om below and helped by
Hanson's hands above. He was panting when he reached the top, but he
could still talk. "Look, it's your skin, but you're going to be in
trouble if you don't get busy. Look out for that overseer up there.
Don't just stand around when he's in sight." He picked up a loop of rope
and passed it to Hanson, making a great show of hard work.

Hanson stared up at the overseer who was staring back at him. "Why is he
any worse than the rest of this crowd?"

The slave shuddered as the dour, slow-moving overseer began walking
stiffly toward them. "Don't let the fact that he's an overseer fool you.
He's smarter than most of his kind, but just as ugly. He's a mandrake,
and you can't afford to mess with him."

Hanson looked at the ancient, wrinkled face of the mandrake and
shuddered. There was the complete incarnation of inhumanity in the
thing's expression. He passed ropes around the corners until the
mandrake turned and rigidly marched away, the blows of his whip falling
metronome-like on the slaves he passed. "Thanks," Hanson said "I wonder
what it's like, being a true mandrake?"

"Depends," the slave said easily. He was obviously more intelligent than
most, and better at conserving himself. "Some mandrake-men are real. I
mean, the magicians want somebody whom they can't just call back--direct
translation of the body usually messes up the brain patterns enough to
make the thinkers hard to use, especially with the sky falling. So they
get his name and some hold on his soul and then rebuild his body around
a mandrake root. They bind his soul into that, and in some ways he's
almost human. Sometimes they even improve on what he was. But the true
mandrake--like that one--never was human. Just an ugly, filthy
simulacrum. It's bad business. I never liked it, even though I was in
training for sersa rating."

"You're from this world?" Hanson asked in surprise. He'd been assuming
that the man was one of the things called back.

"A lot of us are. They conscripted a lot of the people they didn't need
for these jobs. But I was a little special. All right, maybe you don't
believe me--you think they wouldn't send a student sersa here now. Look,
I can prove it. I managed to sneak one of the books I was studying back
with me. See?"

He drew a thin volume from his breechclout cautiously, then slipped it
back again. "You don't get such books unless you're at least of student
rating." He sighed, then shrugged. "My trouble