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 canceled 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 transshipping 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.”