Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

there."

"Draco, I'm an Occlumens -"

"OH THAT IS SUCH A LIE -"

"I was trained by Mr. Bester. Professor Quirrell set it up. Look, Draco, I'll take one drop of Veritaserum if you can get it, I'm just warning you that I'm an Occlumens. Not a perfect Occlumens, but Mr. Bester said I was putting up a complete block, and I could probably beat Veritaserum."

"You're in your first year at Hogwarts! That's just crazy!"

"Know a Legilimens you can trust? I'll be happy to demonstrate - look, Draco, I'm sorry, but doesn't the fact that I told you count for something? I could have just let you do it, you know."

"WHY? Why are you always like this, Harry? Why do you have to mess everything up even when it's IMPOSSIBLE? And stop smiling, this isn't funny!"

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know it's not funny, I -"

It took a while for Draco to get himself under control.

But Harry was right. Harry could have just let Draco administer the Veritaserum. If he really was an Occlumens... Draco didn't know who he could ask to try Legilimency, but he could at least ask Professor Quirrell if it was true... Could Draco trust Professor Quirrell? Maybe Professor Quirrell would just say anything Harry asked him to.

Then Draco remembered the other thing Harry had told him to ask Professor Quirrell, and thought of a different test.

"You know," said Draco. "You know what it costs me, if I agree that the poison in Slytherin's House is hating Muggleborns, and say that Lily Potter's death was sad. And that's part of your plan, don't tell me it's not."

Harry said nothing, which was wise of him.

"There's something I want from you in return," said Draco. "And before then, an experimental test I want to try -"

Draco pushed open the door to which the portraits had directed them, and this time it was the right door. Before them was a small empty place of stone set against the night sky. Not a roof like the one he'd dropped Harry from, but a tiny and proper courtyard, far above the ground. With proper railings, elaborate traceries of stone that flushed seamlessly into the stone floor... How so much artistry had been infused into the creation of Hogwarts was something that still awed Draco every time he thought about it. There must have been some way to do it all at once, no one could have detailed so much piece by piece, the castle changed and every new piece was like that. It was so far beyond the wizardry of these fading days that no one would have believed it if they hadn't seen the proof in Hogwarts itself.

Cloudless and cold, the winter night sky; it got dark long before students' curfew, in the final days of January.

The stars shining brightly, in the clear air.

Harry had said that being under the stars would help him.

Draco touched his chest with his wand, slid his fingers in a practiced motion, and said, "Thermos." A warmth spread through him, starting from his heart; the wind went on blowing on his face, but he was no longer cold.

"Thermos," Harry's voice said behind him.

They went together to the railing, to look down at the ground a long way below. Draco tried to figure if they were in one of the towers that could be seen from outside, and found that right now he couldn't quite seem to picture how Hogwarts looked from outside. But the ground below was always the same; he could see the Forbidden Forest as a vague outline, and moonlight glittering from the Hogwarts Lake.

"You know," Harry's voice said quietly from beside him where his arms leaned on the railing next to Draco's, "one of the things that Muggles get really wrong, is that they don't turn all their lights out at night. Not even for one hour every month, not even for fifteen minutes once a year. The photons scatter in the atmosphere and wash out all but the brightest stars, and the night sky doesn't look the same at all, not unless you go far away from any cities. Once you've looked up at the sky over Hogwarts, it's hard to imagine living in a Muggle city, where you wouldn't be able to see the stars. You certainly wouldn't want to spend your whole life in Muggle cities, once you'd seen the night sky over Hogwarts."

Draco glanced at Harry, and found that Harry was craning his neck to stare up at where the Milky Way arched across the darkness.

"Of course," Harry went on, his voice still quiet, "you can't ever see the stars properly from Earth, either, the air always gets in the way. You have to look from somewhere else, if you want to see the real thing, the stars burning hard and bright, like their true selves. Have you ever wished that you could just whisk yourself up into the night sky, Draco, and go look at what there is to see around other Suns than ours? If there were no limit to the power of your magic, is that one of the things you would do, if you could do anything?"

There was a silence, and then Draco realized that he was expected to answer. "I didn't think of it before," Draco said. Without any conscious decision, his voice came out as soft and hushed as Harry's. "Do you really think anyone would ever be able to do that?"

"I don't think it'll be that easy," said Harry. "But I know I don't mean to spend my whole life on Earth."

It would have been something to laugh at, if Draco hadn't known that some Muggles had already left, without even using magic.

"To pass your test," Harry said, "I'm going to have to say what it means to me, that thought, the whole thing, not the shorter version I tried to explain to you before. But you should be able to see it's the same idea, only more general. So my version of the thought, Draco, is that when we go out into the stars, we might find other people there. And if so, they certainly won't look like we do. There might be things out there that are grown from crystal, or big pulsating blobs... or they might be made of magic, now that I think about it. So with all that strangeness, how do you recognize a person? Not by the