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let alone kept, your capacity for the three basic things in life."

"Three?" Flandry raised his brows. "Feasting, fighting, and--Wait; of
course I haven't been along when you were in a fight. But I've no doubt
you perform as well as ever in that department too. Still, you told me
for the last three years you've stayed in the Solar System, taking life
easy. If the whole word about Dennitza hasn't reached the Emperor--and
apparently it's barely starting to--why should it have come to a
pampered pet of his?"

"Hm. I'm not really. He pampers with a heavy hand. So I avoid the court
as much as politeness allows. This indefinite furlough I'm on--nobody
but him would dare call me back to duty, unless I grow bored and request
assignment--that's the only important privilege I've taken. Aside from
the outrageous amount of talent, capability, and charm with which I was
born; and I do my best to share those chromosomes."

Flandry had spoken lightly in half a hope of getting a similar response.
They had bantered throughout their month-long jaunt, whether on a
breakneck hike in the Great Rift of Mars or gambling in a miners' dive
in Low Venusberg, running the rings of Saturn or dining in elegance
beneath its loveliness on Iapetus with two ladies expert and expensive.
Must they already return to realities? They'd been more friends than
father and son. The difference in age hardly showed. They bore
well-muscled height in common, supple movement, gray eyes, baritone
voice. Flandry's face stood out in a perhaps overly handsome combination
of straight nose, high cheekbones, cleft chin--the result of a biosculp
job many years past, which he had never bothered to change again--and
trim mustache. His sleek seal-brown hair was frosted at the temples;
when Hazeltine accused him of bringing this about by artifice, he had
grinned and not denied it. Though both wore civilian garb, Flandry's
iridescent puff-sleeved blouse, scarlet cummerbund, flared blue
trousers, and curly-toed beefleather slippers opposed the other's plain
coverall.

Broader features, curved nose, full mouth, crow's-wing locks recalled
Persis d'Io as she had been when she and Flandry said farewell on a
planet now destroyed, he not knowing she bore his child. The tan of
strange suns, the lines creased by squinting into strange weathers, had
not altogether gone from Hazeltine in the six weeks since he reached
Terra. But his unsophisticated ways meant only that he had spent his
life on the fringes of the Empire. He had caroused with a gusto to match
his father's. He had shown the same taste in speech--

("--an itchy position for me, my own admiral looking for a nice lethal
job he could order me to do," Flandry reminisced. "Fenross hated my
guts. He didn't like the rest of me very much, either. I saw I'd better
produce a stratagem, and fast."

("Did you?" Hazeltine inquired.