The Great Zoo of China

by Matthew Reilly

  CJ looked out through the giant circular window.

  Like an enormous eye, it offered a commanding view of the zoo: the forests and lakes, the high central mountain. Once again, off to the left, she saw the two castles. The nearer one was beautiful, white and clean, with many fluttering banners, while the more distant one, erected on the western side of a curving waterfall, was in ruins.

  The beautiful white castle seemed to be populated by purple royal dragons. They lounged on its walls and curled lazily on its rooftops.

  The second castle was more utilitarian: squat and defensive; all bricks, crenellations and arrow slits.

  And it looked like a bomb had hit it.

  Its battlements were crumbled. Its watchtowers had literally been torn apart. Lying in the maw of its gate, underneath its grim portcullis, like a cat with its head between its paws, was a huge yellowjacket emperor. Two prince-sized yellow dragons sat atop the castle’s two watchtowers like dutiful sentinels.

  CJ nodded at the castles. ‘I like the castles. Nice touch.’

  Zhang said, ‘Like any zoo, we try to give our animals places to nest, sleep, hide and hunt in. Some of our structures resemble naturally occurring landscapes—caves, dens, glens—while others, like the castles, well,’ he shrugged bashfully, ‘they are more theatrical and designed with our human guests in mind.’

  Off to CJ’s right was a many-storeyed hotel with an adjoining amusement park. A rollercoaster twisted and turned all around it, starting at the top of the hotel and sweeping down into the amusement park. It looked like it had been lifted straight out of Vegas and dropped here.

  ‘Hours of fun for the whole family,’ Hamish said as he took more shots with his camera.

  ‘Yes,’ Zhang said enthusiastically, not sensing the sarcasm.

  CJ’s eyes ran over some of the other monitors in the master control room. She saw one which looked like an overhead map of the crater and its surrounds, and another that looked like a seismograph:

  She was about to ask about them when Hamish said to Hu, ‘Hey, dude, I don’t want to be the jerk who asks the obvious question, but what’s keeping your pet lizards inside this crater? There’s no roof or cage above this valley. Why don’t they just fly out of here?’

  Hu smiled kindly. ‘That is a very good question and this is the best place to answer it. Ladies and gentlemen, if I may draw your attention to this console over here . . .’ He stepped behind a Chinese technician at a computer.

  On the computer’s screen was a digital image of the zoo:

  ‘Mr Cameron’s question,’ Hu said, ‘is a very astute one. When we conceived the Great Dragon Zoo, we didn’t want it to look like a prison. We wanted visitors to see our dragons as they were meant to be seen: soaring against the wide open sky.’

  He held up a finger. ‘Having said that, our dragons are still very much our prisoners. As you will see on this display, there are two barriers—invisible to the human eye—keeping our dragons captive here inside the zoo.

  ‘They are electromagnetic fields. The first and innermost field is in the shape of a dome, the second is in the shape of a pyramid. The first covers only this valley, the second covers a much larger area around the valley. The two domes are essentially invisible walls of ultra-high-voltage electromagnetic energy. They also, I should add, extend underground, just in case our dragons attempt to tunnel their way out of here.

  ‘Now, as Deputy Director Zhang mentioned earlier, each dragon has a microchip grafted onto its brain.’

  He indicated another nearby screen, on which was an x-ray image of a dragon skull seen from the front and from the side. CJ saw the chip situated immediately behind the left eye of the skull:

  ‘That chip,’ Hu said, ‘is actually fitted to the limbic or pain centre of the dragon’s brain and it is capable of emitting a powerful electric shock in certain circumstances. One of those circumstances is when a dragon comes into contact with either of the electromagnetic domes.’

  CJ recalled the yellow remote from the trick show and wondered if that was another such ‘circumstance’.

  Hu said, ‘If a dragon touches one of our domes, it will experience a shock sent directly into the pain centre of its brain. This, I can assure you, is an exceedingly painful experience.’

  ‘How painful?’ Wolfe asked.

  ‘If a dragon hits that dome,’ Hu said, ‘it will black out instantly and drop from the sky. The dragons learned very quickly not to touch the inner dome.’ He rounded on Hamish. ‘And, as a matter of fact, Mr Cameron, we did see Jurassic Park. From a very early stage in the development of this facility, we were cognisant of the dragons’ dangerous potential.

  ‘Make no mistake, my dear guests, these are dangerous animals and we know it. But then this is why people go to zoos in the first place: to see the dangerous animals. The tigers, the bears, the alligators. But we must also recognise that these are important animals, the likes of which the modern world has never seen. As such, we have endeavoured to develop systems that contain our dragons without unnecessarily damaging them. Wire fences, steel walls, even visible lasers were all no good. We want to alter our animals’ behaviour without harming them and we want our visitors to see our animals without the crude intervention of bars. The electromagnetic domes have worked perfectly in containing them.’

  ‘What about protecting your visitors?’ Perry said.

  Hu smiled again and CJ had the distinct feeling that Aaron Perry had been the sucker who asked the question Hu had been waiting for.

  ‘Have a look in your gift pack,’ Hu said, ‘and please take from it the rather unusual pair of sunglasses that came with it.’

  CJ and the others all pulled from their fanny packs the strange-looking oversized sunglasses.

  ‘Put them on,’ Hu invited.

  CJ put on her sunglasses and looked out the bank of windows.

  ‘Whoa . . .’ she breathed.

  Whereas before she had seen the wide valley surmounted by empty sky, now she saw a grid of iridescent green laser-lines forming a perfect geodesic dome above it. The dome stretched from wall to wall, rising up and over the central mountain, completely and perfectly containing the massive space. All the dragons flew and wheeled within it.

  Above the green dome, she glimpsed another laser-like lattice: this one was reddish in colour and it looked more flat-sided than dome-shaped.

  ‘What you are seeing now,’ Hu said, ‘is what a dragon sees. Your odd-looking sunglasses depict the ultraviolet spectrum of light. This is how dragons view the world. Incidentally, modern birds also see this way. Every shield at the zoo is shot through with ultraviolet beams so the dragons can see them.’

  CJ was more enthralled than impressed. She found it fascinating to see the world through an animal’s eyes. Being able to see ultraviolet light gave a predator several advantages, including the ability to spot the urine trails of prey. In the ultraviolet spectrum, urine glowed like neon. That was how hawks and falcons spotted their prey on the ground.

  As she scanned the megavalley, taking in the environment as a dragon would see it, she saw many tiny ultraviolet spheres of a third colour: light blue.

  The glowing blue spheres—invisible to the naked eye, but visible through the glasses—enveloped all the cable cars, every building in the valley, and even all the worker trucks she could see moving along the roads of the zoo.

  There were dozens of the shields, but if you weren’t wearing the glasses you’d never know they existed.

  ‘What are the blue shiel—’ she asked, turning to look back at her fellow travellers.

  She cut herself off.

  Each of them, including herself, had a small pale blue shield around their body.

  ‘Ah-ha . . .’ she said.

  Hu noticed. ‘As Dr Cameron has just discovered, if you look through your glasses at each other, you will see why our dragons do not touch any of our guests.

  ‘The designer wristwatch that each of you was given on your arrival here at the zoo emits
a small but very powerful ultrasonic field around your body—it is essentially a sphere of high-wavelength sonic energy beyond the range of human hearing. But a dragon has exceptional hearing. They can hear on wavelengths undetectable to the human ear. This is great for hunting but our clever engineers at the Great Dragon Zoo have used this talent against them. To a dragon, the sound emitted by your watch is absolutely ear-piercing—it would be like someone sounding an air-horn right next to your ear.’

  Zhang added, ‘You will notice small antennas on every vehicle and structure in the valley. These emit similar ultrasonic shields. Dragons are not exactly small animals. If one brushed against a cable car, even by accident, it would do significant damage.’

  At that moment, CJ saw a cable car emerge from within the main building directly beneath the control room. The cable car did indeed have a small plastic snub antenna on its roof, similar to the ones you saw on expensive cars. Through her glasses, she saw the pale blue sphere around the vehicle.

  ‘So it’s the same sort of thing as the domes above the valley?’ Wolfe asked.

  ‘No,’ Zhang said. ‘The domes are electromagnetic. The personal shields are ultrasonic. Since our dragons come into contact with our cars and buildings far more regularly than they do the electromagnetic domes, the smaller sonic shields give them a jolt that is not as devastating as the one they would receive from the domes. The sonic shields will shoo a dragon away; the electromagnetic domes will knock them out.’

  The group nodded.

  ‘Come now,’ Hu said, smiling. ‘Enough of these lectures. It’s time to get on board one of our state-of-the-art cable cars and see the Great Dragon Zoo!’

  Leaving the master control room, the group took a glass elevator down a few more floors, arriving at a high-ceilinged hall that looked like a train station. Only this was no train station.

  First, it opened onto thin air. It had no northern wall. The platform at that end just dropped away, a full three hundred feet to the floor of the megavalley.

  And second, the ‘carriage’ parked beside the platform didn’t stand on rails. Instead, the huge double-decker carriage hung suspended from a thick overhead cable. It was a cable car, at least thirty metres long, with wide viewing windows that curved up and over its roof. And it looked very modern, all sleek and silver, with the obligatory Great Dragon Zoo of China logo on its flank.

  The sturdy cable from which the cable car hung stretched out from the station, lancing across the valley in a dead-straight line, passing through a watchtower-like way station before disappearing into a tunnel bored into the front face of the central mountain out in the middle of the megavalley, several kilometres away.

  The group boarded the cable car and it eased out of the station and suddenly they were moving high above the valley.

  The ambience inside the cable car was like that of a drawing room: soft music played and, except for the loudest of sounds, outside noise barely crept in. There was a bar at the rear, manned by a Chinese bartender in a bow tie and vest.

  Seen from the cable car, the valley took on a whole new level of splendour.

  Lucky—with Yim on her back—swooped and glided theatrically around the moving cable car. Yim waved happily. The four red-bellied black dragons from the show banked and flew in wider circles around the car.

  Hamish’s camera now sounded like a machine gun, he was taking so many photos.

  The dragons flew like alligators swam, CJ saw. Alligators swam with their four limbs tucked close by their bodies while their tails drove them forward. These animals flew with their four walking limbs held tightly against their sides, making them incredibly streamlined, while their wings—many times larger than their bodies—flapped powerfully.

  As they made their way along the cable, CJ saw other dragons: gigantic purple royal emperors gliding around the central mountain; olive-green kings lounging on the banks of a river village. They looked like supersized lizards, basking in the sun.

  Some king-sized purple royals sat perched atop high rocky crags that lined the cable car’s route. They sat upright, tall and noble, as they watched the cable car slide by. When the cable car passed close enough to one of the dragons, CJ would spot the branded number on the animal’s hind leg.

  As the car approached and passed them, the various dragons barked and shrieked at each other, ear-piercing squeals and screams.

  ‘Not exactly pleasing to the ear, are they?’ Wolfe snorted.

  ‘Their vocalisations may not be pleasant,’ Zhang said, ‘but they do have meaning. Our dragons employ several different methods to communicate with each other: complex subsonic grunting, for one thing, and body vibrations not unlike those employed by modern alligators. Dr Cameron will be aware of these forms of communication.’

  CJ nodded.

  Alligators did indeed communicate in this way. Their barks and grunts were both complex and very specific, a kind of guttural language. One of her old colleagues from the University of Florida, Dr Benjamin Patrick, had pioneered the study of alligator vocalisations, going so far as to compile a database of over sixty distinct sounds made by alligators. He had run those vocalisations through a purpose-built supercomputer in an attempt to find similarities and commonalities among them; in effect, to translate their language.

  Similar studies had been done with dolphins and chimpanzees. Dolphins were known to vocalise their names when they jumped out of water and packs of chimps had specific grunts that meant ‘leopard’ or ‘hyena’. Patrick’s work with gators had been an attempt to take this to the next level.

  Six years older than CJ, Ben Patrick had also been the most handsome guy in the faculty and every woman there had had a crush on him. When he’d asked CJ—fresh out of graduate school and before her disfigurement—on a date, she’d jumped at it. But there had been no second date, because during that single dinner, CJ discovered quite clearly that Ben Patrick loved only one thing: Ben Patrick. He had only talked about himself. It pained her, even now, to recall that one disastrous date.

  Arrogant and self-absorbed as he was, CJ had to admit that Patrick was brilliant. His analysis of alligator vocalisations was simply extraordinary. But then about eight years ago, when his research seemed to be hitting a peak, he had suddenly left the university for a much higher paying job at the University of Shanghai. CJ hadn’t seen or heard from him since.

  ‘A colleague of mine named Ben Patrick once did some excellent work in the field of alligator vocalisations,’ CJ said.

  ‘He did indeed,’ Hu said, ‘which is why he is working here, right now, at our zoo. His discoveries here have far outstripped the ones he made with alligators. He works in our Birthing Centre. When we stop by there later, hopefully we will run into Dr Patr—’

  Suddenly, with a great whoosh-whoosh, two purple emperor dragons swept past the cable car. They were indeed the size of airliners and their fly-by caused the cable car to rock gently and the trees on a nearby crag to bend and flutter.

  Everybody grabbed a handhold.

  Hu chuckled. ‘It’s okay. These cable cars are the best in the world. Swiss designed. Our emperors don’t realise the wake they make when they fly past.’

  CJ whipped around, following with wide eyes the two purple emperors that had swept by.

  Their heads alone were simply monstrous in size, as big as a four-wheel drive. Their long teeth, protruding menacingly from their lips, were almost as big as she was.

  ‘Good God . . .’ she breathed. ‘Good God.’

  The cable car passed through the watchtower-like way station halfway between the main entrance building and the central mountain.

  ‘We call this the Halfway Hut,’ Na said. ‘There is a café-restaurant above us that offers excellent views and affordable meals. Also, hikers walking along the valley trails can access a cable car here if they run out of breath.’

  As his guests watched the dragons, Hu Tang watched them. They seemed to be enjoying the cable car ride. Hu was particularly pleased to see the two New Yo
rk Times men nod approvingly when Na mentioned the affordable meals at the Halfway Hut. The consultants had said American visitors would like that: having differently priced restaurants to suit people of different levels of wealth.

  The cable car pushed on.

  Rising up directly in front of it, dominating the valley, was the central mountain. A silver disc-shaped structure sat atop its summit.

  ‘What do you think that is?’ CJ asked Hamish. ‘A revolving restaurant?’

  Hamish shrugged. ‘Or a captured flying saucer.’

  Hu stepped forward, resuming his presentation: ‘We think it was the thick layer of nickel in the earth here that saved these animals from the meteor strike that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Two kilometres of solid nickel insulated them from the impact and since the dragons were buried so deep and their hibernation skills so advanced, they were able to keep hibernating through the thousand-year winter that followed the meteor impact. Our zoo is built on top of the second-largest nickel deposit in these parts; the largest is over at Crater Lake about fifteen kilometres to the northwest.’

  Wolfe said, ‘It’s a pity you couldn’t build your zoo around Crater Lake. Now that would have been a sight.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Hu said. ‘In any case, in November 1979, miners in a nickel mine near here broke through to a most unusual underground passageway. It was unusual because it was not natural; it had been dug out of the nickel—which is no mean feat given how hard nickel is—and then refilled with soil that had settled into it over the centuries. We dug out that soil to discover that the tunnel led to a cavern two kilometres underground, a cavern that was filled with eggs, eighty-eight of them to be precise, large leathery eggs that were bigger than any egg ever seen on this planet.

  ‘Now, for over two thousand years, this area has fostered dragon myths and legends, usually involving a lone dragon tormenting the locals for a short period. We believe those legends related to this nest: that every now and then, a lone juvenile dragon would leave the nest to test the atmosphere and see if it was suitable for the rest of the clan to resurface.’