Starmaker
"Ruled by constellations... Do you think it really could be true?"
Miang purses her lips, the barest hint of a knowing smile. "Well, not ruled. One can never be ruled by something so abstract, should one be or become aware that it's hovering above their head."
A careful statement - one that allows for capitalists and theocracies. One that even believes in the basic power of people. It doesn't believe too much, though. Miang didn't need to call astrology a frivolous device; Galea would have been just as pleased to debate with an opposing viewpoint.
The circumstances of one's birth are not, indeed, completely irrelevant. It's a pithy bit of wisdom, but still, every person is born a separate being, chanced into the framework of the world by a myriad of defining structures.
For there to be only twelve groups into which one is deposited, categorized, must be folly. Surely. It doesn't serve to...to prove anything. There's no new information, there.
And then, what if you don't act according to your astrological sign? Are you an anomaly? Or are you just...quite normal?
"What would be your star system, Miang? If you were to create such a world."
Of course, it's the pettiest of possible questions to concern a matriarch in that point of position, but as Galea has no intention of doing such a thing, she's certainly free to ponder it.
Miang's answer, in fact, is so quick that Galea has to wonder if she hasn't already diagrammed it out, flowcharted the genesis of an ark ship's wet dream with the steely confidence of a master.
"One star for every individual born. They would be tied to the path of that star for the entirety of their life, and as soon as they had passed, another would be born to take their place. In this way, each newfound cluster of people, intertwined via the human charm of happenstance meeting and social networks, would be unique, but all personality and charisma in the world would be balanced against the stars I had already plotted for its inhabitants."
Well. Not wonder if she hasn't. Conclude that she clearly has, and with a vengeance.
Galea reserves further opiniated comment. "And the names of these stars?"
Miang nods, sterile in her approach but not clinical. "The Contact. The Antitype. The Scar. The Tear. The Blossom. The Seed."
"They come in pairs?"
"Balance," says Miang, stressing the repetition of her earlier thrust. "Always balance."
"None are unpaired?"
"Only the Complement." Miang smiles. "But then there is the Emperor, which does not actually rule. The Minister; the Scientist and the Soldier."
Despite Miang's enthusiastic enumeration, Galea realizes that the tarot roles do not go on forever. The number of people, individuals, lifeforms permitted in Miang's toy world is strikingly limited.
So far, twelve buckets of personality are greater than eleven name-purchased souls.
"What about the four elements?" Galea wonders, pretending naïvete. "How do they figure in? Or do they?"
Is she really so entranced by the sight of Miang speaking malevolence to absolute control and total order? This world has no people, and so in that way, examined via ratio, it's quite tightly locked down. Only as expansive as Miang's mechanistic imagination.
"Oh, yes. There will be elements," Miang replies, with an eerie timeliness, to the question Galea had nearly forgotten she'd asked. "We are only so capable of engineering alternative worlds."