holiday on mars

“You only have four days left on Earth?”

She nods her head grinning.

Oh Audrey…” She tells me of her imminent trip to Mars. “…the slums are exquisite! The beggars maintain open flesh wounds to better extract charity; begging in the shade of vast sprawling apartment blocks hundreds of floors out of the red sand and into the crimson sky. Huge isolated and thriving communities of artists and studios and galleries and theatres shared by pornographers and prostitutes; geisha and girlboys; covens of vampires and pothead pagans and peyote cults. Sheer demand for variety prevents the formulation of popular culture and the media empires still thriving on Earth stay here, their suffocating presence quickly rejected by the people of Mars as boring, dangerous and infectious waste. There are no politicians on Mars, all applicants for public office are murdered in the manner of their choosing. There are no children on Mars as no human under the age of sixteen may live there. A growing population of asylum seekers from the hostile, oppressive atmosphere of the long hijacked mother planet: smugglers and pirates; junkies and drunks and stoner punks; queens and dykes and transvestites; models and make-up artists and performers; writers and labourers and engineers; straight-edge Zen Buddhists; sorcerers of demonic pleasure and endless sunshine; alcoholic hair metal heads; refugees from “Friendly Finance” state-administered market-driven education systems; patrols of wild boys camped on the edge of the blue desert.