Turn Left at Venus

by Inez Baranay

  What if. A magic tree in an enchanted forest, you climbed up into a world where people were not known foremost by being female or male. Or what if, you went on a voyage and into unmapped territory and there in deepest Africa or South America or outer Mongolia you came across people like no other; you, who were a traveller from the known world, came across, were captured by, were peaceably discovered by, people who did not divide themselves as men and women. Did or did not divide themselves in other ways, classes, castes, trades, time of life.

  Or what if. Beyond the moon, beyond the known, on other worlds, other planets.

  A traveller from Earth. Or give Earth another name, it is and is not the world we know, it exists in dimensions outside of our knowledge of space and time.

  If Jules Verne had thought about even further away.

  Ada lived on Lueshira for those months, she was learning her way around there, the work of her creation was to go there and learn to see it and to transmit the knowledge of its customs and beliefs. She herself was the stranger from Earth who found this world where things were so very different even while moving about on an Earth-like atmosphere meeting creatures who were near enough to Earth humans – perhaps that was an illusion the technology could create, like the illusion of speaking the same language made possible by a translation device.

  Translation, that’s how the device began, to do translation, then it emerged as a gizmo that could find out anything already known and send a message to anyone. But it was barely described, it wasn’t dwelt upon, it was, perhaps too much so, just a convenience for the plot and setting. The society on Lueshira was technologically advanced. With technology used for the greater good, which meant freely available knowledge and communication.

  In the interview apparently she agreed that one day in the future the device would be a real thing. She didn’t actually care all that much. It was real on Lueshira. Ada didn’t then think she was in the prediction business and will not think so when prediction will be presented as a possibility, an interpretation of her intentions. She never thought she was writing about the future.

  Ada didn’t go to the Club of All Nations anymore. She went one time, went by herself, and only sat in the shadows. She did not want to dance. Someone approached her, to ask her to dance, and she made herself invisible, the man paused, looked confused for a fleeting second, covered up, went past her as if she were not there. Different people were coming. The music wasn’t the same. Charles had gone to Paris. Les Messieurs weren’t there. She didn’t go back.

  Ada was happy, in a way, or something like it. She sat at the card table writing and writing, filling up the exercise books she purchased from the newsagent, who said, ‘How many stories are you writing? The people who come in here – I could write a book if I had the time.’ She made up a world she might want to live in and lived in it by making it up. When she left her room the streets outside looked strange to her, at first as if she had stepped into someone else’s invention in which she had to find her way. Ada had to make her own version of those streets, that world, in order to move in it.

  Ada was back in their city in their neighbourhood back in her rooming house across from the one where Leyla had lived.

  But Leyla wasn’t there.

  Maybe her absence was a very present absence.

  Ada got her job back, you could get a job just like that, even if they knew you sometimes forgot not to daydream.

  Ada had previously assumed that she and Leyla would go on and on, return to Sydney together. Once, they had talked about opening a fashion shop together, full of the best beautiful things, bags and bangles and scarfs.

  But Ada had that wrong, that picture of her near future.

  There’d been a rupture, a fissure, and she would only figure it out later, always later, always one day, when it was ready to be known.

  It’s not as if without Leyla she didn’t know what to do with this new-found sense of possibilities.

  And Ada had to ask herself this: could she be writing as she was if not for that absence?

  Even to ask the question.

  Ada was discovering now she needed solitude, needed to know who she was when there was no one else to tell her.

  Not that she ever knew this exactly.

  She needed to write.

  What if there were no man and woman, no masculinity and femininity, no maleness and femaleness, what if there were simply people, what if there were a world where this were true, what if there was another world. What if people on this world became a man or a woman only once in a while, for only a while, sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, perhaps it could be a choice, no choice could be seen as a better choice or more popular choice, the fact of sex would be unremarkable. No one’s behaviour, personality, destiny was ever linked to any of their brief experiences of having one of two sexes, or was ever considered to be so linked.

  Two. She stayed with two. She didn’t really think about it. Her premise was that there wasn’t fuss and discrimination about it. She had not imagined a premise of more than two.

  On this other world the way things were there would seem unremarkable, would seem the only way they could be, unless someone there started to wonder: what if any of us remained being a man or a woman. What if someone from here from Earth from the world I know from a world where every human being was known as a male or a female, what if they went to this other world and had to have things explained to them, had to find there was another way to exist, had to try to explain – to those others who could only be made baffled, unbelieving – why our ways seem so normal and natural?

  How does the visitor from Earth arrive at this other world? Is it a matter of traveling through space, traveling in a spaceship? Should Ada try to describe the way a spaceship leaves Earth like Jules Verne, but what can she add to the story by such describing, which would require a new education in mechanics and physics. Jules Verne didn’t care about being accurate about the amount and type of fuel they needed. He was showing men keen to invade and conquer.

  A writer can say ‘the spaceship took off’, or she can stop what she’s doing and find out how a spaceship might plausibly be described, or we can infer that the spaceship took off by the landing of a person from Earth on this other world. Where is it? Look up into the infinity of the universe that you cannot see all of even in a clear night sky, out in the mountains, say, where you see a clear sky without city lights. Remember in Bali, two weeks after the full moon the clear night full of stars.

  Do you go from Earth in a machine, a very advanced flying machine, you head up into the sky, into the firmament, into the outermost atmosphere maybe only recently discovered, go straight ahead, make a left turn at Venus, find this world, this planet, one of our planets in our solar system, or one beyond, just how advanced does this flying machine have to be, and what about time and the speed of light and relativity and laws of physics; should she choose a known planet or call hers Lueshira and say it is a planet beyond the known.

  Ada walking around the streets of Kings Cross, thinking about these things, watching ideas desire to manifest as words. She did not ever want to describe what she barely saw around her, the dun-coloured world, she only wanted to describe the conjurings in her mind.

  Or what if you discovered this planet, this other world, not by a flying machine invented by people on Earth with science and mechanics, but some other means, means that belong to this story. There is no taking off in a spaceship, there is no left turn at Venus, there is an arrival by occult acts of rending the screen of timespace, you can say this has been, don’t say ‘discovered’, don’t say ‘shown’, say it has been available for some time or don’t even say that, it’s part of the reality of this world and for now you don’t say whether aliens brought it and made it available. And there is no need to dwell on the means by which anyone got anywhere, or why the explorer from Earth is a woman – no, the explorer had better remain a man, a man from our own times or not very far ahead, a world where explorers even if they hav
e not always been men, what about Amelia Earhart what about Gertrude Bell, still the word ‘explorer’ means a man, and it’s better if a man asks what he’s going to have to ask. A woman wouldn’t, what, she wouldn’t have as much to lose, that was Ada’s strange-feeling thought, strange feeling-thought, forming an idea about the power of men being related to the way sex was organised in all cultures.

  ‘I didn’t even know the word “binary”,’ Ada tells Noemi.

  Even while Ada’s thoughts had touched on the consideration that maleness and femaleness were not discrete but on a kind of continuum, a scale she would have said then.

  Or whatever she would have said then.

  Noemi says, ‘It was the 1950s, even I didn’t say “binary” yet.’

  Ada tells Noemi, ‘I still had no idea how readers could make of the book I wrote a different book.’

  Noemi says, ‘You wrote a book that no one else had read. Then there were readers and they changed the book. The meaning of a text becomes what people say it is. Increasingly people learn about a book by what is said about it, not by going to the book.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Baby, I write about architecture. It’s the same thing. Also, architects.’

  ‘It can’t be the same.’

  ‘People ask them to describe their style. Who inspires you. What advice you’d give. Like they’d know.’

  ‘I never wanted to answer questions like that.’

  ‘And so you never did.’ Noemi makes it seem as if there is no need to doubt that Ada’s refusal to be an author anyone could interview was the right decision. As if she had it all worked out and that was to her credit. It’s good to love someone who can see you like this. For Ada’s decision was made long ago, and since then she was honour-bound to renew it.

  What would Ada call it? A gadget, a gizmo, a widget, a little machine? Make up a word for it? A zeko, an unkot? ‘Contraption’ sounded clumsy, ‘utensil’ sounded crude, ‘instrument’ sounded wrong, too much like a measuring tool. ‘Gadget’ sounded inessential. ‘Gizmo’ sounded like you didn’t know how it worked. ‘Machine’ sounded cumbersome; these devices were not so much carried about as attached to or integrated with the Lueshiran body. ‘Device’ for now, finish a draft, can change it later. Ada learned about the devices everyone on Lueshira used, daily, naturally; she learned that the device, its use, meant that everyone lived in part in the other world, the world of their connection, a world where all knowledge is stored and can be accessed, a non-material world.

  What about personalities, did they exist on Lueshira, why yes – cold warm flirtatious reserved; some people had more talent, skills or interest in some fields than others, abilities varied but, this is what The Stranger found, there was no sex to hang such differences upon. The idea of any characteristic or ability having to do with the sex of a person did not exist. No one was always the same sex.

  He worked on a newspaper and they said hello if they ever met on the stairs or the landing, must have said a bit more than that. One day, Ada was looking for her key at the front door and suddenly he was there with his key in his hand. ‘Funny time for you to be out,’ remarked Ada, the kind of thing she might venture to say in case of an interesting reply. Or, not knowing what she was meant to say, said what she thought.

  ‘I’m on a different shift now,’ the boy said, opening the door and waiting for her to pass first. Freckle-faced, fair-haired, something innocent about him, an Australian country boy determined upon becoming a city boy, moved here after a job at a small-town newspaper. Kind of a migrant also, then. Relocating for his sentimental education, for the loss of illusions, for his great expectations.

  Ada said something lame about his newspaper job, asked, ‘Are you bringing us important news today?’

  ‘I’m just learning,’ the boy told her.

  ‘I’m just learning too,’ Ada found herself saying. He gave her a curious glance, this boy who noticed things.

  Ada must have asked him, or would he have wanted her to know. ‘Police rounds now,’ he said. He’d had a cadet-level desk job before.

  He must have known how much a lot of people around here were not fond of the cops. Very not.

  Ada, for instance. There was something she was angry about. And now she felt the anger.

  ‘Do you write anything about the police who ignore certain lawbreaking and who beat and terrorise private citizens who are hurting no one and enjoying each other’s company in private? Beat them, bash them,’ she said emphatically, even aggressively.

  She didn’t wait to hear if he had anything to say, went on to her room.

  Anger, fury, even a helpless feeling, for the world was vile.

  ‘You’ll never come back,’ they had said to Charles as he packed for Paris.

  Jack told them all: ‘As long as you can say, oui-oui Monsieur, you’ll be all right’.

  Eventually he did come back. Sure, he was inspired, sure it was all merveilleux.

  But. In Paris, he was nobody. Charles said, ‘Please, my work is as good as theirs, but … but to be in the fashion business there, I would have to get in on the ground floor and spend a lot of time down there. Back in Sydney I’m my own boss.

  ‘Also,’ he said, ‘I have a Harbour view.’

  You come back here, you really appreciate it. People were starting to say that.

  That was the only time Ada saw him. Then he didn’t answer the doorbell and he didn’t answer his telephone and she expected to run into him in Macleay Street but never did, and one day Ray came into the bar. Ray was the one who told her and that’s why Ray, later.

  Charles, soon after he came back from Paris, exulting in its freedom, its openness, was going to hold on to those feelings right here in this city in his Salon with its view, and those weekend parties, private parties, for those who wanted to go.

  The cops raided a private party and set about bashing men they first put in handcuffs.

  No one knew what happened to Charles after that for a long time.

  He never recovered from his injuries. They’d bashed his head in.

  Charles was a present spirit.

  What about on Lueshira?

  Where all that evil was something so other … How could that be, wouldn’t there have to be a historical reason? Something some reason something that meant in this utopia people had to know about it, about evil. The worst thing about knowing about evil was wanting revenge on an evildoer and being led into evil that way.

  In Bali they told her there must be evil for there to be existence at all.

  ‘What are you learning?’ the newspaper boy asked her when they ran into each other again.

  Ada remembered. ‘To write a novel.’

  ‘I hope to learn that myself one day,’ he said with such an intense mix of shy reluctance and certainty that she believed him.

  They were at the newsagent’s, both picking out books from the shelves of paperbacks. Registering this fact at the same time. They both read books. And had made their secret signs.

  ‘Learn about life first,’ Ada told him; she must have had the idea he wanted advice, or maybe she later thought about what she could have told him.

  ‘I’m learning,’ said the boy. Then he said, ‘I might not always agree with what they do on police rounds, but it’s an education.’

  All right, he won’t be there forever.

  Ada held out her hand, asking his permission to see what he had taken from the shelf. She nearly laughed. ‘So you’re the one I have to beat to get these.’

  ‘I read other things too,’ he said, ‘I read Dickens.’

  ‘But there’s something else you want from books.’

  He tried to say what that something was. ‘Other worlds. Crazy weird lives.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ada encouragingly. He meant the possibility that things could be otherwise, the possibility that something imagined well enough has an existence. She herself was encouraged to see this.

  He returned one of the paperb
acks to the shelf. ‘Don’t you want it?’ Ada asked.

  ‘I’ve read that one.’

  ‘Any good?’

  ‘If you like wacko space monsters.’

  She took hold of it firmly in a way that made them grin at each other.

  Ada thought, he is my future reader, he might be the one in the future reading the book she is at present writing.

  Back in her room Ada looked at the paperbacks she’d brought home. She opened the one the young reporter had recommended.

  It was a story about monstrous multi-tentacled creatures from outer space who kidnapped Earth women to breed a hybrid monster that could survive on all planets and become a new master race.

  On the back page there was an announcement from the publisher, inviting authors to send in their manuscripts.

  Really?

  To an address in San Francisco.

  Soon, Ada wrote The End after the last page of her own book. She typed it all out freshly, making a carbon copy for herself.

  16

  PORTAL: THE POINT OF SCIENCE FICTION

  As if the point of science fiction were to accurately predict the future, as if a book should be judged on how much it “got it right” , as if prediction were the point of the enterprise.

  Of course it’s the point. Fiction exists to inform reality.

  Fiction invented our reality. We live in A.L.Ligeti’s world.

  Why do people usually see the future in terms of its gadgets? It’s like the future is only about applied science, technology. What about a future in terms of social and personal change? The books about that are a kind of different genre. Not dystopias of totalitarianism. Instead, futures of tolerance and inclusiveness. That’s why I read Ligeti.

  Ligeti’s future is our present and it’s not quite as foreseen. For example, Ligeti didn’t predict cell phones, but who had? No one, right up to the 1980s.

  The device everyone has on Lueshira is a kind of cell phone, though it is never clear how they actually work. But you can contact anyone using it.