Stroking one of her ancillary gripping claws down the side of the male's face, Chersal crooned, "Oh, sweetness, that was [i]phenomenal[/i]," into what her studies had shown to be his ear.

The male stirred in the cocoon beside her. "Please..." he muttered.

Chersal chuckled deep in her thorax. "My eager little lover." Her ovipositor twitched with a desultory sort of arousal, but no. "Now that I've pumped my eggs into you, darling, another bout, as pleasurable as that would be, would simply be superfluous." She touched his lower back with her primary gripping claws. "Even as we speak, our children are latching onto your luscious interior and will soon truly be blood of my blood and flesh of your flesh."

He moaned, though she knew he wasn't in pain. The first thing the eggs did upon attachment was dull the entire nervous system. "That can't—" he said. "It isn't— It's impossible! This far out in the galaxy, nothing should be even remotely compatible with human biology!"

"Shhh, my sweet." Chersal stroked his face again, delighting in the smooth meat of him. "Your basic building blocks will prove admirable, I'm sure, and really, that's all any mother can ask of a father, isn't it? The carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen that will bring their children to life?"

"But my complex organic molecules would be poisonous to—!"

Her ovipositor stirred even further, sliding against the back of his legs with a friction that made her catch her breath. His voice choked off, too.

"You're perfect," she said. "And so concerned for our children!" All her gripping claws deployed almost of their own accord to draw him closer, warm and soft and yielding against her carapace. "You humans will make wonderful mates for my sisters and me." Nestling her mouthparts against his ear, she whispered, "Really, though, I thought my speaking your language would be more astonishing." She sighed. "All the years I spent listening to your subspace broadcasts and puzzling out the syntax..."

As still as he'd gone in her embrace, she began to fear he'd had a adverse reaction to their mating. But the strong thump, thump, thump of his circulatory pump—[i]heart,[/i] she recalled, was the word in his language—reassured her. "I take it," he said then, "that I'm not likely to survive the birth process?"

She reached around to trail some feelers across his ventral surfaces—[i]chest[/i] and [i]stomach,[/i] as they termed them. "You will live on in our progeny, and I'll be certain to tell them all about their father."

"But..." He drew in and blew out several breaths, a process that made him swell and shrink against her quite delightfully. "But if all you need are the basic elements, aren't there non-sapient beings you could plant your eggs in? Wouldn't that be, I don't know, less problematic?"

With a sigh of her own, Chersal shifted, the spongy rock of the cave outside their cocoon suddenly too spongy. Why did so many males want to talk about religion afterwards? "Would you doom our children to a life of non-personhood? They can't form souls from soulless animals, can they?"

"Souls?" He chuckled. "Yeah, well, good luck with that."

The nictitating membranes in most of her eyes flickered. "Darling? What...what do you mean?"

"I mean I'm fucked anyway—quite literally, right? But you? Expecting to get souls from us humans?" His head lolled back and forth across her upper thorax. "We've been trying forever to figure out if we've even got 'em, and the consensus, last time I checked, was coming down pretty heavily on the 'no' side."

His language and attitude made Chersal frown, a flexing of mouthparts that she certainly hadn't thought she'd be engaging in on such a joyous day. "Well, of [i]course[/i] you have souls. You can talk and think and construct robust-enough mathematics to power the ship that carried you to this spot however many light-years from where you started." She clicked two claws together as one did when one had proven a point. "Sapience is all that's required for a soul where [i]I[/i] come from, and it's the traits that mark your sapience that you'll be passing on to our children along with your more basal elements."

He made some sort of small clicking sound. "Yeah, that's even worse."

Chersal's cilia began vibrating in a quiet sort of alarm, but she tried her best to quell the tremors. "Again, I'll ask you what you mean."

"If these little zygotes or whatever are gonna be picking up human traits, well, you oughtta know that we're the loudest, crassest, most argumentative buncha rat bastards in the galaxy." The slurring of his words told Chersal that the inner quickening was proceeding apace: she'd heard that the process acted upon the male nervous system much as alcohol did. "So how long?" he asked with a hiccup. "How long've you and your sisters been grabbing unsuspecting spacers of whatever species and shoving eggs up their asses, huh?"

Not sure where he was going with this line of questioning, she answered, "Ever since the first Diribian ship arrived on our world nearly five thousand years ago. Their children were filled with their knowledge, and we've been spreading steadily throughout the stars ever since."

"Yeah, well, that'll be changing soon." He was quivering now, a sure sign that his essences had begun flowing to fill the new life growing within him. "Once you get human pieces floating around in your gene pool, it'll all be about changing the way you do things: sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, sometimes just changing things because you haven't changed 'em in a while. Get ready for questions to every answer and vast social upheavals every...three decades or...so..."

Bubbling noises overwhelmed every other sound he was making, and he lurched violently in Chersal's grip. Red fluid burst from the dozen sudden holes in his ventral region—[i]chest[/i] and [i]stomach,[/i] she reminded herself—and spattered across the surface of the cocoon ahead of her. Cooing and chittering rose up to caress her ears, and she smiled at their twelve children, spiky and undulating and breaking their father down into his component elements before absorbing those elements into themselves.

Cooing back, Chersal used her claws to slice her mate's skin into easy-to-digest cutlets and draped them over the children's backs, their own pin-like claws stabbing and injecting caustic fluids into their first external meals. So cute!

They looked different from her other children, of course, the underbellies smooth and narrow like their father, their eyes almost as large as his. And...was there perhaps something sharper in those eyes than she was used to seeing from children just emerged from incubation? An awareness, a calculation, an odd dissatisfaction?

She clicked her claws to dismiss the thought. They were simply children like any others despite whatever it was their father had been going on about there at the end.

Change for the sake of change? Ludicrous! But then one could never put much stock in things males said, could one?