Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (11 page)

A cold chill was coming over Harry, a chill that came with instructions to keep his voice and face normal.
Note to self: Overthrow government of magical Britain at earliest convenience.

Harry coughed again to clear his throat. “Draco, please please
please
don’t take this the wrong way, my word is my bond, but like you said I could be in Slytherin and I really want to ask for informational purposes, so what would happen
theoretically speaking
if I
did
testify that I’d heard you plan it?”

“Then if I was anyone other than a Malfoy, I’d be in trouble,” Draco answered smugly. “Since I
am
a Malfoy… Father has the votes. And afterwards he’d crush you… well, I guess not easily, since you
are
the Boy-Who-Lived, but Father is pretty good at that sort of thing.” Draco frowned. “‘Sides,
you
talked about murdering her, why weren’t you worried about
me
testifying after she turns up dead?”

How, oh how did my day go this wrong?
Harry’s mouth was already moving faster than he could think. “That’s when I thought she was
older!
I don’t know how it works
here
, but in Muggle Britain the courts would get a lot more upset about someone killing a child -”

“That makes sense,” Draco said, still looking a bit suspicious. “But anyway, it’s always smarter if it doesn’t go to the Aurors at all. If we’re careful only to do things that Healing Charms can fix, we can just Obliviate her afterwards and then do it all again next week.” Then the blonde-haired boy giggled, a youthful high-pitched sound. “Though just imagine her saying she’d been done by Draco Malfoy
and
the Boy-Who-Lived, not even
Dumbledore
would believe her.”

I am going to tear apart your pathetic little magical remnant of the Dark Ages into pieces smaller than its constituent atoms. “
Actually, can we hold off on that? After I found out that headline came from a girl a year younger than me, I had a different thought for my revenge.”

“Huh? Do tell,” Draco said, and started to take another swig of his Comed-Tea.

Harry didn’t know if the enchantment worked more than once per can, but he
did
know he could avoid the blame, so he was careful to time it exactly right:

“I was thinking
someday I’m going to marry that woman.
”

Draco made a horrid ker-splutching sound and leaked green fluid out the corners of his mouth like a broken car radiator. “
Are you nuts?
”

“Quite the opposite, I’m so sane it burns like ice.”

“You’ve got weirder taste than a Lestrange,” Draco said, sounding half-admiring about it. “And I suppose you want her all to yourself, huh?”

“Yep. I can owe you a favor for it -”

Draco waved it off. “Nah, this one’s free.”

Harry stared down at the can in his hand, the coldness settling into his blood. Charming, happy, generous with his favors to his friends, Draco wasn’t a psychopath. That was the sad and awful part, knowing human psychology well enough to
know
that Draco
wasn’t
a monster. There had been ten thousand societies over the history of the world where this conversation could have happened. No, the world would have been a very different place indeed, if it took an
evil
mutant
to say what Draco had said. It was very simple, very human, it was the default if nothing else intervened. To Draco, his enemies weren’t people.

And in the slowed time of this slowed country, here and now as in the darkness-before-dawn prior to the Age of Reason, the son of a sufficiently powerful noble would simply take for granted that he was above the law, at least when it came to some peasant girl. There were places in Muggle-land where it was still the same way, countries where that sort of nobility still existed and still thought like that, or even grimmer lands where it wasn’t just the nobility. It was like that in every place and time that didn’t descend directly from the Enlightenment. A line of descent, it seemed, which didn’t quite include magical Britain, for all that there had been cross-cultural contamination of things like ring-pull drinks cans.

And if Draco doesn’t change his mind about wanting revenge, and I don’t throw away my own chance at happiness in life to marry some poor crazy girl, then all I’ve just bought is time, and not too much of it…

For one girl. Not for others.

I wonder how difficult it would be to just make a list of all the top blood purists and kill them.

They’d tried exactly that during the French Revolution, more or less - make a list of all the enemies of Progress and remove everything above the neck - and it hadn’t worked out well from what Harry recalled. Maybe he needed to dust off some of those history books his father had bought him, and see if what had gone wrong with the French Revolution was something easy to fix.

Harry gazed up at the sky, and at the pale shape of the Moon, visible this morning through the cloudless air.

So the world is broken and flawed and insane, and cruel and bloody and dark. This is news? You always knew that, anyway…

“You’re looking all serious,” Draco said. “Let me guess, your Muggle parents told you that this sort of thing was bad.”

Harry nodded, not quite trusting his voice.

“Well, like Father says, there may be four houses, but in the end everyone belongs to either Slytherin or Hufflepuff. And frankly, you’re not on the Hufflepuff end. If you decide to side with the Malfoys under the table… our power and your reputation… you could get away with things even
I
can’t do. Want to
try
it for a while? See what it’s like?”

Aren’t we a clever little serpent. Eleven years old and already coaxing your prey from hiding…

Harry thought, considered, chose his weapon. “Draco, you want to explain the whole blood purity thing to me? I’m sort of new.”

A wide smile crossed Draco’s face. “You really should meet Father and ask
him
, you know, he’s our leader.”

“Give me the thirty-second version.”

“Okay,” Draco said. He drew in a deep breath, and his voice grew slightly lower, and took on a cadence. “Our powers have grown weaker, generation by generation, as the mudblood taint increases. Where Salazar and Godric and Rowena and Helga once raised Hogwarts by their power, creating the Locket and the Sword and the Diadem and the Cup, no wizard of these faded days has risen to rival them. We are fading, all fading into Muggles as we interbreed with their spawn and allow our Squibs to live. If the taint is not checked, soon our wands will break and all our arts cease, the line of Merlin will end and the blood of Atlantis fail. Our children will be left scratching at the dirt to survive like the mere Muggles, and darkness will cover all the world for ever.” Draco took another swig from his drinks can, looking satisfied; that seemed to be the whole argument as far as he was concerned.

“Persuasive,” Harry said, meaning it descriptively rather than normatively. It was a standard pattern: The Fall from Grace, the need to guard what purity remained against contamination, the past sloping upwards and the future sloping only down. And that pattern also had its
counter
… “I have to correct you on one point of fact, though. Your information about the Muggles is a bit out of date. We aren’t exactly scratching at the dirt anymore.”

Draco’s head snapped around. “
What?
What do you mean,
we?
”

“We. The scientists. The line of Francis Bacon and the blood of the Enlightenment. Muggles didn’t just sit around crying about not having wands, we have our
own
powers now, with or without magic. If all your powers fail then we will all have lost something very precious, because your magic is the only hint we have as to how the universe must
really
work - but you won’t be left scratching at the ground. Your houses will still be cool in summer and warm in winter, there will still be doctors and medicine. Science can keep you alive if magic fails. It’d be a tragedy, but not literally the end of all the light in the world. Just saying.”

Draco had backed up several feet and his face was full of mixed fear and disbelief. “
What in the name of Merlin are you talking about, Potter?
”

“Hey, I listened to
your
story, won’t you listen to mine?”
Clumsy,
Harry chided himself, but Draco actually did stop backing off and seem to listen.

“Anyway,” Harry said, “I’m saying that you don’t seem to have been paying much attention to what goes on in the Muggle world.” Probably because the whole wizarding world seemed to regard the rest of Earth as a slum, deserving around as much news coverage as the
Financial Times
awarded to the routine agonies of Burundi. “All right. Quick check. Have wizards ever been to the Moon? You know, that thing?” Harry pointed up to that huge and distant globe.

“
What?
” Draco said. It was pretty clear the thought had never occured to the boy. ”
Go
to the - it’s just a -” His finger pointed at the little pale thingy in the sky. “You can’t Apparate to somewhere you’ve never
been
and how would anyone get to the Moon in the
first
place?”

“Hold on,” Harry said to Draco, “I’d like to show you a book I brought with me, I think I remember what box it’s in.” And Harry stood up and kneeled down and yanked out the stairs to the cavern level of his trunk, then tore down the stairs and heaved a box off another box, coming perilously close to treating his books with disrespect, and snatched off the box cover and quickly but carefully pried out a stack of books -

(Harry had inherited the nigh-magical Verres ability to remember where all his books were, even after seeing them just once, which was rather mysterious considering the lack of any genetic connection.)

And Harry raced back up the stairs and shoved the staircase back into the trunk with his heel, and, panting, turned the pages of the book until he found the picture he wanted to show to Draco.

The one with the white, dry, cratered land, and the suited people, and the blue-white globe hanging over it all.

That picture.

The
picture, if only one picture in all the world were to survive.

“
That
,” Harry said, his voice trembling because he couldn’t quite keep the pride out, “is what the Earth looks like from the Moon.”

Draco slowly leaned over. There was a strange expression on his young face. “If that’s a
real
picture, why isn’t it moving?”

Moving?
Oh. “Muggles can do moving pictures but they need a bigger box to show it, they can’t fit them onto single book pages yet.”

Draco’s finger moved to one of the suits. “What are those?” His voice starting to waver.

“Those are human beings. They are wearing suits that cover their whole bodies to give them air, because there is no air on the Moon.”

“That’s impossible,” Draco whispered. There was terror in his eyes, and utter confusion. “No Muggle could ever do that.
How…
”

Harry took back the book, flipped the pages until he found what he saw. “This is a rocket going up. The fire pushes it higher and higher, until it gets to the Moon.” Flipped pages again. “This is a rocket on the ground. That tiny speck next to it is a person.” Draco gasped. “Going to the Moon cost the equivalent of… probably around a thousand million Galleons.” Draco choked. “And it took the efforts of… probably more people than live in all of magical Britain.”
And when they arrived, they left a plaque that said, ‘We came in peace, for all mankind.’ Though you’re not yet ready to hear those words, Draco Malfoy…

“You’re telling the truth,” Draco said slowly. “You wouldn’t fake a whole book just for this - and I can hear it in your voice. But… but…”

“How, without wands or magic? It’s a long story, Draco. Science doesn’t work by waving wands and chanting spells, it works by knowing how the universe works on such a deep level that you know exactly what to do in order to make the universe do what you want. If magic is like casting
Imperio
on someone to make them do what you want, then science is like knowing them so well that you can convince them it was their own idea all along. It’s a lot more difficult than waving a wand, but it works when wands fail, just like if the
Imperius
failed you could still try persuading a person. And Science builds from generation to generation. You have to really
know
what you’re doing to do science - and when you really understand something, you can explain it to someone else. The greatest scientists of one century ago, the brightest names that are still spoken with reverence, their powers are as
nothing
to the greatest scientists of today. There is no equivalent in science of your lost arts that raised Hogwarts. In science our powers wax by the year. And we are beginning to understand and unravel the secrets of life and inheritance. We’ll be able to look at the very blood of which you spoke, and see what makes you a wizard, and in one or two more generations, we’ll be able to persuade that blood to make all your children powerful wizards too. So you see, your problem isn’t nearly as bad as it looks, because in a few more decades, science will be able to solve it for you.”

“But…” Draco said. His voice was trembling. “If
Muggles
have that kind of power… then… what are
we?
”

“No, Draco, that’s not it, don’t you see? Science taps the power of human understanding to look at the world and figure out how it works. It can’t fail without humanity itself failing. Your magic could turn off, and you would hate that, but you would still be
you
. You would still be alive to regret it. But because science rests upon my human intelligence, it is the power that cannot be removed from me without removing
me.
Even if the laws of the universe change on me, so that all my knowledge is void, I’ll just figure out the new laws, as has been done before. It’s not a
Muggle
thing, it’s a
human
thing, it just refines and trains the power you use every time you look at something you don’t understand and ask ‘Why?’ You’re of Slytherin, Draco, don’t you see the implication?”