Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (85 page)

Harry raised his wand then, and Draco turned, and looked away, as he had promised; looked toward the stone floor and stone wall in which the door was set. For Draco had promised not to look, and not to tell anyone of what Harry had said, or anything at all of what happened here this night, though he didn’t know why it was to be so secret.

“I have a dream,” said Harry’s voice, “that one day sentient beings will be judged by the patterns of their minds, and not their color or their shape or the stuff they’re made of, or who their parents were. Because if we can get along with crystal things someday, how silly would it be not to get along with Muggleborns, who are shaped like us, and think like us, as alike to us as peas in a pod? The crystal things wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference. How impossible is it to imagine that the hatred poisoning Slytherin House would be worth taking with us to the stars? Every life is precious, everything that thinks and knows itself and doesn’t want to die. Lily Potter’s life was precious, and Narcissa Malfoy’s life was precious, even though it’s too late for them now, it was sad when they died. But there are other lives that are still alive to be fought for. Your life, and my life, and Hermione Granger’s life, all the lives of Earth, and all the lives beyond, to be defended and protected,
EXPECTO PATRONUM!
”

And there was light.

Everything turned to silver in that light, the stone floor, the stone wall, the door, the railings, so dazzling just in the reflection that you could hardly even see them, even the air seemed to shine, and the light grew brighter, and brighter, and brighter -

When the light ended it was like a shock, Draco’s hand went automatically to his robe to bring out a handkerchief, and it was only then that he realized he was crying.

“There is your experimental result,” Harry’s voice said quietly. “I really did mean it, that thought.”

Draco slowly turned toward Harry, who had lowered his wand now.

“That, that’s got to be a trick, right?” Draco said. He couldn’t take many more of these shocks. “Your Patronus - can’t
really
be that bright -” And yet it
had
been Patronus light, once you knew what you were looking at, you couldn’t mistake it for anything else.

“That was the
true
form of the Patronus Charm,” Harry said. “Something that lets you put all your strength into the Patronus, without hindrance from within yourself. And before you ask, I did not learn it from Dumbledore. He does not know the secret, and could not cast the true form if he did. I solved the puzzle for myself. And I knew, once I understood, that this spell must not be spoken of. For your sake, I undertook your test; but you must not speak of it, Draco.”

Draco didn’t know any more, he didn’t know where the true strength lay, or the right of things. Double vision, double vision. Draco wanted to call Harry’s ideals weakness, Hufflepuff foolishness, the sort of lie that rulers told to placate the populace and that Harry had been silly enough to believe for himself, foolishness taken seriously and raised up to insane heights, projected out onto the stars themselves -

Something beautiful and hidden, mysterious and bright -

“Will I,” whispered Draco, “be able to cast a Patronus like that, someday?”

“If you always keep seeking the truth,” Harry said, “and if you don’t refuse the warm thoughts when you find them, then I’m sure you will. I think a person could get anywhere if they just kept going long enough, even to the stars.”

Draco wiped his eyes with his handkerchief again.

“We should go back inside,” Draco said in an unsteady voice, “someone could’ve seen it, all that light -”

Harry nodded, and moved to and through the door; and Draco looked up at the night sky one last time before he followed.

Who
was
the Boy-Who-Lived, that he was already an Occlumens, and could cast the true form of the Patronus Charm, and do other strange things? What was Harry’s Patronus, why must it stay unseen?

Draco didn’t ask any of those questions, because Harry might have
answered
, and Draco just couldn’t take any more shocks today. He just
couldn’t
. One more shock and his head was going to just fall right off his shoulders and go bounce, bounce, bounce down the corridors of Hogwarts.

They’d ducked into a small alcove, instead of going all the way back to the classroom, at Draco’s request; he was feeling too nervous to put it off any longer.

Draco put up a Quieting barrier, and then looked at Harry in silent question.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Harry said. “I’ll do it, but there are five conditions -”

“
Five?
”

“Yes, five. Look, Draco, a pledge like this is just
begging
to go terribly wrong somehow, you
know
it would go wrong if this were a play -”

“Well, it’s not!” Draco said. “Dumbledore killed Mother. He’s evil. It’s one of those things you talk about that
doesn’t
have to be complicated.”

“Draco,” Harry said, his voice careful, “all I
know
is that
you
say that
Lucius
says that
Dumbledore
says he killed Narcissa. To believe that unquestioningly, I have to trust you
and
Lucius
and
Dumbledore. So like I said, there are conditions. The first one is that at any point
you
can release me from the pledge, if it no longer seems like a good idea. It has to be a deliberate and intended decision on your part, of course, not a trick of wording or something.”

“Okay,” said Draco. That sounded safe enough.

“Condition two is that I’m pledging to take as an enemy whoever actually did kill Narcissa, as determined to the honest best of my ability as a rationalist. Whether that’s Dumbledore, or someone else. And you have my word that I’ll exercise my best ability as a rationalist to keep that judgment honest, as a question of simple fact. Agreed?”

“I don’t like it,” said Draco. He didn’t, the whole point was to make sure Harry never went with Dumbledore. Still, if Harry
was
honest, he’d catch on to Dumbledore soon enough; and if dishonest, he’d already broken his word… “But I’ll agree.”

“Condition three is that Narcissa has to have been
burned alive
. If that part of the story turns out to be something exaggerated just to make it sound a little worse, then I get to decide for myself whether or not to still go through with the pledge. Good people sometimes have to kill. But they don’t ever torture people to death. It’s because Narcissa was
burned alive
that I know whoever did that was evil.”

Draco kept his temper, barely.

“Condition four is that if Narcissa got her own hands dirty, and, say,
Crucioed
someone’s child into insanity, and that person burned Narcissa for revenge, the deal might be off again. Because then it was still wrong for them to burn her, they still should’ve just killed her without pain; but it wasn’t
evil
the same way as if she was just Lucius’s love who never did anything herself, like you said. Condition five is that if whoever killed Narcissa was tricked somehow into doing it, then my enemy is whoever tricked them, not the person who was tricked.”

“All this
really
sounds like you’re planning to weasel out of it -”

“Draco, I won’t take a good person as an enemy, not for you or anyone. I have to really believe they’re in the wrong. But I’ve thought about it, and it seems to me that if Narcissa didn’t do any evil with her own hands, just fell in love with Lucius and chose to stay his wife, then whoever burned her alive in her own bedroom isn’t likely to be a good guy. And I’ll pledge to take as my enemy whoever made that happen, whether it’s Dumbledore or anyone else, unless you deliberately release me from that pledge. Hopefully
that
won’t go wrong the way it would if this were a play.”

“I’m not happy,” said Draco. “But okay. You pledge to take my mother’s murderer as your enemy, and I’ll -”

Harry waited, with a patient look on his face, while Draco tried to make his voice work again.

“I’ll help you fix the problem with Slytherin House hating Muggleborns,” Draco finished in a whisper. “And I’ll say it was sad that Lily Potter died.”

“So be it,” said Harry.

And it was done.

The break, Draco knew, had just widened a little more. No, not a little, a
lot.
There was a sensation of drifting away, of being lost, further and further from shore, further and further from home…

“Excuse me,” Draco said. He turned away from Harry, and then tried to calm himself, he had to do this test, and he didn’t want to fail it from being nervous or ashamed.

Draco raised his wand into the starting position for the Patronus Charm.

Remembered falling from his broomstick, the pain, the fear, imagined it coming from a tall figure in a cloak, looking like a dead thing left in water.

And then Draco closed his eyes, the better to remember Father holding his small, cold hands in his own warm strength.

Don’t be frightened, my son, I’m here…

The wand swung up in a broad brandish, to drive the fear away, and Draco was surprised at the strength of it; and he remembered in that moment that
Father
wasn’t lost, would never be lost, would always be there and strong in his own person, no matter what happened to Draco, and his voice cried,
“Expecto Patronum!”

Draco opened his eyes.

A shining snake looked back at him, no less bright than before.

Behind him, he heard
Harry
exhale a breath, as though in relief.

Draco gazed into the white light. It seemed he wasn’t lost completely, after all.

“That reminds me,” said Harry after a while. “Can we test my hypothesis about how to use a Patronus to send messages?”

“Is it going to surprise me?” said Draco. “I don’t want any more surprises today.”

Harry had claimed that the idea wasn’t all that strange and he didn’t see how it could possibly shock Draco in any way, which made Draco feel even more nervous, somehow; but Draco could see how important it was to have a way of sending messages in emergencies.

The trick - or so Harry hypothesized - was wanting to spread the good news, wanting the recipient to know the truth of whatever happy thought you’d used to cast the Patronus Charm. Only instead of telling the recipient in words, the Patronus itself was the message. By wanting them to see that, the Patronus would go to them.

“Tell Harry,” said Draco to the luminous snake, even though Harry was standing only a few paces away on the other side of the room, “to, um, beware the green monkey,” this being a sign from a play Draco had once seen.

And then, just like at King’s Cross station, Draco wanted Harry to know that Father had always cared for him; only this time he didn’t try to say it in words, but wanted to say it with the happy thought itself.

The bright snake slithered across the room, looking more like it was slithering through the air rather than the stone itself; it got to Harry after traveling that short distance -

- and said to Harry, in a strange voice that Draco recognized as how he himself probably sounded to other people, “Beware the green monkey.”

“
Hsssss ssss sshsshssss,
” said Harry.

The snake slithered back across the floor to Draco.

“Harry says the message is received and acknowledged,” said the shining Blue Krait in Draco’s voice.

“Huh,” Harry said. “Talking to Patronuses feels odd.”

…

…

…

…

“Why are you looking at me like that?” said the Heir of Slytherin.

Aftermath:

Harry stared at Draco.

“You mean just
magical
snakes, right?”

“N-no,” said Draco. He was looking rather pale, and was still stammering, but had at least stopped the incoherent noises he’d been making earlier. “You’re a Parselmouth, you can speak Parseltongue, it’s the language of all snakes everywhere. You can understand any snake when it talks, and they can understand when you talk to them… Harry, you can’t
possibly
believe you were Sorted into Ravenclaw!
You’re the Heir of Slytherin!
”

…

…

…

…

…

“SNAKES ARE SENTIENT?”

It was Saturday, the first morning of February, and at the Ravenclaw table, a boy bearing a breakfast plate heaped high with vegetables was nervously inspecting his servings for the slightest trace of meat.

It
might
have been an overreaction. After he’d gotten over the raw shock, Harry’s common sense had woken up and hypothesized that “Parseltongue” was probably just a linguistic user interface for controlling snakes…

…after all, snakes couldn’t
really
be human-level intelligent,
someone
would have noticed by now. The smallest-brained creatures Harry had ever heard of with anything like linguistic ability were the African grey parrots taught by Irene Pepperberg. And that was unstructured protolanguage, in a species that played complex games of adultery and needed to model other parrots. While according to what Draco had been able to remember, snakes spoke to Parselmouths in what sounded like normal human language - i.e., full-blown recursive syntactical grammar. That had taken
time
for hominids to evolve, with huge brains and strong social selection pressures. Snakes didn’t have much society at all that Harry had ever heard. And with thousands upon thousands of different species of snakes all over the world, how could they all use the
same
version of their supposed language, “Parseltongue”?

Of course that was all merely common sense, in which Harry was starting to lose faith entirely.

But Harry was sure he’d heard snakes hissing on the TV at some point - after all, he knew what that sounded like from
somewhere
- and
that
hadn’t sounded to him like language, which had seemed a good deal more reassuring…

…at first. The problem was that Draco had also asserted that Parselmouths could send snakes on extended complex missions. And if that was true, then Parselmouths had to
make snakes persistently intelligent
by talking to them. In the worst-case scenario that would make the snake self-aware, like what Harry had accidentally done to the Sorting Hat.

And when Harry had offered
that
hypothesis, Draco had claimed that he could remember a story - Harry hoped to Cthulhu that
this one
story was just a fairy tale, it had that ring to it, but there
was
a story - about Salazar Slytherin sending a brave young viper on a mission to
gather information from other snakes.

If any snake a Parselmouth had talked to, could make
other
snakes self-aware by talking to
them,
then…

Then…

Harry didn’t even know why his mind was going all “then… then…” when he knew perfectly well how the exponential progression would work, it was just the sheer moral horror of it that was blowing his mind.

And what if someone had invented a spell like that to talk to cows?

What if there were Poultrymouths?

Or for that matter…

Harry froze in sudden realization just as the forkful of carrots was about to enter his mouth.

That couldn’t, couldn’t possibly be true, surely no wizard would be stupid enough to do THAT…

And Harry knew, with a dreadful sinking feeling, that
of course
they would be that stupid. Salazar Slytherin had probably never considered the moral implications of snake intelligence for even one second, just like it hadn’t ever occurred to Salazar that
Muggleborns
were intelligent enough to deserve personhood rights. Most people just didn’t see moral issues at all unless someone else was pointing them out…

“Harry?” said Terry from beside him, sounding like he was afraid he would regret asking. “Why are you staring at your fork like that?”

“I’m starting to think magic should be illegal,” said Harry. “By the way, have you ever heard any stories about wizards who could speak with plants?”

Terry hadn’t heard of anything like that.

Neither had any seventh-year Ravenclaws that Harry had asked.

And now Harry had returned to his place, but not yet sat down again, staring at his plate of vegetables with a forlorn expression. He was getting hungrier, and later in the day he would be visiting Mary’s Place for one of their incredibly tasty dishes… Harry was finding himself sorely tempted to just revert back to yesterday’s eating habits and be done with it.

You’ve got to eat something,
said his inner Slytherin.
And it’s not all that much
more
likely that anyone sneezed self-awareness onto poultry than onto plants, so as long as you’re eating food of questionable sentience either way, why not eat the delicious deep-fried Diracawl slices?

I’m not quite sure that’s valid utilitarian logic, there -

Oh, you want utilitarian logic? One serving of utilitarian logic coming up: Even in the unlikely chance that some moron
did
manage to confer sentience on chickens, it’s
your
research that stands the best chance of discovering the fact and doing something about it. If you can complete your work even slightly faster by
not
messing around with your diet, then, counterintuitive as it may seem, the
best
thing you can do to save the greatest number of possibly-sentient who-knows-whats is
not
wasting time on wild guesses about what might be intelligent. It’s not like the house elves haven’t prepared the food already, regardless of what you take onto your plate.

Harry considered this for a moment. It was a rather seductive line of reasoning -

Good!
said Slytherin.
I’m glad you see now that the most moral thing to do is to sacrifice the lives of sentient beings for your own convenience, to feed your dreadful appetites, for the sick pleasure of ripping them apart with your teeth -

What?
Harry thought indignantly.
Which side are you
on
here?

His inner Slytherin’s mental voice was grim.
You too will someday embrace the doctrine… that the end justifies the meats.
This was followed by some mental snickering.

Ever since Harry had started worrying that plants might also be sentient, his non-Ravenclaw components had been having trouble taking his moral caution seriously. Hufflepuff was shouting
Cannibalism!
every time Harry tried to think about any food item whatsoever, and Gryffindor would visualize it screaming while he ate it, even if it was, say, a sandwich -

Cannibalism!

AIIIEEEE DON’T EAT ME -

Ignore the screams, eat it anyway! It’s a safe place to compromise your ethics in the service of higher goals, everyone
else
thinks it’s okay to eat sandwiches so you can’t use your usual rationalization about a small probability of a large downside if you get caught -

Harry gave a mental sigh, and thought,
Just so long as you’re okay with
us
being eaten by giant monsters that didn’t do enough research into whether
we
were sentient.

I’m okay with that,
said Slytherin.
Is everyone else okay with that?
(Internal mental nods.)
Great, can we go back to deep-fried Diracawl slices now?

Not until I’ve done some more research into what’s sentient and what isn’t. Now shut up.
And Harry turned firmly away from his plate full of oh-so-tempting vegetables to head toward the library -

Just eat the students,
said Hufflepuff.
There’s no doubt about whether
they’re
sentient.

You know you want to,
said Gryffindor.
I bet the young ones are the tastiest.

Harry was starting to wonder if the Dementor had somehow damaged their imaginary personalities.

“
Honestly
,” said Hermione. The young girl’s voice sounded a little acerbic as her gaze scanned the bookshelves of the Herbology stacks in the Hogwarts library. Harry had left her a message asking if she could come to the library after she’d finished breakfast, which Harry had skipped; but then when Harry had introduced the day’s topic she’d seemed a bit nonplussed. “You know your problem, Harry? You’ve got no sense of priorities. An idea gets into your head and you just go running straight off after it.”

“I’ve got a
great
sense of priorities,” said Harry. His hand reached out and grabbed
Vegetable Cunning
by Casey McNamara, and began to flip through the starting pages, searching for the table of contents. “That’s why I want to find out whether plants can talk
before
I eat my carrots.”

“Don’t you think that maybe the two of us have more
important
things to worry about?”

You sound just like Draco,
Harry thought, but of course didn’t say out loud. Out loud he said, “What could
possibly
be more important than plants turning out to be sentient?”

There was a pregnant silence from beside him, as Harry’s eyes went down the table of contents. There was indeed a chapter on Plant Language, causing Harry’s heart to skip a beat; and then his hands began to rapidly turn the pages, heading for the appropriate page number.

“There are days,” said Hermione Granger, “when I really, truly, have absolutely no idea what goes on inside that head of yours.”

“Look, it’s a question of multiplication, okay? There’s a
lot
of plants in the world, if they’re
not
sentient then they’re not important, but if plants
are
people then they’ve got more moral weight than all the human beings in the world put together. Now, of course your brain doesn’t realize that on an intuitive level, but that’s because the brain can’t multiply. Like if you ask three separate groups of Canadian households how much they’ll pay to save two thousand, twenty thousand, or two hundred thousand birds from dying in oil ponds, the three groups will respectively state that they’re willing to pay seventy-eight, eighty-eight, and eighty dollars. No difference, in other words. It’s called scope insensitivity. Your brain imagines a single bird struggling in an oil pond, and that image creates some amount of emotion that determines your willingness to pay. But no one can visualize even two thousand of anything, so the
quantity
just gets thrown straight out the window. Now try to
correct
that bias with respect to a
hundred trillion
sentient blades of grass, and you’ll realize that this could be thousands of times more important than we used to think the whole human species was… oh thank Azathoth, this says it’s just mandrakes that can talk and they speak regular human language out loud, not that there’s a spell you can use to talk with
any
plant -”

“Ron came to me at breakfast yesterday morning,” Hermione said. Now her voice sounded a little quiet, a little sad, maybe even a little scared. “He said he’d been dreadfully shocked to see me kiss you. That what you said while you were Demented should’ve shown me how much evil you were hiding inside. And that if I was going to be a follower of a Dark Wizard, then he wasn’t sure he wanted to be in my army anymore.”

Harry’s hands had stopped turning pages. It seemed that Harry’s brain, for all its abstract knowledge, was still incapable of appreciating scope on any real emotional level, because it had just forcibly redirected his attention away from trillions of possibly-sentient blades of grass who might be suffering or dying even as they spoke, and toward the life of a single human being who happened to be nearer and dearer.

“Ron is the world’s most gigantic prat,” Harry said. “They won’t be printing that in the newspaper anytime soon, because it’s not news. So after you fired him, how many of his arms and legs did you break?”

“I tried to tell him it wasn’t like that,” Hermione went on in the same quiet voice. “I tried to tell him
you
weren’t like that, and that it wasn’t like that between the two of us, but it just seemed to make him even more… more like he was.”

“Well, yes,” Harry said. He was surprised that he wasn’t feeling angrier at Captain Weasley, but his concern for Hermione seemed to be overriding that, for now. “The more you try to justify yourself to people like that, the more it acknowledges that they have the
right
to question you. It shows you think they get to be your inquisitor, and once you grant someone that sort of power over you, they just push more and more.” This was one of Draco Malfoy’s lessons which Harry had thought was actually pretty smart: people who
tried
to defend themselves got questioned over every little point and could never satisfy their interrogators; but if you made it clear from the start that you were a celebrity and above social conventions, people’s minds wouldn’t bother tracking most violations. “That’s why when Ron came over to
me
as I was sitting down at the Ravenclaw table, and told me to stay away from you, I held my hand out over the floor and said, ‘You see how high I’m holding my hand? Your intelligence has to be at least this high to talk to me.’ Then he accused me of, quote, sucking you into the darkness, unquote, so I pursed my lips and went
schluuuuurp
, and after that his mouth was still making those talking noises so I put up a Quieting Charm. I don’t think he’ll be trying his lectures on me again.”

“I understand why you did that,” Hermione said, her voice tight, “I
wanted
to tell him off too, but I really wish you hadn’t, it will make things harder for
me,
Harry!”

Harry looked up from
Vegetable Cunning
again, he wasn’t getting any reading done at this rate; and he saw that Hermione was still reading whatever book she had, not looking up at him. Her hands turned another page even as he watched.

“I think you’re taking the wrong approach by trying to defend yourself at all,” Harry said. “I really do think that. You are who you are. You’re friends with whoever you choose. Tell anyone who questions you to shove it.”

Hermione just shook her head, and turned another page.

“Option two,” Harry said. “Go to Fred and George and tell them to have a little talk with their wayward brother,
those
two are genuine good guys -”