Eliezer Yudkowsky - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Harry closed his eyes, and his own hand massaged his forehead; if he had seen it from the outside, it would have looked the mirror of Professor Quirrell in deep thought.

The problem of defeating Professor Quirrell was looking increasingly difficult, even by the standards of the sort of impossible problems that Harry had solved already. If communicating that difficulty was what Professor Quirrell was trying to do, he was succeeding. Harry was starting to seriously consider the possibility that it might be better to offer to rule Britain as Voldemort’s nonhomicidal delegate, if Professor Quirrell himself would just agree to stop killing people all the time. Even mostly .

But that wasn’t likely to happen.

Harry stared at his hands, from where he had sat down upon the floor, feeling sadness shading over into despair. The Lord Voldemort who’d given Harry his dark side had spent that long thinking things over and reflecting on his own thought processes… and had emerged as the calm, clear-headed, and still homicidal Professor Quirrell.

Professor Quirrell added a pinch of golden hair to the potion of effulgence, and that reminded Harry that time was continuing to move; the locks of bright hair were rarer than the bellflowers.

“I ask my second question,” Harry said. “Tell me about the Philosopher’s Stone. Does it do anything besides making Transfigurations permanent? Is it possible to make more Stones, and why is that problem hard?”

Professor Quirrell was bent over the potion, and Harry could not see his face. “Very well, I shall tell you the Stone’s story as I have inferred it. The one and only power of the Stone is the imposition of permanency, to render a temporary form into a true and lasting substance—a power absolutely beyond ordinary spells. Conjurations such as the castle Hogwarts are maintained by a constant well of magic. Even Metamorphmagi cannot manifest golden fingernails and then trim them for sale. It is theorized that the Metamorphmagus curse merely rearranges the substance of their flesh, like a Muggle smith manipulates iron with hammer and tongs; and their body contains no gold. If Merlin himself could create gold from thin air, history does not record it. So the Stone, we can guess even before research, must be a very old thing indeed. In contrast, Nicholas Flamel has been known to the world for a mere six centuries.

Tell me the obvious next question to ask, boy, if you wanted to trace the Stone’s history.”

“Um,” Harry said. He rubbed his forehead, concentrating. If the

Stone was old, but the world had only known Nicholas Flamel for six centuries… “Was there some other very long-lived wizard who disappeared at around the same time Nicholas Flamel showed up?”

“Close,” said Professor Quirrell. “You recall that six centuries ago there was a Dark Lady called undying, the sorceress Baba Yaga? She was said to be able to heal any wound in herself, to change shape into any form she pleased… she held the Stone of Permanency, obviously. And then one year Baba Yaga agreed to teach Battle Magic at Hogwarts, under an old and respected truce.” Professor Quirrell looked… angry, a look such as Harry had rarely seen on him. “But she was not trusted, and so there was invoked a curse. Some curses are easier to cast when they bind yourself and others alike; Slytherin’s Parselmouth curse is an example of such. In this case, Baba Yaga’s signature, and signatures from every student and teacher of Hogwarts, were placed within an ancient device known as the Goblet of Fire. Baba Yaga swore not to shed a drop of students’ blood, nor take from the students anything that was theirs. In return, the students swore not to shed a drop of Baba Yaga’s blood, nor take from her anything that was hers. So they all signed, with the Goblet of Fire to witness it and punish the transgressor.”

Professor Quirrell picked up a new ingredient, a loose thread of gold wrapped around a pinch of foul-looking substance. “Entering her sixth year at Hogwarts, then, was a witch named Perenelle. And although Perenelle was new-come into the beauty of her youth, her heart was already blacker than Baba Yaga’s own—”

“ You’re calling her evil?” Harry said, then realized he had just committed the fallacy of ad hominem tu quoque.

“Hush, boy, I am telling the story. Where was I? Ah, yes, Perenelle, the beautiful and covetous. Perenelle seduced the Dark Lady over the months, with gentle touches and flirtations and the shy pretense of innocence. The Dark Lady’s heart was captured, and they became lovers. And then one night Perenelle whispered how she had heard of Baba

Yaga’s shape-changing power and how this thought had enflamed her desires; thus Perenelle swayed Baba Yaga to come to her with the Stone in hand, to assume many guises in a single night, for their pleasures. Among other forms Perenelle bid Baba Yaga take the form of a man; and they lay together in the fashion of a man and a woman. But Perenelle had been a virgin until that night. And since they were all rather oldfashioned in those days, the Goblet of Fire accounted that as the shedding of Perenelle’s blood, and the taking of what was hers; thus Baba Yaga was tricked into being forsworn, and the Goblet rendered her defenseless. Then Perenelle killed the unsuspecting Baba Yaga as she slept in Perenelle’s bed, killed the Dark Lady who had loved her and come peacefully to Hogwarts under truce; and that was the end of the pact by which Dark Wizards and Witches taught Battle Magic at Hogwarts. For the next few centuries the Goblet of Fire was used to oversee pointless inter-school tournaments, and then it resided in a disused chamber at Beauxbatons, until I finally stole it.” Professor Quirrell dropped a pale beige-pink twig into the cauldron, and its color changed to white just as it touched the surface. “But I digress. Perenelle took the Stone from Baba Yaga, and assumed the guise and name of Nicholas Flamel. She also kept her identity as Perenelle, calling herself Flamel’s wife. The two have appeared together in public, but that might be done by any number of obvious methods.”

“And the Stone’s manufacture?” said Harry, his brain working to process all this. “I saw an alchemical recipe for it, in a book—”

“Another lie. Perenelle was making it appear as though ‘Nicholas Flamel’ had earned the right to live forever by completing a great magic that any could attempt. And she was giving others a false path to pursue, instead of seeking the one true Stone as Perenelle had sought Baba Yaga’s.” Professor Quirrell looked rather sour. “It should come as no surprise that I spent years trying to master that false recipe. Next you will ask why I did not kidnap, torture, and kill Perenelle after I learned the truth.”

This had not in fact been a question that had come into Harry’s mind.

Professor Quirrell continued to speak. “The answer is that Perenelle had foreseen and forestalled the ambitions of Dark Wizards like myself. ‘Nicholas Flamel’ publicly took Unbreakable Vows not to be coerced by any means into relinquishing his Stone—to guard immortality from the covetous, he claimed, as if that were a public service. I was afraid the Stone would be lost forever, if Perenelle died without saying where it was hidden, and her Vow prevented attempts at torture. Further, I had hopes of gaining Perenelle’s knowledge, if I could find the right strategy to extract it from her. Though Perenelle began with little lore of her own, she has held hostage the lives of wizards greater than herself, holding out dribs and drabs of healing in exchange for secrets, and small reversals of age in exchange for power. Perenelle does not condescend to bestow any real youth upon others—but if you hear of a wizard who lived, greybearded, to the age of two hundred and fifty, you may be sure that her hand was in play. By my own generation, the centuries had given Perenelle enough of an advantage that she could raise up Albus Dumbledore as a counterweight to the Dark Lord Grindelwald. When I appeared as Lord Voldemort, Perenelle raised up Dumbledore yet further, parceling out another drop of her hoarded lore whenever Lord Voldemort seemed to gain an advantage. I felt like I ought to be able to figure out something clever to do with that situation, but I never did. I did not attack her directly, for I was not sure of my great creation; it was not impossible that I would someday need to go begging to her for a dollop of reversed age.” Professor Quirrell dropped two bellflowers at once into the potion, and they seemed to merge as they touched the bubbling liquid. “But now I am sure of my creation, and so I have decided that the time has come to take the Stone by force.”