Chapter 12: Better Living Through Alchemy

DISCLAIMER: Does the wizarding world only know about one alchemist and assume his wife isn't also an alchemist, despite alchemy being a thing the world over for two thousand years with one of the most famous ones being a woman? If so, I don't own Harry Potter.

Chapter 12

"Not what I was after. I mentioned trying to find a way to get a new body so I don't have to borrow Vernon here, and being able to consult an alchemist who's read in on modern biochemistry and genetics would be a great help. I'm after magical methods of growing clone bodies from DNA samples. Even if only to tell me that what I'm thinking is impossible, it'll help to rule it out. If you can effect an introduction?"

"It can't hurt to ask, and most of the alchemists I'm personally acquainted with have telephones. Obviously I can promise nothing and confidentiality forbids me reporting back, mind, but between ourselves most of them would take the bit right between their teeth at the prospect of an interesting problem to solve. If I mention it to more than one of them, why, there may even be a fight."

-oOo-

Two weeks of telephone calls back and forth about Tom's numbered swiss account and we've got a plan I'm ethically comfortable with. Not as to stealing all of Tom's money - there's a war on, and looting enemy supplies is my actual duty in this context - but as to involving bank employees, who don't have a honking great big Mystery Defensive Spell to hide behind. Huw - we're on first name terms after about a week - reassures me repeatedly that everyone who's taking part is a volunteer, fully aware of the risks, and would be targets in the event of Voldemort II: Return Of The Arsehole anyway. Muggleborns and halfbloods who choose to live away from the wizarding world: very much persona non grata in the Coming Pureblood World Order.

He gives me the nutshell version of the scheme they've come up with. It's going to cost nearly twenty per cent off the top - not that I care, it's Tom's money - to use a combination of wire transfers, bankers' drafts walked from one bank to another and some jiggery-pokery with shell corporations created especially for the purpose. The money's going to pass through several dozen sets of hands and be beyond tracing by all but the toppest of top-flight forensic accountants.

He also comes up with the frankly brilliant idea of having the real property, stocks, shares and bonds liquidated by their current managers and the funds put into the swiss account Tom has been using all along to accumulate the proceeds. Thus laundering his money through his own account, and looking a lot less suspicious to the mundane authorities. Big investors and landholders cash out all the time after all. The fact that it adds insult to injury is totally not a factor. Honest.

I give him the go-ahead, and sign a wad of blank stationery with Tom's signature to allow his team to forge all of the bank instructions they're going to need. Ethically flexible bankers: I know I take the mickey out of them at every available opportunity, but damn they're coming in handy right now. I mean, technically what they're doing could and should get them all fired, but the chance to stick it to Tom is all kinds of motivating. It's like giving a lot of 1930s jews the chance to burgle Himmler: all kinds of moral and legal objections get treated as minor talking points, if that.

I also send instructions to Tom's lawyers to start liquidating his assets, giving a new post office box number to write back to. They write back asking for the client meeting I was expecting, and that goes swimmingly as I convince Tom's solicitor - I am abusing the fuck out of Tom's Jedi mind-trick skills - that the fat bloke in his office looks exactly like Tom. His mind will replace memories of me with memories of the few meetings he's had with Tom, and I scramble the receptionist's memory of my appearance on the way out: a moment's effort and she's slightly surprised to recognise Jimmy Savile coming out of her boss's office. While I can't think of a likely way to get that fucker put in his proper place just yet, painting a target on him for a murderous undead lunatic will do until I come up with something. I leave Tom with the house at Little Hangleton and just enough bonds to pay the maintenance and the rates on the property for the next ten years.

Assuming we can put Tom permanently in the ground - hopefully in a more organised and tidy manner than they managed in the books - I'll go back in with instructions to sell the Little Hangleton house to me and put the proceeds in the swiss account, whence I'll straight up steal it back. I grew up quite near there, and if I can manage to get corporeal again I'm going to want a house.

I don't expect to hear anything for a while - between the set up and the execution, it's apt to be a big job - so I break the news to Petunia. Including the number that I'm likely to be worth when it's all finished.

"HOW MUCH?" is her first response.

"Calm down, Petunia, the boys are trying to sleep. Also, the neighbours don't need to hear."

"We won't get in trouble, will we?"

"Pretty much impossible. It's not like he can go to the police, now, is it? Excuse me constable, but some thieving git has emptied my numbered swiss bank account that I'm not really supposed to have, taking all of the proceeds of my crimes, and I didn't notice because I was dead at the time."

"Well, when you put it like that, no."

"He'll get even shorter shrift from the wizard police, too, probably involving explosive spells and cursed fire. Tom rather outplayed himself by trying to do the International Man Of Mystery thing with anonymous banking and safe deposits to store everything he stole off his victims. If he'd stuck with regular banking and investment there'd be far more oversight and scrutiny and I'd never get away with this at all."

"Well, it's no crime to rob a thief, I suppose. And all this is in your name, not Vernon's?" Petunia gets to the heart of the matter, of course. She's rightly worried about comeback. As am I: while I'm confident that the Great Big Defensive Spell will work to keep Tom from tracing anything to Little Whinging, or at least doing anything about it if he manages, if he's still alive when Harry turns seventeen and I haven't managed to undo that link Dumbledore created then we'll be dealing with a Tom who's even angrier than the standard-issue version.

"Not even that. I'm going to be owning most of it through a series of offshore company accounts that are very difficult to trace back to any real person's identity, let alone mine. Once I've got it all properly untraceable I was thinking of setting up an endowment for Dudley to cover his time at university and help him get a start, student grants are going to stop being a thing in a few years so he'll need it." Vernon gets the warm fuzzies at that suggestion, and Petunia, improved though she is over the last six months, simmers down considerably by the simple expedient of being bribed this way. Harry's got what he inherited from his father, of course, which I might give a little boost to, it depends very much on how much is in his vault. In the books, it looked like a lot to an eleven-year-old seeing the wizarding world for the first time, but it's in Galleons, which I don't trust any further than I can throw, say, Dudley.

"Everyone's talking about how nice it was that you did the Father Christmas thing, you know." An abrupt subject change, but I can see the connection, we're talking about presents for Dudley after all. I've been talking about giving gifts, after all. "I was getting my hair done today and it came up. They'd had Miss Coonan from the school in over the weekend, apparently her highlights had had a bad reaction and turned her hair blue of all things, and she told them what you did."

"Blue hair, you say?" I ask, noting to myself that it's hair rather than a wig, and apparently nobody has actually blamed Harry for it, "tell me, did Harry or Dudley come home complaining about her being unfair to either of them last week?"

"Well, yes, why?"

"Was it Harry or Dudley?"

"Both. Apparently Harry was helping Dudley, you know what they're like, and Miss Coonan told them off because Dudley's supposed to be working on his own. Dudley got upset about it and she made him stand in the corner. Naturally, I backed up the teacher, Dudley isn't always going to have Harry to help him with his schoolwork and that they should be polite and calm about things like that." I bite down hard on the sarcastic retort to that: if it wasn't for me forcing the issue Dudley wouldn't have any help at all and would be acting up because he was struggling.

"Well, it doesn't look like Harry was calm on the day," I say once the urge to be mean about it has passed.

"You don't think -?"

"What, Harry thinks Dudley's being punished unfairly, he also thinks it's unfair he's not allowed to help, and right afterward the teacher suffers a minor, slightly embarrassing misfortune? Two and two very definitely make four if you know about magic," I say.

"What can we do?"

"I'll have a word with him. Accidental magic is, by all accounts, inevitable. We can at least give him some guidance on not getting angry at people who are just doing their jobs."

I take Harry aside the next morning before I leave, and sit him down on the sofa. "I've got some good news and some bad news, Harry," I say. "The good news is that you've almost certainly got magic like your mummy and daddy."

"Oh!" and then a frown. "What's the bad news?"

"We think you might have done some magic by accident and upset someone."

"Oh no! I'm sorry!"

"Well, you won't be able to say you're sorry to Miss Coonan, because she doesn't know about magic. She thinks she was just unlucky. We know that you got angry and you had an accident with your magic and her poor hair turned blue."

"Oh, no!" Harry's eyes are welling up. I snatch the box of kleenex off the coffee table and hand it to him.

"Don't get upset, now, Harry, it was an accident and you know I don't get angry about little boys having accidents." I'd never be bloody stopping with Dudley, that's for sure. Boy's straight-up clumsy, and while we're still waiting on a dyslexia test appointment as far as I can tell dyspraxia isn't even a recognised thing yet. Although they do go together quite often. " I expect you to get things wrong from time to time and it's my job to teach you to do better."

"'kay," he sniffles, visibly trying to hold it together.

"Now, the important thing is that you should try not to get angry at people who are just trying to do their jobs, okay?"

"'kay."

"Miss Coonan wants to see that Dudley can read on his own. We already know he can read with you helping him, you do it at home all the time." Less than half a school year and Harry's further along than Dudley even with a year's head start. Petunia may not like it, but Dudley needs help: Harry's bright and eager and thriving now he's got some support in his life, but he's not any kind of prodigy, just on the bright side of normal. "So, don't get upset at Miss Coonan - or anyone - if they're just doing their job. If you don't understand when they tell you to do something, ask why. They might not have time to tell you, and you might still not understand even if they do, but it's better than getting angry, isn't it?"

"'es." Harry's mortified at not having been a Good Boy, even by accident.

"And, going forward, see if when you're helping Dudley you can think of a way to help him read by himself, okay?"

After a round of hugs and forgiveness and promises to do better, I leave for work.

-oOo-

Weeks pass: everything goes silent from the banking side of things, although I get fortnightly reports from Tom's solicitor on the progress of liquidating his assets. (Blatant bill-padding, but I let it slide. Not really my money, after all.) Tom had investments and rental properties sufficient to generate an annual income of over two hundred grand and I'm taking about ninety per cent of it off him. It's not actually a lot compared to what was in Switzerland: that was nearly forty years of compound interest on all of the income from these assets just socked away and left alone and I'm going to be a multi-millionaire by the end of the next tax year, but it takes it away from Tom and that's what matters.

I decide that the books hidden in Little Hangleton are worth a certain amount of risk - considerably less than assimilating Tom's memories of them, that's for sure - so I make a trip to Diagon Alley to get another lockbox: this one's going in the attic with all the dangerous stuff in, the cursed artefacts I can't unload on Gringotts (cursebreaker practice if nothing else) and cursed books I don't want where the boys can get at them. Tom learned the right runic spells to keep shit like this contained while he was apprenticed to Borgin & Burke, so it'll be an afternoon's work with carving chisel, brush and paint to modify the box.

While I'm there, with said strongbox under my arm because I'm about to have a heavy load to carry, I pop in to Gringotts to have at Tom's password-locked vault. A bit over ten thousand galleons later, leaving enough to pay the vault fees for ten years or so - they notify customers when the vault closes for lack of funds, and I don't want him to know he's been robbed until he actually goes in - I have to choke down the urge to leave a cheeky note. I could pay the money straight into my Coutts account from the tellers' counter, but that would be rather more traceable. As it is, I'm taking a bit of a risk by showing Vernon's face while doing this, but Tom's going to assume polyjuice before he jumps to the conclusion of a parselmouth muggle, and having cashed cheques with Gringotts at least some of them know me as Malcolm Reynolds now anyway.

A visit to Little Hangleton (a trip down memory lane: I've hiked every fell, moor and hill within sight of the place, Crosby Ravensworth being the nearest town I remember from my own universe, although it's called Crosby Ravensclough here) and a bit of mild jedi mind-trickery on Frank Bryce - who I'd completely forgotten about until he challenged me on the grounds of the house - gets me the contents of the parseltongue-passworded safe at the back of the wine cellar of the old Riddle place. Mostly it's books and a stash of tools and cursed objects. Not much of it has intrinsic value, and what little does is a drop in the bucket next to what I'm already stealing.

I make a note to get Frank packed off to sheltered housing with an annuity (which is cheap: disabled septuagenarians don't tend to live long) to supplement his state and war disability pensions: he's nearly seventy and barely keeping up with the work. It would actually be cheaper to have a gardening and maintenance service pop in every few weeks anyway and the results would probably be slightly better. Was Tom keeping a victim handy in case he needed one? I have no idea, but I'm not leaving the poor man in the line of fire if I don't have to. A letter to Tom's solicitor takes care of the matter. A few weeks later I laugh when I see the name of the place Frank has picked, it's right around the corner from where my old self will be living in about thirty years' time.

One of the books is the source of the ritual Tom used in the graveyard, which is a relief. I don't have to go digging in his memories and pick up all of the disgusting shit he got into while finding it. It's actually a text on alchemy as it pertains to the Dark Arts - used here in its sense of 'disgusting transgressive magic for wizards with personality disorders' rather than any of the other senses in which the term is used. There's a great long section on the creation of alchemical homunculi and how to make the process work with dark magic.

Which is entirely fucking ridiculous. The alchemists were trying to create life and in the process figure out how life was created. The version in my old world was generally wrong-headed - there was a widespread belief that sperm contained tiny people that grew to full size if they got into a womb, for instance - but they were at least trying. They would, eventually, exhaust all the wrong approaches and figure out the right one. In the middle of the 19th century, as it happens: scientific progress is not always uniform or, for that matter, in the right direction.

What the alchemists were trying to do in this universe I have no idea. It's not generally in books you can buy, you have to have reading privileges at a university library to get most of it because 'history of failed attempts at science by pre-enlightenment chaps with decidedly odd ideas' is too niche a market for most bookshops. That changes with the advent of the internet and collections getting digitised and made available online of course, but here in the eighties? That shit is obscure.

Tom's book - there's no title on the cover, and the bookplate just says 'ex libris Baronis de Retz' which, you know, figures - sort of assumes that you know enough alchemy to understand that side of it and only explains the dark arts portion. Between that and the translation fuzz between my classical latin and what I think is early medieval latin, I'm not getting a lot out of it. Although I do get the bit that explains the blood, flesh and bone part of the magic, in which the author of the spell appears to have gone out of his way to be as entirely fucking awful as possible. It's meant to guide the development of the homunculus into an adult body in as manly and dominant a form as possible, as envisioned by someone for whom mere toxic masculinity might as well have been prancing about in a frilly blouse with a handbag full of glitter. It makes me want to devise a spell to cross the barriers of time and punch someone in the dick six hundred years ago. The arithmancy of it is, however, finite and computable and since I already have the appropriate references I should be able to figure out alternatives that ought to work and aren't even slightly repugnant. Not least because I can handle any necessary macho posturing on my own merits, thank you very much.

The conclusion I reach is that maybe making a homunculus and guiding its development into a useful human body is possible using someone's genome as a template - Harry would be entirely pleased to donate a cheek-swab, I'm sure, since it would mean he had an actual brother to go with the magic ghost daddy - but the devil is in a massive pile of details. Foetal and infant development is the result of a couple of billion years of evolution, after all, it's unlikely to be a trivial job even with magic.

Giving up right at the start is the greatest failure possible, though, so after a few sessions of browsing the publicly-accessible bits of the University of Reading's library - mind-trick again, I don't have reader's privileges here at all but I need less supervision than the undergraduates so it's not like it's an imposition - I give a telephone sales clerk at Blackwells a red-letter sales day and acquire a shelf of books on biochemistry, genetics and developmental biology. Working through them - I've gone for undergraduate stuff, even though I really don't have the right A-levels to easily grok what I'm reading - is a major chore, sufficient that doing the reading-all-night-in-spirit-form thing isn't actually much worse and I decide to just suck it up in the interest of making faster progress. I'm able to sketch out a vague plan, but if I can't find a way to make magic handle the nitty-gritty I'm going to be proper fucked.

So I'm kind of relieved when I get a telephone call on a Saturday morning in late March. I'd been helping the boys with their 'homework' on the Easter Story when Petunia yells that it's for me.

"Hello?"

"This, ah, Malcolm Reynolds?"

"Speaking. Who's calling?"

"Hartlib. Young Rhys gave me this number, said you wanted to talk about a problem in biochemistry." Translation: I can't talk about alchemy over the phone. Because I do recognise that name.

"That's right, yes. Tell me, any relation to Samuel Hartlib?" Hartlib is about half the reason I know about early modern alchemy: he turns up a lot in Pepys's diaries - they were neighbours - and his archive of correspondence was found in the sixties, giving historians a detailed look at the founding era of the modern scientific community. Fascinating stuff.

"Closest possible, he's me. Assume you know me from Pepys's scribblings." Hartlib's telephone manner is brusque and to the point, with over-enunciated diction. If he really is the Samuel Hartlib, he predates the telephone by about three centuries and probably picked up his habits with the thing when it was all crackly party lines and human operators.

"That and your correspondence archive turned up and got the University of Sheffield all in a tizzy with the history of science in it. I was rather hoping we could meet and I could show you how far I've got with my own efforts. If nothing else, whether the approach I have in mind is likely to bear fruit." I'm that near the beginning of it all: I have no idea if I'm even on the right track. Alchemy, however, is famous for making homunculi so I have high hopes of at least getting an overview of the prior art to my problem.

"Yes. Rhys's description of your problem sounded intriguing. Got your diary handy?"

We hit on a date in the following week and I tell him I'll book a catered conference room somewhere - he tells me he's happy with anywhere in England, and gives me his number at Imperial College. Leaving aside the difficulties of having a discussion of fairly abstruse science, alchemy and magic in a house with two rambunctious little boys in residence, I'm aware that Number Four is being watched. While Nicolas Flamel is the only alchemist famous in the wizarding world - assuming chocolate frog cards are to be trusted - if Mrs. Figg reports unusual visitors it'll trigger follow-up and if any wizard knows that there are other alchemists and what they look like, it's Dumbledore.

Hartlib turns up - I end up booking a conference suite at a hotel in Guildford that I'm pretty sure was called something different when I lived there - accompanied by a woman who could be from anywhere from Iberia to Istanbul: Dark hair and eyes, strong features, robust-looking but she carries it well. Hartlib, for his part, looks like about every other farmer from the countryside where I grew up, only half a head shorter than average. Round-faced, big-nosed, with salt-and-pepper hair and blue eyes and a chunky outdoorsman's frame that looks like he ought to have a pair of collies at his heels. I'd been expecting someone a bit more teutonic-looking, frankly. They're both in completely unremarkable, if slightly dated, suits, hers a skirt rather than a trouser-suit. The impression they give is of academics in their prime: both look about fifty or so. Although she could as easily pass for senior counsel, there's a certain sharpness in her manner that I'm used to seeing from lady QCs.

Hartlib is first to step up, extending his hand for a shake. "Reynolds? Good. Allow me to introduce Perenelle Flamel, as she's calling herself these days."

She laughs at him. "Six centuries, boy. You've only been Samuel since, what, sixteen hundred?"

He's smiling, of course. Clearly these two get on famously, which they'd surely have to if they've known each other for literal centuries and can still stand the sight of each other. I've noticed that they're implying to have known each other longer than Samual Hartlib's official dates would allow. I decide not to ask about that, nor why Nicolas isn't along.

"The famous Perenelle Flamel, I presume?" choking down my urge to get all fanboy on either of them.

"I've managed to avoid being famous outside of being married to Nicolas for quite a long while, now," she says, avoiding all but the barest essence of my question. Which, fair's fair, was a bit prying, "Samuel asked me to come along because I've been funding biotech startups for the last little while."

That is interesting. Although I suppose it makes sense for someone with centuries of accumulated wealth to try and direct research where she wants it to go, and Venture Capitalism is as good a method as any and better than most. It also gives me an idea: it's going to require a leap of faith that these two are who they say they are. Rhys having vouched for Hartlib and Hartlib vouching for Flamel will, I think, do. Their minds are sufficiently occluded I can barely tell they're there: it's like conversations I had in my old life with no magic involved at all. Acquiring allies is important for what's to come, and these two are like the folks at Coutts: peripheral to the wizarding world at their closest, and therefore relatively safe to cultivate. And, being centuries old, unlikely to fall for any kind of misdirection or obfuscation I might try, along with being open-minded enough to keep their heads above water despite the world changing out of all recognition around them. The implications of their longevity for what their inner lives must me like are fascinating.

"Oh, good," I say, after a moment to think of an approach, "that's going to pay off enormously. Especially when the Human Genome Project gets going. I shan't be surprised to learn you're going to have a hand in that."

They look at each other. Very speaking looks, and I shouldn't be surprised if there was some legilimentic communication going on. It's an often-overlooked aspect of the discipline, since it requires both parties to the conversation to know each other very well.

Flamel looks at me with a searching and suspicious eye, "How do you know about that? The first meetings were only last year, and it hasn't been publicised at all."

"Bluntly, I'm from the future. Take a seat, there's coffee and tea, and I'll tell you the tale."

It takes me an hour to cover the basics. Neither of them is taking notes, but neither strikes me as the sort that needs to, very much. I give them the whole thing: parallel universes in which there's no magic and they're historical figures only and magic isn't real, the possibilities vis a vis fiction leaking from one universe to another, time travel, disembodiment, possible interaction with personifications of fate itself, and the extent of my future knowledge. Up to 2019 in the real world and up to 1998 in the magical.

"Questions?" I conclude.

"Are you willing to consult for me?" are the first words out of Flamel's mouth. As a venture capitalist, future knowledge is going to be immensely valuable to her. Which is a happy accident, because I was a bit stumped for how I could foot the bill if they insisted on treating me as a paying customer.

I smile. "I don't have a scale of charges, but if you can point me toward getting a pensieve made for me - I only need an introduction to a maker, I'm fairly well-funded - I'm quite happy to work on a quid pro quo basis for help on my own project."

"Ha!" Hartlib's amused by my response. "Largely the way we do business among ourselves, you'll fit right in. How far have you got?"

I feel a little giddy. It sounds very much like they're willing to help, in return for things that are entirely within my capabilities. I give them a presentation on the developmental biology I want to magically induce - very light on details, I've only been working on this a matter of weeks - and my thoughts on non-transgressive alternatives for the ritual in the de Retz book. I cheerfully admit that there remain some enormous blank spots in my plan, and the bits that are filled in are based on a very first-reading understanding of the magical theory and arithmancy involved.

It quickly devolves into a four-hour tutorial - interrupted with lunch in the hotel restaurant, so we're there until dinnertime - on homunculi and the alchemy of life and its relation to magic in general, transfiguration in particular, and biochemistry. My glee at this development simply cannot be overstated: even on the official dates there's nearly a millennium of alchemical experience in the room with me, and both of them are in teaching mode.

The conclusion: it's entirely possible, almost certainly completely unmarketable - an eye for the commercial applications is apparently important for alchemists, it's what pays for the research at the price of the pesky lead-into-gold rumours - and probably won't be any use to anyone but me. That last probably is heavily qualified: neither of them have ever specialised in an appropriate field but they assure me they Know People who will consult purely out of academic interest. Apparently growing homunculus clones for transplant-organ purposes doesn't occur to them, and I'm not going to mention it until I know where their squick limits are.

They're also quite interested in my theory that transfiguring matter from one allotrope to another should be quite simple with a bit of practise so the diamond reaction vessel that the optimised arithmancy calls for moves from the 'impossible' to the 'tricky, but doable' category. They're highly amused to learn it's an idea I nicked from sci-fi novels that won't come out for ten years or so, with transfiguration standing in for nanotechnology. Between them they know half a dozen better methods for turning foodstuffs into nutrient soup for the reaction vessel than the potions-and-transfiguration method I'd sketched out.

At one point I even leave Vernon taking a short nap and float out to allow them to cast analytical spells - Flamel's magic is all plangent strings while Hartlib's sounds more like a brass section that needs to switch to decaff - that tell them I'm, while not unique, definitely unusual. I'm certainly not a ghost as it's understood by wizards, and while spirits like me are known, they've never been known to remember any kind of life as a mortal. It could be that they started off like me and just eventually forgot who they were, but none of us can think of a practical way of testing any of it.

Over dinner, Flamel asks me, "Why you, do you think?"

I have to shrug, pretty much. "Well, let's assume that that experience after I died was genuine. We're dealing with entities that simply aren't human, so what their standards are for an appropriate agent to manifest their will may not be comprehensible to us. If it wasn't genuine, of course, then this is all a wildly improbable set of coincidences - I might not even be the original Mal despite having psychological continuity with him -" Philosophy of Mind and Identity is fun like that, there's a reason a lot of philosophy undergraduates go a bit odd by the end of their second year until they get over it - "and all I can do is the most right I can under the limits I'm working with."

"Which includes possessing a man and pillaging a Dark Lord's bank account?" Hartlib's amused tone suggests that a man who lived through the Thirty Years War and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms might know a thing or two about situational ethics.

"Just so," I say. "Look, if I could have gone back in time and done something about Hitler, I would have. Germany would still have been a shit mess, but I think it might have been possible to make it not a genocidal warmongering shit mess. Would I have made some ethical compromises to achieve that? Of course I would, within the ethical limits I'm not prepared to break, but then strangling art students in their sleep is illegal no matter how much of a racist arsehole they are. I'm under no illusions that I'm some mighty hero here to save the world from a dreadful villain who threatens everybody -"

"- he doesn't," Flamel observes, and she's been around long enough to see a few Dark Lords come and go, so she should probably know.

"But when it comes to a choice between helping a child who's been set up for a life of being shit on and pondering the second- and third- order consequences for possible ethical issues, I'm not minded to take much time over it. Sure, Tom almost certainly isn't an existential threat, the history books are full of his sort and they never come to good ends, but with advance warning of how things would play out un-meddled-with it should be possible to mitigate the damage considerably. Some carefully-managed inconvenience for a couple of reprehensible idiots - which they're benefiting by, in the long run - and looting the stores of the principal villain? I shan't lose any sleep, frankly."

Hartlib's nodding agreement, while Flamel's giving me a look I can't identify. She's at least six and a half centuries old, of course, so my chances of figuring out what she's thinking are pretty slim.

Hartlib waves for a waiter. "Dessert, anyone?"

I've had Vernon on his feet all day, so I decide he can have something and nod my assent.

"The thing is," Hartlib says once we've ordered sweets, "we can't take much time away from our regular work, we're in the business of saving millions at a time, after all."

This is true. Hartlib told me over appetizers that he's currently part of the effort to eliminate rinderpest, and was pleased to hear that it was completely gone by 2019. That will save millions while improving the quality of life of hundreds of millions more.

"So," he goes on, "while your effort to save a few thousands is a worthy one and we will help, delaying our own projects to get involved full-time will cost a lot more lives in the long run. And once you're done, I'd like you to think about joining the Invisible College. You've got a head start in as much as you're probably already immortal, no need for bizarre accidents or decades of magical training or spending half your time repairing yourself. Get your science up to speed and if nothing else you can work with the likes of Perenelle here organising things even if you can't do original work in the lab. You can pick up the magic and alchemy as you go along, but from what Rhys says you're fairly far along on the financial side of things already."

I'm a bit blown away by that. I'd already confirmed with them that the Elixir of Life and the Philosopher's Stone were red herrings made up by people writing about alchemy rather than alchemists themselves, and didn't think it was appropriate to ask for the Grand Secret Of Immortality at a first meeting. To learn that there is no Grand Secret and at least some of them just lucked into it is quite the revelation, and is dwarfed by the realisation - I literally hadn't considered it - that having died once I've got it out of the way and should be thinking about a career for the centuries ahead.

Urk.

-oOo-

After a short break from everything due to the boys being off for Easter - days out and activities to fill the lengthening evenings, as well as working our way through the educational toys that Dudley never bothered with but now enjoys because they get him a lot more interaction with what he thinks is his father - I get back to it.

First order of business is to catch up with my correspondence on the looting and money-laundering fronts. Which I'm privately acknowledging they are, for all the nodding and winking that goes on about where the money's coming from. By the time serious anti-laundering measures come in in about ten years' time I'll look like an entirely respectable capitalist. I'm pretty sure that the scandalous case that prompted that legislation has only just happened, although I can't remember anything about it except that it involved the proceeds of making a whopping quantity of LSD.

I amend the instructions I've given to the bank to leave a reasonable sum in the Swiss account to go with the assets I've left in the hands of Tom's lawyers. Unless he specifically asks for a statement, he won't know how much is missing, and I don't want him to think of doing that purely because he's tried to draw money out and had the order, cheque or whatever bounce.

While that's going on I end up in a blistering correspondence with what surely must be most of the world's alchemists. They've got quite the network going and word of what I'm putting together turns out to be an amusing hour or so's diversion for most of them. I get reams and reams of advice, notes, book recommendations and reading lists: what I thought would be a couple of years' work starts to look manageable in months, and then I'm able to revise it down to weeks. If I had an actually corporeal head, it'd be bursting with the influx of information. The only way I'm able to keep up - the notes of thanks alone are a demanding job of work - is by buying an electric typewriter, fitting runic silencing spells to the case with big messy blobs of sealing wax, and poltergeisting my way through bread-and-butter letters and questions about what I've received while incorporeal in the wee small hours of the morning.

This is also the time I reserve for having massive attacks of rampant fanboyism. I got a critique of my arithmancy from ISAAC FUCKING NEWTON. Who isn't dead, he just retired from public life. The rest of my correspondence consists of slightly more esoteric names, but still notable. I'm a bit disappointed that I don't hear from Paracelsus or Boyle, who I'm given to understand are still knocking about the scientific community under assumed names.

Petunia raises a quite reasonable objection to the full conversion of the garage into a magical workroom. Purifying and marking it out as a ritual space is one thing - I can cover things up with tarpaulins when they're just painted on the floor and walls - but the accumulating bookcases and crates of magical equipment are kind of obvious any time I leave the door open. Which I have to do several times as the paint fumes and ritual incense can get a bit overpowering at times during the preparation stages.

The solution is one that anyone can buy on Diagon Alley: a magical tent. Basic models contain the floor plan of a modest bungalow. They're still expensive, as putting extension charms on the inside of a tent is highly skilled work and the enchanters who do it charge accordingly. Even at the ridiculous Galleon exchange rate you're not getting any change out of five hundred quid, which is silly money at 1985 prices. However, if two thousand galleons, ten grand in real money, doesn't give you sticker shock - to which I'm immune, because it's all stolen money anyway - then you can get a tent superficially identical to the cheap one, whose interior an estate agent would describe as '6 beds, 5 receps, 3 bath, fitted kitchen, basement storage, c/h, floo, integral owlery, & all mod cons'. It fits in Harry's room, and the saleswitch assures me that the interior is unplottable and glamoured against scrying so I'll have no nasty owls from the Ministry if the kids sneak a few spells while on holiday.

Harry is impressed as hell with this example of magic in action far more than he is with his new bedroom - the tent doesn't come furnished, so it's basically the same as his old room just a bit bigger - and Petunia allows that she'd maybe have been a bit less dismissive of magic if she knew it could do this. Dudley sees nothing out of the ordinary about it: the muggleworthiness enchantments are pretty clever and he just carries on as if there was always an entire extra house behind Harry's bedroom door. One of the selling points is that you could entertain muggles as guests in this tent and they'd simply not notice anything out of the ordinary about having a six bedroom house in a tent pitched on a campsite unless you point it out to them repeatedly and forcefully with intent to let them in on the gag. Petunia isn't affected, another point for the Petunia-is-a-little-bit-magical theory. She is, happily, now blaming the magicals themselves rather than magic as a concept for her inability to attend Hogwarts.

Some experimentation later, I learn that whatever it is at Hogwarts that does for electronics, it's not present in sufficient quantities in the tent to break anything. So when I go out and sort out proper home entertainment - the Betamax is going in the attic, having served as a test subject in the tent - there'll be video and a sound system in the tent. TV reception inside is non-existent, but running a cable to the house aerial is a simple job for a local electrician, and we're having to cope with cables along the floor from the house electrical supply anyway. The electrician doesn't ask why I want a high-amperage socket on the upstairs landing and I don't tell him. The extra rooms the tent furnishes give us a library, study and laboratory, and Dudley's room becomes a games room for the boys - so I can shut them out of the tent while I'm working - while Dudley moves into the tent, getting a bedroom that's just for sleeping in.

Having a floo of our own would be the icing on the cake, of course, although for security's sake I don't get it connected up. It's perfectly possible to get an ex-directory address but I've no idea whether or how badly that might leak and frankly the longer I can go without having to deal with the Ministry the better I'll like it.

Thus the garage goes back to looking - to outsiders - like a bare space with tarps on the floor and walls, with a chest freezer at the back in which I'm accumulating the feedstock for my homunculus project. Wholesalers don't want to deal with me for one sale, of course, but there are a couple of local butchers who are happy to help with my 'experiments in medieval recreation cookery' by supplying whole pigs' heads, suckling pig carcasses and the entire gamut of offal. I was already braced for not being able to get really good black pudding in the south, but even mediocre black pud is better than none at all and it's all the same if you're breaking it down for the materials to make a body with. I've picked pork products because I've heard that pigs are, at the meat-and-bone level, quite similar to humans so I'm hoping that all-pork feedstock will give me the right balance of reagents when they're magically rendered down. One of the suckling pigs gets barbecued as the weather turns nice to the immense delight of the boys and all of their friends that they invite around for pork-inna-bun. They both want a pig roast for their sixth birthday parties.

The biggest job vis a vis preparation is making the reaction vessel. The arithmancy doesn't distinguish between grades of diamond - magically, unless you specifically need a particular cut of gem-quality diamond then powdered industrial diamond is as good as, and for some purposes better than, the Koh-i-Noor. Because, as a process, this has potential to go hilariously wrong, I rent a lock-up on an industrial estate near Woking. My raw material is two pallets of coke, being the easiest form of carbon to buy in 25-kilo sacks.

My first dozen tries result in finely-divided carbon all over the inside of the lock-up - I'd known this would probably happen and bought a respirator and a case of tyvek coveralls, both items selling particularly well while people are paranoid about Chernobyl - but the thirteenth attempt results in a uniform if slightly lumpy block of what an appraiser would call 'dark coffee diamond'. (This is a grade of diamond more-or-less invented to try and sell worthless rocks as gems. While gem-quality diamonds are uncommon enough that De Beers can make price-fixing work, diamond as a material is basically just another mineral.)

With the basics down - and reversing the transfiguration is child's play, not least because the material remembers all previously inhabited loci in its magical phase space (See! I can make up my own jargon on the fly too! Suck it, theory-of-magic writers! Get some consistency, you fuckwits!) I buckle to and start refining my technique.

A couple more false starts and I learn to control the shaping as the diamond forms, and improve step-by-step in getting the impurities out. They don't matter for the magic - pure diamond doesn't occur in nature at all - but they do matter for being able to see inside the vessel. According to my notes it's attempt 43 that gives me my first serviceable result, about the right size and shape to serve as a sarcophagus for a thirteen-year-old. Number 61 is where I declare myself up to the task of safely making and unmaking these things as and when I need them, and I transfigure the final version into easy-to-carry ingots of diamond that I can unmake and remake in the garage once I've got them home.

I am, of course, never going to get rich doing this. Not only is diamond way more common than the prices de Beers charge would suggest, but also there's a world of difference between 'diamond' and 'gem quality diamond'. One is an allotrope of carbon, the other a thing of beauty. Transfigurationists will tell you you can't make gemstones that will last, just imitations that revert after a while. I suspect - and I believe I will one day be able to prove - that this is a limitation of the artistic skill of transfigurationists rather than on the art itself. Getting the right lustre and cleavage and colour that make a gem suitable for jewelry use requires refined skill that is beyond most - certainly beyond me at this point - but should theoretically be attainable in a permanent transfiguration if someone cared to put in the years of practise required. Absent that effort, well, mineral samples that lack gemstone qualities? Just a case of knowing what you're doing, working from the right raw materials - which is key in making your transfigurations permanent - and not minding that the results actually look like the rocks they in fact are. Or, in my case, slightly cloudy brown-tinted glass.

I'm able to slack off a bit on my preparations and rehearsals once I realise how much time I have before the Summer Solstice, which I've picked as the next auspicious date for my first attempt. Not only is it a Saturday, so Harry can do his part, the exact moment of local Solstice is at 5:28 in the late afternoon, British Summer Time. I will have to get Vernon up early to prepare, but only so I'll be able to take my time over it. Next year's solstice is just before midnight, for example. Again, I'm doing things slowly and carefully with no short-cuts taken because, really, I don't trust my wand-work to rectify any errors as I go along. I should imagine that once I've done it once, I'll be able to do it with a lot less fuss and botheration in future and be more flexible about the date and time. For the first try, though, I'm going to science the shit out of it.

If all goes well, I'll have a body to inhabit - a young one, there's a whole lot of development once the adult teeth start coming in that I don't care to try magically monkeying with at my present state of knowledge - before the beginning of July. Failure, of course, just means trying again after more study, but I'm quietly optimistic.

-oOo-

"No, no, that's not what I'm saying at all. Look, the disaster resulting from deregulation isn't until at least two thousand and six, probably nearer two thousand and eight, and it's going to run on for years and fuck up world politics for at least a decade after. What I'm talking about in '87 is a massive market correction, nothing more. Get me into short positions around the first week of October of that year, I'm quite happy to miss out on some of the upward movement up to that point if you have to start getting out of the market earlier."

"Ah, right, I take your meaning now." I've been having a bit of a chat with Rhys about the kind of wealth management I'm after. It turns out that if you wait until after you've got an A-level in maths before you turn your hand to arithmancy, it's a lot easier than it looks to thirteen-year-olds. And, since it goes with Statistics like sausages go with mustard (the proper English stuff, not that there's anything wrong with the French and American sorts, they just don't satisfy), I'm discovering I have something of a knack for Arithmantic Prognostication.

Of course, I'm cheating: I know that Big Bang begets Black Monday and together they sow the seeds for the the Credit Crunch. It's just that with Arithmancy I can prove it. Foretelling was the first use for which Arithmancy was devised by Pythagoras, building on much older traditions of numerology. The discipline has found other purposes since pre-classical Greece, of course: if you can couch predictions in numerical terms you can also work back from numerologically-quantified desired results to figure out what possible means are in or out of your available solution set. This is how it contributes to spell-crafting and magical research generally. The core of the discipline, however, is prediction.

"I'd like you to be careful with how you use these predictions," I go on to say, "because if they get too widespread they'll invalidate themselves by becoming a factor in the number squares they're based on. I'm holding out for improvements in home computing to the point where I can automate at least some of this and produce more responsive prognostications, but until then we're limited in what we can do if things go recursive like that."

"I'll take your word for it. Some of the stuff you sent me has us all scratching our heads, and we've three Os and an EE in Newt-level arithmancy between us and a lot of experience."

"Well, If you treat me nicely I'll send you a reading list of the maths textbooks I cribbed the techniques out of."

"How nicely do I have to treat you to get you to come in and do a seminar showing your working for all this?"

I consider it. Doing the prep for something like that will be a bit of a chore, but on the upside it will enhance the capabilities of the bankers who're looking after my money. And hoarding knowledge is only very rarely a good idea, after all. Plus, if I make some 'informed speculations' about where computing is going to go, maybe one of them's a clever enough bugger to do all the hard work with computers when they come out so's I don't have to. God knows my ability to write code never got a lot past an evening course in Java. "My first thought," I say, "is that I probably will. Obviously, it's going to be a bit of a chore for me - I've got things that really ought to be a higher priority than teaching - but there are some follow-on projects that you could look into for me in return. Which you'll find useful yourselves, quite within what you're being paid for by Coutts, so all I'm asking is for the results to be shared on the q-t."

"I don't see that being a problem at all, Mal. Let me know when you've got it ready, we'll do our best to be good hosts."

It occurs to me that since I've already got one form of forecasting up to about journeyman level, I might want to look in to others. After all, while they suggest in the books that Divination has a poor name due to a succession of crappy teachers, there might actually be something in that branch of magic available to a sufficiently determined researcher. Expanding the field of study to information-gathering magics generally - the future is only one direction one might turn one's inner eye, after all - could make it quite the ace in the hole. And telling the future isn't in and of itself impossible: we know causality isn't quite as cut-and-dried in a magical universe as it is in the one I was born in. (Even there it was open to one or two theoretical loopholes.)

I put it aside for future study, adding another item to my rapidly-growing note-to-self list. For now - we're a few weeks into the '86/'87 fiscal year - I've got preparations for the body-growing procedure to look after and, more importantly, Harry's guardianship hearing to get him prepared for.

Not that he needs to know anything, just that it's going to seem like a very big deal to a kid his age and it would be remiss not to ensure he understands all of it that he can within his present limits.

NOTES

The teacher-with-blue-hair incident is one I did wonder about when I first read it: how did they think Harry pulled that off?

Baronis de Retz is a reference to Gilles de Rais under one of the variant spellings of his name. One of history's more alarming characters, the sort where the demon-summoning was one of the less morally unsound things he indulged in.

Samuel Hartlib is a real historical figure. He did some moderately important stuff like educational reform and helping to organise the Invisible College, the forerunner to what we now know as The Scientific Community: scientists corresponding and meeting and exchanging ideas (and having massive outbreaks of feuding and drama, because 17th Century and also because Academics.) Hartlib was in the middle of all of that and - judging from his correspondence, which is available free on Sheffield University's Digital Humanities Institute website - having a whale of a time taking an interest in ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING. Including, as it happens, alchemy. I may have jazzed him up a bit: this version didn't wreck his health by drinking dilute sulphuric acid to cure his kidney stones, for one thing… (when I said pre-modern alchemists had some decidedly odd ideas, that was one of the examples I had in mind.)

The case about proceeds of crime is R. v. Cuthbertson (1981) AC 470 - which I looked up for the purposes of this note. It's about how I remembered.

If you found the estate agent jargon confusing, don't worry, so does everyone else. The blighters aren't even consistent about it, just to make house-hunting that bit more of a special experience.

There's a ranking in kinds of mustard, and it goes like this: English Mustard, and then all the others. I will not be taking questions at this time. Black pudding is a form of blood sausage. Usually served cut in thick slices and fried. If you like it, you already know what's in it. If you don't, the recipe sounds … unappealing. Which is not reflected in how delicious the result is.

The magical theory bits you're just going to have to bear with me on for the time being (although Pythagoras being one of the earliest known arithmancers is historical fact). I do have this all worked out, but I'm not info-dumping unless and until I have to. We do have a story to be getting on with, after all, and it's already running way longer than I originally meant it to. I'm having far too much fun with the world-building and figuring out what was really going on to bring about What Harry Saw In The Books.

Fanfic recommendation: Harry Potter, Self-Insert by 15Redstones on FFN. A very fun story, which promises much in the way of hijinks. Two words: magical rickrolling.