Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (146 page)

“And I’m not going to complain,” Harry Potter said in an eerily calm voice, “about wizards not having any logic and believing the craziest things. Because I said that to Professor Quirrell once, and he just gave me this
look
and said that if I wasn’t blinded by my upbringing I could think of a hundred more ridiculous things that lots of Muggles believe. What you’re all doing is very human and very normal and doesn’t make you
unusually
bad people, so I’m not going to complain.” The Boy-Who-Lived rose up from his bench. “I’ll see you all later.”

And Harry Potter walked away from them, walked away from all of them.

“You’re not thinking he’s
right,
are you?” said Su Li from beside her, in a tone which made it clear what
she
thought.

“I -” said Padma. Her words seemed to be caught in her throat, her thoughts seemed to be caught in her head. “I - I mean - I -”

If you think hard enough you can do the impossible.

(It had always been an article of faith with Harry. There’d been a time when he’d acknowledged the laws of physics as ultimate limitations, and now he suspected there were no true limits at all.)

If you think
fast
enough you can sometimes do the impossible
quickly
…

…sometimes.

Only sometimes.

Not always.

Not
reliably
.

The Boy-Who-Lived stared around the trophy room, surrounded by awards and cups and plates and shields and statues and medals kept behind thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of crystal glass displays. For as many centuries as Hogwarts had existed, this room had been accumulating details. A week, a month, maybe even a year, wouldn’t have sufficed to take the ‘examine’ option on every item in the room. With Professor Flitwick gone, Harry had asked Professor Vector if there was any way to detect damage to the wards around the crystal cases, verify the residue that a real duel should have left behind. Harry had raced through the Hogwarts library looking for spells to tell the difference between old fingerprints and new fingerprints, or to detect lingering exhalations in a room. And all those attempts at playing detective had failed.

There were no clues, none that he was smart enough to find.

Professor Snape had said that the portkey led to an empty house in London, with no sign of anyone or anything else.

Professor Snape hadn’t found any notes in Hermione’s dorm.

Headmaster Dumbledore had said that Voldemort’s spirit was probably hiding out in the Chamber of Secrets where the Hogwarts security system couldn’t find him. Harry had snuck into the Slytherin dungeons under the Cloak of Invisibility and spent the rest of the afternoon looking through all the obvious places, but he hadn’t found anything snaky that answered back when spoken to. The entrance to the Chamber of Secrets, it seemed, hadn’t been meant to be found in a day.

Harry had talked to all of Hermione’s friends that would still talk to him, and none of them had remembered Hermione saying anything specific about why she’d believed that Draco was plotting against her.

Professor Quirrell hadn’t come back from the Ministry as of dinnertime. The older students seemed to think that this year’s Defense Professor would probably end up being blamed for the incident, and fired for teaching Hogwarts students to be too violent. They’d talked about the Defense Professor as though he were already gone.

Harry had used up all six hours from his Time-Turner, and there were still no clues, and he had to go to sleep now if he wanted to be functional at Hermione’s trial the next day.

The Boy-Who-Destroyed-A-Dementor was standing in the middle of the Hogwarts trophy room, his wand dropped at his feet.

He was crying.

Sometimes you call your brain and it doesn’t answer.

The trial of Hermione Granger started on schedule the next day.

The Most Ancient Hall of the Wizengamot is cool and dark, with concentric half-circles of stone rising up from the lowest center, and simple wooden benches set down upon those elevated half-circles. There is no source of light, but the chamber is well-lit, without any apparent cause or reason; it is simply a brute fact that the hall is well-lit. The walls like the floor are stone, dark stone, some elegant and mysterious conjugation of rock most fine to gaze upon, with a smooth texture that seems to flow and shift beneath its surface. This is the Most Ancient Hall, the oldest place of wizardry that has lasted into the modern day; every other place of power was destroyed in one war or another. This is the Hall of the Wizengamot, which is most ancient because the wars ended with the building of this place.

This is the Hall of the Wizengamot; there are older places, but they are hidden. Legend holds that the walls of dark stone were conjured, created, willed into existence by Merlin, when he gathered the most powerful wizards left in the world and awed them into accepting him as their chief. And when (the legend continues) the Seers continued to foretell that not enough had yet been done to prevent the end of the world and its magic, then (the story goes) Merlin sacrificed his life, and his wizardry, and his time, to lay in force the Interdict of Merlin. It was not an act without cost, for a place like this one could not be raised again by any power still known to wizardkind. Nor yet destroyed, for those walls of dark stone would pass unharmed, and perhaps unwarmed, through the heart of a nuclear explosion. It is a pity that nobody knows how to make them anymore.

In the highest of the rising half-circles of the Wizengamot, on the topmost level of dark stone, there is a podium. At that podium stands an old man, with care-lined face and a silver beard that stretches down below his waist; this is Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore. His right hand bears a wand of power, upon his shoulder perches a bird of fire. His left hand holds a short rod, thin and featureless and forged of the same dark stone as the walls, and this is the Line of Merlin Unbroken, the device of the Chief Warlock. Karen Dutton bequeathed the Line to Albus Dumbledore on the last day of her life, scant hours after he returned half-dead from his defeat of Grindelwald with a phoenix flaming brightly at his side. She in turn received the Line from the perfectionist Nicodemus Capernaum, each wizard passing it to their chosen successor, back and back in unbroken chain to the day Merlin laid down his life. That (if you were wondering) is how the country of magical Britain managed to elect Cornelius Fudge for its Minister, and yet end up with Albus Dumbledore for its Chief Warlock. Not by law (for written law can be rewritten) but by most ancient tradition, the Wizengamot does not choose who shall preside over its follies. Since the day of Merlin’s sacrifice, the most important duty of any Chief Warlock has been to exercise the highest caution in their choice of people who are both good and able to discern good successors. You would expect that chain of light to miss a step, sometime down through the centuries; that it would go astray at least once, and then never return. But it has not. The Line of Merlin continues, unbroken.

(Or so say those of Dumbledore’s faction. Lord Malfoy would tell you otherwise. And in Asia they tell other tales entirely, which may not make Britain’s version wrong.)

Upon the bottommost platform of the Ancient Hall there is a high-backed chair, legged and armed and without cushions, of dark metal rather than dark stone, which Merlin did not place there.

The Ministry building that grew up around this place is wood-paneled and gold-washed, bright and fire-lit, filled with bustling foolishness. This place is different. It is the stone heart of magical Britain, and it is neither gold-washed nor wood-paneled, neither fire-lit nor bright.

Filing solemnly into this room are witches and wizards in plum-colored robes each embroidered with a silver W. They carry themselves with an air of seriousness showing that they are well aware that they are terribly, terribly important. They are meeting in the Most Ancient Hall, after all. They are the Lords and Ladies of the Wizengamot, and they consider themselves the greatest folk of the world’s greatest magical country. Lesser folk have fallen before them on bended knee in supplication; they are powerful, they are wealthy, they are noble; are they not great?

Albus Dumbledore knows everyone in this room by name. He has taught many of them, though too few have learned. Some are his allies, some his opponents, the rest he courts within the careful dance of their neutrality. All of them, to him, are people.

The current Defense Professor of Hogwarts, if you asked him for his opinion of the Lords and Ladies, would say that while many of them are ambitious, few have any ambition. He would observe that the Wizengamot is exactly where someone like that would end up - that it is exactly the sort of opportunity you would grasp, if you had nothing better to do. Such folk are rarely interesting, but they are often useful; pieces to be manipulated, points to be scored, by the true players of the game.

Not among the rising half-circles, but off to one side among a raised arc for the spectators, next to a witch in pointed hat whose face is lined with apprehension, there sits a boy dressed in the most formal black robes that he owns. His eyes are green ice and abstraction, and he hardly glances at the Lords and Ladies as they bustle in. To him they are just a collection of murmuring plum-colored robes to decorate the wooden benches, visual background for the scene of the Most Ancient Hall. If there is an enemy here, or something to be manipulated, it is merely “the Wizengamot”. The wealthy elites of magical Britain have collective force, but not individual agency; their goals are too alien and trivial for them to have personal roles in the tale. As of now, this present time, the boy neither likes nor dislikes the plum-colored robes, because his brain does not assign them enough agenthood to be the subjects of moral judgment. He is a PC, and they are wallpaper.

This view is about to change.

Harry gazed unseeing around the hall of the Wizengamot; it looked quite old and historic and there was no doubt that Hermione could have lectured him about the place for hours on end. The plum-colored robes had stopped arriving, and Harry’s pocketwatch, advancing at the rate of three minutes every half-hour, said that the trial was almost due to start.

Professor McGonagall was sitting beside him, and her eyes never left him for more than twenty consecutive seconds.

Harry had read the
Daily Prophet
that morning. The headline had been “MAD MUGGLEBORN TRIES TO END ANCIENT LINE” and the rest of the paper had been the same. When Harry was nine years old the IRA had blown up a British barracks, and he’d watched on TV as all the politicians contested to see who could be the most loudly outraged. And the thought had occurred to Harry - even then, before he’d known much about psychology - that it looked like
everyone
was competing to see who could be most angry, and
nobody
would’ve been allowed to suggest that anyone was being
too
angry, even if they’d just proposed the saturation nuclear bombing of Ireland. He’d been struck, even then, by an essential emptiness in the indignation of politicians - though he hadn’t had the words to describe it, at that age - a sense that they were trying to score cheap points by hitting at the same safe target as everyone else.

Harry had always possessed that sense of hollowness about political indignation, but it was strange how very much more obvious it seemed, when you were reading a dozen articles in the
Daily Prophet
beating on Hermione Granger.

The leading article, written by some name that Harry didn’t recognize, had called for the minimum age for Azkaban to be lowered, just so that the twisted mudblood who had defaced the honor of Scotland with her savage, unprovoked attack upon the last heir of a Most Ancient House within the sacred refuge of Hogwarts could be sent to the Dementors that were the only punishment commensurate with the severity of her unspeakable crime. Only this would be enough to discourage any other foreign, subhuman brutes who similarly believed in their twisted insanity that they could evade the majesty of the Wizengamot’s inevitable and merciless scourging of all that threatened the honorable nobility of etcetera etcetera etcetera.

The next article had said the same thing in less eloquent words.

Earlier, Albus Dumbledore had told him,

“I will not try to keep you from this trial.” The old wizard’s voice quiet and unyielding. “I can well foresee how that would go. But I would have you treat me with equal courtesy in return. The politics of the Wizengamot are delicate, and of them you know nothing. Dare any folly and it shall be to Hermione Granger’s cost; and you will remember that folly for the rest of your days, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres.”

“I understand,” Harry said. “I know. Just - if you’re planning to pull a rabbit out of your hat and save the day at the last minute when everything seems lost, please tell me now instead of letting me sit and worry -”

“I would not do that to you,” the old wizard said, a terrible weariness seeming to suffuse him as he turned to go. “Still less to Hermione. But I have no rabbits in my hat, Harry. We can only see what Lucius Malfoy wants.”

There was a small sharp rap, a single brief sound that somehow silenced the entire room and caused Harry’s head to jerk around and upward. High above, Dumbledore had just tapped his podium with the dark rod he held in his left hand.

“The ninetieth session of the two-hundred-and-eighth Wizengamot is convened at the request of Lord Lucius Malfoy,” the old wizard said tonelessly.

At once, far to the side of the podium but also in the highest circle, rose a tall man with a mane of long white spilling down from his head over the shoulders of his plum-colored robes. “I present a witness for questioning under Veritaserum,” Lucius Malfoy said, his cool tone clear throughout the room, smoothly controlled with only a slight undertone of righteous fury. “Let Hermione, the first Granger, be brought forth.”

“I ask you all to remember that she is a first-year of Hogwarts,” Dumbledore said. “I will brook no abuse of this witness -”

Someone in the benches quite audibly said “Pfah!” and there was a spread of disgusted snorts, even one or two jeers.

Harry stared at the plum-colored robes, his eyes narrowing.

And with the growing anger came something else, a rising sense of disquiet, of something horribly skewed, like reality itself was being disrupted. Harry knew that, somehow, but he couldn’t figure out what was awry, or why his mind thought it was getting worse…

“
Order!
” Dumbledore bellowed. He rapped the stone rod twice against the podium, producing two more small clicks that overrode all noise. “I will have order here!”

The door through which the witness was brought forth was set directly beneath Harry’s own seat, so it wasn’t until the entire group had emerged fully into the stone hall that Harry saw -

- an Auror trio -

- Hermione’s back was to Harry as she was brought out, he couldn’t see her face -

- followed by a shining silver sparrow and a running moonlit squirrel -

- and the source of the horrible wrongness, half-hidden beneath a tattered cloak.

Harry shot to his feet before he could even think, it was only Professor McGonagall’s sudden frantic grab on his wrist that stopped his hand going for his wand; and the Transfiguration Professor whispered desperately, “
Harry it’s all right there’s a Patronus -
”

It took a few seconds for Harry to remember himself. For the part of himself that understood that Hermione hadn’t been directly exposed to a Dementor, to argue his other parts into something like sanity -

But animal Patronuses aren’t perfect,
said another voice inside his mind.
Or Dumbledore wouldn’t see the form of a naked man painful to look upon. You felt it approaching, animal Patronus or no…

Slowly, Harry Potter sat back down again as Professor McGonagall pulled down with her grip on his wrist.

But by then he’d already declared war on the country of magical Britain, and the idea of other people calling him a Dark Lord no longer seemed important one way or another.

Hermione’s face became visible to him, as she sat down in the chair. She wasn’t upright and defiant like she’d been in front of Snape, she wasn’t crying like she’d been when the Aurors arrested her. She just sat there with a look of vacant horror as dark metal chains snaked out from the chair and bound her arms and legs.

Harry couldn’t take it. Without even thinking he was trying to flee inside himself, flee into his dark side, pull the cold rage over himself like a shield. It took too long, he hadn’t tried to go fully into his dark side since Azkaban. And then when his blood was something like cold, he looked up again, and saw Hermione in the chair again, and discovered that his dark side knew nothing about how to deal with this type of pain, it pierced through the coldness like a knife and didn’t hurt less in the slightest.

“Why, if it isn’t Harry Potter!” came a high, light female voice, sickly sweet and indulgent.

Slowly, Harry turned his head away from the chair and saw a smiling woman wearing so much makeup that her skin looked almost pink, sitting next to a man that Harry recognized from photographs as Minister Cornelius Fudge.

“Did you have something to say, Mr. Potter?” inquired the woman, as cheerfully as if this wasn’t a trial.

Other people were also looking at him now.

Harry couldn’t speak, all the words in his mind would have been stupid to speak aloud. He couldn’t find anything to say that Neville could also have said. Dumbledore had warned Harry that if anyone
else
wanted the Boy-Who-Lived to speak, he must
pretend to be his age
-

“The Headmaster said I shouldn’t ought to talk,” the boy said, not quite able to keep the edge out of his voice.

“Oh, but you have
our
permission to talk!” the woman said brightly. “I’m sure the Wizengamot is always happy to hear from the Boy-Who-Lived!” Beside her, Minister Cornelius Fudge was nodding.