Jill looked at him in disbelief. “Where do you get this stuff? You’re a carefree student.”

Nate waggled his eyebrows. “I have six older siblings, remember?”

“Well, my life isn’t that complicated—wasn’t that complicated. Back on Earth, I mean. You can make the decision not to have life be that complicated.”

“Yeah, you can be single and not have kids. But what are you giving up on the flip side? Because I think that’s the point. No matter what choices we make to try to make life easy for ourselves, there’s always something negative or some challenge on the new path. You can’t escape it. That’s the law of good and evil.”

Jill grimaced, face set stubbornly. “I don’t agree. There is no disadvantage to being childless for me.”

“Sure there is. It’s just that you, as an individual, don’t put much value on the positive aspects of having kids. Nor are you particularly worried about the negative aspects of not having kids. But let’s look at the issue from a completely dispassionate point of view.”

Jill shrugged.

“Okay. So having kids—here’s on the good side: nurturing, mentoring, love, having a family around you, passing on your genes—”

Jill snorted. “A: they’re not that great as genes go. B: there are too many people on the planet already.”

“Fine. That’s your opinion. We’re just listing pros and cons, remember? On the negative side of having kids there’s the loss of personal time and space, the financial burden, the limitations on lifestyle, the ‘exasperation factor’ of dealing with a child all the time—”

“Exactly.”

“So you, personally, are more afraid of the negative stuff than you value the positive stuff. But for someone who gets off on being nurturing or really can’t imagine life without a big family, it might be the other way around. But objectively, having kids is equal amounts reward and shit factor. In fact, I would say that, as with anything, the bigger the rewards, the bigger the shit factor. That’s how fifty-fifty land works. And not having kids is equally good and bad. It’s just a different set of gotchas.”

Jill folded her arms defensively as she walked. “What’s negative about not having kids?”

“You don’t get all the good stuff about having kids for starters, all the nurturing, family stuff. Plus, don’t you want someone to take care of you when you’re old?”

“If I can’t take care of myself, I’d rather not hang around, frankly.”

“Really?” Nate gave her an appraising look. “Okay, what about this: I remember my mother talking about my great-aunt. She was a ripe old bitch and Mom said it was because she’d never had kids, never learned how to have patience or put someone other than herself first. Without love in her life she just sort of hardened up. Emotions are like a muscle—use ’em or lose ’em. Kids definitely make you use ’em.”

Jill shrugged indifferently, but a knot of pain flared in her chest. He had aimed that barb at her personally, and it was pretty damn cruel.

For a moment she said nothing. Then, because she didn’t want him to know how much he’d hurt her, she asked, “I assume this theory of yours has other examples?”

He shrugged, jiggling those capsules around in his hand. “Of course. Everything is fifty-fifty. Take flying, for example. Airplanes introduced a fast way to travel to just about anywhere on Earth. That’s an amazing benefit compared to what our ancestors had. But it’s never that simply good, huh-uh. Now we have all of the great cities, like in Europe, and all the most beautiful islands, like Greece, so packed with tourists that you can’t even enjoy them anymore. People hijack planes and use them as weapons or target them with missiles. And the airport scene has gotten increasingly intolerable. There’s also the little fact that although planes crash very rarely, when they do, your chances of survival are nil. In fact, that’s kind of an interesting point. It’s almost like because planes crash infrequently when they do it has to be catastrophic, as if the badness of the bad, when it happens, has to be so bad that it still balances out all the good.”

“But planes are incredibly convenient!”

“Of course. So we invent stuff like that, trying to make life convenient. But there’s always stuff that comes with it that we don’t like, because nothing can be purely good.”

“But how can you deny that life on Earth is a whole lot better now than it was in the Middle Ages? If everything stays fifty-fifty, by law, how would anything ever progress?”

Nate considered it. “But it progresses because it’s fifty-fifty, because we always try to make things better, but we never actually get there. I mean, that’s how evolution works, right? I do see your point, though. Things may be better for us, overall, than they were for our cave-dwelling ancestors. It may be that things gradually improve over time, even if it’s still fifty-fifty. You know, more like the entire graph shifts upward in tiny increments.”

Jill gave an appreciative hmmm. It wasn’t all that far from Darwin’s theory, actually. Species did, overall, improve, but things rarely ever stabilized. There were always new challenges to be overcome, new ways for the species to try to adapt.

“Even so,” Nate continued, “nothing comes without a cost. Is life really that much better in the twentieth century than it was in the fourteenth? Yeah, we have modern technology. But with it came the bomb, car and plane crashes, computer hackers, global warming, and TV zombification. What are we missing emotionally now that we no longer live close to the land, raise our own food, or live in extended communities? Modern society may be superior in some ways, but it’s highly isolating and remote, from other people, even from our own planet. Nothing comes without a price. That’s fifty-fifty.”

Despite herself, Jill had to smile at his cojones. “Give me a break! You’re as much of a TV zombie as anyone, and you wouldn’t know how to raise a potato to save your life.”

Nate spread out his hand. “Naturally. I’m a product of my culture. So give me another example.”

“What about modern medicine?”

Nate didn’t even have to think about it. “Uh-huh. Modern medicine is cool, ‘specially if you’re the one having the heart attack. But overuse of antibiotics has led to immune microbes, blood transfusions give AIDS, our health care system is in crisis, we have a zillion old people hanging on now, like, forever, eating up their kids’ resource and the government’s, and medical technology has allowed us to engineer nifty new plagues like anthrax… I mean, don’t you find it incredibly elegant? No matter what we do, no matter what we invent to make life easier, there’s bound to be a catch in there somewhere. That is so incredibly cool. Scary as hell, but cool.”

Jill was taking it as a personal challenge now. She wracked her brain. “Mother Teresa? Gandhi?”

“For every one of them there’s a Ted Bundy?” He shook his head, eyes narrowing. “No. Check that. I have a better answer. I was raised Greek Orthodox, right? So look at Jesus Christ. During his lifetime he taught pacifism, equality, charity… Yet the religion created in his name caused some of the bloodiest, most ignorant centuries ever. And even Gandhi—a lot of the Pakistani–Indian hostility came out of that whole period.”

“Hmmm.”

Nate spun to walk backward, facing her. He had the energetic bounce of a twelve-year-old, even in this heat. “Anything else? Come on. You’ve got more.”

Jill threw up her hands. “Nope. You’re too smart for me, Socrates.”

“Come on!”

“Huh-uh. I’m done.”

“Please? Please, please, please?” he wheedled, making a pout face designed to bug the crap out of her.

It was good to see him come back to life again, even if there was a tinge of mania about it. She sighed. “Oh, all right. What about being a big celebrity? You’re telling me that life as Nate Andros, physics student, is just as fifty-fifty as, say, being Keanu Reeves?”