At Fourteen Minutes Each Way, Mars Learns to Speak in Letters

VALLES MARINERIS (relayed) — The signal from the canyon settlements now takes about fourteen minutes to reach Earth, up from twelve at midsummer, and the roughly fifty thousand residents of Valles Marineris are quietly relearning a lost human skill: the letter. With the planets pulling apart on their long arc, a spoken exchange means nearly half an hour between question and reply, so the colony has drifted back to composed, complete messages that expect no instant answer. "You stop interrupting when interrupting costs fourteen minutes," said a habitat communications officer whose dispatch reached this desk after that delay. Families on both worlds now send finished thoughts rather than half-sentences, and the colony's schools have made letter-craft a subject again. The gulf will only widen toward year's end, and the settlement plans for it as a fixed fact of life, not a fault. "Earth thinks the delay is our problem," the officer wrote. "We think it made us more careful with each other. We recommend it."