"I very much agree that removing us from power is not the same as kicking us off the planet entirely, and would be much less catastrophic."

"Anyway. Besides pointed remarks, what do you think of the prospects for getting them to consider us, y'know, people."

"It would very much surprise me if that were among the things making an agreement hard to reach."

"Do you actually know what question I am asking or are you having a Timothy Island Of Denseness."

"It seems like you're asking 'how do we get them to be nice'  and I think it advances none of your goals to give that more than five seconds' thought."

"That is not what I'm asking. Them being nice isn't important except that the fact that they don't think it's worth being nice might be a sign that something else is wrong. I assume they don't act like that to most foreign diplomats."

"So, from their perspective, they learned of a foreign power who has been mind-altering, kidnapping and raping our citizens and which is prepared to go to war over any effort on our part to inconvenience anyone doing that. They learned that you consider us reds. They learned that no one in the foreign power's government is interested in compromise, but that there is a faction not in power willing to help us pretend to be people their government would consider deserving of basic rights, for the small price of abandoning population controls. I am not saying that it wouldn't have been helpful if they could have been inspired to go "oh, wow, we're so lucky that there are wizards who see eye-to-eye with us on this!' but, well, if you were expecting that then I think I failed to be anywhere near clear enough about what was reasonable to expect from this meeting."

Sigh.

"This is exactly what I would expect 'progress towards getting your demands met' to look like."

"I guess that's good then."

"I think so. I'm sure everyone who gets appointed to go back to Earth and work on this with you will be chosen for being really nice and tactful and so on."

"Uh-huh."

"Intal was slightly overstating his pessimism about ending population controls for humans without a war but also was much more closely involved in the treaty negotiations than me, and I expect that he is probably right that the natural response to 'we don't want to do population controls for humans/the humans have convincingly demanded no population controls' is 'Anitam can meet its benchmarks or go to war'."

"I imagine you are much too embedded in Anitami politics to seriously consider this but if we shopped around to other countries..."

"With what request of them exactly?"

"Wanna back humans in upcoming population controls fighting in exchange for bits of Earth and magic goodies?"

"I think that does not avert a war. Changes the balance of power in the war, sure, but by the time it comes to a war at all millions of people are dead. Also I am not sure how many Amentan states you want to have owning chunks of Earth. If you could terraform them their own planets you'd have vastly more leverage, but if we have terraforming at all then we just renegotiate the treaties on that basis."

"I think... population controls hurt Amentans more than humans from a cold start but you're all so used to it that you don't even factor that in any more, that it hurts people."

"I think imposing population controls on humans would be a really significant harm. I'm delaying access to reliable birth control in order to delay international pressure to do it. I think having to do it will be really really bad, probably the worst thing about the occupation. But it might well be that even doing our absolute best on all fronts, we cannot convince an international community to abandon the one absolute law that has kept our world mostly peaceful for the last fifty years on the basis of evidence which they'd have every reason to suspect us or you of manufacturing."

"I didn't mean you personally, I more meant them. But I dunno, I'm not really good at this stuff."

"I think they're definitely mis-locating the harm? They're expecting to cause families constant anguish over not having a baby, they aren't expecting harm resulting from interacting with a population control system. On the whole they're probably imagining that the imposition will cause more suffering than it will, but almost entirely of a different type, and if they fully believed humans didn't want kids very much they wouldn't expect it to cause any suffering. 

 But - they also don't see the point of human self-governance but they'll happily have a team of people sit down with you to come up with something you like, and then implement it. They don't have to agree about a demand to make it happen, the problem with population controls really is..." he grimaces. "If we tried to cut credits to zero to make up for humans there'd be a coup. We could cut them some and remain stable as a society, but we'd still be causing tremendous suffering. And it's the obvious demand for everyone else to make, if we insist that humans don't need controls."

"Doesn't the prospect of hybrids help at all?"

"We won't know if they have milder springs for four years. It's exciting but it's not something we can start planning around."

"I mean for credit allocation but I guess it wouldn't cover nearly enough."

"There might be a way. Terraforming probably solves this, and even without terraforming maybe the potion'll do it. But it's going to be hard."