"The other option is not telling everyone in Amenta there are powerful mind-control aliens, and fudging the population thing some other way."

"Magically inducing confusion on the part of all the international observers might not be literally impossible but it's unappealing as a solution. Nonmagically inducing confusion buys time but there's only so much time you can get away with.

Loosely, I am trying to figure out a way to maintain an Anitami government here while having everyone persuaded that we couldn't reasonably implement population controls but not persuaded that wizards are an existential threat."

"They're not."

"They're not. But they're scary, and they're completely above the law, and they could in fact do a lot of damage if one of them happened to feel like it. - well, completely above the law unless you have other wizards stopping them. But then we'd need a wizard government that conducts itself like an organization we can trust to do things, and my impression is that this will be hard to come by and it might be smarter to ask our alts to function as one."

"And so that's what's on the table before you even get to the question of who gets to stay on Earth and what they get to do with it."

"Could you maybe - localize it - like, we're not attached to doing them by Voan system, right, we could say individual regions of Earth are allowed a certain growth rate because we're trying to be humane and they weren't using all the space efficiently and now they can, peg it above what they do of their own accord, if a region outstrips its growth rate then you're in a bind but you could maybe make up for it by moving humans around - kind of a gamble though."

"The problem is that right now they're growing really fast, above a rate I can really hope to get anyone to countenance - I believe our alts that they'd slow down once the culture changed but it's probably going to be several generations - there is regional variance but it's between family sizes of seven and ten, it's not something we can convince people looks fine..."

"And there's no way to speed that up? They can't all just happen to have a religious prohibition against birth control, can they -"

"We've had pretty good uptake on birth control in some regions! They're used to it, they need lots of kids to help on the farm, it's a status thing, they don't expect them all to survive - falling infant mortality might help in the medium-term but it's also going to produce such a surge in population in the immediate term -"

"Can you buy any time by saying - look, if there were three times as many of them when we landed, we wouldn't have been in a much greater hurry really, we can afford to be gentle about it, we are not the Oahk Empire -"

"Came up when we got everyone agreed on checking for long-term consequences of the birth control and then rolling it out really gently. I still might be able to. But - five more Earth years, maybe ten, what are we going to be doing with them such that it's worth it..."

"- fucking with gender ratios somehow? Reportedly they have gender almost in the way we have caste, you could noncoercively all but empty a place of a caste if you wanted to..."

" - invent things for them to do, I guess, we could have a try at that - possibly once more women work outside the home...they don't spring but they will be upset by being apart from their partners and you'd have to do it a very very long time to get much population benefit..."

"They don't have a very long fertility window, if you had enough of a crash in the generation that's attending school..."

"If we kept them very busy through their twenties they might see a substantial decline just off that. - I wish there were more planets, there'd be less incentive for everyone else to hover around waiting for us to do something wrong enough to call into doubt that we can handle this one..."

"Apparently warp takes too long for their luck potion to work."

"That's a shame. The wizards are working on terraforming resources, that'll help. - but in a slightly destabilizing fashion, I can't imagine 'Anitam has two planets now' going over spectacularly well. We'd take immigrants. - I'm the reason we're not taking immigrants yet, I was stubborn about leave it at temporary work visas, but if I were really sure we can stay here I'd allow immigration, takes some pressure off everyone else."

"If we could just stay here or if Mars had air?"

"Convincing everyone that we should let a nontrivial number of people buy visas would be easier with both but could probably be achieved with either one."

"Before you knew about wizards why didn't you want to let people buy visas?"

"I was in favor, once we had a bit more of a handle on the place."

"Gotcha." Sigh. "How bad is 'Anitam has two planets now', I didn't think there was much dispute over our use of Mars as-is, if we say we terraformed it with resources extracted from Earth..."

"It's not a catastrophe on the scale everything else is a potential catastrophe, but if no one else has found any and we have two fully-terraformed ones, one of which we are barely using, there'd be enormous pressure to share a little and probably lots of observers bopping around trying to find things to object to about our handling of Earth. I like the observers but too many of them would be hard to manage, especially since there is something we're hiding from them."

"You like them?"

"They're useful. I'm worried some division is taking troop discipline too lightly, I assign them somewhere with observers and warn them that we're deathly serious about it in this region what with the observers around and then either they shape up or I have an airtight excuse to remove them. I want to make a project happen, I find a vaguely related complaint - you know how people like that are, they'll complain even if there's nothing to complain about, I've got a wealth of things to pick from -"