"Okay. I suggest you experiment with whether blocking the portal does anything. Is there any point in defending your community on your side? Preparing for people to attack it and having a plan to fight them?"

"- we aren't allowed to do that. If we try to stop cleans from coming in, or if we don't do our jobs, it gets worse."

"All right. Are there resources which would change that?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, it's not a good idea to prepare to fight them. If you had, say, chips in your head like ours, would that make it a good idea? If you had, uh, guns? If you had a supply of some other resource you require?"

"I don't think so."

"All right. Are there problems on your side of the portal which you'd be able to solve with access to this planet?"

"There are some things we have trouble getting sometimes - but the stuff you have is very fancy, it'll be conspicuous - they check up on us to make sure we don't have nicer things than makes sense with how much money we make -"

"Why?"

"They think we might be stealing or something, if we have nicer things."

He frowns. "Okay. Are there things you're hoping to get from having the portal open and accessible?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe some people could come here - not too many, if we disappear in large numbers they'll notice, but -"

"You're welcome to come here."

"How many?"

"I suppose not more than a few dozen a day so we can get them settled and acclimated, barring emergencies."

"You don't have a population control policy, yet - it's probably better to already have one -"

"I don't really want to have a population control policy, it sounds like it'd be hard for people to follow the law and I don't want laws people find hard to follow."

"- people will have a lot of children if they're allowed."

"Orcs have a lot of children."

"How many?"

"I'm not really sure. I think there are orcs who've had 50."

"- oh, we can't have that many, we don't live long enough and aren't fertile most of our lives -"

"Well, we'll see what we can do about those things, too."

"We'll have to think about how to get people in here in a way that doesn't attract attention. Maybe we can - pretend the people who disappear are dying -"

"They won't be worried by that?"