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the place, you’d never guess what lies beneath.
    The favored euphemism for a graveyard is cemetery. A mausoleum if the remains are stored aboveground, a crypt if it’s underground or in a basement. A repository for ashes, or “cremains” as they like to call them, is a columbarium. Black bubble technology is fairly new, and there still isn’t consensus on what to call a place that holds humans in stopped time, but most seem to favor “vivarium.”
    Gran was still ambulatory and hooked up to only a small number of machines that easily fit on a cart. We went under a rather grand marble archway into the vivarium. The floor was white marble, stretching off into the distance. Overhead signs flashed slightly ahead of us, directing the GARCIA PARTY to DEPARTURE HALL #40 . I thought that was a rather tacky thing to call it, then we passed other halls with names like “Until We Meet Again,” “Bon Voyage!” and “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.” I kid you not. I couldn’t see Gran going for anything like that; the neutral #40 would appeal to her.
    This farewell party was probably a challenge to Grandma Kelly, who had naturally organized it, since it’s all relatively new and social standards for something like this were still in flux. What do you wear, for instance? Nothing about the party should resemble a funeral, so black is out. On the other hand, it’s not exactly a luau, either. Leave the print dress with the pineapples and surfer dudes at home. It’s a send-off, no question, but most honorees don’t really want to go, and most of the guests are at least ambivalent about the whole thing: happy she’s going to be alive, but frightened that it may, in fact, be the last time you’re ever going to see her. What do you do with that? What’s a proper emotional response? Mostly confusion, if the others here were feeling anything like I was.
    But come with me now into Departure Hall #40, which is all abuzz with people who’ve come ahead, friends of the family, waiting for the guest of honor. If I don’t introduce you to my family now, it’ll be too late, they’ll be lost in the crowd, and some of them will be drunk.
    In any gathering on Mars, if she is in the room, your attention will immediately go to Kelly Strickland. I don’t know what it is. You could call it charisma. Cameras love her. She is attractive, but not in a movie-star way. Her clothes are ordinary, and she’s worn the same hairstyle all my life. When it started to go gray she let it, and now it’s a startling silver. She’s not an imposing figure, certainly not on Mars. Maybe a little bit less than average height for an Earth girl.
    You could call it intensity. I’ve met people who can concentrate on one thing so exclusively you’d think their eyes could bore right through whatever it is they’re looking at. Grandma Kelly can do it to a whole room. She can juggle a dozen tasks at the same time and not neglect anything.
    Whatever it is, it was enough to get her elected first president of Mars, and she might still be president if she had wanted to serve a third term and keep running, despite a dedicated minority who hate her intensely. A lot more people wish we had her back, and every election time there is a “Draft Strickland” movement, which she always politely turns down. When Grandma Kelly is done with something, she’s done. Oh, she’s still political, you’d better believe it. She just concentrates on individual causes now rather than trying to lead the whole planet. I respect her tremendously, am a bit in awe of her, dislike her much of the time. But I know that if I was in trouble —any kind of trouble—she would lay down her life for me, right behind my own mother and father.
    So I guess I love her. Sort of. It’s not easy being the granddaughter of the George Washington of Mars.
    She’s sixty-three now, looks forty-five, and has had a life I can only envy, when I read about it. And that’s what I usually have to do; she’s