"If people don't notify the governments before conceiving a child perhaps they could be fined or ineligible for government jobs or obliged to take an irritating class in the availability and uses of contraceptives. And the objection would be 'we can't notify you in advance, because we are opposed to birth control'. And you have some veneer over it which isn't 'we just really object to humans reproducing for some reason' which is already very obvious and obtrusive and hostile, like, if you notify the government before you have a baby you get a box of baby stuff and it's easier or cheaper or both to sort out their identification and such. You can add friction Amentans wouldn't blink at. Humans will blink."

"I think a very generous goodie bag for purchasing a credit is already planned, but it's encouraging to know that you think it'll be well-received."

"That's nowhere near the main point of what she said," says Pelape.

Blink.

"It sounds like there are lots of suggestions about how to gently lower human birth rates over the course of fifty or sixty years, and unfortunately those aren't going to be workable because we don't have fifty or sixty years. They're still worth mentioning, of course, because many of them will probably still be important elements of a plan to reduce human birth rates inside fifteen years."

"While a plan that incorporates some non-coercive elements among others is better than one that is made entirely of abducting people for surgery or rehoming, it's not what I had in mind."

"So the thing I'm concerned about is that I think we'll put humans in a much, much worse situation if we try and fail to stall long enough for populations to drop on their own. One plausible way that that could play out, for example, is that we collect lots of research suggestive of the malleability of human reproductive rates, add lots of speed bumps, and then tell everyone we're doing this instead of controls because we think it'll result in low enough birth rates within fifty years. And then, for whatever reason, that fails to occur - religiosity remains very high, maybe, or there are some genetic differences between wizards and nonmagical humans which affect birth rate, or it turns out that it's highly relevant that for wizards there are no aptitude differences between men and women and for nonmagical humans there are. Or it falls but it falls from twelve to eight and it looking like it'll be slower to fall to four and even slower to fall to two. And in ten years the other nations of Amenta say "okay, no. You're breaking every law in the book on the basis of vaguely suggestive data, that's utterly irresponsible. You have them in place by the end of the year or we'll do it". 

And then we have to put them in place very suddenly with no effort to achieve as much as possible by noncoercive measures and to be transparent and to ease people in and minimize the number of home removals necessary. 

Or, even worse, they don't say that, they decide that it's better to act against us before we're warned that they're intending to and war is declared on Anitam in the middle of the night and the first Earth hears of it is when a coalition of a dozen other countries shows up here to take over Earth's governance. If it comes to that, I think it's likely that more than a hundred million people would die, and depending who takes over governance of Earth quite possibly several hundred million."

"I understand you're working under enormous political pressure. I wonder if you'd be able to find a way to alleviate it if we had magical terraforming sorted out; I think that would be much harder to finagle if we expected this to mostly make Amentans better at accomplishing the goals you already have without any more consideration being offered towards ours. Mars is seasonable, sizable, and empty. We can make air and water. That has to be worth something if we can get it to scale."

"I think that solves the problem entirely; it'd be reason to prompt renegotiation of the population treaties, and it would be straightforward enough for that renegotiation to include a high enough growth rate for humans that humans end up well under it of their own free choice, and as long as we're meeting our treaty obligations we need not fear war."

"What deadline does this place on our research assuming the goal is a zero-coercion approach to the human population?"

"My understanding is that at this time we don't have long-lasting reversible contraception for humans, and that once we have it we'll still be five years from beginning enforcement while they do a longitudinal study to make sure it's safe, has no side effects, and doesn't occasionally cause infertility past the point when it's removed."

"Can you give me a range."

"Six to ten years."

"Okay. Is there likely to be any problem with establishing credible Anitami intent to follow through on that when Mars is terraformed?"

"The reason we're on Earth at all is because it's very urgently important to us that we can let our people have as many children as possible. We'd be so happy to have a way to do that here."

"Not responsive to the question."

She turns to frown at Pelape. "Yes, it was. Miranda asked whether there will be trouble establishing that we're willing to do this, and so I explained that this is something we want to give all our people and will be very happy to have accomplished. It's easier to be confident that we'll do something if it's something that we want to do."

"She's right, it's not responsive to the question, but perhaps it was responsive to a misunderstanding of the question. We are definitely aware that you want as many Amentans to have as many babies as possible. It is absolutely not clear that you want humans to have children, let alone have luxurious-seeming quantities of them in response to false religious precepts when arguably superior Amentan parents lament an empty spring. That is definitely, catastrophically unclear and the question I am asking is how those of us human wizards working on the terraforming problem can be sure you won't go 'great, lots of space for more Amentans' and proceed to implement controls on humans anyway and tell yourself it's harmless because we don't want babies that much anyway."

"'Our people' includes humans. Our people included humans even before we announced as much, we were working on your behalf from when we first went to Tapa to negotiate the arrangement currently in place, which allows for five million credits on top of a Voan system. We want humans to be able to have as many children as we can secure treaty agreements for. No Amentan would ever believe that population controls are harmless, just - currently - necessary to avoid much worse."

"So you'll find my question easily answered, then."

She looks at one of the other diplomats in apparent utter confusion.

"...do you have a particular sort of answer in mind?" another one asks.

"I want you to tell me what stops you from deciding to uniformly apply population controls to your citizenry, by adding them to humans, after you have Mars in hand, presumably for the compassionate motive of preventing empty springs as much as possible in those that have them and possibly just because that's what the democratic constituency will say given weighted-by-caste votes."

"Our understanding was that you are vehemently opposed to population controls even when the alternative is war and would presumably be even more strongly opposed when the alternatives are better."

"So is the answer to my question 'our fear that wizards will appear and perform magic on us' or is it something else."

"Well, you already rejected 'the sincerely felt conviction, which we have already demonstrated including before we knew wizards existed, that humans should have children'."

"...how are you imagining you've demonstrated that conviction, the prevailing message in all your advertising is quite different."