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"But they used the snetha-knife! Dave Hanson, you never died! It was only induced illusion by that that Bork! And to think that I nearly died of grief while you were enjoying yourself here! You ... you mandrake-man!" He grunted. He'd almost managed to forget what he was, and he didn't enjoy having the aircraft worker find out.
But you're no mandrake-man." A load of sickness seemed to leave Hanson's mind. He had never fully realized how much the shame of what he thought himself to be had weighed on him. Then his mind adjusted to the new facts, dismissing his past worries. "I promised you that we would fill your entire lifetime with pleasures," Sather Karf went on. "And you were assured of jewels to buy an empire.
And sometimes we use a mandrake root to capture the essence of a real man, in which case he's a mandrake-man, like you. Human? No. But a very good imitation, I must admit." Dave turned from Ser Perth toward Nema, but her head was bent over the cords she was weaving, and she avoided his eyes. He remembered now that she'd called him a mandrake-man before, in a tone of pity.
The Satheri would hardly feel very grateful to a mandrake-man who had accomplished something beyond their power, now that the crisis was over. They had always been a high-handed bunch, apparently, and he had served his purpose. But he covered his thoughts in a neutral expression and went forward quietly toward the huge council room.
I agreed to find ways to return you to your own world intact, and you shall be returned." For a moment, the thickness seemed to relax, and Hanson choked a few words out through it. "What's the world of a mandrake-man, Sather Karf? A mandrake swamp?" "For a mandrake-man, yes. But not for you." There was something like amusement in the old man's voice. "I never said you were a mandrake-man.
Unless he could find one among them who was either a mandrake-man housing a soul or one of the few reanimates who seemed almost fully human, he'd get little information. But he was curious as to what the Satheri had expected to do with aircraft. The rocs had better range and altitude than any planes of equal hauling power. He located one man who seemed a little brighter than the others.
If they had made him a mandrake-man, then by what little he could remember and guess, they could make him obey them. "Look out the window at the sky," Sather Karf ordered. Dave looked. The sunset colors were still vivid. He stepped forward and peered through the crystalline glass.
He'd heard it might be possible to do that. It was a cockeyed future, if this were the future. Still, if scientists had to set up some, sort of a religious mumbo-jumbo.... Sickness thickened in him, until he could feel his face wet with perspiration. But with it had come a paralysis that left him unable to move or groan. He screamed inside himself. "Poor mandrake-man," the girl said softly.