They're very busy but can take lunch off. "How's the anthropology going?"

"Um," says Hala. "I think it would be fairly easy to drive humans noncoercively extinct by accident."

" - oh?"

"It's possible I'm being deliberately led to believe that," she clarifies. "But - they have babies but they don't want them the same way as us. If I leave the house with Ana and come back, the magic slave creatures are usually minding the little ones till we take them. When Joanna's being especially cute or Jeremy is loud or something people look, but for like, a minute. They haven't been co-sleeping the children and Rebecca says humans mostly only do that because they're poor - cold or can't afford a crib - or don't want to have to get up to breastfeed in the night. They get fed up really fast when Catherine's yelling or Jeremy's fussy for no reason or anything like that. Aaron's not sure he'll get married at all. Theodore doesn't want kids. Minor and Miranda are thinking of having four or five specifically because they are annoyed with you but were considering stopping at one, before we showed up. I haven't heard Timothy speculating with Karen at all about what their children will be like, and she's over a lot because she's also Minor and Miranda's friend. Wizards sometimes wait until they're in their thirties, local years - they live longer than Muggle humans but I don't think any of the reasons they do that would be different and there's a fertility dropoff, more gradual than the fertility cliff but still something. There are fairy tales about people who can't have babies for some reason and want to but they almost always consider it a happy ending when they get one."

"Timothy's gay and hiding it, that might be contributing there. But the rest is - huh. Why do wizards wait -"

"- oh, is he? What about Rebecca - why's he - I will figure out why he would do that, will he be upset if I ask about it - uh, they want to focus on their careers, or don't feel stable in their marriages, or aren't sure they're prepared to handle a child and don't seem to have any ideas about or impetus to going about becoming prepared, or figure if they're going to they'd better get around to it by then since they can't when they're sixty but if it were at all inconvenient to get around to it they might just not."

"If you ask privately when no one's around and clarify that you didn't guess through any behavior of his he won't be upset to be asked, but he's not great at explaining his reasons. Maybe you're in a better position to understand, living with them. So you're worried if there were a credit auction -"

"I mean I don't think it would happen immediately because of religions and low yield agriculture and people being accustomed to large families due to the absence of birth control. I think it would take several generations and a lot of education. But wizards who aren't religious barely manage replacement, and they have some outmarriage and very nearly breed true and have better marital options than most Muggle humans since they can travel more easily. I think on a much less than evolutionary timescale humans might just not bother to have replacement rate numbers of children and I got that from studying a household that had seven."

"Well. Huh.

Shame we can't publish it."

"I could probably justify the result if I could get similar access to Muggle human families but I think that would be difficult."

"The fact that they have had birth control for a while is important, the fact that they can afford to support as many as they want without even much effort on their parts is important, there can't be that many Muggles that's true of. Muggle royal families do tend to have bizarrely few but they're often inbred enough to have fertility problems. - huh. Well, the wizards aren't planning to let us get to the stage of population controls anyway."

"Yes, I noticed. I'm worried they don't manage it for some reason and then we politely drive them extinct."

"I can't not enforce population controls. It's not a question of 'it'd be a hard sell', even if I convinced the council people'd go to war with us. Their birthrates are high now."

"They are. If they drop precipitously enough could you make a case that hard controls are dysgenic? I mean, they are for us too, but it would be a much less justifiable dysgenesis if they weren't having replacement rate numbers."

"At that point I could, yeah, especially if it's the people who spend the most time getting an education not getting around to it - you don't think it'd be too late at that point?"

"Too late for what?"

"If the thing keeping their birthrates above replacement is being used to large families and being religious, and we go through Popes until we find one who will agree with birth control and change the social norm so large families are rare - and then later we lighten up -"

"Our presence might distort norms about family size," she says. "I don't think it would necessarily be irreversible but you'd have to come up with differently encouraging advertisements and ways to make having children pleasanter."

"I guess it's a good problem to have. Maybe there'd be a way to do hybrids, kids who want three or four but don't go through horrible springs..."

"I found various qualities of attestation to wizard hybrids with giants, goblins, veela, trolls, house elves, merfolk, hags, vampires, centaurs, and manticores. But only with wizards, they think Muggles can't. Wizards themselves might be the easily-hybridized factor."

"I think if I propose introducing some wizards to some Amentans Timothy will suspect me of trying to get wizards who'd side with us, which he suspects me of anyway. I suppose we can bring it up with them. Maybe poor Tahike Lam has more information."

Hala nods solemnly.

"Are you having a good time? They haven't been - threatening or coercive or anything, right -"

"I am not having quite as much fun as Ana but she is having a lot of fun."

"Oh good."