They were born, in a sense, perfect.
And now, after the pregnancy and birth, the little jelly beans were crawling into the surrogate’s pouch. These tiny pups wouldn’t be weaned for at least six months. Ten years of work, ten years of countless failures—the malfunction of embryos, the hundreds of clones that had failed to make it to adulthood. Here, with the stem cell technique, we’d created three healthy little babies. But keeping them in captivity was no good: They needed to be able to survive in the wild. Otherwise the entire operation was an expensive zookeeping delusion. We were trying to renaturalise a world that had passed through its sixth mass extinction.
One of the joeys died a week later. The surrogate mother ate it.
But the other two were healthy. They emerged from the pouch more and more, played like kittens, squeaked out their little growls. For hours I watched them pad curiously around the nursery before they were tired and slouched back into the surrogate’s pouch.
Four months on they were learning to hunt in the outside enclosure, with the specially designed cyborg potoroos Thien had created. I loved to watch them stalking the little robot beasts until the potoroos were exhausted. Then the thylacines leaped upon them, seizing their necks like cats and suffocating them. Excitement and horror shot through me as I watched the pups strip the meat, searching for the fake heart and other organs and leaving behind the bloody remains.
Around this time, I needed to visit Hobart. The batteries kept running down on my exoskeleton and the Department of Health Services had ordered new ones from Germany. They’d arrive in twenty days. The doctor reminded me that my condition would worsen over time and to keep up with the exercises I never bothered with. I would die in a decade or so, anyway. I had too much to do. Grimley knew I would be in Hobart, since I was taking the department’s copter, and I told Thien I’d better face the bureaucrat. It was the moment to buy the extra time.
My strategy was to get him out of the department building, so I arranged to meet him at a rooftop bar past the Salamanca Market that Thien recommended. It was midmorning when I arrived, and I checked into an aparthotel and planned the conversation. The things I would say, the order I would say them in. The nerves churned inside me.
From the rooftop, you could see the grand sailing ships come in with their cargo, their immense spinnakers folding down from the winds high in the stratosphere above. Only a few tiny engines could be heard on the little putt-putts moving around the docks. They’d be phased out soon.
To my surprise, Grimley was already perched on a stool next to a high circular table and looking back at the city as it climbed up Mount Wellington like detritus in some immense, darkening tsunami. From the glasses perched on both sides of the table, he’d had a meeting with one of the other bureaucrats before me. They’d obviously been skipping from one cocktail to another: Traces of reds and blues were left at the bottom of the drained glasses.
Turning to see me, he grinned. I’d never seen him do that and for a terrifying moment, I felt like we were on a date. Was he going to hit on me?
I steeled myself and sat next to him.
“See the world we’ve built,” he said. “Only the slightest touch of carbon going out. Much more being sunk into reforestation, carbon sinks beneath the ground…”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “The quiet.”
“It’s not enough,” he said. “It’s never enough because the climate process runs on anyway. We think we can rein it in, but it’s a wild horse out of control. And we’re riding it along with the other three horsemen. We’re deluding ourselves in exactly the same way you’re deluding yourself about the thylacine.”
“People wouldn’t have elected you if they knew you had these kind of thoughts.”
“People!” He practically spat the word out. “They congratulate themselves for having changed the world, and yet they’ve sunk back into what? Into the primal soup of sloth. It’s a law, you know—the rise of a bureaucracy like us. People get involved in history, change the world for a brief moment, then they sink back again, leaving us suspended in the air like balloons. Don’t blame us.”
“No one’s blaming you.”
“Christ, I am, Ellie. I am blaming me.”
“See, this self-criticism is rubbish. It holds no weight if you don’t do something differently. That’s why you have to keep funding us. Otherwise, you’re just a chameleon, fading into whatever background you’re in, and telling me what I want to hear.”
Now his position flipped into its opposite and this reflected all the contradictions that lay within him, within the bureaucracy. “I do everything I can—but within bounds. Within reason.”
“And now you’re justifying yourself. You talk about how you want things to be better, but you wouldn’t dare try anything that would mean a real risk to your position.”
“You’re mean, aren’t you?” he said. “Almost cruel.”
“And you’re cynical and self-serving.” There was silence then and I knew I’d gone too far. A desperation crept into my voice. “You should see the new ones. They’re so beautiful and strong. They’re prancing around in their pen. A boy and a girl. You should hear the haunting cry they make. Come out and see them at least, Grimley. It’ll change your mind.”
He saw my sadness and seemed affected by it. He put his hand over mine, as if he were my grandfather. It was gentle, protective. “The funding runs out in two weeks.”
“We’re done.” Thien kept scanning his account to see if he was wrong. But he wasn’t. We weren’t getting credits from the department anymore. Grimley had cut us off. Time had run out.
“We’re not done. I’ve got funds,” I said.
“What’s wrong with you, Ellie? Can’t you see? People don’t care if we repopulate the thylacine. They care if their water is fresh, if there are beautiful beaches for them to lie on, and snow to play with. They care about themselves. That hasn’t changed.” As he talked, Thien stormed into his room.
I stood at the doorway, watching him shove his clothes into a bag. “I don’t care if they care. That’s never how progress happens. It’s always outliers, those who don’t follow the crowd, who drive things forward.”
“That never ended well. Galileo was put on trial, remember. And I’m not letting you end up with nothing to show for a decade’s work, doing some shitty job that you hate and without a credit in your cloud. No!” He dragged his bag through the centre. “Damn it, Ellie. You need to get back to your exercises, your treatment. Look at you: You look more and more like a pile of bones. And I’ve seen your sores.”
“Where are you going? It’ll be an hour before the copter arrives.”
“It was ordered hours ago.” He stomped out with his bag.
“Who ordered it?! You didn’t!”
He turned back to me, looked over the couches in our lounge. “Ellie, get your stuff. We’re done here.”
“If you think I’m leaving, you know nothing about me.”
The copter touched down twenty minutes later. He climbed aboard and it swept up into the sky like a wondrous giant Frisbee. After he left, I wandered away from the centre, down the crest of the ridge and to the forest that we’d designed. My exoskeleton creaked and whirred softly as it carried me deeper into the bush. My batteries were running down, so I sat on a moss-covered log and watched the eucalypts sway in the breeze. Moss, that little green carpet of growth—what a wondrous thing! The smell of forest engulfed me: the damp earth, the slightly rotting undergrowth, the freshness of healthy plants. We rebuilt the Tasmanian forests and wetlands and grasslands native to the thylacine, but it was like trying to recompose the DNA of the long extinct Australian megafauna. We could only recover certain aspects, certain plants, certain animals, but the dependencies and relationships were altered. It was like building the structure of a house, knowing you could never fill in the walls or roof or the fittings or electrical and computer systems. And then, because the interrelationships were different, new connections and dependencies sprang up and you ended up with an entirely new ecosystem all its own.