Free Streaking by Brian Stableford

used to Canny’s little ways over the years, and was not devoid of a certain dry wit himself. The old man condescended to make an effort to smile, although the expression he actually contrived was something of a travesty.
    â€œAnd the gambling?” the old man said. “You haven’t got a habit, have you? You can let it go, when your luck dries up?”
    Canny didn’t challenge his father’s use of “when” rather than “if”, although he still remained unconvinced that the allegedly inevitable diminution of the family gift following the death of an earl was anything but a patriarchal myth intended to prey on the minds of guilt-ridden scions. “An addiction, you mean?” he said, scornfully. “No—I’m as clean as a whistle. I can leave off for a year, or ten years if it’s necessary, and not feel a pang. I’ll run the portfolio defensively and keep the mill ticking over, until everything’s well and truly sorted. Or would you rather I put all the shares in a blind trust and gave the village elders carte blanche to oversee the mill’s businesses the same way they oversee the village shops?”
    â€œGood god, no! At least you’ve got brains, even if your luck deserts you. Stockbrokers are all crooks, and the village elders are all fools. You can rely on Maurice Rawtenstall, though. He’s probably crooked, but he’s discreetly crooked, and it’s better to have a clever crook in charge of your cash cows than an honest idiot. If he creams a little off the top, that’s fine—just make sure we get all the milk. Keep everything under control. Use a tight rein, until you’ve done what you have to do. All of it.”
    â€œI’ll follow the family motto,” Canny assured him, sourly but not entirely insincerely. “No matter how absurd it seems, it’s best to do it just in case .”
    There was a sneer in his voice, but that too was what his father needed to hear. If he’d said it piously, Daddy wouldn’t have been able to believe it, but saying it as if it were something nasty that he had to swallow regardless, he could be convincing—or as close thereto as was humanly possible.
    Canny could remember a time when his father wouldn’t have cared a tuppenny toss whether Canny intended to follow the rules or not, just so long as he got the lion’s share of the luck he’d renewed by siring a son as the rules required—but he didn’t doubt the sincerity of the old man’s conversion. Daddy really did care about the succession, about the continuation of the Kilcannon streak, not because he thought the Devil would have him if the bargain weren’t properly extended, but because it was the done thing. As men like Lord Credesdale approached death, they cared more rather than less about the state of affairs they were leaving behind: its order; its propriety; its continuity. Canny wasn’t at all sure that he wouldn’t go the same way himself, especially if the course of events did knock him off his high horse, and persuade him of the wisdom of following the rules just in case .
    If parental tyranny had achieved nothing else as he’d grown older under its spur, it had certainly inculcated the habit of doing his petty penances and performing his petty rituals because compliance was far less troublesome than non-compliance. He hadn’t had the benefit of Stevie Larkin’s personal tuition, but he’d read enough psychology to know how easy it would be to take aboard the age-old obsession with lineage and continuity along with all the rest of the petty rituals once the responsibility of managing the family luck was his alone. He wasn’t under any delusion that Daddy’s death would free him, or that burning all the portraits of his ancestors would render their commanding stares impotent.
    Canny had never met the thirtieth Earl, but he had a strong suspicion that