But better to get that out of the way right now.
“I’m not going to have kids,” she said, sitting back down on her swivel chair, and cursing again that her parents didn’t have a couch down here.
“Oh!” said Matt. “I’m so sorry. Is it—um, was it the same thing that caused your blindness?”
She was startled—but she supposed she shouldn’t be. Blindness in young people that wasn’t caused by an injury rarely occurred in isolation; it was usually part of a suite of difficulties. In fact, one of the frustrations for her at the TSBVI had been that so many of the students had cognitive difficulties in addition to visual impairment.
“Well,” she said, “first, my blindness was caused by something called Tomasevic’s syndrome, which only affects the way the retina encodes information. And, second, it’s not that I can’t have children, it’s that I don’t want to.”
Caitlin wished yet again that she had more experience at decoding faces. Matt’s expression was one she’d never seen before: the left side of his mouth turned down, the right turned up, and blond eyebrows drawn together; it could have meant anything. After a moment he said, “Don’t you like kids?”
“I like them just fine,” she replied, “but I could never eat a whole one.”
But that expression she did recognize: Matt’s jaw had dropped.
“I’m joking. I love kids. Back in Austin, I used to help Stacy babysit.”
“But you don’t want to have any of your own?”
“Nope.”
And now his eyebrows went up. “Why not?”
“Just never have. Ever since I was a little girl, it was never something I wanted.”
“Didn’t you play with dolls?”
Caitlin still had that ridiculous Barbie Doll her cousin Megan had gotten her as a joke, the one that exclaimed, “Math is hard!”
“Sure,” Caitlin said. “But that doesn’t mean I wanted to be a mother.”
Matt was silent, and Caitlin felt herself tensing up. For Pete’s sake, they’d only been dating a few days—surely it was way too early to be worrying about this! But if it was going to be a showstopper for Matt…
She made her tone nonconfrontational. “I’ve had this discussion with Bashira, too, you know. She says, ‘How 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 welclass="underline" 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.”