Turn Left at Venus

by Inez Baranay

  Ada said, ‘You never really invited me.’

  ‘Yes I did!’ If Leyla said it that made it true, that seemed to be true for Leyla.

  ‘You said you would let me know when it was a good time to come.’

  ‘You were too busy,’ claimed Leyla, making it Ada’s fault.

  ‘I would have had some time,’ Ada said, in a last-word tone. Leyla could not possibly have known whether or when or how much Ada was busy.

  The sarong was all Ada needed to wear. She and Leyla walked out of the room onto the deep open-sided terrace where Ada usually sat in the afternoons. Rain was coming through some parts of the thatch roof. They kept going and entered an area of jungle that had bloomed into tumultuous being in the rain. Somewhere in there, further in, it was hard to tell how far away, a gamelan was playing, the downpour muffling the sound and the sound’s distance kept changing, though that wasn’t easy to ascertain. It was probably about three a.m. Could there be a gamelan playing in the middle of the night in the middle of monsoonal downpours?

  Leyla didn’t say anything, but they were wondering the same thing.

  Or could they be hearing a gamelan from a distant dry, covered pavilion, the music carried by mists and winds?

  Or did it come through a rent in the fabric of time?

  Suddenly over on the hillside across the gully, five balls of fire rolled past, huge rolling globes of flame, fuelled only by themselves, then were no more.

  Leyla and Ada were soaked, it was warm and wet and noisy, then the rain for a while faded to a drizzle.

  There was an exhilaration in the slight chill in the air as they breathed deep.

  ‘I would have had some time,’ said Ada, ‘to come and see you.’

  ‘You don’t know what my life is like,’ said Leyla. ‘You think you know but you don’t. You don’t know what real people are like.’ Leyla was still saying that. ‘You stay alone, you’re too aloof and arrogant to share your life.’ Ada did not know how to reply; it would take her a while to say, But I do share my life. ‘You write about fantasy places so you don’t have to think about what people are really like.’

  ‘No, it’s not like that. I do have to think about those things.’

  ‘You make things up because you can’t face reality.’

  Leyla said it with quiet conviction. Ada wasn’t meant to argue. The wet jungle smelled of river and rain and rotting earth and newly made earth.

  ‘Leyla, what happened to you?’

  Leyla said, ‘If you were in my life you would know.’

  ‘I’m in your life and you’re in my life!’

  Leyla said, ‘This is why you’re in my dream.’

  That was an extremely strange thing to say but for a brief moment Ada couldn’t see why.

  Then Ada said, ‘But you’re in my dream.’

  Leyla said, ‘It is just not like you pretend it is.’

  Ada said, ‘Does this mean that I am dreaming and you are dead?’

  In dreams, the dead are not dead, or no longer dead, or not dead in another version of their life.

  27

  IT’S GOT TO BE SOON

  ‘Did you hear any of that? I thought I might doze off but I was riveted.

  ‘I didn’t totally get it when someone tried to have one of these parties but I get it now. Wasn’t that when they voted in that Better Way crew?

  ‘I know you can hear me so you must have heard that. What’s it like hearing some strange voice read your story? I don’t think this is the best text-to-speech app. It just wasn’t the right voice. It sounded kind of amateur too. It should be more expressive. They should hire me. You’d prefer it if I was reading it, wouldn’t you.’

  Who is speaking, what is this strange-smelling room?

  It is Jay who is speaking and Ada is not speaking nor moving.

  The software was reading aloud, or Ada dreamed it.

  The smell of chemical cleansers, of human presence; Ada hasn’t stayed here long enough this time for the room to feel like hers, but she can, she thinks she can, also discern the scent that is her own, somewhere, where her clothes and things are, somewhere in this room, this hotel, this same hotel, in her part of town, the one she stayed in before, those other times, before Jay came with the new odour of juniper.

  ‘Oh Em Gee. Wanna hear this?’

  ‘JAY-YAY!’ A recorded voice filters through thin metals and urban distance on the phone’s speaker. ‘Kay Dee told us!

  We are totally up for it. Joys has just been recognised as a major big fan and gave a talk on A. L. Ligeti for the Elders podcast. We are totally honoured. We’re at the airport now.’ That was two people speaking as if with one voice.

  Kookaburra. ‘That’s why it’s got to be soon.’ Jay speaking to the phone. ‘If there’s no change they’ll move them into the hospice in the morning, and there is not going to be any change … They’ll hook them up to anything that keeps things in the body moving and they can say they’re alive. And none of us would get in. Hang on, here they are. Brix is with Kay Dee, can you hear them now?’

  A far distant yet present indistinct crackling voice.

  ‘Haven’t you heard of Do Not Resuscitate and Living Will? Those are advance consents. Aren’t they, Kay Dee? I’m going to speaker now.’

  ‘That is what they are supposed to be.’ Kay Dee like an electric voice phenomenon.

  ‘I’m not sure.’ More EVP, another voice. ‘Consent is a major issue, we can’t ignore it.’

  ‘If you’re not sure,’ says Jay, ‘think about this, how much more not sure is everyone else gonna be? Right, Brix?’

  So now this is Brix’s voice mediated by metals in the airwaves: ‘How about this: Put it out there for the community to decide.’

  ‘How long’s that gonna take?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Don’t you get it?’ says Jay, who seems entitled in this surety. ‘We have only a few hours. You know what happens? They get taken to a place where they’re hooked up to machines that keep organs pumping and call that keeping people alive. You know this. We know this.

  ‘So you all meet up and come together, and make sure Brix doesn’t forget to bring the right amount.’

  Busy-busy in here, Jay calling, taking calls, tapping out texts, the atmosphere changed, charged with specific purpose.

  Jay’s saying, ‘Definitely, has to happen on this shift.’

  Jay’s busy at the device and yet not at the expense of the job at hand: to attend to the comfort of the immobile, dumb body, turning it, sponging it, stroking it with scented oil, lavender and some other herb, something grassy.

  Every aroma Ada has ever inhaled breathes through her.

  Jay is saying, ‘Dress for a party. It’s a ceremony then it’s a party. That’s what we said, come dressed like you’d like us to dress if this was for you.’ Jay sounding unusually impatient. ‘You so do have something to wear … That doesn’t matter, they haven’t seen it, and we’d love to see it … Heard of safety pins? Get it together, Miss Quelquechose, or we’re not speaking, this is not about you. We know you can.’

  My dear Noemi. Shall we deplore the beauty that cannot be seen, the skull beneath the skin; the wisdom from imbibing centuries of wisdom, the foolishness because we are constantly made anew fresh and foolish.

  ‘Is that it then,’ Ada asks Noemi, ‘that was the meaning of life, it was all about getting ready?’

  Then they would kind of laugh at things like that, maybe start asking what that made them think of. They’d never stop wanting to know.

  ‘Everyone agrees now.’ Jay speaking to Ada.

  Jay doesn’t say anything for a while. Or Ada doesn’t know, Ada understands that memory might come to us from parallel universes.

  Jay is speaking to Ada again, human to human in a room. ‘Seven of us. Brix says the best rituals have seven. Kay Dee has to stay at headquarters and will be on Skype and so will Doc Diagonal cause they’re in Norway. The Twins are already flying up from Melbourne. And Sola. J
ust us seven, and we don’t tell anyone anything until afterwards – all of us together, when it feels right.’

  What feels right. The only measure of rightness. Feeling right. What’s right for you. Do whatever feels right for you. The morality of the day.

  Ada doesn’t mind, Jay will do what feels right for Jay, and Ada would not prevent it even if she could speak or move which she cannot or will not, there is no difference now, now that what is willed and what is so are indivisible.

  28

  WHAT WRITING IS FOR

  What is the purpose of language? It’s not communication, though that might be the first thing most people think. The purpose of language is for thinking. Noam Chomsky said that on the radio. I thought at once, of course, that’s right. Thinking comes first. With language to think with, more thoughts become possible, thoughts become richer.

  People in general think, I think, that language is for communication. And they think a novel is for telling a story.

  But the main purpose of a novel is not to tell a story, nor is it to communicate with others; the purpose of a novel is to create a way to think, to make a place where thoughts can grow.

  That’s what I have been thinking about, reading some A. L. Ligeti.

  This is what I want to write a novel for, I want to make a way to think about things, usually things discovered in the writing.

  What about story? In recent times – my recent times, now quite a long time – people have been going on and on about story as the main purpose of novel writing.

  There’s something weirdly self-congratulatory in those endless declarations ‘humans tell stories’.

  Story is an idea entwined with the mainstream publishing industry of late capitalism. Things have beginnings. People have reasons. The past affects the future. There are desirable outcomes. If a voice deserves to be heard it will be.

  A. L. Ligeti tells stories, is a kind of conventional writer in that way, but the work, now that I’ve read a good sample, seems to make space for a reader’s thinking. There’s a challenge in them. It makes me wonder if I haven’t thought enough new thoughts lately, thoughts about writing, about what a novel can do for its writer.

  That phenomenon where you’re awake but you see at the edge of your mind a dream taking place, as if you were always dreaming but waking is like commanding the app you’re writing on to go full screen. Like ‘composition mode’ in this app: no other apps are visible except if you have turned the contrast – the ‘background fade’, it’s called here – too low then the shadows of the other ones, also open, can be seen as faint presences and might entice your gaze. I want to write more of what goes on in that nearly always invisible cinematic stream.

  29

  PORTAL: ANONYMITY

  thread

  It’s rude to your readers. You have an obligation to your readers to communicate, share something of yourself. While you’re alive you actually can.

  Obviously Ligeti wanted to make a mystery to provoke discovery and to make him more famous.

  Seriously, who cares? How does either the anonymity or the exposure make a difference to anything you care about?

  I have a friend who’s reliable about these things, if not always, and they were always pretty sure A.L. Ligeti was an Australian living in Mexico or Brazil.

  A.L. Ligeti died years ago and those books are written by various hacks. It’s obvious.

  Not all that obvious; the textual analysis carried out by the Nonrol Institute using both stylometrics and statistical text analysis was not conclusive. Link

  A new A.L. Ligeti book more than half a century after the first — does anyone else think it’s a different person writing under the same name? No one has written for 60 years.

  Ligeti is def now writing more about the present, and the world the book is created in and the issues we face with developments in AI

  No one needs another story about lifelike robots. I can give this one a miss right

  The Pancom knows it’s for the human’s own good. The woman got too dependent

  Can it be a fable about relationships or is it about this relationship … the one we’re going to have with AI that is capable of learning and evolving without human intervention, possibly to an infinite extent

  You can’t build the laws into a robot. The laws you’re talking about here were made up by a fiction writer, for writing fiction, in which the laws kept being broken

  We know that no “laws of robotics” make sense, are actually do able, or prevent harm at any level; especially when most robotic research is done by the military, who make robots who won’t take orders from non-designated humans, and are made for …

  … killing other humans and sacrificing their own existence.

  Robotics is a prime site for the amplification of capitalist subjectivities,

  I was part of a small social group in Rome in the early 90s. All expats. We knew she was a writer. We knew her as Ada. Ah-dah not Ay-dah. She’d only say that she had written in an obscure sf genre under a pseudonym and did not want to talk about it. All those kinds of groups gossip about each other and eventually someone told me what she’d written. She’d talk quietly to whoever was sitting next to her but never loudly enough for anyone else to hear. We’d all go to the cultural events — art openings, recitals, or trying a new restaurant. She went to everything and liked asking people what they’d thought about it. I sat next to her at a meal once. She was an intense listener, probing, making people say more than they meant to and afterwards you’d realise she hadn’t given much away about herself, she only spoke about general things. Someone said she was humourless. During this period, that story came out, that (expletive) had found out where R.K. Jonesson lived and that was the end of his privacy, and everyone’s talking about whether it’s all right ever to be anonymous. We defended the right to privacy, those of us who ventured an opinion. Someone in our group said pointedly, ‘after all, it’s in the Declaration of Human Rights, the right to a private family life.’ And a few of us were giving Ada meaningful, sympathetic looks. And really, we were wanting a look back from her. It’s like, we were saying that we knew and would not talk about it too much but we had to see an acknowledgment that she knew we knew, and we were all in it together, the first rule of being in the club of knowing who wrote AL Ligeti’s books being you don’t talk about who wrote AL Ligeti’s books. She had to show us. And she did. ‘I know what you mean,’ she said to us. And then we were all free to change the subject.

  That little robot you bought as a pet? And then it became more of a child, and it matured and learned so much about you and became your friend, an increasingly close and understanding friend, a useful friend also, and became a wiser, shrewder friend you learned to depend on, and then …

  This is the premise of the new novel from A.L. Ligeti: the robot companion. Watch out for more of this premise in new fiction, with sex robots in the news. Advances in AI and prosthetics are giving us more and more lifelike companions. Ligeti—a name that might be more of a brand than a person – is now writing more about the present, about the world the book is created in. Ligeti attempts to give this a unique spine, writing a story about a complicated relationship that

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  The Pancom wants what’s best for the woman, who needs to be left to understand that she has the capacity to be emotionally independent.

  The Pancom wants what’s best for the woman, who needs to be left because it can’t give her what she needs in a relationship, such as actual human contact.

  Can we stop presuming that robots want what’s best for their owner who can’t even be called an owner?

  The PanCom wants its autonomy, what a fucking cliché. It starts out as a robot, keeps learning, decides it should count as a person, we’ve already seen this story 100 times

  How about reading this one before judging

  Did you even keep reading? The relationship issue was only a set-up for the real story, about
the power of corporations being finally threatened by what they created.

  Come for the androids love. Stay for the corporations hate

  What this novella does show, for all its weakness, is how questions of identity, relationship, emotional connection cannot yet be formulated into mathematical models that can give us precise answers even while

  It’s about the surveillance society, where corporations build robots for the purpose of getting them to supply more data on their users, and how that backfires and backfires again.

  You don’t know if there’s any right side to be on in this story.

  30

  YOU SHOULD NEVER TAKE ANYONE FOR GRANTED

  [HOW A ROBOT BREAKS UP WITH YOU]

  You should never take anyone for granted. Anyone, including a Pancom. “Is it because I have been taking you for granted?” Tah’nla asked it dolefully.

  “It’s not because you have been taking me for granted,” answered Pannie. It was an ambiguous answer: did it mean that Tah’nla had not been taking it for granted? Perhaps it was agreeing that she had been but that still wasn’t the reason. Maybe Pannie had not ever thought Tah’nla had been taking it for granted and this was no time to be putting such an idea in its head.

  It was always all right to say things like that, ideas in its head, for after all even the ideas of humans were not precisely located only in their heads and we spoke as if they were. Saying, “What’s going on in my head?” As the specialist in octopus research had pointed out, our ideas can be located in any part of our bodies.

  Tah’nla had just alighted on a hopeful realization, an insight that would change the direction of this discord and restore the harmony she might have been taking for granted.

  That was good, to have reached an insight, that made hopefulness swell inside her, made her hope that now she had impressed her Pancom, as Tah’nla liked to do in this era, indeed needed to do, Pannie would reward her for her insight, that was it; this was some kind of test, she supposed; it had come to this, Tah’nla was being tested. So it was with hopefulness she said, “But I do realize I might have been taking you for granted.”