Streaking (28 page)

“I've never been quite that confident,” Canny admitted. “Afterwards, when the nausea's relented, I get the rush, but beforehand...perhaps I've never really
known
, even in a purely psychological sense. Perhaps I've always been conscious, at the back of my mind, of the fact that it could all go wrong—that at any moment, Lady Luck might cast me aside like a worn-out sock in favor of some new toy boy.”

“It's not a fact,” she said. “It's a fiction. You've let the burden of past superstitions weigh you down, Canny. You've let talk of deals with the devil seep into your conscience. You've started to grow old before your time by letting your father take too greedy a command of the family well. That's the way it's supposed to be in my homeland too, but globalization has all-but-obliterated traditional deference in the space of a single generation. God bless America, the land of youth and
Vanity Fair
! Not to mention
Cosmopolitan
,
Vogue
,
Time
, and
Life
and all the rest. Even
Hello!
and
OK!
. They made me what I am, and there was nothing my darling mother could do about it. You should be grateful for that. You
are
grateful, aren't you?”

“Daddy was always horrified by the idea that the family secret would ever come out,” Canny observed, “and I can understand why. He was afraid that the hatred and envy people already felt for the Kilcannon luck would be further intensified. But that's not the kind of world we're living in now, is it? Today's world is just a vast spectrum of opportunities to be exploited. People don't hate success the way they used to—they idolize it, and try to copy it. I suppose they always hoped it would rub off—even in the Middle Ages, they thought that the mere touch of a king's hand might cure scrofula, and regarded some kinds of marriages as matters of magical alchemy, from which divinely-favored offspring might be born. I'm not so sure that this hasn't happened before, Lissa—but I don't know what the results were if it has. On that point, at least, history is vague.”

“History's always vague,” she told him. “Everything is vague, until people like us make an effort to see it clearly. If you won't confront the shadows, they'll consume you. If you do—the brightness is there, if only you look hard enough.”

“Not according to Martin Ellison,” Canny said. “According to him, it's all a matter of nEurological disorders—nEurones firing in the brain, sometimes at random but more often in response to stress, producing flashes of illusory light and surges of emotion that consciousness strives to rationalize as best it can.”

“Martin Ellison is dead,” Lissa said, baldly. “He was born unlucky, unlike us. He was so envious of what we have that he tried to argue it out of existence—but we're still here, with the world at our feet. You know that, and I know that you know it. We both know that no matter what anyone might say—including your father and my mother—you're with me on this. I'm willing to take risks that might improve our situation even further, and so are you. Your mother might think of it as a matter of her poor boy being unable to resist a wicked woman's temptation, but we know that's not the way it is. We know that it's better to live in hope than fear, and that people like us are far better equipped by nature to do it than fortune's fools. We have to do this, because we'll never forgive ourselves if we don't.”

Canny remembered what his father had said about his never being able to forgive himself if things went awry, because he would always know that he could and should have done better. According to his father, there was a special Hell reserved for people of the Kilcannon kind, into which every one of them must fall who went in search of a special Heaven...but it hadn't stopped him, in his own young days, and perhaps he would have succeeded had he only had the right kind of help.

“It's never easy to forgive,” he said. “But we do to have think it through, even so. We have to consider the future—what happens
after
we contrive the ultimate orgasm.”

She smiled, wryly but gloriously. “You have my word that I won't try to cut you out if there is a child,” she said. “Mother lied about that. I won't marry you, but I have no intention of bearing a child who doesn't know his father. I always intended to share whatever rewards the adventure brings—not just because it would be stupid to turn co-operation into competition, but because it's the more courageous thing to do.”

It wasn't as simple as that, and Canny knew it—but he wasn't sure how much even Lissa thought she knew about what might happen if she did bear the child of another of her kind.

Lissa rose to her feet with astonishing grace, and came around the desk to stand before him. It was, he supposed, all a matter of knowing how to walk.

She tilted her face, and invited him to take her in his arms and kiss her. It was as if he were in the front row of a widescreen cinema, looking at her in a close-up more intimate than any of which ordinary vision was capable.

He accepted the unspoken invitation.

When a couple of minutes had passed she detached herself, presumably having dispelled the last lingering doubts about his readiness to co-operate.

“I'm glad the old witch didn't make any lasting impression,” she said. “She's clever—but she's the older generation. Closer to your age than mine, of course, but not part of our world, not a party to our modernity.”

“She did make a lasting impression,” Canny told her, blandly. “She told me that I have a responsibility to act like a man and not a slave of passion. She was right. I won't go into this telling myself that I'm helpless to resist. It has to be what I want to do, and what I need to do.”

That was easy enough to say while the world remained in focus, he knew. He still feared that the black lightning and terror might come, if and when they overstepped the limits of uncertainty's tolerance, and knew that lust would not help him then—but Lissa was right. To go forward together was the courageous thing to do, and to face whatever came of it as a couple rather than as individuals in competition was the right thing to do.

And even if it is lust
, Canny thought,
there's nothing mere about it. Whether it's true love or not, it may still be more than equal to whatever the darkness can deliver
.

“And
is
it what you want and need to do?” Lissa asked, smiling because she already knew the answer.

“It is,” he said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Dinner was very civilized, all things considered, although the food was little better than mediocre. Canny brought up the last bottle of the '73 Pomerol in honor of their newly-founded tradition, and Lissa drank two glasses with evident relish, although she refused dessert and left the greater part of the main course on her plate.

“Miss Lo and her companions will be staying for a few days,” Canny told Bentley, while the table was being cleared. “She doesn't want to be disturbed while she's here, and she doesn't want her presence here to be discussed outside these walls. If anyone asks for her on the phone, or in the village, you're to deny that she's in the house. I know that I can rely on the discretion of everyone on the staff, but if anyone making deliveries should catch sight of her, or either of her companions, you might need to have a quiet word. Can you do that?”

“I believe so, milord,” Bentley said, with just a hint of sarcasm. “Provision has already been made for her maid and... manservant. Which room shall I make up for the lady?”

“Have her cases placed in the master bedroom—and put her car inside one of the stables, out of sight.”

“Yes sir.”

Lissa made no comment on this exchange; she obviously trusted her own servants' discretion, and fully expected Canny to have sufficient power over his.

When his mother had gone resignedly to her bedroom, leaving them alone in the drawing-room, Lissa seemed to become slightly uncomfortable for the first time. Now that her timetable had run its course and her objective was immediately before her, her puritanical habits began to reassert themselves. She was afflicted by a procrastination that he had not seen in her before.

“I suppose my mother spun you the usual line,” she said. “We can't actually
do
anything—all we can contrive is to
undo
the work of the consensus, and that only momentarily. For which reason, collaboration is infinitely more dangerous than conflict, because we might undo so much that the consensus loses its grip for more than a moment.”

“That's what she said,” he confirmed.

“But you don't believe it?”

“I believe that she believes it.”

Lissa nodded. “Me too. But the world's still here. The apocalypse isn't so cheaply bought.”

“Step on a crack, break your mother's back,” Canny quoted. “That's what the local kids used to say—but no one could remember anyone's mother ever having broken her back. Our fears do tend to be exaggerated—
our
fears more than most, I suspect. Unlike the average superstition, the mother's back thing didn't even need a single instance of coincidence to set it off—all it had to do was rhyme. According to the bullshit in the library, no one who saw black lightning ever lived to tell the tale...but that calls into question everything anyone's ever said about it. People who benefit from the white lightning are bound to fear the black, even if they never catch a glimpse of it...even if it doesn't really exist. On the other hand....”

“If there were such a thing,” she finished for him, “and nobody who saw it ever lived to tell the tale, we'd have exactly the same absence of evidence.”

“But as you say,” he added, returning the compliment, “the world's still here. If it's ever been seriously disrupted, the consensus has always got a grip again, one way or another. The way I figure it, Lissa, you and I are the only ones taking a big risk, and we're entitled. We're adults, after all. My mother says you'll break my heart, and she might be right...but it's my heart. The other earls might have been paranoid about the succession, but that was the pressure of conventional expectation as much as the desperate desire to do anything that might be necessary to renew their good fortune. I'm going into this with open eyes, just like you. You have no need to feel guilty about your seductive powers.”

“I don't,” she assured him.

“This is just between the two of us,” he went on. “We're responsible for our own risks, just as your mother said. I had to make an adult decision. Well, that's what I've made. If one or both of us loses the gift, or life itself, as a consequence of tempting fate a little too far...well, it's a risk we take. It's a risk everybody takes, at every one of life's turning-points. We're not so different from the average man and woman—just a little bit luckier. Sometimes, we can see the light, and that obliges us to fear the darkness—but for at least twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds of every day, we take what fate throws our way, just like everybody else. The rewards of being the most beautiful woman in the world may flow a little more strongly and constantly than the interest on the Kilcannon investments, but you don't need to bathe in the blood of innocent virgins to maintain it any more than I need to sacrifice them to the Great Skull. We're only human. We can allow ourselves to be human.”

“Is that what we're doing?”

“Yes,” he said, refusing to raise the issue of whether they were both being human in exactly the same way.

Lissa hesitated for a moment before saying: “I'm sorry for what I said about it being just an experiment, not a love-match.”

Canny knew better than to raise the issue of whether she was sorry because it wasn't true, or because it was.

“I've always been alone,” Lissa continued, after a pregnant silence. “Mother wouldn't like to hear me say it, but it's true. I've always been alone. Now, for the first time, there really are two of us—not bound together like conjoined twins fighting one another for access to a single blood supply, but independent individuals with our own hearts and minds, willing and able to make a coherent team. If we can only overcome our fear that simply being together might precipitate disaster...it might be good for us, in more ways than one.”

In a way, he was glad that she had admitted that she
did
feel the fear, even though she gave the impression of someone who was stalling, making conversation because she wasn't quite ready to get down to action. The light in the room was steady and electric; there were no awkward shadows gathered in the corners, no smoky hazes forming up in the coverts—none, at least, that Canny could see. His mind was still quiet, untroubled by the phantasmagoric spin-off of any hereditary glitches that might be lurking in his cerebral cortex.

“I know what you mean,” he said, mildly. “Daddy and I were never close. How could we be? I never fought him with the kind of ferocity you seem to have brought to competition with your mother, but not a day went by when I wasn't aware of the tension between us. You're right—it's because he and I were so tightly bound together that we were always alone. And you're right about the other thing, too. If we can make a coherent team, a real couple, it might be good for us in more ways than one. Even if playing double or quits were to end up quits, with our lucky streaks shattered forever, we'd still be able to understand one another better than most.”

“We're not going to lose, Canny.” she said. “We can't. That's the whole point.”

“True,” he conceded, readily enough. “We're not. We've never been destined for loneliness, no matter what our ancestors thought and feared—our kind may be rare, but there are others around—and if competition between beings of our kind is invariably disastrous, how come I'm the thirty-second earl? We're all in competition all the time, simply by being here, and the world isn't getting any less crowded. We're entitled to try—to run our own risks, and damn the consequences.”
And you are one of the ten most beautiful women in the world
, he didn't add,
and my blood's as red as any in Yorkshire
.

“In that case,” she said, softly, “we might as well go to bed.”

The first time was awkward, as Canny had fully expected—not because their somewhat-limited experience had left them unprepared but because first times always were awkward. Because they both knew that, they hastened into the second with all due determination.

That was when Canny finally became able to feel that he had been carried away, and that it was good to have been carried away...because, after all, nothing terrible was going to happen.

Canny had never found it difficult to focus his attention during sex, because he always tried to make the most of it, for obvious reasons, but there had always been an excessive attentiveness in his focusing: an element of calculation that he had never been able to set aside. He had tried to set it aside more than once, most recently with Alice Ellison, but he had never quite succeeded. He had always hoped—
known
, Lissa Lo would probably have said—that it would be different with anyone with whom he embarked upon a longer-term relationship, but he had always feared, too, that setting aside the calculative hyperconsciousness might also set aside the intensity of the focus.

It didn't.

He had not the slightest difficulty in absorbing himself entirely in the sensations of Lissa's intimate presence: the touch sensations most of all, but the sight of her too, and the scent. He was too close to her now to take full account of the fact that she was very probably the best-looking woman in the whole world, but there was no doubt in his mind that she was the most exquisitely tangible. He lost himself in her presence, and forgot that there was anything else in the universe but her and the sensory pathways that carried her into his mind, where his consciousness of her seemed to float upon an infinite ocean of subliminal response.

There was no fear, because there was no longer any scope in Canny's supersaturated awareness in which fear could take form. For the first time in his life he felt that he was in a place where he had no need of luck, nor any premonition of anything to come.

He seemed to be in a moment that could not be deconstructed, no matter how temporary it might prove to be. He seemed to be in a state of mind that was secure against all anxiety, all thought, and all sensation—except for the sensation of being with Lissa Lo, and the sensation that she was with him, answering to his own touch, his own movement, his own emotional agitation.

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.