“Holy shit,” said the physicist, when his daughter showed him her invention. And he oversaw the patents and saw that they made his daughter wealthy.
For two years, Mona lived in a wheelchair, waited on hand and foot by her own invention. It enabled her to speak and write down thoughts and invent two or three other things before the day it helped her say, “Goodbye,” and hovered nearby, purring sadly, while she died.
—
In some lives, Milo developed talents that were pretty much superpowers. In medieval China, he was the kung-fu master Mo Pi, who walked alone up to a Mongol encampment one day and quietly demanded that they turn around and go home. When the invaders laughed, Mo Pi stamped his foot one time on the ground, bowed, and went home. Three days later, an earthquake rolled through the countryside and the mountains. When the last aftershock had faded, the Mongols had gone home.
—
Often enough, great talents must also be great secrets.
Behind the Iron Curtain, Milosevic Kocevar became a respected shoemaker. He made sturdy shoes for reasonable prices, married a drab woman and raised drab children and ate a great deal of cabbage, and never bothered anyone. Or so it seemed.
Unknown to all but a few, Milosevic sometimes made bombs. He planted the bombs under the cars of the snerkezeii, the secret police, and in the dustbin of the little government building at the edge of town. Sometimes he planted bombs on the highway, where the Red Army caravans passed. The bombs looked like discarded shoes. They were never detected in time to stop them from exploding.
Later on, when he was very old and the Iron Curtain came down and he told everyone what he had done, even his own family didn’t believe him.
—
Sometimes you become good at something by accident. Centuries ago, Milo owned a brewery and brewed an excellent beer. His only competition was old Geoffrey Morgan, who had won the top prize at the Bristol fair every year since before Milo was born.
Geoff Morgan had a beautiful daughter named Igraine, and when she turned sixteen, Milo asked to marry her.
“Nay!” barked Geoff Morgan. “The day you get Igraine’s hand is the day that swill of yours wins top prize at the fair!”
So Milo went home and brewed his finest beer and was almost finished when a battle broke out nearby between the king’s men and the retainers of the Duke of Salisbury. The fighting spilled into town. The dead and their blood got into the open vats, and while a dead man can be fished out, you simply cannot remove blood from beer.
Milo arrived at the fair that year with a dark, bitter beer, instantly popular for its peculiar and aggressive taste. He won top prize, and won Igraine, and returned to a long, fat life making beer and children. And every year he grew more famous for the drawing of his mysterious dark beer. He and his lady always arrived at the fair just a shade too pale and with bandages about their forearms (though these were scarcely noticed and never remarked upon by polite folk). What was remarked upon was the way Milo and his bride were so devoted that there was nothing he couldn’t ask of her, nothing she wouldn’t do for him.
—
Milo enjoyed his brewing talent so much, he tried to take it with him when he died.
He spent hours and hours in the basement of his modest afterlife home (his reward for a modest life making beer), making more beer and still trying to find a way to make the perfect dark beer without having to open a vein.
“You’re supposed to move on,” griped Suzie, sitting on the basement steps. Her eyes watered and her voice sounded scratchy. She was experimenting with smoking cigarettes, her latest human curiosity. It wasn’t working well. She stubbed out her smoke on the steps.
“I am moving on,” said Milo, opening a tap and tasting his latest batch. He grimaced. “The last keg was too sweet. This one’s bitter. A step in the right dir—”
“That’s not what I mean,” she coughed. “You’re supposed to take what you learned and start getting ready for a new life. Not dwelling on the old.”
A smirk twisted Milo’s lips.
“I know what this is about,” he said. “This is about her.”
Suzie scrunched her eyes up. “Her who?”
“Her. Igraine. The love of my life. The most recent one.”
“You’re off your pickle. Jealous of an Earth chick?”
“Be respectful,” he said.
Suzie’s eyes flared. “Listen to you!” she shouted. “You’re the one who’s got her on the brain. Not me.”
“Okay,” said Milo, closing the tap, rolling the barrel away. “Fine. She’s on my mind. We were married fifty years, after all. And that makes you jealous.”
She gave him a complicated look.
“You know we’re just friends,” she said. “Right?”
How could she be so dumb?
“I’m not dumb,” she said, her tone pure ice. “I’m Death. Don’t you get it? I bring things to an end. I don’t do the Love thing. It’s not my area.”
Milo shrugged. Fine. He wasn’t going to beg.
“Next time I’m alive,” he said, “I’m going to be the first man to sleep with a million women. How do you like them apples?”
“Good. I hope your soul pecker falls off.”
Milo went silent, inside and out.
Soul pecker?
—
After a life in banking, Milo had to serve a penalty life as an alligator snapping turtle, waiting in the murk at the bottom of slimy ponds. Claws dug in, holding his breath.
These were talents, too. Waiting. Striking fast, when the time came.
Sitting in the murk, raw talent fifty million years old, coiled like a spring in the swamp.
—
He was a jazz musician, saxophone, smoky and slow. Mookie Underwood, in pinstripes and suspenders and a tie with a perfect four-in-hand. Saddle shoes, shined like planets that clicked and tapped their way through orbit.
If you watched people listening, whether it was in a club or a hall or down at Smokestack Records, they all had a certain look, which they couldn’t help, as if they were trying to get a peek down the bell of that big brass sax, because it sounded like something lived down there. Something wise and wet and not particularly happy. There was an old soul behind that sound, but whether the soul was in the saxophone or in the man himself was never plain.
KING’S COLLEGE, CHRISTMINSTER, BRIDGER’S PLANET, A.D. 3417
An old stone bridge.
A primordial morning, full of mists and loomings. A river of mist flowed under the bridge, and a shore of mist came to meet it.
The mist retreated before morning sunlight, and a stone church emerged, as if rising out of time. It was followed, at a distance, by a stone clock tower.
Three wooden sculls, flying like spears across mist and water, shot out from under the bridge. Strong, hearty voices called out: “Stroke, slow the slide!”
“Power three on five, boys! One, two…”
“Three, hands down and away!”
On the shore, shouts and cheers from people half visible:
“Huzzah!”
“Steady on, Harrow, that’s the way!”
Somewhere in the fog, a finish line crossed. A climax of cheers, jeering.