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bubble sunglasses except for the thicker frames and wings, and the strap that keeps them on your head. Stereos are tough, and not as expensive as they used to be, but you don't want them dropping on a hard floor too often at four hundred euros a lens.
    So Dad was standing and staring at the wall opposite the "view" windows, which was also vidpaper but divisible into different electronic windows. He had a dozen of them going, his eyes darting back and forth.
    Dad isn't an imposing figure, in his slightly stuffy and definitely out-of-fashion navy blue suit with the Red Thunder emblem on the chest. He's of medium height, getting a little thick around the waist, and his dark hair has receded right to the top of his head and is gray on the sides. Once we were standing side by side at a mirror so he could see how tall I'd grown (I topped out at six-foot-six, which is not tall for a Martian child – the low gravity lets us shoot up like beanstalks – and I wasn't even Mars-born; no telling how big some of those kids are going to grow), and he muttered "I used to look like Jimmy Smits. Now I look like Cheech Marin." I didn't know who either of those guys were, but I googled them and I have to say he wasn't entirely wrong.
    Mom, on the other hand...
    My parents are different in so many ways I have sometimes wondered what it is that keeps them together. Dad's a Green, Mom's a Red. Dad hates stereos. Mom... well, whoever first invented the wearable computer, he probably had my mother in mind. Mom has always got fifteen things going at once. She has always had the newest hardware, the newest programs. Dad says she changes computers more often than a lot of people change their underwear, and Mom says he should change his underwear more often. Then they laugh. Usually.
    She was on the move, which is the normal state for her. Elizabeth says that when Mom isn't on the move, she's either sleeping, sick, or dead, and she never allows herself to get sick and doesn't even sleep much.
    She doesn't show any marks from her hectic lifestyle. Her face has a few more wrinkles than she had in those pictures from the Red Thunder days, there are streaks of gray in her hair, and her skin is much paler than it used to be when she lived in the Florida sunshine because she never has time for sitting under a sunlamp. Of course, wearing a stereo, you can get all sorts of work done sitting down, but if it's a tan you're trying to get done, you'll end up looking like a raccoon. But even working on the stereo she's a multitasker and a pacer. Simply working on the stereo when she could be doing something else at the same time is never enough for her, so she's usually in movement around the apartment or her office doing physical chores or getting from point A to point B, even if there was nothing wrong with being in point A in the first place. Dad says that when they were going together on Earth he hated to be in a car when she was driving. She was always doing several things at the same time, like talking on her cell phone, thumbing the controls of her pocket computer, eating a sandwich because she didn't have time to stop for lunch... "I never actually saw her painting her toenails while she was driving," Dad told me, "but I wouldn't have been surprised." She banged up a few fenders. Luckily, her father was a car dealer with a body shop.
    Their arrangement seems to be that he runs the hotel and she runs everything else. She pretty much does what she wants to do, which probably would have been harder for my Latino dad if he'd grown up with a father in the house. He doesn't seem to mind. When something is really, really important to him he will speak up about it, and Mom will work out a compromise and make a promise, and that seems to satisfy him. He knows Mom usually gets her way, but he also knows she never breaks a promise.
    "Elizabeth, Ramon, you have to start packing, right now," Mom said. I've been Ray , had started insisting on it, since I was ten but every