Amanda ended up pouring a drink for each of them. She lined up the gla.s.ses and placed the pill in front of the row. She said:

"The first person to touch a drink must also take the pill."

"Easy," said Sharon right away. She stepped forward and picked up the pill and popped it in her mouth. Then she washed it down with her scotch, and put the gla.s.s back on the table. She did it so fast it was over before any of the remaining girls managed to get their hands on the drinks.

"I can use the rest," she told Amanda. "It was a h.e.l.l of a ride. How are you holding up?"

"I"m fine," said Amanda. She hadn"t done c.o.ke for quite a while, and the tiny toot she"d had was still working wonders. She said:

"Tell Linda I"ll be waking her up soon. She needs a break, she"s been there for ages. You just keep everything calm and peaceful until it"s time to split, okay?"

"How are we going to this? And where are we going to go?"

"I don"t know yet. I"ll find out right away. Problem is, I"ve got stationary phone numbers for just a handful of the fan clubs. Four or five in all of North America."

"s.h.i.t."

"Yes. Well, three or four, really, because I remember one of these is in Albuquerque. We don"t wanna go there."

"I agree. I - wow. I think I"d better go lie down. Anything in particular you want me to tell Linda?"

"Just a thank you. I"ll talk to her here when she"s awake and back."

"Okay."

Sharon started turning to go, then looked at Amanda and said:

"You want me to start getting stuff together for the move? Like, to the new colony site? I don"t think Skykomish is a good idea."

"Neither do I. We"re not moving the colony, Sharon. We"re liquidating it, and starting a new one. And we"ll start it from somewhere else than Seattle."

"Good idea," said Sharon. "Just wake me up before you pull my implant, okay? I don"t want to experience dropping dead over there."

"Promise. Sweet dreams."

"Thanks."

Sharon left, and when she opened the heavy door to the hall Amanda suddenly realized she couldn"t hear the Bandidos talking or moving around. They seemed to be all gone from the house. Sharon shut the door behind her and Amanda looked at the girls that remained and saw all the gla.s.ses were empty, and all the eyes were on the bottle on the coffee table. It was more than half full, and the girls" eyes were full of desire.

Alcohol, the magic drug, thought Amanda. The only drug that was also food, highly calorific food in fact. The drug that made it possible to stay constantly high, and live on without having to bother about eating. It might not be a long, healthy life, but it definitely could be a happy life, as long as one stayed drunk all the time.

But that was where complications ensued: staying drunk all the time cost money, and it was difficult to make money while staying constantly drunk. It was one of those situations that are commonly known as serious life dilemmas, and Amanda couldn"t recall knowing or even hearing of more than half a dozen people who had really managed to pull off that number. It was a hard number to pull off, the digits just didn"t jell, they couldn"t jell when one of the parties was seeing them double.

"That"s for later, girls," she told all the hungry eyes. "And anyway I haven"t had a drink myself, have I? Give me your gla.s.s, Fiona, I"m too lazy to go all the way to the cabinet."

She poured herself a drink, making sure it was exactly the same size as theirs. She raised her gla.s.s in a salute to them all and drank quickly, hiding the grimace she made when she saw all those eyes focused on her drink. She said:

"It would be best if we all got some rest as well. Sharon and Linda will deal with everything over there. Make sure to tune out - mute the signal so that you all get some real rest."

Then she went looking for the Bandidos.

She saw the first of them emerge from behind the house the moment she walked out. He was wheeling a family-sized rickshaw: an ancient-looking motorcycle whose front fork had been exchanged for a wheeled platform big enough to seat six, provided fat Pierce took the driver"s seat. She watched the remaining Bandidos troop out from behind the house, all carrying huge backpacks bulging with stuff, with Pierce bringing up the rear pushing a second motorbike rickshaw. Its platform was half-filled with bundles wrapped in garbage bags. Amanda recognized the bags she"d bought back in the days when garbage was a problem.

Pierce stopped and looked up at her and grinned and wheezed:

"Hey. We parked those round the back, just in case. You know, those f.u.c.king patrols. I"ve talked to the boys and it"s a deal. You got two more hours, twenty over there."

"You said twenty four hours."

"Well, that was a while ago. The clock sure didn"t stop when I said that. It"s six minutes per hour, right? Oh yeah, one more thing. We"re taking your implant kits and beds and scrolls. Not all, we"ve left you ten kits and ten beds and two scrolls. That"s more than enough for all of you here."

"You can"t do that!"

"The f.u.c.k I can"t."

"f.u.c.k you, Pierce. You never mentioned that when we were talking."

"I thought it was kind of obvious. Anyway, it wouldn"t have changed a thing. You"d have gotten your a.s.s reamed for a bunch of implant kits? I don"t think so. You got more than enough money to make things nice and legal. You"ll get kits with your license, and you"ll have ten extra kits on the side. You won"t be hurting."

"f.u.c.k you."

"Yeah well. Promises."

He resumed pushing the bike: the first few Bandidos were already busy opening the main gate, conspicuously free of the chains and padlocks that used to be there. Amanda watched him go, boiling with fury. She made a silent vow to herself: wherever her new colony might be, she"d make a point of hunting down every Bandido settlement she came across. She was sure they would be all over the place, they had chapters in a whole bunch of cities in the US as well as Canada.

It was time to face a sad fact: the first Amazon colony had failed. The absence of any metal ore within reach had been a fatal handicap. Had the Skykomish deal gone through... No, it was already too late for that. What had lost that first Amazon foray into the New World was her own reluctance to break the law.

The girls had urged her to recruit more people the moment the food situation in the New World was under control. She resisted. She told them that they should wait until everything was made legal. They had a head start anyway, she"d argued. They"d go full speed the moment the licenses had been bought.

It was a problem brought around by her upbringing, she saw that clearly. Her parents brought her up to respect the law. She had rebelled against it and broke it many times, but always within certain limits. She"d thumbed her nose at it, not kicked it to death.

She hadn"t figured on colonizers such as the Bandidos, colonizers who didn"t care whether law lived or died. That had been a bad mistake. It was pretty obvious to her now that gangs and other criminal organizations would be very eager to set up operations in the New World.

It was something she kept in mind as she looked for the stationary phone numbers of Amazon fan clubs located in North America. She actually had many more than the three or four she"d told Sharon she had: close to a hundred. But most of them involved locations where starting the new Amazon colony would be either impractical or simply a bad idea.

She wanted plenty of empty country, and good natural resources. She wanted plenty of water: drinking water as well as a waterway that would enable her to connect with other Amazon colonies on the continent. And she needed a strong local branch of the Amazon fan club, big enough to yield many colonists.

That really limited her choices to just three or four locations.

She disconnected the stationary phone downstairs, and took it with her to the study next to her bedroom: she didn"t want anyone listening in on her conversations. Her study also acted as her office: its walls were covered with various awards won by her band. She looked at them while locking the door - she didn"t want to be disturbed while making the calls. She grimaced: her previous life, the life of a world-famous artist, now seemed to have been some sort of a joke.

She put the phone she"d brought from downstairs on a side table by the door, and used the one on her desk. It was a vintage piece with a rotary dial, the box and the handset done in ebony and silver. The hand-wound, antique ormolu clock next to the phone told her she had just over one hour and forty minutes to find the site for the new Amazon colony.

She came close to running out of time.

Her first choice, the relatively small town of Eureka in northern California, beautifully located on the sh.o.r.e of a large lagoon, was a washout. The president of the local fan club turned out to be a total d.i.c.khead, one of those semi-r.e.t.a.r.ded males that s...o...b..red when they saw her and had to be restrained from kissing her feet. She just couldn"t imagine dealing with him every day, and on top of that Eureka and its environs seemed to be pretty crowded already. They"d had two cubes in that area, the d.i.c.khead told her, and one of them hadn"t been discovered by the authorities for over a week. Northern California in the New World was already crawling with colonists.

She called the fan club in Portland, Oregon next. This time around, the fan club president was a hysterical chick who had lost many friends and family members in the aftermath of the catastrophe. She had difficulty answering simple questions, and had no idea at all about the colony situation down there. Portland was a relatively big city, but Amanda had been hoping for a colony site somewhere along the Columbia river, preferably between Portland and the Pacific coast. However, it was fast obvious the amount of cooperation and help she would receive were next to nil.

The third site was across the old border, in Canadian Vancouver. Once again, Amanda had been hoping for a place outside the city: the coast stretching north of it was sure to contain plenty of good colony sites. The president of the Vancouver fan club was on the ball, too: a confident and level-headed young woman who knew the score.

Unfortunately, the score wasn"t good. There were literally hundreds of illegal colonies in the corresponding area of the New World. One of the cubes had appeared undetected on an island in Vancouver Bay: it had been stripped clean before the authorities caught wind. Worst of all, the Bandidos as well as h.e.l.l"s Angels had already set up colonies, and were beginning to throw their weight around.

That took care of the three good options Amanda had. She still had a fourth number she could call: unfortunately, it was located in Toronto. Just getting there on their bicycles would take a month. And she was quite sure the whole Great Lakes area in the New World would be as crowded with colonies as Seattle or Vancouver.

However, there were tons of empty s.p.a.ce north of the Great Lakes. And from what Amanda knew, that whole area was rich in mineral resources, and covered with a dense network of waterways.

It took half an hour for someone to answer the phone at the headquarters of the Amazon fan club in Toronto, and another ten minutes before its president was located and brought to the phone. By that time, Amanda was close to boiling. Betty and the Wailing Sisters had been calling fan clubs all over North America for days, impressing the importance of keeping the stationary phones staffed at all times. It didn"t feel like a good start.

Fortunately, it went well from there. The prez of the Toronto fan club turned out to be as sharp and on the ball as the one in Vancouver. And she also had some very good news: she intimated the Toronto Amazon fans were in possession of a large quant.i.ty of implant kits. A colony in the New World? They were all raring to go over there, she told Amanda. No, not from Toronto or indeed any spot along Lake Ontario. There was an area to the northwest, between Toronto and Ottawa, that was just perfect. It checked all the boxes on Amanda"s list. Matter of fact, her fans in Toronto had already been planning to set up a colony right there. They would go wild with joy if the great Amanda Queen and the rest of the band joined them personally in that enterprise.

A few minutes later, it was a done deal. The Toronto club would get going promptly on the first of March: when the Amazons joined in a month"s time, they"d arrive in an established colony. A colony with plenty of s.p.a.ce to grow.

But... A full month on the road, and that a.s.suming they covered a hundred kilometers per day! Just the preparations involved would take several days. She also had to arrange for someone to take care of her house while she was away. And she also needed to wake up all the girls right away, and pull their implants before the Bandidos in the New World got rough. The clock on the desk told her she had just over five minutes: more or less, a single New World hour.

She was quite sure she would need all the c.o.ke in her emergency stash to get through the days ahead. She shook her head.

"You"re a f.u.c.king leader, so lead," she said out loud.

Then she shook her head again, and went to wake the girls.

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