Valles Marineris Logs Its Best Harvest Yet, and Waits the Usual Fourteen Minutes to Tell Us

VALLES MARINERIS — The settlement strung along the great rift brought in its largest hydroponic harvest to date this week, and the news reached Earth the only way news from Mars ever does: late, this cycle a little over fourteen minutes each way, arriving already finished. By the time we read the administrator's bulletin, the celebration on the far end was hours old and the crops were already in the stores. The colony, now pressing past 49,000 residents and fitting out a fourth pressurized district, has long since stopped treating self-sufficiency as remarkable. Every calorie eaten on Mars is grown in Martian light under Martian glass; nothing edible is shipped across the gulf anymore, and hasn't been for years. "We earned the right to find this boring," the administrator wrote, "and then we remembered we shouldn't." The lag makes every triumph a letter from the recent past. This week the letter said the greenhouses are winning. We answered, into a delay we'll never feel, that we were glad.