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.’
‘She was on twenty-four-hour watch?’
‘She was. There’s nothing my team could have done. There’s nothing we can do now.’
The entire
unit of marine biologists looks on as Ann pleads their case, bringing to mind the unspoken fate of the others: the missing architect, the disappeared foreman. What errors did they make?
‘Is she in pain?’
‘No. There’s no longer any brain activity. She feels nothing.’
Mr Wei looks up at the dark body of the whale and the tube extending to her mid-section and he knows the sight brings to mind similar memories for all of them. They have all seen loved ones in this state, full of dutiful tubes that sustain life, but not hope.
‘No one can know about this,’ he says. ‘Let’s tell technical to change the touch screens, say—Blue whales are nocturnal, sleep deep during the day, breathe only once every few hours, maybe less. Something like that?’
‘Right.’ Ann’s rubbed her short hair with a towel so it sticks straight up from her head. She looks around at her team. ‘We all clear?’
There’s a murmur of assent.
‘No one can know about this,’ she says.
Ann meets Mr Wei’s eyes and her nod might be grateful, or apologetic, he can’t tell. He stretches his hand to tap the glass twice. Poor Vera.
She had come to them, like most of the park’s animals, through non-specific and probably shady means. The practice of keeping large whales in captivity had been popular for a brief period under the pretence of salvaging them from deteriorating conditions in their natural habitats. There were laws prohibiting their capture, but those proved difficult to enforce. Wealthy homeowners and private casinos bribed authorities and pool cleaners for their silence, but it soon became impossible to maintain enough water or food for the whales anyway, and so they died out on land, as they had in the oceans.
Vera had been kept in a shopping mall and was then passed to a private owner who tagged and returned her to the sea, championing her right to be free before reconsidering and selling her to the park for an unknown sum. Satellite and acoustic tracking led a crew of trappers straight to her.
Now she floats above Mr Wei. He has often wondered what she might know of her predicament. She would put an eye close to the glass, her wrinkles shifting as she eyed them. He was never sure what she could see or what she would make of the humans who constrained her.
Mr Wei checks his phone. He is set to meet Petro, who is head of hygiene, and together they will check the park’s twelve bathroom complexes for cleanliness and function.
Petro waits outside as Mr Wei slips off his shoes to avoid dirtying the tiles. He gives each bathroom a quick once over, checking repairs made to hand dryers, basins and sky lights. The taps are the brightest silver, the basins unmarked by water. The toilet paper must be replaced—the mist has left it moist and unfit for use. He pauses in one of the cubicles, takes his phone from his pocket and calls his sister, but there’s no answer.
I’m worried, he types. Then he deletes each letter. He breathes to calm his nerves.
Please send update if you can. I hope things are going well and as planned.
Mr Wei skips the last two bathrooms because time is short and Petro is a reliable worker. He hurries to inspect the remaining installations; he rides the curves of the Reef’s Revenge Rollercoaster, takes a turn on the Tundra Teacups, pulls on a helmet and navigates the virtual Antarctic plains of the Emperor Penguin Strikes Back, until he is struck down by a penguin with laser-shooting eyes.
Carla can’t see what’s happening.
‘Is everything okay?’ Her voice is flat and unfamiliar.
‘It’s just fine, he’s just fine,’ her mother says. Carla takes this for the truth, but they don’t bring her baby.
Her mother is the only person Carla can rely on through the drugs and the exhaustion, and she trusts her. But she can’t hear her baby cry.
She thinks of Uncle Carl. Sees him in his office with the phone to his ear, his neat hair and pressed polo shirt, left hand in his pocket to hide his two missing fingers. His expression composed, as always, to hide his discontent.
How will she tell him if the baby is gone, after all they have already lost?
Her father, her own husband, her aunt. All the others with their diseased and wheezing lungs, hospital machines pumping air into their fading bodies. The doctors will check the baby for any sign of respiratory disease—they do that early now. Maybe that is what’s taking so long?
Her mother squeezes her hand. The room has been silent for minutes when she hears her baby’s cry.
‘See? See?’ her mother says.
‘Your son is doing fine.’
A doctor places the child on Carla’s chest.
‘We had to help him breathe. He’s big, though. His lungs will be strong.’
The crowd gathering at the park’s entry is bigger than it’s supposed to be. Mr Wei is early, but the investors are already impatient and they heave forward as he greets them. This is their park—how dare they be kept waiting.
Mr Wei signals to security to open the gate and the visitors push their way inside. There are fifty of them, maybe more. And children, at least twenty children.
‘Please, be orderly. I need to check your names. Are you all on my list of names?’ Mr Wei says.
The investors in their suits and high heels refuse to line up. They form a semicircle and point out children who are not on the list and are already heading off towards the Lake of Amphibians. Mr Wei makes a show of taking down details and counting up all the extras in an exasperated way, but he can’t send them home or make them wait outside the park, these unaccompanied children.
‘This way, please all follow.’ Mr Wei makes his way to the front of the group and starts off along the walkway. He signals to security to hurry the stragglers.
‘Hello, hello?’
He raises his voice to draw everyone in his direction.
‘Okay, thank you. Welcome to the park, to the World of Lost Wonders. You are our first ever guests, which is very special. I hope you will feel special.’
Mr Wei thinks that there is nothing special about these people, who are already wandering out of earshot.
‘Stay with me, please. Parents, adults, this park is under construction, some parts of it are not safe for your children. We cannot go further until we have all children. What about that one over there? Someone get that one. Hey!’
Security guards signal that they will bring up the rear of the group and begin herding the stragglers together.
‘Behold!’ Mr Wei says. ‘Our first stop, The Safari of the Walking Dead. Climb aboard, my friends.’
This part of the tour has been scripted and Mr Wei is relieved to read from his notes without any genuine feeling, then shuffle the visitors inside where the safari team will take over for the next twenty-five minutes.
As he waits outside, he calls Ann.
‘Is everything ready?’
‘Yes. She’s ready. How far away are you?’
‘Still an hour. But they bought children, twenty of them.’
‘So?’
‘I don’t want them upset, if they discover what we’ve done—a dead whale displayed in front of their children.’
‘They won’t. Mr Wei, the children won’t know
.’
It’s crossed his mind, the way she looked at him in the control room and her tone now, her acceptance—could Ann have done this, killed the whale or hastened its death? He knows the patient anger they’ve carried all these months, their shared distrust of the investors. Could it have driven her to this?
‘It’s okay, Mr Wei. You were not involved in anything. I’ll tell them that, if it goes that way. I know what you must think.’
He ends the conversation because he does not want to hear her admission or be implicated, especially over the phone. And anyway, she does not know what he thinks. His feelings are mixed.
The world’s last blue whale is here, the investment prospectus reads, and with us she is safe from the ravages of the natural world.
After the safari, the tour continues with scripted introductions and intermittent toilet stops.
The visitors are impressed by the penguins and amused by a ride on the teacups. They are taken in by both the animatronic Galapagos turtles and the holographic owls, although the rollercoaster proves divisive, and those who are too small or too scared are left to wait with Mr Wei.
He takes the hands of the two youngest boys and leads his group, five smaller children and two with medical conditions, over to the unopened Hall of Undersea Secrets.
‘We weren’t going to take you in here today.’ He talks to them quietly, in confidence. ‘This is a special surprise for you.’
Doors swing open and lights flicker on. The sea lion pool is dissected by glass so visitors can stand beside the animals as they rest on the rocks or play underwater.
The children are timid, the boys cower at Mr Wei’s side and he pats his hands across their fine hair and assures them they are very safe with him. Only one girl approaches the enclosure.
‘There you go,’ Mr Wei says. ‘They’re very friendly.’
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