More direct than he's used to, but - not unpleasant. "Embarrassingly, I think I'm blocked on figuring out how to calculate the actual benefit to your breeding program of tossing in a huge batch of new intelligence alleles given that you do already have people as smart as me, there's a theorem about how the speed of improvement goes as the covariance of reproductive variance with the variance of the quality. I - also feel a need to know something about how my kids would grow up? It's not the Good answer because my kids would be displacing other kids that would exist and I don't see how my kids would be expected to lead worse lives than the stupider people who'd otherwise exist, in terms of how that affects total utility, but I think I feel some Evil attachment to my own personal kids."
He can't come right out and say this next part, it just feels too weird not to put some level of indirection in it where he doesn't come straight out and become the petitioner for sex.
"Dath ilan has also figured out some alternatives to reproductive sex besides the standard methods of contraception, and even people with contraception have been known to use those. For much the same reason that wizards here fling themselves off cliffs or have sportfights with - ostriches? I know it wasn't ostriches but I forget which animal you said it was." That gives Carissa an out if she doesn't want to reply directly to the line of conversation about non-reproductive sex.