“Pretty much.” Miriam waved for the check. “Which is why I had to get away from it all for the day. I’m not a, a prisoner. I’m just considered valuable. Or something.” She frowned. “It’s absolutely crazy. Even their business operations! It’s like something out of the middle ages. They’re about three centuries overdue for modernization, and I’m not just talking about the cultural crap. Pure zero-sum mercantilism, red in tooth and nail, in an environment where they have barely invented banking, never mind the limited liability company. Deeply fucking primitive, not to say wasteful of resources, but they’re set in their ways. I’ve seen companies like that before; sooner or later someone else comes along and eats their lunch. There ought to be something smarter they could be doing, if only I could think of it…”

“O-k-a-y. You do that, Miriam.”

The bill arrived and Miriam stuck down a fifty before Paulette could protest. “Come on.” She stood up; Paulette hurried after.

“Did I just see that? Did I? Miriam Beckstein putting down a thirty percent tip? What the hell is happening to my eyes?”

“I want out of this restaurant,” Miriam said flatly. Continuing on the hoof: “Money doesn’t mean anything any more, Paulie, didn’t you catch that bit? I’m so rich I could buy The Weatherman if I wanted to—only it won’t do me a blind bit of good because my problems aren’t money-related. There are factions among the families. One of them wants me dead. They had a nice little number going with my mother’s shareholding in the Clan; now that I’ve shown up, I’ve disrupt a load of plans. Another faction wants me married off. The king, his number-two prince is a retard, Paulie, and you know what? I think my old goat of an uncle is going to try to marry me off to him.”

“Oh, you poor baby. Don’t they have an equal rights amendment?”

“Oh, poor-baby me, these guys don’t even have a constitution,” Miriam said with feeling. “It’s a whole other world, and women like me get the…get the—hell, think about the Arabs. The Saudi royal family. They come over here in expensive suits and limousines and buy big properties and lots of toys, but they don’t think like us, and when they go back home they go straight back to the middle ages. How would you feel if you woke up one morning and discovered you were a Saudi princess?”