" - for relationships that'll produce children. Not for gay couples."

"What does co-rulership of the planet improve that I care about?"

"Amentans feel represented in their government and less like the rug was suddenly pulled out from under them and who knows what happens now. It's more democratic- there are likely going to be enough Amentans that they'd sometimes end up winning elections. You can't have a human-ruled world unless you deny nonhumans the franchise."

"Are there considerations you're not mentioning."

"A co-rulership agreement seems like a better angle from which to push Amentan interests. If it turns out we're better at governance than humans - which I have no reason to believe, just, it could turn out that way - it'd allow for us to still solve coordination problems and so on. You'll probably like my successor less than me and you'll definitely trust them less and you might want to not embed power for Amentans into your system for that reason."

"Amentans won't liberalize over the next eighty years?"

"We will, we have been, but I doubt that that'll happen fast enough that my successor is better than me by your standards."

"It's not your planet. You stole it. Letting you stay is already generous."

"You could let us rule Mars, once we know how to give it atmosphere - can wizards help with that? Mars is governed for Amentans and Earth for humans and people can move freely between the two but there's somewhere for Amentans on Earth to go if it turns out that humans are bad at doing right by us."

"Wizards could maybe help with that. Would just dumping a lot of air on it do it."

"I don't think it's quite that easy but if that is a thing you could do you could probably do it in conjunction with the right engineers."

"You can have Mars. And I'm happy to optimize the handover of Earth for your political leverage at home if you're going to use it to make people leave other species alone."

"In that case having the resources to stop you from hurting me would not change my goals."

"I love it when that happens!"

Aitim blinks at him exhaustedly. 

"Am I going to regret letting you move?"

"No."

Un-paralysis.

He sits up. "Is there still a substantial risk of other wizards trying to puppet this government in yet another direction?"

"Yeah, but if I decide not to keep you under magic mind control for the next decade I can teach you how not to be vulnerable to it. It took me an hour and a half to learn how to throw off and six practice sessions to get to 'instantaneously', and it seems like there's reason to suspect you'd be similar."

"I don't think you'd do it. I think you might've been intending to before we met, but - not as security against implausible scenarios by which our incentives diverge again, I'm not that ruthless and I think you're less so."

"Well, we had better hope I don't like you too much to practice on you, that's how you learn to throw it off. - security against implausible scenarios by which our incentives diverge is important to me."

"And my people having space is important to me - look, the reason we are liberalizing - and we are - the reds thing is so unspeakably enormous I cannot adequately convey it and it's not just that, we're also doing better at international collaboration, at caste flexibility, at minimizing caste status differentials - it's because we have space to grow in, it's because people can experiment a bit and expect that they'll still get a kid, it's because politicians are popular and can afford to be idealistic about their pet concern whatever it is, it is because my father gave us planets, it is because our children are going to suffer less. If you want - better Amentans - you've got to cede some ground to undeserving Amentans.

And the only circumstances under which I see us - disagreeing - is that I want to get undeserving Amentans everything I can."

"That's fine when it doesn't come at the expense of someone else."

"No more death penalty, mysterious delays in birth control - the best thing would be if it's safe and insufficiently reliable, then we can give it out to everybody but justify not imposing controls yet. Protecting the forests, even though they're just forests and people are people. Leave the nomads alone. Start our cities in places where they aren't displacing or absorbing anyone. You don't need a promise from me on any of that, I want the same things as you. Do you really need mind control curses and magically binding oaths? Can we - meet there for now?"