Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (53 page)

“Even so,” said the Boy-Who-Lived, his eyes distant as they stared off into somewhere else, some other place that Neville couldn’t imagine. “There might be some incredibly clever solution that makes it possible to save everyone and let them all live happily ever after, and if only I was smart enough I would have thought of it by now -”

“You have problems,” said Neville. “You think you ought to be what Lesath Lestrange thinks you are.”

“Yeah,” said the Boy-Who-Lived, “that pretty much nails it. Every time someone cries out in prayer and I can’t answer, I feel guilty about not being God.”

Neville didn’t quite understand that, but… “That doesn’t sound good.”

Harry sighed. “I understand that I have a problem, and I know what I need to do to solve it, all right? I’m working on it.”

Harry watched Neville leave.

Of course Harry hadn’t said what the solution was.

The solution, obviously, was to hurry up and become God.

Neville’s footsteps moved off, and soon could no longer be heard.

And then there was one.

“Ahem,” said Severus Snape’s voice from directly behind him.

Harry let out a small scream and instantly hated himself.

Slowly, Harry turned around.

The tall greasy man in the spotted robes was leaning against the wall in the same position Harry had occupied.

“A fine invisibility cloak, Potter,” drawled the Potions Master. “Much is explained.”

Oh, bloody crap.

“And perhaps I have been in Dumbledore’s company too long,” said Severus, “but I cannot help but wonder if that is
the
Cloak of Invisibility.”

Harry immediately turned into someone who’d never heard of the Cloak of Invisibility and who was
exactly
as smart as Harry thought Severus thought Harry was.

“Oh, possibly,” said Harry. “I trust you realize the implications, if it is?”

Severus’s voice was condescending. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you, Potter? A rather clumsy try at fishing.”

(Professor Quirrell had remarked over their lunch that Harry really needed to conceal his state of mind better than putting on a blank face when someone discussed a dangerous topic, and had explained about one-level deceptions, two-level deceptions, and so on. So either Severus
was
in fact modeling Harry as a one-level player, which made Severus himself two-level, and Harry’s three-level move had been successful; or Severus was a four-level player and wanted Harry to
think
the deception had been successful. Harry, smiling, had asked Professor Quirrell what level
he
played at, and Professor Quirrell, also smiling, had responded,
One level higher than you
.)

“So you were watching this whole time,” said Harry. “Disillusionment, I think it’s called.”

A thin smile. “It would have been foolish of me to take the slightest risk that you came to harm.”

“And you wanted to see the results of your test firsthand,” said Harry. “So. Am I like my father?”

A strange sad expression came over the man, one that looked foreign to his face. “I should sooner say, Harry Potter, that you resemble -”

Severus stopped short.

He stared at Harry.

“Lestrange called you a son of a mudblood,” Severus said slowly. “It didn’t seem to bother you much.”

Harry furrowed his eyebrows. “Not under those circumstances, no.”

“You’d just helped him,” Severus said. His eyes were intent on Harry. “And he threw it back in your face. Surely that isn’t something you’d just forgive?”

“He’d just been through a pretty harrowing experience,” Harry said. “And I don’t think being rescued by first-years helped his pride much, either.”

“I suppose it was easy enough to forgive,” Severus said, and his voice was odd, “since Lestrange means nothing to you. Just some strange Slytherin. If it was a friend, perhaps, you would have felt far more injured by what he said.”

“If he were a friend,” Harry said, “all the more reason to forgive him.”

There was a long silence. Harry felt, and he couldn’t have said why or from where, that the air was filling up with a dreadful tension, like water rising, and rising, and rising.

Then Severus smiled, looking suddenly relaxed once more, and all the tension vanished.

“You are a very forgiving person,” Severus said, still smiling. “I suppose your stepfather, Michael Verres-Evans, was the one who taught it to you.”

“More like Dad’s science fiction and fantasy collection,” said Harry. “Sort of my fifth parent, really. I’ve lived the lives of all the characters in all my books, and all their mighty wisdom thunders in my head. Somewhere in there was someone like Lesath, I expect, though I couldn’t say who. It wasn’t hard to put myself in his shoes. And it was my books that told me what to do about it, too. The good guys forgive.”

Severus gave a light, amused laugh. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t know much about what good people do.”

Harry looked at him. That was kind of sad, actually. “I’ll lend you some novels with good people in them, if you like.”

“I should like to ask your advice about something,” Severus said, his voice casual. “I know of another fifth-year Slytherin who was being bullied by Gryffindors. He was wooing a beautiful Muggleborn girl, who came across him being bullied, and tried to rescue him. And he called her a mudblood, and that was the end for them. He apologized, many times, but she never forgave him. Have you any thoughts for what he could have said or done, to win from her the forgiveness you gave Lestrange?”

“Erm,” Harry said, “based on only that information, I’m not sure
he
was the main one who had a problem. I’d have told him not to date someone that incapable of forgiveness. Suppose they’d gotten married, can you imagine life in that household?”

There was a pause.

“Oh, but she
could
forgive,” Severus said with amusement in his voice. “Why, afterward, she went off and became the girlfriend of the bully. Tell me, why would she forgive the bully, and not the bullied?”

Harry shrugged. “At a wild guess, because the bully had hurt someone
else
very badly, and the bullied had hurt
her
just a little, and to her that just felt far more unforgivable somehow. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, was the bully handsome? Or for that matter, rich?”

There was another pause.

“Yes to both,” said Severus.

“And there you have it,” said Harry. “Not that I’ve ever been through high school myself, but my books give me to understand that there’s a certain kind of teenage girl who’ll be outraged by a single insult if the boy is plain or poor, yet who can somehow find room in her heart to forgive a rich and handsome boy his bullying. She was shallow, in other words. Tell whoever it was that she wasn’t worthy of him and he needs to get over it and move on and next time date girls who are deep instead of pretty.”

Severus stared at Harry in silence, his eyes glittering. The smile had faded, and though Severus’s face twitched, it did not return.

Harry was starting to feel a bit nervous. “Um, not that I’ve got any experience in the area myself, obviously, but I think that’s what a wise adviser from my books would say.”

There was more silence and more glittering.

It was probably a good time to change the subject.

“So,” Harry said. “Did I pass your test, whatever it was?”

“I think,” Severus said, “that there should be no more conversations between us, Potter, and you would be exceedingly wise never to speak of this one.”

Harry blinked. “Would you mind telling me what I did wrong?”

“You offended me,” said Severus. “And I no longer trust your cunning.”

Harry stared at Severus, taken rather aback.

“But you have given me well-meant advice,” said Severus Snape, “and so I will give you true advice in return.” His voice was almost perfectly steady. Like a string stretched almost perfectly horizontal, despite the massive weight hanging from its middle, by a million tons of tension pulling at either end. “You almost died today, Potter. In the future, never share your wisdom with anyone unless you know exactly what you are both talking about.”

Harry’s mind finally made the connection.

“
You
were that -”

Harry’s mouth snapped shut as the
almost died
part sank in, two seconds too late.

“Yes,” said Severus, “I was.”

And the terrible tension flooded back into the room like water pressurized at the bottom of the ocean.

Harry couldn’t breathe.

Lose. Now.

“I didn’t know,” Harry whispered. “I’m s-”

“No,” said Severus. Just that one word.

Harry stood there in silence, his mind frantically searching for options. Severus stood between him and the window, which was a real pity, because a fall from that height wouldn’t kill a wizard.

“Your books betrayed you, Potter,” said Severus, still in that voice stretched tight by a million tons of pull. “They did not tell you the one thing you needed to know. You cannot learn from stories what it is like to lose the one you love. That is something you could never understand without feeling it yourself.”

“My father,” Harry whispered. It was his best guess, the one thing that might save him. “My father tried to protect you from the bullies.”

A ghastly smile stretched across Severus’s face, and the man moved toward Harry.

And past him.

“Goodbye, Potter,” said Severus, not looking back on his way out. “We shall have little to say to each other from today on.”

And at the corner, the man stopped, and without turning, spoke one final time.

“Your father was the bully,” said Severus Snape, “and what your mother saw in him was something I never did understand until this day.”

He left.

Harry turned and walked toward the window. His shaking hands went onto the ledge.

Never give anyone wise advice unless you know exactly what you’re both talking about. Got it.

Harry stared out at the clouds and the light drizzle for a while. The window looked out on the east grounds, and it was afternoon, so if the sun was visible through the clouds at all, Harry couldn’t see it.

His hands had stopped shaking, but there was a tight feeling in Harry’s chest, like it was being compressed by metal bands.

So his father had been a bully.

And his mother had been shallow.

Maybe they’d grown up later. Good people like Professor McGonagall did seem to think the world of them, and it might not be
only
because they were heroic martyrs.

Of course, that was scant consolation when you were eleven and about to turn into a teenager, and wondering what sort of teenager you might become.

So very terrible.

So very sad.

Such an awful life Harry led.

Learning that his genetic parents hadn’t been perfect, why, he ought to spend awhile moping about that, feeling sorry for himself.

Maybe he could complain to Lesath Lestrange.

Harry had read about Dementors. Cold and darkness surrounded them, and fear, they sucked away all your happy thoughts and in that absence all your worst memories rose to the surface.

He could imagine himself in Lesath’s shoes, knowing that his parents were in Azkaban for life, that place from which no one had ever escaped.

And Lesath would be imagining himself in his mother’s place, in the cold and the darkness and the fear, alone with all of her worst memories, even in her dreams, every second of every day.

For an instant Harry imagined his own Mum and Dad in Azkaban with the Dementors sucking out their life, draining away the happy memories of their love for him. Just for an instant, before his imagination blew a fuse and called an emergency shutdown and told him never to imagine that again.

Was it right to do that to anyone, even the second most evil person in the world?

No,
said the wisdom of Harry’s books,
not if there’s any other way, any other way at all.

And unless the wizarding justice system was as perfect as their prisons - and that sounded rather improbable, all things considered - somewhere in Azkaban was a person who was entirely innocent, and probably more than one.

There was a burning sensation in Harry’s throat, and moisture gathering in his eyes, and he wanted to teleport all of Azkaban’s prisoners to safety and call down fire from the sky and blast that terrible place down to bedrock. But he couldn’t, because he wasn’t God.

And Harry remembered what Professor Quirrell had said beneath the starlight:
Sometimes, when this flawed world seems unusually hateful, I wonder whether there might be some other place, far away, where I should have been… But the stars are so very, very far away… And I wonder what I would dream about, if I slept for a long, long time.

Right now this flawed world seemed unusually hateful.

And Harry couldn’t understand Professor Quirrell’s words, it might have been an alien that had spoken, or an Artificial Intelligence, something built along such different lines from Harry that his brain couldn’t be forced to operate in that mode.

You couldn’t leave your home planet while it still contained a place like Azkaban.

You had to stay and fight.

Whatever can go Rowling will go Rowling.

This should
again
go
without saying,
but views expressed by Severus Snape are not necessarily those of the author.

“Okay,” Harry said, swallowing. “Okay, Hermione, it’s enough, you can stop.”

The white sugar pill in front of Hermione still hadn’t changed shape or color at all, even though she was concentrating harder than Harry had ever seen, her eyes squeezed shut, beads of sweat on her forehead, hand trembling as it gripped the wand -

“Hermione,
stop!
It’s not going to work, Hermione, I don’t think we can make things that don’t exist yet!”

Slowly, Hermione’s hand relaxed its grasp on the wand.

“I thought I felt it,” she said in a bare whisper. “I thought I felt it start to Transfigure, just for a second.”

There was a lump in Harry’s throat. “You were probably imagining it. Hoping too hard.”

“I probably was,” she said. She looked like she wanted to cry.

Slowly, Harry took his mechanical pencil in his hand, and reached over to the sheet of paper with all the items crossed out, and drew a line through the item that said ‘ALZHEIMER’S CURE’.

They couldn’t have fed anyone a Transfigured pill. But Transfiguration, at least the kind they could do, didn’t enchant the targets - it wouldn’t Transfigure a regular broomstick into a flying one. So if Hermione had been able to make a pill at all, it would have been a
nonmagical
pill, one that worked for ordinary material reasons. They could have secretly made pills for a Muggle science lab, let them
study
the pills and try to reverse-engineer them before the Transfiguration wore off… no one in either world would need to know that magic had been involved, it would just be another scientific breakthrough…

It hadn’t been the sort of thing a wizard would think of, either. They didn’t respect mere
patterns of atoms
that much, they didn’t think of unenchanted
material
things as objects of power. If it wasn’t magical, it wasn’t interesting.

Earlier, Harry had
very
secretly - he hadn’t even told Hermione - tried to Transfigure nanotechnology a la Eric Drexler. (He’d tried to produce a desktop nanofactory, of course, not tiny self-replicating assemblers, Harry wasn’t insane.) It would have been godhood in a single shot if it’d worked.

“That was it for today, right?” said Hermione. She was slumped back in her chair, leaning her head against the back; and her face showed her tiredness, which was very unusual for Hermione. She liked to pretend she was limitless, at least when Harry was around.

“One more,” Harry said cautiously, “but that one’s small, plus it might actually work. I saved it for last because I was hoping we could end on an up note. It’s real stuff, not like phasers. They’ve already made it in the laboratory, not like the Alzheimer’s cure. And it’s a generic substance, not specific like the lost books you tried to Transfigure copies of. I made a diagram of the molecular structure to show you. We just want to make it
longer
than it’s ever been made before, and with all the tubes aligned, and the endpoints embedded in diamond.” Harry produced a sheet of graph paper.

Hermione sat back up, took it, and studied it, frowning. “These are
all
carbon atoms? And Harry, what’s the name? I can’t Transfigure it if I don’t know what it’s called.”

Harry made a disgusted face. He was still having trouble getting used to that sort of thing, it shouldn’t matter what something was
named
if you knew what it
was.
“They’re called buckytubes, or carbon nanotubes. It’s a kind of fullerene that was discovered just this year. It’s about a hundred times stronger than steel and a sixth of the weight.”

Hermione looked up from the graph paper, her face surprised. “That’s
real?
”

“Yeah,” Harry said, “just hard to make the Muggle way. If we could get enough of the stuff, we could use it to build a space elevator all the way up to geosynchronous orbit or higher, and in terms of delta-v that’s halfway to anywhere in the Solar System. Plus we could throw out solar power satellites like confetti.”

Hermione was frowning again. “Is this stuff
safe?
”

“I don’t see why it wouldn’t be,” Harry said. “A buckytube is just a graphite sheet wrapped into a circular tube, basically, and graphite is the same stuff used in pencils -”

“I
know
what graphite is, Harry,” Hermione said. She brushed her hair back absentmindedly, her eyebrows furrowed as she stared at the sheet of paper.

Harry reached into a pocket of his robes, and produced a white thread tied to two small gray plastic rings at either end. He’d added drops of superglue where the thread met either ring, to make it all a single object that could be Transfigured as a whole. Cyanoacrylate, if Harry remembered correctly, worked by covalent bonds, and that was as close to being a “solid object” as you ever got in a world ultimately composed of tiny individual atoms. “When you’re ready,” Harry said, “try to Transfigure this into a set of aligned buckytube fibers embedded in two solid diamond rings.”

“All right…” Hermione said slowly. “Harry, I feel like I just missed something.”

Harry shrugged helplessly.
Maybe you’re just tired.
He knew better than to say it out loud, though.

Hermione laid her wand against one plastic ring, and stared for a while.

Two small circles of glittering diamond lay on the table, connected by a long black thread.

“It changed,” said Hermione. She sounded like she was trying to be enthusiastic but had run out of energy. “Now what?”

Harry felt a bit deflated by his research partner’s lack of passion, but did his best not to show it; maybe the same process would work in reverse to cheer her up. “Now I test it to see if it holds weight.”

There was an A-frame Harry had rigged up to do an earlier experiment with diamond rods - you could make solid diamond objects easily, using Transfiguration, they just wouldn’t last. The earlier experiment had measured whether Transfiguring a long diamond rod into a shorter diamond rod would allow it to lift a suspended heavy weight as it contracted, i.e., could you Transfigure against tension, which you in fact could.

Harry carefully looped one circle of glittering diamond over the thick metal hook at the top of the rig, then attached a thick metal hanger to the bottom ring, and then started attaching weights to the hanger.

(Harry had asked the Weasley twins to Transfigure the apparatus for him, and the Weasley twins had given him an incredulous look, like they couldn’t figure out what sort of prank he could
possibly
want that for, but they hadn’t asked any questions. And their Transfigurations, according to them, lasted for around three hours, so Harry and Hermione still had a while left.)

“One hundred kilograms,” Harry said about a minute later. “I don’t think a steel thread this thin would hold that. It should go up much higher, but that’s all the weight I’ve got.”

There was a further silence.

Harry straightened up, and went back to their table, and sat down in his chair, and ceremoniously made a check mark next to ‘Buckytubes’. “There,” Harry said. “
That
one worked.”

“But it’s not really
useful
, Harry, is it?” Hermione said from where she was sitting with her head resting in her hands. “I mean, even if we gave it to a scientist they couldn’t learn how to make lots of buckytubes from studying ours.”

“They might be able to learn
something,
” Harry said. “Hermione,
look
at it, that little tiny thread holding up all that weight, we just made something that no Muggle laboratory could make -”

“But any other witch could make it,” Hermione said. Her exhaustion was coming into her voice, now. “Harry, I don’t think this is working out.”

“You mean our relationship?” Harry said. “Great! Let’s break up.”

That got a slight grin out of her. “I mean our research.”

“Oh, Hermione, how
could
you?”

“You’re sweet when you’re mean,” she said. “But Harry, this is nuts, I’m twelve, you’re eleven, it’s
silly
to think we’re going to discover anything that no one’s ever figured out before.”

“Are you really saying we should give up on unraveling the secrets of magic after trying for less than one
month?
” Harry said, trying to put a note of challenge into his voice. Honestly he was feeling some of the same fatigue as Hermione. None of the
good
ideas ever worked. He’d made just one discovery worth mentioning, the Mendelian pattern, and he couldn’t tell Hermione about it without breaking his promise to Draco.

“No,” Hermione said. Her young face was looking very serious and adult. “I’m saying right now we should be
studying
all the magic that wizards already know, so we can do this sort of thing after we graduate from Hogwarts.”

“Um…” Harry said. “Hermione, I hate to put it this way, but imagine we’d decided to hold off on research until later, and the first thing we tried after we graduated was Transfiguring an Alzheimer’s cure, and it
worked.
We’d feel… I don’t think the word
stupid
would adequately describe how we’d feel. What if there’s something else like that and it does work?”

“That’s not
fair,
Harry!” Hermione said. Her voice was trembling like she was on the verge of breaking out crying. “You can’t
put
that on people! It’s not our
job
to do that sort of thing, we’re
kids!
”

For a moment Harry wondered what would happen if someone told Hermione she had to fight an immortal Dark Lord, if she would turn into one of the whiny self-pitying heroes that Harry could never stand reading about in his books.

“Anyway,” Hermione said. Her voice shook. “I don’t want to keep doing this. I don’t believe children can do things that grownups can’t, that’s only in stories.”

There was silence in the classroom.

Hermione started to look a little scared, and Harry knew that his own expression had gotten colder.

It might not have hurt so much if the same thought hadn’t already come to Harry - that, while thirty might be old for a scientific revolutionary and twenty about right, while there were people who got doctorates when they were seventeen and fourteen-year-old heirs who’d been great kings or generals, there wasn’t really anyone who’d made the history books at eleven.

“All right,” Harry said. “Figure out how to do something a grownup can’t. Is that your challenge?”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Hermione said, her voice coming out in a frightened whisper.

With an effort, Harry wrenched his gaze away from Hermione. “I’m not angry at
you
,” Harry said. His voice was cold, despite his best efforts. “I’m angry at, I don’t know, everything. But I’m not willing to lose, Hermione. Losing isn’t always the right thing to do. I’ll figure out how to do something a grown wizard can’t do, and then I’ll get back to you. How’s that?”

There was more silence.

“Okay,” said Hermione, her voice wavering a little. She pushed herself up out of her chair, and went over to the door of the abandoned classroom they’d been working in. Her hand went onto the doorknob. “We’re still friends, right? And if you can’t figure out anything -”

Her voice halted.

“Then we’ll study together,” Harry said. His voice was even colder now.

“Um, bye for now, then,” Hermione said, and she quickly went out of the room and shut the door behind her.

Sometimes Harry hated having a dark side, even when he was inside it.

And the part of him that had thought exactly the same thing as Hermione, that no, children
couldn’t
do what grownups couldn’t, was saying all the things that Hermione had been too frightened to say, like,
That’s one hell of a difficult challenge you just grabbed for yourself
and
boy are you going to end up with egg on your face this time
and
at least this way you’ll know you’ve failed.

And the part of him that didn’t enjoy losing replied, in a very cold voice,
Fine, you can shut up and watch.

It was almost lunchtime, and Harry didn’t care. He hadn’t even bothered grabbing a snack bar from his pouch. His stomach could stand a little starving.

The wizarding world was tiny, they didn’t think like scientists, they didn’t know science, they didn’t question what they’d grown up with, they hadn’t put protective shells on their time machines, they played Quidditch, all of magical Britain was smaller than a small Muggle city, the greatest wizarding school only educated up to the age of seventeen,
silly
wasn’t challenging that at eleven,
silly
was
assuming
wizards knew what they were doing and had already exhausted all the low-hanging fruit a scientific polymath would see.

Step One had been to make a list of every magical constraint Harry could remember, all the things you supposedly couldn’t do.

Step Two, mark the constraints that seemed to make the
least
sense from a scientific perspective.

Step Three, prioritize constraints that a wizard would be unlikely to question if they
didn’t
know science.

Step Four, come up with avenues for attacking them.

Hermione still felt a little shaky as she sat down next to Mandy at the Ravenclaw table. Hermione’s lunch had two fruits (tomato slices and peeled tangerines), three vegetables (carrots, carrots, and more carrots), one meat (fried Diricawl drumsticks whose unhealthy coating she would carefully remove), and one little piece of chocolate cake that she would earn by eating the other parts.

It hadn’t been as bad as Potions class, sometimes she still had
nightmares
about that. But this time
she
had made it happen and
she’d felt like its target.
Just for a moment, before the terrible cold darkness looked away and said it wasn’t angry with her, because it hadn’t wanted to scare her.

And she still had that feeling like she’d missed something earlier, something really important.