Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (56 page)

There was silence.

“Um…” Harry said. “I don’t want to turn anyone over to the Inquisition, but I did tell one other student -”

The word almost exploded from Professor McGonagall’s lips. “
What?
You discussed a completely novel form of Transfiguration with a
student
before consulting a recognized authority? Do you have any idea how
irresponsible
that was?”

“I’m sorry,” said Harry. “I didn’t realize.”

The boy looked appropriately frightened, and Minerva felt something inside her relax. At least Harry understood how foolish he’d been.

“You must swear Miss Granger to secrecy,” Dumbledore said gravely. “And do not tell anyone else unless there is an extremely good reason for it, and they too have sworn.”

“Ah… why?” Harry said.

Minerva was wondering the same thing. Once again the Headmaster was thinking too far ahead for her to keep up.

“Because you can do something that no one else will believe you can do,” Dumbledore said. “Something completely unexpected. It may prove to be your critical advantage, Harry, and we must preserve it. Please, trust me in this.”

Professor McGonagall nodded, her firm face showing nothing of her inner confusion. “Please do, Mr. Potter,” she said.

“All right…” Harry said slowly.

“Once we have finished examining your materials,” Dumbledore added, “you may practice partial Transfiguration, on glass to steel and steel to glass
only
, with Miss Granger to act as your spotter. Naturally, if either of you suspect any symptom of any form of Transfiguration sickness, inform a professor at once.”

Just before Harry left the workroom, with his hand on the doorhandle, the boy turned back and said, “As long as we’re here, have either of you noticed anything different about Professor Snape?”

“Different?” said the Headmaster.

Minerva didn’t let her wry smile show on her face. Of course the boy was apprehensive about the ‘evil Potions Master’, since he had no way of knowing why Severus was to be trusted. It would have been odd to say the least, explaining to Harry that Severus was still in love with his mother.

“I mean, has his behavior changed recently in any way?” said Harry.

“Not that I have seen…” the Headmaster said slowly. “Why do you ask?”

Harry shook his head. “I don’t want to prejudice your own observations by saying. Just keep an eye out, maybe?”

That sent a quiver of unease through Minerva in a way that no outright accusation of Severus could have.

Harry bowed to both of them respectfully, and took his leave.

“Albus,” Minerva said after the boy had gone, “how did you
know
to take Harry seriously? I would have thought his idea merely impossible!”

The old wizard’s face turned grave. “The same reason it must be kept secret, Minerva. The same reason I told you to come to me, if Harry made any such claim. Because it is a power that Voldemort knows not.”

The words took a few seconds to sink in.

And then the cold shiver went down her spine, as it always did when she remembered.

It had started out as an ordinary job interview, Sybill Trelawney applying for the position of Professor of Divination.

THE ONE WITH THE POWER TO VANQUISH THE DARK LORD APPROACHES,
BORN TO THOSE WHO HAVE THRICE DEFIED HIM,
BORN AS THE SEVENTH MONTH DIES,
AND THE DARK LORD WILL MARK HIM AS HIS EQUAL,
BUT HE WILL HAVE POWER THE DARK LORD KNOWS NOT,
AND EITHER MUST DESTROY ALL BUT A REMNANT OF THE OTHER,
FOR THOSE TWO DIFFERENT SPIRITS CANNOT EXIST IN THE SAME WORLD.

Those dreadful words, spoken in that terrible booming voice, didn’t seem to fit something like partial Transfiguration.

“Perhaps not, then,” Dumbledore said after Minerva tried to explain. “I confess I had been hoping for something that would help in finding Voldemort’s horcrux, wherever he may have hidden it. But…” The old wizard shrugged. “Prophecies are tricky things, Minerva, and it is best to take no chances. The smallest thing may prove decisive if it remains unexpected.”

“And what do you suppose he meant about
Severus?
” said Minerva.

“There I have no idea,” sighed Dumbledore. “Unless Harry is making a move against Severus, and thought that an open question might be taken seriously where a direct allegation would be dismissed. And if that was indeed what happened, Harry correctly reasoned that I would not trust that it was so. Let us simply keep watch, without prejudice, as he asks.”

Aftermath, 1:

“Um, Hermione?” Harry said in a very small voice. “I think I owe you a really, really, really big apology.”

Aftermath, 2:

Alissa Cornfoot’s eyes were slightly glazed as she gazed upon the Potions Master giving her class a stern lecture, holding up a tiny bronze bean and saying something about screaming puddles of human flesh. Ever since the start of this year she’d been having trouble listening in Potions. She kept staring at their awful, mean, greasy professor and fantasizing about special detentions. There was probably something really
wrong
with her but she just couldn’t seem to stop doing it -

“Ow!” Alissa said then.

Snape had just flicked the bronze bean unerringly at Alissa’s forehead.

“Miss Cornfoot,” said the Potions Master, his voice cutting, “this is a delicate potion and if you cannot pay attention you will hurt your classmates, not just yourself. See me after class.”

The last four words didn’t help her any, but she tried harder, and managed to get through the day without melting anyone.

After class, Alissa approached the desk. Part of her wanted to stand there meekly with her face abashed and her hands clasped penitently behind her back, just in case, but some quiet instinct told her this might be a
bad idea
. So instead she just stood there with her face neutral, in a posture that was very proper for a young lady, and said, “Professor?”

“Miss Cornfoot,” Snape said without looking up from the sheets he was grading, “I do not return your affections, I begin to find your stares disturbing, and you will restrain your eyes henceforth. Is that quite clear?”

“Yes,” said Alissa in a strangled squeak, and Snape dismissed her, and she fled the classroom with her cheeks flaming like molten lava.

Unfortunately, no one can be told who J. K. Rowling is. You have to see her for yourself.

Science disclaimers: Luosha points out that the theory of empathy in Ch. 27 (you use your own brain to simulate others) isn’t quite a known scientific fact. The evidence so far points in that direction, but we haven’t analyzed the brain circuitry and proven it. Similarly, timeless formulations of quantum mechanics (alluded to in Ch. 28) are so elegant that I’d be shocked to find the final theory had time in it, but they’re not established yet either.

There’d been a sinking feeling in Hermione’s stomach lately, every time she heard the other students talking about her and Harry. She’d been in a shower stall this morning when she’d overheard a conversation between Morag and Padma that had been the last straw piled on top of quite a lot of other straws.

She was starting to think that getting involved in a rivalry with Harry Potter had been a terrible mistake.

If she’d just
stayed away
from Harry Potter, she could have been Hermione Granger, the brightest academic star of Hogwarts, who was earning more points for Ravenclaw than anyone. She wouldn’t have been
as
famous as the Boy-Who-Lived, but she would have been famous for
herself
.

Instead the Boy-Who-Lived had an academic rival, and her name happened to be Hermione Granger.

And worse, she had gone on a date with him.

The idea of getting into a Romance with Harry had seemed like an appealing idea at first. She’d read books like that, and if there was anyone in Hogwarts who was a candidate for the heroine’s love interest it was obviously Harry Potter. Bright, funny, famous, sometimes scary…

So she’d forced Harry into going on a date with her.

And now
she
was
his
love interest.

Or worse, one of the options on his dinner menu.

She’d been in a shower stall that morning and just about to turn on the water, when she’d heard giggles coming from outside. And she’d heard Morag talking about how that Muggleborn girl probably wouldn’t fight hard enough to win against Ginevra Weasley, and Padma speculating that Harry Potter might decide he wanted
both
.

It was like they didn’t understand that GIRLS had options on their dinner menu and BOYS fought over them.

But that wasn’t even the part that hurt, really. It was that when she scored 98 on one of Professor McGonagall’s tests, the news wasn’t that Hermione Granger had scored the highest in the class, the news was that Harry Potter’s rival had scored seven more points than him.

If you got too close to the Boy-Who-Lived, you became part of his story.

You didn’t get your own.

And the thought had come to Hermione that she should just walk away, but that would’ve been too sad.

But she did want to get
back
what she’d accidentally given away by letting herself become known as Harry’s rival. She wanted to be a separate person again instead of Harry Potter’s third leg, was that too much to ask?

It was a hard trap to climb out of once you fell in. No matter how high you scored in class, even if you did something that deserved a special dinnertime announcement, it just meant you were rivaling Harry Potter again.

But she thought she’d come up with a way.

Something to do that
wouldn’t
be seen as pushing up on the opposite end of Harry Potter’s seesaw.

It would be hard.

It would go against her nature.

She would have to fight someone very evil.

And she would need to ask someone even
more
evil for help.

Hermione raised her hand to knock upon that terrible door.

She hesitated.

Hermione realized she was being
silly
, and raised her hand a bit higher.

She tried to knock again.

Her hand quite failed to touch the door.

And then the door swung open anyway.

“Dear me,” said the spider, sitting in its web. “Was it really that hard to lose a single Quirrell point, Miss Granger?”

Hermione stood there with her hand raised, her cheeks growing pink. It
had
been.

“Well, Miss Granger, I shall be merciful,” said the evil Professor Quirrell. “Consider it already lost. There, I have taken a hard choice from you. Are you not grateful?”

“Professor Quirrell,” Hermione managed to say in a voice that squeaked a little. “I have a lot of Quirrell points, don’t I?”

“You do indeed,” said Professor Quirrell. “Though one less than you had before. Terrible, isn’t it? Just think, if I don’t like your reason for coming here, you could lose another fifty. Maybe I’d take them away one… by one… by one…”

Hermione’s cheeks were going even redder. “You’re really evil, did anyone ever tell you that?”

“Miss Granger,” Professor Quirrell said gravely, “it can be dangerous to give people compliments like that when they have not been truly earned. The recipient might feel bashful and undeserving and want to do something worthy of your praise. Now what was it you wanted to talk to me about, Miss Granger?”

It was after lunch on Thursday afternoon, and Hermione and Harry were ensconced in a little library nook, with a
Quietus
field up so they could talk. Harry was lying stomach-down on the ground with his elbows resting on the floor and his head in his hands and his feet kicking up casually behind him. Hermione was occupying a stuffed chair much too large for her, like she was the Hermione center of a candy shell.

Harry had suggested that they could, as a first pass, read just the
titles
of all the books in the library, and then Hermione could read all the tables of contents.

Hermione had thought this was a brilliant idea. She’d never done that with a library before.

Unfortunately there was a slight flaw in this plan.

Namely, they were both Ravenclaws.

Hermione was reading a book called
Magical Mnemonics.

Harry was reading a book called
The Skeptical Wizard.

Each had thought it was just one special exception they would make only this one time, and neither had yet realized it was impossible for either of them to ever finish reading all the book titles no matter how hard they tried.

The quiet of their little nook was broken by two words.

“Oh,
no
,” Harry suddenly said out loud, sounding like the words had been torn out of him.

There was a bit more quiet.

“He
didn’t
,” Harry said, in the same voice.

Then she heard Harry start giggling helplessly.

Hermione looked up from her book.

“All right,” she said, “what
is
it?”

“I just found out why you never ask the Weasleys about the family rat,” Harry said. “It’s
really
awful and I shouldn’t be laughing and I’m a terrible person.”

“Yes,” Hermione said primly, “you are. Tell me too.”

“Okay, first the background. There’s a whole chapter in this book about Sirius Black conspiracy theories. You remember who that is, right?”

“Of course,” said Hermione. Sirius Black was a traitor, a friend of James Potter who had let Voldemort into the protected home of the Potters.

“So it turns out there were a number of, shall we say,
irregularities
, associated with Black going to Azkaban. He didn’t get a trial, and the Junior Minister in charge when the Aurors arrested Black was none other than Cornelius Fudge, who became our current Minister of Magic.”

That sounded a little suspicious to Hermione too, and she said as much.

Harry made a shrugging motion with his shoulders, as he lay on the floor looking at his book. “Suspicious things happen all the time, and if you’re a conspiracy theorist you can always find
something
.”

“But
no trial?
” said Hermione.

“It was right after the Dark Lord’s defeat,” Harry said, his voice serious as he said it. “Things were incredibly chaotic, and when the Aurors tracked down Black he was standing there laughing in a street ankle-deep in blood, with twenty eyewitnesses to recount how he’d killed a friend of my father’s named Peter Pettigrew plus twelve bystanders. I’m not saying I approve of Black not getting a trial. But these are wizards we’re talking about here, so it’s not really any more suspicious than, I don’t know, the sort of thing people point to when they want to argue over who shot John F. Kennedy. So anyway, Sirius Black is the wizarding Lee Harvey Oswald. There’s all sorts of conspiracy theories about who
really
betrayed my parents instead of him, and one of the favorites is Peter Pettigrew, and this is where it starts getting complicated.”

Hermione listened, fascinated. “But how do you go from there to the Weasleys’
pet rat
-”

“Hold on,” said Harry, “I’m getting there. Now, after Pettigrew’s death it came out that he’d been a spy for the Light - not a double agent, just someone who snuck around and found things out. He’d been good at that since he was a teenager, even in Hogwarts he had a reputation for finding out all sorts of secrets. So the conspiracy theory is that Pettigrew became an unregistered Animagus while he was still in Hogwarts, an Animagus of something small that could scurry around and listen to conversations. The main problem being that successful Animagi are rare and doing it as a teenager would be really unlikely, so of course the conspiracy theory says that my father and Black were unregistered Animagi too. And in that conspiracy theory, Pettigrew himself killed the twelve bystanders, turned into his small Animagus form, and ran. So Michael Shermer says there are four additional problems with this. One, Black was the only one besides my parents who knew how to get through the wards around their house.” (Harry’s voice was a little hard as he said that.) “Two, Black was a more likely suspect to start with than Pettigrew, there’s a rumor Black deliberately tried to get a student killed during his time at Hogwarts, and he was from this really nasty pureblood family, Bellatrix Black was literally his cousin. Three, Black was twenty times the fighting wizard that Pettigrew was, even if he wasn’t as smart. The duel between them would have been like Professor Quirrell versus Professor Sprout. Pettigrew probably didn’t even get a chance to draw his wand, let alone fake all the evidence the conspiracy theory requires. And four, Black was standing in the street
laughing.
”

“But the
rat
-” said Hermione.

“Right,” Harry said. “Well, to make a long story short, Bill Weasley decided that his little brother Percy’s pet rat was Pettigrew’s Animagus form -”

Hermione’s jaw dropped.

“Yes,” Harry said, “you wouldn’t exactly expect Evil Pettigrew to be living a sad and furtive life as the pet rat of an enemy wizarding family, he’d either be with the Malfoys or, more likely, off in the Carribean after a bit of plastic surgery. Anyway, Bill knocks out his little brother Percy, stuns and grabs the rat, sends out all these emergency owl messages -”

“Oh,
no!
” Hermione said, the words torn out of her.

“- and somehow manages to gather Dumbledore, the Minister of Magic, and the Head Auror -”

“He
didn’t!
” said Hermione.

“And of course when they get there they think he’s crazy, but they use
Veritas Oculum
on the rat anyway, just to be sure, and what do they discover?”

She would’ve
died
. “A rat.”

“You win a cookie! So they dragged poor Bill Weasley off to St. Mungo’s and it turned out to be a pretty standard schizophrenic break, it just happens to some people, especially young men around what we’d consider college age. Guy was convinced he was ninety-seven years old and had died and gone back in time to his younger self via train station. And he responded perfectly well to antipsychotics and is back to normal and everything’s fine now, except people don’t talk as much anymore about Sirius Black conspiracy theories, and you don’t ever ask the Weasleys about the family rat.”

Hermione was giggling helplessly. It was really awful and she shouldn’t be laughing and she was a terrible person.

“The thing I
don’t
understand,” Harry said, after their giggles had died down, “is
why
Black would hunt down Pettigrew instead of running as fast as he could. He had to know the Aurors would be after him. I wonder if they got the reason out of Black before they took him to Azkaban? See, this is why people who are absolutely positively guilty still go through the legal system and get trials.”

Hermione had to agree with that.

Soon Harry was done with his book while Hermione was only halfway through hers - hers was a much more difficult book than Harry’s, but she still felt embarrassed about that. And then she had to put
Magical Mnemonics
back on the shelf and drag herself away, because it was time for her to face the most dreaded class in Hogwarts, BROOMSTICK RIDING.

Harry tagged along as she walked there, even though his own class wasn’t until an hour and a half later, like a fighter jet escorting a sad little propeller plane on its way to its own funeral.

The boy wished her goodbye in a quiet, sympathetic voice, and she walked onto the grassy fields of Doom.

And there was much shrieking and almost falling and horrible brushes with death and the ground in completely the
wrong place
and the sun getting in her eyes and Morag buzzing her and Mandy thinking she was being
subtle
about always being near enough to catch her if she fell and she
knew
the other students were laughing at both of them but she never said anything to Mandy because she didn’t actually want to die.

After ten million years the class ended, and she was back on the ground where she belonged until next Thursday. Sometimes she had nightmares about it always being Thursday.

Why
everyone had to learn this, when they were just going to Apparate or Floo or portkey everywhere once they grew up, was a complete and utter mystery to Hermione. Nobody actually needed to ride broomsticks as an adult, it was like being forced to play dodgeball in P.E.