"Hmmmm."

"He's a tougher nut to crack?"

"A grey baby I think he'd worry. But I don't think we really want that anyway."

"Hooray patrilineality. - does this mean it has to be Miranda's eggs, a mix appeals aesthetically but if it can't work out legally to have them be green..."

"I can bug Aitim but honestly legal caste ambiguity sucks, maybe the first one that way to be safe and then see how things have shaken out down the road."

"Yeah, first one that way is fine."

"Hybrid babies."

"Magic ones!"

"They'll be so tiny."

"Tiny, possibly perpetually-sunshiney babies!"

Kiss.

Kiss!!

Kefin tracks Minor down to talk about babies.

"I realize that the singleminded obsession with having magic children is just a product of the general singleminded obsession with having children but it's not, like, great for assurance that you won't just decide you have no reason to do what we want once you can instead fight back."

"Yeah, I get it. But I think everyone's already on close enough to the same page about what we want? What we were doing when we thought absolutely no one here could threaten us in the slightest was building you trains and schools and clinics and water treatment plants, you're not dealing with hostiles."

"Population controls -"

"Were, based on all the information available to us, the right thing to expect we'd need to do, and when we got more information we changed course even without a gun to our heads. Wand."

"You wouldn't really aim a wand at someone's head in particular."

"I am pretty sure recommended gun practice is to aim for the center of mass. It's an expression."

"The amount of independence that is good for humans is a lot more than you were planning to give them."

"It'd be kind of cool if we could decide on the kids without ending up in complete political accord about everything, but. Hmmm.

When the Oahk Empire dissolved they gave everyone who wanted it independence. Some places more or less shook themselves off and stood up; some immediately descended into chaos and got conquered by someone else; Anitam got lucky in that Tapa didn't want the hassle of absorbing that many people and did want us to be less of a shitshow and invested a lot in our growing-up. I do - I do know the thing you are gesturing at. It's the thing I mean when I say 'Anitam got lucky', it's the sense in which there's some amount of stable competent government we'll trade for it being our government, for our kids being taught in our language, for - being the default kind of person that is around, instead of a different kind of person who is tolerated as long as they act like the default kind. It's important.

I cannot think of a single person who wouldn't beg to be conquered, if we'd had a thirty percent child mortality rate. The disconnect isn't that we don't know what it's like to want independence, it's that there's a limit to that and it's way short of 'burying four of your children'."

"Could have fixed it anyway -"

"It's investment, you realize that, the thing we've done is only about one third 'spend all the government's money on this' and about two-thirds 'assure private investors that if they go ahead and build airports and build clinics and build shopping malls and build apartment buildings, we will maintain the security and infrastructure that will make those investments worthwhile'. We could've given you charity - wasn't politically viable, but okay, maybe we're the most altruistic people in all of history and want to give you most every cent the government makes out of pure altruism. That would get you about a third of what you got. All of the rest is value created by the assurance that the electricity will stay on and the roads stay safe, and we could not have given it to you because it's not a gift, it's the extension of the assumptions under which economies work."

"You should maybe try selling Aaron on this."

"No. Markets are too big and important for you to outsource your thinking about them, this is still green, you can keep up. We could not have accomplished most of the things we are accomplishing on Earth without a guarantee backed by force that people who pour their life savings into building things here will have their investment treated the way it would be treated back home. You are treating as separable things that are not separable. Helping Earth would not meaningfully have been possible without serving as the guarantor of that help and predictably being willing to keep that up. If we were planning to cut you loose in thirty Earth years - hell, in a hundred - these buildings would never have gone up in the first place. It would have been a moral and strategic error to come to Earth intending anything less than a permanent guarantee, backed by force, of peace and prosperity."