The Twelve-Minute Delay Is Now Eighteen, and Mars Has Made Peace With It

VALLES MARINERIS — The settlement's dispatches reach Earth eighteen minutes late this week, up from twelve in the summer, and the drift is only beginning; as the planets pull apart along their orbits the lag will lengthen toward its far end before it ever shortens again. For the fifty thousand people strung along the rift, this is not a problem to be solved but a fact to be lived, and they have built an entire culture around it. No one on Mars waits for an answer, because a real-time answer is a thing the physics does not permit. Decisions are made whole, on the spot, by the people present, and only reported afterward across a gulf no message can shorten. "Earth still occasionally forgets and asks us a question expecting a reply," said one colony administrator in this morning's bulletin, arriving with its patient eighteen-minute stamp. "We answer as if writing a letter, because that is what it is. We decided everything that mattered before the letter reached you." It is a whole society organized around the certainty that every reply arrives late — and the quiet competence of a people who long ago stopped minding.