Streaking (11 page)

He had expected a reflexive cry of “That's impossible!” but none materialized. Lord Credesdale had certainly been taken aback by the utterly unexpected news, but the old man took it aboard more thoughtfully than Canny could have imagined.

“How did she know what
you
are?” his father asked, eventually.

“She says that she suspected before, but that she didn't know for sure until she saw the world come apart when I hit that zero—
deconstructing the moment
, she called it. Nobody's ever been able to see it before, Dad—some feel a twinge or a shudder, but she saw it. In her part of the world, she says, it's passed from mother to daughter—but the rules seem pretty similar, to judge by her sketchy description.”

“And you think that because she's female you don't have to stay away from her? You think that because she's female, you don't need to
compete
? You think that she's your ready-made soul mate? You think that if you can only find true love together, as lonely people should, you might be twice as lucky together as you are apart?”

The scorn increased with every rhetorical question in the sequence; it hurt, but Canny knew that it was something he had needed to hear. It was what he had come to his father's room to find.

“I think it's a possibility,” Canny said, quietly, although he realized how feeble the statement must sound to a cynical audience.

All Lord Credesdale said was: “What kind of bet is that, Canny? What kind of risk do you think it amounts to?”

“A kind people take every day,” Canny told him.

“And lose, over and over again. You'd have to deconstruct more than a moment, Can. You'd have to pull the fabric of reality to pieces and remake the whole bloody garment.”

“You don't know that, Dad.” Canny warmed to the developing contest. He had come to make his own case, as well as to listen to his father's.

The old man thought long and hard about that before he finally gave way and said: “No, I don't. What I do know is that the odds are way too long. It's a bad bet.”

“Sometimes,” Canny said, “the only bet worth making is the one where the odds are long.” But that was where the tenuous rapport between them became overstretched. He knew full well that everything his father had tried to tell him, throughout his life and in the last few minutes, was that the only bets worth making were the ones most likely to win—the ones the universe could concede without tearing apart the unfolding pattern of causes and effects.

Even so, his newly-transfigured father didn't get angry. The morphine had numbed that along with the pain, now that he had parted with the keys to the family fortune. “It's not so, Can,” the old man said. “Only fools think like that, and you've gambled enough not to be that kind of fool. If she's what you say she is, you have to stay away from her. You know that, without me having to tell you. It doesn't matter how beautiful she is—and in the dark, she'll be no different from all the rest. Make the sensible bet, Can. Leave the big lotteries to the idiots who can't calculate the odds like rational men.”

“It's not that simple, Daddy,” Canny said.

“Yes it is,” the old man insisted.

“Maybe it was, in the days of the earls who never left the dale, even to go to Leeds, let alone London,” Canny said, as much to himself as to the dying man. “In those days, it made sense to stay within narrow horizons, and to cling to the illusion that what lay beyond them was irrelevant. It's a different world now, Daddy. A global village. There's so much more to be done, so much more to be
tried
....”

“And so much more to go wrong,” his father told him. “When the risks increase, the canny man plays even more carefully than before. Are you a canny man, Canny? That was always the intention, always the hope. That's the way I tried to bring you up. Did I really turn you against me to that extent? Is that why you wanted my advice—so that you can go and do the exact opposite?”

“No, Daddy,” Canny said. “That's too simple as well. I really do need to work this out—but I'm not an old man, who automatically thinks of anything new as dangerous. You can see that, can't you?”

“I can see it,” Lord Credesdale agreed, “but I don't have to like it. I'm giving you the best advice I can, son. Play safe. Follow the rules. Don't tangle your luck with anyone else's. It works—not very extravagantly, I'll admit, but it does work. Everything we know about other strategies tells us that they usually don't.” His eyelids were descending even as he spoke, but he wasn't dying yet. The morphine was extending its grip upon him as his energy-reserves ran out. He might not have said his last words, but he wasn't going to say anything different if and when he woke again to say a few more.

Canny stood up. “Thanks, Daddy,” he said, more sincerely than he would have imagined possible. “I think I need to lie down myself, now—and I think I might actually be able to sleep.”

“You're welcome,” the old man murmured, as he drifted away into his final, inescapable dream.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Canny went back to bed—and this time, he was able to sleep. It wasn't that his mind had ceased to buzz with anxieties and dilemmas, and it certainly wasn't that he could see any kind of a solution to his difficulties, but at least he had a clearer idea of the dimensions of his problems, and the kind of choice he had to make.

He woke up in time for dinner, but he went back to bed again long before midnight, and had no difficulty returning to sleep.

The next day, in spite of what he'd said to his father, Canny did take his problems back to the library. He did study the diaries, just in case there was something in them that would give him an insight. He delved into the early twentieth century, and then into the nineteenth, searching for evidence that some of his ancestors had grappled with similar problems before, on an intellectual level if not a practical one.

Some had, but their grappling did not seem to have been very productive. Not all the lucky Kilcannons of the past had taken it for granted that the family's negative curse was a kind of magic. Even before the Industrialist earl several of them had been more inclined towards primitive versions of the scientific method—hence the endless experiments with spells and rituals, and variations of spells and rituals, and all the marginal notes in all the so-called text-books, condemning the spells that were followed by failure as bullshit, or whatever similar vulgarity had then been in vogue.

In the Age of Reason, inspired by Blaise Pascal, one Earl of Credesdale had apparently seized on probability theory like a gamekeeper's bulldog closing its jaws on a poacher's leg—he it was who had realized that the streak was a matter of coming out slightly ahead of the expectations of chance, and that there was no profit in considering each winning bet or stroke of good fortune individually—but the conceptual breakthrough had merely been added to the register of hearsay, never methodically investigated.

Even after the great conceptual leap forward, the methodology followed by subsequent experimentally-inclined earls had been routinely flawed by the assumption that each spell or ritual had to be correlated with the specific event most closely following in its train, and no matter what the results of their experiments had been, they had all fallen prey to the “safe” strategy based on the proposition it was better to do too much than too little.

Unfortunately, it seemed that the Kilcannons had never been as ruthless in their philosophical methods as they sometimes had in business. The conclusions at which they had arrived—whether by way of argument or experience—did not seem at all convincing to Canny, even insofar as they concerned mere matters of mathematical probability.

With regard to other kinds of rewards—matters of quality of life—the diaries were even more confused. His father had not been the first earl to be attracted to a woman who did not fit the specifications of tradition, nor even the first to marry one. Among the earls who had followed the specifications faithfully in matters of marriage, several had tested the limits of the supplementary rules regarding sexual abstinence and fidelity by falling in love and taking mistresses...and every one had come out of it badly in the end, and had castigated himself for his foolishness.

But what if they had been ordinary men? Canny wondered. What if they had been everyday victims of the laws of chance, with no special luck to aid them? Would they not have loved and lost in exactly the same fashion, and given vent to resentful misogyny in exactly the same way, and issued warnings to their sons and descendants to put such foolishness aside and stick to making money?

One thing that did seem certain, however, was that the Kilcannon luck was limited to quantitative matters. It had never been a qualitative matter. The Kilcannons had become rich, and they had stayed rich, but they had never obtained much evident happiness from their wealth. If anything, their raised expectations had made them more prone to misery than common men when those aspects of their lives that remained unprotected had gone badly.

Read in that way, the testimony of his ancestors gave every support to his father's advice. Play safe. Stick to what you know. Collect the house percentage. Don't howl for the moon.

“But times
have
changed,” Canny murmured. The idea wouldn't let go. Whatever the diaries or his father said, times surely must have changed. Thus far, the Kilcannon luck had not changed with them to any further extent than diversifying the business interests of the estate—but did that necessarily imply that the Kilcannon luck was immutable, unexploitable in any other way? Could it be used to other ends, if only one were prepared to make the effort in an enlightened way?

There were also accounts in the diaries of encounters between Kilcannons and other lucky men: of card games, feuds and duels in which probability went crazy; of business deals that unwound in bizarre fashion. Again, the stated conclusions were unanimous, piled one atop another as an accumulation of bitter reflection. Stay out of such contests, if at all possible. Avoid such men, if at all possible.
Play safe
.

There was not a word about lucky women. If any had ever been encountered by any previous earl whose testimony had survived, she had passed unnoticed, or at least unidentified. There was no precedent for Lissa Lo—but his father's reaction to the notion had been no mere personal whim. All the diarists, and all their predecessors who had contributed to the oral tradition summarized in the earliest writings, would have agreed with the thirty-first earl. A new risk was even more dangerous than those encountered before and judged too dangerous to take. It ought not to be taken, and ought in fact to be fled, removed from the realm of temptation, and hence from the realm of possibility. A Kilcannon had to play safe. A Kilcannon
always
had to play safe.

But if every new risk were to be refused, Canny thought, then every new opportunity would perforce be lost. If every danger were to be avoided, what new achievement was possible?

Was the house percentage enough to compensate for the closing down of every other possibility? Did he really want to live his life in the same manner as his forebears, knowing what the testimony of the diaries was in regard to the price they had paid for their success?

The problem had become even clearer in his mind—but he was no nearer to a solution, as yet.

If there was progress to be made in understanding the scope and limitations of the family gift, Canny decided, it could not be made by following his father's advice. It had to be won by trial and experiment. But what if there really was no progress to be made? What if all the experiments failed? What if all the trials turned into errors?

There had been other experimentalist Kilcannons, calculated and uncalculated, and all
their
trials had failed—or so, in the end, they had concluded. They had all arrived, eventually, at the same attitude of mind. They had settled for what they had, for what fate seemed to guarantee. As long as what they did succeeded in renewing the streak, it had ceased to matter to them whether ninety-nine per cent of what they did was objectively irrelevant. All that really mattered, they had decided, was that in amongst all the rubbish they somehow did whatever was objectively needed to keep the Kilcannon luck running—and whatever the Kilcannon luck failed to deliver, that which it did deliver was far too precious to jeopardize. The inevitable result of that invariable settlement, however, had been that no one had ever tested the limits of the rules
scrupulously
; after thirty-one Earls of Credesdale and who knew how many earlier Kilcannons, no one was really any the wiser as to whether
any
of the customs and rituals had ever been objectively necessary...or whether there might have been so much more luck to be enjoyed, if only the rules had been properly refined and wisely elaborated.

The diaries and the portraits on the walls of Credesdale House were supposed to be testaments to family success, family triumph and family fortune—but they also told another story.

Didn't they ever smile?
Lissa Lo had asked.

Maybe it
had
been just a matter of propriety that compelled his ancestors to glower at their portrait-painters—but Canny couldn't believe that. The simple truth was that they'd never been
happy
, or even content with their lot—even though wild horses would never have dragged the admission from them.

The diaries told Canny that they'd never understood why, in spite of their wealth and status, they hadn't been happy—but of the fact itself there was no doubt. They'd been miserly with the kind of luck they had and had refused, in the end, to count the costs they were paying in currencies that didn't show up on a balance-sheet.

By the time he'd turned twenty-one, Canny reflected, he had already managed to convince himself, more or less, that none of the magical mumbo-jumbo could be necessary and that the secret of the family fortune had to be a gene carried on the Y-chromosome. He'd firmly resolved, then, to do what one of his ancestors had never had the nerve to do for more than a year or two: to stand firm against the pressure of superstition and abandon all the spells and rituals, including the insistence that he mustn't marry outside the county.

He still wanted to stand by that decision, now that he had official custody of the library keys. He ought to wait politely for his father to die, of course, but when that
coup-de-grâce
was accomplished, he would be free. He would be free to experiment, to apply the scientific method...to pursue Lissa Lo, or at least to consent to be pursued, since that was the way things seemed to be working out.

If he entertained doubts, he told himself, they ought to be rational doubts, not irrational ones. They ought to be based in the analyses of probability theory, and the theory of psychological probability, not in the miserly insistences of his ancestors.

There were, of course, doubts of that kind that had to be taken on board. For one thing, his genetic hypothesis didn't seem so compelling now that evidence had been presented to him that there were streakers in the world who couldn't possibly have got their luck from a Y-chromosome gene. Was that a stroke of luck, or something else? He certainly hadn't seen a colored streak or felt reality shudder when Lissa Lo had dropped her bombshell; the world had not been re-ordered in the least by the revelation alone.

But those kinds of doubts only made the experiment more intriguing, and its corollaries more various.

Didn't they?

That afternoon, Canny went back to his father's room again, and found him in the same serene frame of mind. He tried not to talk about the issues he had raised the previous day, but that proved impossible. His father wanted to reiterate the advice he had given, as often as possible.

Play it safe
.

DON'T TAKE ANY CHANCES.

When Canny asked his father, curiously, whether he'd had a happy life, the old man said: “Of course I have—what kind of a question is that?” But he didn't smile. He seemed to Canny to be protesting a little too much.

It wasn't a question that Canny could put to his mother with any greater expectation of an honest or considered answer, any more than he could ask her questions about any other aspect of the Kilcannon luck. She had always known that there was a mystery surrounding that luck, but she had always been content to leave it uninvestigated. Canny couldn't admire her for that, but he wasn't tempted to break the rule that specified that she must never be told—and he didn't ask her, either, whether she and his father had been happy. Like Bentley, he figured—who had a butler's gift for not seeing what he was not supposed to see even when he was staring right at it—Mummy was entitled to her hard-won ignorance.

The more pertinent question he put to his father was: “Do you wish you'd done anything differently?”

The old man did him the favor of thinking seriously about that one before answering.

“I'd be a fool if I didn't,” Lord Credesdale said, eventually. “Hindsight always tells you which bets you should have laid but didn't, and you can't help but wish you'd laid them. But that doesn't mean that the losing bets you did lay were
all
mistakes, even if a few of them were. You have to make your choices as best you can, and you have to accept that some of your bets are going to lose. You have to be content with the house percentage. I did what I did, including a few things I shouldn't have done, but I came out ahead in the long run. If I'd followed the rules, maybe I'd have come out a lot further ahead—but hindsight can't tell me that. You
will
make mistakes, Canny—there's no avoiding them. Just try not to make too many stupid ones.”

“That's not what you'd have said to me last week,” Canny observed.

“No,” his father admitted, “it's not. And maybe that was one of my mistakes. This dying is turning out a more complicated and time-consuming business than I'd expected. I don't feel quite myself, you know—but I do feel a little better, even though I know I'm worse. That old saw about
putting your affairs in order
is total crap, you know. I thought I was doing it—had done it—but it isn't even something I can do, discreetly or otherwise. It's something over which I have no control at all. Am I making any sense?”

“Yes, Daddy,” Canny assured him. “You're making sense.”

“You needn't say it as if it were the first time ever.”

“That's not what I meant,” Canny assured him, although it had been exactly what he meant.

“At least you gave me something to chew on,” the old man said, “even if I can't swallow it. Is the room getting darker, or is it just me?”

“I can't see anything, Daddy. It's clouding over outside, though.”

“I wasn't talking about a streak. I'm hardly in need of omens, am I? And there's nothing for a bright streak to promise, short of a miracle. It is getting darker, though. If I go to sleep, will you sit with me for a while?”