Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

  The old wizard was staring at him, a sad look in his eyes. "I suppose I do understand now," he said quietly.

  "Oh?" said Harry. "Understand what?"

  "Voldemort," said the old wizard. "I understand him now at last. Because to believe that the world is truly like that, you must believe there is no justice in it, that it is woven of darkness at its core. I asked you why he became a monster, and you could give no reason. And if I could ask him, I suppose, his answer would be: Why not?"

  They stood there gazing into each other's eyes, the old wizard in his robes, and the young boy with the lightning-bolt scar on his forehead.

  "Tell me, Harry," said the old wizard, "will you become a monster?"

  "No," said the boy, an iron certainty in his voice.

  "Why not?" said the old wizard.

  The young boy stood very straight, his chin raised high and proud, and said: "There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! We care! There is light in the world, and it is us!"

  "I wonder what will become of you, Harry," said the old wizard. His voice was soft, with a strange wonder and regret in it. "It is enough to make me wish to live just to see it."

  The boy bowed to him with heavy irony, and departed; and the oaken door slammed shut behind him with a thud.

  Chapter 40: Pretending to be Wise, Pt 2

  Harry, holding the tea cup in the exactly correct way that Professor Quirrell had needed to demonstrate three times, took a small, careful sip. All the way across the long, wide table that was the centerpiece of Mary's Room, Professor Quirrell took a sip from his own cup, making it look far more natural and elegant. The tea itself was something whose name Harry couldn't even pronounce, or at least, every time Harry had tried to repeat the Chinese words, Professor Quirrell had corrected him, until finally Harry had given up.

  Harry had maneuvered himself into getting a glimpse at the bill last time, and Professor Quirrell had let him get away with it.

  He'd felt an impulse to drink a Comed-Tea first.

  Even taking that into account, Harry had still been shocked out of his skin.

  And it still tasted to him like, well, tea.

  There was a quiet, nagging suspicion in Harry's mind that Professor Quirrell knew this, and was deliberately buying ridiculously expensive tea that Harry couldn't appreciate just to mess with him. Professor Quirrell himself might not like it all that much. Maybe nobody actually liked this tea, and the only point of it was to be ridiculously expensive and make the victim feel unappreciative. In fact, maybe it was really just ordinary tea, only you asked for it in a certain code, and they put a fake gigantic price on the bill...

  Professor Quirrell's expression was drawn and thoughtful. "No," Professor Quirrell said, "you should not have told the Headmaster about your conversation with Lord Malfoy. Please try to think faster next time, Mr. Potter."

  "I'm sorry, Professor Quirrell," Harry said meekly. "I still don't see it." There were times when Harry felt very much like an impostor, pretending to be cunning in Professor Quirrell's presence.

  "Lord Malfoy is Albus Dumbledore's opponent," said Professor Quirrell. "At least for this present time. All Britain is their chessboard, all wizards their pieces. Consider: Lord Malfoy threatened to throw away everything, abandon his game, to take vengeance on you if Mr. Malfoy was hurt. In which case, Mr. Potter...?"

  It took more long seconds for Harry to get it, but it was clear that Professor Quirrell wasn't going to give any more hints, not that Harry wanted them.

  Then Harry's mind finally made the connection, and he frowned. "Dumbledore kills Draco, makes it look like I did it, and Lucius sacrifices his game against Dumbledore to get at me? That... doesn't seem like the Headmaster's style, Professor Quirrell..." Harry's mind flashed back to a similar warning from Draco, which had made Harry say the same thing.

  Professor Quirrell shrugged, and sipped his tea.

  Harry sipped his own tea, and sat in silence. The tablecloth spread over the table was in a very peaceful pattern, seeming at first like plain cloth, but if you stared at it long enough, or kept silent long enough, you started to see a faint tracery of flowers glimmering on it; the curtains of the room had changed their pattern to match, and seemed to shimmer as though in a silent breeze. Professor Quirrell was in a contemplative mood that Saturday, and so was Harry, and Mary's Room, it seemed, had not neglected to notice this.

  "Professor Quirrell," Harry said suddenly, "is there an afterlife?"

  Harry had chosen the question carefully. Not, do you believe in an afterlife? but simply Is there an afterlife? What people really believed didn't seem to them like beliefs at all. People didn't say, 'I strongly believe in the sky being blue!' They just said, 'the sky is blue'. Your true inner map of the world just felt to you like the way the world was...

  The Defense Professor raised his cup to his lips again before answering. His face was thoughtful. "If there is, Mr. Potter," said Professor Quirrell, "then quite a few wizards have wasted a great deal of effort in their searches for immortality."

  "That's not actually an answer," Harry observed. He'd learned by now to notice that sort of thing when talking to Professor Quirrell.

  Professor Quirrell set down his teacup with a small, high-pitched tacking sound on his saucer. "Some of those wizards were reasonably intelligent, Mr. Potter, so you may take it that the existence of an afterlife is not obvious. I have looked into the matter myself. There have been many claims of the sort which hope and fear would be expected to produce. Among those reports whose veracity is not in doubt, there is nothing which could not be the result of mere wizardry. There are certain devices said to communicate with the dead, but these, I suspect, only project an image from the mind; the result seems indistinguishable from memory because it is memory. The alleged spirits tell no secrets they knew in life, nor could have learned after death, which are not known to the wielder -"

  "Which is why the Resurrection Stone is not the most valuable magical artifact in the world," said Harry.

  "Precisely," said Professor Quirrell, "though I wouldn't say no to a chance to try it." There was a dry, thin smile on his lips; and something colder, more distant, in his eyes. "You spoke to Dumbledore of that as well, I take it."

  Harry nodded.

  The curtains were taking on a faintly blue pattern, and a dim tracery of elaborate snowflakes now seemed to be becoming visible on the tablecloth. Professor Quirrell's voice sounded very calm. "The Headmaster can be very persuasive, Mr. Potter. I hope he has not persuaded you."

  "Heck no," said Harry. "Didn't fool me for a second."

  "I should hope not," said Professor Quirrell, still in that very calm tone. "I would be extremely put out to discover that the Headmaster had convinced you to throw away your life on some fool plot by telling you that death is the next great adventure."

  "I don't think the Headmaster believed it himself, actually," Harry said. He sipped his own tea again. "He asked me what I could possibly do with eternity, gave me the usual line about it being boring, and he didn't seem to see any conflict between that and his own claim to have an immortal soul. In fact, he gave me a whole long lecture about how awful it was to want immortality before he claimed to have an immortal soul. I can't quite visualize what must have been going on inside his head, but I don't think he actually had a mental model of himself continuing forever in the afterlife..."

  The temperature of the room seemed to be dropping.

  "You perceive," said a voice like ice from the other end of the table, "that Dumbledore does not truly believe as he speaks. It is not that he has compromised his principles. It is that he never had them from the beginning. Are you becoming cynical yet, Mr. Potter?"

  Harry had dropped his eyes to his teacup. "A little," Harry said to his possibly-ultra-high-quality, perhaps-ridiculously-expensive Chinese
tea. "I'm certainly becoming a bit frustrated with... whatever's going wrong in people's heads."

  "Yes," said that icy voice. "I find it frustrating as well."

  "Is there any way to get people not to do that?" said Harry to his teacup.

  "There is indeed a certain useful spell which solves the problem."

  Harry looked up hopefully at that, and saw a cold, cold smile on the Defense Professor's face.

  Then Harry got it. "I mean, besides Avada Kedavra."

  The Defense Professor laughed. Harry didn't.

  "Anyway," Harry said hastily, "I did think fast enough not to suggest the obvious idea about the Resurrection Stone in front of Dumbledore. Have you ever seen a stone with a line, inside a circle, inside a triangle?"

  The deathly chill seemed to draw back, fold into itself, as the ordinary Professor Quirrell returned. "Not that I can recall," Professor Quirrell said after a while, a thoughtful frown on his face. "That is the Resurrection Stone?"

  Harry set aside his teacup, then drew on his saucer the symbol he had seen on the inside of his cloak. And before Harry could take out his own wand to cast the Hover Charm, the saucer went floating obligingly across the table toward Professor Quirrell. Harry really wanted to learn that wandless stuff, but that, apparently, was far above his current curriculum.

  Professor Quirrell studied Harry's tea-saucer for a moment, then shook his head; and a moment later, the saucer went floating back to Harry.

  Harry put his teacup back on the saucer, noting absently as he did so that the symbol he'd drawn had vanished. "If you happen to see a stone with that symbol," said Harry, "and it does talk to the afterlife, do let me know. I have a few questions for Merlin or anyone who was around in Atlantis."

  "Quite," said Professor Quirrell. Then the Defense Professor lifted up his teacup again, and tipped it back as though to finish the last of what was there. "By the way, Mr. Potter, I fear we shall have to cut short today's visit to Diagon Alley. I was hoping it would - but never mind. Let it stand that there is something else I must do this afternoon."

  Harry nodded, and finished his own tea, then rose from his seat at the same time as Professor Quirrell.

  "One last question," Harry said, as Professor Quirrell's coat lifted itself off the coatrack and went floating toward the Defense Professor. "Magic is loose in the world, and I no longer trust my guesses so much as I once did. So in your own best guess and without any wishful thinking, do you believe there's an afterlife?"

  "If I did, Mr. Potter," said Professor Quirrell as he shrugged on his coat, "would I still be here?"

  Chapter 41: Frontal Override

  The biting January wind howled around the vast, blank stone walls that demarcated the material bounds of the castle Hogwarts, whispering and whistling in odd pitches as it blew past closed windows and stone turrets. The most recent snow had mostly blown away, but occasional patches of melted and refrozen ice still stuck to the stone face and blazed reflected sunlight. From a distance, it must have looked like Hogwarts was blinking hundreds of eyes.

  A sudden gust made Draco flinch, and try, impossibly, to press his body even closer to the stone, which felt like ice and smelled like ice. Some utterly pointless instinct seemed convinced that he was about to be blown off the outer wall of Hogwarts, and that the best way to prevent this was to jerk around in helpless reflex and possibly throw up.

  Draco was trying very hard not to think about the six stories worth of empty air underneath him, and focus, instead, on how he was going to kill Harry Potter.

  "You know, Mr. Malfoy," said the young girl beside him in a conversational voice, "if a seer had told me that someday I'd be hanging onto the side of a castle by my fingertips, trying not to look down or think about how loud Mum'd scream if she saw me, I wouldn't've had any idea of how it'd happen, except that it'd be Harry Potter's fault."

  Earlier:

  The two allied Generals stepped together over Longbottom's body, their boots hitting the floor in almost perfect synchrony.

  Only a single soldier now stood between them and Harry, a Slytherin boy named Samuel Clamons, whose hand was clenched white around his wand, held upward to sustain his Prismatic Wall. The boy's breathing was coming rapidly, but his face showed the same cold determination that lit the eyes of his general, Harry Potter, who was standing behind the Prismatic Wall at the dead end of the corridor next to an open window, with his hands held mysteriously behind his back.

  The battle had been ridiculously difficult, for the enemy being outnumbered two-to-one. It should have been easy, Dragon Army and the Sunshine Regiment had melded together easily in practice sessions, they'd fought each other long enough to know each other very well indeed. Morale was high, both armies knowing that this time they weren't just fighting to win for themselves, but fighting for a world free of traitors. Despite the surprised protests of both generals, the soldiers of the combined army had insisted on calling themselves Dramione's Sungon Argiment, and produced patches for their insignia of a smiling face wreathed in flames.

  But Harry's soldiers had all blackened their own insignia - it didn't look like paint, more like they'd burned that part of their uniforms - and they'd fought all through the upper levels of Hogwarts with a desperate fury. The cold rage that Draco sometimes saw in Harry had seemed to trickle down into his soldiers, and they'd fought like it hadn't been play. And Harry had emptied out his entire bag of tricks, there'd been tiny metal balls (Granger had identified them as "ball bearings") on floors and staircases, rendering them impassable until cleared, only Harry's army had already practiced coordinated Hover Charms and they could fly their own people right over the obstacles they'd made...

  You couldn't bring devices into the game from outside, but you could Transfigure anything you wanted during the game, so long as it was safe. And that just wasn't fair when you were fighting a boy raised by scientists, who knew about things like ball bearings and skateboards and bungee cords.

  And so it had come to this.

  The survivors of the allied forces had cornered the last remnants of Harry Potter's army in a dead-end corridor.

  Weasley and Vincent had rushed Longbottom at the same time, moving together like they'd practiced for weeks instead of hours, and somehow Longbottom had managed to hex them both before falling himself.

  And now it was Draco and Granger and Padma and Samuel and Harry, and by the looks of Samuel, his Prismatic Wall couldn't last much longer.

  Draco had already leveled his wand at Harry, waiting for the Prismatic Wall to fall of its own accord; there was no need to waste a Breaking Drill Hex before then. Padma leveled her own wand at Samuel, Granger leveled hers at Harry...

  Harry was still hiding his hands behind his back, instead of aiming his wand; and looking at them with a face that could have been carved out of ice.

  It might be a bluff. It probably wasn't.

  There was a brief, tense silence.

  And then Harry spoke.

  "I'm the villain now," the young boy said coldly, "and if you think villains are this easy to finish off, you'd better think again. Beat me when I'm fighting seriously, and I'll stay beaten; but lose, and we'll be doing this all over again next time."

  The boy brought his hands forward, and Draco saw that Harry was wearing strange gloves, with a peculiar grayish material on the fingertips, and buckles that stapped the gloves tightly to his wrists.

  Beside Draco, the Sunshine General gasped in horror; and Draco, without even asking why, fired a Breaking Drill Hex.

  Samuel staggered, he let out a scream as he staggered, but he held the Wall; and if Padma or Granger fired now, they would exhaust their own forces so badly that they might just lose.

  "Harry!" shouted Granger. "You can't be serious!"

  Harry was already in motion.

  And as he swung out the open window, his cold voice said, "Follow if you dare."

  The icy wind howled around them.

  Draco's arms were already starting to feel tired.


  ...It had developed that, yesterday, Harry had carefully demonstrated to Granger exactly how to Transfigure the gloves he was currently wearing, which used something called 'gecko setae'; and how to glue Transfigured patches of the same material to the toes of their shoes; and Harry and Granger had, in innocent childish play, tried climbing around the walls and ceiling a little.

  And that, also yesterday, Harry had supplied Granger with a grand total of exactly two doses of Feather-Falling Potion to carry around in her pouch, "just in case".

  Not that Padma would have followed them, anyway. She wasn't crazy.

  Draco carefully peeled loose his right hand, stretched it over as far as he could, and slapped it down on the stone again. Beside him, Granger did the same.

  They'd already swallowed the Feather-Falling Potion. It was skirting the edges of the game rules, but the potion wouldn't be activated unless one of them actually fell, and so long as they didn't fall they weren't using the item.

  Professor Quirrell was watching them.

  The two of them were perfectly, completely, utterly safe.

  Harry Potter, on the other hand, was going to die.

  "I wonder why Harry is doing this," said General Granger in a reflective tone, as she slowly peeled the fingertips of one hand off the wall with an extended sticky sound. Her hand plopped back down again almost as soon as it was lifted. "I'll have to ask him that after I kill him."

  It was amazing how much the two of them were turning out to have in common.

  Draco didn't really feel like talking right now, but he managed to say, through gritted teeth, "Could be revenge. For the date."

  "Really," said Granger. "After all this time."

  Stick. Plop.

  "How sweet of him," said Granger.

  Stick. Plop.

  "I guess I'll find some truly romantic way to thank him," said Granger.

  Stick. Plop.

  "What's he got against you?" said Granger.

  Stick. Plop.

  The icy wind howled around them.