Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (166 page)

“Hermione,” Harry said seriously, as he started to dig down into the red-velvet pouch again, “don’t punish yourself when a bright idea doesn’t work out. You’ve got to go through a
lot
of flawed ideas to find one that might work. And if you send your brain negative feedback by frowning when you think of a flawed idea, instead of realizing that idea-suggesting is good behavior by your brain to be encouraged, pretty soon you won’t think of any ideas at all.” Harry put down two heart-shaped chocolates beside the book. “Here, have another chocolate. Besides the one from earlier, I mean. This one is to reinforce your brain for generating a good candidate strategy.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Hermione said in a small voice, but she didn’t touch the chocolate. She started to turn the pages back to 167, where she’d been reading before Harry had come in.

(Hermione Granger did not require
bookmarks,
of course.)

Harry was leaning over slightly, his head almost touching her shoulder, watching the pages as she turned them, as though he might be able to glean valuable information from glimpsing the page for only a quarter-second. Breakfast hadn’t been long ago, and she could clearly identify, from the faint scent of his breath, that Harry’d eaten banana pudding for dessert.

Harry spoke again. “So with all that said… and please take this as a positive reinforcement… did you really try to invent a way to
mass-produce immortality
so that I could
pay off my debt to Lucius Malfoy?
”

“Yes,” she said in an even smaller voice. Even when she
tried
to think like Harry, it seemed she hadn’t yet got the knack of it. “So what’ve you been doing this whole time, Harry?”

Harry made a disgusted face. “Trying to collect evidence on the whole ‘Who Framed Hermione Granger’ mystery.”

“I…” Hermione looked up at Harry. “Shouldn’t I… be trying to solve my
own
mystery, though?” It hadn’t been her first thought, her first priority, but now that Harry mentioned it…

“That wouldn’t work in this case,” Harry said soberly. “There’s too many people who’ll talk to me and not you… and I’m also sorry to say that some of them made me promise not to talk to anyone else. Sorry, I don’t think you can help much on this one.”

“Okay, I guess,” Hermione said leadenly. “Fine. You do everything. You gather all the clues and talk to all the suspects while I just sit here in the library. Let me know after it turns out that it was Professor Quirrell who did it.”

“Hermione…” Harry said. “Why is it so important
who
does what? Shouldn’t it be more important to get everything solved, than who solves it?”

“I guess you’re right,” Hermione said. She lifted her hands to press up at her eyes. “I guess it doesn’t matter any more. Everyone’s going to think - I
know
it’s not your fault, Harry, you were - you were being Good, you were a perfect gentleman - but no matter what I do now, they’ll all think that I’m just - someone for you to rescue.” She paused, and said, with her voice quivering, “And maybe they’re
right
, Harry.”

“Whoa, whoa, hold on there a second -”

“I can’t scare Dementors. I can get Outstandings in Charms class, but I can’t scare Dementors.”

“
I’ve got a mysterious dark side!
” Harry hissed, after his head turned around to scan the library. (There was one boy in a distant corner, who did look in their direction occasionally, but he would’ve been too far away to hear anything even without the Quieting Barrier.) “I’ve got a dark side that
definitely
isn’t a child, and who knows what other crazy magical stuff going on in my head - Professor Quirrell claimed that I become whoever I believe I am - that’s all
cheating,
don’t you see, Hermione? There’s an arrangement that the school administration made that I’m not supposed to talk about, so that the Boy-Who-Lived could have more time to study every day, I’m
cheating
and you’re
still beating me in Charms class.
I’m - I’m probably not - the Boy-Who-Lived probably isn’t even something that you could properly call a child - and you’re
still competing
with that. Don’t you realize, if it
wasn’t
for people paying attention to me, you’d look like the most powerful witch to come along in a century? When you can fight three older bullies by yourself, and win?”

“I don’t know,” she said, pressing her hands again over her eyes, with her voice wavering. “All I know is - even if that’s all
true
- nobody’s ever going to see me for myself anymore, ever.”

“All right,” Harry said after a while. “I see what you mean. Instead of the famous Potter-and-Granger research team, there’ll be Harry Potter and his lab assistant. Um… here’s an idea. How about if I
don’t
focus on making money for a while? I mean, the debt doesn’t come due until I graduate Hogwarts. So you can do it yourself and show the world you’ve still got it. And if you coincidentally crack the secret of immortality along the way, we’ll just call it a bonus.”

The thought of Harry relying on
her
to come up with a solution seemed… like a crushing burden of responsibility to dump on a poor traumatized twelve-year-old girl, and she wanted to hug him for offering her a way to restore her self-respect as a heroine, and it was what she
deserved
for being a horrible person and speaking sharply to Harry all the time, when all along he’d been a truer friend to her than she’d ever been to him, and it was good that he still thought she could do things, and…

“Is there some amazing rational thing you do when your mind’s running in all different directions?” she managed.

“My own approach is usually to identify the different desires, give them names, conceive of them as separate individuals, and let them argue it out inside my head. So far the main persistent ones are my Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, Gryffindor, and Slytherin sides, my Inner Critic, and my simulated copies of you, Neville, Draco, Professor McGonagall, Professor Flitwick, Professor Quirrell, Dad, Mum, Richard Feynman, and Douglas Hofstadter.”

Hermione considered trying this before her Common Sense warned that it might be a dangerous sort of thing to pretend. “There’s a copy of
me
inside your head?”

“Of course there is!” Harry said. The boy suddenly looked a bit more vulnerable. “You mean there
isn’t
a copy of me living in
your
head?”

There
was,
she realized; and not only that, it talked in Harry’s exact voice.

“It’s rather unnerving now that I think about it,” said Hermione. “I do have a copy of you living in my head. It’s talking to me right now using your voice, arguing how this is perfectly normal.”

“Good,” Harry said seriously. “I mean, I don’t see how people could be friends without that.”

She continued reading her book, then, Harry seeming content to watch the pages over her shoulder.

She’d gotten all the way to number seventy, Katherine Scott, who’d apparently invented a way to turn small animals into lemon tarts, when she finally worked up the courage to speak.

“Harry?” she said. (She was leaning a bit away from him now, though she didn’t realize it.) “If there’s a copy of Draco Malfoy in your head, does that mean you’re friends with Draco Malfoy?”

“Well…” Harry said. He sighed. “Yeah, I’d been meaning to talk with you about this anyway. I kind of wish I’d talked to you sooner. Anyway, how can I put this… I was corrupting him?”

“What do you mean
corrupting?
”

“Tempting him to the Light Side of the Force.”

Her mouth just stayed open.

“You know, like the Emperor and Darth Vader, only in reverse.”

“
Draco Malfoy
,” she said. “Harry, do you have
any idea -
”

“Yes.”

“- the sort of things Malfoy has been
saying
about me? What he said he’d
do
to me, as soon as he got the chance? I don’t know what he told to
you,
but Daphne Greengrass told me what Malfoy says when he’s in Slytherin. It’s
unspeakable,
Harry! It’s unspeakable in the completely literal sense that I can’t say it out loud!”

“When was this?” Harry said. “At the start of the year? Did Daphne say
when
this was?”

“No,” Hermione said. “Because it doesn’t matter when, Harry. Anyone who said things - like Malfoy said - they can’t be a good person. It doesn’t matter what you tempted him to, he’s still a rotten person, because no matter
what
a good person would
never
-”

“You’re wrong.” Harry said, looking her straight in the eyes. “I can guess what Draco threatened to do to you, because the second time I met him, he talked about doing it to a ten-year-old girl. But don’t you see, on the day Draco Malfoy arrived in Hogwarts, he’d spent his whole previous life being raised by
Death Eaters.
It would’ve required a
supernatural intervention
for him to have
your
morality given
his
environment -”

Hermione was shaking her head violently. “
No,
Harry. Nobody has to
tell
you that hurting people is wrong, it’s not something you don’t do because the teacher says it’s not allowed, it’s something you don’t do because - because you can
see when people are hurting,
don’t you know that, Harry?” Her voice was shaking now. “That’s not - that’s not a
rule
people follow like the rules for algebra! If you can’t
see
it, if you can’t feel it
here,
” her hand slapped down over the center of her chest, not quite where her heart was located, but that didn’t matter because it was all really in the brain anyway, “then you just don’t have it!”

The thought came to her, then, that Harry might
not
have it.

“There’s history books you haven’t read,” Harry said quietly. “There’s books you haven’t read yet, Hermione, and they might give you a sense of perspective. A few centuries earlier - I think it was definitely still around in the seventeenth century - it was a popular village entertainment to take a wicker basket, or a bundle, with a dozen live cats in it, and -”

“Stop,” she said.

“- roast it over a bonfire. Just a regular celebration. Good clean fun. And I’ll give them this, it was cleaner fun than burning women they thought were witches. Because the way people are built, Hermione, the way people are built to
feel
inside -” Harry put a hand over his own heart, in the anatomically correct position, then paused and moved his hand up to point toward his head at around the ear level, “- is that they hurt when they see their
friends
hurting. Someone inside their circle of concern, a member of their own tribe. That feeling has an off-switch, an off-switch labeled ‘enemy’ or ‘foreigner’ or sometimes just ‘stranger’. That’s how people are, if they don’t
learn
otherwise. So, no, it does
not
indicate that Draco Malfoy was inhuman or even unusually evil, if he grew up believing that it was fun to hurt his enemies -”

“If you believe that
,
” she said with her voice unsteady, “if you
can
believe that, then you’re evil. People are always responsible for what they do. It doesn’t matter what anyone
tells
you to do, you’re the one who does it. Everyone knows that -”

“
No they don’t!
You grew up in a post-World-War-Two society where ‘I vas only followink orders’ is something
everyone knows
the bad guys said. In the fifteenth century they would’ve called it honourable fealty.” Harry’s voice was rising. “Do you think you’re, you’re just
genetically
better than everyone who lived back then? Like if you’d been transported back to fifteenth-century London as a baby, you’d realize
all on your own
that burning cats was wrong, witch-burning was wrong, slavery was wrong, that every sentient being ought to be in your circle of concern? Do you think you’d
finish
realizing all that by the first day you got to Hogwarts? Nobody ever
told
Draco he was personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society he grew up in. And
despite that
, it only took him four months to get to the point where he’d grab a Muggleborn falling off a building.” Harry’s eyes were as fierce as she’d ever seen him. “I’m not
finished
corrupting Draco Malfoy, but I think
he’s done pretty well so far.
”

The problem with having such a good memory was that she
did
remember.

She remembered Draco Malfoy grabbing her wrist, so hard she’d had a bruise afterward, while she was falling off the roof of Hogwarts.

She remembered Draco Malfoy helping her up, after that mysterious tripping jinx had sent her stumbling into the Slytherin Quidditch Captain’s plate of food.

And she remembered - it was, in fact, the reason she’d brought up the topic in the first place - how she’d felt when she’d heard Draco Malfoy’s testimony under Veritaserum.

“Why didn’t you
tell
me any of this?” Hermione said, and despite herself, her voice rose in pitch. “If I’d
known
-”

“It wasn’t my secret to tell you,” Harry said. “Draco’s the one who would’ve been at risk, if his father had found out.”

“I’m not stupid, Mr. Potter. What’s the
real
reason you didn’t tell me, and what were you
actually
doing with Mr. Malfoy?”

“Ah. Well…” Harry broke eye contact with her, and looked down at the library table.

“Draco Malfoy told the Aurors under Veritaserum that he wanted to know if he could beat me, so he challenged me to a duel to
test it empirically
. Those were his
exact words
according to the transcript.”

“Right,” Harry said, still not meeting her eyes. “Hermione Granger. Of
course
she’ll remember the exact wording. It doesn’t matter if she’s chained to her chair, on trial for murder in front of the entire Wizengamot -”

“What were you
really
doing with Draco Malfoy?”