Turn Left at Venus Page 3

  The Space Traveler arrives in an Earth-like world where some Otzies are preparing for their Going Out party.

  In this world, apparently occupied only by women, one of its rituals is this marvellous party where all those who are ready gather to meet their end in the way of their long tradition.

  Apparently it’s a feature of Ligeti’s writing, worlds with only women, or with people of indeterminate or changing gender.

  I’m relying on some commentary for the rest of my account or precis here.

  The Space Traveler tries to think of all the objections there would be in her own world, and finds them answered here.

  ‘People should have their families around them at their deathbed.’ But in this world people do not have conventional families. ‘No one should die before natural causes take them away.’ That one’s too illogical to pause to make objection. Logic, please, people. Also compassion. What else? ‘It will never be legal.’ Never is a tricky word; once people said ‘never’ about women prime ministers; you probably said you’d never get this old, never stay in at night, never accept that perfection is impossible, never find that you seem to have stopped dancing.

  But then someone young and apparently healthy turns up at the gates of that season’s Going Out party. Which has not happened before. And the society of women finds that it has not foreseen the need to draw the lines. And the story ends.

  And is continued.

  In its new lease of meta-life in the online era.

  An account of the ups and downs of its visibility. Obscurity (lesser-known short-story collection), rediscovery (internet), recasting (teachers, courses, virtual communities).

  Fanfiction, the story written from the point of view of the young woman who turns up to join the party.

  Theories: The big loud generation found, to the same old surprise, that they would die and wanted to talk about it. Medical advances, longer life expectancy, consequences.

  I’ve had this conversation with friends who looked after their mothers in their long years of dementia, decline, dependency; witnessed the change of personality, the long stage where no recovery is at all possible and everyone knows they are only waiting for that sweet release, relief – certainly for the carers and no doubt mostly for the sufferer who cannot be having a life of quality. And cannot make their wishes known, if they have any any longer. In just the past two years, three of my closest friends have faced this ordeal, ‘ordeal’ being my word not theirs; only one of them admitted she hoped her mother, totally disabled by now in every way, would die soon. The tough old one hung on a good while longer than anyone could have imagined or hoped for. It was impossible to know if she even had an inner life.

  Not for me, we declare to each other, do not ever let that happen to me. Those mothers had their daughters to look after them, one way or another, in all cases by paying for professional care.

  There are machines that keep people alive who never asked for them.

  No one has to look after me.

  Promise me, I say to one friend after another, you will not let me reach such a stage. No one has actually promised. No one can make themselves responsible for this.

  My own mother died at an age younger than I am now. She did not linger long in life after the diagnosis of cancer, but long enough for us to reach a belated mature love for each other.

  I brought to consciousness that I had always thought my mother’s final age told me how long I had. So, now? What should I do with my extra life?

  ‘Going Out’ first appeared in a 1970s collection of stories of various lengths, some less than a page. In all of them, The Space Traveler, a woman, travels around the universe or anyway in outer space to various other worlds to inquire into their beliefs and practices.

  In one of the reviews or discussions, I read that there’d been a group IRL that had actually tried to organise one of these Going Out parties. They’d been thwarted in various ways, this thwarting a cause, it was argued, of more distress than the chosen peaceful (or riotous) death would have brought.

  I suppose once for some the idea of a perfect end was to die in battle or at any sudden deliverance. Once you wouldn’t have had so much dread, for decline is worse than death, and now there is a lot of enforced decline on people who’d rather be dead, if they can even have a coherent wish at all.

  I realised I had read one of Ligeti’s books a long time ago. It was a later one, the one where a person changed reality by their dreams, changed not only their own reality but the entire consensual reality shared by everyone where they lived. Something about it was so convincing and enthralling that I remember going about for a long time captivated by the thought that everything that seemed real might be someone’s latest dream, my own memory too having been freshly created. We were all in a world where true previous realities were forgotten, extinguished, or maybe turned up in our own dreams.

  In The Dreamer’s dreams she remakes the whole world and upon awakening the whole world has in fact been remade, and only The Dreamer retains the memory of what the world was the day before and the day before that. Everyone in each newly created world has a subjective reality of a long history in that world, long memories of the past, cultural history, all of it, and would not think it possible it had all just been created. Anyway, somehow this Dreamer is under someone’s malign influence, and she’s made to dream a certain way, in order to benefit only the malign one, and also The Dreamer, in a way that would make her self-interest a matter of confusion. Eventually The Dreamer finds a way to dream a fair and kind world where all the iniquities have been undone.

  I might read that one again one day.

  If Ligeti is still alive she’s a lot older than me. I did sort of assume she was she. Or I knew that from something that came out some time ago. The years await. With me or without me. There was a fortune teller or otherwise designated holy-man-ish clairvoyant in India who would tell you when you were going to die. I never wanted to go to him, not necessarily because of not wanting to know but more because it would be impossible to 100 per cent believe what you are told. Impossible to check the outcome of all his predictions. And suppose all has been correct, it’s still not logical to say he will always be correct. So you just accept you can’t know for sure.

  Unless something, some event or knowledge, and you do know. Know the actual certainty of death so close you are moving into the embrace, smelling its breath.

  The possibility of quite some years ahead of being glad to be alive, not ready to go. All the pleasures. And always something new in the news.

  There’ll always be something new, whenever you go, whatever state you’re in.

  Even if you get decrepit. Still you’ll remain curious. Or perhaps – maybe more so – all interest will be dulled, perhaps by the knowledge you’re not going to know the next bit of any story at all.

  Even if there’s something like a soul it will be part of the one great soul and not a single individual consciousness.

  Or, whatever version is true in the reality simulation you live in.

  Or, nothing anyone can have imagined.

  Or, really nothing, just nothing.

  A new version of the film of Ligeti’s first book is being made. For TV this time. There are hashtags about the casting. I think I saw that news before but didn’t take much notice at the time (signal, noise).

  It will be interesting to read the book first then one day see both film versions.

  I could keep going on clicking on every name in these stories. Not really.

  I don’t know now why I never read Turn Left At Venus.

  There are books that you feel you know without actually having read them. (That’s one definition of a classic.)

  Ligeti has written more books in this Lueshira series, where other Earth people come to Lueshira and where different aliens arrive there. Which I’d quite like to look at also but probably won’t, there is just too much to read.

  But can start something new. Feel like reading.

 
; I should read Turn Left At Venus.

  What’s wrong with now? I could just see what it’s like and see if I want to finish it some other time.

  I have obtained the book within seconds. Here’s my night given to A. L. Ligeti.

  6

  THE MEANING OF THE STORIES OF THE DARK SAGA

  “I inquired into the meaning of the stories of the Dark Saga,” The Stranger wrote in his reports. “My primary informant explained that these stories were created by the wise ancestors, and that they are complete fiction.”

  The stories in the Dark Saga told the Lueshirans that there are worlds where viciousness and greed are their driving forces, where the powerful become addicted to power, never having enough of it, crazed by the need to constantly increase their power, not caring who might suffer in consequence, perhaps even satisfied by others’ suffering as if those others have freed the powerful from suffering by taking on the burden: scapegoats, whipping boys.

  “The Lueshirans must be able to imagine, however slightly and fleetingly, that there were or could be or might be such worlds, in the very long ago or the very far away, to reinforce by contrast the satisfaction and pleasure of living in Lueshira,” The Stranger reported.

  The Dark Saga was passed on in various forms, its verses made into songs, into performances, into works of art in various materials and media, and even sometimes truly frightening horror-story enactments, never forgotten, leaving an imperishable legacy of the knowledge of fear. These artifacts were not popular and rarely sought, but all Lueshirans had seen them at some time.

  In the regular lives of Lueshirans, in their real world, their daily existence, there was nothing but the harmonious structures that gave support and shape to their civilization and individual lives.

  Optimism was never severely wounded in their newer stories from this actual present, from this world; they reinforced the expectation of happy outcomes. Lueshiran stories did not require conflict and climax.

  To The Stranger, the informant explained: What we liked in our stories on Lueshira was description and conversation, and of course the poetic turns of phrase and word games that even the device found it hard to translate into other known languages, but gave delight to the Lueshiran readers.”

  “It is not easy to investigate the meaning of the stories in the Dark Saga,” reported The Stranger. “I take them to be moral tales, fables, inventions. But I have spoken with those who say that these tales of horror are relics of history, and others who say they are a warning about a future that must be forestalled.”

  As The Stranger inquired into the Dark Saga, the voices of Lueshira told him:

  They are stories about injustice, inequality, cruelty, grinding poverty, destructive obsession; stories which feature people unsettlingly similar to us on Lueshira except for their living in their world of woe, misbegotten desire, chronic disappointment. These characters are sometimes presented as coming from a long ago, prehistoric past.

  The debates and gentle disagreements about the origins of the classic story cycles of Lueshira provide one of the ways that Lueshirans can entertain some conflict within their harmonious reality, just enough to make things interesting, the way a sudden cold gale can scatter dust, make you shiver, cause unfettered metal chairs to fall off balconies, and then with its subsiding generate fresh appreciation of the mild weather of their longest season.

  The Stranger decided he would ask his informant if he could see the Dark Saga for himself.

  7

  THE TREE

  They lived in different suburbs and you had to go into town, change trains, and leave town again if you wanted to go from her suburb to her suburb.

  That day had come and they met again by a chance that was clearly engineered by mystical forces. They were fourteen now, no longer little girls but of an age to be young ladies, or to refuse to be.

  They recognised each other before they knew they had, hugging and something that was a mix of laughing and crying that Ada never found a word for.

  Their two schools had taken them to the same event on the same day, some absurd thing, stupid songs and speeches at the Town Hall, and they had both managed to leave the main hall and find their way along a cathedral-like corridor to the palatial ladies room, where an annex could be discovered, where a few girls who didn’t want to hurry back inside to the main hall and the rows of seated uniforms had decided to sit for a while, not intimidated by the massive shiny curtains and settees of plush. Ada, you’ll always find the refusenik hangout.

  Then someone wrote a letter and they had written letters and rung up on the telephone, and Ada and Leyla were old enough to take the train and change to another platform at Central Station.

  They had been only children and now were no longer children and everything else had changed but what had not changed was this. They recognised each other at once. They made a society of two, a society with its own manners and customs and origin stories.

  They didn’t have a normal family. They were aliens in their world, and however different they were from each other their same difference from the rest was stronger.

  A big old almond tree rose from the yard next door to Leyla’s house, its branches strong and wide extending over the fence. A platform was up there, constructed by the neighbour, the floor of a treehouse once made for a son who had left home to be in the army. No one else ever went there. The tree was their place. The world went away.

  Ada would return to the world of school knowing herself as someone who had experienced what the others never had, having been to faraway lands, heard tales from other worlds. Going to Leyla’s place was a journey no one else she knew could begin to understand, or should have any idea about. At her school Ada was a secretive bookworm.

  She was called a ‘brain’, which was a mild insult.

  Also a ‘snob’ because she’d rather keep reading than join a game.

  Also she was told she was ‘different’: not good. But she got along all right, she had some others to hang around with sometimes, sharing jokes and rumours like anyone, while at times she was left alone to find a bit of overlooked shadow to sit and read in, where no one seemed to see her if she didn’t want them to.

  Ada seemed like someone who might finish high school and even go on to the university but she had other plans, she’d made a different promise.

  Because Ada knew she would see Leyla again, because they would in an ever-closer future leave their little world of suburban street and weird school, because Leyla thought of her too and sent her letters in the post written in large round letters in purple ink, because Leyla showed her what kind of girls they were, Ada felt patient and distant waiting to leave school. Because Leyla, Ada had become herself when she did, and because Leyla, Ada was becoming herself in a new way now, when they sat in the tree.

  In a new book Ada had read from the library, children would find a new world every time they climbed up into a huge tree where various tree folk lived. Some wore necklaces made of painted acorns.

  The children did not tell their mother about the enchanted wood, afraid they would be forbidden to go. A child should wander about with other children, have adventures and meet fairy folk, and the parent should never know or have anything to say. There’s a secret world of night where all the fun is.

  It’s as if every time they met in those school years, Ada and Leyla sat in the tree, and all the things they said to each other were said there, but it could not have been so. They also had sat in each other’s bedrooms, at least once, with a handful of books from her shelf; the other, at the other time when she was the visitor, held a handful of books from her shelf. They had been introduced to women who if they were English they might have had to call aunts, or aunties; Leyla met Ada’s prodigal mother who even one day when Leyla was there had one of her fits screaming and trying to hit people and throwing things around the room, apparently crazy furious at some little thing that didn’t even matter. After it was over, everyone else might still be shaking and recovering b
ut the mother had just snapped out of it and was calm and smiling.

  Ada was introduced to the mother who baked piles of börek for them, grim and radiant from the making and the feeding, and insisting in fragmented English she still did not know a word of English and never would. While the still-growing girls were anywhere in findable, callable distance from her kitchen, it was her job to feed them. ‘Eat!’ she’d say, ‘to make you beautiful.’ Then she must make them a strong real coffee in a little copper pot, drunk black and bitter, then turn the cups over and she’d peer into the coffee grounds and tell the girls that great things were in store, they would go far away and find treasure. This occult world of the kitchen thus became part of Ada’s background too.

  Leyla and Ada each were kind to the other one’s mother, which was good really, it wasn’t disloyalty at all, it was offering oneself as a substitute. Not quite the good daughter but close.

  Each went over to the other’s place and saw how it was with the family.

  Ada knew more about her own father now.

  Leyla’s father was really her stepfather.

  They barely remembered the adults from the boat. But a little bit.

  Leyla went to ballet classes every Saturday morning and Wednesday night.

  Ada kept not a diary but a pretend diary kept by someone from a book.

  Everything Ada and Leyla said they said perched upon the almond tree’s sturdy limbs, on the platform, or you found the place you could sit quite fittingly with some back support from the trunk, and Leyla, above, found space to extend her legs from time to time. As she spoke, she became a little dance, her arms flew about in arcs as she made her declarations; already she was doing that, graceful and entertaining and beguiling; far from restraining herself, her own realisation of her natural gestural habits only made them more deliberate and cultivated. The gestural repertoire accompanied Leyla’s insistence that she and Ada should embrace their sense of an identity different from … But they didn’t use the word ‘identity’ yet. How did they put it? Maybe just by having a name for those others, the Australian-born, with their mums and dads, their white sliced bread, eating their tea, their holy pictures of the English Queen.