It was the vision of a narrow line of Time that Albus Dumbledore had steered through fate’s narrow keyhole, a hair-thin strand of possibility threaded through a needle’s eye.
The prophecies had instructed Dumbledore to have Tom Riddle’s intelligence copied onto the brain of a wizarding infant who would then grow up learning Muggle science. What did it say about the likely shape of the Future, if that was the first or best strategy the seers could find that didn’t lead to catastrophe?
Harry could look back now on the Unbreakable Vow that he’d made, and guess that if not for that Vow, disaster might have already been set in motion yesterday when Harry had wanted to tear down the International Statute of Secrecy. Which in turn strongly suggested that the many prophecies Dumbledore had read and whose instructions he’d followed, had somehow ensured that Harry and Voldemort would collide in exactly the right way to cause Voldemort to force Harry to make that Unbreakable Vow. That the Unbreakable Vow had been part of Time’s narrow keyhole, one of the improbable preconditions for allowing the Earth’s peoples to survive.
A Vow whose sole purpose was to protect everyone from Harry’s current stupidity.
It was like watching a videotape of an almost-traffic-accident that had happened to you, where you remembered another car missing you by centimeters, and the video showing that somebody had also thrown a pebble in exactly the right way to cause an enormous lorry to miss that nearcollision, and if they hadn’t thrown that pebble then you and all your family in the automobile and your entire planet would have been hit by the lorry, which, in the metaphor, represented your own sheer obliviousness.
Harry had been warned, he’d known on some level or the Vow wouldn’t have stopped him, and yet he’d still almost made the wrong choice and destroyed the world. Harry could look back now and see that, yes, the alternate-Harry with no Vow would’ve had trouble accepting the reasoning that said you couldn’t get magical healing to Muggles as fast as possible. If the alternate-Harry had acknowledged the danger at all, he would have rationalized it, tried to figure out some clever way around the problem and refused to accept taking a few years longer to do it, and so the world would have ended. Even after all the warnings Harry had received, it still wouldn’t have worked without the Unbreakable Vow.
One tiny strand of Time, being threaded through a needle’s eye.
Harry didn’t know how to handle this revelation. It wasn’t a sort of situation that human beings had evolved emotions to handle. All Harry could do was stare at how close he had come to disaster, might come again to disaster if that Vow was fated to trigger more than once, and think…
Think…
‘I don’t want that to happen again’ didn’t seem like the right thought. He’d never wanted to destroy the world in the first place. Harry hadn’t lacked for protective feelings about Earth’s sapient population, those protective feelings had been the problem in a way. What Harry had lacked was some element of clear vision, of being willing to consciously acknowledge what he’d already known deep down.
And the whole thing with Harry having spent the last year cozying up to the Defense Professor didn’t speak highly of his intellect either. It seemed to point to the same problem, even. There were things Harry had known or strongly suspected on some level, but never promoted to conscious attention. And so he had failed and nearly died.
I need to raise the level of my game.
That was the thought Harry was looking for. He had to do better than this, become a less stupid person than this.
I need to raise the level of my game, or fail.
Dumbledore had destroyed the recordings in the Hall of Prophecy and arranged for no further recordings to be made. There’d apparently been a prophecy that said Harry mustn’t look upon those prophecies. And the obvious next thought, which might or might not be true, was that saving the world was beyond the reach of prophetic instruction. That winning would take plans that were too complex for seers’ messages, or that Divination couldn’t see somehow. If there’d been some way for Dumbledore to save the world himself, then prophecy would probably have told Dumbledore how to do that. Instead the prophecies had told Dumbledore how to create the preconditions for a particular sort of person existing; a person, maybe, who could unravel a challenge more difficult than prophecy could solve directly. That was why Harry had been placed on his own, to think without prophetic guidance. If all Harry did was follow mysterious orders from prophecies, then he wouldn’t mature into a person who could perform that unknown task.
And right now, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres was still a walking catastrophe who’d needed to be constrained by an Unbreakable Vow to prevent him from immediately setting the Earth on an inevitable course toward destruction when he’d already been warned against it. That had happened literally yesterday, just one day after he’d helped Voldemort almost take over the planet.
A certain line from Tolkien kept running through Harry’s mind, the part where Frodo upon Mount Doom put on the ring, and Sauron suddenly realized what a complete idiot he’d been. ‘And the magnitude of his own folly was at last laid bare’, or however that had gone.
There was a huge gap between who Harry needed to become, and who he was right now.
And Harry didn’t think that time, life experience, and puberty would take care of that automatically, though they might help. Though if Harry could grow into an adult that was to this self what a normal adult was to a normal eleven-year-old, maybe that would be enough to steer through Time’s narrow keyhole…
He had to grow up, somehow, and there was no traditional path laid out before him for accomplishing that.
The thought came then to Harry of another work of fiction, more obscure than Tolkien:
You can only arrive at mastery by practicing the techniques you have learned, facing challenges and apprehending them, using to the fullest the tools you have been taught, until they shatter in your hands and you are left in the midst of wreckage absolute… I cannot create masters. I have never known how to create masters. Go, then, and fail… You have been shaped into something that may emerge from the wreckage, determined to remake your Art. I cannot create masters, but if you had not been taught, your chances would be less. The higher road begins after the
Art seems to fail you; though the reality will be that it was you who failed your Art.
It wasn’t that Harry had gone down the wrong path, it wasn’t that the road to sanity lay somewhere outside of science. But reading science papers hadn’t been enough. All the cognitive psychology papers about known bugs in the human brain and so on had helped, but they hadn’t been sufficient. He’d failed to reach what Harry was starting to realise was a shockingly high standard of being so incredibly, unbelievably rational that you actually started to get things right, as opposed to having a handy language in which to describe afterwards everything you’d just done wrong. Harry could look back now and apply ideas like ‘motivated cognition’ to see where he’d gone astray over the last year. That counted for something, when it came to being saner in the future. That was better than having no idea what he’d done wrong. But that wasn’t yet being the person who could pass through Time’s narrow keyhole, the adult form