"- okay. This is still not a very strong argument against kicking you out once we get the infrastructure, you know."

"To me, 'this was absolutely the right thing, less some details in implementation' and 'this was a great wrong which it'd be just to respond to in kind' are really different even if what they imply about the costs and benefits to humans of some kind of mass expulsion are the same. We did the right thing. A cost is that humans are governed by people who aren't theirs, which was true for like ninety-five percent of humans anyway, and a benefit is that your child mortality rate is now below thirty percent and soon no one will die of absolute poverty or disease and already no one is dying of war. We didn't have a way to give you both of those things. We gave you the right one."

"Tapa didn't conquer you. When they were doing the thing."

"Yeah, they could guarantee their investments by just saying 'Anitam's government has agreed to these terms and if they fuck up at them will stop being Anitam's government'. We couldn't realistically have secured investor confidence that way."

"Aitim hasn't taken this angle on it -"

"Aitim's not green. He gets a - sort of received wisdom of history, he gets a hundred case studies and the rules that they've gleaned from them, he knows the moving parts but they're not the terms he thinks in. Aitim conquered Earth because that is the kind of humanitarian operation we know how to successfully conduct, and I am explaining to you why this is the kind of humanitarian operation that we know how to successfully conduct."

"None of this changes how I feel about human self-governance."

"Human self-governance in forms that keep the lights on and the capital flowing at least until this planet is not in desperate poverty sounds great. But like, we know one thing that works for that, and it is the thing we are doing, and if you successfully come up with something else that works for that, we will help you implement it, and kicking us out would be stupid and evil."

"I don't think Timothy's leaning that way anyway. Just self-governance."

"Then what exactly are you imagining we'll do with the magic kids? Go to a successful human-run territory and turn them into cabbages?"

"Go back to what you were doing before this, which did not involve eventual human independence."

"The equatorial areas were going to end up pretty much all-human, and there wouldn't have been restrictions legal or logistical on freedom of movement, I think there'd have been more space for most varieties of that than you realize. But sure, we can do better. We want to do better. More resources make us better at doing things. The kids aren't even a resource, but if they were, that would be a good thing, because with more resources we can get more of the things we want."

" -yeah, okay."

"Eeeeeeeeee babies."

"I'm still mad at you all."

"They'll be such tiny squishy magic babies. They will coo and giggle and sneeze sparks and things."

"Magic babies do not typically sneeze sparks."

"Awwww. Okay. What do they do?"

"...poop and eat. They're babies."

"Yes they are!"

"Amentans," he tells his wife, "are weird."

"This isn't news. What have they done now?"

"Oh, Kefin wanted to convince me he is a good person so I would approve bizarre gamete arrangements which Pelape apparently thinks you are already fine with."

"I mean, if you don't mind and we aren't going to have endless handwringing over magical Amentans, Arrange For Optimal Pelape Offspring seems like a valid project to me."

"Kefin feels very strongly that they actually could not have done better than 'conquer the planet'. I don't know if he's right but it makes me feel a lot better about their persistent refusal to admit that it was bad to conquer the planet, they actually mostly agree with me about which things are bad and are just reasoning from different evidence about which things work. And he doesn't think they'd do worse with more resources, which is - a really good point. And I do want our alt-kids to have as low a chance as possible of being as miserable as Ana."