CHAPTER TWELVE

In the short term, at least, where they went was deeper into matters philosophical and theoretical. Of numerous unsafe alternatives, that seemed the safest to Canny—and, apparently, to Lissa too.

“It all seems to make a certain sense, to my mother at least, in the context of what your bigoted father might disdainfully call Eastern Mysticism,” the model told him. “In her equally-bigoted view, it doesn’t seem to make any sense at all in terms of what she derides as Western Materialism—but you and I have both grown up in a world whose scientific establishment is entranced by quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, so we know better than either of our respective parents or any of our ancestors, where the opportunity for a proper explanation might lie. The hereditary aspect is puzzling, though. If there were a gene for good luck—passing over the question of how on Earth the biochemistry could work—surely it would give its possessors such a massive advantage that people like you and I would be far more common than we are.”

Lissa’s beauty seemed even more mesmeric to Canny now, in the shaded lamplight, than it had aboard the neon-lit jet or the twilit ridge. He knew, though, that the ever-problematic possibility of sex had now become extremely problematic indeed.

She might still be lying, Canny told himself, although he couldn’t believe it and it was more deliberate distraction than serious proposition. She might have been very thoroughly briefed by someone else—someone of my kind in a narrower sense. But if there is a male streaker involved, he’s playing a dangerous game....

“It’s not be as simple as that,” he told her, trying hard to keep his tone relaxed and matter-of-fact. “There are some genes that are only advantageous if they’re rare. Don’t bother trying to come to terms with the paradoxes involved in groups of lucky people playing zero-sum games—just think about those harmless hoverflies which mimic dangerous wasps. The mimicry only protects the hoverflies if there are so many more wasps around that the predators are able to learn that black-and-yellow-stripes are associated with stings, so the mimetic coloration of the hoverflies can only be favored by natural selection along with genes that maintain their relative rarity by restricting their reproduction.

“Cuckoo-strategies might be a more relevant example. Cuckoos can only get away with laying their eggs in other birds’ nests if they don’t become too common. As their numbers increase, so does the pressure on their victims to develop the ability to detect and destroy their eggs, so the price they pay for getting other birds to raise their offspring is that they don’t lay very many eggs. In their case, natural selection works in favor of a strict avoidance of reproductive excess. Sometimes, selfish genes have to be exceedingly prudent in order to maximize their own selfishness.”

“And you think it works the same way with us?” she said, apparently following the argument easily enough. “You think that the genes producing our luck, however they might accomplish it, have to be packaged with other genes that make it difficult for us to reproduce?”

“Without any supportive biochemistry it’s just so much sociobiological flimflam,” Canny admitted, “but the logic seems sound enough. You’re still young, but you’ve been around long enough to know how much hatred there is in the envy that people try so hard to hide whenever they smile at people they credit with the luck of the devil. Sometimes, I think people as lucky as us use up ninety per cent of their luck just keeping themselves alive, so that they can reap the full benefit of the other ten per cent. Their rarity is a precious asset.”

“Have you ever met another?” she asked. “Before me, I mean.”

“Maybe,” he admitted. “I’ve certainly thought so, more than once—but if there’s one thing the journals are very clear about, it’s the necessity of caution. The last thing a lucky Kilcannon wants to do is to come into conflict with someone who also has luck on his side—and you seem to have been given the same warning. The diaries record numerous anecdotal instances of things getting very freaky, usually with ruinous results—although the darkest warnings of all must be products of paranoia, because there’s no way anyone could have survived to compile the records. If I’d thought that your interest in me might be generated by a similar talent, I might not have dared to set foot on your jet—and I’m astonished that you let me do it, given what you knew.”

“Mother would be horrified,” the model admitted. “But the world changes so quickly, doesn’t it? My generation has so little respect for the wisdom of its ancestors.”

“I’ve been tempted too,” he admitted. “Throw discretion to the winds and challenge the gods to do their worst! After all, it can’t really be magic, can it? Almost all of the so-called evidence of disasters befalling the foolishly bold is anecdotal hearsay—but on the other hand, there’s hardly a portrait on the staircase that doesn’t have one seriously weird tale hanging invisibly from its frame. Irresistible forces don’t mix—and so far as I know, they’ve always been rare enough, and exercised so discreetly, that they’ve only had to demonstrate their immiscibility to my ancestors once or twice in every century.”

“That’s what our tradition says,” she agreed. “If it were genetic, though, you’d have to look at the matter differently.”

“The Kilcannon women only have to be fertile, so far as I can judge,” Canny said. “They don’t have to be carriers. The lucky ones only have one son apiece, of course—although there are some interesting accounts in the diaries of sons that weren’t lucky...admitting cuckoos into the nest, one might say, if one were to extend the earlier metaphor. If you’d been a man, I probably wouldn’t be talking to you like this—but I suppose the fact that you aren’t raises possibilities I never had to consider before. Some temptations are hard to resist, as you must know very well.”

“I think I’ve met other females,” she said. “I was warned about not keeping close company with them—but I wasn’t warned about men like you. Other kinds, of course, but never ones like you. That’s very strange, don’t you think? If the gift really has been handed down through hundreds of generations, there must have been other meetings like this one, not just same-sex encounters.”

We all came from Africa in the beginning, Canny thought, but we went our separate ways. If there are two different genes, they could have emerged independently, in the latter stages of the story, one in the East and one in the West. The female variant could be sex-limited in its expression. It’s a cosmopolitan world now, but it hasn’t been that way for long, and cuckoos have to be prudent to survive and thrive.

“I suppose there must,” he said, aloud. “Maybe they didn’t dare talk as freely as we have. Maybe they were blinded by their preconceptions, and couldn’t even get this far without running for cover. Or maybe the multiplication of freakish possibilities really did cause some kind of a storm that wiped them out. Maybe we won’t survive the night—the clouds could be mustering the black lightning even as we speak. You have been warned about world-shattering catastrophes, I suppose?”

“Deconstructed moments can’t always be reconstructed,” she said, with a lightness that was probably feigned. “The illusion of Maya sometimes dissolves and expels that which has troubled its harmony. Things fall apart. That sort of thing?”

“That sort of thing,” he agreed. “It must have sounded far more ominous in the days before high explosives and modern seismology. Do you always get by on two hours sleep a night, or is it one of your...ritual privations?”

She smiled at that. “Tired or not, I ought not to stay any longer,” she said, with a mischievous smile, although her relaxed posture suggested that she was not yet in a hurry to leave. “My people will be missing me in York, and they know where I was bound even though they didn’t come with me. I wouldn’t put it past them to come looking for me—or even to phone mother, which would really whip up a storm of sorts. Do you think I dare come back another time, if the black lightning leaves me the choice?”

The way she said it implied that she’d already got what she had come back for: confirmation of his nature. She hadn’t been sure, and she hadn’t been able to bear the uncertainty, but she was absolutely sure now, in spite of his calculated flippancy. It was a different ball-game now, and they both had to take aboard the possibility, however slim, that there was a zero on the wheel that really might wipe them both out. Canny knew why he might be willing to take the risk, but he couldn’t see what was in it for her. She was one of the most beautiful women in the world, but he was a very long way from being one of the ten sexiest men.

“Do you want to come back?” he riposted, wondering what answer he ought to hope for.

“Will you let me in if I do?” she parried.

Canny didn’t want to answer that in case he over-committed himself. “All my ancestors thought it was magic,” he said, carefully. “They didn’t have our oh-so-modern flexibility of mind, or the lesson of the uncertainty principle. But they did contrive to renew their lucky streak over and over again for at least thirty generations. How many other families had something like it, but lost it through carelessness? We don’t know. You and I might be wiser to take what precautions we can, and stay in different hemispheres from now on.”

“I wasn’t betting against you at the table in Monte Carlo, even before the last bet of all,” Lissa said. “That’s the beauty of roulette—you can bet on possibilities that aren’t mutually exclusive. If you hadn’t decided to pull off that coup on the zero, I could have bet with you without being so obvious—by betting on the color of your chosen number, or whether it was odd or even. You could have been more discreet than you were.”

“True,” he admitted. “But I didn’t know that there was a risk of tangling my streak up with someone’s else’s. You did, apparently.”

“I still couldn’t be entirely sure,” she said, without specifying how long she’d been suspicious of him, “but I was sure enough not to bet against your zero. Twice running I let my chips stay where they were; the third time, I went with you. Would you have done any differently, in my situation?”

It was a genuine question, but it was one that Canny couldn’t answer. “I’m not sure I’d have thought it was a good idea to offer you a lift in my private jet,” he said. “Even though we wouldn’t be in any kind of competition....”

“Yes you would,” she said, confidently. “You wouldn’t have been able to resist the temptation—and for once, I’m not talking about my face and figure. In view of everything you’ve told me tonight, I’d say we’re now running even in the silly risk stakes.”

“In that case, it might be sensible to stop now,” Canny said, dryly.

He knew that he was the one who was in greater danger. His father was upstairs dying, and if history was any guide at all, his own streak would dwindle away with Daddy’s frail flesh. Unless Lissa was much older than she looked, her mother was probably in perfectly good health, having only begun to lose her looks a couple of years ago. But he also knew that he didn’t want Lissa Lo to walk out of his life forever, no matter what the risk might be.

Maybe, Canny thought, he should have gladdened his mother’s ignorant heart by making sure that he had a potential bride waiting in the wings—a bride he could impregnate as soon as the ink was dry on Daddy’s death certificate. Some of his more recent ancestors had been careful to do that, although others had loudly sung the praises of the education gained during the “doldrums phase.” Some of the ones who’d rushed into marriage—including, he supposed, his father—hadn’t been as fortunate in their choice of brides as they ought to have been, if their lucky streaks had applied to all matters equally. But what difference could it have made to his present situation if he’d been engaged, or even in love? It was probable, Canny supposed, that Lissa Lo still thought of her discovery of his gift as one more stroke of her own good luck—but he had to bear in mind the potentially-ominous fact that neither of them had had any previous inkling of the possibility of any such meeting.

The model must have been doing her own share of thinking, because she said; “Maybe we’d simply neutralize one another if we entered into competition. Restored balance. Yin and yang. That’s likely, I think. But if we were to work together...to lay the same bets....”

“We still don’t know whether your presence added a twist to my streak,” Canny pointed out. “If it did, and if the mugging was part of the twist...betting together might not have the effects we’d expect. Synergy might work in mysterious ways.”

She smiled at him. “I really do have to go to Venezuela,” she told him. “The jet’s ferrying me down to Heathrow tomorrow morning to pick up a 747. I have to go now—but I’m glad I came back. We will talk again, won’t we?”

“I’ll be tied up here for quite a while,” Canny countered. “I’ve got a father to bury—and a hell of a lot of reading to do, if I take his advice.”

“That’s not an answer,” she pointed out. “But that’s okay. I’ll come back anyway, and take the risk of being turned away. I won’t try to alter the odds in my favor—but I still can’t believe that you can turn your back on me now.”

“If that’s what you want,” he conceded, knowing that she held all the cards, and that she knew it—and also that she might be the better judge, if only because she were subject to the lesser temptation.

“It is,” she told him—and he couldn’t help his heart quickening at the sound of the words, as if they were a promise of unsurpassable joy.