The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1)

by Charles Stross

  ‘Frankly, no. What I see is a lot of frightened people, none of whom particularly like the way things work, but all of whom think they’ll lose out if anyone else disrupts it. And you know something? They’re wrong and I don’t want to be part of that. You’ve been telling me that I can’t escape the Clan, and I’m afraid you’re right – you’ve convinced me – but that only means I’ve got to change things. To carve out a niche I can live with.’ She stood up and walked toward him. ‘I don’t like the way the families live like royalty in a squalid mess that doesn’t even have indoor plumbing. I don’t like the way their law values people by how they can breed and treats women like chattels. I don’t like the way the outer family feel the need to defend the status quo in order to keep from being kicked in the teeth by the inner families. I don’t like the dehumanizing poverty the ordinary people have to live with, and I don’t like the way the crazy fucked-up feudal inheritance laws turn an accident of birth into an excuse for rape and murder. But most of all, I don’t like what they’ve done to you.’

  She leaned down and pulled him up by the shoulders, forcing him to stand in front of her. ‘Look at me,’ she insisted. ‘What do you see?’

  Roland looked up at her sceptically. ‘Do you really think you can take them all on?’

  ‘On my own?’ She snorted. ‘I know I can,’ she said fiercely. ‘The whole country is ripe for modernization on a massive scale, and the Clan actually has the muscle to do that, if they’d just realize it. All it takes is a handful of people who believe that things can change to start the ball rolling. And that handful has to start somewhere! Now are you with me or against me?’

  He hugged her right back, and she felt another response: He was stiffening against her, through his robe. ‘You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in years. If ever. I don’t want to lose you.’

  ‘Me too, love.’

  ‘But how do you think you’re going to make it work?’ he asked. ‘And stop whoever’s trying to kill you.’

  ‘Oh, that.’ She leaned into his arms, letting him pull her back in the direction of the bed. ‘That’s going to be easy. When you strip away the breeding program, the Clan is a business, right? Family-owned partnership, private shareholdings. Policy is set at annual meetings twice a year, next one at Beltaigne, that sort of thing.’

  ‘So?’ He looked distracted, so she stopped fumbling at his belt for a moment.

  ‘Well.’ She leaned her chin against the hollow of his neck, licked his pulse spot slowly. ‘It may have escaped your attention, but I am an expert in one particular field – I’ve spent years studying it, and I think I probably know more about it than anyone else in the family. The Clan is an old-fashioned unlimited-liability partnership, with a dose of family politics thrown in. The business structure itself is a classic variation on import/export trade, but it’s cash-rich enough to support a transition to some other model. All I need is a lever and an appropriate fulcrum, and then a direction to make them move in. Business restructuring, baby, that’s where it’s at. A whole new business model. The lever we need is one that will convince them that they have more to lose by not changing than by sticking with the status quo. Once we’re in the driver’s seat, nobody is going to tell us we can’t shack up on this side and live the way we want to.’

  He lifted her off her feet and lay down beside her. ‘What leverage do you need?’ he asked alertly. ‘I spent years looking and didn’t find anything that powerful . . .’

  ‘It’s going to be something convincing.’ She smiled hungrily up at him. ‘And they’ll never know what hit them. We need to establish a power base by Beltaigne. A pilot project that demonstrates massive potential for making money in some way that relies on the Clan talent without falling into the classic mercantilist traps. It’ll make me worth much more to them alive than dead, and it’ll give us the beginning of a platform to recruit like-minded people and start building.’ She looked pensive. ‘A skunkworks within an established corporation, designed to introduce new ways of thinking and pioneer new business opportunities. I’ve written up enough stories about them – I just never thought I’d be setting one up myself.’

  She stopped talking. There’d be time to work out the details later.

  BUSINESS PLAN

  Miriam dozed fitfully, unable to relax her grip on consciousness. She kept turning events over in her mind, wondering what she could have done differently. If there was anything in the past two weeks that she could have changed, what might have come of it? She might not have accepted the pink and green shoebox. She wouldn’t be in this mess at all.

  But she wouldn’t have met Brill, or Roland, or Angbard, or Olga, or the rest of the menagerie of Clan connections who were so insistently cluttering up her hitherto-straightforward family life with politics and feuds and grudges and everything else that went with the Clan. My life would be simpler, emptier, more predictable, and safer, she thought sleepily. With nobody trying to exploit me because of who I am.

  Who I am? She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling in the dark. Is it me they’re after or someone else? she wondered. If only I could ask my mother. Not the mother who’d loved her and raised her, not Iris – the other one, the faceless woman who’d died before she’d had a chance to remember her. The woman who’d borne her and been murdered, her only legacy a mess of –

  She glanced sideways. Roland was asleep next to her, his face smooth and relaxed, free of worry. I’ve gone from being completely independent to this in just two weeks. Never mind Brill and Kara back in the palace, the weight of Angbard’s expectations, the Clan’s politics . . . Miriam wasn’t used to having to think about other people when planning her moves, not since the divorce from Ben.

  She glanced at the alarm clock. It was coming up to seven o’clock – too late to go back to sleep. She leaned over toward Roland’s ear. ‘Wake up, sleepyhead,’ she whispered.

  Roland mumbled something into the pillow. His eyelids twitched.

  ‘Time to be getting up,’ she repeated.

  He opened his eyes, then yawned. ‘I hate morning people,’ he said, looking at her slyly.

  ‘I’m not a morning person, I just do my best worrying when I should be asleep.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’m going to have to go find that lever to move the Clan,’ she told him. ‘The one we were talking about last night. While that’s going on, unless we can find out who’s really got it in for me, we may not be able to meet up very often.’

  ‘We can’t talk about this publicly,’ he said. ‘Even if Olga keeps her mouth shut – ’

  ‘No.’ She kissed him. ‘Damn, I feel like they’re all watching us from behind the bed!’

  ‘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 cell 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 cell 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 sid
e 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. 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. There are lots of really competent, smart people who are never going anywhere because they can’t world-walk, and lots of time-wasting prima donnas who are basically content to serve as couriers on a million-dollar salary.’ He caught her eye and flushed.

  ‘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 identifying 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 up to seven tons each way, each day. But maybe half of that is taken up by luxury items or stuff we need just to keep sane. An average of one in four trips is used to carry passengers piggyback. And there’s the formal personal allowance. So we really only have a little over two tons 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 day – ’

  ‘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 Ariane or Lockheed.’ Miriam crossed her arms. ‘Who 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, assuming the natives don’t murder you along the way. Remember, guns 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. In fact – ’ his eyes unfocused, he stared into the middle distance – ‘Sky Father, it would 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 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 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?’

  ‘Yes.’ 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 cell 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?

  Next she collected essential supplies. She started by pulling more cash from an ATM. She stuffed three thousand dollars into an envelope, wrapped a handwritten note around it, and FedExed it to Paulette’s home address. It was an eccentric way to pay an employee, but it wasn’t as if she’d had time to set up a bank account yet. After posting the cash, Miriam hit on a couple of department stores, one for spare socks (there were no washing machines in history-land, she reminded herself) and another for some vital information. A CD-ROM containing the details of every patent filed before 1920 went in her pocket: She had difficulty suppressing a wild grin as she paid ten bucks for it.