The Family Trade

“What are you going to do today?” he asked diplomatically.

“Well.” She rolled up against him. “First, we’re going to order breakfast from room service. Then you’re going to go and do whatever it is that Angbard expects of you this morning. If you come back here, I’ll probably be gone, because I’ve got some research to do and some stuff to buy. There’s someone I’ve hired—” he raised an eyebrow—“Yes, I’ve established a pattern of drawing out cash against that card, for as long as it’ll hold out. I’m paying a friend who I trust, implicitly, to keep an eye out for me. I’m not going to tell you any more about it because the fewer people who know, the better. But when you come back to this room, even if I’m not here, you’ll find a prepaid new mobile phone. From time to time, I want you to check for voice mail. Only three people will know the number—you, me, and my employee. It’s for emergencies only. There’ll be a single number programmed into it, and that’s for me—again, I’ll only check for voice mail occasionally. I figure if I can’t even hide a mobile phone, there won’t be anything you can do to help.”

“So you’re going away,” he said. “But are you going back to court or are you going underground?”

“I’m going back to face the music,” she replied. “At least for this evening, I need to be seen. But I’m going to hole up on this side at night, at least until I can find a safely doppelgängered room or figure out who’s after me. And then—” she shrugged. “Well, I’ll have to play it by ear. For now, I’m thinking about setting up a new startup venture, in the import/export field.”

“That’s not safe—they’ll kill you if they find out! Clan business ventures are really tightly controlled. If you splinter off, they’ll assume you’re setting up as a rival.”

“Not if I do it right,” she said confidently. “It’s a matter of finding a new business model that hasn’t occurred to any of them. Then get it going and deal the Clan shareholders in before they know what’s happening. If I can finesse it, they’ll have a vested interest in seeing me succeed.”

“But that’s—” Roland was at a loss for words. “A new business? There is no scope for anything new! Nobody’s come up with a new trade since the 1940s, when the drug thing began taking over from gold and hot goods. I was thinking you were going to try and do something like bootstrap reforms on your own estate, not—”

“That’s because you’re thinking about it all wrong.” She reached out and touched his nose. “So are they. You did the postgraduate research thing,” she said. “Economic history, right?”

“Right. What’s that got to do with it?”

“Well. The family business structure is kind of primitive, isn’t it? So you went looking for a way to modernize it, didn’t you? Using historical models.”

“Yes. But I still don’t see—”

“Historical models are the wrong kind. Look at me. They tried to train you up to improve things, but there’s not a lot you can do when the management tree is defined by birth, is there?”

“Correct.” He looked frustrated. “I did some work on this side, cutting overheads and reorganizing, but there’s stuff I couldn’t touch—I just wasn’t allowed anywhere near it, in fact. There’s no easy way to apply the European model in the Gruinmarkt. No investment banking infrastructure, no limited liability, all property rights ultimately devolve to the king—it’s straight out of the late-feudal period. Lots of really competent, smart people who are never going anywhere because they can’t world-walk and lots of time-wasting prima do

“Whether I approve or not doesn’t matter, does it?” she said tartly. “The families are dependent on drug money and weaning them off it will be a huge job. But I’d like you to think on this. You said that their company structure is basically fifteenth—or sixteenth-century. They’re still stuck in a mercantilist mode of thinking—’What can I take from these other guys and sell at a profit?’, rather than ways of generating added value directly. I am absolutely certain that there is a better way of ru

“The legality of the Clan’s current business isn’t a problem, at least not from the commercial point of view; I think we spend a couple of hundred million a year on security because of it.” He shrugged. “But what can we do? We’re limited to high-value commodities because there’s a limit to how much we can ship. Look, there are roughly three hundred active i

“So what? Isn’t it a bit of a challenge to try and figure out a better way of using this scarce resource—our ability to ship stuff back and forth?”

“But two and a half tons a week—”

“Suppose you were shipping that into orbit, instead of to a world where the roads are dirt tracks and the plumbing doesn’t flush. It doesn’t sound very impressive, but that’s about the payload to orbit capacity of Arianespace, or NPO-Energiya, or Boeing-Sealaunch.” Miriam crossed her arms. “All of whom make billions a year on top of it. There are high-value, low-weight commodities other than drugs. Take saffron, for example, a spice that’s worth three times its weight in gold. Or gold, for that matter. You said they used to smuggle gold, back when bullion was a government monopoly. If you can barter your aristocratic credentials for military power, you can use modern geophysics-based prospecting techniques to locate and conquer gold-mining areas. A single courier can carry maybe a million dollars’ worth of gold from the other side over here in a day, right?”

Roland shook his head. “First, we have transport problems. The nearest really big gold fields are in California, the Outer Kingdom. Which is a couple of months away, as the mule train plods, and assuming the Comanche or the Apache don’t murder you along the way. Remember, M-16s give our guards a quality edge, but quantity has a quality all of its own and ten guards—or even a hundred—aren’t much use against an army. Other than that, there’re the deposits in South Africa, the white man’s graveyard. Do I need to say any more about that? It’d take us years to get that kind of pipeline ru

She shrugged. “Sure it’s hard, and in the long term it’d be deflationary, but in the long run we’re all dead anyway. What I’m thinking is: We need to break the deadlock in the Clan’s thinking wide open. Come up with a new business model, not one the existing Clan grandees have seen before. Doesn’t matter if it isn’t very lucrative at first, as long as it can fund textbooks—going the other way—and wheelbarrows. While we wean the families off their drug dependency problem, we need to develop the Gruinmarkt. Right now, the Clan could implode like that—” she snapped her fingers—“if Congress cancelled the war on drugs, for example. The price would fall by a factor of a hundred—overnight—and you’d be competing against pharmaceutical companies instead of bandits. And it’s going to happen sooner or later. Look at the Europeans: Half of them have decriminalized marijuana already and some of them are even talking about legalizing heroin. Basing your business on a mercantilist approach to transhipping a single commodity is risky as hell.”