Chapter 31: Saralinda

"You and Moira are pretty close, huh?"

I looked at Malia to try and get, like, some kind of clue as to just what she was asking. But we were on the beach, and we were both wearing sunglasses, and I couldn't see her eyes.

So I just nodded.

"I mean, I've seen you kiss and stuff..."

I nodded again.

"Sorry, I shouldn't be so personal..."

"No, it's okay. Moira is my – my everything. I love her. And she loves me back. She loves Gary too."

"What's it like? I mean, you sleep with her, right?" She was practically whispering.

"Uh huh," I told her. "We have sex, too," I added brightly, teasing her. "Really good sex."

She was quiet for a bit.

"I don't think I'm gay," she said after a while.

"I don't think I'm gay either," I told her. "Jake says I'm bisexual, but I don't even know what that means, really. This is all so new to me,"

Malia shot me a look, or at least I guess she did. Sunglasses...

"I guess nobody's really told you my story, huh?" So I told her a little about my mother disappearing, and about my father and 'stepmother'. I didn't tell her about the bridge...

"I can see why you ran away from all that when you met Gary, then," she said. "When was this?"

"It was only like a month ago," I said, in utter amazement, having not really realized the truth of it myself.

"Wow – it is new for you. So you'd never even kissed anyone until last month?"

"Nope. Anyway, I feel so much love for Moira, and I've discovered how wonderful sex is, and everybody is so nice. It's kind of a problem, because I don't really know, like, how this is all supposed to work. I end up wanting to sleep with all of my friends, but I guess that's not normally how people do things." I stopped, pondering for a while. "Why do people pair up?" I asked.

Malia smiled. "It's biology," she told me.

"Huh?"

She snorted. "Actually, people probably aren't really meant to be monogamous, just to look that way."

I gave her another questioning look, hoping she'd see it through my glasses.

"Okay, well, human children take a long time to grow up, right? And they're probably more likely to survive if they're part of a family, with both a mother and a father. Traditionally, that allowed a division of labor – the mother would provide care for the children, do the cooking, do a lot of gathering, and whatever. The father would provide the rest – like hunting, and protection, and anything that required brute force. But having one father for all of your children is pretty risky, from an evolutionary standpoint."

"What do you mean?" I asked her.

"Well, what happens if your guy has some bad genes. If he fathers all of your children, then all your children might die of some disease, or maybe they'd all come out stupid or weak. Same thing for the guy – if there's only one mother for all of his children, then he could face the same problem. So both of them are better off cheating."

"That's weird," I said.

"Well," she went on. "They're best off if they cheat discretely. If both of them are being blatant about it, then they're likely to split up, and the children might have to grow up with only one parent. But if each of them is sneaky about it, then they may both think they got away with it. So the guy is pretty sure he's got a bastard or two out there, and maybe he even slips some food their way sometimes. And the woman is pretty sure her third kid is actually by the postman, if you get what I mean. But she pretends it's her guy's, of course. In the old days, if a guy thought that one of the children wasn't his, he might kill it. Otherwise, his own kids might not get enough food."

And I thought my dad was bad.

"So it's all about having babies, then?", I asked her. "So I guess being gay is wrong, biologically?"

Malia laughed. "Oh, Saralinda. I'm a strong Darwinist. Various religions like to label things as right or wrong. Not me. There is no right and wrong, to a Darwinist. There are only those who become grandparents and those who don't, and even the ones that do become grandparents aren't good. It's just that they've managed to propagate their genes. Likewise, the ones who die aren't bad, just unsuccessful. People with lots of successful traits are more likely to propagate than those with traits that tend to be unsuccessful. It's all just probability, given the current conditions.

"Now, since we have gay and bisexual people, then those traits must not be terribly unsuccessful, or they would have faded from the population. So there's either some kind of advantage to tending that way, or at least there's no big problem with it. If being gay was really bad, biologically, it would have died out and gone away. There's no way to say that it happened for a reason, but if it was bad for survival, it would have been selected against. So, a Darwinist like me can speculate. Maybe wives fooling around with other wives keeps their sexual frustrations from being so bad that they leave their husbands. And maybe it's better off, for the general survival of a community, if unmarried guys give each other blowjobs, rather than cuckolding married guys or raping young girls."

"Wow – you've really thought a lot about all this stuff," I said to her, somewhat, like, amazed at her."

"Well, if you want to be a conservation biologist, that's the way you have to think. You can only increase the population of a species by increasing their reproductive success rate or decreasing their mortality rate. So you have to understand how they fuck, and how they croak, and everything in between."

We both laughed at that, but she'd been serious, I knew.

"But that doesn't help me understand me, though, does it. I'm, like, just having sex. I'm definitely not having babies!"

"I know how you feel," she said quietly, "about being confused about sex. Having a baby now would really screw up my life. Heck, even having a long-term boyfriend would probably screw up my life. But then there's the whole problem that I get, you know, horny, but I've never really enjoyed sex. It's frustrating."

"Wow. Maybe I'm just really lucky, because sex with Moira and with Gary has always been great."

"Maybe it's because they love you?"

"Maybe. Have you ever been in love?"

"Nope. It's kind of sad, really. All those guys hot for me - young guys, old guys. But the old guys are all married, and I hate that they hit on me. The young guys are all just horny. The only times I've done it were times I kind of gave in to one of them when I was horny too. But they were never more than guys I kinda liked, but not really."

"What about God," I asked Malia, a bit later. "If you're a Darwinist, does that mean you don't believe in God?"

"Hmmm. I don't believe in the Christian god – at least not the way most Christians believe. I don't think of God as being someone who actively helps us with our lives, who we can pray to for help in winning a game or a war or anything. If there is a meddling god like that, he's a jerk for letting so many people suffer and die and everything. No, I think the suffering and dying is just part of the way the world works, and I don't think there's a god taking an active role in all that. It's just, well, luck – like Gary's definition of luck. You need the right genes and you need your lucky chance. Only a few with the wrong genes will make it, but having the 'right' genes doesn't guarantee anything either.