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could you not want kids?’ and ‘Aren’t you being selfish?’ and ‘Who’s going to look after you in your old age?’ ”

Matt leaned back in his chair. “And?”

“And, I just don’t want kids; I don’t know why. And, no, I’m not being selfish.” She paused. “Have you ever read Richard Dawkins?”

“I read The God Delusion,” Matt said.

“Yeah, that’s a good one. But his most famous book is The Selfish Gene. And that’s his point: that genes are selfish, that all they want is to reproduce. And it is selfish to reproduce, in a very literal sense: it’s about making more copies of yourself, or as near as is possible, given our, um, our method of reproduction.”

Matt averted his eyes, and said, “Ah.”

“And, as for the looking-after-me-when-I’m-old question, surely that’s a truly selfish reason to have a child: for what it can do for you. Heck, you might as well have one to harvest its youthful organs so you can live longer. After all, they’d likely be a good tissue match.”

“Yuck,” said Matt.

Caitlin smiled. “Exactly.”

“But, um, ah, speaking of genes and stuff… I mean, that’s interesting that you don’t want to have kids. How could, ah…?”

“How could a disposition toward not having children evolve?” asked Caitlin.

Matt nodded. “Exactly. I mean, you’re here because every one of your ancestors wanted to have children.”

Caitlin felt butterflies in her stomach. She had an answer for that, of course, and had had no trouble presenting it to Bashira, but…

She took a breath and found herself now not quite looking at Matt. “Actually, the having-kids part is just a side effect. I’m here because every one of my ancestors liked having sex.”

But even not quite looking at him, she could see another expression she now knew well: the deer-caught-in- the-headlights look. “Ah,” he said again. He was clearly nervous, and he quickly changed the topic. “So, um, so what do you think about the upcoming election in the States? ”

Caitlin shook her head; she had her work cut out for her. She wheeled her chair a little closer to his; their knees were now touching. “I hope he gets re-elected,” she said. “My parents have already done the paperwork to be able to vote from Canada.”

Matt nodded. “They’re allowed to vote from here?”

“Sure. They’ll do absentee ballots. They’ll be counted for Austin, which was their last US address.”

“Um, are—are you guys going to stay in Canada, or is your dad’s job a temporary thing?”

Caitlin smiled. “As long as he doesn’t accidentally push Professor Hawking down the staircase, he’s here for good. In fact, he’s already talking about taking out Canadian citizenship. He has to travel a lot to conferences and, well, there are some places it’s just not safe to go as an American.”

It was awkward facing each other in separate chairs, and—

And Matt probably weighed only 130 pounds, and she was only 110—and these chairs had had no trouble supporting Dr. Kuroda, and he surely had weighed a lot more than 240. She got up from her chair and gave it a push to send it rolling away, and she said, “Do you mind?” with her eyebrows raised.

Matt smiled. “Um, no, no, not at all.”

She sat in his lap, and he put his arms around her waist, and the chair’s hydraulics compressed a bit under their combined weight.

They kissed for a while, and she shifted her bottom a bit to get more comfortable, and—

And, well, well! Penises did do that!

Matt seemed a bit embarrassed. “Um, so, ah, is this the last time he’ll get to vote for president?”

“Who? My dad?”

“Uh-huh.”

Caitlin stroked Matt’s short blond hair. “No. He’ll become a dual citizen.”

“I thought the US didn’t allow that.”

“They didn’t used to, unless you were born with it—and that was hard to come by. But, well, they—we—bowed to international pressure, and do allow it now, in fact, have allowed it for decades.”

“Ah,” said Matt, but there was something about his voice.

“Yes?”

“No, nothing.”

Caitlin kissed him on the nose. “It’s fine,” she said. “Go ahead.”

“Well, it’s just, um, you know, you should be either a Canadian or an American.”

“Oh, I think dual citizenship is a wonderful thing. It’s… see, it’s anti-Dawkinsian.”

“Oh. Um, I know you’re from Texas, but, ah…”

She flicked her forefinger against his shoulder. “We’re not all rubes, Matt. Of course I believe in evolution. But—”

“Yes?”

Caitlin’s heart started pounding even harder than it had when Matt had first arrived. She suddenly felt the way she did when she saw something in math: something that was suddenly, obviously, gloriously true. She leaned back a little so she could look clearly into his blue eyes. “Evolution—natural selection—is only effective up to a point. The problem with evolution is everything Richard Dawkins talked about: selfish genes, kin selection. Favoring your closest genetic relatives initially lets you out-compete those who aren’t related to you, but then it actually becomes counterproductive once you become a technological civilization.”

“How so?”

“Look, take a bunch of… I dunno, a bunch of wolves, right? They’re all competing for the same resources, the same food. Well, if you and your close relatives outnumber them—if you squeeze the other wolves off the fertile land or keep them from getting access to prey, they die out, and you survive. That’s evolution: survival of the fittest, and it works so long as numerical superiority is all that counts. But as soon as you become a truly technological species, evolution doesn’t provide the right… um, what’s that word?”

“Paradigm?” suggested Matt.

She kissed him as his reward. “Exactly! The right paradigm! If there are a hundred of you and your close relatives and only one of the guy who you’ve been squeezing out, but he’s got a machine gun and you don’t, he wins; he just blows you all away.”

“Ah,” said Matt in a teasing tone. “You’re not packing heat now, are you?”

Caitlin thought about saying, “I’m not the one who’s packing,” but she couldn’t quite get the words out. So instead she said, “No. Us blind Americans tend to prefer hand grenades—they don’t require a precise aim.”

Matt tightened his arms around her waist. “Good to know.”

“But, in fact, that is the point: it doesn’t have to be guns. Any technology that allows you to take out large numbers of your competitors changes the whole evolutionary equation. And… ah! Yes! And that’s why sophisticated consciousness evolved, why it was selected for. Consciousness has survival value because it lets you override your genetic programming. Instead of mindlessly squeezing out those who aren’t like you—pushing them back to the point where they retaliate with their weapons—consciousness lets you decide not to squeeze them further. It lets us say to our genes, hey, give this guy who isn’t our close relative a chance, too— because that way he’s not going to feel a need to come after us while we’re sleeping. Making sure that only your own family is well-off is an advantage only when those who aren’t well-off can’t hurt you.”

Matt was slowly getting bolder. He brought his face close to hers and kissed her, then said: “That makes sense. I mean, it’s usually not happy people who lash out with terrorism or try to take their neighbor’s land.”

“Exactly! Those things are done by the desperate, or the forgotten, or—I don’t know—the envious. By