"Is it actually that bad or are you just annoyed that someone had the nerve to conquer your planet."

"Population controls would be really bad, the caste system would be really bad. All the pollution stuff is pretty obnoxious. If we could just not have those I think it'd work out great."

"There are bad ways to do population control for sure but you can't just not have any."

"We think we can. Wizards average like two kids per family, and we've had birth control for ages. ...Muggles might be harder, because of religion, but still, I think if you left us alone we'd level off eventually."

"And at the density Amentans are fond of this planet could have forty, fifty billion people. If in a century it looks bad then maybe I'd reconsider but this is just so not a problem we have."

"If people only average wanting two then credits'd just be really cheap, it wouldn't be a big deal."

"Governments powerful enough to do population controls are a big deal. In a bad way."

"Why do you have so few kids?" asks Katin. "- there's still seven of you guys, right, and there's a me and an Ana and an Elemi, that's three, are you stopping - are you just really weird, do you not expect really weird people to eventually dominate the population even if you don't now -"

"Oh, Rebecca's Catholic, she's morally opposed to birth control, I'd have probably stopped at two or maaaybe three if the aliens hadn't tried telling us we had to - I don't think wanting a lot of kids is very heritable -"

"I don't want kids."

"I want two to inherit, but one would be pretty much fine."

" - do you think you'll still feel that way once they're big, though -"

"Oh, we don't have the seasonal thing."

"We still like babies even if it is not spring."

"So do lots of humans, just, not so much that wizards tend to average more than two births per woman."

"Do you know about evolution yet?" asks Ana.

"Hmm?"

"I didn't know if Grandpa had been here long enough. Uh, imagine you have a bunch of fish in a bowl and they come in black and white and two black fish will usually have black baby fish and two white ones will have mostly white baby fish but one of each can be either. If there's a bird who comes to the bowl for lunch every day and eats fish but isn't so hungry it eats all of them, and the bird thinks white fish taste better, eventually there will only be black fish. But it works just the same if instead of getting eaten you decide not to have any or very many kids, and just the same if instead of black and white there's more complicated things. Anything where kids are like their parents will eventually get to be more whatever way makes there be more kids. Unless you do something to change that, like that gamete donor charity for people with awful springs who don't want their kids to have awful springs."

"That seems like a decent argument that in several centuries we'll have a population that wants kids more than our current population. It does not seem like an argument for putting tons of people through a horrifying nightmare now because you'd rather Amentan babies who do have this problem be born instead of human babies who don't."

"I'm not sure you get, uh, how altruistic people have to be to not want them."

"We don't care that you want them, we care that you want to stop us from having them so that you can steal more of our stuff!"

"We should maybe not get into this."

Catherine squirms. Katin puts her down.

Michael reaches for her. "It's okay, sweetie, it's okay."

Makel puts an arm around Peka. "So how did you and Rebecca meet?"