Streaking (30 page)

The object of universal destruction had been the moment of their child's conception, and all that went with it: not merely the moment at which the head of the sperm penetrated the egg-cell, but all the intangible components of its causality: the illusion, the ambition, the desire, the hubris, the curiosity. She had been the prime mover in all of that, and she was the one who bore its loss.

Canny had to wonder, when he realized that, how much real cause he had for regret in the judgment handed down to him by the reconstruction—the callous, contemptuous judgment that his role had been so passive, so slightly relevant, that his memory did not warrant erasure or perversion.

In a way, that was the worst thing of all.

The woman in his arms looked into his eyes, dizzy with confusion, and he knew that Lissa—the Lissa he had known, and loved—had gone. The new one knew who he was, in the sense that she knew his name, and knew that they had met once or twice—but she did not
know
him. They had not made a child, nor had she ever had any intention of so doing. She did not know what she was doing here, and had no memory of what had happened—to him, at least—the previous night.

It was all in her eyes, all in the animating intelligence of her startled gaze.

I'll win her back
, he thought.
Whatever it takes, I'll win her back. We can still be together. We can try again
. Even the thought was enough to set off an aftershock of darkness and nausea, though. He knew that the die had been cast, and that the wager was lost, and that there was no way to turn back time.

There was more, and worse, to come.

While he looked down at her, and saw what he saw, Lissa Lo began to age. Her face changed—perhaps not as much as the face of the Lo-Tsen who unwisely ran away from Shangri-La, but quite visibly. Perhaps, when her face had ceased to change, she looked no older than her true age—but if so, then Lissa had not merely seemed far younger than she really was, but had actually been much younger than she actually was, in body and attitude alike.

It was, he supposed, all a matter of knowing how to walk.

He looked up then, at last, and saw Lo Chen standing there, flanked by Lissa's bodyguard and maid.

Lo Chen looked younger by far than she had when she confronted him in the house at Frimley. She still looked older than her daughter—her clone—but no older than she really was.

“I've come to take her home,” Lo Chen said. “She will need to rest—to recover herself. Fortunately, she has no commitments for a while, and will not be missed.

“You knew, didn't you?” Canny said. “You knew all along that this would happen. You wanted it to happen. You weren't trying to put me off—you knew that I'd be more likely, not less, to want to go ahead.”

“Don't be ridiculous, Lord Credesdale,” Lo Chen said. “I was warned, of course, else I would not be here. You saw and felt the warning yourself, when I summoned you. You saw what I saw, felt what I felt—but you did not understand, any more than I did. How could I possibly have
known
? How could you imagine that I
wanted
this? Am I not her mother, closer to her than any mother ever could be to a cuckoo-child? You know nothing; you understand nothing. We do not need you. We never have. No good could ever come of our knowing you, and there was always more danger in collaboration than competition. I played fair with you, Lord Credesdale. I urged you to see sense.”

“I have seen sense,” Canny murmured. “It's gone, now.”

“May I take her?” Lo Chen asked—although it wasn't really a question, and it was in fact the bodyguard who stepped forward and lifted Lissa up in his arms, ready to carry her down the slope to the Lexus that was no longer hidden in the stable but parked in the yard, ready to depart. Canny didn't doubt that Lissa's suitcases would be in the boot, fully and neatly packed.

“Shall I call Dr Hale in Cockayne and ask him to take a look at her?” Canny asked. Lissa had not broken any bones when she fell, and hadn't even sustained any obvious bruises, but her eyes were wild and confused and she didn't seem able to speak. She knew that something had happened to her but she didn't know what. It would probably take her a while to catch up with the world as it now was—but she would do it.

“That's not necessary,” Lo Chen said. “It's not western medicine that she needs. She's had too much of that these last few years. You do know, don't you, that you won't be able to see her again—not because I forbid it, but because she doesn't wish to? You do understand that the folly is ended?”

“Yes,” Canny said. “I know.”

He did know. Just as he had known that the day would be fine, Canny knew what had happened to Lissa even in the absence of any blatant evidential confirmation in word or gesture. He knew, as soon as he had perceived and understood the deconstruction of the moment, what it was that had been leeched out of reality and substituted by a subtle poison, calculated to thin the blood of passion and life and prevent the coagulation of desire and purpose. He
knew
, far more precisely than he had ever been able to judge the oracular quality of any of his premonitory streaks. For once, his mind had been stripped absolutely bare by the presence and force of the reality that made him what he was, and he could not put up the slightest resistance to the exactitude of its revelation.

He knew
everything
.

He even knew that Alice Ellison, summoning the shade of her dead husband, would curl her lip as she referred him to the second aspect of the “Road to Damascus Effect”: the irresistible sensation of conviction that sometimes accompanied the sensory hallucinations generated by the spontaneous firing of unruly nEurons. This, she would argue, was the basis of the most powerful prophetic illusions of them all—the illusion of communication with God, the source of a faith that could never be dismantled or corroded by rational argument or subsequent experience.

But Canny had neither seen nor heard from God. He had conceived no faith. What he knew—and it was true—was something far more intimate, and perhaps far more trivial...although it did not seem so.

He knew that he had lost Lissa Lo. She was gone, and in her place was someone else: someone who would never have dared to suggest the experiment that had brought them together, the project that really had enabled them to move the world. She had been replaced by someone who could never have wanted
him
, for any reason whatsoever. All of that had been sucked from the marrow of her being, not by her mother-vampire but by jealous fate; she was not merely different now from what she had been before but less.

But she hadn't fallen down the slope. She hadn't broken her bones on the unforgiving rocks of the Great Skull. She hadn't fractured her own skull, or even broken her heart.

In an way, she had been lucky.

So had he.

Canny knew that all the people in Cockayne would continue to think that he was a lucky Kilcannon, and would always say that he had the luck of the devil. Everyone would think that, and say that—with one possible exception. And they would be right. By every conceivable standard, except his own private conviction, they would be right.

He was lucky not to have broken his arm when he fell—and even if he
had
broken his arm, he would have been lucky not to kill himself. He was lucky to find himself unchanged, given that he might have been changed—and even if he
had
been changed, he would have been lucky not to have been erased. He was lucky to have loved and lost, given that he might never have loved at all, and there was even a sense—albeit a cruelly ironic one—in which he was lucky to have been the loser, when he might have been the lost. He was lucky that he had not been struck by the black lightning, even though he was lucky enough, perhaps, to have found out what the phrase really meant, to those who could read the ancient wisdom in the way that the ancient wisdom was intended to be read.

Lissa was lucky too, in a way. In another way, of course, she was not—but that other way was no longer possible, let alone material.

That was the trouble with luck, Canny thought, as he watched Lo Chen follow the bodyguard and is burden down he hill, followed in her turn by the patient maid; it was rarely unambiguous. Even when you sat at a roulette table and placed a bet, when there seemed to be no alternatives available but winning or losing and nothing at stake but mere money, luck was by no means unambiguous. Sometimes, winning led to trouble. Sometimes, losing led in the opposite direction. The house percentage was all that was perceptible and calculable, but that was only a fraction of the whole phenomenon of luck, by no means its greater part merely because it was calculable.

The greater part was what he and Lissa had found, or at least glimpsed, within the last twenty-four hours...the part that their bargain with fate had refused, in the end, to sanction.

Lucky at cards, unlucky in love
, declared one of the clichés that poor Martin Ellison had been so assiduous in collecting, so interested in understanding. But who was really qualified to judge, at the end of the day, exactly how lucky or unlucky Lissa Lo had been when the moment of conception of her miracle child had killed her? It had, after all, placed a clone in her place, who would doubtless carry her career forward when she had rested a while, perhaps to even greater heights of success, and make a spectacular marriage with an entirely suitable husband.

Perhaps, Canny thought, that was calculated in the accounts of the idiot cosmic mind, not as a loss but as a gain, not as a punishment but as a reward, not as misfortune but as salvation. But that was to fall, yet again, into the trap of thinking that there as some kind of justice in what had happened, or some kind of reasoning. There wasn't. It was just a matter of exotic cause-and effect, of freakish accident, or utter confusion.

There was not a mark on Lissa's lovely body, let alone any evidence of a cause of “death”—but Canny knew that the violation of cause and effect had always been her domain as well as his; and he had always known, although he had refused to voice the knowledge of late, how much luck everyone needed merely to maintain the miracle of life within the frail envelope of flesh. That was especially true, he now understood, in a world where every moment that passed might be deconstructed and reconstructed, blotted out and rewritten, dissolved into uncertainty and crystallized out again as something not merely certain but inevitable...something that could never have been otherwise than it was.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Canny went down the hill after Lo Chen, and caught up with her in the yard, as the bodyguard was laying Lissa down in the back seat. It was the maid, not Lo Chen, who got in with her, to make sure that she would be as comfortable as possible. Lo Chen made ready to get into the front passenger seat, from which she could direct the driver, but she turned to Canny again before she did so. “I could not know what would happen, any more than I can know exactly what did happen,” she told him, before adding her own question: “Do
you
know what happened?”

It was an honest question. She didn't know. She wondered if he did. He wondered, in his turn, whether she would pity him if he told her everything. He decided, after only a moment's reflection, that she wouldn't.

“Yes,” he said. “I know what happened. I remember the world as it was, and am a stranger in this one.”

She didn't tell him that he was talking nonsense, although she might well have been entitled to do so. “We are all strangers in the world,” she told him. “Your kind and mine more than many others. We all live in the world we construct by common consent, and we all long for worlds that might have been and might yet be, had we only the wit to realize their potential. We all believe that we know the world for what it is, for that is the price of its existence, but the only real power we have is the power of hindrance and interruption; to mistake that for the power of creation is vanity. We are neither artists nor architects, you and I, but merely skilful fugitives who sometimes contrive to hide—for a little while—from the oppressions of implacable causality.”

“You knew that something like this would happen,” he said, not to be put off, “even if you didn't know exactly what it would be—and you wanted it to happen. You knew that whatever happened would hurt her, slow the pace of your own deterioration. You wanted her to over-reach herself, to stumble, to fall. Your ancestors kept no written records, but you have your legacy of accumulated experience.”

“How could I know more than the darkness could tell me?” Lo Chen retorted, reinforcing her insistence. “If there had been any more to know, she would have known it too. You were there when the dark streak terrified us all. You know that I had no more ability to read it than you did.”

Canny didn't believe her. He could not doubt that Lissa Lo had been diminished by the failure of her bold experiment, and that her diminution was matched by an increase in her mother's portion of their family fortune. In due course, Lo Chen would die as his own father had died, but in the meantime, Lissa would be a more obedient and patient child, a more docile partner in the game of chance. But he, too, had known no more than he could read in the darkness, and had not even taken proper heed of the darkness while Lissa's radiance had blotted it out...and he had always been an obedient and patient son, unable to challenge his father's authority in any but the pettiest rebellions.

His mother arrived home in the Citroen just as the Lexus drove away; the two vehicles passed one another in the driveway.

“What happened, Can?” Lady Credesdale asked, as she got out of her car. “I thought your friend was going to stay for a few days.”

“Lissa had a slight accident, Mummy,” Canny told her, soothingly. “She's not hurt—just a little confused. She didn't want me to go with her. It really wasn't my fault, but I don't think she'll want to see me again.”

“That's no great loss,” his mother said, blissfully unaware of her own brutality. “I could tell during dinner that she didn't really like you—that she was just amusing herself. You didn't really think that there was anything between you, did you?”

“I'm not a mind-reader, Mummy, except for the occasional flash of insight,” he said. “Most of the time, I can't even imagine what people might be thinking. But whatever there was between us is gone know. Strange, isn't it, how these things can evaporate in a moment, without the ghost of a reason?”

“It was all in your mind, Can,” his loving mother told him, seemingly making every effort to be kind in spite of the harshness of the judgment. “I'm surprised she accepted your invitation. If you want my opinion, I think she was hoping to get together with that footballer without the press finding out. Did you know that he's playing for Leeds now? Of course you did—you went to the party, didn't you? I think she was hoping to set up an assignation here, out of the reach of prying eyes. They probably planned it when they came to Daddy's funeral.”

“That's not how it was, Mummy.”

“You take after your father when it comes to women, Can,” the dowager Lady Credesdale went on, relentlessly. “He was always a fool for a pretty face. Do you think I never saw the look in his eye when he turned away from me to follow some silly bit of skirt with that moony expression? Do you think I didn't understand that he always felt
trapped
?”

“He didn't feel trapped by you, Mummy,” Canny told her, truthfully. “He felt trapped by the weight of tradition, the legacy of a thousand years of expectation and custom.”

“You don't have to spare my feelings, Can,” she said. “For once, I'm not trying to spare yours. She didn't want you, no matter how much you wanted her—and it wasn't really her you wanted anyway. It was her image, what she stood for. But that's no way to manage your life, Can. You can probably use the title as a hook to snare pretty girls, if that's what you want, but what kind of pretty girls will you catch? It's not the right way to do it, and there'd so much more to life than that. You have to see sense, Can—even if you can't resist the temptation to look sideways for the rest of your life every time a bit of fluff drifts by, you have to be sensible. Not because it's what Daddy would have wanted, but just because it
is
the sensible way to do things. She's not our sort, Can—not because she's Oriental, but because she's not part of
our world
. You do see what I mean, don't you?”

“I understand what you mean, Mummy,” Canny assured her. “I'm sure Daddy would be proud of you, if he could hear you—but you're free of him now. You're free of his expectations, his restrictions, his superstitions. I'm not—but you are. Think on that. You can be anything you want to be, now.”

“Don't be silly, Canny,” she said, after a pause. “People can't be anything they want to be. They can only be what nature made them. We're what we are, you and I, and you need to accept that.”

“How about you, Bentley?” Canny asked, when the butler came out of the house to meet them as they moved towards the door. “Are you what nature made you?”

“Certainly, sir,” was the inevitable answer. There was nothing caricaturish in Bentley's manner now; the spark of satire seemed to have vanished, for the moment, with the world that had inspired it—although it would doubtless reassert itself in time.

“Mummy reckons that Lissa Lo was only scouting the place out to see if it would make a convenient hideaway for meeting Stevie Larkin on the sly,” Canny told him. “Is that what the gossips are saying in the kitchen?”

“It's not for me to speculate, sir,” Bentley observed, shrewdly.

“Well,” Canny said, “at least we had our one night stand. No one an take that away from us.” He didn't know, in fact, whether that
had
been taken away from the realm of objective reality by fate's hasty reshuffle, but he did know that Bentley was too discreet to confirm or deny any judgment he might have made—and that his mother would have made scrupulously certain that she had no information on the subject one way or another.

“Actually, sir,” Bentley said. “Mr. Larkin did phone. He didn't mention Miss Lo, but he did mention the possibility of you and he meeting up. He seemed strangely anxious that you might not return the call, although I can't imagine why. Perhaps he thinks that you still haven't replaced your mobile phone—or perhaps you forgot to give him your new number.”

“I haven't got around to circulating the new number,” Canny admitted. “I'll ring him later to fix something up.”

“I hope he won't be too disappointed to hear about Miss Lo's accident,” Lady Credesdale put in.

“He'll cope,” Canny assured her. “If any reporters should call, Bentley, you'd better deny that Lissa Lo was ever in the house. It doesn't matter whether they believe you or not. We don't know where she is, and we know nothing about any accident.”

“Yes sir.”

In the event the paparazzi never did come calling; Lissa and Lo Chen had covered their tracks so well that no discoverable evidence now remained that Lissa Lo had visited Credesdale House since the funeral of the thirty-first earl. Her image could still be found in back issues of
Cosmopolitan
and
Hello!
tucked away in the magazine-rack, but of her physical presence and eager vitality there was no trace whatsoever.

Lo Chen never phoned to report on her condition, nor did Lissa contact Canny herself. It was as if he had never met her.

By the time three days had passed, Canny actually began to wonder whether he had imagined the details of their brief affair—but he knew that the fantasy was too self-indulgent. He knew what had happened, and he knew
everything
that had happened, in the world that now was as well as the world that had been.

He had seen it in her eyes.

He wondered, too, whether he ought to reckon himself lucky that the universe in which he had lived the greater part of his life had chosen to conserve him and destroy her, preserving itself for his memory while obliterating itself from hers.

What a privilege that was, if only he could ignore the pain!

The despotic Imperium of actuality had refused to produce any kind of child by means of their ill-starred union, but its blind, unreasoning, utterly confused reflex had let him live while she died. If there had been an element of competition in their collaboration, he had won, in spite of all the odds stacked against him. Even Lo Chen had been convinced, when she handed down her deceptive warning, that Lissa might hold the upper hand—but she had not reckoned with the Kilcannon luck, which had held in spite of its alleged dormancy, just as it had when Stevie had been kidnapped.

Unless, of course, it was Lissa's luck that had protected him, as she had sworn that it would, while his was impotent to intervene. Or perhaps—a much more extravagant unlikelihood—it had been the luck of his own nascent miracle-son, in spite of the fact that his existence had been so infinitesimally brief.

If, as Canny had quoted only recently—from Sophocles, he now remembered—the best thing was not to be born at all, and after that to die young, perhaps the child had been the luckiest of all the Kilcannons. Perhaps he had reached out from the ephemeral moment of his almost-existence to let his father know that. At the same time, the child might have protected his mother from the knowledge that she had not, after all, been favored by the luck of the chromosomal draw. Perhaps the child had been more powerful than either he or Lissa had been able to imagine—and perhaps his awesome prescience had informed him that, although existence was a thing to be avoided, blissful ignorance ought sometimes to be reserved for those who needed it.

But that, of course, was asking
why
again, and there was no
why
. It was all just a matter of chance, of quantitative probability, with no qualitative dimension at all. It was all horribly unfair, but the cosmic balance knew nothing of fairness; it was not that sort of balance.

On the fourth day he met up with Stevie Larkin for a meal in a restaurant in Leeds. They were together for five hours, during which time Lissa Lo's name wasn't mentioned once. They talked about exchange-rates, Italy, guns, football, organized crime, friendship and fish and chips. It was a welcome, if temporary, relief.

By the time Canny secluded himself in the library at Credesdale on the following day, however, he had relegated Stevie to the status of a mere revenant—an illusion of reconstitution, who had not the means to know that he was just a copy, and not a real thing at all. It was possible to convince himself, for a moment or two, that his own Lissa Lo had never actually existed at all—except as a hallucinatory element of his curse—but each such momentary success only served to increase the darkness of the returned conviction that blasted the truth into his reluctant brain time and time again.

The inescapable truth was that Lissa had not only existed in the flesh, but that she had been the finest thing the old world—the true world—had contained...until he had broken the rules, precipitating her destruction, and the destruction of all the children he and she might have had.

What a power he had to spoil, to diminish, to subvert, to impoverish!

What an expert he was at interference, at prevention, at annihilation!

Lucky Canny Kilcannon!

Lucky Killer Kilcannon, possessed of the power to blast universes apart, inflicting scars upon them that could never be fully healed.

Did he dare to hope, he wondered as he turned the pages of the ancient diaries, that there was another universe somewhere in the infinite manifold of potential universes, existing in parallel to this one, in which Lissa had not changed but that
he
had forgotten that he had ever loved
her
?

No, he didn't. He couldn't.

Once, he might have dared, but not now. He knew better. He had been cured of that kind of daring. He would have to find another if he were to live as a man and not a slave of chance.