"You see?" Lana said. "It's just a camera." She smiled disarmingly.
I went toward it casually, and suddenly I stopped as though another mind controlled my actions. When I gave up the idea I had had of smashing the camera, the control vanished.
There was no lens in the lens frame. "Where's the lens?" I said.
"It doesn't use a glass lens," Lana said. "When I take the picture a lens forms just long enough to focus the elements of your body into a Mantram fix." She touched my shoulder. "Would you sit down over there, please?"
"What do you mean by a Mantram fix?" I asked her.
She paused by the camera and smiled at me. "I use your language," she said. "In some of your legends you have the notion of a Mantram, or what you consider magical spell. In one aspect the notion is of magical words that can manipulate natural forces directly. The notion of a devil doll is a little closer. Only instead of actual substance from the subject—hair, fingernail parings, and so on—the Mantram matrix takes the detailed force pattern of the subject, through the lens when it forms. So, in your concepts, what results is an iconic Mantram. But it operates both ways. You'll see what I mean by that."
With another placating smile she stepped behind the camera and without warning light seemed to explode from the very air around me, without any source. For a brief second I seemed to see—not a glittering lens—but a black bottomless hole form in the metal circle at the front of the camera. And—an experience I am familiar with now—I seemed to rush into the bottomless darkness of that hole and back again, at the rate of thousands of times a second, arriving at some formless destination and each time feeling it take on more of form.
"There. That wasn't so bad, was it?" Lana said.
I felt strangely detached, as though I were in two places at the same time. I told her so.