Sand grated under his feet like the sands of the exercise yard at Moonbase. Sands of the Moon, not of Earth. All those years, looking up to the Earth at night—the blue and white glory of it. His desires had not been for the stars, not for some mathematical conception at Tau Ceti. He had wanted only the Earth—that one place forbidden to him in all of the universe.

Pandora is not Earth.

But the nest was a temptation—so like the Earth of his dreams.

Probably not like the real Earth at all. What do I know of the real Earth?

His kind had known only the clone sections of Moonbase, forever separated from the human originals by the vitro shields. Always the vitro shields, always only a simulated Earth—just as the clones simulated humans.

They didn’t want us taking strange diseases all over the universe.

A laugh escaped him.

Look at the disease we’ve brought to Pandora! War. And the disease called humankind.

A shout came from off to his right, bringing him out of his reverie. He saw that a beam from the Redoubt had incinerated a large rock ahead of them on the plain. Thomas signaled for wider separation. He looked back, saw Panille with his spreading pack of demons still walking imperturbably behind the army.

A terrible resentment of Panille welled up in Thomas then. Panille was a naturally born human.

I was grown in an axolotl tank!

How odd, he thought, that it should take all of these uncountable eons and an ultimate crisis here for him to realize how much he resented being a clone.

Clones from Moonbase are expressly forbidden . . .

The list of “Thou shalt nots” had stretched on for page after page.

It is forbidden to come into contact with Natal humans or with Earth.

Banished from the Garden without benefit of sin.

What is felt by one is felt by all, Avata said.

Yes, Avata, but Pandora is not Earth.

Ship had said he was original material, though, some bit of what Earth had been. What memories of Earth tingled in the genes sparkling at the tips of his fingers?

It was very hot out here on the plain, glaring hot. Exposed. Could Panille’s projection truly confuse the Redoubt’s defenders? Panille had confused the probes, that was a fact. And Thomas recalled his own mental linkage with Bitten, the control program for the freighter which had brought such a cornucopia of supplies. As Panille said, the ability to communicate was also the ability to dissemble.

What if Panille just left them out here, dropped the masking projection? What if Panille were wounded . . . or killed? Panille should have stayed back by the cliffs.

That’s just like a clone, missing the obvious.