Free Red Lightning by John Varley

class.
    Dad doesn't talk about it a lot. I know it annoys him to think back about it, he'd prefer to focus on the future, but I know it was also hard to have a rich and beautiful girlfriend. I think he wasn't sure of her love for a long time. I think sometimes even now he's not sure of it, though they've been together for years and years.
    Evangeline's family was working-class, no doubt about it, and it clearly bothered her. She went to Nelson Mandela High School, which I'm told is a fine place, certainly better than most public schools on Earth. I know they have a better basketball team than my school does; they beat us every year. Well, they have a larger enrollment. Basically, they have everybody who doesn't go to one of the private academies that the more-well-off Martians, like my family, can afford.
    Money's a bitch. I'm sure glad we have it, but it doesn't bring people together, except within their own class, and that's not good, is it?
    It's especially bad when you think you might be falling in love, and the girl you want to be with is so ashamed of her baby brothers she can hardly bear to look at you.
    I'd have to talk to Elizabeth about it.
     
    Even for a trip as short as Mars to Earth, you get into a shipboard routine very quickly. Pretty soon, it seems like you've been doing it all your life.
    Memorial and prayer services replaced the normal shows for the first twenty-four hours. But you can only mourn so long, so normal entertainment was resumed fairly quickly. The comedians in the lounges even found they were getting more than the normal amount of laughs, though the audiences were smaller. Not all the passengers were going back to look for survivors, of course. The rest maintained a respectful distance from the emergency passengers at their dinner tables, but they had paid a lot of money for their tickets, and you couldn't expect them to give up their merrymaking just because some people had died on Earth.
    But how many? That was the question. We knew we would not be likely to know much about specific survivors until we got there, but we'd expected to learn more about the scope of the disaster in the first day or two.
    It didn't happen.
    That was almost as shocking as the disaster itself, in some ways. We live in the information age, we're used to a steady stream of it. Sure, in the first hours after a big event the news is dominated by rumors or flat-out inaccuracies, but usually the true story begins to emerge fairly soon.
    We were learning some things. No tsunami can keep helicopters and airplanes out of the air. But governments can.
    Many of us were gathering in a Starbucks near the observation lounge that had been converted into a meeting place that was more or less restricted to those of us "going home" to see about our loved ones. We found it was better to sit together and watch the news on the multiplex screens on the wall rather than explore in the isolation of our personal stereos. The coffee was better, too.
    It was certain that at least half a million people were dead. There were rumors that the various governments involved, in particular the United States government, were suppressing casualty figures while they frantically tried to find a way to cope with the situation. There was no question that it would be handled, in time, that all the bodies would be gathered up and disposed of – there were rumors of mass graves, of vast funeral pyres. There was no question that all the debris would eventually be bulldozed out of the way and burned or recycled.
    One big question was, who was going to pay for all this? And another question: What are we going to do with the survivors who have lost everything, including the clothes on their backs? Until somebody had a better idea of the answers to those questions, those in power were trying to limit knowledge of just how bad the problem was. That was the buzz on the wires, anyway. And that, of course, just made the rumors buzz all the louder, and made them more