"It's incidental with respect to the conquest. It's perfectly reasonable for people in Imde to have complained about Tapa's infanticide policy when they were going to be newly subject to it but we haven't even got a serious proposal in the works for casteing humans."

"I don't know much about Muggles but subdividing wizards into wizards who make things and wizards who research things and wizards who teach things and wizards who fight things would be - I mean, Michael was the best in his year at duelling and invented music boxes so he could do concerts remotely and he's not unusual, that's a very normal wizarding sort of career, it really does seem completely ludicrous to try to separate out the things people do and make rules about which of them they can make money off."

"Maybe it wouldn't work for wizards since you substitute magic for most ordinary skills."

"And because you have elves to do anything you find tedious."

"Not everyone has house-elves, there are also spells for chores. It's not just that it doesn't work, it's that the whole idea seems like a sort of collective insanity."

"It works for us," says Sinkali.

"I promise that we won't try to stop you."

"There are other wizards, though."

"They don't care about your hair-color system either."

"Because of principles about letting people do their own thing or for approximately the reason we don't care about the internal community organization of migratory geese?"

"Second thing."

Sigh.

"Sorry. We're working on it."

"It seems a little hypocritical to - the only reason wizards haven't imposed whatever it might amuse wizards to impose on the non-magical humans is that they don't think it's worth the bother," says Sinkali, "this doesn't actually give us good information on what wizards would impose if they did bother..."

"We don't bother even with magical creatures who are more useful than humans, really. Wizards let them do their own thing and occasionally commit mass murder when they do things that suggest thinking too highly of themselves."

"We're doing much better than that. Clean your own house before judging."

"I think my cousins are under the impression that you're doing better than that pretty much entirely by the personal efforts of Aitim, are they wrong?"

"He was definitely emphatically on the side of 'there might be powerful aliens and they might retaliate for misconduct so we'd better self-police on handling of less powerful aliens' but I bet people'd have settled on that anyway, it is kind of obvious. And given that we decided on that he'd be in trouble if he were committing mass murders."

"I see."

"And people do find it a bit quelling to imagine their great-grandchildren remembering them as commissioners of atrocities."

"But, you know, doing humans on a credit sale setup and setting prices higher than humans are actually willing to pay until there are no more humans, that doesn't seem like it's broadly-conceived-of-as-an-atrocity enough that anyone might worry what their great-grandchildren would think."

"Credits are auctioned, they literally can't go higher than what some humans are willing to pay."

"You don't think they'd shrink the numbers year-after-year if they were really cheap? Since humans evidently don't care very much?"

"We would probably do that. If you can only give out so many children and some people desperately want them and some barely want them enough to bother interacting with a credit system even if credits are the price of a nice dinner..."

"Yeah. So, no atrocity, but no more humans, soon enough, or a token population that can be shooed to the equators."