The Great Zoo of China Page 5

  CJ nodded.

  Yim went on, clearly glad to be resuming her script. ‘Now—’

  ‘Can they also detect electricity?’ CJ asked quickly. This question drew odd glances from her American companions.

  Yim frowned. She threw a look at Hu, who nodded.

  ‘Yes. Yes, they can detect electrical impulses,’ Yim said. ‘How did you know this?’

  CJ nodded at the dragon. ‘See those dimples on its snout? They’re called ampullae: ampullae of Lorenzini. Sharks have them. They are a very handy evolutionary trait for a predator, a kind of sixth sense. All animals, including us, emit small electrical fields by virtue of the beating of our hearts. A wounded animal’s heart beats faster, distorting that field. A predator with ampullae, like a shark—or one of your dragons—can detect that distortion and home in on the wounded animal. It’s like being able to smell electrical energy.’

  ‘They are remarkable in many ways,’ Yim said diplomatically. ‘In fact,’ she added, sliding smoothly back into her patter, ‘one of the most remarkable things about them is their bite.’

  Yim stepped aside, revealing a cloth-covered object on the stage behind her. She removed the cloth to reveal a brand-new bicycle.

  ‘No way . . .’ Hamish whispered. ‘Not the bike. This is so cool . . .’

  Yim said, ‘A large dog has a bite pressure of about 330 pounds per square inch. A saltwater crocodile has a bite pressure of a whopping 5,000 pounds per square inch. A prince dragon has a bite pressure of 15,000 pounds per square inch. Allow me to demonstrate.’

  One of the red-bellied blacks strode lazily forward. This dragon had large dollops of red on its head and snout. Indeed, it looked like its otherwise black head had been dipped in a bucket of red paint.

  It stared at Yim with what could only be described as insolence . . . and didn’t do anything.

  It just stood there.

  And then something happened that only CJ saw: by virtue of the angle of her seat, she saw Yim produce a small yellow remote control from her belt and subtly hold it out for the dragon to see.

  Seeing the yellow remote, the dragon promptly turned and, with a loud crunch, casually bit down on the bicycle. Like a soda can being crushed, the bike crumpled within its massive jaws.

  The audience gasped.

  ‘Whoa, mama,’ Aaron Perry said aloud.

  The red-faced dragon spat out the bicycle and stomped back to its place, its forked tail slinking behind it.

  But all CJ could think about was the yellow remote that had prompted the creature into action. Trained animals reacted to stimuli: rewards and treats or, in the less enlightened places of the world, pain. She wondered what kind of stimulus that remote triggered and suspected that the answer was pain.

  Yim bowed. ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I will hand you back to the deputy director now.’

  Zhang stepped forward. ‘Let me ask you this: what precisely is a dragon? Myths of gigantic winged serpents have existed for thousands of years. As with many other things, they originally appeared in China. The first Chinese dragon myth dates back to the year 4700 BC, to a statue of a dragon attributed to the Yangshao culture of that time.’

  On the plasma screen behind him, a timeline appeared. The words 4700 BC CHINA popped up at the left-hand end of it.

  ‘The Babylonian king, Gilgamesh, fought a fierce dragon named Humbaba in the epic tale that bears his name. He lived around 2700 BC.’

  2700 BC BABYLON/PERSIA appeared on the timeline.

  ‘The ancient Greeks spoke of Hercules fighting a dragon in order to steal the apples of the Hesperides, the eleventh of his twelve labours. Hercules is generally thought to have lived around the year 1250 BC.’

  1250 BC GREECE popped up on the timeline.

  ‘From about 100 BC and for the next 1500 years, several Meso-American cultures including the Aztecs and the Mayans venerated a flying serpent named Quetzalcoatl.

  ‘And, of course, the United Kingdom has long lauded the bravery of St George who slayed a dragon not in England but in Libya around the year 300 AD.

  ‘In the eighth century, the Scandinavians wrote of Beowulf fighting a fire-breathing dragon and in the thirteenth century, the Vikings sang of Fafnir.’

  At each mention of a historical period, the appropriate date sprang up on the timeline on the plasma screen, until it looked like this:

  Hu took over. ‘There is something very curious, however, about all of these mythologies. In every single one of these myths found across the ancient world, the dragons are the same. Their features are consistent around the globe.

  ‘Mythical dragons are almost universally large hexapods with four walking limbs and two wings.’

  At that moment, all five of the dragons on the stage opened their wings while remaining standing on their four legs.

  Yim rewarded them with more treats.

  At which point, CJ glimpsed another detail that caused her some concern.

  While the yellowjacket accepted her treat happily, one of the four red-bellied black dragons took its treat with what could only be described as a long, lingering glare at its handler. Its tail began to twitch, a bit like an alligator did when it—

  Entirely ignorant of this, Hu went on: ‘Dragons of lore were serpentine creatures with scaly reptilian skin.’

  The yellowjacket turned on the spot, showing off its leathery hide like a model doing a turn at a fashion show.

  The others laughed. CJ didn’t. The dragon, she saw, got another treat.

  Hu added, ‘And, of course, most famously, some dragons . . .’ he paused dramatically, ‘ . . . breathed fire . . .’

  The five dragons suddenly opened their jaws wide, crouched low and aimed their open mouths at the audience.

  Seymour Wolfe sat bolt upright. Aaron Perry gripped his seat. Hamish tensed. Ambassador Syme made to shield his eyes with his forearm. His aide, Johnson, half sprang to his feet.

  CJ was already out of her chair by the time the dragons had opened their mouths. She had seen their body language change—seen them crouch and lower their heads—and had immediately dived clear, her reflexes honed from years of working with crocs. She was on the stairs and out of the line of fire and about to sprint away when the laughing started.

  She looked up.

  Hu and Zhang were chuckling.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ Hu said. ‘Alas, the ability of a dragon to breathe fire is the stuff of legend. None of the animals at the Great Dragon Zoo of China is able to breathe fire.’

  The audience visibly relaxed, smiled nervously at each other. CJ resumed her seat, nonplussed. The dragons got more treats.

  Zhang continued. ‘But the question remains: how could this happen? How could the fundamental characteristics of this mythical creature be so consistent across an ancient world without mass communication or intercontinental travel? The answer is obvious: there were dragons everywhere around the world. And they became the stuff of myth and legend because they only appeared irregularly.’

  Wolfe threw up his hand. ‘What do you mean by that? Irregularly?’

  ‘I am glad you asked,’ Zhang said, ‘because this brings us back to our original question: what precisely is a dragon? The answer is actually quite simple. The animal we know as a dragon is a dinosaur, a most unique kind of dinosaur that survived the meteor impact that condemned the rest of its species to extinction.’

  CJ leaned forward, intrigued.

  Zhang explained. ‘After much study by palaeontologists from the Universities of Shanghai and Beijing, it has been determined that our “dragons” are part of a hitherto unknown line of dinosaurs belonging to the family or “clade” of creatures known as archosauria.

  ‘The archosaurs ruled the Earth after the Permian-Triassic extinction event, a mass extinction event that occurred 250 million years ago, not unlike the famous Alvarez Meteor that struck the Earth 65 million years ago causing the extinction of the dinosaurs. Archosaurs were the dominant land animals during the Triassic Age and they
are the ancient ancestors of crocodilians and, importantly, the branch of flying reptiles known as pterosaurs.’

  ‘Ah, pterosaurs,’ Wolfe said, getting it. Beside him, Ambassador Syme nodded, too.

  CJ cocked her head. It probably wasn’t quite as simple as that, but she could see what the Chinese were doing. Convincing someone to believe something that was inherently unbelievable often meant getting that person to make a quick and easy comparison to something they already knew. By linking dragons to a dinosaur with similar features—the pterodactyl—the Chinese could get the paying public to accept their logic quickly and readily. They had just done exactly that with Wolfe and the US Ambassador.

  But as a herpetologist, CJ knew that the pterodactyl’s lineage was famously uncertain: it was neither a dinosaur nor a bird. It didn’t fit at all into the so-called ‘Great Tree of Life’. It was the same with the archosaurs—they were a catch-all category for any ancient creature whose origins couldn’t be easily explained.

  Zhang said, ‘Scientists here at the Great Dragon Zoo believe that our dragons—our archosaurs—survived the Alvarez Meteor 65 million years ago by hibernating deep beneath the surface of the Earth underneath dense nickel and zinc deposits. Their hibernation techniques are very advanced and really rather fascinating; they also explain the consistent worldwide myth of the dragon.’

  ‘How so?’ CJ asked.

  ‘Many animals hibernate,’ Zhang said, ‘although usually the term hibernate is limited to warm-blooded creatures. For reptiles, the technical term is brumate, and fish experience what is called dormancy, but for now, for simplicity’s sake, let us just use the term hibernate for all animals. Rodents and bears do it, so do alligators and snakes. As a general rule, hibernation involves a creature slowing down its metabolism to an incredibly low level, sometimes only a single heartbeat per minute. The animal gorges itself before entering hibernation and slowly, over a long period of time, its body consumes that fuel.

  ‘Mammalian hibernation usually occurs over the winter—rodents will hibernate for up to six months until the next feeding season. Classic rodent hibernation also involves a decrease in body temperature. Bears, on the other hand, employ a special variety of hibernation called torpor that involves the remarkable recycling of both urine and proteins.

  ‘Reptiles exhibit other qualities in their hibernatory states: when it gets very cold, an alligator can float to the surface of a pond, allowing its nostrils to sit above the waterline; as the water freezes, the alligator will be frozen into the very surface of the pond yet it is still able to breathe. Alligators can slow their heart rates down to unbelievably low levels, far lower than any mammal. When the ice melts, the gator simply swims away.’

  This was true, CJ thought. The remarkable abilities of members of the animal kingdom never failed to impress her. Indeed, it was one of the reasons she enjoyed being a vet.

  Zhang continued: ‘And then there are the “group hibernators”, like dormice. These animals hibernate in packs and have a rather unusual waking routine: they select one of their number to emerge from the den and see if the season has changed. If it has, the lead animal wakes the others and they emerge. If it has not, the lead animal returns to the den and resumes its slumber.

  ‘Our archosaurs here at the Great Dragon Zoo of China exhibit many of these hibernation techniques but their genius is they exhibit them on an incredible timescale.

  ‘First, our archosaurs are warm-blooded, not cold-blooded, so while they may look like reptiles, they are not. They exist somewhere in between mammals and reptiles, so they exhibit the capabilities of both when it comes to hibernation.

  ‘They also have one other advantage: their hibernation is done in an egg state. Since the animal is not yet fully formed but rather is still in a foetal state in albumenic fluids it is capable of considerably longer hibernatory periods.

  ‘Our animals went into hibernation a long, long time ago, at a time when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and when the Earth was much, much warmer. And like the dormouse, they have been periodically sending forth one of their number ever since that epoch: a lone egg will hatch and a young dragon will emerge to check if the climate has warmed enough for the rest of their group to emerge.

  ‘Let me direct you to our timeline from before.’ Zhang indicated the plasma screen. ‘Now let’s overlay the average ambient land temperature from each era to that timeline.’

  A wavy red line appeared below the timeline.

  CJ saw the match instantly. ‘I’ll be damned,’ she said.

  Zhang said, ‘The appearance of dragons in human mythology perfectly matches every rise in average land temperature on this planet, from the rise in temperature that occurred around the building of the pyramids in 2700 BC to the Medieval Warm Period.

  ‘Why does the dragon legend persist around the world so consistently? Because all around the world, for thousands of years, lone dragons have been emerging from hibernation to test the atmosphere, checking on behalf of their clans to see if the ambient temperature has risen enough and the time to emerge has arrived.

  ‘Myths arise from actual events, remarkable events that get talked about precisely because they are remarkable and which then get embellished in the retelling. This does not change the fact that the original event actually happened. We believe that all of those ancient dragon myths, from Gilgamesh to Hercules to Beowulf, have their genesis in real events, real events that occurred at times when the Earth was warmer.

  ‘And now the world warms again—more than it ever has in recorded history—and about forty years ago, a lone dragon emerged. We here at the Great Dragon Zoo of China were waiting when it did, for by chance we had found its nest. Come, let me show you how it happened.’

  He clicked his fingers and right on cue—clearly as rehearsed—the five dragons took flight, leaping into the air with a great beating of wings.

  CJ was surprised to see that the woman, Yim, now sat on Lucky’s back in a custom-made saddle. While Hu and Zhang had been speaking, she must have slipped it onto the dragon. Yim was riding the flying yellowjacket and with considerable skill, too. Handler and animal glided away over the view, flanked by the red-bellied black princes.

  ‘What a fucking show,’ Wolfe whispered to Perry.

  CJ had to agree with him.

  Leaving the amphitheatre, Hu and Zhang led the group back to the glass elevators. They boarded an elevator and it descended briefly.

  As the elevator eased downward, CJ whispered to Hamish, ‘What do you think, Bear?’

  Hamish shrugged. ‘It’s all pretty cool and impressive . . . if you never saw fucking Jurassic Park. Did you see the fangs on those things? How do we know they’re not gonna go all medieval on our asses and start munchin’ on the juicy little humans? I like old-fashioned zoos where they keep the animals in cages.’

  After travelling only a few floors, the elevator stopped. The group was then led around a catwalk suspended high above the entry atrium, and into a room that looked like mission control at NASA.

  Three broad descending levels containing perhaps thirty shirt-and-tie-wearing Chinese computer operators looked out over the megavalley through a perfectly circular three-storey-high window. Plasma screens and monitors were everywhere, displaying all kinds of graphs, charts and digital images. It was a kaleidoscope of blinking lights and data: the nerve centre of the Great Dragon Zoo.

  ‘This is our Master Control Room,’ Zhang said proudly.

  CJ’s gaze was drawn to the biggest and most central monitor. On it was a huge white-on-black map of the zoo.

  It was an animated map: scattered all over it were coloured icons—red crosses, yellow triangles, grey circles, and purple diamonds—many of them moving.

  ‘Every icon is a dragon?’ CJ asked Zhang.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In their infancy, each dragon was fitted with two microchips: one in the brain, the other grafted onto the animal’s heart. Those chips give us real-time data on the dragons’ heart rates, respiration rates, b
rain activity and other health information. The microchips are also GPS-capable, so we know where each dragon is at all times.’

  Zhang grabbed a mouse and ran the cursor over one of the red crosses. Instantly, a text box appeared beside the cross. It read:

  DRAGON ID: R-09

  HEART RATE: 67 bpm

  RESPIRATION RATE: 13.6 min-1

  O2 CONSUMPTION: 0.06 ml g-1 h-1

  The numbers changed constantly, giving data in real time. Impressive.

  ‘You can see the heart rate of every dragon in the zoo?’ CJ asked.

  Zhang smoothed his tie again. ‘We want to maintain a close eye on the health of our animals. If any of them catches an infection, we want to detect it early, both to save the animal in question and prevent an epidemic spreading to the other dragons.’

  Below the main map screen was a legend which allocated the coloured icons to names written in both Chinese and English:

  RED-BELLIED BLACKS

  YELLOWJACKETS

  PURPLE ROYALS

  EASTERN GREYS

  GREEN RIVERS

  SWAMP BROWNS

  ‘Nice names,’ Ambassador Syme said. ‘Catchy.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Hu said. ‘We hired a brand-consultancy firm in Los Angeles to come up with them. Of course, we have given the dragons formal Latin names—Draconis imperator, Draconis rex and the like—but this facility is built for tourists, not academics.’

  CJ scanned the rest of the map.

  She immediately noticed how icons of the same colour mostly appeared to cluster together.

  The dragons stuck to their clans: red with red, yellow with yellow, and so on. It even looked like they had claimed their own territories: the purple ones dominated the central mountain, the red-bellied blacks the northwestern corner, the grey dragons the eastern slopes, while the yellowjackets appeared to live in two tight clusters on either side of the valley. The green and brown dragons lived almost exclusively in the rivers and the lakes.