Alien Astrology

My great granddaughter, Elisa, was doing an assignment for school where she had to interview someone who had left a home planet that they had been raised on. Every single child in her class had been born on the space station or had been born on a spaceship but raised on the space station. The teacher understood that many of the children would return to their parent’s home planet and was hopeful that discussing the transition might help these children adjust to life on a planet and where there was less diversity in species. It was unlikely that my great granddaughter would be going to my home planet of Earth. I had left Earth centuries ago and none of my children or grandchildren had returned to Earth for longer than a long vacation. My family was established here in space. That being said the majority of the population of the space station were temporary. They were diplomats, the diplomats staff, teachers, students, or an elected official. Retired spaceship crew made up another large percentage of the population. They would tend to commandeer a table in a pub or coffee shop and tell tall tales all day and night long. Typically the pub would give free drinks and food to the old-timer for providing entertainment, there was a tip jar as well. It was a good place for someone who had no family and/or no longer felt comfortable on a planet. Spend enough time on climate controlled space stations and spaceships and variable unpredictable weather that has extreme cold and hot and sometimes even snow become unbearable, also if you were in an interspecies relationship the space station was often a better fit and caused minimal drama. The Inter-Galactic Space Station has a faux sun, the filtration system simulates fresh breezes, and acres and acres of parks and greenspaces. Insects are closely monitored if they aren’t synthetic and none of them bite. The last large group in the population was the ones needed to maintain the space stations functions. In this group we had the lawyers, administrators, shop keepers, engineers, maintenance, and anyone else needed to keep a five hundred kilometer space station that had a two million soul capacity running.

The first question Elisa asked was what surprised me the most when I left Earth and came to the Inter-Galactic Space Station. I smiled and told her that Astrology represented the biggest surprise for me when I arrived. Practical and sensible humans scoff and say there is nothing to it. When I first left Earth I didn’t expect astrology to ever rear its head again. I put aside the idea that being a Capricorn had any effect on my personality or determine whether I was going to have a good day or not. I briefly mourned the idea of the pithy warnings that were a daily horoscope. But this was not to be the case, horoscopes are for the most part universal. I haven’t found a single planet and or culture that didn’t have some type of divination of the stars. I don’t say this lightly because I have been looking. I have asked every person I met from a different planet or species. The first person may or may not have known about the divination of the stars and it was common to be pooh poohed by those who “know better.”

I suppose I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was since there are several types of divination by the stars on Earth, but the naysayers had influenced me, I suppose. I had thought when I entered space and left my birth planet that I would find scientific reasoning and that rationality would reign supreme. Instead I found aliens who had telepathy, ones who could translocate at a whim, some who could see spectrums that I could only dream of, and more than I could actually imagine. Science fiction shows had also hinted at the fact that divination by the stars was rooted in ancient knowledge. Regardless, I was still surprised the first time I looked at a newssheet and found the divination by the stars section. It was just as pithy as the Earth version and I promptly started my research, by talking to the person next to me. I asked so many questions that they told me to contact the writer of the article. So I went looking and found him.

The divination of the stars writer was very helpful and could answer most of my questions. What he couldn’t answer was, was it universal Egret Timions was the name of this pithy alien astrologer. You know him as the author and creator of the Inter-Galactic Astrology system. Now I didn’t write the book that led to this system, but I was listed as a major contributor. The divisive guide to the divination of the stars regardless of where you are in the universe or galaxy was the brainchild of my and Egret’s meeting and my seemingly endless questions. I did also give Egret everything that I learned from that day. Egret managed to make sense of ten separate divination of the stars systems and combine them to a universal system that refined the originals because he was able to bring it to the source of one.

I may have given him the idea and the training manuals for several types of astrology but what Egret did with it was nothing short of astounding. Those who study their own divination that have looked at his system have almost all been impressed. There were several who informed Egret that he was nothing but an arrogant nothing that had no idea of the sanctity of what they were doing. Egret was so upset. He felt that he created a universal truth, and in many ways he had. The fundamentalists though were brutal to him. There were many that saw Egret’s genius and his system is used in every news sheet, not controlled by fundamentalists, in the Inter-Galactic Federation.

As for me my birthplace was Earth and I was a Capricorn in western astrology and a Monkey from eastern astrology. This showed my practicalness and combined it with playfulness. Egret used me as a subject and was able to explain some traits that were the antithesis of a Capricorn. Many friends who did astrology, back home, were astounded at a few of my traits that were distinctly uncapricornian, mainly my ability to leap before thinking. Although that trait has saved my bacon more times than I can count as a Inter-Galactic Temporal Master.

My father would be appalled that Astrology is a universal constant, but I have always found comfort in the constants. It doesn’t matter what type of religious building I go in, the ambiance of a hundred prayers always feels the same. Fundamentalists are just as rigid no matter where you go and there are always those that have no faith. Growing up on a planet of only one species you are often taught that you are unique and special. That there is some magic in your species, but we are more alike than we are different. For me that was most obvious in the fact that we all do astrology and we all mock it.