Streaking

by Brian Stableford

  There was no desperation in the way he clung to the moment, nor any effort needed to prolong it now that the first release of purely physical pressure had liberated him from that vulgar kind of need.

  It was all he could have wished for.

  While it lasted, it was all he could possibly need.

  It didn’t seem to last forever, or even for very long, but when it was over he felt sufficiently content to reflect that nothing ever did last forever, or—in the context of forever—even for very long.

  When his train of thought began to move again, slowly, it moved in a new way: serene; uplifted; majestic. True love or not, it was as imperious as it was exhilarating.

  Then, and only then—at least for Canny—the special effects began.

  If it was a streak it was like none he had ever experienced before, but it was certainly bright. It was a kind of light he had never seen, or thought possible, of a color he had never before been able to perceive. If the world blurred at all, it did so very discreetly, as if it wanted to slip into soft focus but didn’t quite dare, and therefore trembled on the brink, protractedly.

  Canny didn’t doubt that the tremor was pregnant with all manner of possibilities—all of them good and some of them miraculous—but he wasn’t in the least inclined to exert any mental effort to precipitate them from the mist. He was, for the moment, languidly satisfied with the unapprehended, the unanticipated, the unrealized.

  Perhaps, he thought, this isn’t an experience unique to people of my kind. Perhaps anyone and everyone can get to this state of satisfaction with a world hesitating on the brink of conclusive settlement. Perhaps it’s a grail worth seeking, a prize worth keeping, a memory never to be surrendered.

  What it certainly was not, it seemed to him, was a deconstruction of the moment. It appeared to him to be the inverse of that: an enhancement of the moment; an elevation of the moment to a new expressiveness and a new expansiveness.

  Perhaps, Canny continued, gladly following his train of thought, the bright streaks have never been more than detritus, products of the decay of this very ordinary kind of light, this very ordinary kind of luck.

  It seemed, in his present state of mind, an amazing thought—but it didn’t seem absurd.

  Perhaps, he concluded, as the train ran on towards its terminus, this is the first time that I’ve ever really seen what my gift was intended to let me see, the first time I’ve ever contrived to draw upon its full potential and isolate the crystallized reward from the echoes of its chaotic collapse.

  In the ancient world, Canny recalled, as the swell of thought calmed again, romantic love had been regarded as a kind of madness—the very antithesis of a secure base for an actual relationship. Romantic love could only lead to tragedy, because it cut across all the careful boundaries that constituted society’s order; it could have no consequence but disgrace and ruin, and disgrace and ruin could have no further consequence but lifelong penance, or death. His ancestors—all the ancestors of all humankind, in fact—would have regarded the modern mythology of romance, which supposed love to be a maker rather than a breaker of marriages, was a lunatic folly, a universal flirtation with disaster.

  But the world had changed.

  The old order had passed, because its rigidity no longer served any purpose. The old boundaries had melted, because social unity no longer had to be secured by designating outsiders and enemies. The old terrors could be set aside, because there was nothing any longer to be feared more than fear itself.

  Romantic love had seemed to the ancients to be a supernatural force, which carried people away in spite of all the resistance that reason could muster—to the extent that some Romantic fantasists had been prepared to assert, and perhaps to believe, that the only love that could ever satisfy a human heart was the love of a supernatural being, untainted by any of the frailties of flesh or constraints of everyday life.

  Perhaps, Canny thought—knowing that he was being self-indulgent—they were right.

  “Did you see it?” Lissa Lo asked him, in a whisper, when she had found a voice capable of carrying the question.

  “Yes,” he said, glad that she had seen it too. They were still entwined within one another’s arms, and Canny was still glorying in the miracle of her presence, the marvel of her substance.

  “No nausea,” she said. “No vertigo. Just...the sum of what we have—what we are.”

  “Synergy,” he said.

  “We were right,” she said. “We’ve made a child. I know it. I feel it. We’ve made a child.”

  That, Canny knew, was an imaginative step too far. He had educated himself in biology, and he knew that conception was far from instantaneous. If one of his sperm were fortunate enough to reach Lissa Lo’s womb, and to find an egg waiting there, avid for fertilization, it would not do so for several hours yet.

  If that union were eventually to be secured, it would happen tomorrow, perhaps around noon, when the sun was as high in the sky as the autumnal season allowed. They would not be in bed then, but they would surely be together—walking hand-in-hand, perhaps, on Cockayne Ridge, with the mythical terrain of the Land of Ease spread out before them, shallow moor succeeding shallow moor to the ascendant horizon.

  And if that were to happen, how could it be other than a miracle child? If it were a boy, bearing his Y-chromosome, could it not also carry her gift on the X, or in the autosomes?

  It would, he felt certain, be a boy. Did Lissa know that? Did she understand that it was the most fortunate outcome?

  As a geneticist, Canny had to hope, and desire, that the child would be a boy—because a girl could not be carrying his lucky Y chromosome.

  On the other hand, he realized, he was also bound, as a geneticist, to hypothesize that if Lissa’s talent had always been passed down to her from mother to daughter, never displaying itself in any son, then it had to be a sex-limited gene, not a sex-linked one: a gene whose expression his Y-chromosome would suppress and prevent. Even if the child were a boy, his gift might find itself in competition with hers. Even if he and she were not in conscious competition—even if they really were united by heart and mind alike—their genes might be in conflict, locked in an age-old struggle to determine the sexual characteristics of the embryo they were sculpting.

  So, at least, Canny was bound to think as a geneticist.

  Was there, he wondered, a third possibility? A freak with a second X-chromosome as well as a Y, somatically female but genetically male, or a true hermaphrodite. Didn’t occult tradition suggest that true miracle children combined the key features of both sexes?

  No, he concluded, after a moment’s reflection. It wasn’t possible...if it were a matter of genetics. Either the genetic complement of the double X would suppress the expression of the genes favoring maleness, or the genes on the Y-chromosome would suppress those favoring femaleness; any confusion of the two could only be disruptive, obliterating potential rather than creating it.

  If, on the other hand, it were a matter of magic, or miracle, or even madness....

  That was unthinkable, or so he had to suppose. If genetics didn’t hold the key, then it had to be something to do with the arcane mysteries of quantum mechanics: the bizarre and seemingly-paradoxical relationship between observers and events, and the manner in which the vagueness of potentiality was rendered down into the concrete certainty of reality. It had to be science—not magic; not mumbo-jumbo; not superstition; not blind terror, but something else. Something explicable, if only one could get one’s head around it...but not the Road to Damascus Effect, not a mere matter of some nEurophysiological disorder rumbling way in the brain like tremors in the earth’s crust. It had to be explicable, but it also had to be real. The numbers couldn’t lie. They could flatter and deceive, induce all kinds of illusions, appeal to all kinds of psychological predispositions, but they couldn’t lie to a computer or a balance sheet. At the end of the day, something actually had to happen; at the end of the day, there had to be an authentic interaction,
a meeting and melding of skewed probabilities, a collision of discreet destinies.

  There really is no need to be afraid, Canny said to himself, silently, trying as hard as he could to mean it.

  “There really is no need to be afraid,” Lissa Lo said, aloud, her words overlaying his thought with uncanny neatness. “We can be together. We really can. It’ll be our child, no matter whether it’s a girl or boy. It’s our good fortune, our triumph.”

  The culmination of our love, Canny added, still not daring to say the words aloud in case they fell victim to some cosmic stutter that would shatter their meaning. The tie that will bind us together forever.

  After that, as if to prove the point, he slept—and never doubted, as he slipped away, that Lissa would sleep too, cradled in his arms: his world, his future, his fate.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Canny and Lissa got up late, thus avoiding his mother’s presence at the breakfast table. Indeed, Lady Credesdale had already gone out by the time they came down, obviously as keen as Canny to avoid an embarrassing confrontation.

  Canny expected Bentley to be in his stiffest and most formal mode, and was not disappointed—but the butler was careful to overplay the role, moving it towards caricature; although he never actually cracked a smile, his eyes were by no means unamused. Even so, Canny thought it best to take a walk in order to remove themselves from the retainer’s mildly discomfiting presence.

  Fortunately, the weather was fine—what might have been described as an “Indian summer” in the days before global warming had caused the advent of autumn to be delayed on a routine basis.

  They didn’t linger long in the garden, but made haste to climb the hill, ignoring the disapproving specter of the Great Skull. Canny felt in need of a literal elevation to suit their emotional state, and Lissa seemed to be in complete agreement.

  They walked along Cockayne Ridge hand-in-hand, with the gentle undulations of the dale spread out before them and the moors standing out with unusual clarity in the distance. The green horizon was clear cut against the blue sky, unconfused by any trace of atmospheric haze.

  The beauty of the day didn’t seem to Canny to be a coincidence, but he didn’t think that the judgment was any mere illusion or acceptance of superstition. He preferred to think of it as indulging the dream, prolonging the moment.

  It seemed to him that he had been sure, even before he awoke, that the day would be bright, with no clouds descending to shroud the tops of the hills and draw a veil around the Land of Cockayne. He counted the fact that he had been right as a testament to their shared luck, their communal good fortune.

  “You can’t see it at all from up here, can you?” Lissa observed, as they looked down at the slate roof of Credesdale House.

  “See what?” he asked, momentarily puzzled.

  “That skull-shaped rock-formation.”

  “The resemblance is partly a matter of perspective,” he told her. “If you look out of the attic window over there, it doesn’t look nearly as sinister as it does when you look up at it from ground-level. From up here, you can see that the slope isn’t as sheer as it seems from below, and the apparent foreshortening works the other way around. You can see the rocks easily enough, but there’s only one vantage-point from which they combine to form anything like an inverted skull. It’s right over there, but you have to be careful—the slope is at its steepest just at that point. You could hurt yourself if you slipped. I slid all the way down once and nearly broke my leg.”

  “But you were lucky, and escaped with no more than a few superficial bruises,” she said.

  “Very lucky—but even if I had broken my leg, everyone would have told me how lucky I was not to break my neck.”

  “I’ll be careful,” she promised. “I’m good at keeping my balance.”

  Canny refused to let go of her hand, although there wasn’t the least hint of a dark streak in the blue sky and his stomach was settled.

  Lissa went right to the edge, pulling him along in her wake, and looked down.

  “I see what you mean,” she said. “From this angle, the eyes aren’t round and the mouth’s too thin. If I hadn’t seen it from below, I wouldn’t ever have been able to think of it as an inverted skull. Why didn’t your remotest ancestor—or one of the nearer ones—build his house up here, free of that ominous stare?”

  “Too exposed. The hillside provides shelter from the wind. It’s mild now, but when it’s blowing a gale....”

  Lissa shook her head. “It wasn’t that,” she said. “The person who built the original house wanted the skull there. He wanted it as a memento mori...or perhaps a symbol, of his imagined guilt. Your rules forbid any interference with it, right?”

  “Right,” he confessed.

  “If one of my ancestors had been in his place, it would definitely have been the guilt, but yours seem to have seen things rather differently. It’s a memento mori, isn’t it?

  “Probably,” Canny agreed. “But they suffered from the guilt too—perhaps they weren’t as different from your foremothers as you think. It would probably need more fingers than I’ve got to count the Earls of Credesdale who convinced themselves that they really had made tacit pacts with the devil—and made human sacrifices of their own sons in so doing. The luck of the devil has always been more than a way of speaking in my family, even in the Age of Enlightenment. Daddy always denied that he took it seriously, of course, and I dare say that his father did the same—but I sometimes wonder whether I might be the first to be entirely free of that kind of anxiety.”

  “But you are entirely free of it?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “Whether genes are involved or not, the Kilcannon luck is just an accident of happenstance. There’s nothing to feel guilty about. You and I haven’t done anything wrong. Whatever comes of this, we haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Lissa came back from the edge, drawing him with her to safer ground. She turned her face up to his then, inviting a kiss. He felt the same impulse—the same causeless whim—and smiled at the coincidence.

  This, he thought, must be the moment of conception.

  And suddenly, he knew that it was.

  Black lightning was a myth after all, he thought. The streak was bright—brighter than any he had ever seen. It dazzled him, blinded him, and catapulted him into a new way of seeing, a whole world of exotic sensation.

  There was no tremor in his guts, no sword-thrust of pure objectless terror. The world, as it fell apart, did not darken in any way, even metaphorically; although it lost all trace of color, it did not even become grey, let alone black.

  The world lost the possibility of color, just as it lost the possibility of mass, of space, of time—but a world there was...or a Heaven.

  If the moment was, indeed, deconstructed it gained in timelessness what it lost in coherency. The flash, if flash it was, seemed to go on indefinitely.

  Canny had the opportunity to remember reading, somewhere, that what seemed to human senses to be a single lightning flash was actually thousands of nanosecond-long flashes, united by the persistence of vision.

  He also had the opportunity to reflect on the impossibility of his actually perceiving all that he saw and heard and felt, given that if the world had really been deconstructed his sensory apparatus and his brain must have fallen apart along with everything else. In any case, he knew, such an event was quite incapable of sensory expression. He knew, therefore, that anything that he believed he saw or felt could be no more than a reconstruction after the event: a kind of dream or confabulation; a belated attempt to grasp the ungraspable.

  Canny could not doubt, though, that he was in a privileged position of some kind, in spite of the fact that he must have fallen apart along with everything else—and that what he constructed or reconstructed in his mind en route to Damascus was a kind of truth as well as a kind of warning, a kind of luck as well as a kind of terror.

  No man can ever know what death is like, he thought, no matter what effort he puts in
to the business of dying. No man can ever know what it is to be devoid of any appreciable existence, as what was once his self dissolves into a mere mist of potentialities.

  The thought was only part of his realization, which cut much deeper than thought itself—or that poor shadow of thought that was all he had been able to experience, until now.

  It seemed that the kind of luck that allowed some favored individuals to avoid overmuch infliction of the pain of loss also allowed them to imagine, and even to believe, that they knew what loss was really like. Perhaps it was an incentive, provided by their genes and by their physical make-up, for those occasions when fear lost its force. So, at least, Canny tried to explain it to himself, when he was far enough removed from the pure horror of it to be able to think about it at all.

  Illusion or not, he believed that he had felt the world dissolve around him, falling apart under a kind of stress that—for whatever reason—it couldn’t endure. He believed, too, that he had felt the world reconstitute itself again, gracefully finding a new accommodation. There was no thunderous explosion, no violent tremor of any kind; from the viewpoint of the cosmos, it was no more than a reflexive twitch, too brief even to be described as a shudder, a frisson or a flicker. From the viewpoint of the cosmos, the concrete reality beyond the fabrications of human sensation, it was almost nothing.

  It might, indeed, have been nothing at all—but between the moment in which Lissa Lo stumbled, having been suddenly transfixed by the conception of a miracle inside her womb, and the moment in which he snatched her back from the edge of the Great Skull, so that she could not tumble down the slope at risk to life and limb, he saw the future far more clearly than he had ever sensed it before, not as a shadow of unrealized possibilities but as a soaring arc of light, full of promise and actuality.

  He saw Lissa give birth to a son, for which result she had hoped as fervently as he—because she too had realized that only a boy could possibly combine her gift with his. He saw the three of them together, coming gradually to the triumphant realization that her heritage had neither been suppressed nor diluted, having been transmitted not by genes at all but by the benign influence of the maternal environment. He shared in their discovery, by careful reasoning and investigation, of the fact that her maternal ancestors had been—until that miraculous moment—a chain of natural clones, who had required the intervention of a paternal sperm only as a trigger to the development of anomalous egg-cells which carried a full complement of maternal genes rather than a selective half. He shared in the revelation that she, alone of all her ancestors, had contrived to undo the perverse curse that usually rendered the conventionally-endowed egg-cells of her kind infertile. This had not been accomplished by means of any intervention of twenty-first century technology, but by sheer good fortune, thus allowing the extraordinary generosity of her womb—whose compensatory effect had prevented the damaged cell-line from becoming extinct—to work upon a hybrid embryo for the first time in many, many generations.