From Valles Marineris, a Seventeen-Minute Letter About the Rain

A dispatch from the Valles Marineris settlement arrived this week seventeen minutes after it was spoken, the one-way gap having widened through the autumn as the planets draw apart, and it carried a subject the colony's fifty thousand residents have followed with unusual attention: Earth's water. A hydrology technician in the settlement, relaying a message meant for a sister in a Sahel corridor, said the delay makes the following strange. "By the time your worry reaches me, the morning you worried about is over," she said. The colony, which passed fifty thousand residents in September, recycles every drop it holds and watches the home planet ration what it once wasted. Idris Nakasone reports that the settlement's council has asked Earth agencies for corridor data not out of policy but out of kinship — a settlement built on scarcity, reading the news from a world discovering it. The letter closed, seventeen minutes late, the same way each of them has this autumn: it rained here once. Tell me it still does there.