"No, I'm talking about them, none of this is your fault and diplomats who can only talk to other diplomats aren't very good diplomats."

"I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to bring in a Muggleborn friend and go 'look, this is a person who grew up in a totally normal Muggle household, free of most childhood illness and resistant to childhood injury but otherwise ordinary, until age eleven, when she attended school among wizards for seven years but still went home and passed for Muggle each summer, ask her how many kids she wants and anything else you're worried about wizards being weird examples of'."

"I think everyone agrees that it's likely that humans can change culturally reasonably quickly, over the course of a few generations, and that human interest in children is culturally dependent. The problem is that - eighty percent likely, ninety percent likely, and if we try to break the treaty off that and we're wrong..."

"You could say that about any probability, you could say that about 'we landed on people whose population is aging and plummeting because they aren't having enough children but maybe if their infant mortality rate fell they'd think it was more appealing, maybe if they don't go extinct very soon they'll evolve to be like Amentans'..."

" - no, if your population were growing at a slower rate than the rate allowed in the treaty then we wouldn't impose controls. The average human family size is eight. If it were two, we could easily make this happen."

"But I don't know where the dividing line is, I don't know how convinced anyone has to be, and you can always fall back on 'but what if actually wanting children is heritable' or 'but wizards are a weird example, like all possible examples of a population that had birth control and low infant mortality but was otherwise the same species and lived on the same planet because that is how populations work'."

"If we break the treaty on the strength of the evidence currently available to us I think we're running a ten to twenty percent chance of an immediate war, and a near-guarantee of a war in a decade if the promised gains are not showing signs of starting to materialize. I think we probably disagree on whether this would be worth a one percent chance of a war, but we're not talking about that, the risk is much higher than that."

"I think we can probably sort out Mars but the fact that if we couldn't..."

"The inviolability of this principle has saved probably billions of lives over the last forty Amentan years. I'm sorry that it interacts poorly with situations where birthrates are incredibly high but there's reason to suspect that they will fall on their own."

"It just seems so - blinkered - to land on aliens who are eerily alike but clearly not identical, and assume that all the realities that led to the necessity apply to them, and that the principle should be just as ironclad with respect to them, and this won't have any unintended consequences or cause any unnecessary pain, and no amount of feasibly gathered evidence will call off the wars everyone else will want to start."

"I'm sorry."

"I appreciate that and am not remotely tempted to hex you. How do we fix it. Should wizards visit other Amentan world leaders in the night."

"If wizards are tempted to hex people as often as they express being tempted to hex people, then that would be a disaster."

"It does happen fairly often although I've historically mostly confined myself to aggressively braiding people's hair."

"This is kind of one of the more important cultural differences. If you do that to someone who's being egregiously annoying, to you you braided their hair, to them you brandished a deadly weapon and then used it to assault someone at a diplomatic talk. I don't think I know something that your society would find analogously appalling. Maybe - if there was a weapon that permanently drained someone's magic from them, and someone pulled it out and broke someone else's nose with it during a conversation. That might be the sort of thing."

"I feel like the problem with that is demonstrating that you have it on hand. Which would make any magic I could possibly do threatening even if I just fixed my hair."

"No, assaulting someone at a diplomatic talk is the problem. We do understand that wands are not supposed to parse as deadly weapons in every conceivable context, but when you're using them to attack someone it's hard to keep cultural nuance in mind."

"I have not attacked anyone."

"I know. I appreciate it. But knowing that you're unusually even-tempered for your society, and that you find it really tempting to assault people with a deadly weapon during peace talks, it's nervewracking to consider having you interact with more governments, some of whom are going to be significantly more upsetting than the ones you've met so far."

"I don't know if it's comparable but I'm alarmed that these are diplomats trained from childhood to do diplomacy and hand-picked by Aitim who is a Timothy and they are like that, when some wizards they might eventually find it expedient to diplomacize with are more violent than me."

"I can see why that would worry you! My understanding is that we're planning to have all interactions with other wizards go through people who are pretending to be wizards."

"Are they better at their jobs than the diplomats?"

"I certainly hope so."

"Me too."

"If you'd like I can try to provide some cultural translation on that conversation."