Moses, Hugh and Mu Ren were having their blood drawn when they noticed racks of cryocoffins containing battle-scarred buckeyes. Tinker’s strike force!
Moses studied the readouts. The bodies were dead.
“Where did you get these?” he asked.
“Floating in the place called Coweye Sump,” said Olga. “They read buckeye on my scanners. I beamed them up. Although they had been dead for several hours, I was able to find viable, intact nuclei. They are being Tattered also.”
Mu Ren ran frantically from coffin to coffin, falling to her knees sobbing at the one containing Tinker’s remains. Olga recognized a widow’s anguish.
“The man you call Tinker will be with us in the new world,” said the ship’s Nordic voice. “His soul still lives.”
“Soul?” sniffed Mu Ren.
“His essence—life principle—DNA-gene-soul. I have copied his genetic person—an embryo now in this bottle,” Olga explained, illuminating a small vial high on a wall rack. “We will all miss his personality and skills.”
Mu Ren sobbed into Moses’ shoulder. He comforted her.
“Tinker will be with us,” he said softly. “Counting Little Tinker, who is almost four years old, and the baby in your belly—this new budchild makes three. Three Tinkers.”
She blinked back her tears. With her own budchild that made four! She studied Moses’ face purposefully. Was that look in his eye appropriate? She held his hand firmly and asked what his mating plans were.
Moses’ experience with coweyes made him a bit wary of their primitive sexual behavior. The violent ups and downs of their tense ovarian cycles upset his calm, ordered existence. Here was a female raised, as he had been, in the city. She would not disappear or drive him away during the luteal phase. Yet, her years in the buckeye camps had toughened her for life in the new colony. He put a protective arm on her shoulder.
“My own budchild will need a mother’s milk when we set down. I can think of no one else I’d rather have caring for him,” he said.
Her eyes dried. They picked up little Tinker and walked towards Olga’s Suspension Clinics—Hugh sauntered along behind, a little self-conscious about the tender love scene.
Olga sang through the oxygen squeeze and cryotherapy.
After what seemed like a brief period in suspension, Olga’s charges awoke to find her in orbit around the new planet. Orbit-to-Surface Modules were being loaded—single-seaters for outposts and larger cabin classes for the settlements.
“This planet will be your new home,” announced Olga. “It was stocked with Earth biota 392.7 standard years ago. My probes indicate a successful take for most of the Earth species but local alien forms still predominate. You will have to use some judgment, of course—but the probability of a successful implant is very high.”
Gruff old Moon approached Moses, who stood in line with Mu Ren. Moon carried his infant carbon copy—young Moses held three crying infants.
“Where are the single seaters?” asked Moon.
Moses nodded toward one of the smaller bays on his left.
Moon studied the three crying infants in Moses arms. Setting his own casually on the deck, he took the triplets and held them underhanded like small sacks of grain. They quieted.
“You have to be confident,” he explained. “When you’re nervous, they detect it. Parental anxiety means danger—to any species. If there was one thing you should have learned Outside, it was self-confidence.”
Moses smiled and took back the kids.
“Aren’t you overdoing it?” commented Moon, gesturing to the three small blinking faces.
Moses shrugged, “Just me, Mu and Tinker.”
“Tinker—” said Moon, picking up his infant. “Good man.” He ran his tongue over gold teeth and grinned. Moon walked off followed by three-legged Dan and a tiny, clumsy puppy.
Dan-with-the-golden-teeth tilted his head quizzically. The small four-footed creature had been following him ever since he woke up. He growled at it, but still it tagged along. Its tail wagged three times. Ancient memories stirred. He gave it a big wet lick, knocking it down.
Moon pushed the two of them into the OSM and closed the hatch.
The acromegalic lumbered up to the checkout point.
“Skills?” asked the turnstile.
“Healer. But I’ve been retired ever since—”
He held up his large clumsy hands.
“Your pituitary tumor was destroyed by the pyrotherapy of Dundas. What you can do today, you will be able to do for years. Your condition will improve. A Healer you are! I would like to assign you to this settlement with Moses and Mu Ren. Is that satisfactory?”
The acromegalic nodded. He could see from Mu Ren’s duck-walk and winces that his first job would be delivering a baby. He put his own infant on his shoulder and approached Moses smiling.
As Moon’s OSM entered the atmosphere he caught a glimpse of Moses’ cabin-class ship in a lower orbit.
“Dammit,” he spat. “We all should be in single-seaters. Putting down a ready-made city like that only hastens the evolution of civilization.”
Olga’s soft confident voice soothed: “A little civilization may be necessary for survival. The ecology and geography of this planet are a bit more hostile than your Mother Earth’s.”
“Civilization is too high a price to pay for survival,” he grumbled. He meant it.
He and Dan pressed their noses against the viewport. Continents and oceans—not too unlike Earth. There were more mountains—younger and sharper. Strange circular blemishes marred many of the flat areas—like astroblemes. Misty, overgrown archipelagos mottled the oceans. He smiled. It would be many generations before transportation linked the various implants.
Moses’ OSM put down at an estuary. It was night, but on a previous pass they had seen promising grain-fields and herds of ungulates. The colonists were optimistic.
Mu Ren delivered. The acromegalic held up the wrinkled wet infant and gave it a ritual spank. Mu Ren nursed it while Moses joined the acromegalic on his Mediteck rounds. Simple Willie sat with a young coweye. His face was bandaged. Olga had removed thick keloid scars from his face—and excised the molecular scars that had blocked his memory. When he saw Moses he smiled—a symmetrical, clear-eyed smile.
“Olga unblocked my memory,” he said enthusiastically. “My trophy was a hunter—the same hunter who had cut off my own toes. I remember him threatening to cut off the little things that made me a man—my fifth toes. The MR confused me when they hunted the yellow-haired ones—but I managed to wipe out the entire hunting party. Honey, my coweye, escaped with a leg wound. I imagine she has found another mate by now.”
Moses smiled while Willie’s bandages were removed. A coweye can be relied on to find a mate—if one is available. He studied the new coweye seated next to Willie—licorice hair and mint-green eyes… at least the second most beautiful thing in the world… any world.
Moses Eppendorff turned and walked back to Mu Ren and his five children.