A Valles Marineris Dispatch Arrives Sixteen Minutes Late and Almost Full

VALLES MARINERIS — The colony's weekly dispatch reached Earth this week the way it always does now: sixteen minutes after it was sent, one way, a lag that has crept wider month over month as the two planets pull apart along their orbits. There is nothing to be done about the delay; it is the price of the distance, and the colonists have long since stopped treating a conversation as anything but two monologues posted back and forth. This week's message was mostly census. The settlement is climbing toward fifty thousand residents, the administrators reported — not there yet, but near enough that the habitat leads have begun rationing pressurized volume the way an old city rations water. "We are running out of the easy places to put people," one habitat coordinator wrote, in a message that took the full sixteen minutes to arrive and would take sixteen more to answer. The colony grows; the gulf widens; the mail, patient and late, keeps crossing it.