The Sixteen-Minute Delay: A Week of Living With Mars at Arm's Length

VALLES MARINERIS — The gulf is widening, as it does on its long clock, and the settlement along the rift has watched its conversations with Earth stretch this week toward sixteen minutes each way. At that distance a question and its answer belong to different afternoons. The colony — pressing toward 49,000 residents, fitting out its fourth pressurized district — has made a discipline of the lag rather than a lament. Nobody here waits by a screen; you send, you live, you receive. "We stopped treating a delay as a wound years ago," an administrator wrote in a dispatch that reached us this morning already hours stale. "A letter was never an insult. Why should a signal be?" The colonists batch their words, compose them like correspondence, and trust the reply to find them at whatever hour it arrives. It is, they insist, no lonelier than any long-distance love. The planets drift; the sentences lengthen; the settlement answers late, on purpose, and calls it courtesy.