The sun had almost set on another day, the landscape the same -- dead brown and broken only by occasional spots of green weeds. Taller plants clustered around rare waterholes. Corden scanned the scenery for another such place, hoping to find one still within walking distance tonight. He only saw desert and ruins, old and some far more ancient.
His canteen was already dry, and he didn't like to think about another night without water, waking miserable and weaker in the morning. The hydronet might get him enough liquid from condensation to go through tomorrow, too, but it would be a dry and miserable day.
Then something odd caught his attention. Something glittered in the distance, somewhat north of the way he walked. Flashed again, red and orange -- he realized it was something catching the last light of day.
Windows?
His map had shown no city in this area, new or ancient. He pulled out his pocketcomp, just to be sure. Nothing in the files, not even a lost listing for this area. He had already turned that way and started walking a little faster despite being worried about what exactly he might have spotted. It had been more than a century since anyone had found a true unknown settlement and all of those in ruins.
When Corden's aircar had dived toward the ground in a sudden catastrophic failure, he'd thought he would just die in the crash. Thanks to the long side across the sand, he'd come out of it with hardly more than a few bruises. He'd thought someone would come out to find him. Three days later, and with water and food nearly gone, Corden decided it was time to help himself instead. He was a government surveyor by trade, specializing in finding old supply caches in the Wildlands of the American Southwest. He'd always liked flying over the barren land, marking out old towns, finding the occasional working well.
Walking through it was not nearly as much fun.
The longer he walked into the dark, the more he doubted his sanity when it came to that glittering jewel in the distance. It could not be a town -- not of that size and clearly out in the open rather than buried beneath the sand. Such a place would have been seen in a flyover. Hadn't there been a report of things that looked like tilled land in this area? The directors had waved it off pointing out that there were no settlements large enough to support those kinds of fields -- it was just chance the plants seemed to grow in ordered plots of land.
Corden hadn't questioned it. But now -- now he could see lights glittering in buildings, and he walked down a path between tall rows of maize. He drank a little water from an artesian well and thought he'd never had better. And kept walking all the way to a brick wall and gate where a guard stood.
"Stranger!" the man said startled. Not much of a guard, but he guessed maybe a single person wasn't why he'd been watching.
"Crashed -- days ago," Corden said with a wave back at the dark desert behind him. "Saw -- lights?"
Corden stared past the gate made of tree limbs tied together into a crisscrossed box. The lights were still there, but shadows as well ... a settlement built under a substantial cavernous overhang.
"Come on in," the man said, pushing the gate open. "Welcome to Shangri-la." Then he laughed at Corden's sudden glance. "Yeah, local joke. Not much of a paradise -- but we do have water."
It took Corden two days to figure out that he'd wandered into something ... unusual. It wasn't just the hidden buildings, but all the rather modern equipment they used -- and the fact they spoke perfect Basic rather than any local Earther dialect. At the morning meal of the third day, he finally asked the questions that had kept him awake for most of the last two nights.
"Where are you from?" he said, looking straight at Sani.
Sani put his cup aside and offered a bit of a worried smile. "Mostly from Terra Nova. Some from other colonies. We petitioned to make a small settlement in some backwater location to test out theories. The Earth Gov said no. We had expected it."
"And you came anyway," Corden said with a nod. "I wonder how they expected to stop you."
"Nothing personal, but too many Earthers have delusions of godhood," Sani replied. "If they say it, it is so."
"I won't argue," Corden said with a grin. "And I've spent a lot of years off-world."
"Obviously. Earthers don't learn Basic. Why did you come back?"
"Family, mostly. But my parents died, and I just took another job and another -- I liked the surveying at first, but I've come to realize that it's just work for no good reason. Pays well enough, I suppose."
Sani nodded. "You can go back. We won't stop you. You can let the Earthers know we're here --"
"I won't," he said. He looked at the gate and the crops beyond. "What are you trying to do here?"
"Survive," one of the others said. "Re adapt to Earth after several generations elsewhere. Earthers claim that we're not the same anymore. This is our proof -- for them and for colonists who tend to think the same way."
"You know the tale of Shangri-la?" Corden asked. "If you leave, you can't find your way back, can you?"
"Somehow I don't think that would be a problem for you," Sina said with a laugh. "You have the coordinates, don't you?"
"Yes."
"We're not magic, you know."
"I don't think I want to take the chance just yet."
Corden stayed a long time, one generation passing into another -- and if some nights he and others looked at the stars and counted the places where they'd been ... well, they were just old tales, and there were wonders enough at their feet.
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