Draco did not have to fake being speechless.
Father had once taken him to see a play called The Tragedy of Light, about this incredibly clever Slytherin named Light who'd set out to purify the world of evil using an ancient ring that could kill anyone whose name and face he knew, and who'd been opposed by another incredibly clever Slytherin, a villain named Lawliet, who'd worn a disguise to conceal his true face; and Draco had shouted and cheered at all the right parts, especially in the middle; and then the play had ended sadly and Draco had been hugely disappointed and Father had gently pointed out that the word 'Tragedy' was right there in the title.
Afterward, Father had asked Draco if he understood why they had gone to see this play.
Draco had said it was to teach him to be as cunning as Light and Lawliet when he grew up.
Father had said that Draco couldn't possibly be more wrong, and pointed out that while Lawliet had cleverly concealed his face there had been no good reason for him to tell Light his name. Father had then gone on to demolish almost every part of the play, while Draco listened with his eyes growing wider and wider. And Father had finished by saying that plays like this were always unrealistic, because if the playwright had known what someone actually as smart as Light would actually do, the playwright would have tried to take over the world himself instead of just writing plays about it.
That was when Father had told Draco about the Rule of Three, which was that any plot which required more than three different things to happen would never work in real life.
Father had further explained that since only a fool would attempt a plot that was as complicated as possible, the real limit was two.
Draco couldn't even find words to describe the sheer gargantuan unworkability of Harry's master plan.
But it was just the sort of mistake you would make if you didn't have any mentors and thought you were clever and had learned about plotting by watching plays.
"So," said Harry, "what do you think of the plan?"
"It's clever..." Draco said slowly. Shouting brilliant! and gasping in awe would have looked too suspicious. "Harry, can I ask a question?"
"Sure," said Harry.
"Why did you buy Granger an expensive pouch?"
"To show no hard feelings," said Harry at once. "Though I expect she'll also feel awkward if she refuses any small requests I make over the next couple of months."
And that was when Draco realized that Harry actually was trying to be his friend.
Harry's move against Granger had been smart, maybe even brilliant. Make your enemy not suspect you, and put them into your debt in a friendly way so that you could maneuver them into position just by asking them. Draco couldn't have gotten away with that, his target would have been too suspicious, but the Boy-Who-Lived could. So the first step of Harry's plot was to give his enemy an expensive present, Draco wouldn't have thought of that, but it could work...
If you were Harry's enemy, his plots might be hard to see through at first, they might even be stupid, but his reasoning would make sense once you understood it, you would comprehend that he was trying to hurt you.
The way Harry was acting toward Draco right now did not make sense.
Because if you were Harry's friend, then he tried to be friends with you in the alien, incomprehensible way he'd been raised by Muggles to do, even if it meant destroying your entire life.
The silence stretched.
"I know that I've abused our friendship terribly," Harry said finally. "But please realize, Draco, that in the end, I just wanted the two of us to find the truth together. Is that something you can forgive?"
A fork with two paths, but with only one path easy to go back on later if Draco changed his mind...
"I guess I understand what you were trying to do," Draco lied, "so yes."
Harry's eyes lit up. "I'm glad to hear that, Draco," he said softly.
The two students stood in that alcove, Harry still dipped in the lone sunbeam, Draco in shadow.
And Draco realized with a note of horror and despair, that although it was a terrifying fate indeed to be Harry's friend, Harry now had so many different avenues for threatening Draco that being his enemy would be even worse.
Probably.
Maybe.
Well, he could always switch to being enemies later...
He was doomed.
"So," Draco said. "Now what?"
"We study again next Saturday?"
"It better not go like the last one -"
"Don't worry, it won't," said Harry. "A few more Saturdays like that and you'd be ahead of me."
Harry laughed. Draco didn't.
"Oh, and before you go," Harry said, and grinned sheepishly. "I know this is a bad time, but I wanted to ask you for advice about something, actually."
"Okay," Draco said, still a bit distracted by that last statement.
Harry's eyes grew intent. "Buying that pouch for Granger used up most of the gold I managed to steal from my Gringotts vault -"
What.
"- and McGonagall has the vault key, or Dumbledore does now, maybe. And I was just about to launch a plot that might take some money, so I was wondering if you know how I can get access -"
"I'll loan you the money," said Draco's mouth in sheer existential reflex.
Harry looked taken aback, but in a pleased way. "Draco, you don't have to -"
"How much?"
Harry named the amount and Draco couldn't quite keep the shock from showing on his face. That was almost all the spending money Father had given Draco to last out the whole year, Draco would be left with just a few Galleons -
Then Draco mentally kicked himself. All he had to do was write Father and explain that the money was gone because he had managed to loan it to Harry Potter, and Father would send him a special congratulatory note written in golden ink, a giant Chocolate Frog that would take two weeks to eat, and ten times as many Galleons just in case Harry Potter needed another loan.
"It's way too much, isn't it," said Harry. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked -"
"Excuse me, I am a Malfoy, you know," said Draco. "I was just surprised you wanted that much."
"Don't worry," Harry Potter said cheerfully. "It's nothing that threatens your family's interests, just me being evil."
Draco nodded. "No problem, then. You want to go get it right now?"
"Sure," said Harry.
As they left the alcove and started heading toward the dungeons, Draco couldn't help but ask, "So can you tell me which plot this is for?"
"Rita Skeeter."
Draco thought some very bad words to himself, but it was far too late to say no.
By the time they'd reached the dungeons, Draco had started pulling together his thoughts again.
He was having trouble hating Harry Potter. Harry had been trying to be friendly, he was just insane.
And that wasn't going to stop Draco's revenge or even slow it down.
"So," Draco said, after looking around to make certain no one was nearby. Their voices would both be Blurred, of course, but it never hurt to be extra sure. "I've been thinking. When we bring new recruits into the Conspiracy, they're going to have to think we're equals. Otherwise it would only take one of them to blow the plot to Father. You already worked that out, right?"
"Naturally," said Harry.
"Will we be equals?" said Draco.
"I'm afraid not," Harry said. It was clear that he was trying to sound gentle, and also clear that he was trying to suppress a good deal of condescension and not quite succeeding. "I'm sorry, Draco, but you don't even know what the word Bayesian in Bayesian Conspiracy means right now. You're going to have to study for months before we take anyone else in, just so you can put up a good front."
"Because I don't know enough science," Draco said, carefully keeping his voice neutral.
Harry shook his head at that. "The problem isn't that you're ignorant of specific science things like deoxyribonucleic acid. That wouldn't stop you from being my equ
al. The problem is that you aren't trained in the methods of rationality, the deeper secret knowledge behind how all those discoveries got made in the first place. I'll try to teach you those, but they're a lot harder to learn. Think of what we did yesterday, Draco. Yes, you did some of the work. But I was the only one in control. You answered some of the questions. I asked all of them. You helped push. I did the steering by myself. And without the methods of rationality, Draco, you can't possibly steer the Conspiracy where it needs to go."
"I see," said Draco, his voice sounding disappointed.
Harry's voice tried to gentle itself even more. "I'll try to respect your expertise, Draco, about things like people stuff. But you need to respect my expertise too, and there's just no way you could be my equal when it comes to steering the Conspiracy. You've only been a scientist for one day, you know one secret about deoxyribonucleic acid, and you aren't trained in any of the methods of rationality."
"I understand," said Draco.
And he did.
People stuff, Harry had said. Seizing control of the Conspiracy probably wouldn't even be difficult. And afterward, he would kill Harry Potter just to be sure -
The memory rose up in Draco of how sick inside it had felt last night, knowing Harry was screaming.
Draco thought some more bad words.
Fine. He wouldn't kill Harry. Harry had been raised by Muggles, it wasn't his fault he was insane.
Instead, Harry would live on, just so that Draco could tell him that it had all been for Harry's own good, really, he ought to be grateful -
And with a sudden twitch of surprised pleasure, Draco realized that it actually was for Harry's own good. If Harry tried to carry out his plan of playing Dumbledore and Father for fools, he would die.
That made it perfect.
Draco would take all of Harry's dreams away from him, just as Harry had done to him.
Draco would tell Harry that it had been for his own good, and it would be absolutely true.
Draco would wield the Conspiracy and the power of science to purify the wizarding world, and Father would be as proud of him as if he'd been a Death Eater.
Harry Potter's evil plots would be foiled, and the forces of right would prevail.
The perfect revenge.
Unless...
Just pretend to be pretending to be a scientist, Harry had told him.
Draco didn't have words to describe exactly what was wrong with Harry's mind -
(since Draco had never heard the term depth of recursion)
- but he could guess what sort of plots it implied.
...unless all that was exactly what Harry wanted Draco to do as part of some even larger plot which Draco would play right into by trying to foil this one, Harry might even know that his plan was unworkable, it might have no purpose except luring Draco to thwart it -
No. That way lay madness. There had to be a limit. The Dark Lord himself hadn't been that twisty. That sort of thing didn't happen in real life, only in Father's silly bedtime stories about foolish gargoyles who always ended up furthering the hero's plans every time they tried to stop him.
And beside Draco, Harry walked along with a smile on his face, thinking about the evolutionary origins of human intelligence.
In the beginning, before people had quite understood how evolution worked, they'd gone around thinking crazy ideas like human intelligence evolved so that we could invent better tools.
The reason why this was crazy was that only one person in the tribe had to invent a tool, and then everyone else would use it, and it would spread to other tribes, and still be used by their descendants a hundred years later. That was great from the perspective of scientific progress, but in evolutionary terms, it meant that the person who invented something didn't have much of a fitness advantage, didn't have all that many more children than everyone else. Only relative fitness advantages could increase the relative frequency of a gene in the population, and drive some lonely mutation to the point where it was universal and everyone had it. And brilliant inventions just weren't common enough to provide the sort of consistent selection pressure it took to promote a mutation. It was a natural guess, if you looked at humans with their guns and tanks and nuclear weapons and compared them to chimpanzees, that the intelligence was there to make the technology. A natural guess, but wrong.
Before people had quite understood how evolution worked, they'd gone around thinking crazy ideas like the climate changed, and tribes had to migrate, and people had to become smarter in order to solve all the novel problems.
But human beings had four times the brain size of a chimpanzee. 20% of a human's metabolic energy went into feeding the brain. Humans were ridiculously smarter than any other species. That sort of thing didn't happen because the environment stepped up the difficulty of its problems a little. Then the organisms would just get a little smarter to solve them. Ending up with that gigantic outsized brain must have taken some sort of runaway evolutionary process, something that would push and push without limits.
And today's scientists had a pretty good guess at what that runaway evolutionary process had been.
Harry had once read a famous book called Chimpanzee Politics. The book had described how an adult chimpanzee named Luit had confronted the aging alpha, Yeroen, with the help of a young, recently matured chimpanzee named Nikkie. Nikkie had not intervened directly in the fights between Luit and Yeroen, but had prevented Yeroen's other supporters in the tribe from coming to his aid, distracting them whenever a confrontation developed between Luit and Yeroen. And in time Luit had won, and become the new alpha, with Nikkie as the second most powerful...
...though it hadn't taken very long after that for Nikkie to form an alliance with the defeated Yeroen, overthrow Luit, and become the new new alpha.
It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other - an evolutionary arms race without limit - had led to in the way of increased mental capacity.
'Cause, y'know, a human would have totally seen that one coming.
And beside Harry, Draco walked along, suppressing his smile as he thought about his revenge.
Someday, maybe in years but someday, Harry Potter would learn just what it meant to underestimate a Malfoy.
Draco had awakened as a scientist in a single day. Harry had said that wasn't supposed to happen for months.
But of course if you were a Malfoy, you would be a more powerful scientist than anyone who wasn't.
So Draco would learn all of Harry Potter's methods of rationality, and then when the time was ripe -
Chapter 25: Hold Off on Proposing Solutions
To seek out new life, and J. K. Rowling!
Note: Since the science in this story is usually all correct, I include a warning that in Ch. 22-25 Harry overlooks many possibilities, the most important of which is that there are lots of magical genes but they're all on one chromosome (which wouldn't happen naturally, but the chromosome might have been engineered). In this case, the inheritance pattern would be Mendelian, but the magical chromosome could still be degraded by chromosomal crossover with its nonmagical homologue. (Harry has read about Mendel and chromosomes in science history books, but he hasn't studied enough actual genetics to know about chromosomal crossover. Hey, he's only eleven.) However, although a modern science journal would find a lot more nits to pick, everything Harry presents as strong evidence is in fact strong evidence - the other possibilities are improbable.
Act 2:
(The sun shone brilliantly into the Great Hall from the enchanted sky-ceiling above, illuminating the students as though they sat beneath the naked sky, gleaming from their plates and bowls, as, refreshed by a night's sleep, they inhaled breakfast in preparation for whatever plans they'd made for their Sunday.)
So. There was only one thing that made you a wizard.
That wasn't surprising, when you thought about it. What DNA mostly did was tell ribosomes how to chain amino acids together into proteins. Conventio
nal physics seemed quite capable of describing amino acids, and no matter how many amino acids you chained together, conventional physics said you would never, ever get magic out of it.
And yet magic seemed to be hereditary, following DNA.
Then that probably wasn't because the DNA was chaining together nonmagical amino acids into magical proteins.
Rather the key DNA sequence did not, of itself, give you your magic at all.
Magic came from somewhere else.
(At the Ravenclaw table there was one boy who was staring off into space, as his right hand automatically spooned some unimportant food into his mouth from whatever was in front of him. You probably could have substituted a pile of dirt and he wouldn't have noticed.)
And for some reason the Source of Magic was paying attention to a particular DNA marker among individuals who were ordinary ape-descended humans in every other way.
(Actually there were quite a lot of boys and girls staring off into space. It was the Ravenclaw table, after all.)
There were other lines of logic leading to the same conclusion. Complex machinery was always universal within a sexually reproducing species. If gene B relied on gene A, then A had to be useful on its own, and rise to near-universality in the gene pool on its own, before B would be useful often enough to confer a fitness advantage. Then once B was universal you would get a variant A* that relied on B, and then C that relied on A* and B, then B* that relied on C, until the whole machine would fall apart if you removed a single piece. But it all had to happen incrementally - evolution never looked ahead, evolution would never start promoting B in preparation for A becoming universal later. Evolution was the simple historical fact that, whichever organisms did in fact have the most children, their genes would in fact be more frequent in the next generation. So each piece of a complex machine had to become nearly universal before other pieces in the machine would evolve to depend on its presence.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Page 43