An Astronaut's Life (16 page)

Some workers have been here so long they barely remember their children's faces.

‘But if you are not required for the investor's presentation, please be out of the
visitor areas by 1pm.' Mr Wei continues. ‘I can't stress this enough.'

The echoes of his words writhe in the smog and he waits for them to fade.

‘Thank you for your attention, have a good work day.' Mr Wei closes the balcony door
and turns off the PA. He takes his towel and rubs it across his forehead, pats the
sweat from his ears. The extension of the shark tunnel is not complete. The dome
housing the Ice Caps of Doom has failed to maintain a steady temperature and workers
have been crawling over it for days searching for a leak—but Mr Wei has told the
investors to come. Of course we are ready, he said. And now he can't afford to let
them down.

On the other side of the country, Mr Wei's niece is wheeled into a small room to
wait out the rest of her labour. Carla moves from the chair to the bed and back again,
smiles for a photo and rests a hand on her belly just as everything within her heaves.

‘For Uncle Carl,' her mother says.

Mr Wei's phone buzzes and the message
She is feeling good, not long to go
seems to
contradict the accompanying photo, in which his niece looks drained, almost frightened.

I am thinking of her every moment
, he writes back.
His day begins at the Walking
Dead trek, where Amazonian creatures live among a fair estimation of lost jungles
fleshed out with mood lighting and a looping soundtrack of animal noise. Spider monkeys
and ocelots look on as the jungle team leads Mr Wei to the banks of the Amazon River.
This is where visitors will climb aboard rafts and paddle the rapids while animatronic
caimans and unrealistically large alligator heads rise up to snap at their oars.
The combination of real animals and robotics makes the whole thing more convincing,
but this complexity comes at a price. It's at the slow point of the journey, where
the rapids fall away and the rafts settle into the still lagoon, that the technicians
are having a recurring issue with the (real) giant otters.

Mr Wei's boots sink into the red soil on the riverbank and the jungle team don't
need to explain. He sees them: three more dead otters, one fully grown, the others
under a metre in length, perhaps just a year or two old.

Mr Wei is always thrown by the sight of the bodies, their little faces with furry
cheeks and eyebrow whiskers, but then how snake-like their tails are.

‘It's the same, like last time,' the head veterinarian says. She autopsied the first
lot of otters but found no sign of disease, no sign of injury. Since then, the
workers
charged with their disposal have buried eight more otters in shallow graves now concreted
beneath the visitors' walkways.

Together they consider the options: new otters could undergo more tests, daily check-ups,
be kept in isolation.

‘No more otters,' Mr Wei says. ‘Call technical and have them reprogram the touch
screens.'

‘Remove the otters altogether? All references to them?'

‘Change them to past tense.'

Mr Wei unsticks his boots from the riverbank. He knows it's a poignant moment for
the team, but he has not, in his request for this change, announced the death of
a species. He is not a veterinarian, he is not a zoologist or an expert in genetics.
He is a foreman and a builder and this is far beyond his area of expertise, so when
he thinks of those snake-like tails, and of his workers waiting to return home, there's
no competition. Fast and firm decisions, that's his job.

He looks over at the rolling river they're so proud of, ignores the tears welling
in the vet's eyes, and wipes the soles of his boots on a rock.

‘Lead me back out?' he says.

Mr Wei is not really the foreman. He clings to the title, the promotion he was awarded
after the first foreman left without explanation or farewell, along with a host of
administrative staff and the original architect. He does not know who the new architect
is, or even if there is one. Plans come in with amendments in multiple versions and
he takes them with a grain of salt, makes unsentimental decisions, and in this way
he keeps things on track for the investors. From time to time, he hands out advice
to young workers who are homesick or full of dreams about future wealth.

‘But where did money ever get us?' Mr Wei says, gesturing at the park.

His workers are confused by this because they work twelve-hour days in a thick, damp
mist and in other places there are people who do not.

Carla pushes her mother's hand away.

‘No more photos,' she says. After a sleepless night, it's happening faster than she
expected. Not just the pain, but her sense of self eroding, people poking and coaxing,
exhaustion overwhelming her personality. She feels reduced to an average of human
experience.

Her mother types a message. Sends it.

Still here, progressing well. She's being so brave.

Carla, far away and fearful.

The idea keeps Mr Wei, in a funny way, at a distance from those around him but also
incredibly present. He is still shrouded by the low-set clouds that break up the
stingy reality of the mud paths he and the workers use to navigate the park. The
walkways are reserved for visitors.

He has six more hours before they arrive.

As he walks, Mr Wei phones to make sure the sea lions are in transit to their enclosure.
He can hear their barks in the background of the call, sharp and finite. Once he
hangs up he stands still, listening for these creatures in unknowable distress. They
might be as far away as Carla for all he can do to reach them.

Tell her to be strong. Tell her I am proud.

The doors of Meltwater Station swing open as Mr Wei approaches.

‘Good,' he says. They close behind him. ‘Good.'

He is met by the Arctic crew leader and led onto the train's first carriage. The
crew leader clicks the carriage door into place and the Glacier Ghost Train begins
its cruise into darkness, jerking to the right before
coming to a stop at the base
of a wall of backlit ice. It's remarkably real and affecting. Mr Wei turns to the
crew leader and shares the start of a smile before the train jerks forward again,
tracing the blue lines of the glacier up towards the sun.

The crew leader is Shen, a short man with a shaved head. It was Shen who discovered
the problem with the official plans, the physical impossibility of the icebergs,
and oversaw the redevelopment of the ride to its current state.

At the peak of the glacier the train stops and teeters on the edge of an icy cliff.
The lights dim, a warm glow suggests sunset and the outlines of twenty-four icebergs
flicker to life in the ocean below.

Mr Wei clutches Shen's kneecap. His phone buzzes inside his pocket.

At this point of the ride there's a loud clap of thunder, which turns out to be the
glacier giving way beneath them and tumbling into the sea. Their carriage plunges,
his stomach leaps. They bob on the water's surface, watching icebergs shift, and
after a long moment of silence a faint roar draws their curiosity.

The polar bears seem to have been there all along, white on white, only now their
movements bring them
into contrast. Mr Wei imagines an exchange between a father
and a daughter.
Remember, I told you? The white bears. Do you see?

A bear dives into the water, on cue.

Then it fades. A final growl and their boats beach on the shelf of rock that seems
to rise up beneath them, revealing the spectacle as a projection, a trick of light.
There are no bears and no glaciers.

Mr Wei rests his hands in his lap. ‘Excellent work,' he says to the technicians concealed
by the back wall. ‘Your polar bears are spot on. Please know you have made a very
moving experience.'

Mr Wei's phone buzzes a second time and his mind flashes him an image: the baby that
will come and is even now battling its way into the world. But it's not his sister
on the phone. It's someone from the marine team in a panic, some kind of accident,
the worst possible timing.

It's the whale.

For all the technical wizardry of the rides and the zoological experiences, they
are not the point of the park. They are not the centrepiece, the focus of public
excitement and scrutiny. They are not featured on the cover of the park's investment
prospectus or in the many
newspaper articles heralding the approaching opening. That
distinction is reserved for the whale.

A sixty-million litre aquarium, the world's largest, holds Vera, the last blue whale
on the planet. Unlike some species in the park that are functionally extinct but
kept alive by captive breeding programs in sufficient numbers to maintain genetic
diversity, marine biologists are ninety-nine per cent sure there are no other blue
whales in the ocean. Just this one, just Vera, in a raised aquarium where clever
engineering allows her to be viewed from all sides and a variety of heights (including
from underneath) and where every child on the planet can see her, or see video of
her, and for a small fee be awed by the simultaneous strength and fragility of the
world's largest animal.

Mr Wei had expected more opposition to her capture. Shouldn't the last example of
the species be allowed to live out her days at sea? The world's loneliest creature,
searching the oceans for companionship, and finding none. Mr Wei doesn't have much
time for reading so it's quite likely there were editorials to this effect—but whether
there were or not, curiosity won out, at least among his workers, who lined up along
the fences to see the sedated whale trucked in
and lowered by crane into the new
enclosure.

Mr Wei had not penalised workers who stood too long waiting for the whale's release.
But those who spent the night beneath the aquarium, watching as she opened an eye
and gulped in water, stunning them with a burst of air from her blowholes—these he
gave the most taxing responsibilities, shoveling krill into storage containers while
the marine team redid calculations about water flow and food intake. He could not
afford workers with an emotional attachment.

Mr Wei pushes through the back entry to the aquarium and takes the service stairs
up to the control room. There the staff of the marine team, twenty of them at least,
stand deep in conversation.

‘Where is she?' Mr Wei says, raising his voice to be heard over the hammering of
the tank's water pumps.

They point at the glass of the aquarium, as if to say, Where else would she be?

‘Not Vera. Ann,' he says, referring to the chief marine biologist.

‘She's in the tank, too,' someone says, and Mr Wei presses his hands to the glass
to see.

If Vera is dead or injured, it will be a disaster for
the park and for the investors—and,
personally, it will be a disaster for Mr Wei. He searches in the tank. Technicians
have used lighting to build an illusion of endless depth in the aquarium's corners.

He can't find her, so someone in the control room throws a switch and floods the
aquarium with light, revealing two metre thick glass and the tank's clinical interior.

Vera is a dark stain on the floor.

‘Is she okay?' Mr Wei says.

He is in a room full of marine biologists but no one replies.

‘Is she okay or not okay?'

‘Not really.'

In the tank a diver (perhaps Ann?) tugs on some sort of tubing and a monitor on the
control-room desk races. Biologists panic and shout through headsets. Two more divers
signal to the control room and a conversation begins that Mr Wei cannot fully understand.

‘It's not in far enough.'

Hand signals.
Wait. Wait.

‘Still nothing.'

Push, push.
Or maybe
turn, turn.

‘That's it. Hold it! That's it, Vera.'

Thumbs up.

Since they surround the control room monitors, Mr Wei can't see the signals that
cause the biologists' applause. What he sees is the whale, still not moving, with
three divers hovering near her midsection. They push a long tube into her blowhole
and signal
okay
and someone does something so that machinery hums to life. The tube
throws itself free, bubbles explode around the divers and the control room fills
with apologies.

They manage to reinsert and this time the tube seems set. A technician turns on the
pump and Vera begins to lift off the aquarium floor, regaining the shape of a living
whale. Mr Wei watches the divers swim up to the ladder and dissolve through the water's
surface.

Ann peels off half her wetsuit. She stands dripping in the control room until one
of the technicians hands her a towel.

‘Mr Wei, I'm afraid Vera has a bacterial pneumonia. It's common in captive marine
mammals.'

‘But is she all right now?' He gestures to Vera, who is suspended mid-tank but not
moving.

‘I've had her on antibiotics for a couple of days, but this morning she took a turn.
We couldn't get her up to
breathe, and I don't think it would have helped, anyway.
I've got her on a breathing tube now, we've got air back in her lungs.'

‘And how long does that stay in?'

‘She'll have to keep it from now on. It's permanent.'

‘But that's not possible. The investors.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘And the sedation, when will it wear off? At the very least, we need her moving.'

‘We've got her on life support. Mr Wei, Vera's brain dead. We'll insert a feeding
tube and we can keep her like this for a while, but she's not going to swim anymore.
We understand the urgency, the investors, but this is it.'