Streaking

by Brian Stableford

  It was a challenge he had to meet. If he couldn’t do it, with all the intellectual resources of the newly-born twenty-first century at his disposal, who could? His own son? The son, that is, that he would be forced by superstition to sire, in order to renew the lucky streak that would be damped down by his father’s death and not return to full strength until it could once again be shared by a father and son—who would hardly be able to help loving and resenting one another at one and the same time.

  Canny glanced at his watch, and saw that had been reading for longer than he thought by the light of the bull’s-eye lantern mounted on the leather-topped desk. He had been seated at the desk for an hour, when he should have been in bed catching up with a night’s lost sleep.

  And yet, he still didn’t feel that he could go to sleep. His mind was still seething.

  He sighed again—and then he suddenly looked up.

  Lissa Lo was standing in front of him, on the far side of the desk, watching him curiously.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “That’s very clever,” Canny said, trying to sit still even though his heartbeat had accelerated with distressing suddenness. “I never heard a sound.” Or saw a warning cloud of symbolic darkness, he didn’t add.

  “It’s just a matter of knowing how to walk,” Lissa Lo assured him. “If you’d bothered to lock the front door, though, I’d have had to ring the bell. I never believed what they say about country folk not feeling the need to lock their doors, but I guess it must be true after all.”

  “No it’s not,” Canny said. “It must have been a misunderstanding. Bentley must have thought the handing on of the keys meant that I’d be assuming responsibility for the whole house—that’s why he came to ask permission before he went to bed. I didn’t realize.” He paused then, not knowing which of two possible interpretations he ought to put on the remarkable fact of Lissa’s unexpected return.

  Either she was far hungrier for his body than she had seemed, and far hungrier than could ever have seemed likely—or she was avid for something else entirely.

  She wasn’t offering him any obvious clue. She just stood there, waiting.

  “It’s only a matter of hours since I gave Mummy and Daddy my solemn word—or at least my solemn opinion—that you weren’t a Mata Hari,” he said, “but here you are, Matahari-ing away like an expert.”

  “And if you’d locked the door to this strange little cupboard,” the model added, “I’d have had to knock—or pick it. It’s a terrible lock, by the way—I could open it with a nail-file. I should have rung the bell anyway, I suppose, but it’s late. I didn’t want to wake the whole house. No, that’s not true. I didn’t want to wake the creepy butler. I wanted to see you, in private.”

  “That’s very flattering,” Canny said. “the stuff of wet dreams, in fact—except that I’ve a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t the prospect of hot sex that brought you back. Twice or three times I almost had suspicions, but I kept telling myself not to be silly.”

  “What kind of suspicions, Canny?” she asked, mildly.

  “I never show my hand until I’m called,” Canny said. “If you want to beat around the bush, I can beat with the best. You did seem unusually curious, and I’m not quite stupid enough to flatter myself with the notion that it might be my sex-appeal that excited you. I hoped that you were serious about seeing me again, of course, but I certainly didn’t expect you to change your mind half way to York and come back tonight. For that, you’d need a more powerful reason than anything ordinary.”

  “I couldn’t help myself,” she told him, with all apparent frankness. “I drove away because that was the rational thing to do—the safe and sensible thing to do—and then I turned around and came back. Perhaps I’m just a typical fickle female.” The last comment was saturated with sarcasm.

  “You still haven’t told me why,” he pointed out.

  “It was your ability to beat the odds that interested me,” she admitted, finally laying her cards on the table face upwards.

  “That’s what I figured,” Canny conceded.

  “Can I sit down?” she asked.

  “I’ll get you a chair,” he offered.

  “No need,” she assured him. She stepped back through the door to collect one from the intermediate room, and placed it opposite his, with the desk between them. It looked like a businesslike arrangement, and her attitude seemed businesslike too. He couldn’t help regretting that.

  “What tipped you off?” he said. “It wasn’t hitting the zero—you half-expected that, didn’t you? Was it Henri Meurdon?”

  The last question seemed to surprise her, and Canny realized belatedly that he’d given away more than he should have done.

  “No,” she said. “You told him?”

  “Of course not. He’d been studying me for a while, with the aid of his trusty computer and a well that I’d returned to at least once too often. I don’t understand why you decided that my luck might be something out of the ordinary, though. You haven’t had the same opportunities.”

  “I wasn’t sure until I saw the world smear,” Lissa said, calmly, as she recomposed her sitting position, as if she were posing for a photographer. “Before that, it was just a gathering sensation. It takes one to know one, isn’t that what they say in England? I hadn’t expected the disruption associated with your hitting the zero to have the same after-effects as it would have done if I’d deconstructed the moment myself—but I hid it well, don’t you think? Better than you, perhaps?”

  The fact that she had to turn away momentarily to reposition the chair exactly as she wanted it allowed Canny to make some attempt to hide the effect that this bombshell had on him. The casual way she’d referred to the world’s “smear” implied that she didn’t realize quite how appalling the claim would seem. Deconstructing the moment! He’d never thought of calling it that, but it had a certain charm. Calling it a “streak” was Yorkshire bluntness, of which Canny had never entirely approved. “Smear” wasn’t much better, though.

  He thought about denying everything, but that seemed to be the least sensible way to play the scene, given that he was surrounded by the trappings of his strange calling. He’d learned long ago that when anyone raised the possibility that his luck was unnatural in an earnest manner, the best strategy was to play along, but never to seem to be taking it seriously. This was an unprecedented situation, though, and perhaps an impossible one. If Lissa Lo were lying about what she was, she must know far more about his own gift than anyone he had ever met before. If she were telling the truth, she might be more dangerous still.

  “What after-effects do you mean, exactly?” he asked, warily.

  “Do you want a demonstration?” she countered. “Isn’t my lifestyle proof enough of what I am?”

  Canny did want a demonstration, but he knew that it might be dangerous to demand one. As for lifestyle...well, he’d run around with a great many rich and beautiful people who’d never had to give their luck a helping hand. Stevie Larkin was rich and famous, but he certainly wasn’t a streaker, just a big kid who could kick a ball with more than usual precision. Streakers—especially if they heeded the kind of advice he’d just been reading—tended to be more moderate in their habits and demands than footballers or movie stars...or models.

  On the other hand, he thought, the rumors about Lissa Lo’s sexual abstinence suggested that she did practice some kinds of self-restraint, and he’d often given in to temptation himself. He didn’t want to jump to any conclusions just yet.

  “You got a first at Cambridge,” Lissa Lo said, when Canny didn’t answer her question. “My guess is that you didn’t do much work, but the right questions came up in the exams. Your father wanted you to do economics, but you thought pure science was the way to go. You studied genetics, because you thought the answer might be there—but if it was, it didn’t stop you following in the family tradition by becoming a habitual gambler, in which role you’ve enjoyed considerable success. That’s all gossip, by the way—I
haven’t done anything as stupid as hiring a private detective, and I strongly advise you not to do that either. As I say, last night wasn’t the first time I wondered about you, but it was the first time you planted yourself right under my nose, and the first time you placed a bet so ambitious that I could be certain you were the cause of the deconstruction. I had other reasons for my suspicion, of course. You’re very abstemious by the standards of your kind, they say. No drugs, very little sex. I can relate to that. Are you sure you don’t want to set up a demonstration? I know your father’s not dead yet, but as long as we don’t enter into any kind of contest I don’t see what harm it can do. We don’t need to risk anything in competition, Canny—not while we have the option of wanting the same things.”

  Canny wasn’t at all sure that he and Lissa Lo did—or even could—want the same things. He had to say something, but he was completely at a loss. In the end, he became desperate.

  “You didn’t by any chance, have anything to do with the fact that I lost that forty-seven thousand Euros as easily as I’d made it?” he asked.

  Her face registered her astonishment with what seemed like revealing clarity. “I didn’t know you had lost it,” she said. “When?”

  “Last night,” he said. “I was mugged when I went back to the hotel.”

  “Oh! And you think that I...oh, I see! You’re not accusing me of complicity in the mugging, just of complicity in the disruption of probability. You think my presence might have put a twist on the smear! I never thought of that, but it was a peculiar one, wasn’t it? Maybe we’ve already done the demonstration, then. Did things get tangled because I bet on zero with you, do you think, or do you suppose that my simply being there...?”

  Canny was glad to see that she was capable of confusion too. “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s a lot I don’t know. Apparently, there’s a lot that you don’t know either.”

  She recovered her composure with remarkable swiftness. Within five seconds she was as calm as if she had simply changed poses. “Did you get any answers from genetics?” she asked, eventually.

  He was delighted to discover that he had recovered his own composure too. “The only clear answer I got from genetics,” he told her, “is that any gift or curse that might run in my family has to be determined by a gene on the Y-chromosome. It’s always been father-to-son, not just with us but with all the others my forebears have knowingly run into. Which makes you doubly anomalous—and maybe doubly dangerous, if you really are what you say you are.” It wasn’t just a Mata Hari she wasn’t supposed to be, he remembered; it was a Delilah, a Jezebel, or any other kind of femme fatale. Salome and the Biblical Judith, he recalled, really had been woman enough to cause men to lose their heads.

  “Are you sure it’s genetic?” Lissa asked him. Her eyes travelled suggestively around the shelves. She used her gaze as a pointer, picking out the jars and the mortars as well as the books stacked in the open cupboard.”

  “They’re nothing very exotic,” he assured her. “You might have noticed a few commentaries on the Kabbalah on your way in, but the treatises allegedly inscribed in blood are actually written in red ink, the alchemical journals are records of unalloyed failure, and the grimoires are all fake. I suppose, if you add all three rooms together, it’s one of the largest collections of books on ceremonial magic and the occult sciences in the country—but I’ve turned enough pages in the next room to know what rubbish it all is. Even the more credulous of my ancestors left copious marginal annotations—they probably reduced the commercial value of the collection by forty per cent, but they show up its true worth with terrible clarity. Different earls preferred different euphemisms, but the gist is always the same. Trichardy. Japeworthy. Poppycock. Workless. Meaningless. Worn out. Probably trivial. Utter crap. Whatever does the job, it isn’t this. Take your pick.”

  “And genetics is no better?” she persisted.

  “I used to be sure that it had to be genetic,” he said, carefully, “but all my ancestors took it for granted that it was magic—even Daddy, once he’d got his fingers burned in a metaphorical rather than a literal way—so I suppose I might be wrong. How about you?”

  “It was first explained to me in terms of yin and yang,” Lissa Lo told him, “but it’s a cosmopolitan world now. Our horizons get wider all the time, as they must. I have to say that I admire all this scholarship. Would you believe that with us it’s always been strictly oral? Never a word written down. Those are manuscripts in the cupboard, aren’t they? How far back do they go?”

  “Not far,” Canny said. “It was oral with us too, until 1745. The Enlightenment.”

  “Ah! It didn’t reach my part of the world, I fear. We thought we were enlightened enough already.”

  “We had steel nibs and a phonetic alphabet,” Canny told her. “It might have been more difficult for your ancestors, stuck with paint-brushes and all those Mandarin pictographs. No wonder Confucius expressed his philosophy in aphorisms. So how does the story work out in terms of yin and yang?”

  Lissa sighed, but she seemed to recognize the inevitability of making the running. She was the guest, after all. She must suspect—as he and his immediate forefathers had—that any magical account she’d been given was almost certainly codswallop.

  “The cosmic balance,” she said, touching her delicate chin with a well-manicured fingernail. “Opposition and continuity. Fortune and misfortune are unequally distributed among the living, but there has to be a overall evenness; our good luck has to be obtained at the expense of others. The gift has to be passed on, but it can only be doubled while the inheritor is a child; as the child grows to adulthood, she takes an increasingly bigger share of a fixed pool, while her mother ages and eventually dies. The cycle has to begin again, after a suitable interval, or the chain breaks. But the luck always has to be guarded, lest it dissipate. Each new recipient has to cast the spells, maintain the rituals and deny herself certain self-indulgences, especially sexual, except in very particular circumstances. Is that how it works with you Kilcannons?”

  “Pretty much,” Canny admitted. He didn’t elaborate—not so much because he was being discreet, but because it didn’t seem that there was much to add. He could no longer doubt that she was exactly what she said she was, and that she knew him for exactly what he was.

  The question was: where did they go from here?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In the short term, at least, where they went was deeper into matters philosophical and theoretical. Of numerous unsafe alternatives, that seemed the safest to Canny—and, apparently, to Lissa too.

  “It all seems to make a certain sense, to my mother at least, in the context of what your bigoted father might disdainfully call Eastern Mysticism,” the model told him. “In her equally-bigoted view, it doesn’t seem to make any sense at all in terms of what she derides as Western Materialism—but you and I have both grown up in a world whose scientific establishment is entranced by quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, so we know better than either of our respective parents or any of our ancestors, where the opportunity for a proper explanation might lie. The hereditary aspect is puzzling, though. If there were a gene for good luck—passing over the question of how on Earth the biochemistry could work—surely it would give its possessors such a massive advantage that people like you and I would be far more common than we are.”

  Lissa’s beauty seemed even more mesmeric to Canny now, in the shaded lamplight, than it had aboard the neon-lit jet or the twilit ridge. He knew, though, that the ever-problematic possibility of sex had now become extremely problematic indeed.

  She might still be lying, Canny told himself, although he couldn’t believe it and it was more deliberate distraction than serious proposition. She might have been very thoroughly briefed by someone else—someone of my kind in a narrower sense. But if there is a male streaker involved, he’s playing a dangerous game....

  “It’s not be as simple as that,” he told her, trying hard to keep his tone
relaxed and matter-of-fact. “There are some genes that are only advantageous if they’re rare. Don’t bother trying to come to terms with the paradoxes involved in groups of lucky people playing zero-sum games—just think about those harmless hoverflies which mimic dangerous wasps. The mimicry only protects the hoverflies if there are so many more wasps around that the predators are able to learn that black-and-yellow-stripes are associated with stings, so the mimetic coloration of the hoverflies can only be favored by natural selection along with genes that maintain their relative rarity by restricting their reproduction.

  “Cuckoo-strategies might be a more relevant example. Cuckoos can only get away with laying their eggs in other birds’ nests if they don’t become too common. As their numbers increase, so does the pressure on their victims to develop the ability to detect and destroy their eggs, so the price they pay for getting other birds to raise their offspring is that they don’t lay very many eggs. In their case, natural selection works in favor of a strict avoidance of reproductive excess. Sometimes, selfish genes have to be exceedingly prudent in order to maximize their own selfishness.”

  “And you think it works the same way with us?” she said, apparently following the argument easily enough. “You think that the genes producing our luck, however they might accomplish it, have to be packaged with other genes that make it difficult for us to reproduce?”