“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?”