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Show 206 adjustment or close-up or freeze-frame or narration, and none of these involved himself. They were pure spectacle. In one, a strange snake with a head at either end whipped across his field of vision and popped suddenly into a duck's mouth. He would have dismissed this as the kind of easy symbolism you tossed off when your guard was down except that it was not a real snake at all, but a flat, stylized, abstraction of a snake. It was segmented, each segment a different color lit from behind like stained glass, and along its edges were tiny hairs of light. Its heads were not real heads either but disks, one at each end of the body, containing brightly-colored spirals. Teeth rimmed the outside edge of the disks as hairs of light rimmed the body. The stream it swam in was real enough, containing boulders and silt, with grass along the bank and dead rooted twigs around which the rushing water split. It whipped upstream, near the surface of the water, moving by flexing and thrashing its brittle segmented body and moving at a terrifying speed. It had jumped into the duck's open mouth at the very instant Lorin became aware there was a duck there at all. The duck, too, was real enough, at first-white, orange bill, pleasant rictus-but it had just gobbled its death. Its bright, black disk of an eye shrank to a pinpoint, its white body turned brown and then grey; and then, as the air was sucked away from inside it, the rubber surface of its body shrivelled. The back sank in, the bill and tail retracted, the breast folded in to meet the inside surface of the folded wings. In another one human faces he had never seen before swarmed toward him and receded like blowing feathers. At first there were only a few, and he was able to keep their features separated. There was a round face of a young man with bluff honest eyes and a black mustache containing gaps where the hairs ran thin or the lip was scarred. There was the dark face of an older |