Streaking

by Brian Stableford

  He trailed off, realizing that the most interesting aspect of his suddenly-interesting times was Lissa Lo, whose advent still did not seem at all unfortunate. Swings and roundabouts, as he had said to Bentley only yesterday...or yin and yang, as she might have put it. That multicolored streak he had seen in the casino had obviously sent ripples in every direction, stirring up all kinds of craziness.

  “I thought the Union Corse was an insurance company, sir,” Bentley said, mildly.

  “And I thought you knew what I meant,” Canny retorted. “They’re the Riviera’s most efficient racketeers—have been for a century and more, having settled in long before crime first got organized in America. They’ve never had total control, of course, but they’ve always considered themselves a cut above the gangs who followed southern ways. They’re not really Corsican any more, in spite of their name, but they have a sense of tradition and they still define themselves partly in terms of rivalry with Sardinia, where the local bandits used to be much more heavily biased towards such practices as kidnapping. It’s almost as complicated, in its way, as Yorkshire and Lancashire, and far more bizarre in its implications. The Union Corse will try to hunt down the people who stole my money because it’s a matter of honor—they take their protection racketeering very seriously—and pour encourager les autres. By which I mean that they’ll want to send a message to any other Eastern Europeans ambitious to muscle in.”

  “I understand the Voltairean reference sir. A matter of hanging admirals, I believe. What you’re trying to imply is that someone here must have given away information about your family—not just its wealth, but about its situation, Only son, father ailing, old-fashioned concern about the succession. If anyone did, sir, I’m sure they had no idea what they were doing. It’s the sort of information that an unscrupulous inquirer could easily glean from casual gossip. The villagers are always proud to talk about Cockayne’s unique circumstances, enthusiastic to explain them to new business-partners. I don’t think you need assume that anyone you or I know was actually part of a plot to kidnap you. That seems very unlikely to me.”

  “Unlikely,” Canny echoed. “Yes, you’re right. People do talk, quite innocently. And people listen—sometimes anything but innocently. We live in a cosmopolitan world, where there’s scope for all kinds of new commerce, and new misunderstanding. The spectrum of probability isn’t something constant. Being lucky is a much more complicated business than it used to be.”

  “Pardon me for saying so, sir, but are you sure that Monsieur Meurdon is a wholly reliable source of information?”

  Canny laughed, briefly. “Of course I’m not sure,” he said. “He may run an honest casino, but he pays protection money to the Union Corse. His situation is complicated. He practically dared me to place the bet that won me the stolen money, and he’s already investigated my betting patterns. Maybe he did set up the robbery, and made up all this stuff about Eastern European kidnappers as a cover story to distract me. I can’t be sure of anything—and to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about the forty-seven thousand Euros. I could do without any further complications and twists of fate, just for the time being.”

  He knew as he said it that he was lying. What he really wanted was to pick and choose his complications, his twists of fate. He only wanted to hide from some essentially unlikely contingencies. Kidnap gangs and muggers he could do without; Lissa Lo was another matter. He wasn’t sure, any longer, that he could do without her...and if there was a price to be paid in strange ripples of uncertainty and whatever they might stir up, it was a price that he might have to pay, for the sake of simple curiosity as well as not-so-simple lust.

  Bentley probably knew that he wasn’t telling the whole truth, but Bentley was used to that, and to being content with it.

  “Your father is awake now,” the butler said, in a softer tone. “if you’d like to see him, I think you’d find him in a receptive frame of mind.”

  “Yes, I would like to see him,” Canny said. “Thanks, Bentley. I appreciate what you’re doing—all of it. You’re a real tower of strength, and I don’t know what Mummy and I would do without you. Sorry about the clichés—but they really do mean what I want to say.”

  Bentley nodded his head, to signify that he understood.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Hello, Can,” Lord Credesdale said, when Canny went into his room. “I feel a little better today—in myself, that is. This bloody body’s still collapsing on me, but I slept well for the first time in weeks. To judge by the look of you, you didn’t.”

  “Jet lag,” Canny said, trying to sound laconic. “Or too much excitement. I’ll be okay in a day or two.” He studied his father’s face with mild amazement. His mother had not been exaggerating; the thirty-first earl looked much better. Canny was modest enough to take it for granted that it was the morphine rather than his own words that had brought a new tranquility to the old man’s brain, but he was aware of the fact that the drug hadn’t been able to achieve that effect before. Maybe it was mostly a matter of timing, of arrival at the threshold of death—but it wasn’t improbable that he had played a part in facilitating the process.

  “Did you go to the library last night?” his father asked, when he had settled into the chair, conscious of the contrast between his own awkward pose and the ones that Lissa Lo had adopted during their confrontation in he library.

  “Yes, Daddy,” he said. “It was a far more enlightening experience than I expected.”

  “You don’t have to lie to me because I’m dying.”

  “No, Dad—I know that. In fact, I think perhaps I ought to tell you a little more of the truth than I’m normally inclined to do. I think I might have done something rather stupid. I wasn’t going to tell you, because I didn’t want to trouble you with it—but you’re the only person who might be able to see the implications, in the context of the family gift, so you’re the only person who might be able to give me advice. Can I tell you the story, even though it might hurt you a little to hear it?”

  “I’d far rather listen to you than tell stories of my own,” his father said, trying to sit up a little straighter. Canny helped him to rearrange his pillows, then stood over him for a moment before sitting back down, trying to figure out what kind of reaction he might get to his tale—and whether it might, in fact, undo whatever good work he had done the previous day.

  “Go on,” the old man said.

  Canny nodded his head. He told his father about receiving the telephone call at Meurdon’s casino, what Meurdon had said to him, what he’d done when he went back to the roulette wheel, the exotic streak he’d seen when zero came up at the third attempt, what had happened when he went back to the hotel, and what Meurdon had just told him on the phone.

  “Stevie Larkin’s amateur psychoanalysis was right on the button,” he said, by way of conclusion. “The call hit me harder than I thought. The triple bet was way too symbolic. I think I might have called down the lightning, Daddy. Waves of improbability are radiating in every direction.” He didn’t mention Lissa Lo’s return to the house, or what she’d claimed to be. That was something he still hoped to figure out on his own, if he could.

  Lord Credesdale remained perfectly calm—unnaturally so, by his own volatile standards. It couldn’t just be the morphine, Canny thought. There had been a change in him that cut far deeper than any mere anesthetic.

  It must, Canny concluded, have been the handing over of the keys. Even though both of them had known how meaningless and arbitrary the ceremony was, its symbolism had taken effect. The old man had been relieved of his formal responsibility, and his anxiety had evaporated; he really did feel that he had been unburdened—that he could look at the problem that Canny had set before him with a dispassionate eye and weigh it objectively, without any attendant dread.

  “It wasn’t so stupid,” Lord Credesdale said, after a few moments’ thought. “It’s always safer to use the house percentage discreetly, of course—although this Meurdon charact
er seems to have noticed it anyway, thanks to his computer—but it was only a bet, at the end of the day. Nothing really significant. If the streak that went with it caused a massive disruption, it can’t have been a piddling thousand Euro bet that provoked it, even at odds of thirty-six to one. Even if all this stuff about kidnap plots is bullshit and Meurdon’s playing his own game, things had started to go awry before you placed the bet—and we always have to remember that shimmers in the fabric of reality aren’t something we cause, any more than the lightning that blasts a tree is caused by the tree. Fate twists itself, for reasons we can’t comprehend—we just attract a tiny part of the spin-off, and we’re victims as well as beneficiaries. So don’t waste time regretting what you did. You need to ask yourself whether there’s anything you can do now, before the deadline expires on the better part of our collective bounty.”

  Yesterday, Canny thought, he could hardly string words together. Now he can talk about the deadline expiring on our collective bounty. He really is in a different place. He knew, though, that the more significant part of that sentence was the earlier part, and its use of the word “you”. For the first time in his life, Lord Credesdale was looking at his son’s situation as something that did, indeed, belong to his son and not to him.

  “There’s not a lot I can do,” Canny pointed out, “except for trying a little harder to understand. Consulting the diaries really isn’t much help.”

  “Don’t underrate them, Can. The old earls weren’t fools.”

  “I’m sure they weren’t. But that doesn’t mean that their ruminations are relevant to me—to us.”

  “If the diaries are mostly rubbish,” his father told him, “so is most of that pop psychology crap you read.”

  “Some of it, yes. But we do have to be aware of the seductions of psychological probability. There’s a danger of falling into the same trap that claims people who think that they can derive a system for winning at roulette by searching the record of results for patterns that aren’t really there—and I think that far too many of our ancestors got well and truly stuck in that one, without ever realizing it.”

  “Even so....”

  “There’s another reason the diaries aren’t much help, Dad, even if we set aside matters of psychological probability. The thought occurred to me as I was talking to Bentley just now that the spectrum of probabilities changes over time, qualitatively as well as quantitatively. The implications of being lucky are very different now from what they were in the nineteenth earl’s time, let alone the first’s. Do you see what I mean?”

  The old man furrowed his brow. His eyebrows were still dark although the hair on his head was almost all white, and the line they formed now was like the careless stroke of a marker pen across his pale face. “I’m not sure that I do,” he said.

  “What I mean is that there are a great many more opportunities open to people nowadays—and a great many more things that can go wrong for them. If the first earl really had made a deal with the devil, the devil would have to be working overtime to keep up with the technicalities of delivery. Once upon a time, a title, a narrow strip of land and a pot of gold would have been the height of any man’s aspirations—but people have very different expectations nowadays. The land and the title aren’t worthless, but they aren’t worth nearly as much as they once were, relatively speaking, and the gold’s had to proliferate in all kinds of strange ways, into shares and property, businesses and bonds. On top of that, there are all kinds of other rewards and prizes that didn’t exist a couple of centuries ago—or that nobody cared about in those days. The first earl might have wished for a wife and son, but it would never have occurred to him to ask for a wife he could love, and who would love him—and the idea of asking to be lovable, if only in being handsome, would hardly have figured in his calculations. He might have asked for some kind of cleverness, but how could he have imagined the kinds of intellectual skills that people aspire to nowadays? He might have asked for fame, but how could he have imagined modern celebrity? Not that he actually did make a formal contract with fate or the devil, of course—but you see what I’m getting at, don’t you? Sometimes, I wonder whether the Kilcannon luck is really keeping pace with the times—and what the implications would be of its catching up.”

  “Don’t complicate things too much, Can,” his father said, after a pause for thought. “At the end of the day, luck’s luck, and we’ve got more of it than most—always provided that we can protect and prolong the streak.”

  “That’s the Yorkshire way to look at it, all right,” Canny conceded. “But things can’t always be simplified to that extent. What I’m trying to get at is that luck isn’t just luck. It’s not a quantifiable thing you simply have less or more of—it’s much more complicated than that.”

  “It is just a quantifiable thing,” Lord Credesdale insisted. “Everything, at the end of the day, is just probabilities. It’s all just electrons orbiting atoms, statistics and uncertainty. What we think of as the world—everything we perceive through our senses—is just an image. The reality underneath is mathematics, equations, probabilities. That’s where our house percentage is based.”

  “It’s not where we experience it,” Canny objected—but he spoke uncertainly, realizing that his father had a point, and not one that he had expected the old man to make. The Kilcannon luck showed up in all sorts of ways, but the way it showed up most clearly, so that even other people could discern it on occasion, was in gambling. That was where it was most at home, where it operated most comfortably. Where there were numbers, and money, the dividends of the family gift were easily perceptible, and easily delivered. When it came to avoiding kidnap attempts, or avoiding cancers, the calculations and outcomes weren’t nearly as straightforward—but that didn’t mean that they weren’t a matter of juggling probabilities and resolving uncertainties. Maybe the things he thought of as qualitative really were reducible, in some final analysis, to quantitative matters-to the mathematical intricacies of subatomic physics. If so....

  “The one thing you can do, if you really have been caught up by some weird chain of circumstances that might yet carry you into deeper trouble,” Lord Credesdale said, “is to make plans to renew the streak as soon as possible. This kidnap threat might have gone away, but it might not—and either way, it serves to illustrate the kind of dangers that are always around us, lying in ambush. All this stuff about celebrity and lovability is to do with your reluctance to treat the succession as a purely practical matter, isn’t it? Having your head turned by supermodels is just a symptom. What you’re saying is that you might not be able to feel lucky if you don’t get the kind of rewards that modern romantic fiction promises to lovers, no matter how much money you have.”

  “Am I saying that?” Canny recognized, again, that his father might have a point.

  “I’ve been there,” Lord Credesdale reminded him. “And before you say it, I know what your next move will be. Just because it didn’t work out for me, you reckon, it doesn’t mean that your love-match won’t work out. Well, maybe not—but even if Lissa Lo were willing, you must be able to see how long the odds are that it could ever work out. We’re talking about a myth, Canny. Forget my experience—look around at the rest of the world. How many people really get lucky in love? And for how long? How many people can sustain that kind of so-called luck for a lifetime, let alone thirty-two generations? You’re right; the first earl wouldn’t have thought to ask for it if he really had made a deal with the devil, because he didn’t live in the modern world—but that doesn’t mean that he was wrong. Maybe you shouldn’t ask for it either. Maybe you should be content with the luck you have at cards, and in business, Maybe you should just take the money, Can, and forget the rest. Let the luck deliver what it can deliver, and don’t push for the impossible.”

  “That’s easier said than done,” Canny told him, although he realized that his father must have given the matter far more thought than he had ever imagined. The mood might be new, but the philosoph
y wasn’t.

  “Nobody’s ever said that it’s easy,” the old man reminded him. “I never told you that, and none of the diaries make any such claim. Quite the reverse. You might think the rituals and the petty self-mutilations are silly, but they have their symbolic value if nothing else. It isn’t easy. Luck isn’t free; it has to be bought. If you really did come to me for advice, that’s what I can offer. Life’s a bitch, and if you don’t have the luck it can turn rabid. Find a wife, Canny. Conceive a son. Renew the streak. Not Lissa Lo, or anyone like her. Stick to the rules.”

  “You don’t know anything about Lissa Lo, Dad,” Canny told him.

  “I know enough.”

  “I don’t think you do.”

  Canny hesitated for a long time then, fearing that he might undo all his good work—but he had the library keys now, and his father was off the hook. The morphine could take care of the old man’s pain, now. And when it came down to it, it wasn’t the business at the casino about which he really needed advice—the subject on which he really needed advice was much more important than that.

  If his father hadn’t be dying, Canny knew, he would never have dared to make the confession that he was about to make—but the time when he needed to keep his secrets seemed to be past, and the one he’d just parted with by way of testing the waters hadn’t caused any sort of storm.