Vanderbilt looked from Delaware to Anawak. 'But what's that got to do with the yrr?' he asked.

'It's to do with the fact that they might look like spiders,' retorted Anawak. 'How would that make you feel? So don't try to tell us that you're objective. If we can't control our aversion to the sight of the yrr- or to jelly, amoebas and toxic crabs or whatever – then we'll never find out how their minds work. We won't be able to. We'll only be intent on destroying them because they're not the same as us – and we don't want them creeping into our caves to steal our children…'

JOHANSON HAD EXTRICATED himself from the main group and was standing in the shadows, trying to remember what had happened the previous night. Li came over to him and handed him a glass. Red wine. 'I thought this was a soft-drinks-only expedition,' said Johanson, surprised.

'It is.' She clinked glasses with him. 'But there's no point in being dogmatic. Besides, I like to cater to the wishes of my guests.'

Johanson took a sip. 'Tell me, General,' he said, 'what kind of a person are you?'

'Call me Jude. "General" is only for people who have to salute me.'

'Well, I can't work you out.'

'Why's that?'

'I don't trust you.'

Li smiled in amusement and took a sip. 'The feeling's mutual, Sigur. What happened to you last night? Don't tell me you still can't remember.'

'My mind's blank.'

'What were you doing on the hangar deck? It was the middle of the night.'

'Just relaxing.'

'And before that you did a bit of relaxing with Oliviera.'

'When you're as busy as we are, it's important to relax.'

'Hmm.' Li stared past him towards the water. 'What were you talking about?'

'Work.'

'Is that all?'

Johanson looked at her. 'What do you want, Jude?'

'To beat this crisis. And you?'

'Oh, ditto,' said Johanson, 'but I'm not sure I want to beat it in the same way as you. What are you hoping will be left when this is over?'

'The values of our society.'

'Human society? Or American society?'

Her blue eyes seemed to gleam 'Is there a difference?'

CROWE HAD WORKED herself into a fury. Oliviera was on hand to back her up, and a crowd had assembled. There was no doubt that Peak and Buchanan had been forced on to the defensive, but while Peak had lapsed into thoughtful silence, Buchanan was seething with rage.

'We're not the inevitable product of some superior evolutionary development, you know,' Crowe was saying. 'Mankind was created by chance. We owe our existence to a colossal cosmic accident: a giant meteorite hit the Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. If that hadn't happened, maybe intelligent neosauroids would now be roaming the planet. Or maybe there wouldn't be any intelligent life, only animals. We came into being because conditions were favourable for our evolution, not because of any logic. Who knows? Out of the millions of possible turns that multicellular life could have taken since its beginnings in the Cambrian, maybe this is the one and only pathway that could have given rise to us.'

'But mankind rules the planet,' persisted Buchanan. 'You can't argue with that.'

'Right now the yrr rule the planet. You've got to face facts. We're just one small species among the class of mammals, and there's a long way to go before evolution could deem us a success. The most successful mammals are bats, rats and antelopes. We're not the final glorious chapter of natural history, just a couple of pages in a very long book. There's no trend that leads towards a golden era of nature, only selection. Over time, one of the planet's species may have experienced a period of increasing anatomical and neural complexity, but if you look at the bigger picture, that's not a trend, and it's certainly not a progression. Life in general doesn't exhibit any impulse towards progress. Nature gives us complex beings, and at the same time preserves simple ones like bacteria for over three billion years. Life has no reason to want to improve on anything.'

'How does what you're saying fit with God's plan?' asked Buchanan, in a tone that sounded almost threatening.

'Well, if there's a God, and if that God's intelligent, then God must have organised the world in the way I've just described. We're not God's crowning achievement, we're just one version of life that will only survive if we understand our place in the whole.'

'And what about man being created in God's image? I suppose you're going to take issue with that?'

'Surely it must have occurred to you that the yrr might be created in God's image. You're not that narrow-minded, are you?' Buchanan's eyes flashed dangerously, but he didn't get a chance to speak: Crowe smothered him in smoke. 'But it's irrelevant anyway. God's bound to have created His favourite species according to the best of all possible designs. Well, compared to other species, we humans are relatively big. Is a big body a better body? You were right, Peak, about some species growing bigger through selection, but most do very well as they are – and they're tiny. Small organisms are far more likely to survive during periods of mass extinction, which means that every few million years the larger organisms get wiped out and evolution starts again with the smallest possible species. Creatures get bigger and then the next meteorite strikes. Boom! That's God's plan for you.'

'That's not a plan, that's nihilism.'

'Realism, actually,' said Oliviera. 'The thing is, it's the highly specialised species like humans that die out in times of environmental change. They're unable to adapt. Koalas are complex organisms, but they only eat eucalyptus. What happens to the koalas if the eucalyptus disappears? They die too. Now, compare that to single-cell organisms: most species can live through ice ages, volcanic eruptions and shifts in oxygen and methane concentration. They can even survive for thousands of years in a death-like state and come back to life as though nothing had happened. Bacteria are everywhere – in boiling springs, glaciers, or burrowed kilometres under the earth… We couldn't survive without bacteria, but they'd have no trouble surviving without us. We've got bacteria to thank for the oxygen in the air. Our supply of chemicals – oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur, carbon dioxide and so on – depends on the activity of microbes. Plant and animal matter is broken down by bacteria, fungi, protozoa, microscopic scavengers, insects and worms, who feed the chemical components back into the cycle of life. It's no different in the ocean. Micro-organisms are the dominant form of life in the water. The jelly in the lab is almost certainly older and perhaps a good deal smarter than we are, whether you like the idea or not.'

'You can't compare humans to microbes,' Buchanan snapped. 'Humans have a special significance. If you can't see that, what are you doing in this team?'

I'm trying to do the right thing.'

'But you're betraying mankind.'

'No, mankind is betraying the planet by attributing a disproportionate significance to certain organisms. We're the only species to do that, you know. We try to rate everything. We have bad animals, important animals, useful animals. We judge nature by what we see, but we see only a fraction of it, and we invest that fraction with more significance than it deserves. Our focus is on large animals, on vertebrates, and mainly on ourselves. All we see are vertebrates. The total number of living vertebrate species is approximately forty-three thousand, of which six thousand are reptiles, ten thousand are birds and four thousand are mammals. But there are nearly a million scientifically classified non-vertebrate species, including two hundred and ninety thousand species of beetle alone. That's seven times the number of vertebrates!'