I woke up by daylight to a horrible, icy, lost and separated feeling,
as though part of me had really died. I reached out my hand for
reassurance--and I yelled.
That sweet, soft-curved body in the bed next to me was cold and dead.
"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."
"You mean me?" It was flattering to think my stock would invigorate
the population of a sun, but it was no cure for the loneliness in which
I was lost. "You are going back across space--and leave me here alone?"
"Yes, father. We must leave at once."
"Oh, now, wait just one radiating little minute! You say I'm your
father. Well, I forbid--"