  Recent numerical relativistic simulations of black hole coalescence suggest
that in certain alignments the emission of gravitational radiation can produce
a kick of several thousand kilometers per second. This exceeds galactic escape
speeds, hence unless there a mechanism to prevent this, one would expect many
galaxies that had merged to be without a central black hole. Here we show that
in most galactic mergers, torques from accreting gas suffice to align the orbit
and spins of both black holes with the large-scale gas flow. Such a
configuration has a maximum kick speed <200 km/s, safely below galactic escape
speeds. We predict, however, that in mergers of galaxies without much gas, the
remnant will be kicked out several percent of the time. We also discuss other
predictions of our scenario, including implications for jet alignment angles
and X-type radio sources.
