Don't Label Me! (9 page)

George tried to get a handle on all the
strands of what was going down. One thing was sure, Simon had been
busy. “So you don’t need me for a few days?”

Simon poured the ground curry powder into a
jar and then wiped his hands on a towel before giving George a good
hard look which spoke of hidden knowledge as well as a deep
affection for his friend. “Go George, with all my love.”

George found Doc working one of the town’s
main building sites. It’s where he himself should have been if he
hadn’t been so busy avoiding Mendal, Upal and Ally. While he was
over the whole ‘Ally prefers them to me’ rejection thing he still
felt awkward being around them. “Hey Doc, you got a moment?”

Doc swung down the scaffolding with the ease
of monkey. Gods the man was fit. He might be small but the the wiry
Balinese silat martial artist and the town’s general medical
practitioner was someone the wise wouldn’t take on. “So we’re
going?”

“
Sheesh, you’re one step ahead of me.
This whole connected mind thing the town’s got going these days
takes a bit of keeping up with. I thought you’d be at the clinic
anyway.”

“
Nah, no patients these days. Their
repaired genes means that nobody needs me unless they need first
aid or they’re pregnant. I open the clinic on Wednesday afternoons
for the expectant mums. I gather from what I picked up from Simon
that you’ll be needing a guide.”

George showed him the map. “We need to find
this place. Speak any Borneo-ese?”

Doc laughed. “Not the local Dayak dialects
but you can go just about anywhere in Indonesia, or Malaysia for
that matter, using the standard language.”

“
Don’t you have some unresolved issues
with the Indonesian government?”

Doc made a dismissive gesture. “Hardly
matters now. I can teleport out of their way faster than they can
say boo. Plus they won’t expect me outside of Bali. I’ve got no
reason they know of to be snooping around a remote cave system in
Borneo so they’re not going to be looking for me there.”

“
We’ll need Melissa too apparently.”
Although why they needed to put the town’s high priestess of the
local Wiccan coven at risk was beyond him. He could only assume
that Simon saw some difficulty that would require her unique
skills. Inside the Boswell parallel universe everyone could see the
faeries whose space they now co-inhabited but in the slightly lower
dimension outside they still seemed a little handicapped, all
except for a few of the Malakim like Simon, John and Meta and a
couple of the humans; Helena who lived with her mate in the Yungas
and Melissa whose return from death’s door had changed her
somehow.

“
We’re here.” Rob announced, a heavy
pack strung across his broad shoulders. The man was his usual quiet
unflustered self. His pretty ex-waitress wife, who now worked in
her own business making clothing and curtains as well as giving the
odd tarot reading, leaned affectionately against him.

Melissa giggled. “You should have seen the
Major reading the riot act to Adin when we dropped him off with
Sally. Sheesh, he’s not even a year old. I think it’s more likely
Crystal and Sky will get Adin into trouble. Anyway Adin seemed
happy having all the attention. You have to see the grin on his
face.” She took her mobile phone out of her back pocket and passed
it to George.

George did his best not to roll his eyes,
ugh, baby photos, but he knew it was important to Melissa so he
duly looked at the photo for a second or two. “He does indeed look
a happy chappy.” He then passed the photo to Doc with a certain
amount of relief at having dealt with that task. Personally he
prefered kids when you could start talking to them. Although with
the speed Adin and John and Sally’s daughters were growing that
wouldn't be long. Crystal and Sky already chatted merrily with all
the townsfolk they met. They seemed more like three year olds than
a year and a half but then they were reincarnated goddesses or at
least Arion and John’s sisters from a former Malakim incarnation.
They’d already achieved immortality but decided to incarnate as
John and Sally’s children for reasons best known to themselves. Try
rattling your head around that one. The sheer enormity of family
trees when you took rebirth into account became decidedly three
dimensional. A genealogist’s worst nightmare, perhaps. Or maybe an
exciting challenge. He’d met a couple of genealogists in his time
and they’d both had a peculiar obsession with details about the
major events that defined people’s lives and their connections with
others. Not his thing. He had better things to do, like saving
Orea. “Wait here a moment while Doc and I go and grab a couple of
things and then we’ll travel the non-local to the spot that’s
marked on the map. Hopefully it won’t take too long to do what we
have to.”

“
Um, there’s nothing here!” George
looked forlornly at the seemingly vast expanse of jungle. They’d
climbed the escarpment to get a better view but nothing indicated
which way to take. He’d assumed that when ‘x’ marked a spot on a
map then that would be the exact spot to be but that clearly wasn’t
the case. Yet he trusted his friend and boss. “Simon wouldn’t send
us on wild goose chase.”

Melissa looked through different eyes, eyes
that saw a sea of energy, otherworld and etheric beings westerners
called faeries. She didn’t know if the Indonesians had a term for
them. “Hang on a sec. I think I see something. Look, there’s a gap
in the escarpment. The energy is stronger there. I think that’s
where we need to go.”

Rob shrugged his shoulders at the
questioning look from George. He wasn’t in any doubt about his
wife’s abilities. “Let’s go then.”

They scrambled back down to the base of the
escarpment. By the time they reached the bottom again they were
sweaty and covered in grit and leaves from pushing through the
thick scrub. Doc looked in the direction Melissa had indicated.
“Lead the way Melissa.”

To ordinary human eyes the jungle would have
looked the same in all directions: a dark green tangle of vines and
undergrowth. To her vision, which their resident geneticist Jnarn
called some fancy name, tetrachromatic or something, the jungle
took on a dance of light and vibrating particles. She’d hemorrhaged
giving birth to Adin. After Sally and Simon had brought her back
from the edge of death she’d awoken with the enhancement to her
vision. The additional set of light receptors in her eyes perceived
a vastly greater palate of color than any ordinary human could see.
In the distance was a special sparkle. It was just a hunch that
what glowed the brightest would lead them to what they sought but
it was all they had to go on. “This way.”

Journalist Phoenix O’Halloran hung up in the
phone in frustration. An alert from her bank had given her her
monthly balance on her second savings account, the one she she kept
as a safety net. All the message said was that none of it was
available. The bank’s support staff didn’t seem to understand what
the problem was, she’d gotten her monthly sms alert hadn’t she? Yes
but why did it say she couldn’t access it. Oh well, you’ll have to
go into your local branch and get them to fix that. Only they can
take the block off it. Gah. Why had she just wasted twenty dollars
making that long drawn out mobile call? Because you panicked didn’t
you? Again. Gods, why did she have to be so reactive to everything?
She knew it was what always got her into trouble, that inability to
pause before she took her next breath. It was how salesmen conned
her, every single time. Of late she’d taken to never making big
purchases without thinking about it for a day, even when the
salesman said the great deal wouldn’t be there tomorrow. She needed
to learn to pause like that more often.

Most things if you’re asked to do them
straight away are for someone else’s benefit.

Phoenix nodded in agreement. The voice that
had recently been sounding in her head probably indicated some sort
of mental illness but it usually was right in what it said. She
dismissed it, as she usually did, as her subconscious mind taking
on a voice of calming authority.

No use pretending to yourself it doesn’t
happen, just don’t advertise the fact.

No, she sure as hell wasn’t going to do
that. The fact was she’d panicked when she’d seen that ‘account
balance unavailable’ at the bottom of the sms message. In truth it
had probably been there on all the previous monthly sms alerts, she
just hadn’t noticed it. Since she didn’t use that account often it
hadn’t hit her radar. Instead of panicking she could have waited
until she could get to a bank branch which she was going to have to
do anyway. Better than running up her monthly mobile phone charge.
Gods she felt stupid at times. Having a degree in journalism did
nothing to quell that underlying feeling that she was somehow
totally and irrevocably inadequate.

It’s not the mistake that’s a problem it’s
how you get out of it. If you sat at home and never did anything
you’d never make a mistake. Acknowledge the mistake, know what you
did wrong. Pause next time. Then find a way to use what you’ve
learnt to make a difference for the next person. The message had
probably more to do with that account giving zero interest if you
choose to take any money out of it.

“
Yeah, you’re right.” Bloody hell,
what was she doing. She was talking back to her subconscious now.
She might do a piece on the annoyances of the banking industry
though. The hoops you had to jump through to get any return at all
on your savings.

Her mobile phone’s ringtone startled her out
of her brooding. “Hello? Oh hi Tyra. They did what? Yeah sure I’d
love to do an exclusive interview. In Boswell? I’ll need some way
to get my cameraman and soundo inside though. Can you arrange for a
pickup? Sure. Yeah look forward to it. See you then.” She hung up
and smiled. This she could do. This she was good at. By the time
this story aired the Valeton council members who’d just sacked Tyra
as mayor would look like the short sighted idiots they were. Well
all except their new mayor, Peter Stein, who Tyra said had had a
recent change of heart and looked like pushing ahead with most, if
not all, of Tyra’s ideas.

She picked up her phone again and started to
chase up her film crew. Now how did she go about explaining to them
about the chasm at Boswell’s front door?

At the edge of the chasm Phoenix’s crew
peered over the edge with a mixture of bemusement and horror. “What
are you thinking Red? There’s nothing and even if there was how
would we get down there? Absail?”

Phoenix groaned. She expected this. “Look,
just get in the car will you. I just need to make a call and we’ll
have an escort who can get us in.” Since she’d had the retrovirus
she could now see Boswell as clear as day but she remembered what
she’d seen her first time over the chasm. She certainly wasn’t
going to risk her crew’s lives. What’s to say that only the front
of the car with her driving made it through. But before she could
make her call her phone rang. The caller ID surprised her. “Boss?
What’s up? You’re joking? Shit! I need to put this on speaker phone
so the guys can hear this too. Okay boss, we’re all listening now,
could you repeat that?”

“
Just this; I’ve received a directive
from very high up that we are not to give any more coverage to
Boswell. We’re to ignore its existence. If you proceed with this
story I’ll, regretfully, have no choice but to sack you. Sorry team
but the station’s budget is up for review, if you get my
drift.”

“
Understood boss. We’ll head back to
base shortly.” But damn she didn’t want to. She hung up. “Bugger
it!”

Severely disgruntled she looked up and spied
her cameraman and soundo having one of those quiet, mostly unspoken
conversations men sometimes have when they’ve worked as a team for
a long time. “Looks like you two won’t have to worry about crossing
the edge of the crater after all.”

“
Red, you want to do this story don’t
you?” Josh her soundo asked.

“
Yeah, damn it. Not only is the sacked
mayor of Valeton as close to a friend as I have but what they’re
about is a lifestyle so different to what we have now, so outside
of our failed systems and structures that I think it needs all the
coverage it can get. The world needs to see alternatives like
this.”

Mike, her cameraman, absentmindedly tossed
his ponytail over his shoulder. Nervous but thinking. She knew her
crew’s tells.

“
How about we get them more coverage
than a one off thirty second slot on the news would ever give
them?”

“
How are we going to do
that?”

“
The alternate news networks online.
We let it out that the story’s been gagged and ask them to get
people to share it. Tell them there’s no copyright on it and we are
inviting people to download it and share it with
friends.”

“
It’ll cost us our jobs.”

“
Yeah, so. We didn’t get into the
media industry to be dictated to like this. My dad’s got a bit of
dough. He used to be in a civil rights movement back when he was a
hippie. I’ll get him to extend us a loan and we’ll go freelance.
What you say Red?”

“
Hell yeah!” They high fived each
other then she rang back her boss. “We’re resigning effective
immediately. We’re doing this story. We’ll go
freelance.”

“
Always knew you had balls Red. Looks
like those guys with you have too. If there’s anything I can do to
help, unofficially of course, let me know. I don’t like being
dictated to either. I have some contacts. Be in touch.”