Eliezer Yudkowsky - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Maybe.” Harry went on staring at his knees. “Or maybe it’s worse than that. Headmaster, what does it mean if a centaur doesn’t like me?” What does it mean when a member of a race of magical creatures known for Divination gives you a lecture on people who are ignorant of consequences, apologizes, and then tries to stab you with a spear?

“A centaur?” the Headmaster said. “When did you—ah, the TimeTurner. You are the reason why I could not travel back to before the event, on pain of paradox.”

“Am I? I guess I am.” Harry shook his head distantly. “Sorry.”

“With very few exceptions,” Dumbledore said, “centaurs do not like wizards, at all.”

“This was a bit more specific than that.” “What did the centaur say to you?” Harry didn’t reply.

“Ah.” The Headmaster hesitated. “Centaurs have been wrong many times, and if there is anyone in the world who could confuse the stars themselves, it is you.”

Harry looked up, and saw the blue eyes once more gentle behind the half-circle glasses.

“Do not fret too much about it,” said Albus Dumbledore.

June 3rd, 1992.

Professor Quirrell was very sick.

He’d seemed better for a while, after drinking his unicorn’s blood in May, but the air of intense power which had surrounded him afterward hadn’t lasted even a day. By the Ides of May, Professor Quirrell’s hands had been trembling again, though subtly. The Defense Professor’s medical regimen had been interrupted too early, it seemed.

Six days ago Professor Quirrell had collapsed at dinnertime.

Madam Pomfrey had tried to forbid Professor Quirrell from teaching classes, and Professor Quirrell had shouted at her in front of everyone. The Defense Professor had shouted that he was dying regardless, and would use his remaining time as he chose.

So Madam Pomfrey, blinking hard, had forbidden the Defense Professor from doing anything except teaching his classes. She’d asked for a volunteer to help her take Professor Quirrell to a room in the Hogwarts infirmary. More than a hundred students had risen to their feet, only half wearing green.

The Defense Professor no longer sat at the Head Table during mealtimes. He didn’t cast spells during lessons. The oldest students who had the most Quirrell points helped him to teach, the seventh-years who had already sat their Defense N.E.W.T.s in May. They took turns floating him from his room in the infirmary to his classes, and brought him food at mealtimes. Professor Quirrell proctored his Battle Magic classes from a chair, sitting.

Watching Hermione die had hurt more than this, but that had ended much more quickly.

This is the true Enemy.

Harry had already thought that, after Hermione had died. Being forced to watch Professor Quirrell die, day by day, week by week, had not done much to change his mind.

This is the true Enemy I have to face, Harry thought in Wednesday’s Defense class, watching Professor Quirrell leaning far to one side of his chair before that day’s seventh-year assistant caught him. Everything else is just shadows and distraction.

Harry had been turning over Trelawney’s prophecy in his mind, wondering if maybe the true Dark Lord had nothing to do with Lord Voldemort at all. Born to those who have thrice defied him seemed to strongly invoke the Peverell brothers and the three Deathly Hallows—though Harry didn’t exactly see how Death could have marked him as an equal, which seemed to imply some sort of deliberate action on Death’s part.

This alone is the true Enemy, Harry thought. After this will come Professor

McGonagall, Mum and Dad, even Neville in his time, unless the wound in the world can be healed before then.

There was nothing Harry could do. Madam Pomfrey was already doing for Professor Quirrell what magic could do, and magic seemed strictly superior to Muggle techniques when it came to healing.

There was nothing Harry could do.

Nothing he could do.

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

Harry raised his hand, and knocked upon the door, in case the person there could no longer detect him.

“What is it?” came a strained voice from the infirmary room. “It’s me.”

There was a long pause. “Come in,” said that voice.

Harry slipped inside and closed the door behind him, and cast the Quieting Charm. He stood as far away from Professor Quirrell as he could, just in case his own magic was making the Professor feel uncomfortable. Though the sense of doom was fading, fading with each passing day. Professor Quirrell was lying back in his infirmary bed, only his head propped up by a pillow. A coverlet of cottony material, red with black stitching, covered him to his chest. A book hovered before his eyes, outlined in a pale glow which also surrounded a black cube lying by the bed. Not the Defense Professor’s own magic, then, but a device of some kind.

The book was Thinking Physics by Epstein, the same book Harry had lent to Draco a few months back. Harry had stopped fretting about its possible misuse several weeks earlier.

“This—” Professor Quirrell said, and coughed, it didn’t sound quite right. “This is a fascinating book… if I’d ever realized…” A laugh, mixed with another cough. “Why did I assume the Muggle arts… must not be mine? That they would be… of no use to me? Why did I never bother trying… to test it experimentally… as you would say? In case… my assumption… was wrong? It seems sheerly foolish of me… in retrospect…”

Harry was having more trouble speaking than Professor Quirrell was. Wordlessly, Harry reached into his pocket, and laid a kerchief on the floor; which he unfolded to reveal a small white pebble, smooth and round.

“What’s that?” said the Defense Professor.

“It’s a, it’s a, Transfigured, unicorn.”

Harry had checked the books, had learned that since he was too young to have sexual thoughts he would be able to approach a unicorn without fear. The same books had said nothing about unicorns being smart. Harry had already noticed that every intelligent magical species was at least partially humanoid, from merfolk to centaurs to giants, from elves to goblins to veela. All had essentially humanlike emotions, many were known to interbreed with humans. Harry had already reasoned out that magic didn’t create new intelligence but just changed the shape of genetically human beings. Unicorns were equinoid, were not even partially humanoid, didn’t talk, used no tools, they were almost certainly just magical horses. If it was right to eat a cow to feed yourself for a day, then it had to be right to drink a unicorn’s blood in order to stave off death for weeks. You couldn’t have it both ways.

So Harry had gone into the Forbidden Forest wearing his Cloak. He had searched the Grove of Unicorns until he saw her, a proud creature with a pure white coat and violet hair, with three blue blotches on her flank. Harry had gone over, and the sapphire eyes had stared at him inquisitively. Harry had tapped out the sequence 1–2–3 on the ground several times with his shoes. The unicorn had shown no sign of responding in kind. Harry had reached over, taken her hoof in his hand, and tapped the same sequence with the unicorn’s hoof. The unicorn had only looked at him curiously.

And something about feeding the unicorn the sleeping-potion-laced sugar cubes had still felt like murder.

That magic gives their existence a weight of meaning which no mere animal could possess… to slay something innocent to save oneself, that is a very grave sin. Those two phrases, from Professor McGonagall, from the centaur, had both run through Harry’s mind, over and over as the white unicorn had yawned, laid down on the ground, and closed its eyes for what would be the last time. The Transfiguration had lasted an hour, and Harry’s eyes had watered repeatedly as he worked. The unicorn’s death might not have come then, but it would come soon enough, and it was foreign to Harry’s nature to try to refuse responsibility of any kind. Harry would just have to hope that, if you didn’t kill the unicorn to save yourself, if you did it to help a friend, it would be acceptable in the end.