“Am I actually hearing this?”
I cringed at Dremen’s forced tone of disbelief. It concealed what he really communicated: revulsion.
“Ask that again, just to prove you’re the one hallucinating, not me,” he commanded.
“Can Trummels and Iktari bear offspring?” I repeated, my words deflating as I spoke them.
“Can they? Of course they can, idiot!”
“But with each other?” I rallied.

He decided then to crush me.

“That’s as likely as traveling thousands of light years across the galaxy through a trans-dimensional gate, ending up on an alien vessel, and finding out they have the same power outlets as we do. It would never happen. And even if the outlets were remotely close in design, trying to plug into one would either result in nothing, or would probably end up killing you. Get the picture? It can’t work. It won’t work, and anyone who even contemplates crap like that deserves to be left to their perverted experiments in hope they’ll inadvertently remove themselves from the book of genealogies!”