Charles Stross - The Family Trade

“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 running things-and one that doesn’t run the risk of bringing the FBI and DEA and CIA down on everybody’s heads-some way that lets us generate value directly by world-walking. It’s just a matter of spotting it.”

“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 inner family members who can shuttle between the worlds, five days on and five days off. Each of us can carry an average of a hundred pounds each way. That means we can shift three-quarters of a ton each way, each day. But maybe half of that is taken up by luxury items or stuff we need just to keep sane. There’s the formal personal allowance. So we really only have a little over a third of a ton per day-to fund an entire ruling class! The fixtures and fittings in Fort Lofstrom alone amount to a year’s gross product for the family. That’d be, in U.S. dollar terms, several billion. Wouldn’t it?”

“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 running, before we had any kind of return on investment to show the families. It’s very expensive. Plus, it’d be deflationary over here. As soon as we start pumping cheap gold onto the market, the price of bullion will fall. Or have you spotted something all of the rest of us have been missing for fifty years? When I was younger, I thought I might be able to change things. But it’s not that simple.”

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.”

“That would be bad, I agree.” He looked grave. “In fact-” his eyes unfocused, he stared into the middle distance-“Sky Father, it could trigger a revolution! If the Clan suddenly lost its supply of luxury items-or antibiotics-we’d be screwed. It’s amazing how much leverage you can buy by ensuring the heir to a duchy somewhere doesn’t die of pneumonia or that some countess doesn’t succumb to childbed fever.”

“Yeah.” Miriam began collecting her scattered clothes. “But it doesn’t have to go that way. I figure with their social standing the Clan could push industrialization and development policies that would drag the whole Gruinmarkt into the nineteenth century within a couple of generations, and a little later it would be able to export stuff that people over here would actually want to buy. Land reform and tools to boost agricultural efficiency, set up schools, build steel mills, and start using the local oil reserves in Pennsylvania -it could work. The Gruinmarkt could bootstrap into the kind of maritime power the British Empire was, back in the Victorian period. As the only people able to travel back and forth freely, we’d be in an amazing position-a natural monopoly! The question is: How do we get there from here?”

Roland watched her pull her pants on. “That’s a lot to think about,” he said doubtfully. “Not that I’m saying it can’t be done, but it’s… it’s big.”

“Are you kidding?” She flashed him a smile. “It’s not just big, it’s enormous! It’s the biggest goddamned management problem anyone has ever seen. Drag an entire planet out of the middle ages in a single generation, get the families out of the drugs trade by giving them something productive and profitable to do instead, give ourselves so much leverage we can dictate terms to them from on high and make the likes of Angbard jump when we say ‘hop’-isn’t that something you could really get your teeth into?”

“Yeah.” He stood up and pulled open the wardrobe where he’d hung his suit the evening before. “What you’re talking about will take far more leverage than I ever thought…” Then he grinned boyishly. “Let’s do it.”

Miriam went on a shopping spree, strictly cash. She bought three prepaid mobile phones and programmed some numbers in. One of them she kept with Roland’s and Paulette’s numbers in it. Another she loaded with her number and Roland’s and mailed to Paulie. The third-she thought long and hard on it, then loaded her own number in, but not Paulette’s. Blood might be thicker than water, but she was responsible for Paulette’s safety. A tiny worm of suspicion still ate at her; she was pretty certain that Roland was telling the truth, straight down the line, but if not, it wouldn’t be the first time a man had lied to her, and-

What the hell is this? This is the guy you ‘re thinking about spending the rest of your life with-and you ‘re holding out on him because you don’t trust him completely? She confronted herself and answered: Yeah. If Angbard told him my life depended on him giving Paulie away, how would I feel then?