Free Streaking by Brian Stableford Page B

honest probability—but it’s the ones who aren’t that you need to study carefully. Look at the ones who lose more often than they win, not just at their predicaments but at their attitudes. You and I know that their misfortunes are just a matter of chance, and so do they—but that’s not the way they feel. They feel victimized, Can. They feel tormented. They feel that fate has it in for them. Only a few of them get around to thinking, consciously, that they must have deserved the bad things that happen to them, but it doesn’t matter whether they get that far or not, because it’s just as bad thinking that they didn’t deserve it as it is thinking that they did.”
    Canny felt the expression on his own face setting hard as the words got through to him. Even his father it seemed, had drunk his fill of popular psychology. Even his father had worked out the elements of psychological probability. The old man’s eyes were as dark and taut as they had ever been—no slackness or hollowness there!—and they were boring into him with all the fervor of a mind that desperately needed morphine to ease its distress but wasn’t prepared to compromise, for the moment, between raw wakefulness and sugared dreaming.
    â€œIf it’s like that for them, Can,” the old man went on, relentlessly, “imagine what it’s going to be like for you. You’ll be the thirty-second Earl, Can, at the tail end of a winning streak that’s lasted eight hundred years . Imagine what it’s going to feel like if things go wrong for you ! Whatever you believe now about the necessity or otherwise of following the rules, you won’t be able to forgive yourself if things go awry after you’ve decided to break them. Oh, you’ll tell yourself that it’s just a coincidence, not your fault at all...but you’ll never be able to believe it. You’ve been favored by fate all your life, and for you the dominion of probability really would be victimization by neglect. For you, it really would be torment. Believe me, Can, I know . I came back; I saved myself—but I’ve been to the kind of Hell that’s specially reserved for people of our kind, and I’m telling you that it’s a place to stay out of if you can possibly avoid it, and that it’s certainly not a place to spend your entire life.”
    The sick man finally trailed off, and slumped back against the heaped-up pillows, exhausted and agonized. Canny knew what an effort it had cost him to say all that, and exactly what his father now needed to hear—but he also realized, belatedly, that there were certain things he could only say to his father, and that the opportunity to say them would soon be lost. On the Riviera it had seemed easy enough to be alone with his burden, his doubts and his questions—but now that he was home again, it suddenly seemed very much harder.
    â€œThanks, Daddy,” he said, sincerely. “I know you needed to say that, and I did need to hear it. You probably think I’ve never loved you as much as I could and should, because I always resented sharing my luck, blah de blah de blah, but we can cut that crap now. We’re in the same boat. Your luck’s running out, and so is mine. Maybe if I wasn’t benefiting from my half of the partnership, that crab would never have got its claws into your guts. Who knows? We’ve both looked long and hard at the family tree, and we know that our kind of luck isn’t the kind that guarantees long life. How could it be? Renewability implies death. If any father had ever outlived his son, the streak would have ended there and then, according to the rules. The death of the father, before or soon after the marriage of the son, is part of the pattern.”
    It was his turn to pause, without fear of interruption.
    â€œCancer of the liver and pancreas isn’t a pretty way to go,” he continued, “and it