Phoebe, Deirdre, and Mitch, college students working on their primatology and anthropology degrees, set off for Africa to find their father, who has disappeared from a mysterious research station at the edge of an immense forest. After being captured by militant rebels, they begin to travel down different paths to discover things they never imagined existed. In Confessions of a ChimpManZee, parts of Arthur's brain were transplanted into the skull of a hybrid bonobo. In Africa's Children, Arthur is sent to Africa to help with a Pentagon project to create an army of killer apes, but instead, he disappears into the jungle. Arthur has left human children behind in California, and those three children, now of college age, and with an inheritance to finance them, travel to Africa to search for their missing father. After they are captured by a band of rebel soldiers, they discover that the compound where their father had been living has been destroyed by those same soldiers. However, it may be that their father has escaped being killed and has gone somewhere even the forest chimps will not visit. The children become separated and fall in with different groups who are headed in the same direction for their own nefarious reasons, and as the groups converge, the children discover things about themselves and about life that they never dreamed possible.

What is Life? Where did it come from? Where is it going? What are the characteristics of advanced lifeforms? What will life be like as it continues to evolve? What does this have to do with God? Centuries ago, people conceptualized the existence of gods based on conjecture and observable phenomena. These early theories of the driving forces behind nature became codified in such a way that it became impossible for them to change with the times. Now new facts apparently assault these old theories. Is it possible, however, that new scientific facts can reveal the true nature of these unseen forces? Can we learn something of God by examining life--by seeing where it has been, where it is going, where we fit, and how we can help?

Can a single act of love save the world from destruction? A peasant born in pre-war Vietnam has memories of a life he will live in the future. These memories offer clues as to why he must now face the horrors of slavery and war in his current life. Is karma a punishment, or is it simply a choice we make? An Dong, a peasant in French Indochina, has dreams of a life he has lived before, but the dreams are of a place and a time that no one could possibly have seen--a place in the future history of a different country. In contrast to his current life of degradation and slavery, his future life is one of freedom and happiness, at least at first. He becomes convinced that his dreams are telling him that he must take action in his current life in order to keep safe that world of the future, but what it is he is supposed to do is not clear. If such things as reincarnation and karma are real, what is their nature? What are the laws that govern them? Are they punishments for lives poorly lived, or are they choices we make?

An ancient virus is turning animals into people and people into monsters. Two romantically inclined mutants lead a pack of transforming pilgrims from Miami across Africa to Rome. Their two-fold purpose: stop the cure for the disease that created them, and get the Pope's OK for non-humans to marry. A virus from billions of years in the past has emerged from ancient salt beds with devastating results. As the virus turns evolution on its head, people are changed into monsters, animals begin to demand their rights, and civilization is brought to its knees. The few remaining humans seek safety in the quarantine of walled cities such as the Vatican. They desperately seek a cure, but the only one they find may have results too horrible to contemplate Judeus and Miranda, recent converts to the phylum Porifera, set out with a were-wolfish priest, a planeload of mutating pilgrims, and a sabre-tooth shape-shifting cat on their own journey from Miami to the Vatican. One wants to teach the Pope how to pray in this strange new world. The other wants to stop the cure being developed by the remaining humans. And they both want to get the Pope's final answer on whether non-humans should marry. With their plane shot down over Africa, they learn that strange events are not limited just to the civilized parts of the world. Is the virus God's punishment on the world? Or is there no god but the virus? Or is the virus going to create a new god? Can three sponge-monsters straighten this mess out?