“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.