Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (99 page)

And Harry took the broomstick and presented it to Bellatrix, saying simply, “Get on.”

He had decided to keep the memories. For one thing, they were important. For another, he and the Defense Professor had started planning this a week ago, and Harry wasn’t about to obliterate the whole last week,
or
explain to Bellatrix exactly what needed to be Obliviated. Harry could probably fool Veritaserum, and if Dumbledore insisted that Harry drop his Occlumency shields for a deeper examination… well, Harry had acted heroically throughout.

“
Sstop!
” said the snake. Its voice was stronger now. ”
Sstop, sstop, sstop! What do you mean, goodbye?
”

“
Esscape plan iss rissky,
” said Harry. ”
My life iss not at sstake, only yourss and herss. Sso I am sstaying, turning mysself in -
”

“
No!
” said the snake. The hiss was forceful. ”
Musst not! Not permitted!
”

Bellatrix mounted the broomstick; Harry could sense (but never see) her head turning to look at him, she said no word. Awaiting him, perhaps, or merely awaiting his orders.

“
No longer trusst you,
” Harry said simply. ”
Not ssince you tried to sslay the protector man.
”

And the snake hissed, “
I did not sseek to sslay the protector man! Are you fool, boy? Sslaying him would not make ssensse, evil or no!
”

The Earth ceased to turn on its axis, paused in its orbit around the Sun.

The snake’s hiss was now more furious than anything Harry had ever heard from the human Professor Quirrell. “
Sslay him? Had I ssought to sslay him he would have been dead within ssecondss, fool boy, he wass no match for me! I ssought to ssubdue, to dominate, force him to drop sshieldss upon hiss mind, needed to read him, to know who awaited hiss reply, learn detailss for memory sspell -”

“
You casst killing cursse!
”

“
Knew he would dodge!
”

“
Wass hiss life worth sso little? What if he did not dodge?
”

“
Would have pusshed him out of the way with own magic, fool boy!
”

Again the pause in the planet’s spin. Harry hadn’t thought of that.

“
Witlesss dunce of a plotter,
” hissed the snake, so angrily that the hisses seemed to overlap and slither over each other’s tails, ”
clever imbecile, cunning idiot, fool of an untrained Sslytherin, your missplaced misstrust hass ruined -”

“
Thiss iss not a fair time to argue,
” Harry observed mildly. The surge of relief trying to flood through him was canceled by the increased tension. ”
Ssince I cannot get angry at you properly, without opening mysself to life-eaterss. Musst russh, ssomeone may have heard noisse -”

“
Explain esscape plan,
” the snake said imperiously. ”
Sswiftly!
”

Harry explained. Parseltongue didn’t have words for the Muggle technology, but Harry described the function and Professor Quirrell seemed to understand.

There were a few short hisses, the snakish equivalent of a bark of surprised laughter, and then, snapped commands. “
Tell woman to look away, casst sspell of ssilence, sset guardian Charm outside door. Will transsform mysself, make few sswift improvementss to your invention, give woman emergency potion sso sshe can sshield uss, transsform back before you disspell Charm. Plan will be ssafer, then.
”

“
And am I to believe,
” Harry hissed,
“that healer for woman truly awaitss uss?
”

“
Usse ssensse, boy! Ssupposse I am evil. To end usse of you here iss obvioussly not what I planned. Misssion iss target of opportunity, invented after ssaw your guardian Charm, whole affair meant to be unnoticed, hid when left eating-place. Obvioussly you will ssee persson pretending to be healer on arrival! Go back to eating-place afterward, original plan carriess on undissturbed!
”

Harry stared at the invisible snake.

On the one hand, saying it like that made Harry feel rather dumb.

And on the other hand, it wasn’t exactly reassuring.

“
Sso,
” Harry hissed, ”
what iss your plan for me, precissely?
”

“
You ssaid no time,
” came the snake’s hiss, ”
but plan iss for you to rule country, obvioussly, even your young noble friend hass undersstood that by now, assk him on return if you wissh. Will ssay no more now, iss time to fly, not sspeak.
”

The old wizard reached out toward another metal door, from behind which came a endless dead mutter, “I’m not serious, I’m not serious, I’m not serious…” The red-golden phoenix on his shoulder was already screaming urgently, and the old wizard was already wincing, when -

Another cry pierced the corridor, phoenix-like but not the true phoenix’s call.

The wizard’s head turned, looked at the blazing silver creature on his other shoulder, even as ephemeral and substanceless talons launched the spell-entity into the air.

The false phoenix flew down the corridor.

The old wizard raced off after, legs churning like a spry young man of sixty.

The true phoenix screamed once, twice, and a third time, hovering before the metal door; and then, when it became clear that its master would not return for all its calling, flew reluctantly after.

Professor Quirrell had assumed his true form, this time - Polyjuice only lasted for an hour without redosing - and though the Defense Professor was pale, leaning against the metal bars of the nearest cell, his magic was strong enough to seize his wand without a word, even as Bellatrix doffed the Cloak and placed it obediently in Harry’s waiting hand. The sense of doom was building once more, though not in full force, as the Defense Professor’s power returned, the fringes of its vast force clashing with Harry’s slight childish aura.

Harry said aloud the description of his Muggle device, naming it to the observing wizard, and then a Finite from Harry turned all his hard work back into an ice cube. Professor Quirrell could not cast spells on something Harry had Transfigured, for that would be an interaction, however slight, between their magics, but -

Three seconds after, Professor Quirrell was holding his own Transfigured version of the Muggle device. A single barked word and a sweep of his wand, and the residue of glue was gone from the magical item; three more incantations later, the magical and technological were fused together as though into a single thing, and Charms of Unbreakability and flawless function had been cast upon the Muggle device.

(Harry felt a lot better about doing this under adult supervision.)

A potion was thrown to Bellatrix, and Professor Quirrell and Harry both commanded, “Drink,” as though speaking in the same voice. The emaciated woman had already been lifting it to her lips, without waiting; for it was evident to anyone that this snake Animagus was a servant of the Dark Lord, and a powerful and trusted one.

Harry finished pulling the hood of the Cloak of Invisibility over his head.

A brief and terrible magic lashed out from the Defense Professor’s wand, scouring the hole in the wall, scarring the huge chunk of metal that lay in the room’s midst; as Harry had requested, saying that the method he’d used might identify him.

“Left-hand glove,” Harry said to his pouch, and drew it forth, and put it on.

A gesture from the Defense Professor made a harness appear upon Bellatrix’s shoulders, and another, smaller cloth device upon her hand, and something like handcuffs on her wrists, even as the woman finished drinking the potion.

A strange, unhealthy color seemed to come over Bellatrix’s pale face, she straightened, her sunken eyes seemed brighter and far more dangerous…

…small wisps of steam were coming out of her ears…

(Harry decided not to think about that part.)

…and Bellatrix Black laughed, then, sudden mad laughter that rang much too loudly amid the small prison cells of Azkaban.

(Very soon, the Defense Professor had said, Bellatrix would fall unconscious and stay that way for quite awhile, the price of the potion she had taken; but for just a few moments she would regain perhaps a twentieth part of the power she had once wielded.)

The Defense Professor threw his wand toward Bellatrix, and an instant later blurred into a green snake.

An instant after
that
the Dementors’ fear returned to the room.

Bellatrix flinched only slightly, caught the wand, and gestured without a word; the snake flew up and was inserted into the harness on her back.

Harry said “Up!” to the broomstick.

Bellatrix attached the wand to the holster on her hand.

Harry leaped onto the two-person broomstick in the lead position.

Bellatrix followed behind him, she took the cufflike devices on her wrists and chained her hands to the grips of the broomstick, even as Harry’s right hand shoved his wand into his pouch.

And the three shot forward through the hole in the wall -

- emerging into the open air, directly above the Dementors’ pit, in the interior of the vast triangular prism that was Azkaban, the blue sky now clearly visible above them, shining down its daylight.

Harry angled the broomstick and began accelerating, upward and toward the center of the triangular space. His left hand, gloved to prevent direct contact between his skin and something which Professor Quirrell had Transfigured, held the switch of the control on the Muggle device.

Far above them, distant shouts rang out.

All right, you primitive screwheads!

Aurors on fast racing broomsticks angled out of the sky, diving straight down toward them, faint sparks of light already blazing downward as the first shots were fired.

Listen up!

“Protego Maximus!” shouted Bellatrix in a mighty, cracked voice, followed by a cackling laugh as a shimmering blue field surrounded them.

You see this?

From the decaying pit in the center of Azkaban, over a hundred Dementors rose into the air, appearing to some as a great mass of corpses, a flying graveyard; appearing to another as a conglomerate of absences that seemed to form one vast rip in the world as they slid upward.

This…

The voice of an ancient and powerful wizard bellowed a terrible incantation, and a great blast of white-golden fire shot out of the hole in Azkaban’s wall, shapeless for only a moment before it began to form wings.

Is…

And the Aurors activated the Anti-Anti-Gravity Jinx that had been built into the wards of Azkaban, disabling all flying spells whose enchantment had not been cast with the recently changed passphrase.

The lift on Harry’s broom switched off.

Gravity, on the other hand, stayed on.

Their broom’s upward rise slowed, started to decelerate, began the process of turning into a fall.

My…

But the enchantments that kept the broom pointed in a direction and allowed steering, the enchantments that kept the riders attached and somewhat protected them from acceleration,
those
enchantments were still functioning.

BROOMSTICK!

Harry hit the ignition switch on the General Technics made, model
Berserker PFRC
, N-class, ammonium perchlorate composite propellant, solid-fuel rocket that had been mated to his Nimbus X200 two-person broomstick.

And there was noise.

Broomsticks had been invented during what a Muggle would have called the Dark Ages, supposedly by a legendary witch named Celestria Relevo, allegedly the great-great-granddaughter of Merlin.

Celestria Relevo, or whichever person or group had really invented those enchantments, hadn’t known a darned thing about Newtonian mechanics.

Broomsticks, therefore, worked by Aristotelian physics.

They went where you pointed them.

If you wanted to move straight forward, you pointed them straight forward; you didn’t worry about keeping some of the thrust going downward to cancel out the effect of gravity.

If you turned a broomstick, all of its new velocity was in the new direction of pointing, it didn’t go sideways based on its old momentum.

Broomsticks had maximum speeds, not maximum accelerations. Not because of anything to do with air resistance, but because a broomstick had some maximum Aristotelian impetus its enchantments could exert.

Harry had never explicitly
noticed
that before, despite being dextrous enough to get the best grades in flying class. Broomsticks worked so much like the human mind
instinctively expected them to work
that his brain had managed to
entirely overlook their physical absurdity.
Harry, on his first Thursday of broomstick lessons, had been distracted by more interesting-seeming phenomena, words written on paper and a glowing red ball. So his brain had simply suspended its disbelief, marked the reality of broomsticks as accepted, and proceeded to have its fun, without ever once
thinking of the question
whose answer would have been obvious. For it is a sad fact that we only ever
think
about a tiny fraction of all the phenomena we encounter…

That is the story of how Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres was almost killed by his own lack of curiosity.

Because rockets did
not
work by Aristotelian physics.

Rockets did
not
work like a human mind instinctively thought a flying thing should work.

A rocket-assisted broomstick, therefore, did
not
move like the magical broomsticks upon which Harry was such a very good flyer.

None of this actually went through Harry’s mind at the time.

For one thing, the loudest noise he’d ever heard in his life was preventing him from hearing himself think.

For another thing, accelerating upward at four gravities meant that he had around two and a half seconds, total, to go from the bottom to the top of Azkaban.

And even if they were two and a half of the
longest
seconds in the history of Time, that wasn’t enough room to do much thinking.

There was time only to see the lights of the Aurors’ curses arrowing down at him, slightly angle the broomstick to avoid them, realize that the broomstick was simply continuing on with mostly the same momentum instead of going in the direction he pointed it, and activate the wordless concepts

*
crap*

and

*Newton*

whereupon Harry angled the broomstick much harder and then they started to very quickly approach the wall so he angled it back the other way and there were more lights coming down and the Dementors were sliding smoothly up toward them along with some kind of giant winged creature of white-golden flame so Harry wrenched the broomstick back toward the sky but now he was still sliding toward another wall so he tilted the broom slightly and he stopped approaching but he was too close so he tilted it again and then the distant Aurors on their broomsticks weren’t very distant at all and he was going to crash into that woman so he spun his broomstick straight away from her and then in another instant he realized his rocket was an extremely powerful flamethrower and in a fraction of a second it would be pointing directly at the Auror so he spun the broomstick sideways as he kept going up and he couldn’t remember if it was pointing at any Aurors now but at least it wasn’t pointing at
her

Harry missed another Auror by about a meter, zipping past him on a sideways-pointed flamethrower moving upward at, Harry would later guess, around 300 kilometers per hour.

If there were any screams of roasted Aurors he didn’t hear them, but this was not evidence one way or another, because all that Harry was hearing at the moment was an extremely loud noise.

A couple of
calmer if not quieter
seconds later, there didn’t seem to be any Aurors around, or any Dementors, or any giant winged flame creatures, and the vast and terrible edifice of Azkaban looked surprisingly tiny from this height.

Harry got the broomstick pointed toward the Sun, faintly visible through the clouds, it wasn’t high in the sky at this time of day and month of winter, and the broomstick accelerated for another two seconds in that direction and picked up an amazing amount of speed very quickly before the solid-fuel rocket burned itself out.

After that, once Harry could hear himself think again, when there was only the howling wind from their ridiculous speed, and Harry’s enchantment-assisted fingers gripping the broomstick were merely resisting the decelerating drag of moving way faster than terminal velocity,
that
was when Harry actually thought all that stuff about Newtonian mechanics and Aristotelian physics and broomsticks and rocketry and the importance of curiosity and how he was never going to do anything this Gryffindor ever again or at least not until after he learned the Dark Lord’s secret of immortality and
why
had he listened to Professor Quirinus “
I asssure you, boy, I would not attempt thisss if I did not anticipate my own ssurvival
” Quirrell instead of Professor Michael “Son, if you try anything to do with rockets on your own, I mean
anything whatsoever
without a trained professonal watching, you will die and that will make Mum sad” Verres-Evans.

“
WHAT?
” shrieked Amelia at the mirror.

The wind had died down to a bearable level as the air resistance slowed them, giving Harry plenty of opportunity to listen to the buzzing, ringing sound that seemed to fill his whole brain.

Professor Quirrell had been supposed to cast a Quieting Charm on the rocket exhaust… apparently there were limits to what Quieting Charms could do… in retrospect, Harry should have Transfigured a pair of earplugs, not just trusted to the Quieting Charm, though that probably wouldn’t have been enough either…

Well, magical healing probably had something to treat permanent hearing damage.

No, really, magical healing probably had something to treat that. He’d seen students go to Madam Pomfrey with injuries that sounded a lot worse…

Is there some way of transplanting an imaginary personality to someone else’s head?
asked Hufflepuff.
I don’t want to live in yours anymore.

Harry shoved it all into the back of his mind, there really wasn’t anything he could do about it right now. Was there anything he
should
be worrying about -

Then Harry glanced behind him, remembering for the first time to check whether Bellatrix or Professor Quirrell had been blown off the broomstick.

But the green snake was still in its harness, and the emaciated woman was still clinging to the broomstick, her face still charged with unhealthy color and her eyes still bright and dangerous. Her shoulders were shaking like she was laughing hysterically, and her lips were moving as though to shout, but no sound was coming out -

Oh, right.

Harry took off the hood of his cloak, tapped his ears to let her know he couldn’t hear.

Whereupon Bellatrix grasped her wand, pointed it at Harry, and suddenly the ringing in his ears diminished, he could hear her.

A moment later he regretted it; the imprecations she was screaming at Azkaban, Dementors, Aurors, Dumbledore, Lucius, Bartemy Couch, something called the Order of the Phoenix, and all who stood in the way of her Dark Lord, et cetera, were not suitable for younger and more sensitive listeners; and her laughter was hurting his newly healed ears.

“Enough, Bella,” Harry finally said, and her voice stopped on the instant.

There was a pause. Harry pulled the Cloak back over his head, just on general principles; and realized in the same instant that they might have telescopes down there or something, in retrospect pulling down his hood for even a moment had been an incredibly dumb move, he hoped the whole mission didn’t end up failing because of that one error…

We’re not really cut out for this, are we?
observed Slytherin.

Hey,
Hufflepuff objected in sheer reflex,
we can’t expect to do anything perfectly the first time, we probably just need more practice FORGET I SAID THAT.

Harry looked back again, saw Bellatrix looking around with a puzzled, wondering look on her face. Her head kept turning, turning.

And finally Bellatrix said, her voice now lower, “My Lord, where are we?”

What do you mean?
was what Harry wanted to say, but the Dark Lord would never admit to not understanding anything, so Harry replied, dryly, “We are on a broomstick.”

Does she think she’s dead, that this is Heaven?

Bellatrix’s hands were still chained to the broomstick, so it was only a finger that came up and pointed when she said, “What is
that?
”

Harry followed the direction of her finger and saw… nothing in particular, actually…

Then Harry realized. After they’d gone up high enough, there hadn’t been any clouds to obscure it any more.

“That is the Sun, dear Bella.”

It came out remarkably controlled, the Dark Lord sounding perfectly calm and maybe a little impatient with her, even as the tears started down Harry’s cheeks.

In the endless cold, in the pitch blackness, the Sun would surely have been…

A happy memory…

Bellatrix’s head kept turning.

“And the fluffy things?” she said.

“Clouds.”

There was a pause, and then Bellatrix said, “But what
are
they?”

Harry didn’t answer her, there was no way his voice could have been steady, would have been steady, it was all he could do to keep his breathing perfectly regular while he cried.

After a while, Bellatrix breathed, so softly Harry almost didn’t hear, “Pretty…”

Her face slowly relaxed, the color leaving its paleness almost as quickly as it had arrived.

Her skeletal body slumped down against the broomstick.

The borrowed wand dangled lifelessly from the strap attached to her unmoving hand.

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING -

Harry’s mind remembered then, the Pepper-Up potion came at a cost; Bellatrix would
ssleep for a conssiderable time,
Professor Quirrell had said.

And in the same instant another part of Harry became utterly convinced, looking back at the chalk-white emaciated woman, seeming deader in the bright sunlight than anything Harry had ever seen alive, that she
was
dead, that she had just uttered her last word, that Professor Quirrell had misjudged the dosage -

- or deliberately sacrificed Bellatrix to guard their own escape -

Is she breathing?

Harry couldn’t see if she was breathing.

There was no way, on the broomstick, to reach back and take her pulse.

Harry looked ahead to make sure they weren’t about to run into any flying rocks, kept on steering the broomstick toward the Sun, the invisible boy and the possibly dead woman riding off into the afternoon, while his fingers gripped the wood so hard they turned white.

He couldn’t reach back and perform artificial respiration.

He couldn’t use anything from his healer’s kit.

Trust Professor Quirrell to have not endangered her?

Strange, it was strange, that even genuinely believing that Professor Quirrell hadn’t meant to kill the Auror (for it
would
have been stupid), thinking of the Defense Professor’s reassurances no longer felt reassuring.

Then it occurred to Harry that he had yet to check -

Harry looked back, and hissed, “
Teacher?
”

The snake did not stir within its harness, and said no word.

…maybe the snake, not being an actual rider, hadn’t been protected from the acceleration. Or maybe coming that close to the Dementors without a shield, even for a moment in Animagus form, had knocked out the Defense Professor.

That wasn’t good.

It was to have been Professor Quirrell who told Harry when it was safe to use the portkey.

Harry steered the broomstick with whitened fingers, and thought, he thought very hard for a small unmeasured length of time, during which Bellatrix might or might not have been breathing, during which Professor Quirrell himself might have already been not-breathing for a while.

And Harry decided that while it was possible to recover from the error of wasting the portkey in his possession, it was not possible to recover from the error of letting a brain go too long without oxygen.

So Harry took the next portkey in the sequence from his pouch, as he slowed his broomstick to a halt in the bright blue air (Harry didn’t know, when he thought about it, whether a portkey’s ability to adjust for the Earth’s rotation also included the ability to match velocity in general with its new surroundings), touched the portkey to the broomstick, and…

Harry paused, still holding the twig, the mate of the twig he had snapped what seemed like two weeks ago. He was feeling a sudden reluctance; his brain seemed to have learned the rule, by some purely neural process of operant conditioning, that Snapping Twigs Is A Bad Idea.

But that wasn’t actually logical, so Harry snapped the twig anyway.

There was a thunderous boom from behind the nearby metal door, causing Amelia to drop the mirror she was holding and spin around with her wand in hand, and then that door burst open to reveal Albus Dumbledore, standing there in front of a great smoking hole in the prison wall.

“Amelia,” said the old wizard. There was no trace of any of his customary levity, his eyes were hard as sapphires beneath his half-moon glasses. “I must leave Azkaban and I must do so
now
. Is there any faster way than a broomstick to get beyond the wards?”