The only time when he'd ever been truly proud of himself was when he'd rescued that kid. He'd done a good job on the Lady Wexham. He'd helped a crowd of people, and he'd won back Leon as a friend. A photographer had taken a picture, and the next day the newspaper had immortalised the moment.

But the whales were still rampaging, the dolphins were suffering, nature was in agony – and Licia was dead.

Greywolf felt empty and useless. He wasn't going to talk to anyone about it: he was just going to do his job until the nightmare was over.

And then…

Tears welled in his eyes.

THE BIG PICTURE

'See this sphere?' said Crowe. 'That's planet Earth.' She'd blown up some printouts and pinned them to the wall. She walked slowly down the line. 'These markings baffled us at first, but now we think they're the Earth's magnetic field. The blank spaces are definitely continents. Once we'd worked that out, we'd basically cracked it.'

Li frowned. 'Are you sure? Those so-called continents don't look much like the continents I know.'

Crowe smiled. 'They're not supposed to. They're the continents a hundred and eighty million years ago. Just one big land mass – Pangaea, the supercontinent. The lines probably correspond to the magnetic field back then.'

'Have you checked that out?'

'It's difficult to reconstruct the field lines, but the configuration of the continents is easily verified. At first we didn't know what they'd sent us, but once we realised it was a map of the world it all fell into place. It's actually quite straightforward. They used water as the baseline for the message, and paired each water molecule with geographical data.'

'But how would they know what the Earth looked like all that time ago?' Vanderbilt said.

'They remember it,' said Johanson.

'But no one can remember the prehistoric era. Only single-cell organisms-' Vanderbilt broke off.

'Exactly,' said Johanson. 'Only single-cell organisms and the first multicellular life-forms. Last night the final piece of the jigsaw fell into place. The yrr have hypermutating DNA. Let's say they gained consciousness at the beginning of the Jurassic era. That's two hundred million years ago, and they've been storing knowledge ever since. You know the classic lines you get in sci-fi? Whatever it is, it's coming our way, or Get me the President on the line.' Well, there's always the one about the enemy being superior, though by the end of the story you mostly feel cheated. This time you won't. The yrr are superior.'

'Because their DNA stores knowledge?' asked Li.

'Right. That's the crucial difference. Humans aren't endowed with genetic memory. For our culture to survive, we need words, written accounts and pictures. We can't transmit experience directly. When our body dies, our mind goes with it. We talk about not forgetting the lessons of the past but we're kidding ourselves. To forget something you have to be able to remember it. None of us can remember the experience of earlier generations. We can record and refer to other people's memories, but it doesn't alter the fact that we weren't there. Every newborn baby starts from scratch. Each of us has to touch the stove to find out that it's hot. Things are very different for the yrr. One cell absorbs information, then divides into two – it duplicates its genome, complete with all the information stored on it. It's like us being able to duplicate our brain and all our memories with it. New cells don't inherit abstract knowledge – they get real experience, as though they'd been there themselves. Ever since the very first yrr came into being, they've had collective memory.' Johanson turned to Li. 'So, do you see what we're up against?'

Li nodded slowly. 'The only way we could rob the yrr of their knowledge is by destroying entire collectives.'

'Entire collectives probably wouldn't be enough: you'd have to kill every last one of them,' said Johanson. 'And there are plenty of reasons why you can't do that. For one thing, we don't know how dense their networks are. Their cellular chains might stretch hundreds of kilometres. We're outnumbered. And they're not like humans – they don't just live in the present. They don't need statistics, averages or any other intellectual crutch. Taken together they're their own statistics, the sum of all parts, their own history. They're able to survey developments spanning thousands of years. We don't even manage to act for the good of our children and grandchildren. We repress memory. The yrr compare, analyse, diagnose, predict and act on the strength of their ever-present memory. Nothing ever gets lost, not even the smallest innovation. Everything feeds into the development of new strategies and ideas. It's an infinite process of selection towards the perfect solution. They compare back, modify, refine, learn from their mistakes, adapt, make their projections – and act.'

'Cold-blooded little beasts,' said Vanderbilt.

'Do you think so?' Li shook her head. 'I admire them. Within minutes they produce strategies that would keep us busy for years. Even just knowing exactly what – won't work. Then knowing it because it's part of your memory, because you were the one who messed up in the first place – even though you weren't physically present…'

'And that's why the yrr probably get along better in their habitat than we do in ours,' said Johanson. 'For the yrr every thought process is collective and embedded in the genes. They inhabit every era simultaneously. Humans don't have a clear view of the past and they don't pay attention to the future. Our whole existence centers on the individual, the here and now. We're too busy pursuing our own personal goals to worry about higher knowledge. We know we can't exist beyond death, so we try to leave our legacy in manifestos, books and music. We're intent on making sure our names aren't forgotten. We try to leave a record of ourselves to be passed on, misinterpreted, falsified and used for ideological purposes long after we're dead. We're so obsessed with assuring our own perpetuity that our goals seldom coincide with what would be good for humankind. Our minds champion the aesthetic, the individual, the intellectual and the abstract. We're determined not to be animals. On the one hand our body is our temple, but on the other we despise it for being mere machinery. We've become accustomed to valuing mind over body. We feel nothing but contempt for the factors relating to our physical survival.'

'But for the yrr this division doesn't exist,' Li mused. For some reason the thought seemed to please her. 'Body is mind, and mind is body. No yrr would ever do anything that runs counter to the interests of the collective. Survival matters for the species, not the individual, and action is always a collective decision. Fantastic! The yrr don't give prizes for good ideas. Being able to take part in their implementation is all the fame a yrr could wish for. The question is, do the individual amoebas have an individual consciousness?'

'Not in the way we know it,' said Anawak. I'm not sure you can talk about individual consciousness in relation to single cells. But the amoebas are certainly creative on an individual basis. They're sensors that turn experience into something they can use, before feeding it into the collective. A thought is probably only taken into consideration if the impulse behind it is strong enough, that's to say if enough yrr are trying to introduce it into the collective at the same time. Each thought is weighed up against a range of others, and the fittest survives.'

'Just like evolution,' nodded Weaver. 'Thinking by natural selection.'

'That's some enemy!' Li seemed full of admiration. 'Zero loss of information and no pointless vanities. We never see more than part of the whole, while they see everything throughout time and space.'