The
Dragon Factory
Sunday, August 29, 3:17
P.M.
Time Remaining on the
Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 43 minutes
E.S.T.
The three businessmen from China stood
wide-eyed and slack jawed, all pretenses at emotional aloofness
lost in the moment. Behind the glass, perched on the twisted limb
of a tallow tree, its wings folded along the sleek lines of its
sinuous body, was a dragon.
The creature turned its head toward them and
stared through the glass for a long minute, occasionally flicking
its flowing whiskers. It blinked slowly as if in disdain at their
surprise.
One of the men, the senior buyer, broke into
a huge grin. He bowed to the dragon, bending very low. His two
younger associates also bowed. And just for the hell of it Hecate
and Paris bowed, too. It might help close the deal, though both of
them knew that this deal was already closed.
“Does. does.,” began the senior buyer-a
fat-faced man named Chen-“can it.?”
Paris smiled. “Can it fly?” He reached out
and knocked sharply on the window. The sudden sound startled the
dragon, and it leaped from its perch, its snow-white wings
spreading wider than the arm span of a tall man, and the creature
flapped away to sit in a neighboring tree. The enclosure was
designed for maximum exposure, so even though the dragon could move
away, it couldn’t hide.
Chen murmured something in Mandarin that
Paris did not catch. Neither of the Twins could speak the language.
All of the business with these buyers had been conducted in
English.
“How?” said Chen in English, turning toward
the Twins.
“Bit of a trade secret,” said Paris. He was
actually tempted to brag, because the creation of a functional
flying lizard was the most complicated and expensive project he and
Hecate had undertaken. The animal in the enclosure was a patchwork.
The wings came from an albatross, the mustache from the barbels of
a Mekong giant catfish, the horny crest from the Texas horned
lizard, and the slender body was mostly a monitor lizard. There
were a few other bits and pieces of genes in the mix, and so far
the design had been so complicated that most of the individual
animals had died soon after birth or been born with unexpected
deformities from miscoding genes. This was the only one that
appeared healthy and could fly.
The really difficult part was designing the
animal for flight. It had the hollow bones of a large bird and the
attending vascular support to keep those bones healthy. They’d also
had to give it an assortment of genes to provide the muscle and
cartilage to allow it to flap its wings. Unfortunately, they had
not identified the specific gene-or gene combinations-that would
give it an instinctive knowledge of aerodynamics. So they’d spent
hours with it in an inflated air room of the kind used at carnivals
and kids’ parties, tossing the creature up and hoping that it would
discover that those great leathery things on its back were
functional wings. The process was frustrating and time-consuming,
and the animal had only recently begun flapping, and the short
flight it had just taken was about the extent of its range. More
like a chicken thrown from a henhouse roof than a soaring symbol of
China’s ancient history. The heavy foliage in the enclosure helped
to mask the awkwardness of its flight. The entire process had been
a bitch. A forty-one-million-dollar bitch. And the damn thing was a
mule, unable to reproduce.
But at least it was pretty, and it more or
less flew. Paris hoped it would live long enough for them to sort
out all of the genetic defects so they could actually sell one.
This one was display only. A promise to get the Chinese to write a
very, very large check.
Paris thought he could hear the scratching
of the pen even now.
The three Chinese buyers stood in front of
the glass for almost half an hour. They barely said a word. Paris
was patient enough to wait them out. When the spell finally
lifted-though they still looked quite dazed-Paris ushered them to a
small table that had been set with tea and rice cakes. The table
had a view of the dragon, but it wasn’t a great view. That was
Hecate’s suggestion.
“If they can’t see the damn thing,” she’d
said, “they’ll get impatient. They’ll want to close the deal so
they can go back and gape at it.”
Paris liked the tactic.
Before the tea was drunk, before it had even
begun to cool, the buyers had placed an order for three full teams
of Berserkers. The total purchase price was the development price
of the dragon with a whole extra zero at the end. The Chinese had
been too dazzled and distracted to do more than token
haggling.
The deal closer was Paris’s promise to
provide them with a dragon of their very own. Just as soon as they
managed to make another one. Which, as far as he was concerned, was
a couple of days before Hell froze over.