Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (72 page)

Dumbledore stared at Harry for a moment, and then gave a slow nod. “Yes…” said the Headmaster. “And I do believe I know what it might be a distraction
from
, if Professor Quirrell means ill… thank you, Harry.”

The Headmaster was still staring at Harry, a strange look in those ancient eyes.

“
What?
” said Harry with a tinge of annoyance, the cold still lingering in his blood.

“I have another question for that young man,” said the Headmaster. “It is something I have long wondered to myself, yet been unable to comprehend.
Why?
” There was a tinge of pain in his voice. “Why would anyone deliberately make himself a monster? Why do evil for the sake of evil? Why Voldemort?”

Whirr, bzzzt, tick; ding, puff, splat…

Harry stared at the Headmaster in surprise.

“How would
I
know?” said Harry. “Am I supposed to magically understand the Dark Lord because I’m the hero, or something?”

“
Yes!
” said Dumbledore. “My own great foe was Grindelwald, and
him
I understood very well indeed. Grindelwald was my dark mirror, the man I could so easily have been, had I given in to the temptation to believe that I was a good person, and therefore always in the right.
For the greater good
, that was his slogan; and he truly believed it himself, even as he tore at all Europe like a wounded animal. And him, I defeated in the end. But then after him came Voldemort, to destroy everything I had protected in Britain.” The hurt was plain now in Dumbledore’s voice, exposed upon his face. “He committed acts worse by far than Grindelwald’s worst, horror for the sake of horror. I sacrificed everything only to hold him back, and I still don’t understand
why!
Why
, Harry? Why did he do it? He was never my destined foe, but yours, so if you have any guesses at all, Harry, please tell me!
Why?
”

Harry stared down at his hands. The truth was that Harry hadn’t read up on the Dark Lord yet, and right now he hadn’t the tiniest clue. And somehow that didn’t seem like an answer the Headmaster wanted to hear. “Too many Dark rituals, maybe? In the beginning he thought he’d do just one, but it sacrificed part of his good side, and that made him less reluctant to perform other Dark rituals, so he did more and more rituals in a positive feedback cycle until he ended up as a tremendously powerful monster -”

“No!” Now the Headmaster’s voice was agonized. “I can’t believe that, Harry! There has to be something more to it than just that!”

Why should there be?
thought Harry, but he didn’t say it, because it was clear that the Headmaster thought the universe was a story and had a plot, and that huge tragedies weren’t allowed to happen except for equally huge, significant reasons. “I’m sorry, Headmaster. The Dark Lord doesn’t seem like much of a dark mirror to me, not at all. There isn’t anything I find even the
tiniest
bit tempting about nailing the skins of Yermy Wibble’s family to a newsroom wall.”

“Have you
no
wisdom to share?” said Dumbledore. There was pleading in the old wizard’s voice, almost begging.

Evil happens,
thought Harry,
it doesn’t mean anything or teach us anything, except to not be evil? The Dark Lord was probably just a selfish bastard who didn’t care who he hurt, or an idiot who made stupidly avoidable mistakes that snowballed. There is no destiny behind the ills of this world; if Hitler had been allowed into architecture school like he wanted, the whole history of Europe would have been different; if we lived in the sort of universe where horrible things were only allowed to happen for good reasons, they just wouldn’t happen in the first place.

And none of that, obviously, was what the Headmaster wanted to hear.

The old wizard was still looking at Harry from over a fiddly thing like a frozen puff of smoke, a painful desperation in those ancient, waiting eyes.

Well, sounding wise wasn’t difficult. It was a lot easier than being intelligent, actually, since you didn’t have to say anything surprising or come up with any new insights. You just let your brain’s pattern-matching software complete the cliche, using whatever Deep Wisdom you’d stored previously.

“Headmaster,” Harry said solemnly, “I would rather not define myself by my enemies.”

Somehow, even in the midst of all the whirring and ticking, there was a kind of silence.

That had come out a bit more Deeply Wise than Harry had intended.

“You may be very wise, Harry…” the Headmaster said slowly. “I do wish… that I could have been defined by my friends.” The pain in his voice had grown deeper.

Harry’s mind searched hastily for something else Deeply Wise to say that would soften the unintended force of the blow -

“Or perhaps,” Harry said more softly, “it is the foe that makes the Gryffindor, as it is the friend that makes the Hufflepuff, and the ambition that makes the Slytherin. I do know that it is always, in every generation, the puzzle that makes the scientist.”

“It is a dreadful fate to which you condemn my House, Harry,” said the Headmaster. The pain was still in his voice. “For now that you remark on it, I do think that I was very much made by my enemies.”

Harry stared at his own hands, where they lay in his lap. Maybe he should just shut up while he was ahead.

“But you
have
answered my question,” said Dumbledore more softly, as though to himself. “I should have realized that would be a Slytherin’s key. For his ambition, all for the sake of his ambition; and
that
I know, though not
why
…” For a time Dumbledore stared off into nothingness; then he straightened, and his eyes seemed to focus on Harry again.

“And you, Harry,” said the Headmaster, “you name yourself a
scientist?
” His voice was laced with surprise and mild disapproval.

“You don’t like science?” said Harry a little wearily. He’d hoped Dumbledore would be fonder of Muggle things.

“I suppose it is useful to those without wands,” said Dumbledore, frowning. “But it seems a strange thing by which to define yourself. Is science as important as love? As kindness? As friendship? Is it science that makes you fond of Minerva McGonagall? Is it science that makes you care for Hermione Granger? Will it be science to which you turn, when you try to kindle warmth in Draco Malfoy’s heart?”

You know, the sad thing is, you probably think you just uttered some kind of incredibly wise knockdown argument.

Now, how to phrase the rejoinder in such fashion that it also sounded incredibly wise…

“You are not Ravenclaw,” Harry said with calm dignity, “and so it might not have occurred to you that to respect the truth, and seek it all the days of your life, could also be an act of grace.”

The Headmaster’s eyebrows rose up. And then he sighed. “How did you become so wise, so young…?” The old wizard sounded sad, as he said it. “Perhaps it will prove valuable to you.”

Only for impressing ancient wizards who are overly impressed with themselves,
thought Harry. He was actually a bit disappointed by Dumbledore’s credulity; it wasn’t that Harry had
lied
, but Dumbledore seemed far too impressed with Harry’s ability to phrase things so that they sounded profound, instead of putting them into plain English like Richard Feynman had done with
his
wisdom…

“Love is more important than wisdom,” said Harry, just to test the limits of Dumbledore’s tolerance for blindingly obvious cliches completed by sheer pattern matching without any sort of detailed analysis.

The Headmaster nodded gravely, and said, “Indeed.”

Harry stood up out of the chair, and stretched his arms.
Well, I’d better go off and love something, then, that’s bound to help me defeat the Dark Lord. And next time you ask me for advice, I’ll just give you a hug -

“This day you have helped me much, Harry,” said the Headmaster. “And so there is one last thing I would ask that young man.”

Great.

“Tell me, Harry,” said the Headmaster (and now his voice sounded simply puzzled, though there was still a hint of pain in his eyes), “why do Dark Wizards fear death so greatly?”

“Er,” said Harry, “sorry, I’ve got to back the Dark Wizards on that one.”

Whoosh, hiss, chime; glorp, pop, bubble -

“
What?
” said Dumbledore.

“Death is bad,” said Harry, discarding wisdom for the sake of clear communication. “Very bad. Extremely bad. Being scared of death is like being scared of a great big monster with poisonous fangs. It actually makes a great deal of sense, and does not, in fact, indicate that you have a psychological problem.”

The Headmaster was staring at him as though he’d just turned into a cat.

“Okay,” said Harry, “let me put it this way. Do you
want
to die? Because if so, there’s this Muggle thing called a suicide prevention hotline -”

“When it is time,” the old wizard said quietly. “Not before. I would never seek to hasten the day, nor seek to refuse it when it comes.”

Harry was frowning sternly. “That doesn’t sound like you have a very strong will to live, Headmaster!”

“Harry…” The old wizard’s voice was starting to sound a little helpless; and he had paced to a spot where his silver beard, unnoticed, had drifted into a crystalline glass goldfish bowl, and was slowly taking on a greenish tinge that crept up the hairs. “I think I may have not made myself clear. Dark Wizards are not eager to live. They
fear death.
They do not reach up toward the sun’s light, but flee the coming of night into infinitely darker caverns of their own making, without moon or stars. It is not life they desire, but
immortality;
and they are so driven to grasp at it that they will sacrifice their very souls! Do you want to live
forever
, Harry?”

“Yes, and so do you,” said Harry. “I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers. If you don’t want to die, it means you want to live forever. If you don’t want to live forever, it means you want to die. You’ve got to do one or the other… I’m not getting through here, am I.”

The two cultures stared at each other across a vast gap of incommensurability.

“I have lived a hundred and ten years,” the old wizard said quietly (taking his beard out of the bowl, and jiggling it to shake out the color). “I have seen and done a great many things, too many of which I wish I had never seen or done. And yet I do not regret being alive, for watching my students grow is a joy that has not begun to wear on me. But I would not wish to live so long that it does! What would you
do
with eternity, Harry?”

Harry took a deep breath. “Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild’s tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild’s hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we’ve explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I’m a lot more hopeful now that I’ve discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines.”

“I did not understand much of that,” said Dumbledore. “But I must ask if these are things that you truly desire so desperately, or if you only imagine them so as to imagine not being tired, as you run and run from death.”

“Life is not a finite list of things that you check off before you’re allowed to die,” Harry said firmly. “It’s life, you just go on living it. If I’m not doing those things it’ll be because I’ve found something better.”

Dumbledore sighed. His fingers drummed on a clock; as they touched it, the numerals changed to an indecipherable script, and the hands briefly appeared in different positions. “In the unlikely event that I am permitted to tarry until a hundred and fifty,” said the old wizard, “I do not think I would mind. But two hundred years would be entirely too much of a good thing.”

“Yes, well,” Harry said, his voice a little dry as he thought of his Mum and Dad and
their
allotted span if Harry didn’t do something about it, “I suspect, Headmaster, that if you came from a culture where people were accustomed to living four hundred years, that dying at two hundred would seem just as tragically premature as dying at, say,
eighty
.” Harry’s voice went hard, on that last word.

“Perhaps,” the old wizard said peacefully. “I would not wish to die before my friends, nor live on after they had all gone. The hardest time is when those you loved the most have gone on before you, and yet others still live, for whose sake you must stay…” Dumbledore’s eyes were fixed on Harry, and growing sad. “Do not mourn me too greatly, Harry, when my time comes; I will be with those I have long missed, on our next great adventure.”

“Oh!” Harry said in sudden realization. “You believe in an
afterlife
. I got the impression wizards didn’t have religion?”

Toot. Beep. Thud.

“
How can you not believe it?
” said the Headmaster, looking completely flabbergasted. ”
Harry, you’re a wizard! You’ve seen ghosts!
”

“Ghosts,” Harry said, his voice flat. “You mean those things like portraits, stored memories and behaviors with no awareness or life, accidentally impressed into the surrounding material by the burst of magic that accompanies the violent death of a wizard -”

“I’ve heard that theory,” said the Headmaster, his voice growing sharp, “repeated by wizards who mistake cynicism for wisdom, who think that to look down upon others is to elevate themselves. It is one of the silliest ideas I have heard in a hundred and ten years!
Yes,
ghosts do not learn or grow, because this is
not where they belong!
Souls are meant to move on, there is no life remaining for them
here!
And if not ghosts, then what of the Veil? What of the Resurrection Stone?”