"They're not usually so direct about it as "now we'll kill you all so we can live there". They get hungry, they blame their neighbors, they declare war to claim the farmland they need to feed their people, the other side fights back, the other side is mad now, they take retaliatory farmland and now more people are starving."

"They're not going to go hungry. If food got surprisingly expensive there'd be a Vala on it."

" - and they can just - make arbitrary food?"

"Yes but it would probably be more efficient to increase the yield of the farms. Anyway, even if we don't have FTL soon we have conventional ships, it's just annoying to spend that long in transit and they don't have to yet."

- nod. "I guess that'd work. We just - force people to stop, now. And it'll be good when we don't have to."

She nods.

"If we want people to have fewer children sending women to school might work."

"Yeah, it might."

"You presently don't send girls to school?"

"No. Couldn't really afford it, or at least we'd have to rejuggle lots of other things to be able to afford it, and it's economically inefficient since they mostly won't be working anyway."

"Whyever not."

"Looking after children is a full time job.  - even if you only have two or three of them."

" - seems hard on men, if they have to support the household and can't help much with taking care of their children?"

" - I think most men get to do as much childcare as they happen to want to?"

"- and Dwarves don't have gender, I wonder if that's the disconnect there -"

"- oh! Uncivilized humans often draw a really sharp distinction between their men and their women, and have different rules about them. Because the women will spend their adulthood pregnant and nursing, and the men won't. The Radch doesn't. You don't either?"

"Different laws? Definitely not."

"Around here we call 'uncivilized' the humans who don't make any effort to protect their women and accordingly have them having babies they can't feed all the time, a problem they solve by killing them."

"Right, right, I think your thing is pretty normal before there's reliable contraception."

" - why would anyone kill their baby because they might not be able to feed them."

"I mean, if you have a baby and you didn't mean to and you've a job and no one to watch it and no savings and no food and there're no temples near you that take babies, you might smother it."

"- that sounds really implausible!"

"Anaander, do you happen to know how birth control for humans works?"

"I do happen to!"

"Maybe you should explain it to someone. Soon."