"Damn you, Tupper!" he whispered. "Damn you, damn you, damn you." But he meant: damn me.
It's something I did, or didn't. I should have put the wretched brute to sleep.
Guido. Get me Guido.
He looked at his watch. School ends in twenty minutes but Guido has refused to be picked up. He prefers to take the school bus like all other normal boys, thank you, and he'll ask the driver to hoot when he drops him at the gates — at which point, Justin is graciously permitted to fetch him in the jeep. There was nothing for it but to wait. If he made a dash to beat the bus, chances were he would reach the school too late and have to dash back. Leaving the computer to sulk he returned to the counting table in an attempt to restore his spirits with the hard paper he so vastly preferred to the screen.
PANA WIRE SERVICE (09-24-97)
In 1995, sub-Saharan Africa had the highest number of new tuberculosis cases of any global region, as well as a high rate of TB and HIV coinfection, according to the World Health Organization…
I knew that already, thank you.
TROPICAL MEGACITIES WILL BE HELLS ON EARTH
As illegal logging, water and land pollution and unbridled oil extraction destroy the Third World's ecosystem, more and more Third World rural communities are forced to migrate to cities in search of work and survival. Experts predict the rise of tens and perhaps hundreds of tropical megacities attracting vast new slum populations of lowest-paid labor, and producing unprecedented rates of killer diseases such as tuberculosis…
He heard the honking of a distant bus.
* * *
"So you screwed up," Guido said with satisfaction, when Justin led him to the scene of the disaster. "Did you go into her mailbox?" He was already tapping the keys.
"Of course not. I wouldn't know how to. What are you doing?"
"Did you add any material and forget to save it?"
"Absolutely no. Neither, nor. I wouldn't."
"Then it's nothing. You didn't lose any," said Guido serenely in his computer interglot, and with a few more gentle taps, nursed the machine back to health. "Can we go on-line now? Please?" he begged.
"Why should we?"
"To get her mail, for Chrissakes! There's hundreds of people out there sent her e-mails every day and you won't read them. What about the people who want to send you their love and sympathy? Don't you want to know what they said? There's e-mails from me in there she never answered! Maybe she never read them!"
Guido was on the verge of tears. Taking him gently by the shoulders, Justin sat him on the stool before the keyboard.
"Tell me what the risk is," he suggested. "Give me the worst case."
"We risk nothing. Everything's saved. There isn't a worst case. We're doing the absolutely simplest things with this computer. If we crash, it's like before. I'll save any new e-mails. Tessa saved everything else. Trust me."
Guido attaches the laptop to its modem and offers Justin one end of a length of flex. "Pull out the telephone line and plug this in. Then we're all hooked up."
Justin does as he is told. Guido taps and waits. Justin is looking over his shoulder. Hieroglyphics, a window, more hieroglyphics. A pause for prayer and contemplation, followed by a full-screen message switching off and on like an illuminated sign, and an exclamation of disgust from Guido.
Hazardous Zone!!
THIS IS A HEALTH WARNING.
DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT. CLINICAL TRIALS HAVE ALREADY INDICATED THAT FURTHER RESEARCH CAN ATTRACT FATAL SIDE EFFECTS. FOR YOUR SAFETY AND COMFORT YOUR HARD DISK HAS BEEN CLEANSED OF TOXIC MATTER.
For a deluded few seconds Justin has no serious concerns. He would have liked, in better circumstances, to sit down at the counting table and pen an angry letter to the manufacturers objecting to their hyperbolic style. On the other hand, Guido has just demonstrated that their bark is worse than their bite. So he is about to exclaim something like, "Oh it's them again, they really are the limit," when he sees that Guido's head has sunk into his neck as if he has been hit by a bully, and his upturned fingers have bunched like dead spiders either side of the laptop, and his face, what Justin can see of it, has returned to its pretransfusion pallor.
"Is it bad?" Justin asks softly.
Flinging himself eagerly forward like an air pilot in crisis, Guido clicks through his emergency procedures. In vain apparently, for he flings himself upright again, slaps a palm to his forehead, closes his eyes, and lets out a frightful groan.
"Just tell me what's happening," Justin pleads. "Nothing is this serious, Guido. Tell me." And when Guido still does not reply, "You've switched off. Right?"
Transfixed, Guido nods.
"And now you're unplugging the modem."
Another nod. The same transfixion.
"Why do you do this?"
"I'm rebooting."
"What does that mean?"
"We wait one minute."
"Why?"
"Maybe two."
"What will that do?"
"Give it time to forget. Settle it down. This is not natural, Justin. This is real bad." He has reverted to computer American. "This isn't a bunch of socially inadequate young males having some fun. Very sick people have done this to you, believe me."
"To me or to Tessa?"
Guido shakes his head. "It's like somebody hates you." He switches the computer on again, lifts himself on his stool, draws a long breath like a sigh in reverse. And Justin to his delight sees the familiar line of happy black kids waving at him from the screen.
"You've done it," he exclaims. "You're a genius, Guido!"
But even as he says this the kids are replaced by a jaunty little hourglass impaled by a white, diagonal arrow. Then they too disappear, leaving only a blue-black infinity.
"They killed it," Guido whispers.
"How?"
"They put a bug on you. They told the bug to wipe the hard disk clean and they left you a message telling you what they'd done."
"Then it's not your fault," says Justin earnestly.
"Did she download?"
"Whatever she printed out, I've read."
"I'm not talking printing! Did she make disks?"
"We can't find them. We think she may have taken them up north."
"What's up north? Why didn't she email them up north? Why does she have to carry disks up north? I don't read it. I don't get it."
Justin is remembering Ham and thinking of Guido. Ham's computer had a virus too.
"You said she e-mailed you a lot," he says.
"Like once a week. Twice. If she forgot one week, twice the next." He is speaking Italian. He is a child again, as lost as the day when Tessa found him.
"Have you looked at your e-mail since she was killed?"
Guido shakes his head in vigorous denial. It was too much for him. He couldn't.
"So maybe we could go back to your house, and you could see what's there. Would you mind? I'm not interfering?"
Driving up the hill and into the darkening trees, Justin thought of nothing and nobody but Guido. Guido was a wounded friend and Justin's one aim was to take him safely home to his mother, and restore his calm and make sure that from here on Guido was going to stop moping, and get on with being a healthy, arrogant little genius of twelve instead of a cripple whose life had ended with Tessa's death. And if, as he suspected, they — whoever they were — had done to Guido's computer what they had done to Ham's and Tessa's, then Guido must be consoled and, so far as it was possible, have his mind set at rest. That was Justin's sole priority, excluding all other aims and emotions, because to entertain them meant anarchy. It meant deflecting himself from the path of rational inquiry and confusing the quest for vengeance with the quest for Tessa.
He parked andwitha sense of last things put his hand under Guido's arm. And Guido, somewhat to Justin's surprise, did not shake himself free. His mother had made a stew with fresh-baked bread that she was proud of, so on Justin's insistence they ate it first, the two of them, and praised it while she kept guard over them. Then Guido fetched his computer from his bedroom and for a while they didn't go on-line, but sat shoulder to shoulder, the two of them, reading Tessa's bulletins about the sleepy lions she had seen on her travels, and the TERRIBLY playful elephants that would have sat on her jeep and squashed it if she had given them half a chance and the really DISDAINFUL giraffes who are NEVER happy unless somebody is admiring their elegant necks.