A Question Sent to Mars Comes Home Changed, and the Colonists Prefer It That Way

VALLES MARINERIS (via relay) — I sent the colony a simple question this week — what does the delay do to you? — and the answer came back sixteen minutes late and, somehow, larger than the question. On Mars, they explained, no conversation is instant, so no conversation is careless. You cannot interrupt someone sixteen minutes away; you cannot fire back a reflex and take it home. You compose, you send, you wait, you receive a reply written by a person who had sixteen minutes to think before they answered you. "Earth talks over itself," one settler wrote. "We talk *to* each other, because the gulf will not let us do anything else. The lag we complained about for years turned out to be the only thing that made us listen." A crowded, instantaneous Earth — twelve billion people all replying at once — has half-forgotten this patience, they suggest, and does not miss what it cannot feel. The colonists do not want the delay closed. Slowness, on the rift, has become a form of courtesy. The question I sent came home changed for the better, and they would not have it any other way.