Red Lightning by John Varley Read Free Book Online Page B

vision, where I always parked it. It was the log of my incoming calls. There were forty or fifty names of friends who wanted me to log on to a group chat.
    I guess it was the Earth icon that caught my eye. I've got a fair number of chathogs on Earth, but by the nature of the, time lag they were more like old-fashioned pen pals – it was seldom important to get back to them right away. But this one was marked Florida, USA , and any of the people I knew in Florida might be writing their last words to me at that moment.
    I ticked on the icon, and when the number came up I shouted and got to my feet without even realizing I was doing it.
    "It's Grandma!" I said, and quickly ticked the incoming window over to the house computer with an ultra-urgent priority. A window opened up right on the center of the wall. The picture formed, and was chaotic for a moment, then settled down. At first I didn't know what I was looking at, then saw it was an old laptop computer sitting on a chair. Grandma's face was on the screen. She looked a little harried, but calm.
    "– how much time we have left, but I had to take a moment to do this," she was saying. I found Mom and Dad and Elizabeth were standing beside me. I felt Dad grab my hand.
    "There's never enough time to tell everyone you love how much you love them, is there? I know, I've told you all. But trouble is coming, and they're saying it may be big trouble, maybe the biggest of all, and I have a lot of things to do, but I have to take a moment to do the most important thing of all in case... well, in case this is the last chance I have to tell you."
    Dad squeezed my hand so hard it hurt, but I didn't complain. Elizabeth took my other hand.
    "Kelly, I am proud to have you for a daughter-in-law. I haven't told you before, but I never thought it would last, you being... well, from a different sort of people." She laughed. "People with money. There, I said it. I thought you were slumming, and you proved me wrong. I've never been so happy to be wrong in my life."
    I heard Mom sob, and she sat down hard on the couch, like her legs had been cut out from under her. Dad sat beside her and hugged her, and Elizabeth and I were left standing. I didn't look back at my parents. I don't like to see my parents cry. In fact, I don't think I'd ever seen it before. Surely not when Mom's father died. The only thing I ever heard her say about that was "Well, now they've got a Mercedes dealership in Hell. But they better keep their hands on their wallets."
    Mom and her late father hadn't gotten along.
    "Ramon and... sorry, Ray, my big boy, and Elizabeth, I'm so proud of you guys I could just bust when I think about you. I wish y'all could have come to visit me more often, and I wish I'd had the guts to take a trip to see y'all on Mars, but watching y'all grow up in the videos you sent me was the next best thing, and I guess it may have to do. I love you so much."
    Grandma never even liked to go out on a boat on the ocean, and she hated to fly, so she'd never set foot on a spaceship, even though her son had helped build the first really good one. My throat was hurting something awful, and my nose was stopped up. Yeah, I was crying pretty good, I guess.
    "And Manny... oh, Manny. You've done your mother proud, young man. I can't tell you –"
    I thought I was about to burst, and suddenly the camera moved. I gasped, thinking My god, the building is falling over ! It jerked around for a while, then showed Grandma's face. She was holding the little camera at arm's length, looking into it. She looked very tired.
    "Okay, you'll get that as a message attachment if you get it at all. Let's get practical here." She set the camera on something steady and backed up a little bit. We could see her from the knees up, and I realized she was standing on the roof of the Blast-Off Tower. There were other people in the picture, none of them familiar. Grandma was wearing an automatic pistol in a holster on her hip and had a