The Gradual by Christopher Priest Page A

It was a mountainous terrain, dominated by an active but presently quiescent volcano called the Gronner, situated in the western range. My workshop was taking place in the local secondary school. The windows of the main hall looked out across the hills, with the peak of the volcano clearly visible in the medium distance. Wisps of gases or steam were drifting about, high around the summit.
    During the afternoon of the second day I was walking alone from the school building back to the hotel, when I suddenly remembered And Ante, the young man who had plagiarized my music.
    I had been so absorbed by the experiences of the tour that I had all but forgotten him. Of course I had taken a mature decision, as I saw it at the time, to let the matter pass me by, but here I was, on the island where he lived. No longer was Temmil a remote place, a distant island at the opposite end of the world – it was here, this was the place, with these mountains, this town, that sea. It was even possible, probable perhaps, that Msr Ante lived here in Waterside. The recording studio where he had played was somewhere in these streets. I might even have seen him about the place without realizing it.
    The days and evenings were packed. I was happy, engaged, involved in a thrilling musical adventure. I had no time for the electric guitar music of And Ante, whoever he might be.
    In the day and a half before the night of the gala concert I was trying to make contact with Alynna. Before I set out, because we both knew that communications between islands and the mainland were almost non-existent, we had agreed that if we heard nothing from each other while I was away we should not be too concerned. After the final briefing before we left, I had been able to pass on to Alynna two poste restante addresses, one bureau on the island of Quy, the other here on Temmil, but when I checked with the collection bureaux nothing had arrived from her.
    Even so, from every island where we had called, even for the briefest of stops, I mailed her either a short letter or a picture postcard. At least some of those, I reasoned, would work their way through the impermeable barriers that seemed to lie between us.
    The hotel where we were staying told me that phone calls to Glaund had become possible recently, so I went immediately to my room and booked one. I was made to wait for more than an hour while connections were attempted. I don’t know what happened, what went wrong, but getting through turned out to be impossible. I was told, variously, that the number at my home was not obtainable, or that all lines to the mainland were busy, or after one protracted attempt with strange and disjunctive noises rattling in my ear, even that my phone at home appeared to have been disconnected.
    Later that day I wrote Alynna another letter telling her about this and saying that in a few days’ time we would be heading home. Whether it would reach her before I did I had no idea. I mailed it anyway.
    In the morning of the day of the concert I went with several of the other musicians on a short tour of the island, driven around the hinterland of Waterside in a modern, air-conditioned bus. The climax of the trip was an ascent of the roads and tracks that led to the summit of the Gronner.
    As we climbed, circuiting the precipitous sides and terrifying slopes beneath us, the driver guide gave us an account of the importance of this volcano to the island. She described it as one of the few active volcanoes anywhere in the Archipelago. It was the icon of Temmil, she said: the profile image of the Gronner was on the island flag, it appeared on the reverse of Temmil-issued simoleons, it was used as a brand by many businesses and shops. The rich soil of the lower slopes produced fine wines, appreciated in countries around the world. The mountain had not suffered a major eruption for more than a century, but a haze of hot smoke and gases swirled constantly around the main crater and issued from