “Mr. Potter is currently holding up his hand because he has seen an Animagus transformation - specifically, a human transforming into a cat and back again. But an Animagus transformation is not
free
Transfiguration.”

Professor McGonagall took a small chunk of wood out of her pocket. With a tap of her wand it became a glass ball. Then she said “
Crystferrium!
” and the glass ball became a steel ball. She tapped it with her wand one last time and the steel ball became a piece of wood once more. ”
Crystferrium
transforms a subject of solid glass into a similarly shaped target of solid steel. It cannot do the reverse, nor can it transform a desk into a pig. The most general form of Transfiguration - free Transfiguration, which you will be learning here - is capable of transforming any subject into any target, at least so far as physical form is concerned. For this reason, free Transfiguration must be done wordlessly. Using Charms would require different words for every different transformation between subject and target.”

Professor McGonagall gave her students a sharp look. “
Some
teachers begin with Transfiguration Charms and move on to free Transfiguration afterwards. Yes, that would be much easier in the beginning. But it can set you in a poor mold which impairs your abilities later. Here you will learn free Transfiguration from the
very start
, which requires that you cast the spell wordlessly, by holding the subject form, the target form, and the transformation within your own mind.”

“And to answer Mr. Potter’s question,” Professor McGonagall went on, “it is
free
Transfiguration which you must never do to any living subject. There are Charms and potions which can safely, reversibly transform living subjects in
limited
ways. An Animagus with a missing limb will still be missing that limb after transforming, for example. Free Transfiguration is
not
safe. Your body will change while it is Transfigured - breathing, for example, results in a constant loss of the body’s stuff to the surrounding air. When the Transfiguration wears off and your body tries to revert to its
original
form, it will not quite be able to do so. If you press your wand to your body and imagine yourself with golden hair, afterwards your hair will fall out. If you visualise yourself as someone with clearer skin, you will be taking a long stay at St. Mungo’s. And if you Transfigure yourself into an adult bodily form, then, when the Transfiguration wears off, you will die.”

That explained why he had seen such things as fat boys, or girls less than perfectly pretty. Or old people, for that matter. That wouldn’t happen if you could just Transfigure yourself every morning… Harry raised his hand and tried to signal Professor McGonagall with his eyes.

“
Yes
, Mr. Potter?”

“Is it possible to Transfigure a living subject into a target that is static, such as a coin - no, excuse me, I’m terribly sorry, let’s just say a steel ball.”