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.

(“Of course. You see me here, don’t you? It’s practically a sine qua non of a field agent staying alive, that he be able to outthink not just the opposition, but his superiors.”

(“No doubt you were inspired by the fact that ‘stratagem’ spelled backwards is ‘megatarts.’ The prospect of counting your loose women by millions should give plenty of incentive.”

(Flandry stared. “Now I’m certain you’re my bairn! Though to be frank, that awesomely pleasant notion escaped me. Instead, having developed my scheme, I confronted a rather ghastly idea which has haunted me ever afterward: that maybe there’s no one alive more intelligent than I.”)

—and yet, and yet, an underlying earnestness always remained with him.