Streaking

by Brian Stableford

  The worst-case scenario, it seemed to him, was that he might lose his gift along his first-born child, having sacrificed his own opportunities on the altar of Lissa Lo’s divine or diabolical beauty. But was that possibility any more than a phantom of superstition? If the streak really were a mere matter of a gene carried on his Y-chromosome, he ought not to be any worse off for having participated in Lissa Lo’s experiment, even if she tried to cheat him...always provided that she didn’t intend to do him any physical harm. He couldn’t believe that she did...but he wasn’t entirely sure that what he could or couldn’t believe was the best guide to action in his particular case.

  He could almost hear his father’s ghostly voice saying: “Play safe. It isn’t worth the risk. It’s a bad bet.”

  He was too tired to give the matter sensible consideration. He had to go to bed, to sleep.

  Tuesday was entirely taken up by meetings, and so was Wednesday. There seemed to be dozens of acquaintances to renew and cement, dozens more to make for the first time and set firmly in their intended pattern. It was surprisingly exhausting work, but it had to be done. In order to make sure that the house percentage of his business interests didn’t begin to wane or go astray, he would have to be as careful and as vigilant as Henri Meurdon. The process of establishing himself as the new central cog in the many-spoked wheel did, however, have a certain innate fascination to compensate him for the fierceness of his concentration. It was easy enough to think of it all as some vast game, more like mah-jongg than poker, and every bit as demanding of expertise and practice.

  Had he been more confident of his luck, the decisions he was called upon to make would have been simple enough, but as the hours went by he realized that he could not escape the toils of psychological probability. He had not had the slightest atom of real evidence that his luck was running low, but the conviction that it might be was irresistible, and it changed the pattern of his thinking very markedly. Now that he dared not take it for granted that bright streaks would deliver him from any threatened disaster, the problem of redeploying his money to insulate his share portfolio against the stock market’s continued decline—not to mention the possibility of a flood of demands to fulfill his obligations as a Lloyd’s underwriter—seemed quite intractable. The income from the estate would hold up reasonably well whatever happened, but it seemed now to be a tiny proportion of his fortune. The value of his property portfolio, which had soared with the boom, also seemed reasonably foolproof—except for the possibility of a crash, which he no longer dared to rule out.

  He listened dutifully to a great deal of advice, and soon began to wish fervently that there was some discernible consistency in it—but he consoled himself with the thought that the supposed expertise of his inconsistent advisers was evidence that there was nothing accurately calculable in the shape of the future.

  Talking to various bank-managers in Leeds, Canny had easily been able to sustain the illusion that his casual suggestion to Lissa that he was wealthy enough to live indefinitely on his resources without any supernatural injection of luck had been the simple truth. Two days of talking to brokers, underwriters and London estate agents, by contrast, gave him a very different impression. Yes, he was rich—but he was also living in a world where sudden reversals of fortune were not merely possible but had recently become routine. The financial world was full of foam, and no one really knew which bubbles were likely to burst, or when. Nothing was safe any more. He was as fireproof as anyone could be in twenty-first century Britain, and could probably live in relative comfort until he died no matter what might come to pass—but relative comfort was not an obviously worthy aim for the scion of a very long line of hardened gamblers, and could not seem so in the hubbub of the metropolis.

  In the heart of the City of London, the devil’s engine-room, Canny quickly came to understand very well why other recently-elevated earls, who must have been just as determined as he had been to get rid of all the mumbo-jumbo—to eat and drink like normal gluttons and to avoid sticking blades in agonizing places—had soon come to feel an irresistible pressure to comply with the demands of tradition.

  He also began to understand much better what enormous relief those other fledgling earls must have felt when their bizarre endeavors began to pay off—and why his father had spent as much time as possible in the infinitely less fevered environments of Credesdale House and the village of Cockayne.

  The trouble with being a lucky Kilcannon, Canny quickly realized as he made his way around the labyrinthine toils of London, was that it raised the expectations of everyone with whom one came into contact, as well as one’s own—and the expectations of his metropolitan contacts were already wilder than common sense allowed. Perfectly ordinary ill-luck would become, for a Kilcannon, evidence of slackness and inferiority—and while that might be cause for gentle commiseration in Leeds, the only emotion it could generate in the City was contempt. If it would be difficult to suffer the effects of ordinary luck in the secret recesses of his own thoughts, it would even more difficult to suffer them in the arenas of high finance.

  In Leeds, the thought of the self-mutilatory aspect of the rituals that were supposed to complete his compact with Dame Fortune—once he had fulfilled the basic requirement of siring a son—had seemed rather ridiculous. In London, however, it was easy enough to see self-mutilation as a matter of routine: a trivial cost that everyone involved in the life of the City expected to pay, if not by way of knives and flames, then by way of drug addiction, stress and the crushing burdens of the need to conform, the need to succeed and the need to show no weakness. Superstition was everywhere, and all-consuming.

  Was this, Canny wondered as he went through the motions of his schedule, the stuff of which all magic had always been made? Was the real basis of all occult belief little more than a kind of cosmic fruit-machine, which paid off enough people enough of the time to keep them all coming back for more, even though the inevitable sum of all their endeavors was a massive house percentage in favor of the devil? Was his own consciousness of that fact, and his conviction that he was on the devil’s side, really an advantage, or just a kind of cosmic irony? Might it be better, in fact, to be moderately unlucky all the time without ever suspecting—let alone believing—that there was any way to beat the odds, than it was to be as certain as one could be that there was a way to beat the odds without knowing how, exactly, the trick was worked?

  He was tempted to wind down on the Wednesday evening by dropping into Victoria Club or one of its rivals, but he knew that the intention to stay for an hour was likely to slide inexorably into a fierce determination to make a night of it, even if he started losing—as he feared that he might.

  In any case, he still had reading material to keep him busy, even when he’d exhausted the revelations of Bob Stanley’s report. He had also brought the typescript of Martin Ellison’s unfinished book, which was something of a jigsaw puzzle in itself. There he could read deft clinical analyses of the psychology of the belief that good luck came in threes, or that lucky streaks had to be ridden while they were hot. There he could read explanations for the common delusion that so many losers maintained, not merely as a public performance but also in the privacy of their own skulls, that they were actually breaking even. There he could read scrupulously-deciphered accounts of the mythological imagery that persuaded male gamblers to perceive luck as a fickle and capricious female, as deadly as a female black widow spider, as exacting as any vampiric muse, and yet quite irresistible to anyone with balls.

  Lissa Lo would doubtless have loved that particular chapter—and laughed contemptuously at the allegation that even female gamblers saw Lady Luck in much the same terms.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  On Thursday Canny finished early in the afternoon, without any further appointments or an engagement for dinner. He expected to feel relief, glad that he finally had some time to himself, but as soon as he was alone he realized that the time would not be easy to fill. While he had been fo
rced to squeeze his reading and his thinking into the interstices of a riot of obligations their produce had seemed precious, but now that there was plenty of time available he found himself easily distracted and convinced of the uselessness of his own speculations. When his doorbell rang, therefore, he was by no means as annoyed by the unexpected interruption as he might have anticipated.

  The voice that came over the intercom seemed to be muttering away incomprehensibly in some unknown language, but it was punctuated with the name of “Miss Lo”. Canny’s heart leapt then. He had not by any means made up his mind what he wanted to do about Lissa Lo’s interest in him, let alone her proposition, but the prospect of carrying the agenda further by action rather than reflection was suddenly irresistible.

  “I’ll come out,” he said.

  He fetched a jacket from the wardrobe rather than put on the one he’d worn to his meetings. He paused by the mirror in the hallway to check that his hair was properly combed. When he finally went out into the street he found a black limousine insouciantly parked on the double yellow line in front of the building, with a chauffeur who might have been Malaysian or Filipino silently holding the door open for him.

  He got in without an instant’s hesitation, incapable of any other feeling than joyful anticipation.

  The limousine joined the long queue crawling westwards along Marylebone Road heading for the Westway, then turned south along Wood Lane, heading towards Hammersmith in order to take the flyover leading to the M4. The vehicle’s lack of success in avoiding traffic could hardly be deemed unlucky, given the inevitable density of the traffic, and the rear seat was exceedingly comfortable. Once the car had actually moved on to the M4, it gathered speed rapidly.

  When Canny asked the driver where they were going, his only reply was a shake of the head, presumably intended to indicate that the man’s English was insufficient to permit him to understand the question, let alone give an intelligible answer. Canny accepted his fate meekly. It did not matter where they were going; all he really wanted to know was how long it would take to get there.

  They turned off the motorway at Slough and headed for Windsor, but not quite as far as the castle. On the edge of Old Windsor they turned south, skirting the Great Park before moving onto the A30. Ignoring Ascot and the M3, they went through Chobham but turned right before reaching Woking.

  Canny had been to Bisley more than once, but he did not know the area at all well. As dusk fell he lost his bearings completely, but relaxed when the car turned off into a private road through a wood. He had seen dozens of similar roads, each of which led with the utmost discretion to one of the thousands of country houses that were neatly tucked away in the secret coverts of the home counties, as if located in some parallel world unapprehended by the peasantry and the middle class. It wasn’t one that he had ever visited, so far as he could remember, but he didn’t care what its name was. He only cared about who might be awaiting him there.

  He was inside the house, and had actually been introduced into the drawing-room, before the slightest suspicion hit him that he had assumed too much—but a split second before he moved around the high-backed armchair to look at the woman who was sitting there his vision was blurred by a streak.

  It was a dark streak, but if it was a warning, it had come too late. It occurred to him that if it really were his streak, and not merely something of which he was a passive observer, it might not have been able to manifest itself until he came within range of another energy-source.

  Either way, his stomach lurched more vertiginously than the force of such a tangentially-visible streak could normally have contrived. An unexpected chill of pure terror momentarily startled his brain. He couldn’t understand why. There didn’t seem to be anything unduly threatening in the situation, now that the initial surprise was over.

  He was staring at an older version of Lissa Lo—a version so much older, in spite of what he knew about her actual age, that he was reminded of the climax of the movie version of Lost Horizon. Had the girl in the story also been called Lo Chen? No, he remembered; the character in the book had been Lo-Tsen.

  At any rate, it was as if he were looking at a Lissa Lo who had abruptly faded into antiquity when years that she had long defied had caught up with her in a precipitate rush.

  “Won’t you sit down, Lord Credesdale,” the old woman said. Bob Stanley’s report had told him that she called herself Lo Chen nowadays, although she had worn other names in the past. Perhaps, he thought, the chauffeur had not intended to deceive him when he mumbled incoherently about “Miss Lo”—but if so, Canny had certainly taken the opportunity to deceive himself.

  Canny let himself fall into the matching armchair on the far side of the hearth, trying to conceal the fact that his legs had become weak. The fireplace was open, but it looked as if no fire had been lit there for forty years and more. Unlike Credesdale House, this edifice was fitted with central heating and double glazing.

  There was no conspicuous Oriental theme to the general decor, but Canny didn’t know whether that made it more or less likely that the house actually belonged to Lissa or her mother.

  “Are you not taking a risk, Madame Lo?” he asked, although he felt even as he said it that it was a horribly corny line.

  “Madame is sufficient,” she told him. “It will avoid incongruity—so far as incongruity can any longer be avoided. To answer your question, as honestly I hope you will answer mine: yes, I am taking a risk that I would rather not take. We are both weaker than we have been in the past, I think, although you still have the hope of becoming strong again. That might reduce the chance of catastrophe, although the omen we both experienced a few moments ago does not bode well. Were your meetings with my daughter attended by similar ill-effects?”

  “No,” Canny admitted, readily enough. “I had no sense of being in competition with Lissa, even when she told me that she knew what I was—and she, it seems, had no sense of being in competition with me, even when she revealed what she is. Consciously or unconsciously, you seem to feel differently—but it seems to me, now that I’ve recovered from the discomfort, that it was just a flash of anxiety, not a readjustment of the world’s order. How did you find out that Lissa had approached me? Did she tell you?”

  “I have not seen my daughter for some time,” Lo Chen told him. “She is avoiding me, for reasons you will doubtless understand. It was foolish of you to hire detectives to discover what you might have found out easily enough by yourself. Had I done likewise, you would probably have been alerted to my counter-investigation, but I found most of what I needed to know in Burke’s Peerage and the data assiduously collected by the Church of Latter Day Saints. A wonderful toy, the Internet, do you not think?”

  “It’s changing the face of modern gambling,” Canny said, “but the Kilcannons are traditionalists. I’ve been very wary of it, although I’m thinking of setting up an on-line trading facility—my father could never have brought himself to disappoint the family stockbroker, but we live in an age when middlemen are fast becoming redundant. Did you really bring me here to discuss the Internet?”

  “Your father lived a long time,” the not-so-old woman observed, as if it were a matter of little consequence, suitable for polite chitchat. “I shall not live nearly so long. There appears to be a significant difference between the balance of power within our families, Lord Credesdale. Between father and son, the father seems always to have the upper hand. Between mother and daughter...is that because we are female, do you suppose, or because we are from what you call the East?”

  “It’s pure guesswork,” Canny said, “but I’d go for the female line of descent being the more relevant variable. Kilcannon luck has never been overly concerned with handsome features, but Lissa’s beauty is truly magical—as yours must once have been. The demands exacted of fortune by a daughter like Lissa must be powerful. I do understand, from my own experience, why she might feel disinclined to spend too much time in your company—and I think that her motives migh
t be more intense than mine ever were, for good reasons.”

  “I agree,” the old woman said. “Nor is the difference apparent only within the family.”

  The point was a trifle understated, but Canny saw the implication immediately. “You think she has the upper hand over me, too. You think she intends to plunder my luck as avidly as she’s recently plundered yours—and you think she’ll succeed.”

  “I believe that she will try.”

  “Without wishing to be rude,” Canny said, “I’m not sure that I can understand why that prospect should disturb you. If she really could parasitize my luck, might that not release the pressure on yours?”

  “I am a mother. Without wishing to be rude, I hope that you can understand that not all motives are purely or narrowly selfish.”

  Canny nodded his head, conceding the point.

  “Perhaps you cannot listen to reason, and are therefore forgivable,” Lo Chen continued. “She refuses to listen, which is quite a different thing. You know, I suppose, that she will take your child away, if you allow her to conceive it. You would probably never see it.”

  “It seems very likely,” Canny admitted, “but I’ve dared to hope otherwise. Having had good luck all my life, it’s difficult to suppress such hopes—as you must know. If you brought me here to try to talk me out of it, you couldn’t have had more than a very frail hope of success—but if you planned something more forceful, you must have done so in the full awareness that however dangerous a peaceful meeting might be, attempted murder would be even more dangerous. Although not as effective as the birth of a son in the longer term, a direct threat to my life would probably reignite my power. So, at least, precedent suggests.” He felt a little foolish talking about attempted murder in such seemingly-civilized circumstances, but the dark streak was still worrying him; if it had been a warning, there must be some danger.