"So now Lili and Bruce--yes, and _Grossmutterchen_ Maud--have their little nest," he said, and he wouldn't have had to push his voice very hard to get a screech. "But what are the rest of us supposed to be--cowbirds?"
He crooked his neck and flapped his hands and croaked, "Cuc-koo! Cuc-koo!" And I said to myself, "I often thought you were crazy, boy, but now I know."
"_Teufelsdreck!_--yes, Devil's dirt!--but you all seem to be infected with this dream of children. Can't you see that the Change World is the natural and proper end of evolution?--a period of enjoyment and measuring, an ultimate working out of things, which women call destruction--'Help, I'm being raped!' 'Oh, what are they doing to my children?'--but which men know as fulfillment.
"You're given good parts in _Götterdämmerung_ and you go up to the author and tap him on the shoulder and say, 'Excuse me, Herr Wagner, but this Twilight of the Gods is just a bit morbid. Why don't you write an opera for me about the little ones, the dear little blue-eyed curly-tops? A plot? Oh, boy meets girl and they settle down to breed, something like that.'
"Devil's dirt doubled and damned! Have you thought what life will be like without a Door to go out of to find freedom and adventure, to measure your courage and keenness? Do you want to grow long gray beards hobbling around this asteroid turned inside out? Putter around indoors to the end of your days, mooning about little baby cosmoses?--incidentally, with a live bomb for company. The cave, the womb, the little gray home in the nest--is that what you want? It'll grow? Oh, yes, like the city engulfing the wild wood, a proliferation of _Kinder_, _Kirche_, _Küche_--I should live so long!
"Women!--how I hate their bright eyes as they look at me from the fireside, bent-shouldered, rocking, deeply happy to be old, and say, 'He's getting weak, he's giving out, soon I'll have to put him to bed and do the simplest things for him.' Your filthy Triple Goddess, Kaby, the birther, bride, and burier of man! Woman, the enfeebler, the fetterer, the crippler! Woman!--and the curly-headed little cancers she wants!"
He lurched toward us, pointing at Lili. "I never knew one who didn't want to cripple a man if you gave her the chance. Cripple him, swaddle him, clip his wings, grind him to sausage to mold another man, hers, a doll man. You hid the Maintainer, you little smother-hen, so you could have your nest and your Brucie!"