Streaking by Brian Stableford

although that had more to do with the talents of the painters than the features of the sitters. The spectacular awfulness of the ones that had been retired to shadowed corridors on the third floor couldn’t possibly have been entirely due to the ugliness of the subjects.
    â€œDid they ever smile, or did they simply feel an obligation to glower at their painters by way of intimidation?” Lissa asked.
    â€œThey certainly didn’t think of sitting for a portrait as any kind of fashion shoot,” Canny replied. “It was a matter of duty, to be faced in the same purposeful way as checking the accounts and sleeping with their wives. I’m different, of course—too much television, Mummy says.”
    The model made no comment, but Canny could imagine what she was thinking as she scanned the faces of his ancestors. The Kilcannon luck had never extended far in the direction of good looks. Canny was, indeed, the cream of the crop in that regard. Not for the first time, Canny cursed the reflexive flicker of mad optimism which said that there might be something in this encounter for his long-suppressed hormones, as the hostile stares of his forefathers told himself to pull himself together. Wile he was in the presence so many ugly Kilcannons, he didn’t dare believe that someone as beautiful as Lissa Lo might be seriously interested in his body. It seemed far more likely that she was here on some kind of quasi-anthropological field-trip, like a Brave New Worlder visiting the Savage Reservation.
    Lord Credesdale looked terrible, and he wasn’t entirely coherent at first, but Canny had been right about the sight of Lissa Lo giving him a lift. He rallied, in spite of the depressive effect of the morphine—and once his tongue was loose, he began to string sentences together with reasonable fluency. After half an hour of aesthetic appreciation and idle chitchat, though, the thirty-first Earl asked the model, very politely, whether he could have a few moments alone with his son and heir.
    â€œI won’t keep him long,” the old man promised. “Family matter—might not have another chance.
    â€œI can’t believe that,” Lissa said. “A mind as strong and capable as yours isn’t about to lose its grip just yet. But of course you must have a moment with Canny. I’ll wait downstairs for a while. I promised to be in my hotel in York by eleven, because I need to catch up with my sleep before taking the long haul out to Venezuela, but I won’t go without saying goodbye unless I have to.”
    It was the first time that she had spoken Canny’s nickname; Canny was profoundly glad that she hadn’t called him “Can” or “Canavan” in spite of hearing both from his mother’s lips.
    â€œThanks, Lissa,” Canny said. In the circumstances, her promise to wait seemed to him an extraordinarily generous offer.
    Lissa closed the door behind her, very neatly.
    â€œYou know what these are, don’t you?” said the dying man, drawing the keys out from beneath his pillow, where Bentley must have placed them.
    Canny knew that it wasn’t a good time to say “Of course I do”, let alone “Get on with it”. It wasn’t as if he’d never been in the library before, although he’d never been in any hurry to take up the burden of scholarship on which his father had always urged him to make an early start. He could have picked up the keys from their resting-place any time he liked, rules or no rules. The formal passing was purely symbolic—just another little ceremony, insufficiently burdensome ever to have been put to the proof—but Canny made no objection. He said his lines dutifully, trying not to sound weary—although his lack of sleep the previous night would certainly have given him an excuse.
    â€œThat’s almost certainly part of the ninety-nine per cent of it that’s bullshit,” Lord