City adds Valley-wide council question to November ballot
Other chasmata warn of overreach
URBS VALLIS, Oct. 13 - The City (Urbs Vallis) Council voted 5-2 to add the question of whether to establish a Valley-wide council to oversee development of the Valles Marineris to the November ballot.
The move comes just 10 days before the official election season opens, and joins the question of whether Urbs Vallis should be renamed as Tithonia, Tithonium or Tithonia City on the ballot.
The council also voted to extend the voting franchise to all contract employees that have moved out of the worker dormitories, or Cubbies, instead of only those who have completed their first annos on Mars.
The Valley council proposal would include Noctis Labyrinthus and Orson Welles Crater and the question will appear on all ballots in the Valley-wide elections.
The approval of the ballot question came as a surprise as the other chasmata had not agreed to include it in the election.
City Council President Claude Paddingbury cited what he called increasingly chaotic development outside Tithonium Chasma in moving to have the City Council vote on adding it as a ballot measure.
“It’s gotten out of control. It’s chaotic,” Paddingbury said. “We have this one chance to develop Mars for the benefit of all who live here now, those who will come and all the new Martians to be born. Let’s get it right.”
Developments approved earlier this annos by local chasmata councils include a significant expansion at Geryon Montes, industrial development in Candor Chasma, a Melas Chasma water drilling project and the Coprates plan to extend the settlement all around the rim of its home crater.
Mars DevCo strongly supports the idea of the Valley-wide council, corporate planetary manager Elric Balvicar said at Thursday’s meeting.
“It makes sense to take a coordinated approach and avoid overlapping projects that only compete with what we already have or with plans in the works,” Balvicar told the Council meeting.
Tipping the scales?
City Councillors Eugenia Velazquez and Luca Matteo voted against the proposal.
“There is not doubt that we have built the most beautiful city on Mars,” Velazquez said. “But we shouldn’t force the other chasmata to copy our path. The local councils and residents know what is best for themselves. Organic growth will suits Mars better.”
Matteo said he agreed with the suggestions from Ius and other chasmata to establish more regular discussions, rather than creating a new governing body.
“If we force the issue, we are more likely to create resentment than cooperation,” Matteo argued. “Let’s agree to talk more often, more formally, and first let’s ask the other chasmata to accept the ballot question itself rather than just adding it.”
The councils for Noctis, Ius and the other chasmata, have agreed that regular consultation among the local councils could be beneficial but have balked at the idea of a formal body with the power to overrule local development decisions.
“We object strenuously to the idea of adding a new layer of government, removed from the actual citizens of Mars,” Ius Councillor Seamus Mitsutomi said. “We talk to our residents, our farmers and our people every day. The local councils know best.”
The long distances and the difficulties of traveling between chasmata make local government more imperative, Candor Councillor Griffin D’Armagnac said.
“Candor and Melas are a thousand kilometers from the City, Orson Welles is around 2,800. The City doesn’t really have a good idea of what moves are in our best interested,” D’Armagnac said.
The Council voted 6-1, with Valezquez disagreeing, to extend the vote to all contract employees who have been on Mars for one-full annos, cutting the residency requirement in half.
“They’ve been here long enough. They’re part of the City, and they deserve to have a say in their government,” Paddingbury said.
The move adds roughly 3,000 voters to the City rolls as workers who arrived in September 100 become immediately eligible to vote. The July 99 arrivals became eligible in July of this annos.
‘The chasmata will see this as us trying to game the vote in our own favor,” Velazquez said. “We’re aren’t building trust here.”
The voting population of the City now stands just under 100 fewer than the total for the rest of the Valley, which has a larger proportion of residents under the 11-annos (20-year-old) minimum voting age.
Some 58,356 people live in the City as of mid-September, compared with a total of 64,145 for Noctis, Ius and Geryon, Candor, Melas, Coprates and Orson Welles, which although technically outside the Valley is included in the vote.
“I get that they want to get an edge,” Candor’s D’Armagnac said, “But this kind of move so close to the election is unseemly.”
Geryon Agora offers a taste of home brew
Fiesta for the first brew pub on Mars, maybe
GERYON MONTES, Oct. 15 - The growing Geryon Agora celebrated the opening of the first dedicated brew pub for Ius Chasma, and maybe Mars, with a fiesta on the top level terrace that looks across Ius Chasma to its towering north wall.
More than a hundred residents danced to lively music from a trio featuring an accordion, guitar and vocalist performing traditional songs in Spanish and English with a bit of Martian thrown in.
The music came to halt when brew master Rick Zheng, who will manage the cooperative brewery as an outlet for brewers who so far have honed their craft at home, raised an empty glass to the crowd.
“Is anybody thirsty?” Zheng shouted to a chorus of applause. He drew the first pint of pale lager and handed it to Ius Councillor Brynn Gibby, a strong supporter of the Geryon expansion.
The second was a coffee porter for Ius Councillor Sean Mitsutomi, and the third a lager with a hint of strawberry for the musicians, who call themselves Los Jaguars del Marte.
The Agora has become a cultural hub for Geryon and Ius, offering entertainment and arts activities but Saturday’s opening gave the occasional pub crawls a permanent home.
The brew pub is located on the Geryon’s top terrance in a skylit galleria near the Cafe du Mont, a coffee and pastry shop.
“I say it’s the first real brew pub on Mars,” Zheng said as he filled glasses. “The Bottom of the Sea cantina in Melas has beer, but they don’t make it themselves.”
The brew pub was the second big opening for the Agora expansion after the Café du Mont coffee and pastry shop began welcoming customers in September.
“This is a big step forward in making the Agora a real community space for all the residents of Geryon and Ius,” Gibby said.
The Ius approval for the brew pub stands in contrast to Urbs Valllis, which continues to officially ban alcohol, although many residents make their own, and shut down an unlicensed dancing and drinking club in September.
“It makes more sense to have it out in the open and to have people who know what they’re doing serving drinks that are professionally made,” Gibby said. “And we don’t have people sneaking in cases of whiskey.”
That was a reference to a case of whiskey brought to Mars by DevCo Planetary Manager Elric Balvicar that was found last month after going missing from a high-value crate brought from Earth.
The only accordion on Mars
The Geryon expansion includes a skylight dome at the top level Agora leading to a second galleria with more retail and commercial spaces, and link the existing and newer sections of Geryon.
The wider expansion project, approved by Ius in June, aims to add terraced farms and residential space for 10,000 people along a 5km stretch of the north slope of Geryon Montes. About 11,000 people now live in Geryon and more than 12,000 in Ius, which spreads out along the lower slope and onto the chasma bottom.
The combined settlement is the second largest in the Valles Marineris after the City.
Taking a break from pouring beer, Zheng held up a glass of lager, and the crowd quieted again.
“It’s a simple thing, and delicious,” Zheng told the crowd “But it’s also part of a larger milestone. We need the whole community to make it work. We need the Ius farmers to grow the grains and hops, and we need the facilities here to brew the beer, and we need all these people to come out and celebrate.”
With that the accordion started up lively tune that had everyone putting down their glasses and picking up their feet. Dancers bounced up and down as the music and Mars’ gravity lent themselves to energetic movement.
Introducing a slower number, singer Monique Solis banged out a rhythm with wire brush on a metal bowl and tried to get the audience to clap along, though with more enthusiasm than rhythm.
On break, Solis said the music grew out of the old border region between Texas and Mexico where Spanish singing and guitars met German settlers with accordions.
“It’s Norteńo, for the North and from a dry arid land not unlike Mars, well the flatter parts of Mars,” Solis said. “Ignacio (Beck) brought the accordion from L5.”
“I got is from my dad, who got it from his dad, who brought it up from Texas,” Beck said. “It’s the only accordion on Mars and it belongs in a Geryon beer garden.”
HabTube’s third section closer to completion
Wall printers working overtime
URBS VALLIS, Oct. 12 - The third section of the Tithonium habitational tube is nearing completion with all utilities and environmental systems in place and residential areas roughed out, City Engineer Shigeru Kashira told the Planning Commission at Wednesday’s meeting.
“Within the terraces, we have completed the exterior walls for all the residences, and we’re putting in the wall printers for the final 500 or so,” Kashira said.
The three 1.6 km sections of the habitational tube serve as home for about 43,000 residents, with 15,000 living in the WestHill Terrace on the adjacent east-facing slope.
“We’ve got nearly 2,000 new residents coming down from orbit next month,” Planning Commission President and City Councillor Marcus Wu said. “We need to make sure that we have the space for everyone.”
Wu was referring to the arrival of the Earth supply and cargo train on Nov. 30, carrying 2,500 new contract workers, 1,983 of whom will be moving into the worker dormitories in the first section of the HabTube.
“Everyone is out of the Cubbies, and housing is cleaning and restocking them,” Residential Supervisor Guilia Villanova said. “We’re ahead of it this time. When the last supply train came, we still had a thousand people in the Cubbies. With the new habs in the third section, we’ve been able to clear them out.”
The new arrivals have to spend at least 200 sols in the worker dormitories because of training requirements, Villanova said.
That makes it likely that all of the hab units now under construction will be finished well before any of the new workers will be moving out of the Cubbies, Kashira said.
Wu stressed that the City is looking to move new workers into permanent accommodations more quickly.
“We’re printing up the interior walls as we speak,” Kashira said. “But once they’re fully built, we turn them over the housing to stock and furnish. All of the units should be completed by the end of January.”
Roughly 11,000 residents now call the HabTube’s third section home, even though the northern portion of it remains to be completed.
“We’ve got the farms, gardens and aquaculture ponds in place. The final canteens are being outfitted and will be brought online as the residents move in,” Kashira said, adding, “And we’ve increased security on the vacant canteens.”
City apartments come with limited cooking facilities and most residents eat their meals at assigned canteens on their residential terraces,
An unfinished canteen in the third section was being used earlier this year as a surreptitious dining, dancing and drinking club, called “City Speakeasy,” until it was shut down in September.
That canteen was located on a lower terrace that’s home to a growing bamboo garden overlooking a working aquaculture pond in an area has become part of a popular walking and running route for residents.
As the third section nears completion, the fourth HabTube section construction is proceeding on plan.
The new section will bring the total length of the Habtube to 6.4 km and its residential capacity to about 64,000. Work on the fourth section began in July.
Ground preparation has been completed for the entire 1.6 km length, and the first two ring supports for the 800m diameter tub are nearly complete since work began in July.
“Once the first two are done, we’ll start closing in that section and then start the interior work as we did with section three,” Kashira said. “We’ll have it ready well before it’s needed.”
Museum rings in planetary spectaclar three dee
A close encounters with Jupiter
URBS VALLIS, Oct. 15 - As children watched the globe of Earth pass the dinner-plate sized sphere representing Mars in the mechanical orrery above their heads, Jupiter came speeding into the room with its moons.
Jupiter’s moon Ganymede seemingly came flying out of the far wall just as part of a threedee video exhibit. The children leaned back to avoid being hit by Ganymede, only to be enveloped moments later by the Great Red Spot and Jupiter itself.
“Wow!” a boy shouted as Jupiter vanished through the wall behind them.
“Wait till you see Saturn,” astrophysicist Alexis Kimkora told the score of children at the Tithonia Museum’s Planetary Spectacular exhibit.
The exhibit mixes threedee images of planets flying through the room, with the mechanical orrery circling at a more stately pace below the ceiling.
Saturn’s shining rings came into view first, dividing Kimkora in two as they went right through her waist, followed a moment later by all of Saturn itself.
A moment later it was gone.
“What’s next?” Kimkora asked.
“Neptune!” a boy called. “Uranus!” a girl shouted.
A light blue dome appeared at the far wall and a moment later, the pale blue sphere of Uranus came into view flying right towards the children.
“S-U-N,” Kimkora said. “Saturn, Uranus, Neptune,” just as the seventh planet flew right through her and at the children.
Kimkora stepped aside as the deeper blue Neptune followed.
When it had passed, the lights came on, showing the looks of awe on the children’s faces.
“Let’s take it slower,” Kimkora said. “What do we want to see?”
“Mars! Earth! Luna!” the children called.
Earth’s big moon swung right by the children, with its craters and brightly lit settlements.
Then came Earth with its orbital habitations and factories and on the surface, the Pacific Ocean with white clouds swirling above it, as well as Asia and Australia.
It slowed and spun to show Europe and Africa, the Atlantic and the Americas and out over the Pacific again.
Kimkora showed Earth again, getting the children to call out the names of the oceans and continents, and tilted it to show first the Arctic ice and than Antartica.
“What do we know about Antartica?” Kimkora asked.
“It’s nearly as cold as Mars,” a boy replied.
The icy continent grew larger and larger until dark spots appeared, showing the famed dry valleys and a landscape that looked very familiar to young Martians.
And with that, Earth flew out of the room and Mars entered, slowing to show the Valles Marineris at the equator, with its settlements. The planet grew larger and slowed to a stop to show a detailed view of the Valley and its settlements.
“Where are we, Naureen?” Kimkora asked.
A girl stood and pointed to the western end of Tithonium Chasma, first to Ares Port and then to the City and its HabTube. The view zoomed in to clearly show the City.
Naureen looked to Kimkora and said, “Home.”
Arrivals
The May cargo and supply train arrived Thursday in holding orbit for Earth orbital facilities with 97 passengers and 72 crew. Crew returning on a transfer orbit will have plenty of time to enjoy all the blue skies and seas as the next departure is about 1-1/2 Earth years off with Mars arrival scheduled for January 103.
Calendar
Fall into Jupiter
The Tithonia Museum is hosting a holographic planetary spectacular, featuring the planets and their moons in full colors. You can drop right into Jupiter and watch the mechanical orrery overhead. Through October. East Terrace 12
Masses of mums
The Tithonia Gardens chrysanthemum display is a rainbow of autumn colors, with great big masses of flowers. Stop by the fern forest greenhouse for hourly tours. Through end October. Habtube 2, Terrace 4
City farmers' market
Going green with veggie envy? Get to the City farmer's market. Stalls available by appointment. Industrial Tube Terminal. Saturday 0900-1500
Rolling, rolling, rolling
Learn how to play the lawn bowling game of bocce (bot-chee). WestHill Terrace 2 by the terrace edge. 5 pm Tuesday, 10 am Saturday and Sunday. Message City Parks for information.
“The Secret of Olympus Mons”
Fun scifi drama threedee. Deep below the great mountain, the ancients are unhappy with their new neighbors knocking around. Just a little scary. Stage 3. Hab 1. Terrace 8 Oct.20-Oct. 26, 18:00, 20:00, 22:00
City Strings Quartet
Quartet performs selections from Dvorak’s American Quartet. WestHill Terrace 4 Friday-Saturday 19:00
The Opera Tithonia
Issues open call for performers for the Strauss opera Der Fledermaus, Stage 1 on Terrace 8 (HabTube 1). Sunday noon
City Social
Mix and mingle with new arrivals and old hands. Hab 2. Terrace 4, by Tithonia Gardens. Every Friday 17:00
- Merry Grace, lifestyle correspondent
The Chaos Courier helps you over the rough spots.
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The header photo is the iconic mosaic of the Valles Marineris hemisphere of Mars from 2,500 km above the surface taken by the Viking Orbiter. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The Candor Chaos Courier, Candor Chaos, Valles Marineris, Mars
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Copyright © 2025, M. Fitzpatrick, all rights reserved
Photomosaic: Viking Orbiter: NASA/JPL-Caltech