The V'Dan by Johnson Jean

Author:Johnson, Jean [Johnson, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-11-24T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Silence . . . and nightfall. A twilight that spread from the First Tier Plaza to the Imperial Tier, to the Second, Third, Fourth, and finally to the Fifth Tier a full kilometer away. That alone caused another swelling rush of sound, for it was still technically midday. The moment the noise of the crowd died down again, Jackie hit the PLAY button, and focused hard on projecting not only the soft but rising, staccato violin and harpsichord notes in her ears, but the twinkling of stars written high in the darkness overhead, a darkness that blended with the occasional skittering of sparks from force-field-zapped snowflakes.

As the music gained in volume, layers of instruments adding in every few measures, she brought in a distant view of the Sun, at first a pinprick, then a larger, brilliant dot in the darkness. It soared from where it swooped into view of the First Tier, down and down and down, to the Fifth Tier before vanishing into the streets and buildings of the Winter City. As the music grew louder, The Earth, Our Motherworld appeared. It grew larger and larger; The Moon, Luna came briefly into view as the stars shifted, spinning so that the white-gray clouds and snowfields, blue oceans, and green-beige continents could be seen.

When the opening violin solo spilled across the Tiers, the view of the planet grew huge, swelling to hover directly over everyone’s heads. The planet spun past, its oceans and continents and subcontinents labeled, forming a rotating reference map for everyone to study for a few bars of music, before it vanished and recoalesced by the Imperial Tier. Only the world itself shifted, enlarging and sliding seamlessly from hanging overhead to hovering beneath everyone in a great half-circle shift.

The smooth image blurred and zoomed, dipping below the clouds of a half-sunny day, to one of a set of islands lost in that vast expanse of blue. The southern half was thick with green vegetation and carefully blended buildings, the northern half was desert-dry and red-soiled, and in a rounded crater, a cluster of iridescent, green-glazed, and spherical-petaled buildings sat. Two sets of text floated past, Terranglo lettering and V’Dan words and phonetic equivalents, spelling out: Aloha City, Island of Kaho’olawe, Hawai’ian Islands, Pacific Ocean, Earth, Capital of the Terran United Planets.

The image whirled and swept down to the shoreline, where locals in na lei danced and played with fire on reddish-gold beaches to entertain their honored guests. The soaring images slowed as people looked up, looked at everyone there, and smiled and waved. Faces young and old, light-skinned and dark, hair that was short and long, curly and straight, white and black, blond and brown and red. The visitors on that shore, the dancers, everyone smiled and waved to the camera that was Jackie’s memories, mostly real, partially constructed to be strung together into a cohesive holokinetic display.

The view of those illusionary people did not linger long—barely two seconds; none of these images lasted longer than

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