Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (30 page)

“Yes, I’m very angry!” said Harry. “Grrr!”

Harry’s Internal Critic promptly awarded him the All-Time Award for the Worst Acting in the History of Ever.

“And I just wanted you to know,” Dumbledore said, “I wanted to tell you as early as possible, in case something happens to one of us later, that I am truly, truly sorry. For everything that has already happened, and everything that will.”

Moisture glistened in the old wizard’s eyes.

“And I’m very angry!” said Harry. “So angry that I want to leave right now unless you’ve got anything else to say!”

Just GO before he sets you on fire!
shrieked Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Gryffindor.

“I understand,” said Dumbledore. “One last thing then, Harry. You are
not
to attempt the forbidden door on the third-floor corridor. There’s no possible way you could get through all the traps, and I wouldn’t want to hear that you’d been hurt trying. Why, I doubt that you could so much as open the first door, since it’s locked and you don’t know the spell
Alohomora -
”

Harry spun around and bolted for the exit at top speed, the doorknob turned agreeably in his hand and then he was racing down the spiral stairs even as they turned, his feet almost stumbling over themselves, in just a moment he was at the bottom and the gargoyle was walking aside and Harry fired out of the stairwell like a cannonball.

Harry Potter.

There must have been something about Harry Potter.

It was Thursday for everyone, after all, and yet this sort of thing didn’t seem to happen to anyone else.

It was 6:21pm on Thursday afternoon when Harry Potter, firing out of the stairwell like a cannonball and accelerating at top speed, ran directly into Minerva McGonagall as she was turning a corner on her way to the Headmaster’s office.

Thankfully neither of them were much hurt. As had been explained to Harry a little earlier in the day - back when he was refusing to go anywhere near a broomstick again - Quidditch needed solid iron Bludgers just to stand a decent chance of injuring the players, since wizards tended to be a lot more resistant than Muggles to impacts.

Harry and Professor McGonagall did both end up on the floor, and the parchments she had been carrying went all over the corridor.

There was a terrible, terrible pause.

“Harry Potter,” breathed Professor McGonagall from where she was lying on the floor right next to Harry. Her voice rose to nearly a shriek. “
What were you doing in the Headmaster’s office?”

“Nothing!” squeaked Harry.

“Were you talking about the Defence Professor?”

“No! Dumbledore called me up there and he gave me this big rock and said it was my father’s and I should carry it everywhere!”

There was another terrible pause.

“I see,” said Professor McGonagall, her voice a little calmer. She stood up, brushed herself off, and glared at the scattered parchments, which jumped into a neat stack and scurried back against the corridor wall as though to hide from her gaze. “My sympathies, Mr. Potter, and I apologise for doubting you.”

“Professor McGonagall,” Harry said. His voice was wavering. He pushed himself off the floor, stood, and looked up at her trustworthy,
sane
face. “Professor McGonagall…”

“Yes, Mr. Potter?”

“Do you think I should?” Harry said in a small voice. “Carry my father’s rock everywhere?”

Professor McGonagall sighed. “That is between you and the Headmaster, I’m afraid.” She hesitated. “I will say that ignoring the Headmaster completely is almost never wise. I
am
sorry to hear of your dilemma, Mr. Potter, and if there’s any way I
can
help you with whatever you decide to do -”

“Um,” Harry said. “Actually I was thinking that once I know how, I could Transfigure the rock into a ring and wear it on my finger. If you could teach me how to sustain a Transfiguration -”

“It is good that you asked me first,” Professor McGonagall said, her face growing a bit stern. “If you lost control of the Transfiguration the reversal would cut off your finger and probably rip your hand in half. And at your age, even a ring is too large a target for you to sustain indefinitely without it being a serious drain on your magic. But I can have a ring forged for you with a setting for a jewel, a
small
jewel, in contact with your skin, and you can practice sustaining a safe subject, like a marshmallow. When you have kept it up successfully, even in your sleep, for a full month, I will allow you to Transfigure, ah, your father’s rock…” Professor McGonagall’s voice trailed off. “Did the Headmaster
really -
”

“Yes. Ah… um…”

Professor McGonagall sighed. “That’s a bit strange even for him.” She stooped and picked up the stack of parchments. “I’m sorry about this, Mr. Potter. I apologise again for mistrusting you. But now it’s my own turn to see the Headmaster.”

“Ah… good luck, I guess. Er…”

“Thank you, Mr. Potter.”

“Um…”

Professor McGonagall walked over to the gargoyle, inaudibly spoke the password, and stepped through into the revolving spiral stairs. She began to rise out of sight, and the gargoyle started back -

“
Professor McGonagall the Headmaster set fire to a chicken!”

“He
wha-
”

Any sufficiently advanced J. K. Rowling is indistinguishable from magic.

“That does sound like the sort of thing I would do, doesn’t it?”

It was breakfast time on Friday morning. Harry took another huge bite out of his toast and then tried to remind his brain that scarfing his breakfast wouldn’t actually get him into the dungeons any faster. Anyway they had a full hour of study time between breakfast and the start of Potions.

But dungeons! In Hogwarts! Harry’s imagination was already sketching the chasms, narrow bridges, torchlit sconces, and patches of glowing moss. Would there be rats? Would there be
dragons?

“Harry Potter,” said a quiet voice from behind him.

Harry looked over his shoulder and found himself beholding Ernie Macmillan, smartly dressed in yellow-trimmed robes and looking a little worried.

“Neville thought I should warn you,” Ernie said in a low voice. “I think he’s right. Be careful of the Potions Master in our session today. The older Hufflepuffs told us that Professor Snape can be really nasty to people he doesn’t like, and he doesn’t like most people who aren’t Slytherins. If you say anything smart to him it… it could be really bad for you, from what I’ve heard. Just keep your head down and don’t give him any reason to notice you.”

There was a pause as Harry processed this, and then he lifted his eyebrows. (Harry wished he could raise just one eyebrow, like Spock, but he’d never been able to manage.) “Thanks,” Harry said. “You might’ve just saved me a lot of trouble.”

Ernie nodded, and turned to go back to the Hufflepuff table.

Harry resumed eating his toast.

It was around four bites afterward that someone said “Pardon me,” and Harry turned around to see an older Ravenclaw, looking a little worried -

Some time later, Harry was finishing up his third plate of rashers. (He’d learned to eat heavily at breakfast. He could always eat lightly at lunch if he didn’t end up using the Time-Turner.) And there was yet another voice from behind him saying “Harry?”

“Yes,” Harry said wearily, “I’ll try not to draw Professor Snape’s attention -”

“Oh, that’s hopeless,” said Fred.

“Completely hopeless,” said George.

“So we had the house elves bake you a cake,” said Fred.

“We’re going to put one candle on it for every point you lose for Ravenclaw,” said George.

“And have a party for you at the Gryffindor table during lunch,” said Fred.

“We hope that’ll cheer you up afterward,” finished George.

Harry swallowed his last bite of rasher and turned around. “All right,” said Harry. “I wasn’t going to ask this after Professor Binns, I really wasn’t, but if Professor Snape is
that
awful why hasn’t he been fired?”

“Fired?” said Fred.

“You mean, let go?” said George.

“Yes,” Harry said. “It’s what you do to bad teachers. You fire them. Then you hire a better teacher instead. You don’t have unions or tenure here, right?”

Fred and George were frowning in much the same way that hunter-gatherer tribal elders might frown if you tried to tell them about calculus.

“I don’t know,” said Fred after a while. “I never thought about that.”

“Me neither,” said George.

“Yeah,” said Harry, “I get that a lot. See you at lunch, guys, and don’t blame me if there aren’t any candles on that cake.”

Fred and George both laughed, as if Harry had said something funny, and bowed to him and headed back toward Gryffindor.

Harry turned back to the breakfast table and grabbed a cupcake. His stomach already felt full, but he had a feeling this morning might use a lot of calories.

As he ate his cupcake, Harry thought of the worst teacher he’d met so far, Professor Binns of History. Professor Binns was a ghost. From what Hermione had said about ghosts, it didn’t seem likely that they were fully self-aware. There were no famous discoveries made by ghosts, or much of any original work, no matter who they’d been in life. Ghosts tended to have trouble remembering the current century. Hermione had said they were like accidental portraits, impressed into the surrounding matter by a burst of psychic energy accompanying a wizard’s sudden death.

Harry had run into some stupid teachers during his abortive forays into standard Muggle education - his father had been a lot pickier when it came to selecting grad students as tutors, of course - but History class was the first time he’d encountered a teacher who literally wasn’t sentient.

And it showed, too. Harry had given up after five minutes and started reading a textbook. When it became clear that “Professor Binns” wasn’t going to object, Harry had also reached into his pouch and gotten earplugs.

Did ghosts not require a salary? Was that it? Or was it literally impossible to fire anyone in Hogwarts
even if they died?

Now it seemed that Professor Snape was going about being absolutely awful to everyone who wasn’t a Slytherin and it hadn’t even
occurred
to anyone to terminate his contract.

And the Headmaster had set fire to a chicken.

“Excuse me,” came a worried voice from behind him.

“I swear,” Harry said without turning around, “this place is almost eight and a half percent as bad as what Dad says about Oxford.”

Harry stamped down the stone corridors, looking affronted, annoyed, and infuriated all at once.

“Dungeons!” Harry hissed. “
Dungeons!
These are not dungeons! This is a basement! A
basement!
”

Some of the Ravenclaw girls gave him odd looks. The boys were all used to him by now.

It seemed that the level in which the Potions classroom was located was called the “dungeons” for no better reason than that it was below ground and slightly colder than the main castle.

In
Hogwarts!
In
Hogwarts!
Harry had been waiting his whole life and now he was
still
waiting and if there was anywhere
on the face of the Earth
that had decent dungeons it ought to be Hogwarts! Was Harry going to have to build his own castle if he wanted to see one little bottomless abyss?

A short time later they got to the actual Potions classroom and Harry cheered up considerably.

The Potions classroom had strange preserved creatures floating in huge jars on shelves that covered every centimeter of wall space between the closets. Harry had gotten far enough along in his reading now that he could actually identify some of the creatures, like the Zabriskan Fontema. Albeit the fifty-centimeter spider
looked
like an Acromantula but it was too small to
be
one. He’d tried asking Hermione, but she hadn’t seemed very interested in looking anywhere near where he was pointing.

Harry was looking at a large dust ball with eyes and feet when the assassin swept into the room.

That was the first thought that crossed Harry’s mind when he saw Professor Severus Snape. There was something quiet and deadly about the way the man stalked between the children’s desks. His robes were unkempt, his hair spotted and greasy. There was something about him that seemed reminiscent of Lucius, although the two of them looked nothing remotely alike, and you got the impression that where Lucius would kill you with flawless elegance, this man would simply kill you.

“Sit down,” said Professor Severus Snape. “Now.”

Harry and a few other children who had been standing around talking to each other scrambled for desks. Harry had planned on ending up next to Hermione but somehow he found himself sitting down in the nearest empty desk next to Justin Finch-Fletchley (it was a Doubles session, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff) which put him two desks to the left of Hermione.

Severus seated himself behind the teacher’s desk, and without the slightest transition or introduction, said, “Hannah Abbott.”

“Here,” said Hannah in a somewhat trembling voice.

“Susan Bones.”

“Present.”

And so it went, no one daring to say a word in edgewise, until:

“Ah, yes. Harry Potter. Our new…
celebrity.
”

“The celebrity is present,
sir
.”

Half the class flinched, and some of the smarter ones suddenly looked like they wanted to run out the door while the classroom was still there.

Severus smiled in an anticipatory sort of way and called the next name on his list.

Harry gave a mental sigh. That had happened way too fast for him to do anything about it. Oh well. Clearly this man already didn’t like him, for whatever reason. And when Harry thought about it, better by far that this Potions professor should pick on
him
rather than, say, Neville or Hermione. Harry was a lot better able to defend himself. Yep, probably all for the best.

When full attendance had been taken, Severus swept his gaze over the full class. His eyes were as empty as a night sky without stars.

“You are here,” Severus said in a quiet voice which the students at back strained to hear, “to learn the subtle science and exact art of potionmaking. As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. I don’t expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins,” this in a rather caressing, gloating tone, “bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses,” this was just getting creepier and creepier. “I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death - if you aren’t as great a pack of fools as I usually have to teach.”

Severus somehow seemed to notice the look of skepticism on Harry’s face, or at least his eyes suddenly jumped to where Harry was sitting.

“Potter!” snapped the Potions professor. “What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?”

Harry blinked. “Was that in
Magical Drafts and Potions
?” he said. “I just finished reading it, and I don’t remember anything which used wormwood -”

Hermione’s hand went up and Harry shot her a glare which caused her to raise her hand even higher.

“Tut, tut,” Severus said silkily. “Fame clearly isn’t everything.”

“Really?” Harry said. “But you just told us you’d teach us how to bottle fame. Say, how
does
that work, exactly? You drink it and turn into a celebrity?”

Three-quarters of the class flinched.

Hermione’s hand was dropping slowly back down. Well, that wasn’t surprising. She might be his rival, but she wasn’t the sort of girl who would play along after it became clear that the professor was deliberately trying to humiliate him.

Harry was trying hard to keep control of his temper. The first rejoinder that had crossed his mind was ‘Abracadabra’.

“Let’s try again,” said Severus. “Potter, where would you look if I told you to find me a bezoar?”

“That’s not in the textbook either,” Harry said, “but in one Muggle book I read that a trichinobezoar is a mass of solidified hair found in a human stomach, and Muggles used to believe it would cure any poison -”

“Wrong,” Severus said. “A bezoar is found in the stomach of a goat, it is not made of hair, and it will cure most poisons but not all.”

“I didn’t
say
it would, I said that was what I read in one Muggle book -”

“No one here is interested in your
pathetic
Muggle books. Final try. What is the difference, Potter, between monksblood and wolfsbane?”

That did it.

“You know,” Harry said icily, “in one of my quite
fascinating
Muggle books, they describe a study in which people managed to make themselves look very smart by asking questions about random facts that only they knew. Apparently the onlookers only noticed that the askers knew and the answerers didn’t, and failed to adjust for the unfairness of the underlying game. So, Professor, can you tell me how many electrons are in the outermost orbital of a carbon atom?”

Severus’s smile widened. “Four,” he said. “It is a useless fact which no one should bother writing down, however. And for your information, Potter, asphodel and wormwood make a sleeping potion so powerful it is known as the Draught of Living Death. As for monkshood and wolfsbane, they are the same plant, which also goes by the name of aconite, as you would know if you had read
One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi.
Thought you didn’t need to open the book before coming, eh, Potter? All the rest of you should be copying that down so that you will not be as ignorant as him.” Severus paused, looking quite pleased with himself. “And that will be… five points? No, let us make it an even ten points from Ravenclaw for backchat.”

Hermione gasped, along with a number of others.

“Professor Severus Snape,” Harry bit out. “I know of nothing which I have done to earn your enmity. If there is some problem you have with me which I do not know about, I suggest we -”

“Shut up, Potter. Ten more points from Ravenclaw. The rest of you, open your books to page 3.”

There was only a slight, only a very faint burning sensation in the back of Harry’s throat, and no moisture at all in his eyes. If crying was not an effective strategy for destroying this Potions professor then there was no point in crying.

Slowly, Harry sat up very straight. All his blood seemed to have been drained away and replaced with liquid nitrogen. He knew he’d been trying to keep his temper but he couldn’t seem to remember why.

“Harry,” whispered Hermione frantically from two desks over, “stop, please, it’s all right, we won’t count it -”

“Talking in class, Granger? Three -”

“So,” said a voice colder than zero Kelvin, “how does one go about filing a formal complaint against an abusive professor? Does one talk to the Deputy Headmistress, write a letter to the Board of Governors… would you care to explain how it works?”

The class was utterly frozen.

“Detention for one month, Potter,” Severus said, smiling even more broadly.

“I decline to recognize your authority as a teacher and I will not serve any detention you give.”

People stopped breathing.

Severus’s smile vanished. “Then you will be -” his voice stopped short.