It was almost five years now since Marsha and I had first met, and about two since we had had our worst fight, the one that had nearly broken us up. As it was we were apart, "needing space" as they say, for a month.

Now I sat by the porthole of my cabin in the Kirullian starcruiser that was transporting my new band and I, along with our equipment and stage crew, on our galactic concert tour. As we waited for the next jump point to hurtle us through warpspace to our next gig, I stared out at the semi-boring depths of the interstellar void, in a nostalgic and slightly melancholy mood.

She had caught me ordering pepperoni on a pizza and that had been the start of it all. I had been a closet carnivore since before I met her, abstaining from all flesh but that contained in pepperoni pizzas and beef burritos, in private. My weakness for these I hid from Marsha successfully until that night, though the discovery had not been a complete surprise to her. We had frequently argued over our two different reasons for vegetarianism. Mine was economic and health-based, while hers was ethical. I could never sympathize with the animal rights rationale, bu t Marsha's two favorite songs were "Meat Is Murder" by The Smiths and "The Sexual Politics of Meat" by Consolidated. She had even objected to my band's name, The Vampires, but I made the observation that two members were women and all of us were vegetarians, so there could not possibly be any sexist-carnivorous symbolism there (if anything it was meant to be vaguely erotic). She had reluctantly conceded the point.

However, tonight was a totally different story. There I was, almost literally red-handed, telling the folks at Geppetto's to put pork flesh on my food, thinking that my beloved would not be home form her holistic dental yogic acupunture appointment for another hour. The gig was up. She went on a rampage and wouldn't talk to me for weeks.

Finally we got back together the day after Morrisey was found choked to death on a shred of kielbasa skin. Marsha was disillusioned and upset for some time, but at least our disagreement became academic when the Jeebies gave us the technology to develop the Auralyzer. With this amazing device, scientists were finally able to prove that the only creatures with souls, and thus the only creatures even remotely capable of intelligent thought or true suffering, were humans, dolphins, certain species of whales, chimpanzees, and armadillos. This blew the whole ethical viewpoint away, at least for Marsha and her friends, who had already burned all their Smiths and Morrisey CDs and were buying all the Captain Beefheart records they could find. However, a new "Save the Armadillo" campaign sprang up in Texas and caused dozens of riots and bombings. I expected the armadillo rights issue to be one of the major topics in the next presidential election.