"Please! don't be frightened. It's all right. Really, it's all right." That was a voice that wasn't a voice again, as back in the beginning. It was familiar and at the same time new. It wasn't all right! I looked up, over the bed. There were not one but two tiny, blinding-bright pinpoints of light.
"What? Who?"
"Father," they said, "we are your children."
They were certainly not my idea of it.
"No. Oh, no! Star-baby, where are you?"
"Here. We were she. Now she plus you has become us. She has divided and now we are two, the children of you and she."
"Nonsense. Quit the double talk and give it to me straight!" Double talk it was. But if it was nonsense, it was an unhappy sort of nonsense I couldn't get around.
Coming slightly out of shock, I tried arguing and got nowhere. I never won any arguments from their mother either. I was convinced in spite of myself that this was the simple, brutal truth. It was the way of reproduction of her form of life. My alien wife had divided, to become two half-alien offspring.
I felt lousy. I didn't want two bright, pin-point kids. I wanted my wife. "But look, why couldn't one of you—"
"Why, father!" I got it in a tone of shocked horror. "Such a thing would be positively incestuous. No. We must go now. This is what mother-we came here for—to mix and to re-vitalize her-our people by the addition of a fresh, new stream of life force."