The 'meaning' of any object consists in its relationships to other objects, that is, it consists in what the object 'gathers.' A thing is a thing by virtue of its gathering... In general, meaning is a psychic function. It depends on identification, and implies a sense of 'belonging.' It therefore constitutes the basis of dwelling...
To belong to a place means to have an existential foothold, in a concrete everyday sense.
— Christian Norberg-Schulz
John Smith, fallow fine,
Can you shoe this horse o' mine?
Aye, indeed, and that I can,
As well as ony man!
There's a nail upon the tae,
To make the powny speel the brae;
There's a nail and there's a brod-
A horse weel shod.
— Nursery Rhyme.
I believed when I was a child (or I now believe I believed) that if one had a magnifying glass powerful enough, one could look through the cracks and see the Minotaur in the terrible center of the labyrinth. My other nightmare is that of the mirror. The two are not distinct, as it only takes two facing mirrors to construct a labyrinth.
— Jorge Luis Borges.
#
Autolegilimency (IIb: Into Day).
Don't—
Harry drew his wand and fired off a dozen Cushioning Charms while twisting around like a cat to fall face first.
"Don't what?" he said into the rushing wind..
Panic, finished Rupert. You know, on account of unexpectedly plunging to certain death.
"You really don't pay any attention during Quidditch practice, do you?" said Harry, watching the green field of the Quad rush up at him. "I do that about once a week. In the dark."
Twelve feet above the ground he did a midair somersault and landed softly on his feet. A little too softly, really, he thought.
Plunge to certain death? What kind of Quidditch practice is that?
"Flint and Wood decided I should be able to play backup for any position. Seekers have it easy, bludgerwise." He looked up. Somewhere high in the blue, a barely visible dot, which was him, was rising in pursuit of an invisible pink balloon. "How come I didn't end up behind myself on the broomstick? The Bluebottle can seat two...
"Wait a minute, never mind that —" he stared at the holly rod in his hand — "why do I have this? I left this in the wand clip on my bed!"
Because this is imaginatio vera! said Rupert. This is brilliant! Quick, run over there — Harry saw a globe on a pillar, marking the intersection of two walkways — and empty out your pockets while I try to cram a lot of mathematics into a simple and inadequate metaphor.
Harry jogged across the slightly damp grass, looking around curiously. It was a month or so warmer, of course, but other than that almost everything was normal for a nice day in the Quad. The lawns were freshly cut, the sculptured hedges trimmed with Malfoy-hair levels of neatness. All the detritus, he now knew, went onto the Great Hogwarts Compost Heap by way of Professor Sprout, who made regular passes through the Quad to keep things tidy and maintain the weed-wards. He passed by a familiar tree; during Monday's Herbology field excursion he'd collected antler-shaped ling zhi mushrooms from its bark, but here they still were.
It was the ground that wasn't normal; the impact of his feet wasn't quite right. He wasn't sure if it was the landing or the leaving.
Okay, said Rupert, think sheet music. Empty sheet. Eight measures, arranged like floors of a building.
Take a tune one measure long, keep it in mind, write it down on each of those measures.
Now transcribe it down an octave and write it once diagonally through those eight measures, top left to bottom right.
Each of those slight variations is a relative dimension of the original, slightly displaced in what we — some of us —call configuration space.
Play any of those measures and you'll hear the tune with a momentary glitch, but if you play the diagonal you'll hear the same tune in two octaves. You're the bass. You're underneath. From your present point of view. you're coexistent with yourself. From your original point of view — the tune unmodified, which the sheet of variations is sort of conceptually wrapped around — you're just a collection of potentiality, or even noise. The universally privileged point of view is the original, you're just varying it, which is why reality's resetting itself with your every step. Look behind you.
Harry slowed down to cast a glance backwards. It was just the Quad. "At what?" he said, resuming speed.
Exactly. There's a saying about taking nothing but photographs and leaving nothing but footprints, but you don't even leave footprints in a time you never quite walked. You're running over damp grass but not leaving any trace. Also, your trainers aren't wet, and wait until you see your socks!
Harry stopped at the globe. "Socks?" He looked down at his trainers — which of course he'd removed before getting into bed — and hauled up his robes and trouser legs. "Hey!" he said in surprise.
Is for horses, corrected Rupert. Totally not correcting you. Those are brilliant socks, why don't you wear them more often?
"Because they were thrown out," said Harry, looking at his mismatched red and green fuzzy socks. He'd saved them from the discards bag, they were nice and warm, but Aunt Petunia had eventually gotten rid of them... "How did you know?"
By the thickness, said Rupert. Barbarians would criticise your taste, but old Mark Twain said the reason he wore an all white suit was that he didn't have the courage to don the motley. The contents of your pockets may also surprise.
Harry emptied his pockets and assembled a small collection of objects on the flat granite pillar: wand, card-keys, Rupert's toy merlin, and that was all.
"Where's all my junk?" he said. "I should have a pen, and that bit of paper towel I took from the washroom to blow my nose in."
You don't need it, you left your mucus behind. But you do have your glasses. Remember sitting in on Flint and Wood's favourite quidditch matches?
"Yeah, and?"
The weird part — choice word, that — of the pensieve experience, said Rupert, is that you're not peeking into the past through someone else's recycled viewpoint. Not even your own. Autolegilimency ditto.
That was obviously true, thought Harry, and looked up again. He'd be coming down to land on the dock soon.
So okay, continued Rupert, maybe someone thought you should have the gift to see yourself as others see you, and you get a projected self-image even when you visit your own memories. But given that one of the defining qualities of magic is that it's concept-orientated, why should that self-projection reflect the accident of how you got dressed that day rather than, for lack of a better word, the real you? Autolegilimency all the more so. And from that follows both what you have and what you lack.
Gloves, medal and miniaturised mop and bucket, no, cos they're not yours, but glasses, you don't even have to think about. This is all speculation, but I'll bet a Lustrous Super Cinnamon Bar I'm right.
"Huh," said Harry. He picked up the wand and it had the same familiar echo of the thrill that it had given off in Ollivanders, the one that said this is a wonderful thing. "Okay, I can see the wand, and maybe these because I'm my own guardian —" he picked up the card-keys and put them in his pocket, along with his wand — "put what explains this?" He picked up the merlin and hefted it. "This isn't mine. It's not even yours, you thief."
Zaphod Beeblebrox would dispute that last bit, but remember, the one in your hand isn't the real one. Think about that for a moment and then you tell me: given that this isn't the real one, why do you have it? Getting a bit philosophical here.
Harry turned the amber figurine around in the sun. Light sparkled off its internal crack. "It's not mine, except that it sort of is, or I wouldn't have it?"
Yep.
"So I think it's mine? But I don't think it's mine." Harry paused. "Unless I just haven't told me." And he thought: it's a thing, but not a real thing, and a thing that stands for another thing is...a...? He flailed around internally and struck up against Aunt Petunia watching television programmes from America with crying and screaming and psychologists.
Symbol! that was it. But a symbol of what?
I would point out, prompted Rupert, that you did bring something along with you that is not visible. Sort of an annoying thing by now, I expect...
Harry made a sfthput! noise. "This is you?"
It certainly is!
"Well, that's silly!"
It certainly is! All the best things are silly. Here's a Scrabble word for you, it'll help you feel more serious: cathexis. It means investment of personal or emotional energy in an object. So that's me: a shape for something that has no shape.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Harry, but to you I am — fuzzy socks. Socks that are exactly as important as what you put into them.
Which is feet.
...That was a rubbish analogy, forget I used it.
Harry had to laugh, so he did while setting the merlin down on the pillar again. "Well...hello, Rupert! I thought you'd be taller, but...nice to see you. I suppose."
Ha! You're brilliant! That's exactly what I want you to do.
"What is?"
I want you to transfer my name to my action figure. Define it to be me. Look it in the — look me in the eye and call me Rupert. Same idea as when you took back control of your body, only in the opposite direction, not I-am-Harry but you-are-Rupert.
Harry looked at the merlin dubiously. "Okay, and why?"
I want to try shifting my point of view out of your head, and a target and a push are helpful.
"Okay," said Harry. He looked the merlin in the eye. "Rupert," he said, feeling rather foolish, "you — are totally Rupert."
He poked its abundant nose with his index finger.
"Ta," said the merlin.
Harry took a step backwards.
"Absolute total success on first attempt!" said the merlin. "Excellent work! Yours also!"
There was a pause.
"—Except," it continued peevishly, "I can't move."
"Rupert?" asked Harry. But it obviously was, so he quickly added "How are you speaking?"
"You're not hearing me through the air," said Rupert abstractedly, "it's all in the mind. And yet I can't move!
"I suppose I should just be glad my senses work, but if my senses work, why can't I move?
"This is mathematically unreasonable! even if this is an unarticulated merlin!"
"It's an inaction figure," said Harry.
"Oi! Sh'up, you!" said Rupert, visibly failing to rock back and forth in frustration, "I hate magic, magic is rubbish!
"—Give us a wingardium leviosa, would you, Harry? Maybe that will help. Meet the universe half-way."
Harry took out his wand and cast as directed.
There was another pause.
"I bet they don't say Wingardium Leviosa in China," said Rupert reflectively, remaining in place for a long moment, after which he did not move. "I wonder what they say at Durmstrang? Aufhebung, I expect."
Somewhat to Harry's surprise, the merlin began to drift, or float, very slowly, forwards.
"A definitively inaccurate ttranslation of dog-Latin! And at Beauxbatons — relève!" Rupert rose triumphantly up off the pillar to hang in front of Harry's face like a smug hummingbird. "Hah! That's the way you do it! —You have no idea how good this feels," he said.
"Like being a wizard?" said Harry.
"—Okay, maybe you do know," said Rupert, and did a vertical 360. "Ooh. Hoohoo! —Harry!"
"What?"
"Catch me if you can!" said Rupert, and flashed away.
Harry chased after him, feeling pleasantly ludicrous.
#
"Okay," said Harry, not out of breath or even sweating despite having run the Quad lengthwise and then climbed an apple tree, "this is a bit brilliant. Why doesn't everybody do this? Why bother with wizard photography? This is so much better it's not even funny."
"As far as autolegilimency goes," said Rupert, inspecting unpickable apples like a bee, "you may well have a knack other people don't. Not to give you a swollen ego, but there does seem to be a fair chance that you've got genius in the wizarding department."
"Oh," said Harry. (Getting a compliment was like being handed a baby hedgehog: very nice, but now what?) "Well, pensieves, then."
"Well, look," said Rupert. "All of this —" he did a legs-out zig-zag spiral to indicate, basically, everything — "is a landscape, a good and happy place, but imagine walking around in a section of the past full of people making horrible mistakes you can't do anything to help. Definitely not even funny.
"So, you know, don't knock wizard photographs. They even work for squibs, and they extemporise. The good moment revived, not just...repeated."
"Oh," said Harry again. "...What about Time Turners? They even work for Mr Filch."
"Ha, Time Turners," said Rupert. "They may be more trouble than they're worth, Time Turners. Here, think about this —"
(*)
It's 3:58 (said Rupert). You're alone in the dormitory sitting on your trunk. You go downstairs, closing the dormitory door behind you at 3:58 and 10 seconds, and stay downstairs for three minutes.
At 4:01 you return and open the dormitory door to find an unexpected Time Turner on your trunk. Aha, you say, time for some fun! And you dial it back one minute.
It's 4:00 and there's already a time turner on your trunk, meaning it appeared between 3:58 and 4:00. You take that Time Turner off the trunk and put it in your pocket, and at 4:00 and 58 seconds you lock the dormitory door.
It's 4:01. You're in the dorm with a Time Turner in your hand and another in your pocket, and you can't really have either cos you're rattling the knob on the dormitory door and thus never acquired a Time Turner.
You let yourself in, say hello sweetie, take your own arm, and dial your Time Turner back again, this time just shy of three minutes.
It's 3:58 and 10 seconds, immediately after you closed the door. There's no Time Turner on the trunk yet, so you reach into your pocket, take out that Time Turner, and leave it on the trunk, meaning that the one you found to begin with could not have been the one you found to begin with. You and your identical twin then hide under the beds.
It's 4:00. Both of you watch as a third you proceeds to appear out of thin air with a Time Turner. He pockets the Time Turner from the trunk and — at 4:00 and 58 seconds — locks the door. One second later you cast alohomora from under the bed and unlock the door.
It's 4:01. The unlocked door opens and a fourth you enters the room, to the surprise of the third you. Surprise turns to astonishment as the under-bed you's do accio Time Turners followed by tergeo maxima to destroy all of them irretrievably.
The four of you then start a barbershop quartet, even though three of you, especially you, can't exist.
How d'ya like them apples?
(*)
"Please tell me that's not a thing that can happen," said Harry.
"'course it can't happen," said Rupert. "I've heard you sing, you'd never make it as a barbershop quartet.
"Now, Mr Filch's thirty days in the past...if I invoke the Principle of Least Effort, and bear in mind that magic is conceptually-orientated: the whole thirty days reduce to a complicated trip through configuration space — far more elaborate than what we're doing now, cos of simulating interactivity, but still a lot cheaper than doing all the cause-and-effect book-keeping involved in actual happening. The magical principle just Apparates him from Greece or wherever to Hogwarts. He was never in the past."
"He brought souvenirs," objected Harry.
Drawn from wherever the light comes from when you do lumos.
"And...he met people...?"
"A bored concierge with nothing to do spontaneously fantasizes about what he would do if a certain man, who is not actually present, asked for a room. The interaction is real, the events are not. Don't multiply entities needlessly. To everyone involved except him it was a totally inconsequential series of events — he was trying not to be noticed, he didn't trash his hotel room — so skip all the causality, just use people's waking dreams to shape his path through configuration space."
"Huh," said Harry. "Well, what if he had trashed his hotel room?"
"That sort of thing doesn't seem to happen, interestingly enough. Principle of Least Effort says, fake it where it's easy, and if it's hard — the wizard causes a paradox or other severe change to consensus reality — he wakes up. It never happened. Or maybe everyone else wakes up without him. Which would explain those vague references to terrible things that happen to wizards who meddle with time, with never a solid example: they just got dropped out of the world, leaving only stories behind...
"I mean, anyway, real time travel — certainly nothing I've read about Time Turners mentions wizards turning back the clock and coming down with multiple body disorder, which is really what should happen when you loop your own existence: same awareness in two heads, a real broomstick-crasher of a scenario."
"Eeurgh." said Harry. "What was that you said about me being a genius?"
"That you've got one. No worries, it's out of your experience.
"Strangely inadequate on Time Turners, the Hogwarts library. Nothing worth mentioning in the open stacks — too recent a development to be in the palimpsestial auxiliary — can't see why there'd be anything more substantial in the naughty department, it's not considered Dark. Ah, well, set it aside..."
Harry looked out over the quad. The sun was now in a clearly different position, and although time rates differed, he still felt like getting on with things. "So, okay, how do I get out of here? Not that it isn't a nice day, but — you know, pensieve trips end automatically, and this isn't one."
"No worries — you're not quite here. If you close your eyes and cover them you'll see a trace of what's really happening."
"Really? How do you know?"
"You haven't had your eyes open the whole time," said Rupert. ."I saw during your blinks. Preternaturally observant, me. Don't take my word for it, though. Give it the old experimental verification."
Harry covered his eyes with his hands.
Darkness, black and reddish, with tinges of random colours...
...a pattern in the colours...?
...an eye-shaped pattern.
...no, not a pattern, an actual eye —
(*)
— and he was in bed, looking into a mirror.
You know, said Rupert, from his normal position between Harry's ears, this puts a whole new spin on the myth of Narcissus. Maybe he wasn't in love with his own image, he was just hanging out in configuration space.
Harry took out his bit of paper towel and blew his nose into it simply because he could. "Doing what?"
I don't know — sneaking into the movies? Auditing classes for free? Spending the day at the beach without getting sunburn?
Harry stuck his head out between the bed's blackout curtains. According to Dean's quietly ticking wind-up alarm clock, less than a minute had passed. "I should mention that to Hermione. She absolutely would take extra classes by pensieve."
Be my guest, said Rupert. Now, are you ready for the next step? The reason I asked you to take up autolegilimency in the first place?
"In for a knut, in for a sunken galleon," quoted Harry, setting the mirror back on his pillow. "Where do you want to go?"
The night we met Professor Dumbledore by the Transfiguration classroom. I'm guessing you remember that even though I was in charge at the time.
"When you did a one-point landing into a bucket of dirty water?" said Harry, adjusting his position on the bed. "A bit memorable, yeah."
Heh. Sorry about that, chief, said Rupert.
Harry took a deep breath and caught his own eye in the mirror.
He thought backwards into a moonlit hallway...
#
There was a flash of glass.
Of glasses, half-moon, gold-rimmed.
"Good morning, Mr Potter," said Professor Dumbledore.
Harry backed away through an enormous spreading puddle. His trainers did not leave a trail of expanding ripples.
"Is that really me?" he said, as the Headmaster helped his previous self up out of a bucket. "I'm really skinny from the outside..."
"That's why I stuffed you full of bagels," said Rupert, who was hovering over his left shoulder.
It was creepy seeing himself up close, especially since it wasn't him in control, and he quickly turned away, directing his attention to the door of the Transfiguration classroom. Professor Dumbledore had left it slightly open — wide enough to squeeze through, and so Harry did, closely followed by the airborne Rupert.
Harry's momentary wondering as to whether his self-image was bagel-fed or not was cut off by the sudden closing of the door, which left him in the dark. He drew his wand and cast what seemed an unusually intense lumos, although it wasn't any brighter than usual.
"The light of magic," said Rupert approvingly. "Love that light. The numinous-luminous. Hold it a little higher and you'll see why we're here. We've been in this room once before, courtesy of Mrs Norris."
Harry raised his wand. Amid the academic contents of the discontinued classroom stood two tall mirrors, both facing away from the door. "I sort of remember something. What are they?"
Rupert flitted between the mirrors and examined them from the other side. "I'll need light to be sure, but I'll tell you right now what I think they are: Mesmer's Twins. Come around here, but point your wand at the floor."
"What are Mesmer's Twins?" he asked, circling around with wand down.
"In my database, Harry," said Rupert, "Franz Anton Mesmer was a flim-flamming hypnotist in a rather fetching lilac robe who magnetised dogs for profit. In your world, at least according to Asenion Izzard, he's the man credited for discovering ecstatic electricity. Showman either way — and proto-psychologist. Magic mirrors can show you your character, the inside of your own mind. He built himself a pair to experiment with, with some ill-considered enchantments on. Shine the light on the rim there."
Harry lifted the wand to illuminate the bottom left curve of the right-hand mirror. There were letters cut into its frame:
ERIS
He traced the outline of the frame, revealing more letters all around the mirror's edge. They didn't make much in the way of sensible words, just clumps of gibberish that occasionally verged on comprehensibility. When he turned the light to the other mirror's lettering he found that it began
TERGERE
and continued in the same vein of garble.
"I was expecting the lettering to be be mirrored, not just in reverse order," said Rupert, "but we aren't all Leonardo da Vinci. Well, Mesmer wasn't. Why they're regrouped I have no idea."
Oh, thought Harry, and traced the lettering again backwards.
"I show not your face but your one true regret," he read aloud, and shifted his light to read the other inscription. "And heart's desire."
Rupert said, "You can imagine getting hung up on what you might see in the Mirror of Desire, yeah? The other one's just as dangerous to some."
Harry, who was trying to resist his desire to find out what his heart's desire was, pointed his wand safely back at the floor. "Why? Seems like the kind of thing you'd look away from." His wand hand twitched upward. It'd be pretty silly if it turned out his heart's desire was finding out what his heart's desire was...
"You would, most people would. But to a certain kind of...let's say adult, despair can be addictive. Desire won't trap someone who's given up hope, but regret...nose pressed against the glass until you dry up and blow away.
"So according to Izzard, Mesmer thought: have the mirrors face each other, stick the subject in between. In practice it didn't help anybody, just got them caught up in a sort of negative feedback loop, where the one thing they wanted most ended up being the one thing they could never have.
"And now — master conclusion-jumper that I am — I know what's going on and I know what's at stake."
"Which is?"
"Evanesco, Harry. You've seen the higher years practising their Vanishing, haven't you?"
Harry thought about Students Vs Squirrels in the Quad. Hard to get rid of squirrels, apparently. "Yeah," he said, "they're not very good at it."
"It's variable in difficulty. Vanishing your broccoli, that's easy, a smart thirdie could do it; putting a rat on hold would be a fifth-year's final exam. Vanishing a human being — all that complexity, the fine detail of the brain — there are no examples. That'd take a genius.
"In theory.
"In practice — you want to evanesco a man? Take a pair of Vanishing Cabinets, Vanish one of them, stuff him in the other. Where does he come out?"
"...Urg," said Harry.
"So here we have Mesmer's Twins. Halfway to being Vanishing Cabinet mirrors. Dumbledore simply finishes the job, omitting the actual cabinet. My wager is: one of these mirrors still exists, waiting to suck Barrister Doom straight into oblivion. Or even further.
"Which...could be a bad idea, though I can't quite think why..."
Several heartbeats went by.
"Now what?" said Harry.
"Well—"
The classroom door opened.
Professor Dumbledore entered, and turned on the room's lighting with a gesture.
He headed straight for Harry, who got out of the way in a hurry. He tried not to look in the mirror of Desire, but out of the corner of his eye he saw — what was it?
The Professor took a position before the faces of the mirrors. midway between the two, and gave their contents a detached look. "And in conclusion," he said quietly to himself.
Harry was appalled to see Rupert hanging over Professor Dumbledore's shoulder, watching.
The Professor drew his wand and touched its tip to each mirror's surface, murmuring something unintelligible. He drew a pattern on the surface of the mirror of Desire with the wand, and said "Continuum." He then looked at the mirror of Regret and seemed satisfied with what he saw; possibly the same pattern. He then pressed the tip of the wand against the Mirror of Regret.
"Goodbye," he said, and then, more firmly: "Evanesco."
The Mirror of Regret disappeared with a soft clap.
After a long moment, Professor Dumbledore raised his hand to the surface of the Mirror of Desire. "And...yes, good night, Ariana."
Turning out the lights on his way, he left the room, leaving Harry in the dark.
"Interesting," said Rupert.
"You should be ashamed of yourself," said Harry.
"For what?"
"Spying on him like that!"
"I didn't see a thing," said Rupert. "Not even my own regrets. Or desires, and I know I want a jammy dodger."
"Serves you right. … So you didn't see...mine either?"
"Ah, nope."
Harry waved his wand in a circle.
It had looked...like he was standing behind himself, only he was taller, and without glasses. Which didn't make sense if they were part of his self-image. Possibly another shape also? Another person? He waved the wand in a circle again, in the other direction. Hard to imagine getting stuck on something as innocuous as that...couldn't hurt to look...could it...?
"Could it work?" said Rupert, apparently to himself.
"Could what work?" said Harry.
"I suppose it could. Yes, I'm sure it could. I'm pretty sure it could."
"What?"
"Certainly wouldn't hurt to try. Probably."
"What?"
"Could provide vital information not otherwise obtainable..."
"What?"
"And Harry does have access to the point d'appui."
Harry kept his mouth shut.
"Sorry, did you say something?" said Rupert.
"What are you talking about?"
"An experiment I'd like to try. No rush, Harry, but when you're ready to leave here there's another place I want to go."
"No time like the present," said Harry, switching off his lumos. "Where to?"
#
There was a fiery disembodied head in the Headmaster's fireplace.
Harry stepped away as his earlier self took a seat at the side of Professor Dumbledore's desk and waited quietly for the greatest wizard of the age to finish his floo call.
"What are we looking for?" said Harry. "I mean, you're... preternaturally observant, you know. Didn't you already see everything there is to see?"
"It's not what there was to see that I'm interested in," said Rupert, "and you were quite right about spying on people.
"This is a key moment, you see. This was Professor Dumbledore explaining everything to an inquisitive child of prophecy. Even spilling the beans: his own unconscious tipped you — well, me, us — off to Tom Riddle becoming Lord Voldemort. In short, this is Professor Dumbledore at his most vulnerable, even though willingly vulnerable, so before the next step I need a promise from you."
"What?"
"Listen carefully, this is what I want to promise:
"Into whatever house I enter, I will go for the benefit of the sick. May I never see in the patient anything but a fellow creature in pain.
"Pinkie swear me that promise. And I've never been more serious."
"I swear," said Harry, curling his pinkie around the merlin's foreleg.
Sitting at his desk, looking...the other Harry in the eye through his gold-rimmed glasses, Professor Dumbledore said, "Voldemort was a deliberate cipher: self-effacing, a wordless riddle..."
"Right," said Rupert. "The lecture's begun, question time is coming.
"So. Autolegilimency is just a form of legilimency. If you can read your own mind then in principle you can read someone else's. Dumbledore being the greatest wizard of the age it would never work on him; he'd bounce anybody off. In real time.
"But this isn't real time. This is configuration space. In real time, at this hour, Professor Dumbledore's asleep and dreaming. Taken together, an unexpected vector for a direct question, routed through the interconnectedness of all things to his unconscious mind, which wants help. And where's help going to come from when you're the greatest wizard of the age and still out of your league?"
"Where?"
"From you, that's where. The Boy Who Lived."
"What help can I give?"
"I want you to ask him questions,"
That's all? thought Harry. "Is that all?" he said.
"Yep."
"And you think he'll answer?"
"We can hope."
"And nobody's tried something like this before?"
"I don't think it's occurred to them to try. The interconnectedness of all things isn't on their radar. Neither is radar, for that matter."
"Ask what?" said Harry, and Rupert told him.
"And remember you're the Hogwarts Caretaker," added Rupert. "You're here to help."
(*)
Harry Potter awkwardly sat down on his own lap, tried to look the Professor in the eye, and waited for the right moment, which soon came. He leaned forward.
"Listen in between the words," said Rupert. "If he's answering, you'll hear him the way you hear me. And whenever there's room for a question, tell him again."
"The lecture being concluded," said Dumbledore, "I will take your questions."
Harry tried to speak more firmly if not more loudly than Rupert-as-Harry had. "Professor, you've told me about Voldemort. I want to understand Tom Riddle. Can you tell me about Tom Riddle, when he was new?"
Dumbledore spoke the words he'd spoken before. Harry listened to the Professor talk about curse scars and the London Underground, trying to ignore the noises of both the words and all the various distracting devices in the room. He didn't hear anything new...
"Sense of the ridiculous...?" said his previous body.
"Please tell me about Tom Riddle," said Harry.
The mouth moved, words came out; he listened to the silences between the words and sentences.
"...have you found yourself," said Dumbledore, "focusing on a single goal and pursuing it relentlessly and linearly to conclusion, to the exclusion of everything else?"
And there did seem to be words between the words.
Eye.
Time.
Alone.
"I truly believe, Harry," said Dumbledore aloud, "that nothing of Lord Voldemort lives on but his name..."
...library...
...companions, but...
...never asked anyone's help...
...would have, but Grindelwald...
"...it is what makes me still think of him from time to time," said Dumbledore.
The un-words trailed off while the redundant noises of the past continued, until Professor Dumbledore brought out his pensieve, and Rupert-as-Harry tipped Harry off his lap by standing up to look into it.
"Okay," said Rupert, while Dumbledore and previous-Harry stared meditatively, or maybe vacantly, into the past-in-a-bucket. "Proof of concept, but not helpful. One more spot for a question and if that doesn't work we'll have to try over again, and hope he doesn't wake up.
"See," he added, bobbing horn-first towards the bucket-starers, "this is why wizards take photographs instead of using pensieves. They look like they're watching the telly. They'll be drooling in a minute...
"...oh."
"Oh?" said Harry.
"Slap my forehead, Harry," said Rupert, presenting it. "Mind the horn."
Harry was tempted toward an eye-roll, but tapped it with his finger.
"Ta. I forgot there's one good rule to come out of telly. Listen up, slight rephrase of question when he says 'you should be off to a more nutritious meal'."
Harry listened.
(*)
The Professor straightened and replaced the lid on the pensieve.
The clock on the wall began to itemise the hour. It paused at ten, giving Harry time to get in place.
"Will there be more than one additional question?" said Dumbledore. "I am expected at the Department of Mysteries, and you should be off to a more nutritious meal."
"Headmaster," said Harry, looking him straight in the eyes. "Please, can you show me? As a child, can you show me Tom Riddle?"
In the black within the blue, something flickered wetly.
Said Dumbledore of the past, "There are those who shed light where lumos cannot, and then there are, sadly, those who cast darkness where none previously existed..."
Above that, behind that, beyond that, Dumbledore of the now said
I pray, Harry,
that should you reach my age
it will not be with the encroaching feeling
that you have broken
everything you have ever touched.
"...and with pen, brush or wand they scar the world," said Dumbledore of the past, "for everything that hurts is real. Somehow we must defend ourselves against artists of the dark."
The blackness within the mild blue eyes cracked, as though something had been trapped at the bottom of a well for a very long time was finally freed to the light, and the world unexpectedly changed.
#
Harry's feet thudded down on unexpected pavement, followed by his rump.
Concrete gritted under his palms.
He looked wildly around.
There were buildings everywhere, and it stank.
"What happened?" he said. "Where are we?"
"London," said Rupert. "1937."
The truth hurts, but only while it's coming out.
— Jon Kitman.
...those impostors who assumed the character of Tom o' Bedlams for their own nefarious purposes used to have a mark burnt in their arms, which they showed as the mark of Bedlam.
— Isaac D'Israeli.
