Read Rolling Thunder for Free Online Page B

not one for reminiscence, never dwells on the past. It’s the future she’s interested in, and when I say she “has had” a life, I must emphasize thus far. No one who knows her thinks she’s going to settle down anytime soon. She was a bored little rich girl in a medium-sized town in Florida in the early twenty-first century when she met my grandfather, a poor half-white, half-Hispanic boy, and everyone assumed she was slumming. Myself, I think maybe she was. But Granddaddy Manny and his friends had a dream, and Grandma Kelly made it happen. I’ve never been sure if it was her dream, too, or merely the first thing that came along in her life that was worthy of her talents. For whatever reasons, they built the first ship to bring humans to Mars and return them to Earth, though Kelly almost died along the way.
    What surprised a lot of people was that she stuck with Granddaddy. I love my Granddaddy Manny as much as any man in the solar system—for a while there, when I was being difficult, I loved him even more than my father—but he’s not the sort of mate you’d expect for a human dynamo like Kelly.
    Maybe that’s his attraction. Look at him over there, on the other side of Gran Betty from Grandma Kelly, carefully holding her arm like she was a piece of delicate crystal. He’s gentle, courtly, a little old-fashioned. He looks older than Kelly though they are the same age. He’s balding, a little paunchy, his clothes are out of date. If you had to guess his occupation, you might say bookkeeper, or you might say hotel manager.
    Bingo! That’s where they met, at the famous Blast-Off Motel in Daytona Beach, now just a sad memory in the worst part of the Red Zone. According to Granddaddy Manny, it was not a roach motel, Betty never let it sink so low, but it was struggling. Manny grew up there, fatherless, and it was pretty much his life … and he hated it. He dreamed of being an astronaut, and through a combination of amazing pluck, luck, and sheer courage, he got to be one …
    … for a few weeks. That’s when he found that he and his best friend, Dak, were subject to crippling falling sickness, something that afflicts him to this day. Nothing to be ashamed of; it happens, though seldom to the Mars-born.
    So he ended up in hotel management, but this time as manager of the first, and for a long time the biggest and swankiest, hotel on Mars, the Red Thunder. He was good at it. Still is, though he’s largely retired now. While he was running the Red Thunder you could be assured that you would get the best, no matter what it took. And during the Martian War he performed heroically, though with little fanfare. Dad told me there were at least two hundred people, guests and employees of the hotel, who wouldn’t be alive today except for Granddaddy Manny.
    These days he serves on a lot of committees and doesn’t seem to miss working at all. He’s devoted to his two children and to his grandchildren. He was never the kind of sugar daddy who would give you anything you happened to want—and believe me, I tested him every chance I got—but if there was something you really needed, he would always be there with it.
    That guy with the neatly trimmed beard, towering over Manny and slightly behind him, the one in the tweed jacket that might as well have college professor embroidered across the back … that’s my daddykins, Ray (don’t call me Ramon) Strickland-Garcia, Ph.D. He is thirty-eight, young to be the head of the History Department at Marinaris University, but we’re a young planet and a young university. Dad is the foremost expert, anywhere, on Martian history. I am the light of his life, the sun rises and sets on me, and all the planets orbit around me. And you’d better believe I took full advantage of that during my childhood. I actually did call him Daddykins for a while there—I read it in a book somewhere, and isn’t it disgusting?—and he’d wiggle like a puppy when I did. I had him wrapped so