Steal Across the Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

her little friends. “What else did Ragjuptrilpent say?”
    “She said you washed in the shed and pissed in the corner.”
    Pleasure flooded Lucca. Unable to stand his own stink any longer, he had indeed washed in the lean-to behind the stone hut where the water tubs were kept. As soon as he’d undressed, he’d needed to piss and, shivering with cold in the unheated shed and unwilling to dress again and make the trek to the privy, he’d gone in a corner and covered his urine with dirt. But the shed was closed on all sides, and no little girl with an unpronounceable name had observed him. Furthermore, Kularians never entered other families’ huts, which were so tiny they contained room only for piles of sleeping blankets and changes of clothing. Cooking, eating, and socializing all took place in the village lodge, where nearly everyone spent all non-sleeping time. If Lucca had been observed at his hasty and frigid bath, it had not been by the unknown Ragjuptrilpent but by Hytrowembireliaz’s middle daughter herself.
    So Kularians sometimes lied.
    It was the first crack Lucca had found in the surface image of happy, simple natives. So perhaps it wasn’t much—it was still something. A culture that developed lying had things it wished to hide. Chewithoztarel had lied, and she had asked a question out of curiosity. Finally, Lucca had an informant.
    He scrambled up off the frozen ground and put a hand on the little girl’s shoulder. “Will you help me walk back to the hut, little fellow-traveler-on-the-first-road?”
    “Yes!”
    Maybe he would find out something—anything—worth witnessing, after all.

 
     
5: FROM
REWIRED AND HACKED IN
,
EDITORIAL COLUMN
     
     
    Marketing a Thunderbolt
     
    At first, of course, they thought it was a joke, those few Internet roamers who visited the new website. Maybe it came up far down a list at Google or Ask.com , or maybe they just stumbled across it during a session of bored, late-night conspiracy surfing. It was just one of the thousands of bogus sites that sprang up hours—maybe minutes—after NASA released the shattering news that probes had detected an alien spacecraft approaching the moon. Some of Earth’s population panicked; some rejoiced; some urged attack; some joked.
    So no one believed the website was real. Come on, now—a classified ad for human “Witnesses” to some colossal alien crime? The site didn’t even look very inventive: just sixty-seven dry words, unadorned by even basic clip art:
We are an alien race you may call the Atoners. Ten thousand years ago we wronged humanity profoundly. We cannot undo what has been done, but we wish humanity to understand it. Therefore we request twenty-one volunteers to visit seven planets to witness for us. We will convey each volunteer there and back in complete safety. Volunteers must speak English. Send requests for electronic applications to [email protected].
    But after the aliens made radio contact with SETI and then proceeded to talk freely—if circumspectly—with anyone whose communication equipment could reach the moon, everything changed. The Atoners mentioned the website. Within minutes, it took millions of hits, and everything—panicking, rejoicing, attacking, joking—rampedup exponentially. Suddenly the B movies and the old comic books and the paperbacks with tacky covers were all
real
.
    And, in retrospect, the Internet was the perfect way for bona fide aliens to recruit humanity for the stars, for at least five reasons:
     
    1. A website is accessible by anyone with a computer. If you want to reach a whole lot of people simultaneously, 24/7, this is the way to do it. Radio and TV broadcasts must change frequencies across borders, adjust to time differences, pre-empt Monday night football. The Internet is always there, always ready, everywhere at once.
    2. A website bypasses the filters of government censorship, spin, posturing, and rhetoric. Instead of being told what aliens said, we can see for