Tired from her “tour” and walking so much, Marsha “Pink” Krakow sits down at a conveniently placed bar in the middle of it all. She would have settled for water but all they had here apparently was alcohol by the looks of it. And also no one tending the thing. She ended up pouring her own beer, an Anheuser product, probably Busch. Only one other person in the place and that was a woman dressed like a horse sitting at a table against the wall. She figured: protection, like she had on her cow suit for same. But in truth this was the bartender on an unsanctioned break, black mare outfit merely indicating her employee status.
She dreamed of being a novelist, Star Team fan fiction to be precise we could call it. She was waiting on the publisher to judge her latest effort, a two-pronged story about the perils of asteroid belts and also belts in general, including one the Captain wanted his new favorite helmsman to start wearing. He introduced it to her by saying it could transport her to another realm altogether and that he could then join her there if they were properly synchronized. Then the asteroid belt hit and they had to laser a hole through the biggest, darkest one in order to make it out and continue toward their destination. “You see?” she said to her publisher who was interested but not sold yet, calling to ask more questions to assess the ultimate value of the book — money value obviously, the way publishers have to be these days in a dog eat dog, capitalist driven world. “It’s all Freudian (she continued). Readers would eat it up without even knowing it’s trash at the bottom. Or, to use another analogy, wouldn’t even taste the normally intolerable hot spice I added to the meal.”
Shady Lane Publishers worried about the Star Team angle, obviously a nod to Star Trek. They consulted their own team, legal in that case. No go, they said. Can’t take the risk. And so Liz was served with a big thumbs down the day after the call. And here she is. Drinking on the job because of it.
She got the Pleiades angle from a map conjunction in Pennsylvania…
… and a map conjunction in Pennsylvania.
Sunklands 